Is Path of Exile as addictive as Diablo 2?

I made this thread because I was called out. Yes, I'm that easy. Here's the message which prompted me to write this:

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Inexium wrote:

Spoiler

Hello there,

I don't know, you might have read it or not, i will assume you did not and show you something :

http://www.alexc.me/a-scientific-explanation-why-diablo-3-is-less-addictive-than-diablo-2/417/

Purpose of this comment : @Scrotie, how is poe addictive compared to Diablo 2 and old Diablo 3 ? Knowing that we have that RNG and that random crafting who might make you angry whenever you fail to fuse your item successfully.

I give you 48H to think and a few hours to bring up a thread about droprates and addiction to the game, written and organized with your styles, in PoE Feedback forum. Go( please? yeap it's not an order)!

Related : http://www.alexc.me/why-diablo-3-is-less-addictive-blizzard-responds/441/

edit: www.alexc.me appears to be having some issues, so:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130119044046/http://www.alexc.me/a-scientific-explanation-why-diablo-3-is-less-addictive-than-diablo-2/417/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QyiamXP026gJ:www.alexc.me/why-diablo-3-is-less-addictive-blizzard-responds/441/+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

So I read the articles, and let me tell you, that first link is fascinating. Research into monkeys actually has uses in ARPG design. The second link is a lot less focused, but is no less important; actually, considering how well he understands the situation, it's amazing that Blizzard employee Wyatt Cheng hasn't fixed D3's ills himself.

The most important part of his reply is this:

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All of our items are randomly generated, and so follow a distribution curve in power. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you were to somehow distill an item down to it’s “power level” and created a distribution graph of drop rate vs. power level. This graph would probably be normally distributed with outliers at high power levels dropping at a lower rate.

Looking at this graph, an average item drops every 5 minutes, a higher power item drops every 15 minutes, even higher power drops every hour. etc. As you move up the curve to ever more powerful items, the amount of time it takes to find such an item increases. This is what makes certain items more desirable, this is how things worked in D2.

What happens for a standard player who is playing solo when they first hit level 60 is they see an item upgrade every 30 minutes or so. Pretty quickly it becomes every hour, then every 2 hours. The higher the power level of your gear, the longer it takes to find your next upgrade, that’s just the underlying math of this distribution. It’s not really anything we set either. If we magically made all drops rates 10x higher, all it would do is shift the power curve left or right, it would not change the fundamental property that the higher up in power you go, the longer (statistically) it is going to take until you find your next drop.

This entire section is spot on. It's important to really read it, accept it, and take in what it means. Especially the middle paragraph.

Taken it in already? Okay. Let's continue.

This invalidates the charts from Alex Curelea's original post! Well, not completely, but at the very least they're inaccurate. As an exercise for the reader, I'm going to post Alex's charts, and you can figure out what's wrong with them before proceeding to the spoiler tags.

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A hypothetical “enjoyment graph” for Diablo 3 might look something like this (forgive my crude diagram):

While for Diablo 2, it might look more like this:

The point being, increasing drop rates isn't going to do anything. Once again, Cheng is spot-on:

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To further illustrate the point, let’s talk about the coming changes in 1.0.3. In 1.0.3 we’re going to start dropping level 63 items in Act I of Inferno. We’re also reducing incoming damage. What do I expect to happen? I expect that there will be a rapid increase in power across the entire community as all of these items become more widely accessible. It’s like we took the distribution curve of items and made everything drop more. That item that used to take 10 hours to find is now a 2 hour item. An item that used to be a 2 day item is now an 8 hour item. After the initial frenzy of power increase, things are just going to settle again. People who think drop rates are too low now will probably still think drop rates are too low a week later when they move to the new point on the curve.

This is, of course, precisely what happened.

But the really interesting part of this is how similar that player QQ behavior is to behavior researchers observed in monkeys (such as poor Julio):

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When the juice didn’t arrive or was late or diluted, Julio would get angry and make unhappy noises, or become mopey. And within Julio’s brain, Schultz watched a new pattern emerge: craving. When Julio anticipated juice but didn’t receive it, a neurological pattern associated with desire and frustration erupted inside his skull. When Julio saw the cue, he started anticipating a juice-fueled joy. But if the juice didn’t arrive, that joy became a craving that, if unsatisfied, drove Julio to anger or depression.

To put things clearly in analogous terms: an ARPG is by nature a system where, inevitably, the juice drops become later and more diluted. It is intrinsically built into the system. When the monkeys realize this, the result is bad: anger and depression.

So what, then, is Diablo 2's secret? It's not "the rewards were designed and spaced out – just powerful and rare enough to be meaningful, just frequent enough to enforce the loop described above throughout the game," as Curelea claims. The real answer is simple: the monkeys didn't realize it. Diablo 2 had excellent mechanics to confuse you regarding whether you'd received the juice or not.

Here's what I mean: consider a player opening packs of cards for a trading card game (such as Magic the Gathering). If the game is poorly designed, some cards are just strictly superior to other cards: for example, you might replace a common 2/2 for 2 mana and no ability, with a rare 2/2 for the same cost and a beneficial ability. If that is the case, opening packs quickly becomes a bother; once you've gotten the best cards, you have no further incentive to open further packs. However, well-designed TCGs avoid this pitfall by avoiding cases of strict superiority. Instead of a 2/2 for no ability, you can get a common 2/2 with a beneficial ability, and the rare has a totally different beneficial ability; alternatively, the common 2/2 still has no ability, but the rare 2/2 has a situational ability which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. Of course, this all means nothing if the best ability is always the rare one, so sometimes the common ability needs to actually be the trump. Determining which is best becomes a lot harder, and the person opening the packs shifts from a perspective of "get the best and quit" to "gotta catch them all." Why? Because once he does have them all, he is free to experiment on which are better and which are worse, clearing up any confusion and allowing him to make a concrete, more final decision.

