More artifacts available!

Official MAngband News Annoucements
serina
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by serina » Tue 13.07.2010, 20:27

1) find artifacts
2) kill Morgoth
Everyone is happy.

Or

1) find artifacts
2) doodle about
3) doodle about
4) doodle about
5) doodle about
6) doodle about
...
...
785) either die, forget to play, stop to play, die of old age...
Nobody's happy. (unless it makes you happy to hold an artifact on a char you never play)

Since some players prefer the 2nd variant I've listed, I don't think they should keep other players from enjoying those artifacts. It isn't exactly hard playing at your own pace on a personal server and take all the time you need progressing and finding the artifacts. There needs to be resets on a server that has been up for 2 years+. How many have ever had Cubragol, Ringil, Feanor, Fingolfin, Deathwrecker or any of the other really powerful artifacts. My guess is that only a handfull of us have ever had those due to them being on some character not being played.
Some class combinations require artifacts to win (I'm pretty sure that's the case of the "elven-mage". BUT everyone benefits for arts being recycled every now and then.

ZAL

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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Warrior » Tue 13.07.2010, 22:35

Ace wrote:Maybe this is not really the way to go, I know thaere has been a lot of discussions about those artifacts and hoarding but when irght becomes wrong or how many people have to be "incorrectly targeted" by art removal. Strictly speaking my chars are also not active for quite some time though I 'll try to login regurlarly. And I would really like to play some more again, but well yeah...

I think some limitations on # characters per user or something could already prevent hoarding, or simply following a we dont care strategy... maybe you could also every 6 months run the big sauron all rartifacts removed spell.... :) So everybody has chances to refind them. For Super rare arts maybe the time can be longer.

This way the "hunt" is always restarted even on an instance that is long running,,,

Also important (for the next instance) is to implement the improved vaults where you do not get a large number of excellents (the vault with the doors) e.g. Becuase that is early-instance an artifact generator :)
Valid points and I think the time limit for artifact resets will be increased with the new base/ego items that are supposed to act as artifact-replacements. Also, if the process of resetting these artifacts is automated we will (thinking out loud here on behalf of the team, so don't take my word for it) try to add in the artifacts level/rarity in the time and add a little random thing to it as well. Such as a really minor artifact may be reset/replaced after relatively short time (maybe a month or two while a more powerful artifact may not be reset until many months have passed.
Thorbear wrote:I actually like the rules the way they are about artifacts, but they need some automation. Like Warrior put it, it involves humans, and therefore makes room for mistakes.
A limitation on the number of chars _could_ be a good idea, but on the other hand, for some people that likes to start a bunch of chars without hoarding arts (*cough cough* zal *cough cough*) these kind of rules would cause nothing but annoyance. After all, we're not thousands of players here, rules shouldn't have to be too strict...
Yes, at the moment there is a human element so errors may happen. We're all doing this for the love of the game and the community so please don't shoot us if we mess up things sometimes, we do our best to make things enjoyable (most of the time anyway :)) And like Thor says here, we try to not have too many rules or hard limits, accounts have been considered and I do think we may be heading into that direction, simply for the benefits it provides, but at the same time I think we will have to allow people to just download the client and play. So an optional and encouraged account registration (for the client/game characters). Again, these are just my thoughts at the moment and I may be forgetting discussions we've had outlining this in great detail in mangband-dev - (sorry Flambard) :)
Emulord wrote:A long time ago arts were 100x more rare. Now this is silly, since we dont have 100 players, but we do have about 10-25 active players most of the time. Why not make arts 25x rarer so then scumming for arts immediately after arts are freed isnt so easy.

This also makes it go from "damnit this guaranteed excellent was a crapart" to "oh man! i found a crap art. thats pretty rare even though i dont care"

