Artifacts and Trader Joe might need to be rethought

[gigaus]

So, a preface, I run a 24 hour server for my discord and friends. It's generally okay, no glaring issues that don't come from players. Except one.

 

We've managed to get into the Barrier, and as such everyone now has at least 1 block of Avo Jump engines to get passed it. But, we only have 2 Artifact 4/IV after roughly a month of operation. Not too big of an issue, but given that Artifacts use no energy to function, and generally don't need to be bought, we tend to stockpile and trade them. Not a huge issue for that server.

 

But, a few of my friends have their own private servers or just SP games, and almost universally the major endgame problem is Trader Joe: The Mobile Equipment Merchant. He effectively is an RNG barrier to weather or not you can get passed the barrier and thus end game, which in itself functions to stop any other function-- economy growth through station building, fleet building, the like. I'm well aware that Boarding was added to specifically deal with this problem, as well as potential softlocks related to the barrier system, but considering that it requires a set amount of time to get even one ship-- at lowest 30 minutes IF you have a ship with a lot of academy blocks-- it's not nearly as effective as just buying a fresh ship.

 

So I decided to look into the info for Trader Joe, and it's all publicly available; Spawns 20% of the time for a random event, REs happen on average 10~12 minutes, and Equipment Joe is 25% chance, with a 50% to even have the artifact. So  2.5% of the time a RE occurs, which is roughly a 1 in 40 chance every 10ish minutes.

 

....but, that's assuming that there's some mechanism that forces Joe to spawn like this in a given amount of time. There isn't. There's no 'if Joe doesn't spawn after 50 REs with artifact, set spawn chance to 100%' or anything that improves the odds. It's pure dice rolls as far as we can all tell from looking at the code. And as anyone who's got an interest in math or stats will tell you, unrelated probabilities have unfounded averages. What that means translated, is that even if you have a 1 in 2 chance [50%] of something occuring, there is a 100% possibility that you will get 100 negatives and 0 positives despite the averages being 50/50.

 

Case and point, and back to the original mention of the server. After fiddling around with some modding stuff, I realized I could check the chat logs from all the way back since the server started. And, that when an event occurs, it has different text and notifications, which could be tracked by a program. Anyone want to guess how many times Joe has spawned on my server in 30 some days? In 720 hours or so, or 43,200 minutes to make the math simple?

 

7.

 

The mobile equipment merchant has spawned a total of 7 times in a month, with multiple players on, and only 2 hours total of downtime for server maintenance. 7.

 

How many times has he spawned WITH the artifact? 3 times.

 

What, the ever living, flip....are we supposed to do, other than mod this or cheat some other way? By the averages, Joe should have dropped in with his artifact well over 1000 times, yet here we sit with a whooping seven total chances....And don't get me wrong, it goes the other way was well; One of my friend's servers had him crop up 200+ times in a week with only a few hours a day of playtime. Well over the 2.5%.

 

While this isn't an a major issue for me right now, I kinda feel that this, this thing that determines if you're allowed to effectively continue playing the game, should have been dealt with by the devs a long time ago...At least with the RNG boss spawns, you have ways of telling where they can show up and manipulate that-- Hell you can just spam jumping into empty sectors and that has a better chance of working than this. It might be wise to either change how we get Artifact 4, or add in something that actively forces the game to present the opportunity at reasonable intervals. Waiting entire days for one guy to possibly showup isn't all that fun.