Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Abusing container loot mechanics with saved games.

Certain containers in the game intentionally have good loot in them, and they will always have good loot in them every time they're opened. Now, if you save your game just prior to opening these chests, you can then reload the saved game and try your luck again if you don't like the results. You can keep doing this over and over and over again, and I really think many people probably do. All containers/corpses work this way, actually. While this is pointless to do with every container, doing this with certain known containers can yield impressive results.

Is this really the best way to implement loot seeding, or the best behavior to encourage? It's certainly easy to understand that upon opening one of these chests and receive something you have no use for, players can feel silly for not reloading their saved game and trying their luck again. Isn't it more preferable to not even allow that? Yes - I am asking you to police a bad habit. As I had to tell a friend a few sessions ago "Can we make this the last time you reload the game for a chest, please.. I don't want to spend this entire Divinity session re-rolling loot tables..". That was after 15 minutes of being hostage to gambling-induced boredom.

What I would prefer to see is this: no matter how many times we reload a saved game a container has exactly the same items as the previous reload. The contents can (and should) differ from one game to the next, but it shouldn't differ from one reload of the *same game* to the next.

I suppose a change like this opens the way to the abuse of lockpicking (i.e. save before opening a chest, and if the contents suck then reload the saved game and don't bother wasting a lockpick to open that chest). However, the types of chests I'm talking about here are generally filled with pricey items (even if they're not relevant to your needs) which sell for nice amounts of gold, and I have my doubts that players would pass up the opportunity to make some decent coin (especially if you start selling lockpicks on vendors for a reasonable price - hint, hint).

If I could put some input..
Why would you do that? why not just control yourself?
It just feels silly..

At this point I think this is an issue that should be something for the player-end of the scale to be the judge of. Save scumming is always going to be an aspect of games like these where people decide for themselves whether they want to play it true to the RPG spirit of the game, or roll and reroll the dice whenever possible for the best potential results at every possible opportunity. I don't think its something that needs fixing, any more than a dev could try to 'fix' any other methods of exploitation available to people who play single player games.
I don't think a feature like that would be any different from designing your own map/scenario when the game comes out with the editor, and throwing in the best possible items into it at the start for your characters to just walk in, pick up the best gear, and walk back out into the main game. At that point, it is the player who decides how much immersion they want, while it is the developer's trial to give us as much of an opportunity to be immersed as possible, not try to force it in any way.

Silly or not, if it were just a matter of relying on players to control themselves, game design would be a whole lot simpler. It's an unfortunate necessity to keep things reasonably balanced.

There are better ways to seed and spawn loot. Why not use them? The only thing at risk is the ability to abuse the system. That's a goal worth exploring.

Probably because a fixed seed is also more resource-consuming. For all intents and purposes a container is dead to the game as long as it's unopened. Only when it is, it will become a part of savegame content. And it can be completely wiped if there's a path of no return (though I am not sure if Original Sin will be like that).
With a seed like yours ALL containers will need to be logged from the start. Increasing loading times, saving times, savegame space usage, etc.

And as you already mentioned yourself... there will be other exploits replacing this too. One way or the other people will.

No, there are other ways to handle it. Just to name a handful of examples, most containers can be kept as is, while only specific special-case containers are handled differently. You can also populate these as the player enters a specific region (which could be a specific building, a dungeon, etc). You can also seed based on something specific (something about the characters data), which would give you the same results from the same container regardless of reloads, unless you returned to that chest at a much later point when substantial changes have occurred with that character.

The concern about lockpicks I pointed out stops being a concern if vendors start selling lockpicks at a reasonable price (which is a change that should happen anyway).

I never saw an issue with this. For one, some people LIKE to farm items or whatever and may want to "abuse" this method.

The others, should just not worry about it..don't abuse it.

This is one of those things that is rather silly to waste time on. Development time better spent elsewhere.

Well, it's worth bringing to the developer's attention in case they don't want players to exploit the mechanic that way. I'm not a fan of the "don't abuse it, don't worry about it" philosophy as that thinking can be applied to practically any balance concern.

OMG people...
"Larian, please, I am def, blind, a psychotic murderer, a compulsive chest opener, an exploiter, a rule fondamentalist, and I can't live without a day/night cycle.
Could you make DoS just for me, please?"

Godammit ppl, aren't there other more important things to do, like fixing and balancing for normal players ?

I would argue that this "feature" makes it unnecessarily tricky to balance combat for everyone.

When you have players who don't abuse save-game functionality and are working with truly random drops, and other players who are reloading saved games to cherry-pick the best spawns out of every loot table, and both of these groups are coming to the forums and giving their opinions on how difficult or easy combat is, how are the developers expected to make heads or tails of the conflicting reports? It's comparing characters outfitted like patchwork peasants to characters that are hand-tweaked demigods.

Good luck balancing combat like that. Why not get everyone playing from the same rulebook first instead and save the developers some unnecessary combat-balancing headaches?

How many people, really, reload a zillion times on each container?

I do agree it's case of 'restrain yourself, no point wasting dozens of manhours changing this' especially considering any alternative has the equal chance to exploit it.

Or you could have a pseudo-randomgenerator generate a random number at the start of an area (in our case cyseal) and for every 'random' loot apply a function with input this fixed number and the id of the chest/whatever.

DD had the same mechanics; items were set when you first identify them. KB (king bounty) generates item when the world is created not when items are found/identify.
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Which way is better? That's a matter of opinion. From a purist standpoint (which you seem to argue) the KB approach is the correct approach but that is a perspective not an absolute. I see value in both method and at this point would leave it to the designer's choice.

Aside from the fact that speculating on the amount of time it would take to change the loot mechanics is pointless, why do you see this as a case of "restrain yourself", yet you aren't falling back on your advice in that other thread debating players being able to farm summons for XP? Is that not a "restrain yourself, no point wasting dozens of manhours changing this" scenario as well?

That's the problem with the "restrain yourself" answer. It's too easy to apply everywhere.

How can you restrain killing summons you HAVE to kill?
This is something you need to actively do, getting XP for kills you shouldn't get isn't.

There's the difference.

By making an effort to kill the summoner rather than intentionally allowing it to live so it continues to generate XP-fodder for you.

Both scenarios involve a choice in the hands of the player, and in that there is really no difference. I could say the same thing about gold exploits - why plug them? Just rely on the player to choose not to make use of them, right? How well has that worked out for us in the history of gaming?

I'd rather just fix it, personally.

I don't think the container reloading thing needs to be fixed. Who cares, there are way more important things to fix.


And you're talking to someone who did actually use container reload mechanics in Divine Divinity just to see how many free spellbooks I could get, and if I could get uber stats (5 Charm slots and 60 health, 60 mana) on all the unique pieces of gear. Just as an experiment to see how overpowered I could get a character. It wasn't really fun or something I'd care to do again.

I don't know, I'd argue that standing around and killing summons for XP until the end of time so you can reach level 10-billion with your character isn't fun either, and yet we're all suggesting it get fixed rather than leaving it up to players to control their farming urges.

True, but one requires active effort to reload over and over again, and your benefit is essentially random loot. The other you can just sit back doing nothing and get free guaranteed XP.

Wait..what? Who is killing those MOBs, if not the player?

Sitting back and doing nothing in turn-based combat means nothing happens indefinitely while the game waits on input from you. There is active effort involved in both cases.