Caves Quest Balancing | Patreon Weekly #230

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to cover how v2.2.1 is performing from a balance standpoint. (Note that all gameplay data discussed here is from v2.2.1, from 0 challenge runs and players who have already won the game at least once)

This weekly also includes an audio Q&A! Go and give it a listen if you’d like. You can find audio timestamps at the end of this weekly.

Lastly, there are also some results from the most recent Patreon Poll! I opted to not to share the results last week, as they fit perfectly with the theme of this post. I’ll bring them up below.

Crystal Difficulty

V2.2.0 was the largest overall change to balance the game has had in a while. The blacksmith quest is now both much harder and much more rewarding. So, how has that affected the game overall? Things are still a bit shaky given that the quest is so new, but there are some pretty conclusive results that can be seen already. Firstly, here’s how people are performing in the new quest:

• About 5.5% of runs that start the quest die during it. This number is steadily decreasing as people get used to the quest. By comparison. DM-300 is currently ending about 5.4% of runs which reach it.
• ~11% of quest attempts end with exactly 2000 points, clearly from players who don’t feel up to fighting the crystal spire.
• ~74% of attempts end the quest with a perfect 3000 points.
• ~6% of runs have a high number of points, but don’t quite hit 3000. Some missed secret gold is likely to blame.
• The remaining ~13.5% of attempts get varied amounts of points, spread pretty evenly.

This seems to match pretty well with the results we got from the most recent Patreon Poll:

• Voting was on a scale of 1-5, where 3 was an exact match to the DM-300 fight.
• The Crystal Spire’s difficulty got a score of 2.2 out of 5. Respondents felt it was overall a bit less harsh of a fight than DM-300 from a numbers perspective.
• The Crystal Spire’s complexity got a score of 3.77 out of 5, almost an exact inverse of the difficulty score. Respondents felt that there was a bit more going on than DM-300 overall.

Based on both of these sets of data, I’d say the new quest’s difficulty is just about right. I wanted it to be an optional fight that felt about the same as DM-300 challenge-wise, but at a slightly earlier point in the game. I may tune the difficulty of the new quest up a bit if quest winrate keep climbing, but at the moment it’s perfect.

Blacksmith Rewards

So if challenge is perfect, what about rewards? This is the part where I’m going to need a wait a bit before any final conclusions, but I did already nerf the rewards a bit in v2.2.1. This was because early data showed a notable shift in overall winrates:

• Death rates in floors 12-14 were notably up. This made perfect sense, as people were trying out the new quest and dying.
• Death rates were also notably down on floor 15+. This made sense too, if floors 12-14 were acting as more of a filter, the average run after that point would be stronger.
• These changes to death rates didn’t balance out however, notably more runs were winning the game overall. This was the problem.

In response to this, I toned down the rewards slightly to start. So far this has had a good effect, and overall winrates are now closer to equalizing with v2.1.4. To highlight this change, here are the upgrade levels of rewards from each quest, assuming the player picks Smith and then Upgrade (if they are able to):

• Sewers: 50/30/15/5% chance to be +0/1/2/3
• Prison: 0/66/27/7% chance to be +0/1/2/3
• Caves (v2.2.0): 0/20/55/25% chance to be +0/1/2/3
• Caves (v2.2.1): 0/30/65/5% chance to be +0/1/2/3
• City: 0/0/66/27/7% chance to be +0/1/2/3/4 (also always cursed)

Overall I think this better positions the reward upgrade levels between the current Prison and City, and the numbers seem to agree. I plan to keep an eye on this after v2.2.1 has been out for longer, but hopefully won’t need to make any more significant changes here. The deadliness of floor 15+ is also slowly climbing back up, and people are getting used to the quest and dying to it less often.

Audio Timestamps

This month there were 19 questions from 8 different patrons.

• 0:08 "what are some other roguelikes that you enjoy(ed) playing? did you pull any inspiration from them for shattered pixel dungeon?" - radiantchaos
• 1:58 "Hey Evan, in your last Patreon post you mentioned you are taking bit of break from coding. Do you plan or feel like you need some larger break in the future to regain motivation, prevent burnout or just focus on private life? If yes I am sure you deserve it for working on SPD so actively for multiple years!" - Allperino
• 3:52 "How will you buff sniper in 2.3.0?" - Zrp200
• 5:23 "How are you?" - Zrp200
• 6:38 "When you moved Empowering Scrolls from T3 to T2, you removed the spellbook interaction. The corresponding Rogue talent also does not interact with spellbook. Should this be considered a shift away from talent-artifact synergies? (I was sad when my spellbook did not turn me invisible)" - Zrp200
• 8:52 "Do you think you'll use alternate branching in the Metropolis side quest rework?" - Zrp200
• 9:35 "With the recent talent changes, are you feeling like talent balance is in a place you like? Are there any talents you are still looking at possibly changing in the future?" - Zrp200
• 12:02 "Are there any more plans to add more tracks to the game? For example, Goo does not have a finale track." - Zrp200
• 13:41 "How has your approach to Shattered changed over the past few years?" - Zrp200
• 15:38 "Are there any new games you've started playing recently?" - Zrp200
• 18:10 "What sort of TV shows/movies do you like to watch?" - Zrp200
• 21:09 "in honor of spooky season, whats the best halloween costume you've had?" - radiantchaos
• 22:14 "How broken would it be if the player could use the pickaxe outside of the mine (although with only a few uses before breaking for good and not on boss floors)?" - Fcelon
• 23:58 "Which enemy in Shattered is your favorite? Could be in terms of its art or design or both!" - Veek
• 25:36 "Why is the Ambitious Imp so ambitious to... start a shop of all things?" - Arclightning
• 26:07 "Where does the Ambitious Imp go once you defeat Yog? What about the Troll Blacksmith? Shopkeeper? Why does the Rat King not evacuate?" - PunStar
• 27:00 "are the dwarves saying anything coherent in the new metropolis music? what might they be singing about?" - Radiantchaos
• 28:07 "what are you favorite talents to pick when playing through the game, or which ones do you typically find yourself picking when playtesting specific situations (ie when running the caves quest with an average-looking build)?" - Depresbian
• 29:18 "if both subclasses could be selected at once, which hero do you think would be the most overpowered?" - Depresbian