RFC: Metal spiraling

[kilakan]

My hope is that at the end of the day, miners and metal workers still have some way to slowly grow the quality of their products. Otherwise being the only industry that relies on a limited amount of a random spawned high quality resource will be very bad...

[Mafious]

Going up by a percent is the issue. maybe it should be a fixed value instead... or as other have said a lower % to slow it down.

I just hope whatever solution you choose makes it so regular folk can still be competative with botters/major villages...

regular folk are doomed to be regular folk, a competent village should always be better than just one dude, if that dude has an army of bots it can be different but still. also the game revolves in walking from point a to point b and clicking on something, that can and will be automated unless there is some of regulation on the devs end and they have said multiple times they won't ban boting.

[MagicManICT]

What's goal of rework spiraling with quality? For 2 years quality 4-5k? And 10-100 ql it's 1000% up in 1st month? Next comparable up is 1k ql and 10k. How fast is was? Most of what they write here, buyers of high-quality metal on the market. But give out great tips here. And those who work with spiraling, they really worked very hard. And they again will hardworking and all other again will cry.

What's the top quality of carrots you're farming? Should your metal industry exceed that by such a huge margin? No, I think not. Spiraling was added way back when (w2, w3? I forget) so that metal products would have a chance to raise quality like most everything else instead of being stuck at q10 (ore was all q10 when mined then). It's not being removed. It's going to get--not a nerf-bat, i'd say because it's coming really hard, i think--a serious balancing with all other aspects of the game. The question presented to us here is "how much should it get." Should anything else change to make life better in this process while it's being changed?

I think some of this can be balanced out in the first month or two of the world as long as metal qualities aren't exceeding ore qualities by much. If it gets nerfed a bit too hard, it's easier to bring it back up a little than if it doesn't get nerfed enough.

Going up by a percent is the issue. maybe it should be a fixed value instead... or as other have said a lower % to slow it down.

Any percentage increase that is meaningful through the first six months and going into a year or two, and it will eventually outlevel everything else significantly just like now within 2-3 years. it's just going to have to be a flat number unless this compound quality growth is something that is added to all aspects of the game (and effectively it has by how the iron industry touches almost everything).

[LostJustice]

Just to point a few things out that is wrong with a few assumptions in this thread:

1.) Some bots are used for spiraling but really, it doesn't change much and I know this since I wrote those so called scripts and know exactly what they do. Same can be done by hand and most of it is still done by hand, at least by our group.

2.) Recent quality raise was mostly because of the sudden want for people to grind it higher. Theoretically if everything was perfect and people wanted to, it could be 8k quality or higher, but you know we are human too.

3.) People mention that eventually cap out because of formulas. This is wrong, you don't cap out and we proven that when people said the cap was 2.6k when we had already passed that. The only cap that is beginning to happen is diminishing returns for the quality gained vs the effectiveness of the weapon for example, a 2.1k B12 isn't that much different from a 2.4k B12.

4.) People are saying the raising is exponential when it isn't really the case, this more has to relate to #2 and the fact I am questioning people's math abilities and actual practice of spiraling.

5.) We don't use fuel bug for this. This isn't even really relevant to this topic.

6.) People argue metal is broken and that it shouldn't exceed your crops but I also argue shouldn't your crops not exceed your metal? This argument doesn't make sense. If you nerf metal, there is other things to spiral. Would those be broken too because of high quality? No one seems to touch that topic and to look at metal as the only main spiral is condemning because if it isn't metal leading the spiral than it will be other things that spiral and we will be back in this same topic again just with crops or trees or clay.

7.) I really question the math in this topic.

[phoenix]

What's goal of rework spiraling with quality? For 2 years quality 4-5k? And 10-100 ql it's 1000% up in 1st month? Next comparable up is 1k ql and 10k. How fast is was? Most of what they write here, buyers of high-quality metal on the market. But give out great tips here. And those who work with spiraling, they really worked very hard. And they again will hardworking and all other again will cry.

What's the top quality of carrots you're farming? Should your metal industry exceed that by such a huge margin? No, I think not. Spiraling was added way back when (w2, w3? I forget) so that metal products would have a chance to raise quality like most everything else instead of being stuck at q10 (ore was all q10 when mined then). It's not being removed. It's going to get--not a nerf-bat, i'd say because it's coming really hard, i think--a serious balancing with all other aspects of the game. The question presented to us here is "how much should it get." Should anything else change to make life better in this process while it's being changed?

I think some of this can be balanced out in the first month or two of the world as long as metal qualities aren't exceeding ore qualities by much. If it gets nerfed a bit too hard, it's easier to bring it back up a little than if it doesn't get nerfed enough.

if we will compare carrot and metall, then we must compare carrot fep and tools/curiosies, as finish products. Carrot 10 and 100 ql up in 3 times how is up tools/curiosies ? I guess far less, bcs. for example, tools мost of them depend on the tree, same curios. That is why I believe that quality of carrot should not be equal metall. And if we will nerf metall then there will be a reverse situation. Pull the quality of carrots. More ql of trees bcs of bin and etc. But it will not be a race. Everyone will plant trees and wait for them to grow in the chat. It is not good for the game.

