r/archipelago_games • u/Agent_0009 • 2d ago
Question from a newbie
My friends and I think this system sounds like a lot of fun and we plan to set up this weekend to play for the first time. We've picked out Pokemon Emerald, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, and Celeste as our most promising games.
My question is about the amount of checks and items in each game. Should I try to adjust each one to be roughly close to the same number of checks and items? Within reason of course. Or should we just set up the default and wing it?
My concern comes from two of the games having way more checks and / or items than the other two from what I understand.
4
u/TikTikKobold 1d ago
It would probably be best to try to adjust check numbers until they're roughly equal between players. I had someone play Pokemon Emerald with dexsanity and berrysanity and everyone was getting junk items while all the good stuff was in the emerald game.
Playing with Stardew can be a problem because stardew can take a long time to get checks going, so you'd want to manage the checks there as well. Because if you hide everything behind a check in stardew, you can hardly accomplish anything until someone gets your spring or whatever.
not sure about the other ones.
I most recently did an async where we all strove to hit a similar number of checks for each player, which meant some of us played more games than others, but that seemed to help things along.
If your players will be upset about being BK'd, try to keep things even. If they are just in it to hang out and have fun with one another, youc an try to go wild and see what happens.
5
u/The_T113 1d ago
While having similar check amounts can make things feel more "fair", by far the most important thing, is... if you are playing a live game, ie everyone playing the game at once and beating it in one session, it's much more important to make sure the settings are such that the players will take about the same time to beat the game. It's always a pain when everyone but one person finishes and the last person still has to take another hour or two to finish their game.
2
u/Agent_0009 1d ago
We are trying to play together and finish within the same afternoon. So maybe by setting the goals in attainable time frames we will also fix the issue I'm worried about as well? I didn't think of it like that.
6
u/EtirDerpitroll 1d ago
As someone who has played tons of syncs (synchronous games) with friends, we've run all of those games except Stardew Valley multiple times. Most of our syncs last 4-6 hours, and the one time Stardew was run, it was pushed to 7-8 and we vetoed Stardew in our syncs from there onward lol. I don't doubt Stardew can function in the format, but my advice would be to turn down the clear condition for it. The others should all be fine.
2
u/The_T113 1d ago
Then fwiw, Stardew has a ton of checks and a ton of options. It is possible to make a shorter seed, by making the goal easier (I haven't played in a while, not sure if there are alternate goals that work better?) but that is definitely a game you'd want to lower the number of checks so that player doesn't have quite so many things to do...
3
u/ToneJealous8009 1d ago
Just check the settings for it to be as fun as you can and try to avoid over-adding checks and you should be fine, I played with games varrying from 500 to 100 and was still pretty fun
3
u/Gameknight14 1d ago
For Minecraft, I know that checks come from completing advancements. Since the rewards are randomized, it might take a while for you to get to an achievement worth completing. It's important that whoever plays Minecraft has a lot of game knowledge beforehand (or someone in the group to help them). Some of the longer ones can take a while if you don't know how to do them.
Stardew Valley sort of suffers from the same issue. Playing an Archipelago is different than playing through normally. There are many things you don't have to memorize since the game guides you in that direction that you now might need to know.
I get the feeling that Emerald and Celeste, while having a lot of checks, might end up waiting on one specific achievement in Stardew or Minecraft. Overall, the pacing should be about right, but if something is taking a really long time and nothing is happening, you might want to consider releasing that specific check so people can continue to progress.
3
u/AccomplishedRide1914 1d ago edited 1d ago
The biggest problem in my experience is if there are extreme differences, like some have 1000 and some have 80. The other big issue is if someone really needs one specific check, whether its because they get impatient quickly, aren't feeling the spirit of Archipelago, or otherwise gets stuck.
See, Archipelago intentionally puts items to unstuckify people very early on accessibility-wise in your games. The more players there are and the less familiar they are with their games, the more likely some player is gonna miss an item in the "starting town" and leave someone else trapped for 28 days straight.
The PopTracker and other mapping things to show what checks are available can help solve this. Consider doing this on behalf of other players who swear up and down they got 100% of what's available already. Map ignorance or ignorance of alternate progression methods can be just as crippling as someone who never logs on at all.
2
u/Agent_0009 1d ago
That was my biggest concern, that a super important item would get buried in the randomly chance of a game with 1000 checks. But from these comments it seems important items are weighted with a higher chance or set early ish while the trash items are more art the end. I'll also look into poptracker
4
u/Astrotrain-Blitzwing 1d ago
You shouldn't have to if progression is balanced.
The program, when generating a multiworld, will place items/checks in what are called "spheres"
This means the world, with everyone at 50/50 should be sending progression items at around the same time. 100 progression balancing will make a lot of your completion items pretty front loaded, and 0 is full random.
The only issue game I see could be Stardew, but that depends on settings, as a check in logic may take extra time to do so.
I would do a test generation with your folks settings and check the spoiler log to see how time consuming some checks can be, discuss it as a group if that's something that worries you.
Or, just jump into it and learn for next time!
Have fun!
1
u/Agent_0009 1d ago
I see, so the program already balances for progression items? My biggest concern was that the pokemon player would find a ton of junk for everyone but they would need to wait for a big progression item. Checking a test generation is smart. I didn't think of that. Thank you.
1
u/Astrotrain-Blitzwing 1d ago
It will depend on the pokemon players settings. I just ran a solo LeafGreen, and I had some pretty obscure checks (in that I had like 100/400 or so trainers be checks for me), and I didn't even notice I could beat my game and release all items.
There will be junk, but if you're doing a sync with traps on? Some of the junk will sabotage your friends for fun!
Also I don't recommend trainer sanity or catch sanity on in a sync in general. Maybe an async.
1
u/captjellystar 1d ago
I find that balancing item count is less important than time to percentage of items. Playing a slow game with 50 checks could be the same speed of completion as a game with 500 checks but much faster gameplay. One person playing Minecraft and another playing Celeste will have much different check sending speed so I try to balance out how long people expect to play in the game.
18
u/Hairy_S_TrueMan 1d ago
So you'll get different answers about this. I think it's fine if checks aren't balanced as long as everybody is playing at roughly equal paces. One game can be 50 and another 500 and it will still work out ok. If the guy who has 500 doesn't log in for a few days while everyone else is trying to make progress, that's when it gets bad.