more imports

[Tungsten Whitmarsh Cadow]

Each level increases the chance per cell for each Exotic Import to spawn by +0.05%.

.05% or 5% ?

I don't trust what is written by the bone trader. I just bought this and it seems like I'm getting more imports than .05% but less than 5%. People forget that .05% means .0005 x however many increments

[Hunu]

You might get your answer from this page:

https://trimps.fandom.com/wiki/Imps#Exotic_Imp-orts

I personally imagine that if there was something wrong with the numbers it would have been pointed out and patched by now given how old the game is and how early that mechanic is.

EDIT:

"Use more Bones to lure even more Exotic Imports to your World. Each level increases the chance per cell for each Exotic Import to spawn by +0.05%."

I think the important word from the description here in the bone trader window is "more", to me that means that you were already getting some and this is an increase of 0.05% to whatever value it was already.

[Tungsten Whitmarsh Cadow]

In gaming they don't like to be too clear. I think they could be crystal clear on what you're getting for your 79 bones, but then you'll know what to do and they want it to be a little more mysterious.

If it was 1% you'd get an import every 100 cells. .05% you get 5 imports for every 10,000 cells.

[Nico]

Your base chance to find them is 4%, so with all 10 levels that add 0.05% every level you end up with an additional 0.5% for a total of 4.5% chance to find them on every single cell. That means that with it you will be finding 12.5% more Imports than before, which might not be super huge but still something. If it would be 0.5% per level it would end up at 4+5%=9% which would mean finding 125% more Imports, aka it would be more than doubling the number of Imports found, which would be way too strong.

[Hunu]

Origineel geplaatst door Katsaurus Catslaptus:

In gaming they don't like to be too clear. I think they could be crystal clear on what you're getting for your 79 bones, but then you'll know what to do and they want it to be a little more mysterious.

If it was 1% you'd get an import every 100 cells. .05% you get 5 imports for every 10,000 cells.

Did you click the link I sent you? The exact formula for exotic imports is on the page.

I won't argue whether players had to figure the formula out for themselves or not, perhaps they did.

There is a wealth of information on the Wiki and a dedicated Discord which has pinned comments for every stage in the game with instructions on how to play this game efficiently, and there's loads of calculators and such out there too to help make tough choices.

As for "mystery" in games, yeah, that's some of what makes games interesting.

On that point though, did you know you can "save scum" in this game? So you can export and copy your save string, then try something out. If it goes horribly wrong click import and put your old save string back in and magically you're back to before you made the bad choice. The fact you can do that IMO is encouragement TO do that so take advantage of that.

Good luck...

[Gra̶bz]

There's been some correct and some incorrect info here so I will clarify.

The base chance to find an Imp-ort is 3%. With all five bought, the chance is 15% to find any Imp-ort, and then a one-in-five for any specific one. If you have unlocked level 9 Scruffy your chance is increased by 0.5% e.g. from 3% to 3.5% with 1 imp, or from 15% to 17.5% with 5 imps.

With the More Imp-orts bone upgrade maxed the chance is raised by a further 0.5%, bringing the possible chance to 4% with 1 imp or 20% with 5 imps.

You can view your current Imp-ort spawn chance (per imp) in the Bone Trader description. It will reflect all your current bonuses. You can also read it off the Scruffy lv9 ability description.

Origineel geplaatst door Katsaurus Catslaptus:

In gaming they don't like to be too clear. I think they could be crystal clear on what you're getting for your 79 bones, but then you'll know what to do and they want it to be a little more mysterious.

Maybe bigger studios that make upwards of hundreds of thousands are considering things like that, but I can attest that that this hobby project of a dev that works on this game in free time outside their day job does not spend time coming up with ways to make descriptions more confusing (or mysterious?). In a thread like this, we focus on a single bonus in the entire game, so it's easy to pick it apart for flaws, but the entire game is made up of tens of thousands of parts and descriptions and it's not possible to give such focused thought to every single one of them. Descriptions that get many bug reports for being confusing do get fixed as well.

As pointed out, you are also never forced to commit to any decision thanks to the export/import feature, and you are encouraged to use it whenever it is convenient to experiment with choices. If you search the web you may also find the browser version of the game, which can also be used as a "throwaway" tab for importing saves to experiment on, without disrupting the ongoing gameplay of your main save.

[Tungsten Whitmarsh Cadow]

Origineel geplaatst door Nico:

Your base chance to find them is 4%, so with all 10 levels that add 0.05% every level you end up with an additional 0.5% for a total of 4.5% chance to find them on every single cell. That means that with it you will be finding 12.5% more Imports than before, which might not be super huge but still something. If it would be 0.5% per level it would end up at 4+5%=9% which would mean finding 125% more Imports, aka it would be more than doubling the number of Imports found, which would be way too strong.

