Let's talk treasure chests

[Qhue]

The new "treasure chests" introduced in LDON are a source of constant irritation to most people instead of being regarded as a new and really cool feature like they should be.

When you encounter a chest on an adventure a quick /inspect gives you a good idea of what kind of chest it is (mechanical, magical, spiritual) and then you can set about working on it... that part is fine.

While occassionally you will find chests that very easily open up when the right skills/spells are employed it seems that a significant fraction of them defy anyone's ability to open them. A chest on a high adventure last night was clearly not mechanical or cursed as those skills reported they knew nothing about the chest... so when trying the magical detection spell I cast and recast and recast the spell about 10 times (with a REALLY ANNOYING recast time on that thing) even setting off the trap twice and still couldn't tell if it was trapped or not. Eventually we just smashed the chest and ended up destroying whatever was inside because we'd already wasted nearly 5 mins on the thing in total.

Such frustration and such would be worth it perhaps if the chests themselves had a good reason to want to open them.... but more often than not the chests drop 1 5 plat vendor-bait item or maybe the exp you'd get from killing 2-3 mobs.... whoooppeeee. We did have one chest ONCE drop a Regen 2 chest-only augment that was kinda cool, but thats only one chest out of who knows how many we've run into since last week.

Then there are the chests at the end of raid. Last night, for example, we were very careful about checking the chests at the end for traps etc and after determining they werent trapped, but clearly locked, we tried to unlock them with mechanical, spirital and magical means to absolutely no avail... finally we jsut gave in and smashed them open.

There need to be some changes implemented with these darn objects:

1) Reduce the annoyance factor -- yeah okay its nice that the spells dont work 100% of the time since nothing is certain and that they want wizards and clerics to be better at chests than other casters.... but being stuck there for ages chain casting a spell is just insanely dull and frustrating. Remove the recast timer and jack up the manacost on the chest spells if you want. Why make a series of 3 chest spells and then max them out at 34? Move them suckers to low, medium, and high levels and then tack on a minimum-spell needed for a given chest type.

2) Make chests semi-consistent -- Yeah you might open a chest and find a booby prize once in a while, but why on earth would someone put utter shit into a box and then not only lock it and cast massive trap magical spells onto it if it only contains 3 platinum and some goblin bones??? People will go to great lengths to open these if they know somethng good is inside, right now the newness of them is wearing off and since the rewards stink from opening them... why bother? The raid chests seem to be intended to be smashed open, why?

3) Remove class-specific loot from the 6-man adventure loot tables!! This isnt related to just chests actually, but for adventures in general. There are only about 6-7 items on the loot table that ALL named mobs share at a given theme/difficulty which is already rather dull as you see the same stuff over and over and over...to make things worse you run into stuff like the no_drop lute in Mistmoore on normal! Out of the 7 possible drops you get in an adventure one of them is BARD ONLY and NO DROP??


Quite a few things in LDON are very nicely done, but you can tell what things were added in at the last minute of the Beta because those aspects are just plain not right.

[Camu]

fuck chests... i hate those... :-(

fuck having to spend time to get the spells to open those shits

fuck having to have 3 fucking spells...

fuck them not working half of the time, fuck they recast time...


Those are just plainly boring... they need to change the way they work it is plainly retarded...

[Idyar]

My real problem is the fact that even with lockpick% mods and max skills a rogue cant always open them up mechanicals. This seems really stupid to me. The second problem is that even after detecting and disarming the traps the traps still activates, it gives you a succeed message on the disarm but obviously doesnt disarm it.

[Xaen]

Chests should always contain something great.

However, it should be very rare to find one in an adventure. Put them in as a super rare spawn mob.

Then load them up with traps.

[Ming]

Bah I like em. From a Skinnerian PoV, random reinforcement with a dynamic reward ranging from crap to awesome is VERY reinforcing.

