09/06/23 | Minor Update - Drop Rates and Difficulties
Hey there, everyone!
As we draw closer to the release, we’ve begun shifting the focus a little bit from content introduction and have begun working on fine tuning a few of the pre-existing aspects to the game. Among the many to come, we’ve spent today looking into the game mode difficulties and the drop rates. After much deliberation, both through community feedback and our own play testing, we believe these changes will both be better for the longevity of the game and the overall player experience!
First, and it’s been a looong time coming (rejoice, beta testers!), we’ve begun modifying the drop rates for items across the board on an almost entirely individual basis. Items of value will now drop significantly more often (up to a 50% increase in their drop chance, varying), which also lead to the awkward discovery of certain items being upwards of 4-5x rarer than originally intended… sorry. We’ve also rewritten the ways in which group bosses such as Venenatis, Callisto, Nex, etc., designate their loot drops for rare items: now, instead of rolling for a rare drop once per kill and then picking the player weighted solely on how much damage each player did, every player will now get their own roll on a rare drop that will be scaled on how much damage they specifically did. In other words, on average the same amount will drop, but it will now be possible to get multiple rare drops per kill. Our reasoning? Well, it leads us into our next big change…
Whips being dropped with a moderate, respectable, completely balanced 50,000% drop rate increase.
Second, player difficulties/game modes have been reworked in a very significant way: the Medium game mode has been removed altogether; the experience rates for the Easy/Casual game mode have been significantly reduced; we’ve introduced a new modifier to the Hard/Veteran game mode that will increase their drop rate boost by 5% (this means they’ll be more likely to receive rare drops, and it scales in consideration with elements like the new boss drop formula, circling back to the drop rate changes).
We spent an embarrassingly large amount of time deciding which difficulty names to go with.
Originally, we didn’t want to incentivize playing on a harder difficulty beyond the recognition given that’s been build into the project (leaderboard icons, ingame ranks, etc), however we’ve since revisited that stance and after serious deliberation, we’ve landed on the introduction of this drop rate boost. Now, players who pick Veteran difficulty will have a slighter higher chance to receive rolls on the rare drop table than someone on the Casual difficulty. Interestingly enough, implementing this system properly required the redesign of loot allocation formulas (as mentioned within the section boss drops section of this post), and since the groundwork for that has now been laid… the option for us to introduce other means of influencing drop rates on a specific basis has been opened; this means that seaso- well, we can’t go spoiling everything now. Until next time!…
Thanks!
Neox Staff