Resets wouldn't have to happen as often since less arts would be taken up at any point.
This is actually also a very good point, I do think rarities could be increased for artifacts, some of them are much too common but I'm not sure exactly how it could be implemented, it seems like it could maybe rather count *combined* dungeon playing time or some other way of factoring in how much action the dungeon actually gets :) Either way, it's a good suggestion to look at the rarities, though the (partially improvised) suggestions I made would probably fall a bit outside the current plan we have. Maybe simply increasing rarity by a factor of maybe 10 would make more sense. I remember someone in angband-dev asked me about the One Ring, if we find it in MAngband (having multiple players, long time instances etc) and I think I said something along the lines of it usually taking a month or two of relatively intense playing on a new instance for people to find it. That said, new instances aren't really all that common so I guess my answer was at least half a guess :)
Zaxx wrote:My variant has accounts. It's a first step to avoid the problem because unless you write down the names of all your chars somewhere, you'll probably forget some of them... and if they got arts, they will be unavailable for other players.
About resetting arts every 6 months, I'm totally against this. Although I'm probably using only 5 arts on all my chars (3 on my main mage and 2 on a backup warrior), losing them would mean losing many vital resists, stats, or "power" in general. I'm mostly playing brave characters and never store backups (except for one or two characters that serve as "shopkeepers"). Resetting arts periodically would mean storing a huge amount of backup stuff which would cover all resists, stats and abilities to be able to reequip after losing arts. This is not possible unless the whole house system is changed.
To some extent I like the idea of replacing artifacts with items of similar powers, to make the game immediately playable (or at least almost) for someone who has been away from the game for a long time and lost an artifact that was a key part of their equipment. On the other hand, I do not at all like the idea of creating identical (as far as possible) ego replacements to mimic the "reset" artifact, there should be a small element of ... well, not sure how to put this, but only the artifact is the artifact. As far as accounts go, I sort of replied to it above, it's a good idea but I believe I speak for most of the team when I say that we do not want to make it mandatory to register an account in order to play the game, strongly encourage it (for many good reasons) is one thing, but not as a criteria in order to actually play the game.
Thorbear wrote:"Only 5 arts" is a funny statement =) Most new players never even use 1... I only use 1 on all my chars. I once had some more, but figured I didn't play the other chars as much as my mage, so I sold the arts they were holding.
But I agree that resetting *all* arts every 6 months isn't they way to go.

And BBcode is off for all normal users in the news-section in the forum...
Correct, I've been enabling BBcode for posts in this thread, normally news aren't supposed to be discussed I guess? I'll have a look at that later.
Artifacts are nice and make the game easier but new base/ego items should deal with this, hopefully.
serina wrote:1) find artifacts
2) kill Morgoth
Everyone is happy.

Or

1) find artifacts
2) doodle about
3) doodle about
4) doodle about
5) doodle about
6) doodle about
...
...
785) either die, forget to play, stop to play, die of old age...
Nobody's happy. (unless it makes you happy to hold an artifact on a char you never play)

Since some players prefer the 2nd variant I've listed, I don't think they should keep other players from enjoying those artifacts. It isn't exactly hard playing at your own pace on a personal server and take all the time you need progressing and finding the artifacts. There needs to be resets on a server that has been up for 2 years+. How many have ever had Cubragol, Ringil, Feanor, Fingolfin, Deathwrecker or any of the other really powerful artifacts. My guess is that only a handfull of us have ever had those due to them being on some character not being played.
Some class combinations require artifacts to win (I'm pretty sure that's the case of the "elven-mage". BUT everyone benefits for arts being recycled every now and then.

ZAL
Yes.
Not much more to say, we've all played the game enough to know how this stuff works. Plus I'm too tired already so I'll let that be all for now.
Some of my comments may not have been 100% directed to the quote above it, but I think I've covered most the points made here, let me know if I've missed anything and I'll re-read and re-reply :)
-- Mangband Project Team Member

schroeder
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by schroeder » Tue 13.07.2010, 23:59

When it comes to arts, I'm of the opinion that if you have them, you should be actively playing, and not just logging on to make your character not lose them.
So it should be a bit more like 'has spent at least an hour diving in the past x months' instead of 'has logged in once in the past x months'

For the auto-reset time, I think that it could be a bit curved with power... lowest time for the common arts, a medium amount of time for those godly powerful arts that deserve to always be used, and a bit longer for arts in between.
Their are more of those mid-level arts, so you can usually get a different one if you can't get another.
The god-tier ones have no replacements, and should be used as much as possible.

I'd also highly support certain arts that make you a winner (cubby and the one ring and deathwreaker for sure, maybe others) have timers on them that aren't related to idol time. If you have one of these arts, then you really should be able to win within a certain amount of time... not so much with a lot of the other arts.



My personal view on artifact rarity, is that, at the beginning of the server, they should be at their normal rarity. At the start of the server, it is necessary for arts to be common. However as time progresses, that need decreases. For certain arts more than others. If artifacts had a rarity multiplier that increased to a point, based on how many times it had been found, I feel like it would solve our artifact rarity problem, while allowing growth at the start of the server, and it would not make it any tougher to find the arts that are never found, like Bladeturner. Ya just can't increase that rarity.

schroeder
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by schroeder » Wed 14.07.2010, 03:04

sorry for double post
EDIT: The active player thing I mentioned would also be based around max depth; If you weren't somewhere around your max depth, then your time would count for almost nothing. Being about 1000' under or so (depending on your max depth) would add less time, but it would add enough so you could still easily get your hour in.

It might get a little tricky if people died and lost a lot of power, so it'd probably be best to decrease the depth it looked for if you had just died. 'Resurrection Depth' would be some fraction of your previous max depth (or resurrection depth) and it would then be used in calculating how much the player had to play at various depths instead of the true 'max depth'. Resurrection depth would increase if the player ever went past it.

This COULD be abused via 10x Pot of Deathing, and then once in a while idoling at 1k, but at that point its like someone is just asking to be found out.

