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Reduced Reliance on RNG (from the perspective of a game maker)

Posted 2022-10-22 13:51:57 (edited)
I only took 1 vanity talent.  Herbalism, pup survival chances, scout timing boosts, etc.  are all vanity talents and do no help in fighting.  The only one I took was Wolfy Odour, a 5% chance to attract special NBWs.  Everything else is strictly battling.  Which is sad, because the other talents should have been issued to the wolves whose roles it would actually affect, sitters, herbalists, scouts, studs, etc.  Alphas are battlers and really do need the battling talents.

Here is what I did and so far they are working really well for me....so far:

Talents

The rabbit foot though, is still an issue.  It really should be fixed.

Mustang 🐎
#3314

Posted 2022-10-22 14:47:55
There's inconsistency between the same enemies, is what I'm saying. Yes, certain enemies are harder than others. (Though I do think enemies that are lower than 10 should be automatically weaker than a level 25 wolf, regardless of type of enemy. Because that just makes sense. Levels are weird on WD.)

But what I'm focusing on is that it's strange for the same exact enemy to be significantly easier at times than the same exact enemy of only half its level. This isn't so rare that it's unnoticeable.

I'd like to reiterate, I'm not against actual difficulty. (I actually find enraged enemies fun when I have energy, since I can Tumble them to remove enrage. It's cool having agency in battle beyond the same button-spam.) However, it's perfectly fair to want battling to be more consistent.

Whirligig
#11137

Posted 2022-10-22 17:15:57
That's just the thing. I can never know for sure if the 5-level fox I'm trying to battle on full health as lvl 20 Lead is gonna whoop my ass or not - even if I win, it's a whooping if I lost most of my health. And then I run circles around a lvl 20 Moose. What?
That's the problem. It doesn't make sense. Why am I almost loosing to an animal much smaller than me and much lower level? Why can I win against an animal much bigger than me without losing much health at all, that's higher level too? Why is the exact same enemy with exact same level so inconsistent in how hard it is to battle against?

Inconsistency - that's the problem. Outside of generalized "birds often bleed on first move" and "bears hit hard but are slow" etc. it's really not possible to have consistent expectations.

Ihmislehma
#1850

Posted 2022-10-22 18:36:21
I just kindly disagree then.

In the end, only the staff truly know the programming. Maybe I'm wrong and it is more rng based than I'm experiencing. Maybe it's just that some enemies have unbalanced stats and need to be examined once more.

To me, the game feels no less random than a dungeons and dragons roll, where sometimes you can get a natural 20 and win the fight, sometimes you'll get a 1 and it sucks, but most of the time it'll be somewhere in between. I know if I won 100% of battles, I'd be pretty damn bored and the game wouldn't be much fun at all. I need to focus on battles. If I bleed, I need to reexamine whether it's worth biting them our or I should run. I need to think about if I should use a lucky foot because it's a limited resource. And I need to think about what enemies I'm attacking because energy is limited, so I'd like to optimize my battles - I don't ever ever explore in biomes with snakes because they're 100% not worth it to me.

If there's some kind of bug that makes higher level leads battling lower level enemies wonky, I'd love to know about it so it can be fixed. Fighting bugs tend to take a lot of research, though. And I don't feel enough of an issue to do it myself.

I'm not really sure what the other option is for a reduced rng type system. Maybe I'd be a little bit more in agreement if I could understand an alternative system, but in my mind, it feels like it won't make much difference.

Reduced RNG might make people win a little bit more often, but it's only reduced, and people will still lose in some of the conditions I've explained before. It might lessen frustrating, but it won't fix it.

A non rng system - in my opinion - would be pretty dang boring. If battles are based only on stats vs stats, it's going to mean high stat players will just win every single time. Which not only seems boring, but a bit imbalanced. It will leave less room for strats and skill trees, things that will be changing over the next weeks now that skill trees has been introduced. I don't want the game to become Flight Rising where everyone refers to the same 2 guides for builds because there's only 1 or 2 good ways to optimize their dragons. I like how wolvden requires a bit more thought and planning.

