The Treasure Wheel

[Nyzer]

Here's a couple videos showing what the Treasure Wheel will look like in the next version of TLW, after the Rendezvous missions are included as single player content, in case anyone's interested. (It is still in debug mode, though, which is why you can choose from a list of loot sets. That won't be an option in game.)

There's a lot about the WotL treasure wheel that left me unimpressed. In fact, why does it even exist? There's no apparent reason to have it, since each chest is just a totally random piece of loot - this would go much faster for the players if it just gave them a reward list with randomly generated War Trophies. On top of that, the mechanics for determining loot seem to be poorly understood by players, since the system is so hazy about how to get anything. And then the loot pools are so large, it's nearly impossible to actually get anything that you're seeking.

So I completely reworked the concept.

1: Loot is separated into four subsets: Weapons, Armor, Accessories, and Consumables. This allows players to be able to target a specific kind of loot. 
I wasn't going to include the last category, since if there were nothing but Chemist items it would be fairly dull - however, some talk on Discord about the difficulty of getting late-game katanas to be able to actually run Draw Out convinced me to add them to the pool as well, with Consumable chests being able to reward multiple katanas (unlike Weapon chests rewarding just one).
Later on, once we had TLW 2.0 in beta and could watch multiple people streaming it, I realized real quick that no one was ever going for Consumables even with katanas thrown into the pool, so I removed every Item except Elixirs, allowing the player to get Ninja Balls as a weaker reward, Elixirs as a pretty decent reward, and katanas as a fairly great reward. I also retooled the progression so that whenever the player does an older Rendezvous, the common Consumables are always randomly 1-10 Elixirs. This actually makes the Elixir skill worth learning for probably the first time, since Rendezvous are now a viable way to accumulate Elixirs. It also helps make sure that older Rendezvous will always have something worth looting.

2: Rare items are rewarded based on a dual check system. Specially colored chests can be generated, and they are guaranteed to carry a rare item. But even if you don't get a special chest, you still have a secondary chance of just getting a rare from a common chest. Until Chapter 4, you have a 50% chance of getting a single Silver Chest and a 25% rare chance from any common chest. Those rares will reward the player with loot that hasn't been unlocked at a shop yet.
After Chapter 4, the Treasure Wheel background changes from silver to gold, and Silver Chests no longer appear. Instead, you have a 5% chance of getting a single Gold Chest, and a 5% rare chance from any common chest. At first, this seems like a downgrade - but once the wheel has turned gold, you can pay gil to slowly increase the odds and continually reroll the Gold chance until the current chest is gilded, and you can do this with every single chest in the wheel if you so desire. Gold Chests will exclusively reward loot that can never be bought at a shop.
Also, after some playtesting, I retooled the Rare system to scale up to the start of Chapter 4, no matter which Rendezvous the player does, based on which Rendezvous they've unlocked. In that way, Rare items are always all but guaranteed to give loot you can't (yet) buy at a shop. It does stop scaling after the start of Chapter 4, to encourage the player to not just keep spamming the easiest Rendezvous battles for easy Excaliburs, but even then, the Rare loot is still stuff that isn't buyable.

3: While the player will be able to open three chests by default, battle sequences such as Knights Templar or Brave Story, or particularly hard battles like Guarded Temple, will increase the number of chests that can be opened, as well as increase the odds of getting a Gold Chest at the start.

4: The player can Cash In unopened chests. This was inspired by a suggestion from a beta tester. If the player is doing an older Rendezvous, doesn't get any rare chests, doesn't need Elixirs, and isn't in a position to pay to reroll chests until they become rare, they can instead opt to cash in their remaining chests for gil. The amount of gil increases as new sets of Rendezvous are unlocked. They also get more gil depending on the number of chests remaining. Furthermore, after beating the game at least once, a second Cash In option is unlocked - one that rewards JP to every unbenched unit's current job.

With all this, I intend to justify the existence of the Treasure Wheel instead of just tossing the player some randomly generated loot, as well as giving the player the ability to work around the RNG to a large degree, though without going so far as to basically make rare loot purchasable.

Below are two videos of the rough alpha version of the Treasure Wheel, to give you an idea of how Silver and Gold wheels work.

[Squaresoft]

After the talks on whether some WotL events would look better or not tweaked, I fully understood that TLW's approach was to bring WotL content perfectly as it was to PSX.
Even if there were little things I didn't like about WotL, I also understood that it was the best idea because of the following:
• It would not be bringing the original content.
• Any change (good or bad) would be subject to criticism, whether or not the team should have altered the content of WotL or not.
• In this way, TWL is kept clean from the typical questionable 'this project is made to my liking' (once again, good or bad),
and with a clean project, one can then take it as a basis for whatever one likes.

