Low drop/steal rates....why punish the player?

[xist]

I currently hate everything....A LOT!

In fact i hate everything more than A LOT!. I hate everything A WHOLE LOT! Why i hear you ask?(yep i can hear the pre-emptive tapping of keyboards...i'm that good...) It's the Seitengrate. (I hate you Seitengrate...)

For the uninformed, the Seitengrate is a weapon that's featured in FFXII IZJS, which is invisible and spawns randomly in an invisible chest. It's also ridiculously hard to obtain (the chest has a 1% chance of spawning, if it does spawn it'll hold money 80% of the time, and if it doesn't hold money it'll hold a junk item 95% of the time...and that's as long as you have a special accessory equipped). Needless to say the odds are awful. Now there are helpful tips to get it (which i fail at...so if anyone has experience in this feel free to help me out...legit not cheating) but it's not easy. And i've been doing the same things over and over for 5 days now...

The point is why do games use the mechanic of punishing the player with randomness in order to get cool stuff? It doesn't reward skill or ingenuity...and potentially it doesn't reward tenacity. It's just dumb luck. Many RPG's feature items with ludicrous drop rates/steal rates, and moreoften than not a player gets screwed over and either resets or continues blissfully unaware that they missed something.

Surely it makes more sense to make good/rare/unusual items the province of hard challenges to reward the dedicated, rather than the preserve of random chance? Does anyone actually like farming for rare materials? Or experiencing 1% chances of things? Is there any real reason that these ridiculous %'s are implemented today? Much like Random Encounters surely they should be a thing of the past...unless of course i'm missing something?



PS - Posting in the hope of reverse fortune now making me get the Seitengrate....

 

[Clydefrosch]

why do you want it so badly anyway?

i dont know, really, i guess people are meant to go the hard way of beating bosses and such for the first time. i dont really feel that much accomplishment beating, lets say, garland/chaos in FF1 by using advanced classes on level 90, while using haste and that blackmage spell to quadruple my damage output...

or beat FF9 after collecting most of the ultimate weaponry.

so it does make sense to make the weapon that allows for 500k damage output to be somehow hard to get. (its that one, isnt it?)

there are however better or worse ways to make things hard to get. 0.1% chance to get something surely isnt the right way. but i also dont think that a 15 part quest would be any better. those are tedious and you do dozens of things for literally no reward.

well anyway, the keeping players ignorant to certain things at least would be a reason to give game guides a reason to exist. games should always have a plethora of secrets, with every single player only being able to find a fraction of them on their own.

 

[emigre]

Isn't the most important principal of Japanese game design, to fuck over the player as much as possible?

 

[xist]

why do you want it so badly anyway?

Because i know it exists now. I'm someone who wants to squeeze EVERYTHING from every game i play. And whilst it's a somewhat broken weapon, it's not that i want to use it, but that i want to have the option to play around with something that's "special". And now i know about it, it's only logical that it should take SKILL, rather than LUCK to obtain.

Luck is not a mechanic that should be encouraged in games. Discovering secrets is great, but once you discover them they should actually be obtainable.

Isn't the most important principal of Japanese game design, to fuck over the player as much as possible?

See Seitengrate = 0.0001% chance. Bastards...

 

[weavile001]

And why would you want to get that thing, i mean, you can get good weapons and armors from shops or finding on dungeons, but spending so much time trying to find some thing is useless, you can easily beat the game NOT searching for it.

why bother?

this remember me about how F***** is the drop system in Golden Sun(all of them)
its not about luck, it is about planning an strategy.

 

[Rydian]

Isn't the most important principal of Japanese game design, to fuck over the player as much as possible?

Hey man, Korean games are good contenders.

 

[Gahars]

Masochism is a guiding principle of Japanese game design.

How else do you explain FF XIII?

 

[Taleweaver]

Luck is not a mechanic that should be encouraged in games. Discovering secrets is great, but once you discover them they should actually be obtainable.

In and by itself, I would totally disagree with you. Worse: I read some stuff about game design from time to time (or watch extra credits), and randomness certainly has a place within games. And not just video games. IIRC, it's a tool that helps to even the field between the hardcore players and the ones just starting out.

