Game Mechanics Reconsider mount upgrade distribution

Right now, mount upgrades are distributed such that ones you pass over become more common. This is, to be blunt, bizarre. I'm not sure why this was implemented. It's not telegraphed, so players can end up grinding for hours and being extremely frustrated because the one upgrade they take no longer appears. It doesn't seem to have any situation in which it's meaningfully beneficial; the only time it'd help is if you blindly missed upgrades you want, a situation which is so narrow and clouded that it's not worth designing for (you can both blindly and intentionally miss upgrades you didn't want).

There's a simple and better system: make upgrade distribution instead based on which of your mount's stats are the lowest. Upgrades for high and maxed stats are rare, for low stats are common; if all your stats are maxed, you have an increased chance of energy and speed boosts.

 

Wait, that’s why way back my precious wyvern was only getting Boost and Toughness upgrades… despite those being maxxed

 

My only problem with this is that the current system allows for really fast leveling of a single stat, as opposed to encouraging maxing all stats. That probably saves several hours if you're just trying to level a stat high enough to feed another material, depending on whether or not all the pickups end up requiring you to feed your mount.

Personally, I think the current system works well, as it almost entirely removes the RNG of finding multiples of the one stat you need. If they were to change it, I would want the odds of any stat to be even. If they reduced the odds of getting any stat you had nearly maxed, you'd likely have to make as many pickups to max a specific stat, but because you couldn't force the one you need by grabbing other ones with another mount, you'd have to keep wasting time or energy looking for the one you want, with a decreased spawn chance.

Edit: my autocorrect is getting worse by the day I swear

 

This feature has cost me hours, I'm very confused by the logic here. If you stop taking an upgrade, sure, you can guarantee like five will spawn but if you take any of them, that ability goes away.

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Also the only reason my wyvern isnt fully maxed, handling buffs almost never spawn if you don't waste energy taking dead ones

 

It doesn't go away if you pick one up; if you pick up a bunch of other pickups on a different mount, you will queue up a large number of what ever you're looking for that will be present when you switch back to whatever mount you're trying to level. I think it caps out at something like 8, maybe a bit higher. I'll just assume 8 for the rest of this.

Your second statement is the exact reason I like this system; if you have another mount, ride around and pick up everything that isn't handling for like 15-20 minutes. At a certain point, it will only spawn handling pickups. When you switch back to your wyvern, you'll have a good number of handling pickups queued. You're guaranteed a few of these immediately, and the others will spawn in with much higher frequency for the next few pickups. This is because as best I can tell, you can think of it as having 8 slots, and each of those is taken up by a random pickup. If you don't take that when it's offered, it's still in that slot and will be offered again. If something spawns in and you pick it up, that slot gets rerolled, giving you another random pickup, but if you don't it remains there until you do. This means you can fill all of those slots with the same thing by just taking anything else offered on a different mount (thus rerolling any slot that doesn't have what you want).

By switching between the mount you're leveling and a "disposable" mount (I just use the highest energy mount I have), you roll all of those slots to be whatever the leveling mount needs, grab the 8 queued slots worth of that pickup on the leveling mount, then switch back to rolling them with the disposable mount. You do the same number of pickups as if it was totally random (because as far as I can tell, it is; you just get to save the ones you want for when you're on the mount that needs them), but in a way that guarantees the mount you care about leveling will not run out of energy because it's only picking up what it needs (Effectively you get two or more mounts worth of energy, and one of them can be whatever the highest energy mount you have is, making it very hard to run out before maxing whatever stat you want. You can even switch out the disposable mount, to keep it going for an insanely long time.). It's also useful because you can effectively pre-level a mount doing this. Even if I'm feeding or breeding a mount, I can effectively give it speed levels by picking up everything else on another mount, so that when that mount is ready I can just immediately grab 10 levels. If that's all I would need to feed it a higher tier of material, I just turned a massive grind into something I did while waiting; I spend the same amount of time (probably a little less actually; I'm on a faster mount with better handling and more energy so picking stuff up is slightly more efficient), but it gets done sooner.

 

I mean if you know how the system works, it can be interesting I think. But the question I have is: How much sense does it have, that you have to spend time collecting power ups that you don't even need so you can then in turn collect the right power ups? Why should the right power ups not come instantly?

So lets say, everything is maxed except for speed, then only power ups for speed spawn. If there is multiple not maxed, then the power ups spawn proportional to how much you are missing until maxed. This would be I think a more intuitive system and also make the leveling just more convenient. Of course then the problem arises, that the boost power ups wouldn't spawn anymore when the speed stat is maxed. I would suggest to separate those two. That would also make the System more intuitive, because for me it took a moment to realize, that it is the boosts that level the speed stat. That means that if you have a mount with maxed stats, the power ups would not even spawn anymore, except of those which give a temporary boost like the energy battery or the boost.

 

[at Melkor] The system can be run in that way, but it's convoluted metagaming that is never explained in-game. And is that really better? Like, why do you want one stat and one stat only to be maxed? I think it's fairer to do it the way I outline - some power players aren't going to do as well as they could before, but all of the casuals will do much better, and ultimately MMOs rely much more on the casual playerbase.

 

I want one stat maxed because it allows me to level one stat in order to feed them a higher level material. Also, your suggestion only makes sense in the context of leveling one or a few stats. If you're trying to level everything, there's no benefit to it not having a memory for what has been offered and not taken because you won't be taking selectively. The only context in which you would care about excluding a stat is when you are trying to level a stat or handful of stats selectively, in which case being able to remove others from the pool is objectively better. This way, instead of having a chance of being offered something good and a (much larger, once you start hitting the maxes on multiple stats) chance of being offered something useless, you are either given something useful or are given the chance to remove one of those useless rolls from the pool to guarantee something useful eventually.

I agree that it isn't intuitive, and the player should absolutely be informed that it works that way. But at the same time, this system is far more convenient for the knowledgeable player. If you've tried breeding wyverns, you too know the pain of trying to level a mount in order to feed it a higher level material; this massively cuts down on the pain of that, since it takes less time and you'll never run out of energy.

Either way you'll get offered power ups you don't want. With the current system, there's a way of removing them so you temporarily won't be offered them again though. Removing the ones you don't want is would be nice, but given the choice between it being easier to max out a single mount, or being able to level the many, many mounts needed to breed a good mount, I'd take the latter, as it's something you'll need to do more often. Leveling up the final result only happens once, and only becomes selective after most of the stats are already maxed, at which point you likely only need a handful of boosts for one or two stats; the exact scenario the current system helps with the most.