Vore Vendor - 0.095-2 : Mini Christmas Update (1/12/24)

[ShadowsSong]

Alright, I know you're tired of hearing people beat on a dead horse, but hear me out.
I know you don't want to do guaranteed drops because it would mess with the early game progression, but have you considered that you can change the progression rate by changing the required number of creatures for shop requests and/or limiting how many creatures are available to fight (no creature respawns)? If you remove randomness, you have a fixed number of fights players can complete before they run out of resources in the early game, and later the requests are for more creatures or stronger creatures that require more resources to get.
Maybe that's the "one potential solution" you alluded to before?

The reason I bring it up again is I just quit the game in frustration (again) after going through 10 fights in a row against 3 forest slimes with no drops. The random drops are not a sufficient progression rate balance, because I (and many RPG players) will just save scum a fight 10 times rather than accept zero loot for my time and effort, which makes it no different than giving everything a near 100% drop rate (I'll take 2 out of 3 on the slime fights, but not 1).
I had 5,000 gold by the time I unlocked the underground lake in the well. It makes no difference in time played to get enough creatures to complete all requests, the only difference is you expect players to spend more resources doing so because drops aren't guaranteed, while we can play differently and choose not to spend as many resources by save scumming. Either way is just a different type of time sink and grind.

Please don't take this text as being angry or accusatory; that's not my intended tone. I'm frustrated but I see this as something to troubleshoot and am stating how I play to bypass the problem and how I see it could be fixed.
I'm an engineer, I like troubleshooting and problem solving, maybe too much and I make more work for myself (and others) by finding things to fix or addressing employee complaints. I just spent my Sunday afternoon helping my dad make his Windows 11 laptop look and work like Windows 7 because he complained about them changing the right-click menu and removing the old File Explorer ribbon, when I could have been playing video games instead.

While I get where you're coming from with the idea, just bumping up the required number of creatures would result in some very odd lore-related logic. At a 100% rate, you could get, for example, 16 green slimes from a single run of the forest. With numbers like that, I'd have to MASSIVELY boost the amount required for quests, to the point it'd honestly come off pretty ridiculous. The required numbers have always been on the lower side because, from a lore standpoint, no one's going to go about consistently ordering numbers THAT high consistently. And consistent orders is precisely what those orders on board are.

Okay, maybe the slime example is a bad one because the slime fetishist absolutely WOULD order that many, but you get my point Most orders don't make sense with high numbers.

Comes down to an argument between lore and gameplay. Whilst I'd generally favour gameplay, when it makes lore THAT absurd, do have an issue with it. Plus it'd complicate quests like Valerie's one, since you'd be guaranteed an Alraune straight off and there's literally no sense in that requiring multiples.

One potential solution I HAVE been looking into is to give a guaranteed drop after you fail to get one so many times, but having trouble designing a method to allow that. Can't seem to find a way to get whether you get a drop or not to register and thus alter the variable/counter for 'time not earned'. It seems the best solution, but the mechanics of the design have me stuck. I've got an idea I'm looking to test, but it's difficult to 'test' something like that since no way of telling whether or not the resulting earned drop is from would be natural or not.

Just a quick update on this issue. Decided to try out my idea in hopes it would solve this issue (and in hopes I never have to hear about drop rate's again ). While, as I said before, it's something that's incredibly difficult to test out due to the random nature, I DO think I've created a workaround, though currently only applied it to forest slimes for testing purposes. Hopefully I'll have it added to all existing hunting zone monsters by time get next update out.

Basically what I've done is remove the drops from the creatures themselves, and instead set up an admittedly messily-complex system that triggers on victory instead. It''ll run a random check based on existing drop rates, and give you an amount of creatures based on those. But at the same time, should you not get ANY, it'll instead add to a counter that, when it reaches 3 'failed' fights in a row, you automatically get one. When a fight ends, you'll get a message telling you how many creatures you captured.

