Intermittent Reinforcement

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Undon3 wrote:

No "comprehensiveness"? :)

I think you thought this title real good, to minimise the chance it will be (partially) copycatted around the forums :P

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Uvne wrote:

Spoiler

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.

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neonesis wrote:

(evasion/armour, which are not really that necessary, it's more of a convenience).