New player feedback!

[Logorouge]

I'm pretty sure that is broke as shit.

I agree with you on that. It was patched out as too powerful for chance-based powers that only activated a % of the time. But for an effect with 100% chance to activate? It's well past that point.

I do like the mining idea for something separate though, especially if it's a chance-based effect on an item you have to find/buy.

[ptarth]

For the other chance to happen effects, there was no limit on their usage (e.g., they were passives for the main gun, etc). For this effect, you have to use missiles, so it will happen less often.

As for its brokenness, it depends on the frequency of antigravitate blockages. As a reference you were saying you get 6 credits (on average) (~12 if you are patient) for a blockage? If that's the case, then yeah, sometimes you are going to get a bunch of credits (255+ qualifies as a bunch, also you can spend infinite credits in the shops buying experience, so you don't have to leave levels with credits wasting away). However, how often is that going to occur? I don't have the numbers on me right now, but the frequency of antigravitate blockages is pretty low, perhaps 1 in 10? So on a typical run, I'm not sure you'd see something that large. However, the rooms that have anti-gravitate blockages also tend to have several of them, so you'll probably see most runs with a very low count, but on a few you'd have a ton of them. Right now, it'd guess maybe there is 1% per floor of getting 255 credits? I'm not sure if that is broken, simply because it is very rare.

One of the things that Pepisolo is always bugging me about is how he loves chaos. Or as I like to call it, variance in outcomes. He wants to have infinite various all of the time, whereas I want a more structured approach. If this does only happy 1 in 100 times, then I don't think it is a particularly big deal. On the other hand, it it happens 1 in 4 times, then that's probably too much. I just don't have frequency information on it.

[Logorouge]

Well, the odds are pretty good to get at least a room with at least 4 blockages on every floor and often several more of such rooms per floor the further down you go. Regardless of your luck, it's easily many hundred credits worth of flying shrapnels. In my humble opinion, that sounds a bit much (thinking about the Contrishooter specifically).

[Monkooky]

The numbers I gave are per missile assuming a single antigrav blockage.
In a room with multiple antigrav blockages, the numbers are multiplied.

While this.. severity of imbalance is I think unique to that room (it had like 30 antigrav blockages), any room with two antigrav blockages can easily net you 30 credits for 3 missiles, and I've fairly reliably gotten 40-60 credits with 5 or 6 missiles.

And while variance in outcomes is fine, more than 255 credits on FLOOR 1 means a vastly, vastly easier run, far more so than any lucky item find.


EDIT: Just did 6 runs of floor 1, buying nothing but missiles and not using my secondary gun. (I have screenshots if needed)
3 of them I found 1 or more antigrav blockages; here are my remaining missiles and credits
7, 80
15,151
10,121

3 of them I found no antigrav blockages; here are my remaining missiles and credits
13,35
15,42
10,57

That amount of money is absurd for floor 1, and half the time is not sufficiently rare.

[ptarth]

Thanks for the in-depth exploration. As a future note, I do believe your numbers, and you don't have to actually go to the trouble of running your test to such a degree. A simple survey of antigravitate blockage frequency would be sufficient to convince me. (I'd like to think I'm reasonable). As a point of curiosity (since I haven't tested it), assuming infinite missiles, what is the average payout for 1 blockage? I had thought it was 10-15 (with patience), but your text confused me to that point.

Regardless, you have presented sufficient evidence to convince me to switch the system around. It might take a little finesse, but it should turn out as one would expect.

The mining idea though.... perhaps a mining laser secondary?

[Monkooky]

Each blockage outputs 3-4 missiles worth of debris if impatient, 2 if patient. Waiting around mostly gets the debris to cluster, improving missile/ca$$h ratio
Each blockage usually nets you maybe about 20 credits? I'd have to do some more runs to be remotely confidant in that number.

[Pepisolo]

That's convincing enough for me, yeah. We should remove the credit spawns for antigravitate blockages then. Maybe we can reimplement the mining mechanic for a certain item at some point. Thanks for the in-depth feedback!

[ptarth]

Sausage comment
The anti-gravitate blockages already have the non-enemy kill tags. Due to how the system is designed the checks are never made. We'll need to tweak how the system works to achieve that. Theoretically the methods I described above would work, but I'm not going to have time to do any real testing for a bit.