Blessings still feel terrible to farm. Especially with alts

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1

So Cycle2 brought in some changes to blessings where on the main character we can swap between any blessing we’ve farmed and on alts, after defeating boss one time, we can choose any blessing we’ve unlocked , but a min rolled version of this.

THIS IS SO BAD. God I don’t know how else to say it but I’m not creating a second character specifically because of this. I took me 20 full boss kills on one timeline to get a near max mana blessing from ending the storm. God I hated the farm so much. The timeline offered nothing in terms of gear. And several times I rolled mana, it was LOWER than one I already had. How does that seem fun to developers. Blessings shouldn’t be an end game grind. They’re just something to unlock and move on with your life .

PLEASE, for the love of gaming, do the following.

  1. Highest rank of all blessings are stored account wide and instantly available on all characters in the same cycle / game mode.
  2. It should be impossible to roll a lower blessing then one you’ve already unlocked. Which means that eventually you must be able to cap your blessings.
  3. Significantly reduce the roll range (the low end) of the blessings so it’s not as punishing to get a shit roll. Keep the high end the same, do not nerf it.

Thanks

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2

Why not? The devs disagree on this but have made concessions in this regard.

I do kinda agree with this though.

That’s unlikely to happen 'cause the devs like large ranges, they’re not going to slippery slope themselves into blessings having a narrow ramge or just a singular value.

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3

I think 2) alone would help a lot. It would be a middle way, some grind but with a guaranteed progress since when the right blessings shows up it is an upgrade. So annoying to finally get the right blessing on try 5 only to have it roll worse then what you have.

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4

I did some testing using the number range 50 to 100 and it seems that for two iterations (i.e. defeating the boss and getting the respective blessing) the current system is better (87 vs 89.7).
From 3 iterations on your suggestion (option 2) becomes better. However the differences are pretty minimal (97.5 vs 95 after 5 iterations).
I did not look into the variances though but would assume that your suggestion has less.
I would say the system is good as it is in that respect (unless my programming is off).

The most limiting factor appears to be getting the respective blessing in the first place!

5

#2 will alwaus be better, since it’d be impossible to get a worse rolled blessing though how the blessings were rolled would determine how much better it would be. If the game could roll a worse roll but then increased it to the current one, that would feel less good than if the game used the current roll as the floor & rolled between that & the max.

6

No clearly #2 is not always better.
I iniatially was like “yeah, take my vote, #2 sounds very reasonable”. Then I computed the numbers and there is not much of a difference.

For the first iteration the expectation value is (min + max) /2 for #2.
For the current implementation that is the same value but you still have the second roll with a 50% chance of getting a higher value. which is obviously better.

For the second iteration the current implementation is still better and for the third the expectation values are almost identical.

Hence no need to change anything.

7

Really? So if #2 used you current roll as the floor & could only roll from that or higher, how would that be worse? Surely it depends on how it’s implemented 'cause i can think of 2 very different ways of doing it (& I think you’ve only done the maths on the worse one).

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8

The current method is only an advantage for the first roll. After that, #2 is always superior.
Let’s assume a 1-100 range for easier math:
-Rolling twice and using the highest results is an average of 67.16%.
-Doing the same thing has the exact same average in every roll.

-Rolling only once has an average of 50%.
-Rolling the second time using the lowest value has an average of 75%, which is already better.
-Rolling the third time has an average of 87.5%. Etc, etc.

So clearly the current method is only better for the first roll and every subsequent ones it is outpaced by #2.
Not only that, but #2 has a much higher chance of actually reaching the highest roll and with less required rolls.

