No More Lowered RNG For Daily Quests

Hi all,

As stated above, I'd like to fix questing to be based solely on your skills and stats. Judging from discussions with other players, the site appears to have a unnecessary feature from LD that ups the difficulty for no good reason.

Enemies you're supposed to be fighting suddenly become suspiciously scarce once you need them for a quest. Why? Because on LD stats didn't really do as much, HP came back to full after a fight, and lucky feet instantly won you a battle, meaning that questing would be far easier if the enemies were abundant. Quest EXP also scaled to your level, which isn't a feature here.

Now on WD we have permanent HP loss (without using crafted items or RNG encounters), stats that actually do something, levels which affect your total HP, varying enemy levels, lucky feet that just boost your rolls, and so on. With all of these changes that make it harder to fight in the first place, plus the fact that as questing becomes easier the EXP gained is negligible, why do we need the RNG aspect at all?

My suggestion is that we don't need any kind of artificially increased difficulty. Especially for a game where we need to learn what moves work when, have unlocked the biome(s) for the enemies to appear in, find said enemies in our level range, have good stats and full HP, a supply of healing salves, etc, etc, etc. In my opinion it's 100% not needed.

I've also heard that some users immediately get larger trails once they've accepted a hunting quest, and since the number of successful hunts is based on stats/synergy/proficiency I don't think we need that increase in difficulty either.

Is it confirmed, then, that daily quests lower the chance of the desired battle encounter? I have heard lots of people speculate as much, but no official source. I would love to see a link to where as much is stated, or to hear input here from a member of staff, or to see collected data that shows as much.

I've been collecting data on the matter myself for some time and have not seen the effect mentioned, though I don't have anything like enough data to be sure yet (as usual, as soon as I started recording encounter frequencies, the dratted snake stopped giving me kill quests and just wanted hunts an items).

If it is the case that the frequency of relevant combat encounters drops when you have a combat quest active, then I think that's a bit silly for all the reasons mentioned and fully support the suggestion to do away with it.

I've not noticed any difference in getting desirable battle encounters or hunting trails. It's just pure RNG, sometimes it works on your favour and sometimes it doesn't. I don't think the quests lower your chance of encounters/trails and that people simply have bad luck.

However, if it really is a feature I do support removing it and leaving the encounters to just the regular RNG. 

As Coal I would like data that this is actually happening. As far as I can tell it's simply observer bias - with the new quests, you are now paying more attention to the npcs generated and a lack of one enemy will be more obvious than before.

As Coal says, are we sure that the game makes it harder to find the enemies you need to fight in your quest?

Don't get me wrong, I noticed it too that when you need to slay a feline, those damn felines are nowhere to be found, while the previous day they were all over the place. But isn't just that if we are actively searching for something and we pay attention to it, we have the impression it's harder to find?

Because it happens to me even with those random encounter that give HP. When I have my HP bar half empty and I hope to stumble into them, it seems like they never happen. And when I have my bar full, I get them more often. Same for the encounters that can give you quest items. When I have a collect quest, they seem impossible to get, but they are more frequent when I have another type of quest.

Or befriending encounter. When you need a NBW, they seem to disappear. But the game can't really know that we want a new wolf or not.

And at the same time I had days when I had to kill 3 wolves and stumbled in a low level wolf pack almost immediatly, completing the quest in a minute.

So, unless we had proof that the game really try to make it harder to complete quests, I stick with my idea that it's more a psychological impression than a coded aspect of the game

I have no official source, only my own observations, plus talking to other players.

In terms of my own experiences, the most noticeable are coyote and felines quests. There have been times I didn't find any for a number of full energy bars, despite them being possibly the most common enemies in the game.

Anecdotally, I've heard the level range of the needed enemies goes up as well. I tend to be in the desert a lot for exploring, where I pretty much fight nothing but snakes, yet during a snake quest it took me 400 energy to find 2 of them and they were LV18 and LV20. Snakes are frequently LV15-16 and can be lower. I haven't noticed significantly higher levels outside of that, so I didn't mention it in the original post.

I would love to get a confirmation from admins too. It is a well-known feature of LD though, I believe the quest snake is unofficially nicknamed Murphy because of it. Obviously If it is based on pure luck then the suggestion won't be needed, but this is more of a "just in case" argument against it ^^

does this happen with hunting success too? 

whenever i take a hunting quest my hunters fail to bring back anything the majority of the time, even if it's a critter trail, but when i'm not on a hunting quest my hunters can bring back three large trail carcasses in a row - obviously it could be extreme coincidence/bad luck, but it happens way too often for me to think that that's the case.

A small request, but before we get a confirmation from the admins, would it be possible to not delve into whether or not it's actually happening? For now, I'd like to focus on whether or not people agree with the suggestion if WD has the same mechanic as LD.

Please feel free to make a mod box ticket and ask specifically, as well as direct them to this thread should it need locking. I don't have the mental energy to do it myself I'm afraid.

Also, although this is a little personal, and it's not something I would ever expect people to preemptively guess, I do have a mental health problem that can cause a feeling that what I experience isn't real, so I'd be very, very thankful for any help or accommodations in regards to my request/the topic ^^

I will send a modbox ticket for clarification and will post the update here.

Addition: I was also not trying to accuse you of lying or something like that. It is totally possible that there is something in the code and/or that you were unlucky with quest encounters not showing up! I just usually err on the side of caution.

Update from Modbox (just copy and paste but can do a screenshot if wanted):

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out to us.
While we don't answer certain gameplay questions that come into the Modbox, we are happy to have a site admin clarify this one as it has the potential to be misleading or cause false information to spread.

There are, technically, no exact quest encounters.  They spawn at the same rate, it's only that if you are on an item quest that certain encounters will give you the items you need for your quests versus other types of items.  There being a mechanic that intentionally lowers encounter/trail spawn rates once you are on a certain quest is definitely a rumour and is not how the system is set up to work.  We can verify it all boils down to RNG with a smidge of confirmation bias, as well—you're more likely to pick up on your wolves only getting medium/large scent trails or a lack of certain NPC types in explore once you're on a quest to get X amount of hunts/defeat Y amount of an NPC.

We hope this helps to clarify!