And I can certainly see a reason why chance encounters are needed to prevent famers going overboard on efficiently mining things. Suppose some rare item in a MMORPG spawns exactly once every 3 real life days. Who has the most chance to get it? The guy who camps out and just randomly checks every so often, or the die hard gamer/miner who has a map and an exact timing of when it'll be popping up. Yeah...obviously the latter. And it basically punishes those who just keep within the game, wandering around (aka: "playing the game") over those who do all sorts of metagaming stuff to increase their chances.

But that said...0.0001% chance? Really? That's just...sad. Why bother making a weapon that basically has the same chance of being found is as using the lottery?

 

[Arras]

Hey man, Korean games are good contenders.

Nah, those just fuck over non-microtransaction-buying players.

 

[The Pi]

Low chances of certain events are really there to reward long time players and it keeps the people who like to 100% everything happy but that's the most extreme rates I've ever heard of and is quite ridiculous.

 

[Qtis]

While I don't mind low drop rates if it's part of leveling, it's kinda stupid to have the item just randomly disappear without doing anything. Nowadays I see low drop rates compensating the freely available secret location and walkthrough info floating around the internet. Finding a secret without a guide is cool, but in this day and age of trophies, the specific secrets are well documented.

ps. The secret items and such are cool add ons, but I don't see them as a must. I'd rather enjoy the story and game compared to grinding for hours for that one random item that has a bit better damage output..

 

[retKHAAAN]

QQing over a dev leaving the tiniest shred of mystery and/or chance in a game?

 

[TyBlood13]

Sword of Kings, anybody?

 

[RodrigoDavy]

Because i know it exists now. I'm someone who wants to squeeze EVERYTHING from every game i play.

There's no such thing as squeezing everything from a game. You can read an entire book multiples times and even though you're reading the same words, you might notice something that you didn't pay attention the other time you read it or might understand something that you read before differently. It's the same for games, each time you play a game you have a different experience. You might fool yourself believing acquiring every bonus in the game will make you have a perfect game but sometimes there is a word, an object, a movement or a expression that means a lot to the game and you didn't notice.

Luck is not a mechanic that should be encouraged in games.

When used right, luck can be a great mechanic in games. Isn't poker one of the most famous card games? Well, luck is one of the basic concepts of poker...

 

[xist]

There's no such thing as squeezing everything from a game.

When used right, luck can be a great mechanic in games. Isn't poker one of the most famous card games? Well, luck is one of the basic concepts of poker...

This isn't my first run through of FFXII and that being the case i want to experience those things that i haven't before...actually getting everything i have never got will "squeeze" out those aspect that i haven't before.

It's my fault but the implication was for single player experiences. It's a poor mechanic that punishes a player for not randomly being in the right place at the right time, with no prior indication of that event. It's not fun when you have zero influence over something happening, and at 35 hours of zoning between rooms my love of FFXII is rapidly turning to loathing.

Imagine if games like Devil May Cry 3 or Ninja Gaiden Black relied on luck/an RNG to determine how perfect your blocking was....that make it more fun? No. It'd be stupid. Single player games should be influenced by the player and set mechanics, not random ones, else the player can be left frustrated through no fault of their own. And Poker isn't solely dependent on luck as there's a skill element involved....that's why they don't have massive Snap! tournaments too.

 

[DS1]

It's basically player abuse. Take the, "prevent players from selling a used copy as long as possible" principle, coupled with the, "Japanese game-otaku have the compulsion to 100% everything, no matter how dumb it is" principle, and you get items with extremely low drop rates.

This is why TWEWY was brilliant - you could mill about for hours hoping to hit a rare drop, or you could effectively get better at the game and increase a rare item's drop rate by raising the difficulty and chaining battles (which itself increases the difficulty of each battle after the first one). Oh good game design, you are so often rewarded by low sales and droves of idiots who don't understand you

 

[ShadowSoldier]

So.... you want everything handed to you? Well, why put bosses in games, let them already be dead. Why have health, just give the player invincibility.

 

[Gahars]

So.... you want everything handed to you? Well, why put bosses in games, let them already be dead. Why have health, just give the player invincibility.

Yes, that is exactly what he is saying. Exactly.

Oh wait...

Surely it makes more sense to make good/rare/unusual items the province of hard challenges to reward the dedicated, rather than the preserve of random chance?

Oh. Oh. Oh.

 

[ShadowSoldier]

Yes, that is exactly what he is saying. Exactly.

I knew it!

 

[Kirihara]

Wow, i would never have the patience to get that chest, sounds like a punishment for the player.