9

So no matter how often I roll the average does not change? This is clearly off.
Part of the problem in your example is that in the current system you do not start from 0 each time. You keep the current value and only replace it if you roll something better. You just do not use this value as floor for the rolls.
So lets say we rolled 67.16 the first time.
For the second time we have a chance of 32.84% of rolling something better. If we don’t we just keep the 67.16. And not only that, we actually roll twice, resulting in a higher chance.
So the possible outcomes are:

  1. both rolls lower than 67.16 => keep 67.16 [p = 0.6716 * 0.6716 = 45.1% ]
  2. first roll higher the than 67.16, second roll lower => keep first roll [p = 0.6716 * 0.3.84 = 22.05% ]
  3. first roll lower than 67.16, second roll higher => keep secend roll [p = 0.6716 * 0.3284 = 22.05%
  4. both rolls higher than 67.16 => keep the better one [p = 32.16 = 10.78%]

So we have (on average of course)

  • 45% chance to stay at 67.16
  • 44% chance to advance to 83
  • 10% chance to advance to 91
    So the expected result is about 75
10

It doesn’t. Individual rolls don’t care about your previous rolls.
If fact, with the current method, your chance to improve actually goes down over time. If you already have a 90 roll, you only have 1 little over 10% to improve.

Whereas with #2 your chances to improve are always massive. If you rolled 50, your second roll has a 98% chance to improve. And if you rolled 90 as in the previous example, you have a 90% chance to improve. And this goes all the way to a 99 roll where you get a 50% chance to improve, rather than a 1% chance with the current method.

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11

[Let’s hope the ‘preformatte text’ feature is working, otherwise I will delete this…]

Yes, with #2 you almost always improve while with the current method you don’t.
Yet, for the first two times the current is better and for the third almost equivalent.

Let me compute that for you using the number range [1;5], with 1 and 5 being inclusive:

For #2 we get 3 in the first round, 4 in the second and 4.5 in the third as expectation value under the assumption that the roll is greater or equal.

For the current system we are looking at these rolls:

  1 2 3 4 5
1 1 2 3 4 5
2 2 2 3 4 5
3 3 3 3 4 5
4 4 4 4 4 5
5 5 5 5 5 5

9 * 5 = 45
7 * 4 = 28
5 * 3 = 15
3 * 2 =  6
1 * 1 =  1

That sums to 95 and 95 devided by 25 is 3.8
So for the first time the blessing shows up we get 3.8 vs 3

For the second time the blessing shows up for the 
current system we keep this value if we do not get 
a roll higher than 3:

   1   2   3  4 5
1 3.8 3.8 3.8 4 5
2 3.8 3.8 3.8 4 5
3 3.8 3.8 3.8 4 5
4  4   4   4  4 5
5  5   5   5  5 5

9 * 5   = 45
7 * 4   = 28
9 * 3.8 = 34.2

That sums to 107.2 and 107.2 devided by 25 is 4.288 vs 4.

Only for the third time the blessing shows up we start to get better values for #2.

12

Yes, but that is the issue, isn’t it? You won’t get your blessing maxed in 2 tries with the current system. The odds of that happening are very low.
So #2 is actually a better way to improve your blessings because it ensures that you will almost always improve it.
And especially it gets rid of that frustrating feeling of having a lower roll show up all the time, since with #2 you will, at worst, get the same value.

2 Likes
13

Of course.
However, I for one am happy with a ‘very good’ result and for that both systems are more or less equivalent and I would not demand a change but rather have a bug fixed.

Also, as already mentioned two times: You need the blessing to show up in the first place. And that makes a much higher impact than the difference between #2 and the current system, because you can run the boss multiple times without seeing the blessing at all.

14

Sure, but the OP issue was with farming them to get high rolls and getting frustrated with constantly rolling lower results when his blessing does come up. And for that issue, #2 is clearly the superior method.

I do agree that it’s annoying to have to farm each boss dozens of times (because your blessing doesn’t always roll) for each character. #2 would reduce that significantly while not just giving you max rolls which would considerably cut short your alt lifetime.

EDIT: only saw your edit after posting.
As for blessings showing up, those don’t change the statistics. If you want your blessing to roll in the 90% range, #2 will get there in many less tries. Same if you want to max it.

1 Like
15

As for your edit:
If you run the boss 10 times and get the blessing 3 times then both the current system and #2 will give you similar results (with #2 having the smoother progression).
However in 7 out of 10 times the method does not matter because it is not applied.
So drawing more blessings, i.e. increasing the chance that ‘your’ blessing shows up, would probably have a bigger effect than switching from the current rolling method to #2.