"Having said that" (-Larry David)

I'm really happy to see that some liberties have been taken for the better. You guys have great taste and judgment, seeing everything you achieve by using your refined skills to enrich the game never ceases to amaze me.

[Nyzer]

Well, we have no problem taking liberties when we can't get an easy 1-to-1 conversion over from WotL.

For me, when I decided to make a Treasure Wheel event, the big thing I realized early on was that if I just copied the functionality of the WotL treasure wheel... the whole thing would be, essentially, a waste of my time.

A lot of my time.

There's no simple & easy treasure wheel event to pluck from WotL - this had to be recreated from scratch. I think it took a couple months of chipping away at it to finish it off, and the AlterParameter event command that made this thing possible was only implemented after I'd already started the task, IIRC.

And in the end, it would have just been a small handful of a randomized set of rewards that the player had no real control over.

It would have been far, far easier & quicker to just slap a small set of auto-generated bonus rewards at the end of every victory event, and it would give the player the same results: X number of RNG generated items with no player control.

But I figured I'd go a different route. Rather than cross off the treasure wheel because its existence didn't justify the effort, I decided to make it justify the effort with several different loot sets, multiple kinds of chests, the possibility of proccing a rare chest, and the gil sink of trying to generate a gold chest in the later Rendezvous events. Giving the player a host of options to whittle down the RNG to more reasonable levels.

This, I feel, is a treasure wheel that has a reason to exist.

So now it does.

[Vyguard]

Treasure wheel just keeps getting greyed out after every rendezvous mission, can't make any selection can only do a R1L1R2L2 start select quick restart. Any help, at all would be appreciated.

[3lric]

Treasure wheel just keeps getting greyed out after every rendezvous mission, can't make any selection can only do a R1L1R2L2 start select quick restart. Any help, at all would be appreciated.

You either have a derped emulator or edited something you shouldnt have. This bug doesnt actually exist.

[ChocoboChris]

Hi there! Whenever I complete a rendezvous mission, I do get the treasure wheel but it seems that the first chest will always go Silver(pre act 4) and gold but the items are the exact same as common. Is this a known bug?

Edit: I also noticed the consumable section is always 3 of a katana always... is that also supposed to happen?

Nyzer: This is a known issue with some versions of ePSXe.

[Nyzer]

Since this comes up a lot, I figured I'd make a post here with the treasure list for TLW.

Two things to know before reading the list: Rares (which, starting in Chapter 4, you can spend gil to get better odds at) will scale up to the start of Chapter 4. Additionally, doing older Rendezvous battles will cause Consumable chests to only award Elixirs as common loot. So if you're in Chapter 3 and do the Chicken Race battle, you'll always get Elixirs from those chests, unless they have rare loot inside. (The rare loot can also be Elixirs.)

[titter]

in regards to the bug

Hi there! Whenever I complete a rendezvous mission, I do get the treasure wheel but it seems that the first chest will always go Silver(pre act 4) and gold but the items are the exact same as common. Is this a known bug?

Edit: I also noticed the consumable section is always 3 of a katana always... is that also supposed to happen?

Nyzer: This is a known issue with some versions of ePSXe.

is there a fix for this? i'm about 60+ hours into the game and don't want to start over and find a new emulator.

[RetroTypes]

in regards to the bug
is there a fix for this? i'm about 60+ hours into the game and don't want to start over and find a new emulator.

You can use your whole memory card in another emulator, it often just requires changing the file type to whatever the other emulator is looking for. Always make a backup before trying anything, but worst case, you can also use MemCardRex to convert it "properly". I know psxfin wants .mcr, but Duckstation is also a compatible emulator you could use, just gotta find out what extension that one needs.

Make sure you read the TLW FAQ as it has lots of good info, including the recommendation to *not* use epsxe or other emulators besides psxfin/Duckstation lol

[titter]

You can use your whole memory card in another emulator, it often just requires changing the file type to whatever the other emulator is looking for. Always make a backup before trying anything, but worst case, you can also use MemCardRex to convert it "properly". I know psxfin wants .mcr, but Duckstation is also a compatible emulator you could use, just gotta find out what extension that one needs.

Make sure you read the TLW FAQ as it has lots of good info, including the recommendation to *not* use epsxe or other emulators besides psxfin/Duckstation lol

great, thanks! i will try that.

*edit*

turns out epsxe and psxfin both use .mcr so it was just a matter of copy paste. thanks again!

[FernGully]

Treasure wheel just keeps getting greyed out after every rendezvous mission, can't make any selection can only do a R1L1R2L2 start select quick restart. Any help, at all would be appreciated.

This happened to me, as well. I did edit Ramza's job levels and abilities and his brave / faith levels, but I have not done anything else.