Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Vendor restock

Hello,

In vanilla vendor restock happened only on level up.
To my understanding vendor restock was changed in EE.

It is confusing right now as I cannot seem to find an correct answer. Sometimes it doesn't restock on level up, sometimes it restocks out of the blue.

Some people said it is 1 hour real time, others 5 hours. Another bunch of people say it is 25 hours. Even few say that it is based on number of quests done since last restock.

My reason for asking this is that I have lost a nice armor with poison immunity (early game) when vendors just reset their supplies out of the blue: I saw the armor then went to pickup stuff to sell (from my stash in a barrel), when I got back to the npc, inventory was reset and the armor was gone.

I cannot describe this in words. The pain... If I'd have known I would've sold stuff on me.

I don't want to force restock in anyway I just want to moderately keep track of it so I don't lose good gear by walking back and forth.

Care to help a brother out with this?
A response from a dev or someone who verified this would great

I think it's 1 hour real time OR level up. So if you level up midway through a 1 hour period, it resets the 1 hour.

In the script a "gamehour" is 5 minutes long and an NPC will refresh after 12 game hours. 60 minutes.

But also checks when treasure was last generated and checks if there have been more than 12 gamehours since then. So that count should be reset on the level up trade gen. Thus it's either 12 gamehours or on level up.


Also this is all on a per NPC basis, it doesn't do them in a batch.


At least I'm pretty sure that's how it works, there are others who are more familiar with it than I.

Awesome! Thank you very much!

Interesting thing tho, if this is done on a per NPC basis, does the whole cycle start when you talk to an NPC vendor for the first time?

This per NPC right there might be the reason it gets all confusing for me. I role play as much as possible so I get to talk with some vendors (Esmeralda, woman with rogue/witch skills) a lot later than for example Arhu or the Legion captain (what's his name).

I never kept track of this. Then I just checked for resets on random NPC vendors. I get it now!

Restock has not changed much between classic and EE. In EE the time between restocks was changed from 48 ingame hours to 12 ingame hours. That's the only change I think. The logic used in EE was already present in classic.

It's no cycle in a technical sense, it's done on demand. And it's not done when talking to characters but only when the trade window opens. If you don't open the trade window, no treasure generation happens.
First time happens when you first open a trade window. After that, a check is always done when trade is started. If enough time has passed or the character starting the trade has a higher level than the character that triggered the last trade generation, a new treasure is generated.
Pickpocketing requires the pickpocketed character to have a treasure, so the steps taken are exactly the same as for a regular trade. (Even the same internal procedures are called before pickpocketing starts.)

I think that even enemy drops are only generated when needed, i.e. when the enemy dies.
(Unless it's one of the enemies that have dialogs before combat and the trade window is opened during the dialog.)

Yup, it works just like you guys said.

Started a new game and I can pinpoint when each merchant will get restock. Cool!

Thank you!

I can guarantee that is is neither of those things. Well, they may reset every 60 minutes real time and on level up, but they also restock more often, seemingly randomly. I experimented with this once I got to the first town area, in the warehouse. After the guy guarding the door restocked when I went to sell some things to another person since he was out of gold and I lost a nice pair of boots, I started to quicksave and quickload to test some things out.

Sneaking and looting the chest nearby seems to cause him to restock. I loaded a save from before and waited a few minutes and he did not restock. I loaded the same save, looted the chest, then went right to him, and he had restocked, so it wasn't simply an issue of just hitting the 60 minute mark.

He also seemed to restock when I traded with other people.

Another interesting thing to note is that when he restocks, it isn't random. His inventory always changes to the same thing. I loaded the save from before I looted the chest, checked his inventory, then loaded the save again, looted the chest, and checked his inventory. I loaded the save again, looted the chest, and checked his inventory, and he had the exact same things as when I looted the chest the last time, but different things as when I went straight to him.

I REALLY could use some clarification on how this works, because it's extremely frustrating to come back to a vendor a minute later and have an item you wanted to buy disappear, and have him have different goods every single minute.

I kept trying to repeat my steps and get those boots to come back into his inventory, but I can't seem to get the right set of goods in his inventory. I've managed to spawn about 4 different sets of inventory for him, all within 60 minutes of real time, so I know there's something else to this than vendors simply restocking every 60 minutes and when you level up.