This helps. It also shows that the way its written in the game is very misleading. Anybody who knows what .05% means is going to think that this upgrade is worthless. I've not spent hours collecting bones to spend on something as worthless as this. It doesn't amount to anything.

However, if they read your post they soon realize they're going to be getting 12.5% more than they were getting before. This is much more worthwhile. The upgrade is worth it. Either that or you might be one of those people that thinks they know what they're talking about.

You've got to wonder why the game developers didn't chose to give the more accurate information in the first place. Why write down .05% when you could have written 12.5%?
This is the problem with geeks. They'll say that my numbers are correct and ignore that those numbers are misleading. Why would you want to be misleading? Because you're a sociopath and a supreme gentleman. That's why I ask for the maximum penalty, your honor.

The person who wrote these tool tips should be buried up to their necks and pelted with floppy discs until we can find some ants.

[Nico]

Origineel geplaatst door Katsaurus Catslaptus:

You've got to wonder why the game developers didn't chose to give the more accurate information in the first place. Why write down .05% when you could have written 12.5%?
This is the problem with geeks. They'll say that my numbers are correct and ignore that those numbers are misleading. Why would you want to be misleading? Because you're a sociopath and a supreme gentleman. That's why I ask for the maximum penalty, your honor.

The reason for this is actually very simple. Some bonuses are additive and some are multiplicative. _I admit that in idle games it sometimes is difficult to really figure out if an upgrade is additive or multiplicative or even compounding, aka multiplicative with itself. In case of this upgrade it was rather obvious that I would have to be an additive bonus since a mere 1.005 multiplier would be way too insignificant, whereas a 3%+0.5% bonus makes a lot more sense.

Also, I just noticed that I made a small mistake. I saw it saying that I have a 4% chance to find Imports and thought that it means it doesn't include the 0.5% bonus, since I was sure that the base wouldn't be a weird 3.5% chance. But the shown number does seem to include it and I didn't knew that in Universe 2 you automatically get another 0.5% boost. So the base is 3% and the upgrade adds 0.5% which is a multipliative bonus of 1/6, aka 16.6667%. Though while in Universe 2 it goes from 3.5% to 4% which only equals a multiplicative 14.3% bonus. Which I guess shows clearly that a multiplicative bonus would be plain wrong to use in this case as it would be weird to suddenly have the percentage change just because you went into another Universe.

[Hunu]

Origineel geplaatst door Katsaurus Catslaptus:

You've got to wonder why the game developers didn't chose to give the more accurate information in the first place. Why write down .05% when you could have written 12.5%?
This is the problem with geeks. They'll say that my numbers are correct and ignore that those numbers are misleading. Why would you want to be misleading? Because you're a sociopath and a supreme gentleman. That's why I ask for the maximum penalty, your honor.

The person who wrote these tool tips should be buried up to their necks and pelted with floppy discs until we can find some ants.

It's not on anyone else that you didn't understand what you were looking at.

The court finds the dev not guilty, however you are going to be thrown to the Void Snimps for wasting everyone's time and being a ♥♥♥♥ about it.

[Tungsten Whitmarsh Cadow]

No. The info stated ingame is misleading. Maybe you don't notice this kind of thing because you just know that games will give you something of value for something like bones which take time to accumulate. Some of us see something written and expect it to give us a clue. We actually want a clue. Let us use our high school math but the game is like, "you jerk, just buy the thing. It'll be worth it."Its like business advice "Just sign it. I'm not going to screw you over"

Its bad advice. Its a game element that isn't real. "We didn't think anyone would actually try to figure this out or try to read our tooltips and then make use of the information we provided."

Early in the thread someone gave a link to the formula on some page. I looked at it. It wasn't much help. I don't need the whole formula, but the info given should help me come to the conclusion that this is a level up that I should desire and instead careful reading lead me to believe it was worthless.

Why do titimps tend to clump together? This happens a lot. Get a titimp and then two lines later you get another and then another ten lines after that and then often you don't get another for 400 lines. It makes it pointless to get a lot of titimps if they're going to be all bunched together.

The wikis are bad compared to the original wikis. If you search google it will only take you to the most general information. In the original wikis it would take you right to what you were interested in. How was that a bad system?

[Gra̶bz]

Origineel geplaatst door Katsaurus Catslaptus:

Why do titimps tend to clump together?

Random chance. No other tricks.

As for the More Imports upgrade, the description may not be as clear as it should, but it is not misleading. It does exactly what it claims it does. If you read the description of Exotic Imp-orts on the Bone Trader page, you find the following:

Origineel geplaatst door Trimps:

Exotic Imp-orts will be unlocked permanently once purchased. Each has a 3% chance to spawn per cell and better loot than normal enemies. Any stacking multipliers from killing Imp-orts reset on Portal but the imps do not have to be unlocked again.

There is a clear mention of a 3% chance per cell.

