Making skill tapes sane

[Murg]

Skill tapes are unnecessarily misleading, confusing and broken in ways that can never have been intended. This is an area where 1:1 emulation is, in my opinion, detrimental to gameplay and I'm sure many of the problems can be addressed with minimal effort.

Tapes with stats that no longer exist (eg. Grenade Experimentation) or exist but have no effect (eg. Medicine use)

It should be straightforward to remove these from the loot tables and adjust the drop rates so that working tapes are no easier (or harder) to acquire, as suggested by ShadowWalker. Adjusting the drop rates would be complicated slightly by multi-stat tapes with broken stats becoming single (or zero) stat tapes but that isn't an insurmountable problem, it just complicates the math. It would also be nice to remove tapes that have already been looted, perhaps by doing the following:

1. Delete unused tapes with only these stats
2. Remove these stats from unused multi-stat tapes that also have at least one non-broken stat
3. Remove these stats from tapes that have already been used
4. Reinstate empty sockets if possible but remove the stats regardless

Some players will complain that their broken tapes should be replaced with working ones according to the new loot tables, they'll just have to suck it up and accept that they aren't actually any worse off than they were before. I think loot tables should be adjusted even if it isn't feasible to do anything about already looted tapes.

Tapes with negative values could be dealt with in the same way.

Tapes with multiple stats are arcane and difficult to understand the uninitiated (and sometimes the initiated)

Multi-stat tapes should do what they say on the tin and give a bonus to all stats or they should be removed from the loot tables. Unless you know about the need for cancel tapes you would (reasonably) assume that all stats are applied. Even if you do know about cancel tapes you then have to deal with how complicated they can be.

Personally I would remove them from the loot tables; it would be far easier to implement and any conflicts with upstream would be isolated to the loot tables. Drop rates would also need to be adjusted accordingly.

Tapes of the same type do not stack when placed in the same item

This should be left unchanged. Although it isn't obvious it is very easy to understand once you know and wouldn't be worth the effort to fix.

Adjusting drop rates

I would quite happily do the math to work out what the new drop rates should be but I can't do that without knowing more about how tape drops work. If there is interest in implementing any of this I can post the way I assume it works for clarification either here or privately.

[Maldred]

Great suggestion!

Sadly, Shadow just stated on another thread the only way they would consider removing some of the unusable tapes would be lowering the drop rate by around 50% of SEA's to compensate.

In a "hardmode" environment such as our SEA's should be difficult to acquire and like anything else should have its share of junk or unusable loot in the table. Things like this help keep balance in the game and keep the economy strong.

[Murg]

I've been thinking about this for a while and Shadow's comment is what prompted me to make this post. I took his comment to mean that drop rates would be reduced to so that tapes are as hard to find as they are now which is also what I'm suggesting.

I agree that tapes should be difficult to acquire however there's a difference between "hard mode" and "difficult to understand because it's broken"; making tapes do what they say on the tin doesn't have to make them easier to get. In fact, the easiest way to deal with multi-stat tapes would make tapes slightly harder to find.

I like having junk in the tables but I'd rather it be junk because it's not terribly useful than junk because it's broken in a non-obvious way. In any case, there would still be junk or almost junk tapes in the tables even after removing the broken ones, for example:

• Medical foraging
• Foraging
• Group terrain negotiation
• All of the entertainer healing tapes
• Instrument assembly
• Unarmed speed
• One handed weapon speed
• Beserk
• Many speed tapes over a certain value (eg. rifle speed over +10)
• Alertness
• Cover

I'm not sure what impact this would have on the economy if drop rates are adjusted to ensure that working (not necessarily good) tapes are no easier to find.

[bobaphat]

High speed tapes are valuable for mixed templates and grinding.

[Syke]

High speed tapes are valuable for mixed templates and grinding.

Yeah, I have a good Unarmed Speed set of clothing that I can lend to friends who are grinding TK. It makes Unarmed 4 less unbearable.

I'd rather just get rid of the ones that flat out don't work. As in, have no effect at all.

[Murg]

High speed tapes are valuable for mixed templates and grinding.

Aye, perhaps it wasn't fair to call those almost junk; my point was just that not all of the working tapes are highly sought after.

[nethel]

I think this is a great idea. I would even be accepting of a lowered (although 50% might be a little harsh) drop rate on the working tapes.

[Unholyfrostgod]

You've been here from what your profile says under a month, btw welcome to awakening!

What I would do is if you are out there actively tape hunting I would give it a little bit of time before coming to a decision like this.

While it may not fun getting carbine aiming 24's or useless high stat tapes when you really want something else there are times when very useful tapes do show up if you stick to it and I believe for a hardcore server the rate in which you get tapes if you are actively looking is quite fair.

I would be against the lowering of the drop chance because I believe it would not be done correctly and it would just fix the problem of unusable tapes like say cover etc ones that have NO use unlike some mentioned because like they said speed of all types are amazing for grinding, but it would also in some way completely decimate the drop rate in which we get useful stats even worse than they are now.

Also with changes code wise like this it can end up affecting other things and possibly create issues and it sets a domino effect where they have to hunt down and correct that as well.

[Murg]

You've been here from what your profile says under a month, btw welcome to awakening!

Thank you, it's great to be playing swg again and I'm really enjoying the community.

What I would do is if you are out there actively tape hunting I would give it a little bit of time before coming to a decision like this.

While it may not fun getting carbine aiming 24's or useless high stat tapes when you really want something else there are times when very useful tapes do show up if you stick to it and I believe for a hardcore server the rate in which you get tapes if you are actively looking is quite fair.

My suggestions are not intended to make working or desirable tapes easier to find; the idea is for broken tapes to be removed and unnecessarily arcane mechanisms to be simplified. Drop rates should be adjusted to make it no easier or harder to find tapes with working stats than it is at the moment.

I would be against the lowering of the drop chance because I believe it would not be done correctly and it would just fix the problem of unusable tapes like say cover etc ones that have NO use unlike some mentioned because like they said speed of all types are amazing for grinding, but it would also in some way completely decimate the drop rate in which we get useful stats even worse than they are now.

Also with changes code wise like this it can end up affecting other things and possibly create issues and it sets a domino effect where they have to hunt down and correct that as well.

I'm not suggesting we get rid of useless tapes, only ones that don't work. As far as I'm aware cover works so it should stay regardless of how useless it might be.

Why do you think these changes would decimate the drop rate for useful tapes and be so problematic to implement?

[Peleliu]

As much as I like the idea, I think everything should remain as is until emu is done with coding. Probably too many bugs will rear their ugly head if tapes are changed at this point. What would be nice in the meantime though is an official list (not one copied from some web archive, but a new list from our own team) of what works and what doesn't.