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Flying/Driving Luck consumption
Both of these skills trigger luck rerolls too often

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When flying or driving after one's luck pool refills, you will IMMEDIATELY use a reroll per room. Once these rerolls are used, I have not noticed ANY adverse impacts on my flying, meaning these rolls are being used up for something other than crash/stall checks.

Whatever they are being used for...maybe just...don't? Having luck turned on when flying it nice FOR stall/crash checks, but it's basically useless because even with good stats EVERY room you drive/fly through uses a luck point until they are gone, so you end up just having to turn it off.

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 9, 2020 6:25 PM
Are you sure about this? I drive around all the time and luck only hits once in a while, far from every room or even every trip.
By BigArg at Jul 9, 2020 6:28 PM
I stall out once every other month or so. I fly aeros basically non-stop. More than I walk in game even. At the start of a day when my luck pool is filled, every single room I fly into triggers a reroll. I will burn my entire luck pool on the first leg of the first trip.

I had similar experience while driving (granted not nearly as much).

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 9, 2020 7:26 PM
Driving, flying, and using the Grid are definitely major offenders when it comes to burning @luck to questionable results.

I just dislike how @luck works in general. I'd much prefer it was made a passive bonus like all the other stats, or at least more low-impact skill checks were blacklisted as triggers.

90% of the time when I see @luck fire, I don't think 'whew saved by luck', I am thinking 'damn I left @luck on'.

By 0x1mm at Jul 9, 2020 8:31 PM
I kind of think that "damn I left luck on" is the expected experience. I'm getting the impression that by-design it's intended to be used tactically rather than passively or always-on-till-the-pool-runs-out.

I filed a bug once about how just navigating around the grid without attempting to crack, hack or mod anything consumes @luck.

Luck is supposed to be used when you fail a roll.

Using the grid in the fashion I mentioned cannot fail. A casual grid user who's browsing the forums, reading or sending gridmail, or looking (not penetrating or programming) nodes, on a stock term, can't fail at these activities, no matter whether they have any experience points in any of the related tech skills or not.

The title of my @bug was, "Things that don't fail without @luck shouldn't fail with @luck."

The bug was closed with "Won't fix." in the resolution note.

You get how @luck works, right? If you fail a roll, you get a chance to re-roll it before the game gives you the result. So, do you NEED @luck to fly or drive from one place to the other?

Not sure how you'd like to see this "fixed" - Skip the piloting skill rolls 90% of the time while flying? Lower the difficulty of whatever the roll is testing? Create a system where some rolls consume less luck than others because of their frequency?

Do you know what the consequence is of failing whatever roll is getting rolled when you're driving or flying around?

When you turn @luck OFF, are you crashing your car or aero in every room? I mean, when I turn @luck off, the grid works perfectly every time for me.

By beandip at Jul 10, 2020 7:37 AM
I've had up to 4 luck rolls get used on a single move before.

I'd prefer to stall out or crash or something bad happen when I run out of good luck, but... I just keep driving fine. 3 months spent driving without even stalling once.

It really takes the tension out of the entire experience.

By ynk at Jul 10, 2020 9:10 AM
@beandip,

I am not sure I understand your post.

To clarify, my desired outcome is that a roll that doesn't have a NEGATIVE outcome for failure (as opposed to just a less good outcome) doesn't burn a luck re-roll.

Examples of Negative outcomes

-Stalling a vehicle

-crashing a vehicle

-failing a crafting check (lab blows up)

-Missing a parry/riposte

Examples of less good outcomes

-Not travelling as fast as possible

-missing two additional letters when eavesdropping

-using the grid to check your gridmail (???)

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 10, 2020 2:36 PM
I'm fairly certain you'll find plenty of people that -do- want their luck to give them the BEST outcome, not just prevent a failure, though. Tailoring immediately comes to mind.
By PCow at Jul 10, 2020 4:03 PM
Grid 2.0 bugs are almost always closed as 'won't fix'.
By Johnny at Jul 10, 2020 4:06 PM
@PCow

Tailoring doesn't trigger luck rolls.

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 10, 2020 7:23 PM
For reference on how bad it is. Here is my first flight of the day from recently.

fly

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

You bank sharply and almost lose control as the craft abruptly changes course.

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

+----------------------[ ]----------------------+

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

+-----------------[ ]------------------+

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

.

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

.

