Intermittent Reinforcement

I was about to put this as a reply to the recent "RNG sucks" thread but it got long and seemed kinda dumb to bury in the 2nd or 3rd page of a thread that might get locked.

I've had it on the tip of my tongue for a few months now but I couldn't remember exactly what the name was but I finally remembered from my psychology class my teacher briefly talked about intermittent reinforcement.

The basic idea behind it is you do something over and over then you are randomly rewarded. It's why gambling is so addictive and why people play games similar to this. You sit in front of a slot machine and you put in money then sometimes you win but on average you'll lose, but you win enough to forget that and also there's the chance of winning big. Those small victories give you the idea that, "I'm winning some, if I keep going I could win it all."

I remember from playing D2 the two things I cared about were getting to 99, because it felt like an accomplishment and finding new items.

Now the problem that's occurring with POE lately is with all the changes over the last few months there are fewer stats people are looking for. Everyone needs the same mods and there's not much allowing people to be open to other stats either. If you are looking for a non-unique helm for a life build the only useful stats are %defense, flat defense, life, mana and 3 of the 4 res. There are some affixes that are useful in niche builds but there are ways on the tree to avoid needing those affixes completely but not the ones I mentioned.

Then we have sockets, because 5l and 6l are so rare there comes a point where you are only looking for that. If you have a 4l, you want a 5+, 5l you want a 6l. There's no other option there.

With maps, the higher you get the less of a chance you can find higher maps because the pool gets larger.

So getting back to my point earlier about intermittent reinforcement. For it to work, for people to basically get addicted to the game, one revolving around loot and an RNG end game, they NEED to find something good to keep them interested. As there is limited affix rolls that are good (even worse when you consider the tiers of rolls) and there's only 3 options people are really seeking with sockets, each more rare than the last, we are left with a system that gives the illusion you'll be rewarded at some point but there's no mid-term reward.

The game has become polarizing. You either hit the jackpot or you keep putting the coin in the machine hoping to hit it. People scared by gambling will play the penny slots and be happy if they make a small win but the people who want a real shot at winning that million dollar jackpot are playing the $1-$5 slots because they have the better odds and jackpots.

Right now we are all stuck playing the penny slot odds on the $5 machine cost/pay out. We invest a huge amount of time, for small rewards (or none at all) all hoping to randomly find a kaoms or 6l shavs. Even more ridiculous when you consider to get to a lvl 77 map you need to hit the jackpot many times in a row.

This problem, I argue, is by far the largest one facing the game today. If people were finding good loot, progressing easily (not facerolling content mostly not being stuck grinding an area hoping to hit a jackpot) then people wouldn't mind dealing with desync.

Lately I've been either respeccing character I already have leveled or begging friends to rush me. Once I get rushed I head over to poe.xyz.is to buy all my gear because I know I'm not going to find anything good while leveling.

I've found that for the most part the problems I point out get addressed but my solutions get completely ignored but personally I hate pointing out problems to just say "here, you deal with it" so I figured I'll put it in a reply so it's easier to just overlook. (sorry but I'm jaded after the recent duelist "fix")

Keeping with this theme that you need to give people something in order for them to stay addicted, you'll see this theme in players. The ones who get a godly 6l, kaoms, or run higher maps normally fucking LOVE the game, they got their rewards. It's the same reason why the guy who goes to a casino and comes out with $500-$1000 more than he went in with can't wait to go back. They are the lucky ones, they have nothing bad to say because their experience can't get better unless they get more lucky, they also can't understand why people are losing their minds so tell them to stop QQing it's RNG.

So, how do you help the unlucky ones.

Going to bed, will respond in detail tomorrow.

I love your feedback Moo. Another great post, that will hopefully not fall on deaf ears!

Very true, there is no interim goals, it is get to maps, get to endgame, you really don't have much item progression after finishing the 'main' game and getting to the end game, beyond just small improvements over a long period of time

Oh, I guess I should also mention that these are changes I'm suggested with the game in it's current state and the drive to become harder as it seems to be going.

The majority of these problems can be fixed by making leveling smoother by lowering area levels, lower monster damage so high life and es aren't requirements on all gear also by changing resists to something where you aren't required to have so much.

Good post. I can't really disagree with any of it.

