"Just balance the item from the start" is NOT a solution to "balancing fully made areas" which is the topic of the thread, bringing me back to my recurring "Rarva, you should read the posts before you respond, and stop trolling." point. :D

The more you can automate the process of assigning stats (even within the range of having various options for this automation), the easier it is to maintain balance and consistency across the game.

Having such autoset commands then makes it even easier to go back through and reassign balance if you have to.

Says who..you ? Great! I say the contrary, deal with it. Because this is not the subjet in Hades post to start with. It is about a fully made area that has one unbalanced item that makes everyone looks for it.
What does that mean btw ? That the fully made area is not balanced in itself. And not even compared to other area.

So balance an area in itself, before trying to balance it compared to the whole mud is an important start to the solution.

For the rest again, yawn, like I care about your opinoion about me…

Please don't derail the thread with personal attacks, accusations of trolling etc. If you don't want to engage with someone for whatever reason just ignore them and move on.

@Orrin: Certainly.

Let me rephrase: How is "just balance the item from the start" a solution to balancing an item that was not made balanced at its inception?

The solution against having to nerf an item because it becomes widely used because it was not balanced by design to begin with is indeed, to balance it for the start.
Because relying on secret like you think is a such a great idea is wrong. Another proof you are wrong about unbalance not being a problem.
And that problem is also different from balancing a whole area you import from another mud as well. Or balance an area that is not used because not giving enough rewards compared to others.

ps:On this case I admit I may have not been clear enough…
ps2:I already stated that I do not care what you thought about me. Leading me to the definition of madness from Einstein. And yeah I am a little mad cause I bother to repeat it.

If you have an item that you consider overpowered for the effort required to get it, change the stats so it's not overpowered. This isn't rocket science…. there are plenty of tools you can use, depending on your MUD's command system and your data storage format. Heck, an awk script iterating through all the player directories would work for most Dikurivatives.

The trick is how to FIND which items are overpowered. To determine that, you need to store statistical info about what players do, what they choose to kill, which areas they go to, what items they equip and what they just vendor/trash/etc.

Statistics is an after release solution.

But there is a pro active way to find wich item are overpowered, it is to use a solution to the Knapsack Problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_pr...

Basically each item have some sort of stats.
A whole item set for a player represent the backpack and he will try to optimize it.
If whatever the player choice (damage , stat boost affect etc) the item you created is part of the backpack then indeed it means it is overpowered.

I made a program to solve this, but it is less than optimized (In java, multithreaded) and it calculats all possibilities (that means a lot, even when discarding a lot in the process as well, (kinda like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_c... lot) but the results were absolutly on par with reality: The items that were part of the backapck were indeed what most of the players used. It also gave some interesting results that no players used because they were counter intuitive (like an item that looked very weak in itself, but that freed more important slots because it had a very perticular properties)

To weight each stats you need to know perfectly well how it affects you rmud. 10 dam maybe more important than 10 hit, and 1 charisma maybe be a lot less useful than 1 str. Etc.

Best is of course to use both, in order to tune your Knapsack engine to make it better every time.

Balancing an item is a piece of cake after that.

to give an idea of how many possibilities there can be I have an average of 23 slots
in each slots you have an average of 5 'must have' items that are not random drops.

11 920 928 955 078 125 possible set (and I already discarded a majority of the items)

Considering an item that worth it has around 10 stats (armor have wear_loc Ac hit dam saves stats resist hp mana bonus)
Imagine the memory it could take if you wanted to store everything:)

If anyone want the program and improve on it, I can give it to him , but I am not really proud of it.

So let's say I didn't balance it from the start.

And now I want to.

What are some ways to go about that?

I think that's the entire point of this thread…

And saying "balance it from the start" doesn't answer that question.

It's already started, and it's not balanced… now what?

My suggestion is to track statistics, as I said above. I don't think trying to balance via numbers is a good idea, because it tends to give you a bunch of generic items which differ only in the "skinned" appearance.

In other words, don't waste your time balancing items nobody uses. If you see people gravitating towards a small set of items, there's a reason for it. Either they're overpowered, or they're easy to get compared to others… so, look at those and decide if they need to be adjusted, or if you can live with them being the popular choice.

You nerf…there is not much you can do about it. How ? see below.



I think the entire point of the thread is balance and how to attain it. Having the tools to detect them, the tools to automatically fix it, and also the tools to avoid creating it at all.
Having a fully made areas not meaning it is already online.

And I think you cannot have a good tool to fix something if you dont have the tool to detect and create right. Otherwise you have absolutely no idea if you fixed it right. (See me previous post, Runter in #6 explained other useful tools to set those weight)



It is a risk but I have enough possible differents stats (rough count 18 different possible affect) available on item to avoid this effect.

edit: statistics never solve any problems, it only detects them

Good point btw, you may need to revert the stats on the old items. (unless you decide to keep them so they get a higher price, or for RP reasons (it also helps building a history "remember that items ? ha yeah that were the good ol'times" ). I personnaly do this at boot, in the most archaic way possible, hardcoding the modification I want to apply on items or players, as I dont use a database. I think I only had to use this 2 or 3 times, when I needed to change some stuff in char or item format so I can bear the 15 seconds offline to apply whatever patch on all the char/item I want in a few lines of code .

I also have methods that allow me to locate items wherever they are even on offline char. I can grab from an offline char as well, so it only depends if an item is really widespread or not, I may only need a online script to modify the items if there are only a few of them.
Performance wise, loading and offloading all the chars files (around 2K) takes like 4 seconds though. Probably is a lot faster with a DB.