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

.

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

.

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

+----------------------[ ]-----------------------+

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

.

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

.

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

.

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

.

You think . o O ( Lucky Me! )

The world flies past as you roar through the surroundings.

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 10, 2020 8:44 PM
I won't discuss mechanics in-depth but RedSteelButterfuly, just because you can fly or drive 'okay' it doesn't mean you are actually good it at. You don't want your luck to burn off? Then turn it off until you want to use it. This is not new, nor is it broken for what I can see.
By GhostInTheMachine at Jul 11, 2020 10:34 AM
@ghostinthemachine

I suffer no adverse effects for being out of luck points, so it seems that the luck is burning off for no discernable reason. That is a problem.

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 11, 2020 11:33 AM
This is an annoying problem. IMO luck should only be used when failing a roll leads to adverse effects. As has been stated, there are many instances while flying, driving or just browsing the grid where luck triggers and it makes no measurable difference whether the roll is failed or not.

Obviously the solution is to keep @luck turned off, but it's amazing how often it triggers on completely mundane things while other things never trigger rerolls.

By Crooknose at Jul 11, 2020 11:02 PM
Right. If I fail a luck roll, I expect to crash, dent, stall, or heck, even use up extra fuel dodging something.

Once my luck runs out, I should be crashing all over the place. But I'm not.

By ynk at Jul 12, 2020 4:44 AM
Luck simply creates a better outcome than before. It's not a safety net for failure.
By HolyChrome at Jul 12, 2020 7:39 AM
What's the better outcome tho?
By ynk at Jul 12, 2020 8:20 AM
@ynk

That's IC info.

Don't worry about the game engine. Just play the game. ;)

@all

There is a toggle for Luck. If you do not feel your character needs it at any particular moment, turn it off.

By Hek at Jul 12, 2020 8:36 AM
There's nothing wrong with discussing mechanics and whether they can be better or improved or made more intuitive.

The issue as it stands is there are often things you may want to use luck for, but it becomes impractical to do so because the pool is so rapidly depleted on inconsequential rolls.

There are also several skill-based mechanics where'd you'd expect @luck to trigger when it doesn't so clearly there is some kind of blacklisting going on. This makes it much better for certain mechanics rather than others.

There are also a few things that you just switch @luck on for and that knowing to turn it on is the only "skill" required.

I feel like there could be some moderation between the 'instant-win' and 'do-nothing' outcomes so luck doesn't just feel like a button you learn when to press for best outcomes with very specific things and otherwise ignore it.

Something like an internal delay on how often it can fire would make a lot of sense and help avoid situations where you burn six @luck rolls out of nowhere, doing apparently nothing.

By 0x1mm at Jul 12, 2020 9:31 AM
0x1mm, I think a delay would make it so that luck might not get burned when something really bad happens.

The problem is that I don't crash when my luck runs out.

Nothing noticeably bad happens. If there were an assurance that "something bad is happening; you just don't see it" then I would feel a lot better.

By ynk at Jul 12, 2020 3:11 PM
I'll put it this way.

Driving/Flying has a lot of checks for different things, even with one simple command.

By HolyChrome at Jul 13, 2020 8:42 AM
@0x1mm wrote

The issue as it stands is there are often things you may want to use luck for, but it becomes impractical to do so because the pool is so rapidly depleted on inconsequential rolls.

How do you know that the rolls are "inconsequential"?

There seem to be people who are saying that every roll has a consequence.

What seems inconsequential might not be.

My understanding is that to dig deeper than this, and to truly understand whether or not a roll is consequential requires that we start discussing game mechanics on a level that is frowned up.

Am I wrong?

By Hek at Jul 13, 2020 9:59 AM
I agree that it's not up to the system to decide if a player will think a roll is important or not, but several skill checks do at least appear to be blacklisted from @luck, or trigger @luck at a lesser rate.

My impression is that this is done for balancing reasons, so that @luck is not overpowered for certain things, but I think that at least opens the door to question if it's not underpowered, or of questionable usefulness, for others.

By 0x1mm at Jul 13, 2020 11:40 AM
The problem is that luck is essentially useless for vehicles at the moment. Does -anyone- think that burning 6 luck points in one room (my personal record) to decrease fuel consumption/increase speed/whatever the heck it's rolling for is a better outcome than the luck only being expended to prevent crashes/stalls?

