MAngband

Last week, I was talking to a friend on the telephone, who came up with the idea of making most of the artifacts into a new class of ego-items. Now, these would still be just as rare as artifacts are normally, or possibly even rarer, but it would be possible to have more than one of each in circulation.

Thoughts?

Gotta be honest, this has crossed my mind now and then and I have problems coming up with anything bad about it, in and of itself.

Angband assumes one player, who will find art. Multiplayer Angband assumes many players, who, it follows, should each be able to find that same art. So, if the game is built around the idea of all the art being available to be found by the player, then tossing in more simultaneous players means there needs to be more simultanous art. This all strikes me as perfectly reasonable, and it all seems to make sense.

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The real difficulty, however, is the implications of this change. My fear here would be that what seems like a reasonable and logical change in and of itself would have significant implications that would need to be addressed (which translates into a lot more work).

I think the real question is how to keep art from being commoditized without introducing a whole huge slew of new code to keep that from happening.  Its tough to figure out how this could work without it being a massive new feature requiring lots of extra stuff to make things behave smoothly.

I think making art too rare as a response to the fear of it getting too common might not be the best - the Phial, for example, is *not* supposed to be "rare" (ie, hard to find in the single-player sense). The game actively pushes it on you quickly, by design.

I think there's an unspoken fear of having too much art be present ("Hmm, I'll trade your four Phials, Haradkeet, and two Aeglos for a Razorback and a RoS +10"), and this is a good concern. So, its a beefy question to answer: how do we let players get the art the game intends without too much rigamarole, but avoid creating this inflation and profussion of art? Because, again, if you make the new pseudo-art rare enough to not be found too insanely often at, say, 600 feet where the art is intended to appear, then down at the bottom, I'm going to be cranking those things out left and right. On the other hand, if you tune the rarety to the bottom, so us bottom-dwellers (heh) don't uncover it too stupidly often, then the person who the art is intended for (the 600' player) will pretty much never ever see it.

I mean the above paragraph to demonstrate what I mean about a change kind of dictating lots of related changes to support it. To address the above problems, we then might need a way to, say, track what art drops for what players, and do our limiting there (a sizable feature, probably). Or, we might clamp art to depth, so that the Phial does *not* drop at 6350, but does drop in the 200-500 range (a new feature, but maybe not as nasty?). Or, we might need to keep level 50's from scumming 400' for backpacks full of the Phial by checking the level of the player when the level or art-drop is spawned (level 50's quite simply, in this example, cannot get the Phial to be spawned for them, although this means a level 50 could quietly hang out on a low-level player's level to grief them, by virtue of keeping the level from generating the Phial - a problem similar to what TOMEnet has with their exp clamps). Or, to force people to only be able to use art that they themselves found, we would need to have a feature that does the MMORPG convential deal of bind-on-pickup: each instance of the art is flagged for a player id, and only that player can pick up that instance (again, I suspect this would be a bit of work).

Whew! Anyway, I hope you see what I mean here - simply adding multiple art drops by itself is of course doable, but there are a lot of implication which themselves would probably end up requiring a lot of additional work: I suspect the majority of the work would be to cover these implications vs. the work for the basic art feature itself.


Another related implication is tuning. While much of MAngband is significantly harder compared to Angband (the realtime aspect), other elements are a bit easier. Probably what's stocked in the shops, and being able to buy from other players, are the roots of this. I bring this bit up because on one hand, MAngband parallels Angband. But, in other ways, it doesn't. Angband really clamps down on the goodies, to keep them from being commodites: you don't recall real quick and hit shop 7 to get a stack of 20 Potions of Healing. So in Angband, on one hand you get a very steady trickle of art, some of which is pretty nuts (you will very frequently hit 4 or 5k with a handful of immunities. Yes, immunities - a concept that us MAngbanders have difficulty even conceiving of, heh). But, on the other hand, you won't be able to healing-potion-brute-force your way down through the dungeon, or be guaranteed res low via another player if you haven't found it.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that dumping a moderate amount of level-expected art on the player base would result in things being quite a bit easier, to an extent that would have to be adjusted for - the MAngband player would now have the best of both worlds (access to beefy art as they go through the game, and access to the easily accessible goodies like potions of healing, and equipment from other players etc as we have now). Again, I mean this as another implication that would have to be addressed.

