Self-Found (League) [Thread outdated!]
" This demonstrates the level of understanding of most people against SFL. You don't need a dev to state the obvious: games with economies have to be balanced around said economy or else the game goes to shit. Here's a simple demonstration of trading affecting game balance: 10 items drop for you: 5 are garbage; 1 is good for your life based melee character; 1 is good for a freeze pulsing alt; 3 are useless for all your characters but would be good for a facebreaker, sporker, or lowlife character. In a trading league you trade those items you can't use for ones you can. In SFL you vendor them and get a few alts and maybe an alch. Same time spent as the trader, but less than half as much useable loot. The game designers have a set goal for how fast players should acquire items and wealth: too fast and players get bored sooner, too slow and they get frustrated and quit. If you provide trading but don't balance around it then you get an excess of loot making it so traders have too much loot too fast and get bored. If you do balance around it then you have people who don't trade getting too few items and getting frustrated. Whether you agree with either playstyle or not the fact is both exist and both want to have fun in this game but really co-existance under the same drop-rate is going to leave one or the other shafted. There may be some outliers who don't get frustrated with self found in its current form or who wouldn't get bored with higher drop rates in standard, but don't let that fool you into thinking that both playstyles are currently balanced or ever could be with the same ruleset. Last edited by silvershadows#0884 on Oct 20, 2013, 3:55:34 PM
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I think it should be "relatively easy" to reach Maps in Self-found. I say "relatively", because of course you don't want it to be a walk in the park to get past "Merciless" difficulty.
However, maybe it's just me, but too much RNG and little time can make Self-found not viable basically. You get stuck in a certain part, and just can't get past it. Happened to 2 of my chars in Act 2-3 Cruel I believe. Don't have time to reroll/grind, so didn't play more. I tried trading, but I'd spend hours and hours searching trading threads, looking for the right items I could use, and not even getting a PM from people, so yeah not going there anymore. Should be possible to get to end-game with self-found. ...well maybe I just suck at this game. But it's a nice game and I want to play it to the end (don't care about trying to reach 100 or getting godly gear or whatever, I just want to know what it feels to play in maps and have some fun with end-game builds, their customization, etc). So there are 3 options for me: 1)Please make this process easier to me: Basically what people say in this kind of threads. Make a "better" crafting system, make self-found "viable" or whatever, etc. 2)Please give me the tools to be better at this game with the little time I have: The other alternative is actually getting good at the game. To know every single detail, know exactly which build is viable, how to create and sustain it, how to react to each different situation, know every enemy and know how to approach them with your particular build (have general knowledge of mechanics so you can approach them with any build you make), be a master theorycrafter, etc. But yeah that requires too much time and effort, which I don't have. Simple things like having a way to toggle the damage you and monsters take per hit would be a step in the right direction for instance, since you would have an easy and fast way to compare different configurations of your char (for example for how much HP you get hit, or how much HP you hit your enemies). Another option would be having better statistics. The ones in the Char window are basically useless to me, other than "bigger number = better". Real-time statistics would be better for instance. For example, have some counters or something in the screen, which tell you how much HP you get hit per second when you are in a fight (max and average), how much time you spend evading hits from enemies (min, max and average), how much damage is mitigated by your armor. For each of these statistics, you could have a counter for the current one (for example a counter for the current hit on your armor), and for average/max/ming/etc. If it's presented in an user-friendly and useful way, it could make theory-crafting and the like much easier. Of course it should be toggable, in normal situations you don't want to see that shit. I guess other options are better documentation/guides/etc? But yeah the game is huge and the possibilities are huge, it's quite hard to make that sort of thing, at least in the level I'm thinking of (not the ones that are already made, which are either too general or build-specific). Mostly having a better way to know exactly how your current configuration works, and if you get new items/gems/etc, have a way to know exactly if it will be better for you or not. Not this "get unique item X, then get specific gem Z, then farm until you get to specific keystone Y" stuff that's on every "guide"; but more of a "okay, you are level X in zone Z. At this time there are several kind of items, currencies and gems that can drop for you. If any of these drop, then maybe you can do something like this to survive better and shape your build in a certain way. Then you could go get the stat node X to try and do another stuff, but later you can scourge it anyway when you advance to the next Act. Bla bla bla". I think stuff like that should be integrated into the game a little bit better, not just be random advice from people in it's forums. Or rather, that should be the way YOU figure stuff out, but that info should come easily from somewhere, and I think the game could help you more into getting that mentality. 3)Meh: I guess I'm fucked and will spend my time doing something else then..? But this would suck, I like this game. |
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SFL -1
