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Check out the v.249 - Minar Picnic Patch Notes
here!
Sweetwater Equipment in Reboot
The Problem
Sweetwater weapons and armor (hat, overall, gloves, shoes, and cape) drop from the bosses in Commerci Voyages (solo and party) at a low rate. The items that drop are random, and so most likely to be a weapon not for the character's class (simply because there are so many weapon types in the game and each class can only use 1-4 of them). In normal servers, this is not a big problem, because you can sell the weapon you don't need and use the meso to buy your class's weapon. But in Reboot, there is nothing you can do with that weapon except extract it. This leads to much frustration and makes it take a lot longer - possibly even years, depending on RNG - before one can get a complete set.
Possible Solutions
- Increase Sweetwater equipment drop rate considerably
Advantage:
- Easy to implement.
Disadvantages:
- People would still be getting equipment they don't need, and complaining about it (just as they complain about getting wrong-class equipment as drops from ordinary mobs, even though the right-class equips drop very often).
- Still no guarantee of getting a full set in a reasonable timeframe. Just more likely.
- Make Sweetwater weapons and armor buyable for Denaro from NPC Javert's shop, same as Sweetwater accessories
Advantages:
- Easy to implement.
- Gives a use for Denaro, which are near-useless in Reboot (because they can't be used to buy accessories to resell in FM).
Disadvantages:
- The weapons and armor are supposed to come from defeating the bosses. However, the most efficient Denaro-collecting is done by using trade routes with few or no bosses. Making it so defeating bosses gives extra Denaro would require more design effort plus changing parts of the code that I believe the team would rather not touch.
- Make the bosses drop a "Commerci Boss Token" which can be used in NPC Javert's shop to buy weapons and armor.
Advantages:
- Still requires defeating bosses to get the equipment (unlike solution #2, above).
Disadvantages:
- Requires creating a new coin type, and adding it to the mechanism of "Commerci voyage treasure drops". Cubes and Nebulite boxes drop "normally" and can be looted immediately, rather than waiting for the end of the voyage, which leads me to believe that the team would much rather not touch the "treasure" drops.
- Make Sealed Cubic Blades give "Commerci Boss Tokens" when opened. Commerci voyages drop the Sealed Cubic Blade and Sealed Chaos Cubic Blade items in Reboot, same as in other servers. However, since the Cubic Blades themselves don't exist in Reboot, double-clicking the USE item gives nothing. It could be changed to give the tokens to buy equipment with.
Advantages:
- Easy to implement: Does not require any changes to the voyage treasure mechanism.
- Maintains the requirement to kill bosses to get equipment.
Disadvantages:
- The Sealed items don't drop every time, so there is no definite timeframe for getting enough tokens for a full set.
- Requires creating a new coin type, and specific coding for the Sealed items in Reboot.
- Make the bosses drop a "Sweetwater Weapon Box" instead of weapons. This box would function exactly like a Frozen Weapon Box, in that it would give you the weapon for your class (or a choice of weapons if your class can use more than one; note that for Dual Blades, the box should offer a choice between Dagger and Katara, even though Frozen boxes don't).
Advantages:
- Guarantees getting the weapon for your class fairly quickly.
Disadvantages:
- Requires coding a new item (copy-paste from Frozen boxes, but still needs edits)
- Requires messing with the "Commerci voyage treasure drop" mechanism
- Might not solve the armor rarity issue (depends on how the box drop rate is set compared to current weapons)
- Add a "Sweetwater Equipment Exchange" option to one of the NPCs (Fiametta, Pieterno, or even Tepes). This will enable the user to give the NPC any Sweetwater weapon or armor, and choose another weapon or armor in exchange.
Advantages:
- Does not require any changes to the Voyages, nor any new items. The exchange option can be easily coded to appear only in Reboot.
- Solves both the issue of wrong-class weapons and of any duplicate equipment.
Disadvantages:
- Exchange quest is somewhat long and tedious to code, and prone to bugs or exploits if not done carefully.
Comments
1 - Nexon only implements an exchange for weapons since the armor is all class anyway
2 - People freely exchange for gloves, flood the market, price drops down to reasonable levels. Few lucky people profit off it, but overall SW gloves become more accessible to everyone and the price will balance itself out eventually.
For what its worth, the SW katara is also highly sought after, but the price is not quite as high as the gloves seem to be.
Also I have a small modification to your #3: Instead of one token, there can be two, armor tokens and weapon tokens. The armor tokens can drop from the weaker bosses and the weapon tokens from the stronger ones. It makes sense considering how most other sets tend to work, with the weapons costing more/being harder to obtain, but with sweetwater it often seems that the armor is worth more than the weapons. *shrug*
However, if all the weapons were replaced by a single box, then hopefully armor pieces would drop 1/6 instead of 1/35 of the time anything drops at all.
I have yet to find a single SW warrior sword, either one-handed or two-handed.
Gotta love this game's RNG.
The droprate shouldn't change it's supposed to be a rare drop and working hard towards it makes it really a good feeling after finally getting it.
Some really great suggestions here. Thanks for this!
1. Gollux accessories: The earrings and rings at least are a certain pickup after enough time because they're bought with guaranteed gollux coins. The belts and pendants are still random, but there's a much, much smaller pool of drops to contend with.
2. CRA bosses and Cygnus were changed to drop tokens that are ultimately traded in for guaranteed gear.
3. Tyrant gear: most pieces are bought either for Magnus or Kritias coins (the latter being...overpriced perhaps but that's another topic altogether), only the capes have to be dropped by Hard Magnus, and to my understanding, it's a pretty easy drop to get.
4. Absolab and Arcane sets use the combo of gathering items from daily quests/drops from normal mobs and drops from Lotus/Damien/Lucid to trade for coins to buy them.
At this point Sweetwater weapons and armor are the only top tier items that seem to have such a severe RNG requirement anymore. After about 3 or 4 months of near-perfect attendance on daily voyages I finally saw a weapon that my Hero could use drop for the first time: a 2h axe. Which is...not ideal, but it's nice to have I guess? Holding onto that dream that I'll see a sword in the next year or so.
I've started keeping track of how many bosses I kill in both solo and party voyages out of curiosity for drop rates and how my luck matches up with that. I only have about a week of party drops recorded so far (33 bosses, 3 drops seen, 1/11 odds so far) though I've definitely seen plenty of drops, just next to none I could use. Thanks to the solo voyage map keeping track of how many times you do each route, though, I have an exact figure: 1000 bosses killed, 5 drops, about 1/200 odds. A 1h hammer, a 2h hammer, a xenon chainsword, a sweetwater suit and shoes. Funny enough, I've never actually seen armor drop in a party situation.
I'd be curious if others have similar drop rates, but if their data is similar I'd say party drop rates are good enough to switch to a weapon box, token, or weapon trade-in system alone. I do think at least a slight drop rate bump would be nice for solo voyages, given that you can get at most 16 bosses a day with a dreadnaught headed for Lith.
Is this ever going to be implemented? Been doing commerci for months and still only got weapons for different classes.