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So! Is it a neat and reasonable idea? Absolutely! But, is there a lot of implications that would result in a whole bunch more work needing to be done to accomodate the new feature? Yikes, it does look like it

The way I feel about artifacts might be fairly well known, but I'll say it again just because I'm so certain I'm right about it!



First of all, I think randarts is a terrible idea, it'll take the magic away from mangband, I don't want to find some random bastard item thats been automatically generated, it's supposed to be a one of a kind item, thats the whole idea with artifacts.

And as for a new class of ego-item-artifacts I think this too is the opposite of the original idea with artifacts, one of a kind and for the most part related in some way to tolkien'ish writings. Not all are, but in general thats the way it was intended.

_IF_ such a solution was to be implemented I think it'd have to be along the lines of old ideas, like:

Each player can have/find one copy of each artifact, it'll be generated only once for him/her. The player can sell it to the shops or drop it in the dungeon but then he won't find it again. It can't be bought and preferably not even seen in the shops by other players. The player can drop it in a house but there would be a timer on this too. This to avoid all houses in the game to be filled up with artifact collections.

This way each player would be allowed to find all the arts he's used to finding in angband (not that I think thats a point at all, this isn't angband) but we'll avoid having a server with houses full of artifacts.

And we can still look at the artifact list and go - DAMN. Someone found Dor-Lomin! For the most part I don't have a problem with artifacts being taken and I honestly don't think it is a very large problem for most players, of course it's nice to have Bladeturner but it's not something you _must_ have. I don't think I would enjoy it as much if I ran around with the same gear that everyone else did. Thats what the super rare perfect ego items are for.

But I also think the idea about "locking" artifacts to a certain depth range makes sense even if nothing else is to be added. The problem with shallow artifacts appearing at the bottom and eventually leading to high level players housing those to just avoid finding them over and over again goes way back.

So again, spare me from ever hearing "anyone want to buy this stack of 99 phials" - I've played other multiplayer games where the whole point was to collect, collect and collect. Though I'm not saying I'm not a collector - I might be the biggest collector of all, but there's a difference in collecting slime molds or broken swords and collecting artifacts, unique items!

Yes!

Hmm. You both raise excellent points, which give me a lot to ponder.

I don't want to see artifacts become a currency, and neither do I want to see the economy blow up because of them. I'd probably die a little inside if I ever saw someone with multiple copies of Cubragol for the backup gear, you know?

Here are a couple problems yet to be overcome:

* People can have more than one character. Therefore, they can have all the arts they want, given enough time to find them. So it is entirely possible to have the same scenario we now face, which is a handful of people with all their alts now have all of the "Good" artifacts.

* What if you're partying, or your level is occupied, and an artifact is to be generated? Does it simply fail to generate if someone in the party / on the level has it, or does it generate it anyways? Or, does it only appear to be an artifact for the people who don't already have it, and when picked up loses all artifact information?

* Artifact trading will be a reality if everyone has their own personal artifact chain. If they drop an artifact in trade with someone else, what happens if the other party in the trade already has it?

* How about the whole dropping scenario. If we don't have a timer, do we make the artifact destroy itself if it's dropped? Seems a little cheap, but I'll explore that possibility. At what point does it destroy itself - when unidentified, or when pseudo-ID'd, when ID'd? What if your memory is blanked? A market in Lose Memories could spring up overnight. Maybe if artifacts were excluded from memory loss, but that would cheapen memory loss.

Timers are good. To automatically kill artifacts that have been sitting for too long, there will need to be a 'drop' timer that expires. However there's nothing to stop someone from logging in, picking up and dropping one by one all of his/her artifacts, then leaving. I think the timer could be implemented like so: New fields in o_ptr (bool on_floor; u32b turn_dropped; ) and implement the scan in compact_objects. That's an excellent function to hijack for destroying items, by the way, since it scans through the item list. This will only solve the problems of housed artifacts and hoarded artifacts in the wild, because player savefiles are not scanned.

Depth clamping seems like a good idea to me and is most likely the route I would take.

For the record, I think randarts make artifacts less special, and should only ever be used if each one can be guaranteed to have unique powers, which limits the number of possibilities significantly. They should never be as common as regular artifacts, and should be used in conjunction with real artifacts. At that point, why not just make a file of definitions with a script, and let the names for those predefined items be generated at run-time?