Perfectly sane people will go broke trying to hit the jackpot on slot machines, especially when they've seen others hitting them nearby. Say you've got 100 slot machines and 1 person hits a 5000 dollar jackpot over two days. That's enough to keep the other slots raking in cash.. much much more than the 5000 dollars that the slots payed out. Those little crap rewards that are basically a "free spin" keep people jazzed for the big "W" and also make it look good statistically, i.e. they can then say the slots pay out 90% of what they take in.

This isn't an exact analogy by any means, but the randomness of the reward is all that is important. If the reward were consistently great, the frequency of the boxes would have to decrease as one poster suggested - but to me that's less exciting. Yes it's a tad mundane as it is, especially if you're time geared already- but you can always just skip the chests. Right? Or can you!! MUHAA. I know a large segment of you can't as that's the draw of EQ in the first place.

[Demorgoth]

How long would you spend putting coins into a slot machine with a $10 jackpot, when they keep trickling through the machine and falling out of the bottom because of a faulty slot? You'd move onto another machine and hope that one is working instead. After trying a dozen such machines and finding faulty slots on all of them, you'll say 'fuck it' and find another casino where things work...

[Ming]

Originally posted by Demorgoth
How long would you spend putting coins into a slot machine with a $10 jackpot, when they keep trickling through the machine and falling out of the bottom because of a faulty slot? You'd move onto another machine and hope that one is working instead. After trying a dozen such machines and finding faulty slots on all of them, you'll say 'fuck it' and find another casino where things work...

If the machine gave out 10 dollars frequently with the rare chance for 1000-5000 dollars I'd play all the time, even if the machine required me to put the money in a few times. There is no casino nearby that has "working" slot machines. These are the only devices like this in all of EQ. Of course, there's always casino AO, but I've been there and while yes they've got newer machines- they don't have enough different games just a lot of the same thing.

edit- it would be nice however if they worked on the bugs I agree. I was only speaking to the discreet reward aspect of chests. I think the cost of opening them is a tad high, especially at low levels. At low levels your risking almost certain death for baubles as most are twinks at that level. I think at low levels armor w/ decent stats and (definitely unique to LDON textures)should be added to the loot tables to keep it fun.

[Kodylan]

Another major problem with chests that has made me not even want to waste my time with them is the fact that they can't always be looted by your entire group once they are opened. We've had some adventures where the people that actually wanted the augments out of the chest couldn't loot the chest at all, even after the commonly known 3ish minute corpse timer runs out and it opens up to everyone.

The really disappointing thing is this wasn't a problem in beta, so I dunno where things went wrong in that regard.

[Mr.Domino]

My guess is someone read this and sort of misinterpreted. It's a good link if you haven't read it, go give it a shot.

If the rat gets a diseased pellet, or doesn't ever get a pellet, etc. then it is NOT effective. Perhaps the idea of the chests is a good one, which no one is debating. The implementation is off. If what you said was true, then this post wouldn't exist, because everyone would be addicted to opening chests.

In a twink group some rogue opened the first chest he saw. A full group of six well equipped people dropped within three seconds. There was nothing inside =(

[Maegril]

Just a quick suggestion Qhue, but a friend was having all sorts of trouble with chests initially, then determined that most of those troubles went away if you were casting the spells from right on top of the chest. Essentially the cast range on chests is right next to them.

Don't know if this is how you tried them or not. Either way the complaints are still valid, but if you haven't tried casting from right beside them you might want to. We went from not being able to get anything open to opening everything (still getting crap out of them, mind you..) once they determined this was the case.

On the subject of what's inside them, 10pp 99% of the time with the occasional augmentation isn't enough to motivate anyone when you get 20pp + off of a random mob drop. Chests are effectively "Okay, we've won.. now where were the chests again?" at the moment. They'd be far cooler if you actually had the moral dilemma of "Do we stop and try to open this now, or do we continue toward our goal?" Which means the average perceived value of what's in a chest ought to be somewhere on the order of 25-40 points, since that's approximately what you'd be risking to stop and open a chest vs. continuing on and finishing the adventure and maybe forgetting/not having time to get back to all the chests.