A seed is used for the loot random number generator, to make it easier to balance loot.
If he was ready to restock, it is possible trading directly would not give different items, but checking the chest first and then trading would. If you saved after that point, though, I don't know what would be triggering additional restocks before another hour was up.

Treasure generation work like Raze said, it's predefined by feeding a 'seed' created from the last treasure generation to the next treasure generation which results in the same outcome all the time. If you change the order in which you open containers or force new trade inventory generation, the treasure will change of course (but only if two different treasure tables are involved).

There are no triggers for treasure generation other than 1 realtime hour passed or the request for trading (opening the trade window) of a character with a higher level than the one the trader has stored (i.e. after level-up). At least there is nothing else in the Osiris code and nothing else has ever been reported so far, so it must be a case of 'seems like but is not'. (In the end only the devs know if they built in some hardcoded thing that could bypass the story code.)

Where I disagree is the 'balancing' thing, IMO it has absolutely nothing to do with balancing but only with pleasing the envious bunch of whiners who could not stand other people do save scumming to generate different loot. (Must be some telekinetic quantum mechanics effect that affected their games when others did save scumming. Save scumming was everybody's own choice, nobody was forced to do it, but as we all know, people hate freedom ... at least for others ...)
Loot sucks in D:OS, it's a Diablo style loot system without the respawn required to make such a system work (I'm sure it will suck in D:OS2 too). Save scumming was people's - natural - workaround for the shortcoming of this system and this was taken away because of loud whiners.
(But that's my personal opinion of course.)

I've put tons of work into XC_Bags to make the sh....ty loot system matter less.

I've written about some of my own experimenting with treasure generation in the tread Some info about treasure generation in the modding forum.

The question is, who are the greater whiners, people who didn't like save scumming or people who now have to work with what they get?

(Also a personal opinion from one who don't care for either save scumming or it's departure, but who don't like calling people whiners.)

Peace.

People who whine game devs into forcing a certain playstyle on other players although they are not affected by how others play at all.

Save scumming was used by people as a workaround for a defective system.
(But the 'defective system' is of course a personal opinion.)

Were there any official statements about the reasons for the change or what else do you base your conclusions on?

If not, could it be the developers wanted to reduce randomness in loot generation for other reasons than pleasing a vocal part of the player base?

I'm curious because you seem so sure that "the whiners did it" and I am not as long around in the D:OS community as you. Also, I didn't find anything about it searching for "scumming" or "loot" here in the forum save for your posts. So some directions to other sources would be welcome.

I have seen a number of similar complaints that it shouldn't be possible on the D:OS II forum: some are from people who admit they can't resist temptation, others apparently dislike the very idea of other people being able to do it in their own game, which I've never quite understood but it's definitely a thing...

Whatever it is, it's not that important anyway ...

I think the topic was how treasure generation works in EE, if it's still completely random and when traders restock ;-)

I don't care for savescumming either, but the attempts to remove savescumming were more like treating the symptoms than the disease itself, as FrauBlake puts it.

And as FrauBlake put it also, it's a bad idea to use randomness in a long-ass game where you have huge variance in the quality of random rewards you get and few random rewards overall.
It's less of a bad idea if you have a lot of random rewards, or if it's a very short game and you can just start over and over (roguelike-like).

I do not care for savescumming because not only D:OS has a powerful non-random crafting alternative, but also D:OS can be easily beaten with the worst gear. Good gear only makes the game easier, to the point of being boring. Not the other way around, but if that were the case, the randomness problem would be painfully highlighted.

So, beginners who do not know who easy or hard the game ultimately is might be a little bit peeved or afraid when they notice they aren't being lucky with rewards (which can happen), and the game will push them anyway (no savescumming) which is fine because it doesn't make the game unbeatable.

And about whiners, well there's a saying the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

There have been multiple comments about changing to use of a seed to make it easier to balance game loot in Kickstarter videos, etc.

Using a seed makes it less likely for anyone playing normally to have bad luck with rewards over time. Save scumming is still entirely possible, when looting multiple containers or trading with multiple NPCs.

I don't think it's the seed itself that does all you said (if you refer to pseudo random), if there's game loot balance or "bad luck protection" to begin with anyway.

