[2023] A clarification on what "removal of streaking" means for Telos/Arch-Glacor

Posting a top level comment for visibility, but Monado replied:

You and I both know this is about Jagex making it so skill expression/ceiling isn't rewarded economically above a certain point.

In a sense this is true, but also a little misleading. Skill (as in player ability) is (and should be) rewarded, but it's currently rewarded in at least four different ways:

• Higher skill means faster kills.
• Higher skill means access to harder bosses.
• Higher skill means ability to beat higher enrages.
• Higher skill means ability to get longer streaks.

All of these multiply together - the problem isn't that higher skill is rewarded, but that higher skill is rewarded exponentially via multiple explicit mechanics.

What's not necessarily obvious externally is what a technical problem loot streaking is. It's not, as some replies are implying, a lack of willingness on our part to put the work in, but more that managing the streak system requires a wildly disproportionate amount of dev time compared to other systems.

(To give a brief and simplified explanation, the streak system doesn't just tot up your drops and remember them - this would essentially be a duplicate bank. What it does is use a fixed RNG seed to calculate your total drops so that every time you check the results are the same. This is clever, but it means that every time we change the drop table for that boss we have to create a new fork of the entire system - otherwise when we tweak it your current drops would change. IIRC AG is currently at 4 systems running simultaneously and Telos has even more.)

One of the issues we're having with drops and experimenting with improving drop tables and systems is just how bespoke everything is - different bosses use different systems. (This is why AG and Telos didn't get the Raptor's Rampage drop buff.) Streaking is the most idiosyncratic, but there are a lot of other differences between bosses too.

So we have a system which is disproportionately difficult to maintain, which is rewarding a group which is already being rewarded via at least three other systems, and which is blocking the consistency, maintainability and ability to improve drop tables.

We talk a lot about technical debt and design debt, and this is really what that looks like in practice.

Maintaining 10 systems takes 10 times longer than maintaining 1 system. Even more if some of the systems are significantly more complex, and probably longer still because complexity doesn't scale linearly. Maintaining unnecessary systems is bad because time spent doing that is time not spent doing something else - like making content.

It's worth maintaining multiple systems if they're important and hitting fundamentally different things - like you can't fold bosses and quests into a "single system" in order to make maintenance simpler. Drop tables, by comparison, are a relatively simple concept and while it's not that there's no possible benefit to having different bosses work in a different way, from a cost/benefit POV the tradeoff is significantly worse.

Yeah bad luck protection is a great example.

Features always have cost and benefit to be compared against other features. Design time, dev time, risk, etc compared to how many players does it affect and how much of an improvement is it for those players. BLM doesn't affect that many players, but it affects them a great deal (since dry streaks feel awful). That pushes it up the priority list compared to other things.

Having multiple different systems increases the cost of actually fixing the problem, which then pushes it back down. That's also likely exponential in practice. These numbers are probably lowball, but say it takes half a day to design a bad luck system and one hour to apply it to the handful of bosses that use that system. That's 1 day of work, pretty good for how much it will improve the game as a result.

Now say we have 5 different drop systems. Now we're up from 1 day to 5 days, which is a much worse deal. More than that, though, five days isn't a "fix" - it's longer than a game jam, it's not something that a dev can just hop on and do because they have other things they're supposed to be doing with their time and they can't just vanish for a week. Now we're above 1 day, we've got meetings and prioritisation and producers and all the usual stuff involved in software management.

This isn't a hypothetical example by the way - this is exactly what happened when Shogun and I sat down to start making progress on this problem. We got around the initial time problem by doing it in the evening, and we "hacked" the prioritisation a little by sneaking some hygiene work into Raptor's Rampage, but the basic time issue still remains to be addressed, which is why Shogun is chipping away at it in game jams.

No - allowing you to claim your current streak requires the previous system to be in place.