Why randomly dropping "superior" brains is an inferior idea.

I want to make a point of disagreeing. The extractor takes energy and has a slow rate of fire. It stops you getting other drops (or maybe I was at the wrong end of the a different curve but the first point stands). Essentially you can't just slide it into your normal play, you have to make sacrifices to get that brain. I cannot fit using a 3 shots till it's energy dry, range and damage of a cocktail stick gun into my dual swords style. That's nonsense. I've been lucky every time but I see this is a poor system.

I think making the item a guaranteed drop from one of a variety of enemies helps. In the game everything is random, so you can't guarantee anything but what you could do is narrow the odds considerably, or give people struggling other ways to approach it. Or yeah you could cobble together inferior brains, or make humanoids always drop them. Or make the walking monsters always drop them or something. The fact the extractor now really sucks makes it hard. It was easier when it actually did okay damage and didn't eat your entire energy bar just so the enemy could move out the way given it's horrible unresponsive fire cycle.

 

@thenarth that's a fair concern.

But I think the way to improve that situation is by allowing enemies to drop Brains with their normal drops (Meat, Leather, whatever); and to reduce its cost. Not to having a guaranteed chance to drop a Superior Brain, or allowing someone to craft it from like 10 Inferior Brains. Maybe it could have the drop chance slightly increased, but I like the mechanic in itself.

 

Randomness has always nagged me about video games, but not in a sense of "Random epic loot!" but more in a sense "Have random, because it is the easy way out of extending your time spent on any single tier!" This is used quite frequently in MMORPGs, but in sandbox games the best way I feel to extend play time is to give players the tools to explore, build, and create their own goals.

I haven't had any trouble with the brains, but my experiences are not the basis to judge the system; however, I have played a lot of games that use RNG as the be-all-to-end-all of play time and I do feel that Starbound takes RNG to the extreme on even the most miniscule of things.

 

Well instead of just giving a post on why it shouldn't be so, try giving a suggestion on how it could be improved. What distribution would you recommend then? Perhaps a pseudo-random distribution like in Dota 2 would be cool (To those who don't know how it works and to my basic understanding, basically it starts off as a slightly lower probability than intended, then if the event doesn't occur, the next probability of the event occurring will be higher and so on. It doesn't share the memoryless property the geometric dist has). That way, pretty much no player would ever have the possibility of having to farm 999999 monsters again. I think.

http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Pseudo-random_distribution

 

The idea of the random nature of the drop is to suggest that 'superior' is a random component of monster brains.
This is, however, not reflected in the monsters themselves. All the monsters of each type have the identical AI programming and thus any suggestion of variety is laughable.
I agree with the OP, but not for the same reason. This quest highlights a shortcoming in the game and makes a joke of the idea that the monsters have any brain at all when anyone observing their behavior can see that they are governed by a few lines of simple code.
If you care about variety in a game don't add RND for the sake of RND, add modifiers that depend upon slight differences.

 

I have now gotten around to having 100 brains in my inventory...

ATLAST! 167 brains later (Maybe around a total of 180-200 monsters) I finally have a superior brain... Now watch me go lose the fight against robot. LOL!

 

Yowsers! Congrats on getting the brain - and hats off to your odd streak of chance. Maybe you should play the lottery?

On the other hand, it's too bad you didn't make it to 190 inferior brains, considering:

So don't go standing in any puddles just yet, devs!

Gnilbert

 

Yeah, it can be frustrating combined with the large amount of metal required to summon the second boss, but I think that's the point. It took me 70+ kills both times I did this to get a brain, but it was to SUMMON A BOSS. I only wish the other bosses were as hard to summon. It frankly feels like a cake-walk getting the materials together for most of them.

If you needed Superior Brains for everything you built that tier, I'd agree. But you only need 1. Ever.

 

Oddly enough my superior brain was my first kill with the extractor. I honesty had no idea it was an issue until reading this thread. I would agree at the very leaste to increase the brains drop rate.

 

Oops - wasn't paying attention to my units there. If you had 167 inferior brains, and brains only drop 80% of the time, it means you probably actually killed something like 208(ish) monsters. So that's pretty darned close to the worst expected result from 1 million attempts. Can anyone top that?

Gnilbert

 

But is "it should be difficult" a good reason for using RNG to potentially make it difficult or potentially make it trivially easy?