Are those kickstarter videos still accessible? Maybe on Larian youtube?

I still fail to understand how this makes balancing easier.

And save scumming as was possible before is *not* possible any more, it might not be something people would want to do, but there is a limited number of permutations, at some point all possibilities are exhausted (although it might take quite a while to exhaust them ;-).
Also, as my tests showed, it always requires different treasure tables involved, if you loot 5 barrels next to each other with the same treasure table, the outcome is always the same over all 5.

In all my playthroughs of EE, I don't remember mob (boss) drops that did *not* suck, except for the fixed stuff like the uniques. (And I'm pretty sure, I used a 'seed' ... ;-)

I used traders and crafting exclusively to gear up my characters. (Mostly crafting)

My opinion is still that the gear and gear boost system used in D:OS (and D:OS2 too?) is not really made for a game that has no continuation after the finish. As said before, it's a Diablo style system without the replayability of Diablo, which I consider necessary to make such a system work.

This 'defective system' was the reason why I greatly reduced the some of the possible boosts on gear in XC_Bags, which made the bad RNG - if seeded or save scummed - matter a lot less. Which is in my opinion the way to go for a game with a 'limited lifetime'. (Means, you cannot start over again with your built-up party and collect better replacements for bad gear with every new start. But then, I guess most people would go crazy if they had to do Cyseal again with a restart ;-)

Chrest;

Yes, the videos should still be available. I don't recall which specifically mentioned this.

Having a seed for loot generation does not by itself create balance. It allows loot to be better balanced than having a random seed for the pseudo random number generator.


FrauBlake;

There are a limited number of permutations regardless of the seed type.

D:OS 2 uses a combination of random, semi-random and hand crafted loot. People have and do replay D:OS 1 and 2, so only fixed loot would hurt the replayability, regardless of how low you consider it to be to start with.

You do not make sense to me.

To me, a seed is just a fixed parameter that feeds a random number generator, which, if kept, just garantees you get the same "randomness" out of it.

If you have a bad luck protection system in place, that could perhaps give more leeway to loot balance because you can allow yourself to have more variance between good and "not really good" loot (since you're assured you'll get good loot anyway medium term).
If you strike down variance between good and "not really good" loot, for instance by reducing the overall impact of bonuses, then you have way less incentive to do anything about "bad luck protection" because bad luck doesn't matter.

All this is unrelated to keeping a seed.

But perhaps you don't mean balanced you mean distributed? (I don't think a seed does anything to loot distribution either, but loot balance and loot distribution aren't the same thing).
I'm not an english speaker.

Or perhaps you mean something else with seed. Could you describe what you mean by seed?

A simple system that would control the loot distribution would simply be to build a set of rewards (x1 amounts of bows with y bonus, x2 amount of..., x3 amount of garbage reward etc...) that is not too big, and have a random number generator with a fixed seed decide which permutation of your set you will be using to hand out rewards. What gives you control is not the seed. If you want to adjust your reward system, you adjust the set, not the seed (the seed is randomly generated at some events anyway, there's no seed to adjust it doesn't make sense).

I think that TreasureGroups.txt is the system that does some kind of distribution, although I don't know how it works.
But it does probably only control the amount of items in one drop set, i.e. make sure that no 5 daggers are in the set when it's 5 weapons.
(Taking into account that there are no drop sets with 5 weapons, this 'drop control' does not help very much and in my first and second playthrough, I noticed an abundance of dagger drops when I did not have a dagger user in the party.)

And Raze:
D:OS (1 and most likely 2 which I do not know yet) has so much more to offer in terms of replayability than just loot ;-)
Having experience from MMOs myself, I have to agree though that it's a very big point, too big IMO.

And finally, it's not the type of items that drop, but the boosts that can be on it which can make a Divine Weapon bad, worse than a green one ('Uncommon' ?).
And as I said, lowering the value of the possible boosts is a way to make the bad boost matter less.
The other way is to modify the boosts and boost combinations altogether which I believe the Epic Encounters mod did. But that's sooooo much work ;-)

(I still consider stuff like Master level spells on gear a wasted boost slot and I wish now I had taken the time to fully rework the whole boost system in XC_Bags ... but then it would probably still be unpublished and people would compain even more about the mod's 'misleading' name than they already did ;-)