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Question.. - Coca - 08-15-2003
I've heard people talk abotu having their game set so that even in SP the Monster difficulty and EXP is that of 8 players being in it. Is this a mod or simply a settings change in my D2 directory, or another command string trick?
Sorry if this is often asked - I searched the forums with no helpful results.
Question.. - Obi2Kenobi - 08-15-2003
Just press enter to bring up the text screen. In 1.09, type in players X (1-8) to set. In 1.10, type in /players X (1-8) and it gives a confirmation.
Question.. - Coca - 08-15-2003
Thanks
Question.. - Erthshade - 08-16-2003
I'd like to use this thread to ask some related questions:
1) If I'm in a party of three real characters (the only people in the game) and the host has set the game to /players 8, what happens when someone else comes in?
a: The game continues thinking it's got 8 players.
b: The game resets the number of players to 4.
2) Same situation to start, but someone drops out?
a: Again, game thinks it has 8 players.
b: The game drops to 2-player difficulty.
Question.. - Obi2Kenobi - 08-17-2003
I think (but I may be wrong) that it stays at 8 players. And don't forget that the change only effects monsters that haven't been woken up yet. So you can't wittle Diablo down in players 1 then set it to players 8 and get good drops.
Question.. - Hammerskjold - 08-17-2003
>So you can't wittle Diablo down in players 1 then set it to players 8 and get good drops.
I thought in 1.09 at least, the "players x" command has no effect on end act bosses, like Diablo. At least from my memory and experience, there was more than one time where I killed Diablo, the first time, in players 8. And all he dropped was one blue item.
Question.. - Obi2Kenobi - 08-18-2003
Either you had some bad luck, or he was near a zone that items can't be dropped on (happens at Duriel's a lot)
Question.. - Hammerskjold - 08-18-2003
>Either you had some bad luck
Well my best find in terms of weapons at least, in LoD 1.09 has been a Riphook bow. The rest of my gear is either a low-mid level runewords, or a crafted item. So yes my luck isn't the best.
>or he was near a zone that items can't be dropped on (happens at Duriel's a lot)
I know exactly what you're talking about, I've experienced this annoying bug from time to time. However I thought when this happens it would do a no-drop, as in nothing. I had a few battles with Duriel where he got on that buggy tile\location and he didn't even drop a TP scroll. But I don't think this is it.
I did 3 quick runs in normal difficulty, with a clvl 70 Paladin. LoD, 1.09, Single Player. The only MFind gear he has comes from his circlet, a whopping 6%. Obviously this is not enough of a sample size, but I just want to see the quick and dirty result.
Run #1 with players 1: 4 blue items, normal class. The "best" of the bunch was a Strange sabre of some sort of poison damage. The rest was utter garbage like +1 life items.
Run #2 with players 8: 3 blue items, 1 rare javelin, and 1 set item. Normal class. Cathan's staff and the rare was a lightning javelin with Knockback I believe.
Run #3 with players 1: 4 blue items, and 1 set item. Arcanna's staff or Tricks, don't remember the name. And a Razor bow of Worth (Exceptional class, albeit ironically named trinket.)
I might have to do more slumming in norm hell to confirm, but at the moment to me it doesn't look like players x affects the act end boss drops. I mainly just remember the old method that if you want to level grind, do a "players 5-8". And for item hunting like Meph runs, do it on Players 1.
But hey, if anyone can confirm that I'm on the wrong track or the right one, I'd be grateful.
ps. I thought that it might be a Bishbosh TC drop bug, but I thought this doesn't affect act end bosses, at least in 1.09?
Question.. - gekko - 08-18-2003
Hammerskjold,Aug 18 2003, 12:49 AM Wrote: I did 3 quick runs in normal difficulty, with a clvl 70 Paladin. LoD, 1.09, Single Player.Three runs simply gives you zero information. Not enough to even begin coming to conclusions about the drops. The chance to drop unique/sets are so low, even for act bosses, that adding 500% mf and going from 1 to 8 players will not bump the *actual* % to drop very much. That's why mf works reasonably well in the cow level -- each cow has a horrible chance to drop something good, but there are so damned many of them, *in the long run* you get good drops.
Wish I could say I'd done 30 000 runs to test this out, but at this point, I haven't. But don't go making any conclusions or even getting suspicious based on 3 runs.
geko
Question.. - Hammerskjold - 08-18-2003
>Three runs simply gives you zero information. Not enough to even begin coming to conclusions about the drops.
I did say this is not enough of a sample run. What I did want to know however, if there is a -big and noticeable- difference between players 1 and players 8 command. As in, the number of actual items drops. Eg: Will I get more items from act end boss with players x. Not counting those 3 runs I did tonight, but taking in the total amount of characters I've played so far, I still haven't seen a noticeable difference. (Of course that total is still less than 30 000.)
>chance to drop unique/sets are so low, even for act bosses, that adding 500% mf and going from 1 to 8 players will not bump the *actual* % to drop very much.
Eh? Sorry I should've made this clearer. The only reason I mentioned the (negligible) amount of MF I had was to warn that my character wasn't exactly a MF specialist. And I was more interested in the quantity, as opposed to the quality (sets\uniques etc).
>That's why mf works reasonably well in the cow level -- each cow has a horrible chance to drop something good, but there are so damned many of them, *in the long run* you get good drops.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I should've made clear that I was asking more on the effect of quantity of items "players x" on act end bosses, if any. And I mentioned Meph run as a specific example, though running the cow levels is also another way to "item farm" via volume. But as I said, I was more curious on the act end bosses. :)
>Wish I could say I'd done 30 000 runs to test this out, but at this point, I haven't.