It is that "gotta catch them all" mentality which Diablo 2 does such a great job of fostering. Its itemization system was diverse and balanced enough to mask feelings of strict superiority, and thus players kept on pushing to get everything they could, even once they reached the point where they were getting lots of duplicates of items which they'd already found and rejected. Diablo 3, in contrast, had one of the most simplistic itemization systems ever; put pretty much any two items next to each other, and it was child's play to determine which one was just flat-out better than the other. Diablo 2 had you comparing apples to oranges, while Diablo 3 had you comparing apples to apples.

So when we ask "how addictive is Path of Exile compared to Diablos 2 and 3?", what we are really asking is "how good of a job does Path of Exile do at hiding item value and forcing apples-to-oranges comparisons, compared to Diablos 2 and 3?" And this is really as simple as getting any 2 random items from one of the games in question, lying them side by side, and seeing how easy it is to determine which item is better among the two. There can be differences of opinion here, but I think Diablo 2 does the best job, followed by Path of Exile, with Diablo 3 a distant third place.

Which means: if PoE wants to earn the title of "more addictive than Diablo 2," there is still significant work to do in terms of itemization balance (IMHO). We should have more interesting player choices in terms of which gear is best and which is worst, and — since builds are a part of gear — also more confusion about which builds are OP and which aren't.

that's a lot of effort for a troll thread, here's a free bump, you've certainly earned it

Haven't read anything but the title.

Reason: For me, PoE is more addictive than D2 anytime.

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Faerindel wrote:

Haven't read anything but the title.

Reason: For me, PoE is more addictive than D2 anytime.

Fair enough. Slightly edited thread title.

This was a nice quick read with an important takeaway:

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if PoE wants to earn the title of "more addictive than Diablo 2," there is still significant work to do in terms of itemization balance. We need more interesting player choices in terms of which gear is best and which is worst, and — since builds are a part of gear — we need more confusion about which builds are OP and which aren't.

Specific to that point I have my own conclusions. Right now a lot of builds have BIS 6 property rares. While there may be wide variation within those properties compared to uniques it's not all that different. You're still looking for something very specific and rarely making an apples to oranges comparison that leaves you choosing oranges. Item progression in POE consists a lot of searching for items with similar stats as your own but bigger numbers. And while I feel POE does a much better job than Diablo 3, I don't think it's item progression is much deeper at all.

Things that might help include more varied implicit mods, more unexpected tradeoffs such as crossbows that decrease accuracy but pack a punch, more difficult to assess properties like 200% damage to undead, more build-interchangeable properties for rares. It should be impossible to claim any rare is #1 by creating tradeoffs that leave players with more than 6 desirable properties per slot.

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Veta321 wrote:

This was a nice quick read with an important takeaway:

"

if PoE wants to earn the title of "more addictive than Diablo 2," there is still significant work to do in terms of itemization balance. We need more interesting player choices in terms of which gear is best and which is worst, and — since builds are a part of gear — we need more confusion about which builds are OP and which aren't.

Specific to that point I have my own conclusions. Right now a lot of builds have BIS 6 property rares.
[snip]
Things that might help include more varied implicit mods, more unexpected tradeoffs such as crossbows that decrease accuracy but pack a punch, more build-interchangeable properties for rares. It should be impossible to claim any rare is #1 by creating tradeoffs that leave players with more than 6 desirable properties for any given build.

I think the most important thing, actually, would just make it so at least 4 of the prefixes and at least 4 of the suffixes are all very desirable. All that other stuff is fancy and perhaps still good but doesn't effect the core choice: which 3 affixes you want most.

That's right and achieving that has positive ramifications on a wide variety of other mechanics including crafting, trading and PvP.

Edit: I should note one area where GGG does an excellent job is skill gems. There are few if any apple to apple comparisons when deciding what skills to use. And each linked skill has a major opportunity cost associated. Sure cookie-cutter builds exist but they're always changing and variety is always increasing.

who cares? just play the game

and tldr

Indeed Good defensive pieces of gear are very easy to spot by a large portion of the community, first you need to understand the differences between "Armor" "Evasion" and "Energy Shield" then all you need to know is if your item has many resists + Life (es) ( sometimes movement speed) or not ( stun/ reflect.. )

We need more unique mods from unique items to rare items ( example : 10% freeze immunity )

Thanks for this feedback --Scro and thanks for responding to my request

If I may add to this (and I get the feeling you don't like me very much! :), I believe PoE is in the unique situation (with Diablo 2's Oskills coming second) of expanding the potential for interesting item choices to skills as well. It is currently difficult to see because most skills in PoE are very bland (Lightning Warp, Trap and Mine skills, Frost Wall, Detonate Dead are some exceptions, off the top of my head), but I have belief that the landscape will become richer in the future. Imagine, for instance, if we had Auras that went beyond basic stat buffs and did all kinds of interesting shit with interesting effects, as opposed to "use this only if it fits your build". That said, I do think it's getting better, with the upcoming introduction of trigger gems.

Also, I wonder if anyone viewing this thread played Titan Quest and/or Grim Dawn? That/those game/s also do interesting things with itemization, to the extent that I'd probably rank them equivalent to or above PoE currently.