Ideally a balance fix should work perfectly in any domain, in any scenario and in any aspect, but in practice this means you'll have to take into account how this change effects everything and it's extremely difficult to do. Therefore when balancing for a specific issue you should aim to implement a change that effects this issue only. Think locally instead of globally.
In the last twitch stream (February 1th) Mod Jack went over multiple issues with global changes to bad luck mitigation and how it will effect different aspects of RuneScape. He said that if they were to change RS drop tables to make the rare drops less rare (for everyone, all the time) it'll effect many areas. This is correct, but in my opinion he's looking at this issue from a global and IMO wrong view point.
From my POV there are three player types that wants bad luck mitigation at a boss. 1. Grinder who enjoys the boss and does it for profit. 2. Competionist who wants to complete the boss-log. 3. Ironman who wants a specific reward.
Now aim for surgical precision to fix these without effecting external areas/player types:
Example: Completionist would be allowed to sacrifice rare drops they have already gotten for an increased chance of getting what they still need. I can use my own Greg log as an example. Here I got 12 Glaive and 11 Off-hand glaive before I got a single Crest. Imagine a system where (for one time only) I can sacrifice 1 Glaive and 1 Off-hand glaive so that the next time I roll on the unique-drop table at Greg instead of having a 1/3 chance I have a 1/1 chance for Crest.
This is something Completionists will do because they just want to finish log ASAP, and for those players that love grinding Greg there will be less Glaives and crests coming into the game from Completionists which will make Greg on average more profitable.
Notice how this didn't touch the BLM problem for Ironmen, this is because I think if there is a IM specific issue this should be balanced for IM only.
#How to think about balancing in a video game - Bad luck mitigation as example
tight ruin
surreal flume
You can also buy other people's copies of those items and give more reason for those things to be traded, which should boost the gp/hour of some of these bosses a bit.
tight ruin
You can also buy other people's copies of those items and give more reason for t...
yeah this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about
surreal flume
Maybe have a variant of fixate that costs a ton of gp?
Should pull some gp out of circulation.
tight ruin
Maybe have a variant of fixate that costs a ton of gp?
Paying GP for boss drop (through fixate) would be harder to balance because now you're expanding the scope. This would also effect the grinders. Here you need to figure out what the fixate should cost. Take fixate at Raksha. If you can do this people would fixate Greater Rico and is worth quite a lot of GP, where as fixate at Dagannoth Kings would be worth far less.
surreal flume
I'm more thinking about giving an option for completion log types to pay a premium so they aren't stuck at a specific boss for hours upon weeks. And by premium I mean 'if you want one just to have it go buy it on the ge for 2x markup and save your money.
It's an alternative to anteing up the other parts of the unique drop table.
Maybe have it so that if you roll that specific drop when you ante'd up a copy it picks something else in the unique table instead?
If you roll your desired drop naturally, it doesn't consume the ante?
robust marten
yeah I mean
it's no big deal, but I don't think completionists are largely the kind of people complaining about blm/droprates so idk that any kind of fix needs to cater to them
surreal flume
Idunno, the most common comments I see when the subject comes up is people going weeks or more dry on specific drops on bosses that they got bored of by day 5.