Hmm, I never ran any "Mephbot" type of programs, but I'm thinking this might be one legitimate use for it.
>But don't go making any conclusions or even getting suspicious based on 3 runs.
I guess I should make clear what my conclusions or suspicions are first of all. Based on the total of all my 1.09 characters (plus 3 runs) so far (and yes I readily admit it's still much less than 30 000), I have no confirmation if the -quality- of the act end boss drop is affected. I do have a strong suspicion however, that the -quantity- so far isn't affected. At least in 1.09 sp.
Question.. - Ruvanal - 08-18-2003
The act end bosses all have a pick=7 for their TCs. The NoDrop versus the total drop chance (which also includes the NoDrop value) is one of the more important matters for the amount of items that will drop. For Mephiso in non-quest dropping the NoDrop=15 and the total drop chance is 80. This make the chance that any of the 7 picks will be no item 15/80=18.75% and some sort of item 81.25% of the time. With more players in the game (and partied with you and in the same map area) the NoDrop value will be adjusted to smaller numbers. If for example you are just running a solo players 8 game this will end up adjusting the chances for a pick from the previous to these values; no item ~0.7% and some item ~99.3% per pick.
Now another factor that can be very important in case like this is that the standard drops using the TC system (not special quest rewards) is limited to a maximum of 6 items dropped per pass through the TC function. With the act end bosses having 7 picks, it is posible that a seventh successful item pick will be ignored resulting in only 6 items dropped. This also means that if one of the first 6 picks had resulted in a no item pick, then there is still the seventh pick to get teh total item drop up to 6 items. I will leave it to other to run up some sort of chart to show the actual likelyhood of getting specific quanities of items from a Mephiso drop.
Typically you will get 5 or 6 items off of an act end boss per run at players 1. Boosting the player count up will only get you a marginal increase in the quanity of item produced per run.
Drop information reference from an older posts of Jarulf on how the NoDrop is handled.
excerpt:
Quote:So, how does the game pick one of the entries in a TC? Well, each entry has a probability of being picked equal to:http://d2mods.xfernet.com/treasureclassex.php
prob/sum_prob
For sum_prob, add up all the probs of a TC (including the NoDrop).
Lets make another example. Lets look at the TC called "Act 1 Wraith A". It has:
NoDrop: 75
Act 1 Good: 4
Act 1 Magic A: 25
Thus there is a 75/104 (about 72%) chance for NoDrop at all from a monster using this TC. A 25/104 (about 24%) for a drop from "Act 1 Magic A" which is another TC. And a 4/104 (about 4%) for a drop from "Act 1 Good" which also is another Treasure class. Should the game pick one of the two other TC, it will basically repeat the above for that TC until it gets an entry which is an actual item (listed by its 3 letter code). Donât forget about the extra treasure classes created from the Item Type table I mentioned above. Now it also makes more sense, the probability values I gave as 3 for most non class specific items and 1 for class specific ones, no?
...
First off, what happens if there are many people in the game? Well, for that, the game modifies the NoDrop value by lowering it (thus making a NoDrop pick less probable and thus actually dropping something more probable). How doe sit modifies the value? Well, in the following way (note that the game uses floating point calcs for this so donât truncate or round any of this).
1. Calculate the fraction of NoDrop, that is, NoDrop/Sum_Prob
2. Calculate "number of people". Here each character in the party (and in same area) of the killer count as 1 and those not in the party (but in the game) as a half. This value IS truncated to an integer.
3. Raise the value calculated in step 1 to the power of the value from step 2. Assume, the example above, we had 75/104=0.7212. Assume there are 2 people in the party and same area, and 3 other people, so the value from step 2 is 2+1.5=3 (truncate). So we calculate 0.712^3 = 0.375.
4 Adjust the NoDrop value so that it is a value that makes it the fraction calculated in step 3. That is multiply the Sum_prob minus the old NoDrop value (plus the value to be calculated) with the value from step 3. In our example it would be 29*0.375/(1-0.375) = 17. This is the new No Drop value.
A few notes on the drops from chests.
*The standard chest TC (applied to all random terrain containers such as stashes, urns etc.) has picks=4, NoDrop=100, sum_prob=142.
*A locked chest will do 2 passes through the appropriate chest TC, which could result in 4+4=8 items if you are lucky enough.
*Many containers also have a hardcoded chance of not dropping items before the TC code is even checked.
*There are special chests (the "sparkly" one are only one of the graphical representations) the will generate a few fixed items (gold an potions) and then do several passes through the TC code to generate the type of item to be dropped. The base magical quality of these items checked once at the begining and uses a fixed table that ignores the players magic find amount. This base magical quality will then be used for determining as much as possible all the items magical quality that will come from the chest. If you are lucky you could get a chest that spews out several uniques at the same time. The central chest behind Mephisto is one of these special chests.
Question.. - Hammerskjold - 08-18-2003
Thanks again for the info. Though now I'm curious about something else, if you don't mind.
>With more players in the game (and partied with you and in the same map area) the NoDrop value will be adjusted to smaller numbers.
>2. Calculate "number of people". Here each character in the party (and in same area) of the killer count as 1 and those not in the party (but in the game) as a half. This value IS truncated to an integer.
How does the 'players x' command handle this exactly, does the game treat the extra phantom players as partied with you?
Question.. - Ruvanal - 08-18-2003
Hammerskjold,Aug 18 2003, 06:09 PM Wrote:How does the 'players x' command handle this exactly, does the game treat the extra phantom players as partied with you?There are no players with youon the map, right? Then they fall into elsewhere catagory.
Question.. - Hammerskjold - 08-19-2003
nt