Then the More Imp-orts upgrade...

Origineel geplaatst door Trimps:

Each level increases the chance per cell for each Exotic Import to spawn by +0.05%.

I feel like in this case it's pretty easy to put two and two together, and there are definitely far more complex and much harder to understand mechanics in the game than this...

Again, the game is not trying to trick you into anything. You have detailed breakdowns with all the upgrades that affect them on almost every stat. The first level of the upgrade costs 10 bones, which is half a day of farming if you somehow don't already have 10 bones. You can export your save to another tab, buy it, and analyse the impact before you commit to further purchases.

I see where you are coming from in the sense that I am aware that many games are predatory and are trying to exploit the player through various microtransactions, but you may be going a little too much off the deep end thinking every game is going for that. You know, back in 2015, the community on Kongregate literally begged Greensatellite to add a cash shop (now known as Bone Trader) to the game because they wanted to support the game. The shop was never expanded until last year when a few of us on Discord felt like it was a good time to suggest an expansion (which is now known as the Permanent Upgrades section), as most players have thousands of unused Bones as a bone sink practically did not exist.

Even now, on my save file which I started last year, I currently have all imp-orts, all permanent upgrades, 5227 bones left and nothing to do with them. Trimps could do so much more to monetize itself and allow the dev to quit his job, but it doesn't. It does make me think a little, if people think Trimps is predatory right now then perhaps the dev is literally burning money by not adding a cash shop with a million purchases like NGU Idle, I mean if people are gonna say it's predatory then perhaps may as well make it so ...

I am of course kidding, but you'll have to forgive me for being a bit bitter. I've hung around the incremental game community for a while, and it does frustrate me to see many idle games devs make money hand over fist, either because their cash shops are near limitless or because they've gone for the mobile market, and yet we can't even get Steam to approve the game without slapping us with the Profile Features Limited tag despite having 800+ reviews, so we can't even add all the achievements to Steam, and I can't even add the game as a favorite game to my profile.

[Hunu]

Origineel geplaatst door Gra̶bz:

Origineel geplaatst door Katsaurus Catslaptus:

Why do titimps tend to clump together?

Random chance. No other tricks.

As for the More Imports upgrade, the description may not be as clear as it should, but it is not misleading. It does exactly what it claims it does. If you read the description of Exotic Imp-orts on the Bone Trader page, you find the following:

Origineel geplaatst door Trimps:

Exotic Imp-orts will be unlocked permanently once purchased. Each has a 3% chance to spawn per cell and better loot than normal enemies. Any stacking multipliers from killing Imp-orts reset on Portal but the imps do not have to be unlocked again.

There is a clear mention of a 3% chance per cell.

Then the More Imp-orts upgrade...

Origineel geplaatst door Trimps:

Each level increases the chance per cell for each Exotic Import to spawn by +0.05%.

I feel like in this case it's pretty easy to put two and two together, and there are definitely far more complex and much harder to understand mechanics in the game than this...

Again, the game is not trying to trick you into anything. You have detailed breakdowns with all the upgrades that affect them on almost every stat. The first level of the upgrade costs 10 bones, which is half a day of farming if you somehow don't already have 10 bones. You can export your save to another tab, buy it, and analyse the impact before you commit to further purchases.

I see where you are coming from in the sense that I am aware that many games are predatory and are trying to exploit the player through various microtransactions, but you may be going a little too much off the deep end thinking every game is going for that. You know, back in 2015, the community on Kongregate literally begged Greensatellite to add a cash shop (now known as Bone Trader) to the game because they wanted to support the game. The shop was never expanded until last year when a few of us on Discord felt like it was a good time to suggest an expansion (which is now known as the Permanent Upgrades section), as most players have thousands of unused Bones as a bone sink practically did not exist.

Even now, on my save file which I started last year, I currently have all imp-orts, all permanent upgrades, 5227 bones left and nothing to do with them. Trimps could do so much more to monetize itself and allow the dev to quit his job, but it doesn't. It does make me think a little, if people think Trimps is predatory right now then perhaps the dev is literally burning money by not adding a cash shop with a million purchases like NGU Idle, I mean if people are gonna say it's predatory then perhaps may as well make it so ...

I am of course kidding, but you'll have to forgive me for being a bit bitter. I've hung around the incremental game community for a while, and it does frustrate me to see many idle games devs make money hand over fist, either because their cash shops are near limitless or because they've gone for the mobile market, and yet we can't even get Steam to approve the game without slapping us with the Profile Features Limited tag despite having 800+ reviews, so we can't even add all the achievements to Steam, and I can't even add the game as a favorite game to my profile.

Great write up and thanks for the insight, at least your words won't have been wasted on me. Feels like this guy is chat GPT in the wild... Sort of understands what's going on, but look closely enough and it's clear they're wired to the moon.