Are a couple of catches though. First is that the 'failed' counter only applies to the 'main' creature you're fighting. So even if you're fighting, say, the second Alraune fight, which has a slime present, you CAN get a slime drop, but even if you don't, it won't add to the 'failed' slime counter. It'll only add to the Alraune one if you fail to get that. Basically, the counter only increases for the creature that appears on map.

Also, due to this new system, I'll be removing the ability to save whilst in hunting zones, to decrease save scumming. It really shouldn't be needed at this point, after all.

Can't say it's a perfect solution, but hopefully it'll at least help solve the issues for people who are encountering repeated issues with drops. Frankly, still not sure how people are even having THAT bad a time with it, given at a 1/4 rate you should be picking up a few slime girls per forest run. But since I don't know how the RPG Maker's default drop system operates, there's quite possibly an issue I don't know about. At least setting it up as this way via event will definitely give a 1/whatever drop rate as opposed to whatever the base system's modifying the drop rates to.

[GeisKhan]

Alright, I know you're tired of hearing people beat on a dead horse, but hear me out.
I know you don't want to do guaranteed drops because it would mess with the early game progression, but have you considered that you can change the progression rate by changing the required number of creatures for shop requests and/or limiting how many creatures are available to fight (no creature respawns)? If you remove randomness, you have a fixed number of fights players can complete before they run out of resources in the early game, and later the requests are for more creatures or stronger creatures that require more resources to get.
Maybe that's the "one potential solution" you alluded to before?

The reason I bring it up again is I just quit the game in frustration (again) after going through 10 fights in a row against 3 forest slimes with no drops. The random drops are not a sufficient progression rate balance, because I (and many RPG players) will just save scum a fight 10 times rather than accept zero loot for my time and effort, which makes it no different than giving everything a near 100% drop rate (I'll take 2 out of 3 on the slime fights, but not 1).
I had 5,000 gold by the time I unlocked the underground lake in the well. It makes no difference in time played to get enough creatures to complete all requests, the only difference is you expect players to spend more resources doing so because drops aren't guaranteed, while we can play differently and choose not to spend as many resources by save scumming. Either way is just a different type of time sink and grind.

Please don't take this text as being angry or accusatory; that's not my intended tone. I'm frustrated but I see this as something to troubleshoot and am stating how I play to bypass the problem and how I see it could be fixed.
I'm an engineer, I like troubleshooting and problem solving, maybe too much and I make more work for myself (and others) by finding things to fix or addressing employee complaints. I just spent my Sunday afternoon helping my dad make his Windows 11 laptop look and work like Windows 7 because he complained about them changing the right-click menu and removing the old File Explorer ribbon, when I could have been playing video games instead.

While I get where you're coming from with the idea, just bumping up the required number of creatures would result in some very odd lore-related logic. At a 100% rate, you could get, for example, 16 green slimes from a single run of the forest. With numbers like that, I'd have to MASSIVELY boost the amount required for quests, to the point it'd honestly come off pretty ridiculous. The required numbers have always been on the lower side because, from a lore standpoint, no one's going to go about consistently ordering numbers THAT high consistently. And consistent orders is precisely what those orders on board are.

Okay, maybe the slime example is a bad one because the slime fetishist absolutely WOULD order that many, but you get my point Most orders don't make sense with high numbers.

Comes down to an argument between lore and gameplay. Whilst I'd generally favour gameplay, when it makes lore THAT absurd, do have an issue with it. Plus it'd complicate quests like Valerie's one, since you'd be guaranteed an Alraune straight off and there's literally no sense in that requiring multiples.

One potential solution I HAVE been looking into is to give a guaranteed drop after you fail to get one so many times, but having trouble designing a method to allow that. Can't seem to find a way to get whether you get a drop or not to register and thus alter the variable/counter for 'time not earned'. It seems the best solution, but the mechanics of the design have me stuck. I've got an idea I'm looking to test, but it's difficult to 'test' something like that since no way of telling whether or not the resulting earned drop is from would be natural or not.

