I'd certainly appreciate it; it can be really stupid when you suddenly only manage to train bots for under 100 experience when normally they get over a thousand (with a NeuroTech v7 or better chip).
Random in the case of loot is much more tolerable than the utterly strange experience modifiers that don't make a lot of sense, at least in my opinion. Trying to train a bot with an A or B rank skill with them having nothing in it and only managing to teach 68 experience worth is just frustrating.
I've even had similar things happen with S rank skill.
Average training xp gains grows steadily as you get your skills higher, bot parts, plus it depends quite linearly on difficulty level, so it is not completely random.
XP gain spread is design choice as a tool to create bad/great streaks, generating player emotions. I understand it is not for everyone, so as i mentioned earlier i will try to add some ways to tune this with json mods, xp gain for sure and maybe xp gain spread too.
I don't have an issue with grindy games if the grind is tolerable and I can see some results pretty soon. In fact, the two games I love the most are pretty grindy: HHS+ (release 1.10! yay!) and LabRats2. This game is way beyond them as far as grind is compared.
As
Godogma said above, randomizing a loot is not much of a problem, randomizing the grind step result is. You end up with one hand hovering above F5/F8 all the time, reloading the failures, saving the good results. Makes for a pretty bad playing experience.
EDIT: As for balancing the game, your approach of balancing towards the end makes a lot of sense if you're doing the development behind closed doors and only want to show the final product to the world. However, it hurts you if you want to engage the community: you have to involve people, get them to play, to give you feedback, so you can improve the game. The game being fun to play early on is key here. If you fail to do this, you risk turning the community off your game, which results in nobody wanting to play and the game getting worse - or at least not as good as it could be.
If you need to press F5/F8 too often then try playing on lower difficulty or use mods making life easier or just use console to avoid grind.
Code:
mc.mechanics.progress=0.99
will give you enough xp to level up next time you get xp. Same for other skills. There is no "oh, player cheated, punish them!" checks in game.
If you want to play how you like it there are enough ways to do so. If you want to play game as i been making it then i don't think complaining is a good idea, it's like "hey, i want to cheat, but i don't want to cheat, so make game easier officially". No offence.
Plus as mentioned above i will try to add ways to make xp gains more controllable via mods/difficulty.
As for development process. I have irl business to manage, then i do freelance paid gigs, and only then, when i have free time, i work on DSCS, it was a hobby/pet project from very start. Patreon not exactly making me a bank, so i would rather work on it at comfortable pace. While i love community, i'm not exactly interested to do everything people suggests, you can check previous pages to see really ... unconventional ideas
If you like game concept, like mechanics, then you can try modding game.
Again, no offence, please. I understand your concerns, but i'm a single person with certain game vision and limited time/resources. I do what i can, but don't expect miracles.
Radnor, as far as professionalism is concerned, the less emotions you show, the more professional your image is
There is a solution, however, which leaves the randomness intact during the beginning phase of getting expertise, and reduces it in the later phases of your career. Simply treat the expertise level as a number: F - 1, E - 2, D - 3, and so on. This number is a number of "dices" you throw for the result. A "dice" is not necessarily 6-sided, but rather in a range of [0, 2x], where x is an average outcome you want (you have to compute it beforehand, but I assume you're doing it anyway); this range has to be divided by the number of "dices" being "thrown".
- if your skill is F, you get one dice of range [0, 2x], with the result being linearly probable in the range of [0, 2x];
- if your skill is E, you get two dices of range [0, x], so the result's distribution will be triangular, with x being most probable (but still with only 1/x probability) and both 0 and 2x being almost impossible (requiring two zeroes or two xs, so 1/x2 probability);
- if your skill is D, you get three dices of range [0, 2x/3], so the result's distribution will be somewhat 'hat-shaped', with a maximum around x and much less area in the sides,
- as your skill grows, the number of dices grows as well, and the "hat" gets taller and thinner, concentrating the result around x.
Come to think of it, you can simply leave out computing x in the first step and have your "dices" be of constant range all the time. This way you take care of both the randomness reduction and productivity growth at the same time, by simply increasing the number of dices thrown.
I'm not sure if i should care about my professional image on forum focusing on pirating questionable porn games, discussing my even more questionable porn game, using throwaway account
Internally skill/expertise levels work as you said F - 1, etc. Formulas are different though, often custom to specific situations. Making things too uniform is easier when programming, but way too boring to play, at least for me. Narrowing spread was never my intention, but somehow basing it on skill level seems interesting, not going to change whole thing to it, but for some things it can be interesting.
Some quick feedback on balance:
Far too easy to get high quality parts by just continuously pulling high-grade bots from the dump and scrapping them, maybe make scrapping one part take 1AP and reduce the durability/chance to break it with lower skill levels/proficiency.
It should be much rarer to find whole bots in scrap and these should be mostly limited to lower grade models and really banged up stuff (people ain't gonna throw 80k of parts away). The flea market could sell the higher grade broken bots.
Some quests pay out way too much, could be normalized somehow.
Ah, cmon! People been complaining about not getting enough high-level stuff during scavenge and way too little AP.
My view on normalization is above. I don't like too much uniformity. Life is unbalanced, why should game be?
This is why i rarely listen to balance complains, it is impossible to balance game while major parts of it are not yet implemented. Plus there always will be people complaining game is too easy/hard, no matter how it is rebalanced. So when i'm happy with mechanics and general story/world i will do major rebalance/clean up to make game more enjoyable in it's final form. Earlier? Unlikely.
P.S.: Again, sorry everyone, if i'm being bit too rude sometimes, but it is impossible to make everyone happy. When i can i try to make things more enjoyable for more people. Honestly.