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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Emulord » Wed 14.07.2010, 07:49

Good posts Schroeder.

I agree, except maybe the "dungeon time" thing could be related to character level instead of max dungeon level. This way people who scum low depths have to scum for 2 hours or so to clock their time, whereas a diver only has to play for about 30 minutes of intense dungeon play.

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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Thorbear » Wed 14.07.2010, 09:18

I agree with Emulord on that (yes me, the shallowdiver), doing so will probably make it a lot easyer to implement too.

As for the "arts that make you a winner", if such thing were to be added, there would have to be taken into account that not all of the godlike arts works the same wonders for all classes (a mage won't be helped by a super-strong melee weapon).

And I don't understand the idea about making arts common at the start of the server. Wasn't the point earlier here that they should be rare at the start, due to the fact that there are so many arts that are not found, that the first person finding a ZoCD would be granted 5-6 arts instantly?
And about that, if to avoid making bladeturner even rarer than it is (thus making it nearly impossible to find), isn't it possible to ajust the rarity in the artifact.txt file?

Emulord
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Emulord » Wed 14.07.2010, 18:42

Bladeturner isnt *that* rare. The issue is that Power Dragon scale mail is that rare, and the artifact needs to first match the base item. Bladeturner isnt that much better either. Some more AC and some abilities too? Eh, no big deal. PDSM is definetly good enough. Bladeturner is just icing on the delicious cake

grisu
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by grisu » Mon 19.07.2010, 19:52

I'm really sorry about that, would you be able to specify the names? For the time being we're not able to do these resets any other way than manually so there is unfortunately a chance of screwing things up, the passwords are hashed in the savefiles so they have to be copied out, replaced by a temporary password and then pasted back in after the artifacts/houses are sold. Unless there is an error in the our scripts we should not have touched any artifacts of any users who had logged in for the last 85 days, the majority between 100 and 360 days (as of July 1'st) - However, I failed to cross-check everyone against the temporary logs since that date, which is what happened in your case.
Sure, but this just underlines my point.
Using another char is a sensible thing and shouldn't be done in a quick movement.
The validation for using should be checked, rechecked and rerechecked, otherwise you may accidently login 'warrior' instead 'Warrior' etc. After selling the arts, the passwort should be put back with max carefulness. This should be also rechecked, rerechecked etc. to avoid errors. So I had the feeling the whole action was done in a sudden quick action without much careing.
The removed arts only gives holes in the environment puzzle, I hadnt any top arts anyway, so I like the idea to replace them
with a good created ego-item.
However the remaining problem is the char Didysneak, so please put the old password back or post me a new one. Thanks.

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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Warrior » Wed 21.07.2010, 22:23

Put the old password back in, let me know if it doesn't work for you. Sorry about the delay.
-- Mangband Project Team Member

Thorbear
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Thorbear » Thu 10.10.2013, 18:57

Long overdue, several characters have now had their artifacts reset.

Affected arts:
The Phial of Galadriel
The Full Plate Armour of Isildur
The Bastard Sword of Eowyn
The Large Leather Shield of Celegorm
The Pair of Metal Shod Boots of Thror
The Set of Gauntlets 'Paurnen'
The Dagger 'Nimthanc'
The Long Sword 'Anguirel'
The Chain Mail of Arvedui
The Two-Handed Sword 'Gurthang'
The Dagger 'Belangil'
The Cloak of Thorongil
The Morning Star 'Firestar'
The Main Gauche of Maedhros

All of these were reset from characters that have been inactive for 500+ days, suffice to say, many long lost artifacts are now available again =)

If you think you've wrongfully lost your artifact, or cannot log in to your character, let us know.
I am Thorbear...

serina
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by serina » Thu 10.10.2013, 22:09

LOVELY! I've already found several and then sold them again :).

ZAL

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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Warrior » Sun 10.11.2013, 09:01

Yesterday, 18 characters that had been inactive for at least 120 days had their artifacts reset. Some of them arguably among the most powerful in the game. All players were given the sale price plus a compensation.

Dive and find yours!

(If you think you've wrongfully lost your artifact, or cannot log in to your character, let us know).
-- Mangband Project Team Member

Ignatius
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Ignatius » Wed 12.02.2014, 13:36

Could you do a similar cleaning on ironman? there are characters that I dont think have been used in 200+days with arts on them. I know it kinda sucks to loose an artifact with an ironman character, but you cant just abandon your chars and never play them and permanently take the arts out of the game.

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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Warrior » Wed 19.02.2014, 09:27

I've been away for a while, I'll look into this as soon as possible, it's a good point.
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Ignatius
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Re: More artifacts available!

Post by Ignatius » Thu 13.03.2014, 00:16

[quote="Warrior"]I've been away for a while, I'll look into this as soon as possible, it's a good point.[/quote]

ive made pretty good progress since my last post, but i still think its a good idea to flush the unused arts. any update on this?

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