[Ming]

Originally posted by Mr.Domino
My guess is someone read this and sort of misinterpreted. It's a good link if you haven't read it, go give it a shot.

If the rat gets a diseased pellet, or doesn't ever get a pellet, etc. then it is NOT effective. Perhaps the idea of the chests is a good one, which no one is debating. The implementation is off. If what you said was true, then this post wouldn't exist, because everyone would be addicted to opening chests.

In a twink group some rogue opened the first chest he saw. A full group of six well equipped people dropped within three seconds. There was nothing inside =(

And I quote from your link.. which is BTW a nice link:

The most effective method is a random ratio schedule, and the rat is rewarded after it presses the lever a random number of times. Because the rat cannot predict precisely when it will be rewarded even though it knows it has to press the lever to get food, the rat presses the lever more consistently than in the other schedules.

and I had said

From a Skinnerian PoV, random reinforcement with a dynamic reward ranging from crap to awesome is VERY reinforcing.

The article you cited states that fixed interval reinforcement, eg. getting "good" loot in a chest for sure every 5 times isn't very effective. Getting "good" loot randomly, or random ratio -however is cited as the most effective, so I was on the money. My reference, btw, was more to Skinnerian ideas as a whole, eq behavioral science in general but if you wanna drill down there ya go.

[PigBenis]

I feel sorry for your mother

[Mr.Domino]

I just read the link last night for the first time, so what you had wrote sort of struck a chord in my head.

I re-read what you wrote, and perhaps you are correct in theory. And it remains a good idea to keep chests similar to what they currently are. The problem is, the rat in the skinner box never got randomly shocked for pressing the lever, in-between recieving his rewards. I think that is the main complaint.

From memory (don't feel like finding the exact quote from the link), behavior is shaped by both negative and positive reinforcement. It seems in this case, there is a high level of negative reinforcement, for little positive. Also known as poor rvr. That was more my point, not that yours is not valid.

[Aeka]

Its one thing to have a healthy respect for a chest that is in a hostile dungeon. Its something else to have so many that are bogus you just end up ignoring them. As dangerous as they are at the moment, you might as well put a 10k damage hole where chests are.

Chests are highly dangerous. Its bad when you get an item no one wants or can use. Its even worse when its the 10th trapped one in a row.

[Ming]

Originally posted by Mr.Domino
From memory (don't feel like finding the exact quote from the link), behavior is shaped by both negative and positive reinforcement. It seems in this case, there is a high level of negative reinforcement, for little positive. Also known as poor rvr. That was more my point, not that yours is not valid.

Actually, negative reinforcement is when one removes an aversive stimulus as a reward for doing something. For example if you were getting shocked until you pulled a lever, that would be negative reinforcement.

If a subject pulls a lever and gets a shock that's called punishment. Punishment is the addition of an aversive stimulus following a behavior. Punishment comes in 2 flavors, positive and negative.

+ punishment : pull lever get shocked
- punishment : pull lever lose porn.

In the case of getting trapped chests going off this is definitely positive punishment along with the negative punisher of losing the loot. If chests are being set off by people without the proper skills (spells, picking) by bashing on them, then "punishment" is appropriate I think. I'd go on re the more important question which is "are things working as intended" but it's lunch time here at work.

edit- back.

So I don't see anything wrong with chest traps doing severe hurt when manhandled. The damage they do however, should be healable (if only barely) by appropriately levelled healers via cures and heals (assuming the party is at full health) so as to promote utility and teamwork. DoTs or DDs that kill fully healed members of a party that are fully ready to deal with them should be tuned. At level 20 for example, my necro was just barely able to single target cure the entire party of a fast acting disease dot. This was with me having had my finger on the trigger so to speak. I've heard that there are some traps (which I have yet to experience) which are so deadly for the level there's just no way to possibly heal in time. If this is the case I think that's bad design and needs fixing.