Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Reloading for better loot.

There's always a first time!

There's always a time to drop a developer... fortunately, we're not there yet.
Don't make them...

Hmm. I ran that through my decoder ring several times and I'm still unsure as to exactly what you were trying to say. Elaborate and/or rephrase?

did not care at all about the infinity xp bug also. no valid argument there from my point of view which is: "if optional and not game breaking: don't bother. there are better and more important things to do first".

Pressing F9 or whatever is the quickload button and opening container is way too simple to abuse, even accidentally. There is also the downside that if I get some really cool loot, forget to save, die immediately after and load, I don't get that cool loot anymore and feel cheated.

Basically all arguments are I hear against this is that "its not game breaking, don't fix it" which seems incredibly silly, how insanely annoying would it be to play a game with only completely breaking bugs were fixed? Clitchy UI? Don't fix it. Missing textures? Dont fix it, etc.

Games should be designed so you CANNOT abuse the game mechanics without external program or dev console. This is super simple stuff guys.

also consider that you might have done some side quests which granted you XP as Gyson said everyone should be free to explore the game the way he wants and should not run after XP just to kill a boss because he is too much low level to continue the main quest

you talking about a bug. technically this is not a bug. it is a game mechanic that some of you use to your advantage (ie cheat), nothing more.

Since when do we not try to fix cheats or potential imbalances?

Let me use a different game as an example. I play a game where the major focus of the game is on survival, which requires you to gather consumable resources (food, water, depletable equipment, etc). It's also co-op, with character saves being done locally.

You can easily manipulate this setup to dupe items... which really pretty much sacks the entire "survival" aspect of the survival game. You really don't have to worry about running out of resources (or take them seriously at all) when you can just create more by manipulating saves and loads. You're not hacking anything or exploiting a bug.. you're just using a poorly thought out save/load system to trivialize the content.

There are ways to fix that, but should they? A player might argue that an isolated single-player or co-op game doesn't impact other players. But a developer might be thinking "you know what? For the past X years my team busted its collective butts getting our dream game out to the players, and I'm not about to let a huge element of that dream to be trivialized by this exploit.". And that would be a perfectly understandable for a developer to take.

There's nothing wrong with bringing these sorts of problems to a developer's attention. Trust me, it's worse when it catches them by surprise post-launch.

The only "real" solution to that is limit saving...

And we've been shown many times in the past that sucks even worse than the problem...

Well, if that were the only solution, it might be true. But there are others. You can, for example, use ID tags so the game can recognize and react to duplicated items.

you can also creat a random algorithm which is generated when a game is created and stay the same until the end. with that you will have items generated randomly (at the begining of the game) but which will always be the same at the same place when wether you reload or not

But that's boring.
And still prone to exploiting, since if items are also generated then on other factors (say level) aside from the code you can simply wait 1 level for "bad" chests to try again.

As said, there will always be options to savegame scum, unless you can't save. And that's a big no/no.

Only if some factor is taken into account that doesn't stay constant after the game is started. It wouldn't be all that hard to generate a random seed on creation of a new game and then keep that seed around.

One could then just use the seed to specify what item and what stats the item gets and then scale it to the player's level. Of course one could then cheat the system by not opening a chest with a good item until much later in the game.

Of course, if you take item level out of the equation (so every factor is constant after the game's creation) then there's no point in reloading for loot. This would mean that items would be scaled to the level of the area they're found in. There are a few ways to go about this.

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The most efficient (getting technical here, feel free to skip), I think, would be a generator ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generator_%28computer_programming%29 ) that dispenses items based on some formula. Each time an item "drops" (or a chest is opened) the game would pick the next item from the generator, this would always be the same item for the same "position" in the generator. As an example of how this *could* work in a very simplistic way:

You save
1. You kill a mob which drops item X
2. You open a chest, which contains item Y
3. You kill a mob which drops item Z
You reload
1. You open a different chest, you get item X
2. You open another chest, you get item Y
3. You kill a mob which drops item Z

The above example is of course when using a straight up generator for all loot, pretty sure there are ways to make it slightly less predictable without making it totally random.

Now if you'd consider the level in the generator then the result would be similar, except that you'd get an entirely different set of items per level but they'll always be the same items for that level during that play-through.

Of course, mob drops are random, so if you:
save game
1. kill a mob, get item X for lvl1
2. ding lvl2
3. open a chest and get item A for lvl2
reload
1. kill a mob, which drops nothing
2. ding lvl2
3. kill a mob and get item A for lvl2

So you would not get item X in case two (which sort of makes sense I guess)

When you create a new game the random seed gets reset so you'll get entirely different items but they'll remain constant throughout the play-through.
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Anyway, long post, hope it was interesting and made sense

or the dev just says: "well, it is up to a players own responsibility whether or not he/she likes to cheat. it does not bother other players in their experience, so if he/she wants to, please go ahead. and now on to fixing real bugs/issues like crashes and so on or getting new cool features into the game."

i for one would prefer less real bugs and/or more new feature over "fixing" a non-issue (like: a philosophical/academic issue/discussion)

btw: what about the editor? how would you handle the problem of players using the editor to getting themselves advantages not planned by larian, i.e. cheat?

btw 2: if we keep on walking this road of argumentation the next logical step would be to argue that a dev has to find a way to prevent cheating all together, i.e. cheating in every way conceivable, b/c cheating does indeed "trivialize that dream", right? please welcome our next Sisyphean challenge

Well, this is not really true
Changing the seed will change the RNG output (obviously), however using the same seed for two games still won't guarantee the same loot.
The seed is only used for initialization (so you'll get the same random number in the two games at the very beginning of the game), however each subsequent generation changes the internal state of the generator, so depending on the players actions the RNG states will be completely different in the two games, despite the same seed --> different loot.

Incidentally, this is the reason why saving the seed is not a reasonable approach to prevent save scumming. As many events (eg. NPC wander behavior) are tied to the RNG, simply waiting a few seconds more after reloading a savegame will change its state sufficiently enough to give you different loot.

Why, in your opinion, did the developers bother to make the Raistlin and Lonewolf talents incompatible with one another? Why care whether a player takes both of those talents together in the privacy of their own game? Were the developers wrong to police players in this way?

To answer your question: people who ask that question are making too many assumptions about exactly what will be possible with the editor when it comes to the main campaign. They're also not considering the possible impact using the editor on the main campaign will have with their game (compatibility issues with other players or patching, for example).

@ BlackDragon.

Sure. But look at the work involved, the possibility for bugs and the fact that you take all that time to engineer a way to make the game worse. Waste, no?

@ Norbyte.

So basically, the current situation? Like people said, the knife cuts both ways, yes, I've had better loot on reloads after dying, but also had times I lost a great find...

/facepalm

Or... it is because talents are a specific "in-game" feature and someone could unsuspectingly select that combination thinking it is intended by design to be that way. Then it would be the fault of Larian for having poorly balanced features in the game as opposed to a person doing numerous reloads to the game in order to "game" the game itself. In one case, the player is unaware they are causing imbalance within their game, in the other... the person knows they are as they are using outside mechanics to cheat the system.

I think the talents are pretty self explanatory, and it's ridiculously obvious how powerful the combination is. Failing that, it doesn't take long playing with them to recognize it's unbalanced. You're just making excuses now, as unbalancing or not it was up to each player to make use of that pairing, and one player's "fun" with it had no impact on another's.. right?

By the way, didn't you create a big scene on here informing everyone that you were placing me on ignore a few pages back? How's that working out for you? Facepalm indeed.

Still a non-issue for me.