The other part of making drops guaranteed would have to be having a fixed number of creatures that don't respawn, so maybe you could have a dozen slimes in the forest instead of 16 and you can balance requests around that, maybe even having a higher level request from the slime feteshist for 15 slimes they'll pay 1500 gold for (so you have to give more than a full clear of slimes), or 1000 gold + restorative tea (maybe because they recommend it for stomach aches from eating so many slimes ). For the alrune quest you could make it require a specific alrune that spawns deeper in the forest and have it progress the quest stage when you defeat it (maybe with an extra cutscene when you do), rather than giving Valerie an alrune from inventory.
That might be simpler than trying to get the guaranteed after x failures method working. I haven't worked with RPG maker, but for testing your method, is it possible to have it give a debug item so you know its working?

[ShadowsSong]

The other part of making drops guaranteed would have to be having a fixed number of creatures that don't respawn, so maybe you could have a dozen slimes in the forest instead of 16 and you can balance requests around that, maybe even having a higher level request from the slime feteshist for 15 slimes they'll pay 1500 gold for (so you have to give more than a full clear of slimes), or 1000 gold + restorative tea (maybe because they recommend it for stomach aches from eating so many slimes ). For the alrune quest you could make it require a specific alrune that spawns deeper in the forest and have it progress the quest stage when you defeat it (maybe with an extra cutscene when you do), rather than giving Valerie an alrune from inventory.
That might be simpler than trying to get the guaranteed after x failures method working. I haven't worked with RPG maker, but for testing your method, is it possible to have it give a debug item so you know its working?

That's just an extension of your original suggestion though, which wouldn't solve the problem with it I mentioned. To reiterate, it'd be illogical for most orders to require more than two or three creatures at a time, with the exception of slimes. Those someone might order loads of, but other types wouldn't make sense for people to order en masse. As I said, not going to sacrifice common sense in relation to in-game lore to such a ridiculous degree. Whilst I'm not saying no one would EVER make huge orders (if they were doing somethiing like a party, for example), but those wouldn't be the sort of things that'd be ordered consistently, which is the point of the requests.

Given that situation forcing low numbers for most species per request, if I was using fixed encounters, I COULD make only a very limited number of the other types so one clear of map would give right amount, but then there'd be virtually nothing but slimes on the map. Which'd be even more useless on Storm's Eye, since there AREN'T any slimes there, so there'd be next to no encounters. As such, that method would only work if I DID use high-numbers-per-request.

It's only a simpler solution in terms of actually getting drops constantly. In terms of lore, it'd make no sense, and making it that easy would make the 'hunting' aspect of gameplay lame as anything. If you fought, say, three slimes, would you really be able to capture every single one every single time? Lissi can't be expected to capture everything she fights, and it wouldn't feel like hunting any more, just collection, so a 100% rate just doesn't make sense.

As for testing method, I've already managed to test it works (had to temporarily re-activated saving in field so could save-scum to test, since needed string of failures, but know it works now). The event script for it is a bit messy, but as long as it works and doesn't cause major lag in the event processing, see no reason to use something else since it'll help offset the problems without breaking game lore.

[GeisKhan]

It's only a simpler solution in terms of actually getting drops constantly. In terms of lore, it'd make no sense, and making it that easy would make the 'hunting' aspect of gameplay lame as anything. If you fought, say, three slimes, would you really be able to capture every single one every single time? Lissi can't be expected to capture everything she fights, and it wouldn't feel like hunting any more, just collection, so a 100% rate just doesn't make sense.

As for testing method, I've already managed to test it works (had to temporarily re-activated saving in field so could save-scum to test, since needed string of failures, but know it works now). The event script for it is a bit messy, but as long as it works and doesn't cause major lag in the event processing, see no reason to use something else since it'll help offset the problems without breaking game lore.

I can get your point of view and reasons, and it is your game. Maybe it just needs some additional lore/dialog in the beginning to set expectations about how often Lissi can be expected to capture monsters, or rather, how good monsters are at avoiding capture?