In hight quality metal I see only one problem. After a certain quality, about 4000. It is almost impossible for a newcomer to come into the game to catch up with the industry. Because it was necessary to pump a separate character with 2k smithing and 10r str, for example. For soft cap 4k. It's problem. If fix alt characters specially for smithing without skills then it's not so big problem.

IMHO.

[Granger]

6.) People argue metal is broken and that it shouldn't exceed your crops but I also argue shouldn't your crops not exceed your metal? This argument doesn't make sense. If you nerf metal, there is other things to spiral. Would those be broken too because of high quality? No one seems to touch that topic and to look at metal as the only main spiral is condemning because if it isn't metal leading the spiral than it will be other things that spiral and we will be back in this same topic again just with crops or trees or clay.

FYI: I did, here and in other places.
But some claim to need numbers growing endlessly and as fast as possible, else there would be no fun at all

[azrid]

shut up with your proof
the math is wrong!!

[LostJustice]

6.) People argue metal is broken and that it shouldn't exceed your crops but I also argue shouldn't your crops not exceed your metal? This argument doesn't make sense. If you nerf metal, there is other things to spiral. Would those be broken too because of high quality? No one seems to touch that topic and to look at metal as the only main spiral is condemning because if it isn't metal leading the spiral than it will be other things that spiral and we will be back in this same topic again just with crops or trees or clay.

FYI: I did, here and in other places.
But some claim to need numbers growing endlessly and as fast as possible, else there would be no fun at all

Then it should be brought up here in this discussion. Point is, it seems like people are attempting to not really fix anything but only delay what is currently the inevitable known as spiraling, regardless if it is metal, clay, trees, what ever it is. And I agree with the idea on what Pheonix posted. Maybe instead of delay, allow for catch up or similar mechanic. It seems the topic isn't just metal because lets nerf metal, next world we can discuss clay kilns, then lets nerf those and next world we can discuss trees, couple worlds from now, lets talk about nerfing metal again.

Regardless, if spiraling exists people will do it and there will always be some people more actively doing it and seeking the benefits of it for it.

I see the following problems with metals:

The increase on a critical hit is a percentage (if the comments in this topic are correct), this results in quality increase following an exponential function. Same as in RL this looks quite harmless at the beginning... but a little while later, as soon as the numbers have increased over a certain threshold, the function takes off.

Then the quality of the resulting product in smithing is averaged with the quality of anvil and hammer. This has for the problems of being able to cycle an item repeatedly (as is possible with cast->bloom->cast) will move its quality quickly toward that of anvil/hammer within a few rounds, when adding in the % increase from the critical hit chance it's (statistically) easy to end up with a way highter quality than these, rebuild them, repeat - and that having reached a high quality anvil+hammer one can endlessly stamp out quality metal items from no-quality metal.

My suggestion is to turn all quality modifiers that are not consumed in an item transmutation - at least all objects (like anvil/herbalist table/compost bin/loom/...) but possibly (not really certain about that) also the items used (smiths hammer, axe, saws, treeplanter pots) - into softcaps (so these can't raise ingredient quality anymore) and all quality formulas (for crafting, but also for things soil/water/seed in the tree formula) that still use arithmetic means into using geometric averages.

Sure, this would both cut down speed of progression (as a single high quality ingredient would increase the result less) and couple the maximum achievable qualities (eg. for trees as the herbalist table wouldn't boost the result anymore) tighter to the qualities of the resources that can be extracted from the world - but that would be a good thing as IMHO Haven works quite well until the moment it reaches the point where the exponential functions take off, then it starts to fall apart.

First part, you do realize part of it turns to slag so it already lost at that stage. So no, it wouldn't be endless. Metal amount would dictate how long you could do it and the random chances. Only part I agree here is the no quality metal part but no one has actually suggested something that seems reasonable fix for that yet without some major rework. And this still relates mostly to metal.

Second part, yeah lets soft cap everything then remove the concept of spiraling entirely. Then we can twiddle our thumbs while the majority of people who played hafen for crafting can quit while we wait for crops to grow since that would be the only factor left now and then we can complain about how bots are unfair and only way to get high quality crops like world 5 and 6 again.

There is multiple ways to slow down the speed of progression here without killing it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the implied argument is that the strongest players will stop playing actively and therefore decay, allowing others to catch up.

If that is so, wouldn't the others be able to catch up anyway, given that the strongest players aren't playing actively?

[pppp]

If your motivation to play is grinding qualities endlessly up then you need unbound growth. If too high qualities disturb game balance and you want easier catch-up, you need bounded growth.
If you want both bounded and unbounded q growth at once, which is not logical, you need some system to push qualities back, be it quality decay or some other global dev-magic quality pushback.
Pick your poison, please.

[LostJustice]

If your motivation to play is grinding qualities endlessly up then you need unbound growth. If too high qualities disturb game balance and you want easier catch-up, you need bounded growth.
If you want both bounded and unbounded q growth at once, which is not logical, you need some system to push qualities back, be it quality decay or some other global dev-magic quality pushback.
Pick your poison, please.

Or allow people behind the top to grow by percentage to catch up to the top. Sorry don't like poison.