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Moosifer wrote:

When it comes to orbs the way I got rich enough to counteract my awful luck was abusing vendor recipes. These are a GODSEND to someone like me.

Right now, I can only effectively use a few of these recipes (alch shards and chaos). It would be nice if they could improve and add more recipes like the ones you suggested.

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I personally think that 4L items should vendor for 1 fusing, 5ls for 5-10 (a high level item sink needs to exist)

Yeah, I'm still confused at why my white 5-linked and 5-socketed items vendor for a chrom at best.

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Lower the % rolls and bring the base up.

This is going to be more complicated than just adjusting the affix numbers, but I'm sure the balance team can handle this. They did rebalance everything for open beta after all; I wasn't in closed beta to know if that was a good or bad thing though.

On the subject of fusings, I'm not a big fan of your solution, but it is an interesting idea and it would be nice to test out. I'd rather the fusings would only chance the link between two selected sockets, getting harder to link the more links you have on the item. This way 5-links and 6-links are still the same rarity, but you don't fear getting less links for using just one fusing between runs.

+1 moos, this is the biggest design problem in poe right now.
Let me tell you guys a short story...
Recently I found lionseye, holy sh*t! Its the first end game weapon I ever found since CB! Wow! (Without iir/iiq btw.) i was so happy that I desided to get some microtrans. effects for it. Then i realized that i need socks to use it. After blowing up 250 jewelers on it (not much, but still almost 2 weeks of gameplay) I said go f*ck yourself with your retarded rng based piece of sh*t! And i didnt buy any microtrans.
So the conclusion:
Since the game is f2p the success of the game is completely based on happiness of its players. So we can say that devs are sitting in their own rng trap. I hope they know that and the "out of control" rng wont secure the longevity of the game.

While I realize my preferences here may well be in the minority, I don't like the looting aspect of ARPGs at all. I view the RNG-based gearing as an annoyance that has to be put up with, likely due to the lineage imparted from roguelikes being misapplied.

Here's what I mean-- roguelikes are designed around far shorter play sessions, but have a similarly heavy basis in randomly generated and rolled content. The difference is in how it is used. In a standard roguelike, it seems that by and large the intention is to thwart your original race/class intentions and force you to be adaptable. For the same reasons, games like Tetris or poker would be non-functional without high randomization; they would devolve into the memorization of a series of moves and the game would disintegrate. Skill at the game *is* knowing as much as possible about the combinations the game can throw your way and how to manage both good and bad luck. (I believe that the PoE short-races, especially solo, get this mostly right.)While the unlikely successful run of a roguelike will always involve some alignment of luck, it won't happen without a high level of knowledge of the game and clever use of mechanics. In a lot of cases, Diablo-descended ARPGS manage to capture this RNG design goal.

In other cases, they don't. The OP suggests a wholly different usage of RNG, and one that unfortunately has become accepted as a norm. Somewhere along the way, the ARPG became synonymous with "addiction," "gambling," "Skinner-box," and all sorts of other things that in daily life one would consider a pathology. (Check out the Rowan Kaiser article on why Diablo 3's loot system fails for an implicit acceptance of this supposed fact.) I suppose some of this is inevitable when you extend the duration of a character indefinitely and introduce a player-economy, since a high degree of scarcity is required to control inflation, which results in a form of partial reinforcement. I don't know how much of this is intentional on the part of GGG or any other developer of a "loot-driven" RPG, but giving advice on how to perform the addiction function better, rather than alleviate it, runs counter to every intuition I've ever had about good game design.


I know that partial reinforcement is used and abused in a lot of games, particularly the F2P social game market and MMORPGs. For some, this may be the actual appeal of the game, but I'd wager that based on the way GGG bills the game in their own media, that isn't the main goal here, even if the prospect of luring and retaining players through exploitative means is strong. For my part, I play to tinker with builds and find different ways of tackling increasingly difficult content. While I don't claim immunity to the above psychological mechanisms, continuously treading out mobs to see what loot they spew out isn't the defining factor for me. For the most part, it seems like the function of RNG in throwing builds curveballs is lost when you have the ability to select between thousands of other RNG pools via a player economy. To be honest, I'd much prefer a game with no loot drops and no grinding at all, replaced it with deterministic vendor and crafting-based gearing. I just want to speak for a small contingency who prefer to think of PoE like chess rather than pachinko.