16

They can be.
They just shouldn’t be allowed to roll lower then you’ve already achieved. So gradual upgrades every time do you it.
Set a max % amount of what it could upgrade to, check the current unlocked value, provide a random increase between ‘0’ (staying the same) and whatever the maximum increase should be.

Shouldn’t be hard to do.

Also a viable option since it’s a longer-term farm anyway. Agreed.

Nah, not needed if one of the other (or both) are implemented.

Your programming is fine, your math is off :stuck_out_tongue:

If you have a roll-range of 50 values and only full integers can roll then you have 50 different states available. Hence each stage has a 2% chance to roll.

As simple as that. With a 50% chance you’ll have a max roll after 34,5 (or so) tries. Which is… a lot, especially since we have 11 timelines. That related to more then 400 bosses killed (Chance doesn’t rise linear) before maxing out all blessings with that 50% chance… given that we roll the right blessing every single time without fail.
With the variety (and different rarity) of the blessings it can get into the 10k+ range for a 50% normal distribution though, which is not acceptable and never was.

Scaling and EHG just doesn’t go together well. All their scaling systems are just randomly thrown out in the hopes they mesh together, stopping whenever ‘it feels not like crap’. There is no informed decision behind it, or at least not one I can find out since I’m checking out general distribution and exponential equations since a few weeks now as I wanna get to the bottom of those issues.

Not mathematically… perception wise it is better. ‘Number go brrrrr’ is nice, contrary ‘No reward’ is not nice for our brain.

Tricking the brain to think it got a reward is 50% of game-dev.
The other 50% is giving it neither too much nor too little reward.

Once again, perception.
A system which has a random range from 1-100 every time does allow ‘fail states’. ‘No change’ for you. Negative emotions are roughly 10 times as intensive for the human brain as positive emotions, which is why depression is so easy to have and so hard to get out of.
So theoretically (practically there’s much more at work) we would need 10 times as many ‘Number go brrr’ effects then ‘No increase’ ones to make it feel ‘good’. So only a 10% chance to ‘fail’ at most. Which… obviously is impossible when you get higher and higher rolls as the chance to fail gets higher with each pre-earned point for the ‘floor’.

Hence why #2 is psychologically better. You can make the increase a max of 2 points and despite starting off vastly better without this system you would still feel ‘rewarded’ every time you do it, without fail. And you would see that quite a surprising amount of people would be fine with it despite needing a lot longer for the majority of people.

In my example if you get 20 rolls you’ll have a value between ‘10’ and ‘20’ after the incremental rolls, but with the completely random one you’ll have had a 9,5% chance to achieve your ‘100’ value already, which is substantial.
After 25 (20-50) you’ll have had a 22% chance.
And it inverts the higher we go, leading to taking longer… as even when you’ve ‘finished’ your blessing with guarantee after 100 rolls in the incremental version (since 1 is the minimum increase) you’ll still only have had a 63% chance to achieve the 100 roll.
Double it and it’s still only 86%

The formula behind that is “1 - p^n” which in that case is 1 - (99/100)^number of tries.

That one is a important formula for change-based stuff. Puts things into relation properly.

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Binomial distribution. However, the current system rolls twice each time and takes the better roll. I failed to come up with a comprehensive formula for that (hence my hands on approach some posts above), while you seem to have ignored that.

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Yes, true, I missed that in my train of thought.

So instead of 34,5 bosses per timeline it’s 17,25 bosses to happen with a 50% chance.

Because it’s solely the number of rolls, you just double the roll amount per try, it’s a direct correlation there and no funky math needed. Had to think shortly about that too.

19

Bummer, you’re right.

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But WHY cap the potential improvement? If you simply set the floor to the current value with no cap, you get progressive reward AND less grind. Given the RNG of even getting the bonus type you want AND the need to build the stability for each attempt, this is already a significant grind.