The second issue with a non rng system (based on stats) is that if your stats are too low, you will lose every single time. There will be no "roll" to set you above the enemy. So it might cause even more losses.

So unless presented with a really good alternative, maybe there's no solution. Maybe there's many. It's hard to tell without knowing the coding of the site and how much is rng vs programmed behaviours and stats. I have a hard time imagining the admins rehauling a system as ingrained, tested, and integral as the current battling stat system.

Anyways, I'm gonna peace out and unsubscribe. I've said my words and it feels like things are just going in circles. My posts are here for the admins to read and I've made my vote <3

Slothie
#2938

Posted 2022-10-27 08:21:22
My thoughts on the skill tree + recent balance changes: With a heavily battle-centric build, but also all the buffs to enemies (enrage, not being able to overheal mid-fight), it feels like battles are just slightly harder than before. Also, I lose more HP on average from successful battles. I don't personally mind this; if things are harder for me, they're also harder for my competitors, so for me it's basically a wash. However, for people who were frustrated with the battle system, I imagine they're even more frustrated now.

Slothie wrote: "The second issue with a non rng system (based on stats) is that if your stats are too low, you will lose every single time. There will be no "roll" to set you above the enemy. So it might cause even more losses."

I've been thinking about this - specifically, what a more stat-based battle system might look like. If things were being totally revamped, I think it would be neat to have a battle system that rewards stat building. For instance, a basic level 20 NBW with around 800 stats wouldn't be able to beat most enemies in harder zones, because their stats are still too low. You'd have to breed for stats over successive generations to get a nicely statted lead (say, 1500 stats with a focus on strength) to beat the hardest boss enemies. This would give more value to higher-gen wolves and stat breeding. And it would be very satisfying to finally accomplish!

I like the principle of "Your first lead is weak and won't be able to accomplish everything, but he's only the first generation. His children will be stronger, and his grandchildren will be even stronger. They will accomplish what he cannot."

HOWEVER I feel like a lot of the playerbase would hate this. Whereas now, even a low-stat lead (800 stats) has a chance of beating the hardest enemies in the game, due to RNG.

Lionel
#34199

Posted 2022-10-27 08:35:30
To be honest, I just wish I didn't have a situation where a lvl 5 Red Fox can nearly end me from full health and take a lot of energy to beat, and a lvl 20 Red Fox takes 4 energy and a few hits on me.

Ihmislehma
#1850

Posted 2022-10-27 10:58:28 (edited)
What do you think about new special opening moves that are guaranteed to succeed? It looks like these might be the first moves in the battle that are not RNG based.

Dżanek
#24018

Posted 2022-10-27 11:03:53
Personally I think both of the special opening moves are not useful and I didn't take either of them. Focus giving +1 to rest/wait rolls is much more useful than increased damage on attacks (I do most of my damage through bleed, not by attacking) or decreased damage (if a rest/wait succeeds then I take 0 damage anyway so I don't care about damage reduction).

Lionel
#34199

Posted 2022-10-27 11:04:37
I didn't take those talents, as I prioritized having non-battling skills + basic battling skills. So I can't really comment on them at all.

Ihmislehma
#1850

Posted 2022-10-27 11:13:47
Hmm so far not impressed with the battle related talents unfortunately. I can recover energy but in exchange I spend more during fights because now opponents get "enraged". So I have to pay more attention but not in an exciting way which is annoying, and I might have less energy than before to explore in total regardless.

The new opening moves seem to give no real advantage over Focus but cost more energy.

I am VERY strength focused with my leads and would love to get an advantage from bleed, but the talent available also gives the advantage to opponents and bleed is so reliant on RNG that choosing this talent would be a Very Bad Decision. I don't even need to try. Seems absurd to me I could have a 1k strength lead and this talent would still be an awful ideal.

So I love we have a talent tree now but so far it seems it did not improve battling in any way.

🐾Alymiell🐾
#18317

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