The Mana World Forums

In particular I would like to raise this point with the Fallen.
These are the statistics for item drops from a Fallen:
Bone (2.1%)
Skull (3%)
Dark Crystal (10%)
Warlord Helmet (0.03%)
Warlord Plate (0.02%)
Leather Gloves (0.35%)

The 4-leaf clover can be dropped at 0.05% from a Clover patch.
Think carefully a second (or more). Why on Earth would it be so hard to pickup a warlord plate? It is more than 2x harder to get a warlord plate and almost 2x harder to get a warlord helmet. Do the Fallen have an auto-disintegrator upon death? At the very least create a new item called "Damaged armour" that is worth less than a normal undamaged Warlord Helmet/Plate and is used just to sell.

I can understand that in the GY, it is a pure grinding/levelling playground but these drop rates are highly unrealistic. At the point where a player can fight a Fallen (on their own -to get the drops) they have to be high enough level to actually own a set of warlord armour to begin with!

When you consider that any player with half a brain can farm bats for far more profit it seems really unfair to higher level players. What does everyone else think?

I think your right. I think we should make it worth 1k each. Also instead of using helmits dropped from spiders we should use these armors to create with. Why do spiders drop helmits anyway there are now more appropriate monsters for that.

meway wrote:I think your right. I think we should make it worth 1k each. Also instead of using helmits dropped from spiders we should use these armors to create with. Why do spiders drop helmits anyway there are now more appropriate monsters for that.

the helmets used to drop from snakes, but there complaints about that, so it was moved.

Who goes to the graveyard expecting drops?

Yes you're level 99 so I guess the game is over for you so any extra benefits now would seem pretty empty to you. I did mention that GY is a levelling map but that doesn't mean that the drops couldn't be better. I'm level 94 so if someone does change the drops again it would be late for me too but that's not really the point.

The main point of this topic is that players who kill higher level monsters should get more or a better reward than say a level 20 who can kill a bat and get more gold in an hour. The fallen was an example that drop rewards should be redesigned (hopefully a very clear and irrefutable example).

Just to re-emphasise the point at 0.02% one would have to kill 5000 Fallens to get within the statistical likelihood of getting a single Warlord Platebody. Whilst people don't need the warlord platebody at the level that they can kill Fallens it's still a nicer reward than the nothing but shared xp you gain from killing one.

Most of you high level guys have millions of gp. The most expensive NPC items don't cost more than 100.000. What do you need even more money for? When there is something wrong here then it's that low- and mid level monsters give too much loot, not high levels giving not enough.

Here goes for my first ever post:

I agree that higher level players should have something to look forward to such as a better value or higher value drops from those creepy hard to kill monster things in the grave yard, It would keep the game a lot more interesting, otherwise .. what's left to do except to help newer player by being generous and giving them stuff...or hit the bat caves and make more money....

my other issue...... still no patches for us poor mac users.... we miss out on soo much...

aelithia wrote:my other issue...... still no patches for us poor mac users.... we miss out on soo much...

???????????????????????????????????????????????

0.0.29.1 (the latest released client and the only version official support (with mana dev clients)) is available for mac.

If we really want to balance drops, we need to use expected values. Which is the value of the drop times the probability it drop.

For example, a 100gp value drop with a 30% chance to drop has a expected value of 100 * .3 = 30gp. Meaning you would expect to get 30gp for each time you kill a monster.

So say:

100gp @ 30% = 100 * .3 = 30gp
300gp @ 12% = 300 * .12 = 36gp
500gp @ 5% = 500 * .05 = 25gp

For a grand total of 91gp as a expected value. Meaning if you kill the monster 100 times, you would expect to have 9,100gp (91 * 100).

To correctly balance the value of drops you must create a formula to find a expected value for the difficultly of the monster.

However the biggest issue with this is that monsters don't really have a standard 'difficultly' level. So you must find a way to define this.

Kage:
I agree about the method to calculate the expected value of drops you just need to also include the frequency of monsters into the equation. An example would be the bat cave where the bats respawn quicker than say grass snakes.

Apparently each monster has a level like players do (if I'm reading the monster database correctly). Unreleased monster "Snakelord" has level 300, JackO has 250, Fallen 120, etc. The thing that comes into play is location/map. The grass snakes on the higher plane are easier to fight than the grass snakes in the slightly lower plane simply because of the limited area to run around in.

So actually you can class monsters on difficulty but you might need to take into account the maps.

At the time of writing this post, bat item drops have been devalued by 50% and item weights have been changed to be more realistic. I think though that a lot more tweaking of monster drop rates and item values is needed to make it more realistic and add more appeal to fit a traditional game where higher level monster do give higher value rewards.

Acegi wrote:Apparently each monster has a level like players do (if I'm reading the monster database correctly). Unreleased monster "Snakelord" has level 300, JackO has 250, Fallen 120, etc.

These are 'levels' arbitrary, and do not reflect the strength of the monster.

Kage wrote:

Acegi wrote:Apparently each monster has a level like players do (if I'm reading the monster database correctly). Unreleased monster "Snakelord" has level 300, JackO has 250, Fallen 120, etc.

These are 'levels' arbitrary, and do not reflect the strength of the monster.

But they do affect some attributes such as accuracy and dodge. A lot of monsters right now have some rather... unusual... stats.


---Freeyorp

No monster should have a level larger than 50. It heavily breaks gameplay mechanics and makes a dodge-critter (my favorite build) useless as a build.

Monsters should be made more powerful with stats apart from their levels.

Higher-valued drops, though? Sure, just as soon as we get some working money sinks.

Whilst a lot of people may disagree with this because it's harder to get money now. The halving of bat drops (main income for most players) has forced many to consider more focus on red slime hunting and selling iron ores. In a tiny way this helps contribute (at least a small part) towards making these "higher level" monsters' drops seem more valuable.

I'm convinced that in the future even higher level monsters can be used to give larger rewards. For now it maybe worth considering dropping more bones from skeletons. I doubt many people make a huge sum of profit from the GY. Unlike snake pit if you play archer you can't cover your costs (arrows) by selling GY drops. In snake pit you could sell hats to cover you snake slaughtering and make a bit of profit. GY: just exp. Snake pit: exp+profit.

In a way actually, warriors spending time in GY tend not to spend time anywhere else. They don't need to cover any battle costs so the whole game now revolves around mindless grinding. Not really the direction games should push people towards. To cover costs of grinding archers will have to go to other places in the game.

Acegi wrote:Whilst a lot of people may disagree with this because it's harder to get money now.

We're trying to deflate the economy.