And there is no way for the player to make that choice, you either have luck off for driving/flying to save it for something else, or you have it on and it's gone within the first leg of your journey -anyway-, which makes luck useless for these skills outside of some potential niche UE allocation that you wouldn't even actually need luck to prevent the really bad stuff from happening in the first place.

Whatever roll is burning luck at a rate of 1-6 points PER ROOM is a problem, as I suffer zero adverse effects by not having luck on in the first place, or even by having my pool depleted. These are pretty clearly completely useless rolls as far as the luck mechanic goes, and we might even see some performance benefit on the server side by just getting rid of the re-rolls here.

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 13, 2020 11:59 AM
My biggest concern is why am I not crashing??
By ynk at Jul 13, 2020 4:31 PM
Out of curiosity. Would you guys be slightly less peaved if luck auto-toggled off after a certain period of time? Or no?
By Quotient at Jul 13, 2020 4:50 PM
@Quotient

I don't think that would be the solution to this problem. The problem is that flying or driving burns luck for no discernable reason, but avoiding stalls and crashes also uses luck. Turning luck on before I drive or fly just means I burn it all, and don't have the points to spend on crashes/stalls anyway.

The solution would be to blacklist whatever is causing 1-6 luck rolls PER ROOM from even being rollable, IMHO.

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 13, 2020 6:40 PM
The luck system probably could use some love. I'm not denying that. But I am against any changes that would encourage people to minimally invest in luck any more than already happens. The pool needs to drain or nobody has a reason to increase their pool size.

I also want to point out that this reroll pool is not the only way luck is used in the game. It can some into play in other circumstances too.

By Mobius at Jul 14, 2020 6:02 AM
Mobius,

I absolutely understand that the pool isn't the only thing this is used for, but I believe that the sheer number of luck points burned by a skilled driver or pilot is absurd at present. A busy room full of whispered conversations doesn't burn points at this rate.

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 14, 2020 12:50 PM
Nobody has said one single word about why just toggling it is unsatisfactory.
By beandip at Jul 15, 2020 3:19 PM
Toggling @luck works for some activities and not others, because of the way luck is triggered and spent. There is no degree of expert fine control over @luck toggles that will make it work with certain things right now, even though these activities can use luck in a notional sense.
By 0x1mm at Jul 15, 2020 3:23 PM
Have minor rolls use tiny luck points and have disastrous rolls use big luck points?
By ynk at Jul 15, 2020 6:15 PM
Luck in it's present state would work better in a tabletop environment, but the automaton of it in certain actions makes it a very hard to attempt to make educated decisions with it.And thus it's unsuitable for a mud where clarity is needed.

If luck is supposed to be an insurance against bad things happening, then it shouldn't be used up by preventing uselessly neutral things from happening.

If luck is supposed to make things go better in general, then automatic success rolls with no real variations(Browsing the grid, etc,) should not trigger the use of luck.

If it's both, then it's failing is in trying to do too much, without consideration for it's limitations.

Some alternatives to consider, would be luck as a passive scaling minor benefit, with no activation. Or as a similar expenditure or toggle but one for charges, Which disperse a larger bonus or act to reroll explicit failures for a set amount of time. (Depending on developer intentions for the feature.)

Lucks state as a feature is indicative of a lot of overall design and policy problems with the game. Wherein systematically it's balanced to be something you toggle on for a tough fight and then toggle off, but on development of other features the system, which is one of the only things this core attribute does in the grand scheme, had flaws exposed that weren't addressed.

A final option would be the removal of luck as a system and stat. With a UE reimbursement for points spent on it.

By Rhea at Jul 15, 2020 8:39 PM
@Beandip

Flying/driving has at least four checks that run, The ones I am personally aware of are three of them with every room, and one any time you turn.

TWO of those checks are -really good- to have luck points for. The other two burn your pool off very rapidly. So by toggling luck off, you exclude the ones you -want- the rerolls for in addition to the ones you don't want rerolls for. This means that for effectively everyone, luck is completely superfluous when driving or piloting, because having it on means it is used up immediately for rolls you likely don't care about failing, leaving you with no points anyway.

that makes luck worse than useless for these skills as far as rerolls are concerned. Addressing the checks that no one cares about rerolling on will make it useful for these skills.

By RedSteelButterfly at Jul 15, 2020 8:40 PM
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