ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I was killing Adventurer Parties for their sparkle pants and noticed that my gold hadn't gone up much, items that should've been worth around 5 gold were only returning less than 1. Tried it a few times. You can move the items of same rareness/tier to inventory and transmog'd them on the world map for fair value.

Is this actually a feature? I don't like it much.

A feature to discourage grinding. Sludgenest 2 does the same thing.

It is intended behavior.

As you note, it is both trivial and boring to work around the behavior.

I feel that this "feature" should be removed.

Or alternatively, fix the workaround.

If adventurer parties were buffed to provide one with real challenge at 20ish levels, then this totally artificial nerf would be unneeded. They are adventurer parties, why do they get skill trees from one class? Make that at least two!

supermini wrote:Or alternatively, fix the workaround.

That is a terrible idea.

See, you haven't actually fixed the grinding issue, you've just told the person who is motivated to grind to do literally 10 times more grinding.

Grinding sucks.
Your idea implies 10x more grinding.
This is not a good thing.

So I should make them worth 0 ?

darkgod wrote:So I should make them worth 0 ?

If the idea is to take grinding out of the game, yes, they should give 0 gold and 0 fortress energy.

At that point, why don't we just rip them out of the game entirely?
Okay, seriously: they are the part of the game. They are pretty much avoidable, and if you collide with them it's often your own damn fault. Make them actually dangerous! I didn't hear anything about people farming orc patrols, and you know why? Because an orc patrol can actually kill you.
Make them scale faster with level. Maybe exponentially faster, if needed. But saying "oh okay you cannot transmogrify items from encounters with adventurers which is totally unintuitive, feels out of the place and easily avoidable by stacking +ENC equip, but hey! balance!"

darkgod wrote:So I should make them worth 0 ?

No.

Make Adventurers and Zigur patrols spawn a limited number of times, and make them stop spawning entirely after level 40 or so.

Limit the Farportal to only working ~30 times UNTIL you win the game, after which you can go as much as you want.

Now you're rewarded for danger, but there's no grinding.

0player wrote:They are pretty much avoidable, and if you collide with them it's often your own damn fault. Make them actually dangerous! I didn't hear anything about people farming orc patrols, and you know why? Because an orc patrol can actually kill you.

There are places where they're hard to avoid, like the area around the sandworm lair.

Orc patrols kill me around as often as adventurer parties kill me, but orc patrols come in the time of the game where I start to get bored of fighting orcs.

I think this became an issue after the introduction of the sludge nest where you can easily get 12000 gold, 5 levels and a huge number of items(some of them good) without too much effort. Even without gold, grinding is useful for better items and experience.

Personally if someone want to spend two days grinding adventurers for another 4000 gold, I'd think they need something better to do.

I posted a fix for the "workaround" at http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?p=162994#p162994

Another way to stop the grinding is to have the gold multiplier for items dropped in ambushes and farportals decrease based on how many times you've run them. Something like a multiplicative 10% decrease applied after each one is complete (So the first adv. patrol is 100%, then 90%, then 81%, etc., similar for Zigur, and the Orc Ambush (done once) would yield 100%). Keep factors separate for each kind of encounter to not penalize variety.

This way, the patrols are useful for several "legitimate" encounters without penalizing players that are willing to take on a little risk to strengthen a character, while killing any serious grinding abuse. If someone wants to grind these things after the value gets below 10%, there's probably no stopping them.

Hachem_Muche wrote:Another way to stop the grinding is to have the gold multiplier for items dropped in ambushes and farportals decrease based on how many times you've run them. Something like a multiplicative 10% decrease applied after each one is complete (So the first adv. patrol is 100%, then 90%, then 81%, etc., similar for Zigur, and the Orc Ambush (done once) would yield 100%). Keep factors separate for each kind of encounter to not penalize variety.

This way, the patrols are useful for several "legitimate" encounters without penalizing players that are willing to take on a little risk to strengthen a character, while killing any serious grinding abuse. If someone wants to grind these things after the value gets below 10%, there's probably no stopping them.

Why is it important that these high-risk low-reward encounters exist at all?

For Orc Patrols, they are part of a strategic decision: you muddle through them, or you go take out the Breeding Pits and you reduce their frequency. That's fine. The overmap encounters are a type of risk you can make decisions about.

What's the strategic decision enhanced by zigur patrols and adventurer parties?

Instead of taking away the reward, why not just take away the whole encounter? (i.e. limited number of total patrols / adventurers ever)

The real reward for beating adventurers is equipment. They can sometimes drop blue and purple items, which, considering how much rarer these have become since that change, is not insignificant. It's more useful earlier than later, which is ok, because adventurers are more dangerous on early levels than late.

There's no reason to take out adventurer parties, just the gold/energy grinding aspect of it (hence the changes to ruined dungeon, sludgenest, and summoned mobs).

Doctornull wrote:Why is it important that these high-risk low-reward encounters exist at all?

For Orc Patrols, they are part of a strategic decision: you muddle through them, or you go take out the Breeding Pits and you reduce their frequency. That's fine. The overmap encounters are a type of risk you can make decisions about.

What's the strategic decision enhanced by zigur patrols and adventurer parties?

Instead of taking away the reward, why not just take away the whole encounter? (i.e. limited number of total patrols / adventurers ever)

I would agree. This way, they are still a problem on early levels, you can still try and encounter them for items, but since they drop truly small amounts of items (I think you get around ten gold from one patrol?), limiting their amount would be an answer to grind.
Still, Carthage must be destroyed, and Tactical AI should be enhanced.