@Hades Kane: I'm glad I'm not the only one seeing a fallacy in this logic.

You will learn that some problems can only be fixed by NOT happening in the first place.
Nerfing items/skills etc, afterwards cause a whole bunch of new problems as well.

Orrin edit: please see post #44.

I suppose you're asking for balancing methodology. A number of the top solutions have been mentioned in this thread. One way is using systems for builders to help keep the attributes of things they build having some type of attributes they have to keep in check. Like making sure the stat allocations add up to something based on the level of the item. Npc, area, whatever. Also analyzing use patterns to determine where risk/reward scenarios are too beneficial, or not beneficial enough.

If you're asking about what to do in those scenarios, I would suggest not changing the content itself but changing other content. For example, if you have an area that is more popular than others because it's easily accessible, has great drops, and is very easy I would suggest making other areas not being accessed balanced around that. Perhaps making one 15% better drops with 15% more difficult enemies. Or another that's even easier to access, but only slightly less drops and slightly stronger enemies. I guess what I'm trying to say is identifying baselines is the key to balancing, since it has to be around something that it's balanced.

Over all I think it's a poor decision to continually react to content by nerfing or buffing it unless it's just too much to cope with, but you should probably only come to those scenarios briefly if… yes, you balanced from the start.

This isn't meant as an answer to the question presented, but I think it is key that balance be defined before it is achieved. Some items are harder to get, so should they have better stats? Some items may be better than other items in terms of their stats, but can other conditions balance them out? Can three weak items be part of an item set that are more powerful when worn together? If so, is that balanced or imbalanced?

Remember that players also wish to gain knowledge as they proceed. If they know a certain item is 3% better than the standard for its level, then that gives them some mastery over the game (player wisdom) which also keeps them tied to the game as opposed to jumping ship and starting at a new one.

Another question as to whether something is balanced or not. Imagine a scenario where the more difficult tasks/fights/experiences that a character has, the more hidden reward points (HRP) they would accrue. The players may know about the mechanic but never see the value themselves. The higher the HRP became, the better chance a random beefed-up item would be generated (possibly unique) for them. Or perhaps a randomly generated quest could trigger for them, yielding a better item in the end. If everyone that plays has equal opportunity to do this, then is it balanced? I can see some obvious examples of where this system would utterly fail, but I can imagine some game engines that could support such a mechanic nicely.

Also begs the question, how is balanced different from fairness? Statistical balance is different from deserved rewards, but which are we discussing?

Personally, I don't consider information sharing as part of the balance in my game. A prior owner refused to allow the sharing of quest item information. That was not only unable to be enforced, but it upset others. Now, I promote it. The items are definitely unbalanced in terms of game affect compared to other items of similar level, but the classes are (more or less) equally able to complete quests and earn the right to the item, thus the system is balanced in that it rewards those that deserve it. Obviously, my game has a PvE element and isn't purely PvP. As a final point, I'm not stating that a quest system in such a style is a good thing (I personally would remove it, if I felt it would be accepted by the player base.) but I do feel that it is a balanced system.

I think yes, but not more than already existing quest items in that slot, as this will lead to an endless quest of more power. Better have items that allow different game style (like hit more but do less damage). Also you better have many items of equivalent power in the slot , or everyone will end up wearing the same.

Everytime a game creates 'more powerful items than there were before' it justs screams BAND AID for boredom. Though some people actually like grinding.

I will take what I try to achieve in my game as an example using 3 basic stats: a pure damage dealer will have no saves, a pure hit player will have less damage and hit more, a pure saves player will sacrifice hit and dam. (and wanting a mix of all those is rarely efficient, as being a jack of all trades means no mastery in anything). So no items have the best stats in those 3 at once. (there are lots of other stats off course, but hose are the more common).
Then there are many other useful stats available that you can never max all of them. I also have a cap: If every slot is used then the max in saves should not be more than 400. That does not mean you cannot built an item with more saves than an already existing item in a slot, that means that you may have to make it anti-good. With good/evil/neutral that is 3 possibilites. But for that you need a tool that build set.
(hence the Knapsack problem solver I built for that)
If building set for optimum in saves, optimum in hit, optimum in dam, (and some other stats in there like str dex int wis some resist) and in the end an item is present in all sets, then this item is overpowered.

With regard to "harder to get but better stats" I think it's clearly yes.

But I think you can make things harder to get with only trivially better stats at endgame content, and it'll be a good challenge for many players, and still feel rewarding, without people doing easier content feeling uncompetitive.

In other words, if I had an area that has a sword that always hits and deals 100 damage when it hits, and no other attributes, then I may have another area that's intended to be 25% more onerous in some way but has a sword that always hits and deals 103 damage. You don't have to scale rewards with difficulty. A lot of players will still take the trade to get better items, and there's no good reason to scale up the rewards unless you meet the intersection at which players decide it's no longer worth it. A lot of players will always take harder challenges if it means in the long run they will have superior stats.

When I set out to redo ROM in a different theme, I also sought to balance out items. To do this, I installed snippets that will auto-set mobs and items. It just seemed the most appropriate way to make my work simpler and more efficient.

Code that "autosets" your stats certainly IS the easy way. It's also the way to generate hundreds of boringly identical items which differ only by description. When the "smurf berry branch" and the "hammer of odin" do the same damage because the two zones they came from were in the same level range, something is fundamentally wrong.