RNG for required drops basically has 3 outcomes: Some people will forget RNG is even there because they get it instantly, some people will feel it was a reasonable difficulty to acquire, and some people will get bored, annoyed, or upset because it takes them so long to get.

If your goal is difficulty, would you not want to come up with a more predictable system that would give the middle experience to everyone?

 

I like the random drop rate, if it was to easy to get the superior brain, you could just brezze through making the boss even more. And if only npcs had a random chance of dropping a superior brain, then that would actually be more time consuming then just random creatures dropping it.

 

Took me 40 kills. Honestly not seeing this as an issue. Good compromise: It ONLY works on humanoid mobs... but it's a 100% success rate.

Save yourself the line of code for inferior brains, they serve no purpose at all. You can't even cook them!

 

Almost every game uses randomness to produce rarity and difficulty. Ore is random distributed, meat and pixel drops are random, weapon drops are random. If you want to streamline everyone's experience the solution it to require more rare drops at less rarity (moving the curve's peak higher and reducing outliers), not removing randomness all together. My god a game that was wholly static would be terrible... Desert bus...

 

Agree with OP.
Standard/normal deviation is what you need, capped/limited at 1X and -1X as per the graph below or something similar. Thereby stopping those really lucky drops where you got it on the first try and the really unlucky guys who get it on their 254th try.

Or, capped at sigma 1

 

Having it drop a 100% of the time would make it way to easy to get. It would basically mean just beaming down to a planet till you hit a lone merchant/bandit/dungeon, go and kill them and boom freebie of a item drop.

 

Apart from drop rate discussion: Could we pleeeease have a real gun that actually is worth a dime, instead of this "4 blocks range of electricity that miss if your targeted mob is not in the VERY PERFECT RIGHT SPOT for takedown" thingamajig? I do not mind the randomness of the drops - but I would really prefer any kind of gun, heck even a scalpel ffs, for brain retrieval purposes. The Extractor freaks me out because of how it works, not how long it takes for the right brain to drop. Sorry for the interruption, you may continue your awesome spreadsheets and graphs now.

 

Totally agree with this. I got 36 inferiors before i got the superior brain which is not that bad, but overall i had to kill alot more monster to get it just because that extractor is a pain to use.

 

I largely agree - random elements keep games fresh, and allow you to play through multiple times and keep having a novel and entertaining experience. The problem is, truly random experiences (pretty much any memoryless distribution) usually don't feel random most of the time. And games are really all about the player's experience.

And that's where it gets tricky. If we switch to a normal distribution, you lose the outliers who had to kill 100+ monsters, but you also lose the excitement of "I got it on my first or second attempt!" If we add an alternative path (crafting a superior brain from inferior brains), the quest loses its distinction from other "collect X MacGuffin" quests, leading to a feeling of uniformity, and the impact of getting a superior brain is greatly reduced.

An ideal system would model the player's overall experience, and use that to weight all the distributions. Essentially, the game would put you on a pseudo-random reward schedule to encourage you to keep playing, while making sure you were getting rewards frequently enough that you didn't become frustrated. As another poster mentioned, simple random drops handle the first part, but they're pretty terrible at the second part - and each event is usually considered in isolation instead of systemically.

So in this ideal model, the game would track (fuzzy) incidences of "lucky" and "unlucky" experiences, and manipulate the odds so that the user alternates between feeling various degrees of lucky and unlucky, while overall keeping the player happy (because lucky events are meaningless without unlucky events). In other words, it would basically make the game's "random" events behave the way compulsive gamblers and children think it does: "So many bad things have happened to me today, surely this next pull will be a winner!" So if you've just pulled a legendary item out of a chest, and then you start grinding brains, you'd need to kill more monsters than someone who'd just been randomly waylaid by pirates.

The problem is that the player really shouldn't know this is happening, or they'll rebel. It's ironic: Randomness seems fair and fun, but is actually neither. Behind-the-scenes cheating seems unfair and anti-fun, but is actually both (as long as you don't realize it).

Gnilbert

 

Wait a sec. This only adds up to 295,959 players. I thought you were doing a sample of 1,000,000? Also, your math seems a little off (or mine is), because the chance of going 240 straight kills without a brain is 0.0000027284%.

Out of a million, your numbers should looks more like this:
837042.7 need 1-25 kills
136402.2 need 26-50 kills
25849.9 need 51-100 kills
704.6744 need 101-200 kills
0.469983 need 201-240 kills