Summary of most posts - - - Its either this: "GGG I really enjoy your game, but I'd rather not trade and as such I'm finding it difficult to progress and craft at a rate that I would personally deem acceptable. I understand that this game was designed with the concept of open trade between players in mind, but please use your very limited development resources to completely rewrite and/or re-balance the algorithms used in looting and crafting so that this crap is enjoyable to me." Or this: "GGG I really enjoy your game, but I'd rather not trade and as such I'm finding it difficult to progress and craft at a rate that I would personally deem acceptable. I don't want increased drop rates or any tweak to the game's mechanics though, because I MOST DEFINITELY don't want an easier game. So please waste your time creating a league where our particular brand of self-finders can slowly come to the realization that we could've been doing this all along in the leagues as they were." |
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" Those are some nice generalizations there, but PoE's innovative crafting system will never be able to truly shine so long as everything revolves around the trading short circuit. A hungry upstart developer like GGG should be eager to strike the dirt in pursuit of the next great innovation. The whole league framework makes things like this easier than they would be in other games. It's one of PoE's greatest strengths. But it should not be used because... ????? Eh, no reason. Everyone, go back to spamming giant walls of items in trade chat. |
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" Maybe. But they make it a bit harder for soloplayers with the upcoming changes of auras, costing lot more mana. Parties will be able to run all manas with "hugh buff effects". Soloing will in many cases only have 1-2 auras. IGN: Hydralin
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" Pure nonsense. Rebalancing loot & crafting would not require months of work to "completely rewrite XY", because else we wouldn’t have several leagues, with different parameters, like Descent which in fact contained higher drop rates. GGG has all the mechanics to tweak & control drop-rates & crafting already in place because their system of leagues & balancing demands such flexibility. Creating a Self-found league would not require more work than creating Anarchy or Onslaught. All that is missing is the political will to do so. I'm still of the opinion that GGG is afraid that a bunch of nerds playing solo self-found and generally just minding their own business, would generate less revenue for them, than a system where you are required to spam chat, spam forums, advertize, create begging threads, create scamming lotteries, spend more time on the internetz than in the game... and generally """socialize""" (cant put enough quotes around that, lol!) to be able to progress in the game... As a philosophy, SFL would not fit in this forced silly bartering system that is in place right now and could even ruin it - having people just playing the ARPG game, without caring about stock prices, market crashes, chinese farmers, botters, RMT, streamer fusing lotteries... outrageous, I say! :P When night falls She cloaks the world In impenetrable darkness Last edited by morbo#1824 on Oct 21, 2013, 4:43:57 AM
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" Just jumped on to say this. You guys were a small loud group. Same as this "movement". Don't let ongZ get your hopes up. "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right!" Henry Ford
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"While I actually agree with the "Anarchy" part of that, I disagree with the "Onslaught." Creating several Rogue Exiles and testing against them to ensure that they were neither too weak nor too strong (for the most part) wasn't something that happened instantly; it required some behind-the-scenes, honest-to-god playtesting, not just in particular areas but in all areas where Rogues could spawn, across all difficulties. And playtesting takes time. (Onslaught, on the other hand, was a watered-down version of a common race mod, a throw-away option.) Any sort of "increased drop rate" rebalance would almost definitely require effort similar to Anarchy's testing. The problem is not that you equate this type of change to Anarchy, but that you brush it off as easy and costless, as if getting a small group of testers to run through content for days isn't something that costs a game studio money. Creating Anarchy costed money. Creating Domination and Nemesis costed money. Creating Leagues that actually have significant balance changes costs money. Is it possible to create new leagues? Of course it is. But it has a price tag. And most importantly, SFL wouldn't solve the real problem anyway. Do you really believe that increasing drop rates is somehow going to magically fix low-level crafting, or that it's going to make it so gear progression isn't as much of a grind? Did you learn nothing when Jay Wilson famously said "double it" (referring to unique drop rates)... and absolutely no good came of it? You guys are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to a solution for your ills. Want to read a serious suggestion on how to fix low-level crafting? Read this. Want to read a serious discussion on how to make progression feel like less of a grind? Read this. And while you're at it, check out the second link for specifically why increasing drop rates doesn't solve the problems of a grindy progression. I'm not saying I'm perfect; maybe my ideas are wrong. But at least I'm not walking into obvious traps which anyone familiar with D3's history knows will not work. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Oct 21, 2013, 5:00:09 AM
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" Not that it detracts from the point, but the original, famous "we doubled it" referred to the pre-nerf Inferno difficulty :) Have you made a cool build using The Coming Calamity? Let me know!
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" I know you hate with a passion the idea of an SFL, but you mention D3 and the last news from D3 is that they have realised that their model of buying gear through trading and auction house is not what an ARGP is about and that they are going back to the original concept of finding items by killing mobs and looting what drops. Not by spending ages trading. One of their reasons was they have noticed that players spent more time trading than they did actually playing the game and that is not what they want to see in their ARGP. I'm not saying D3 is suddenly perfect, but at least they have the sense to realise that an ARGP is a hack n' slash to get loot, not a buy low, sell high trading economic simulator. I know you will never agree and will fight the idea of having a SFL constantly. Last edited by Jaknet#1426 on Oct 21, 2013, 5:21:45 AM
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