POE: The Best of Games and the Worst of Games
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About Crafting
In other words you mean the orb mechanic. Like what i said a few times before, the orbs give you a second chance at drops, i.e. a rare drop(alchemy, chaos), magical(transmute, alts), etc. they are services which replaces the use of gold like "gamble" in D2, socketing, durability, etc.
Fun stuff to drop
If you mean, drops that give alternate mechanics, then we have uniques for that my 2 cents I need more purple titles Last edited by Ocylix#1741 on Dec 8, 2013, 11:18:05 PM
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" The problem with any arpg, including PoE, is how to accommodate the extremely divergent player base. From your narrow perspective you can solo to 55+ level in one day, similar to the post by Vombat911 on how to get to level 65 in only 8 hours. He and you can do it but there are many, many players that are never going to be able to progress that fast. Should everyone that loves the PoE skill system and passive tree and sockets and gem skills be forced out just because they don't have the high playing skills that you do? You and other hardcore players are perfectly happy because you can level so fast but for others it might take weeks playing a few hours a day due to real life requirements that limit free time. GGG knows all this, yet Chris and company steadfastly insist that they can't make changes lest they upset the apple cart of silent players that are playing now and are ok with the current state of PoE. They're using that as an excuse to not have to put their collective minds together and engineer a better way to craft. GGG could if they so choose make 2 new leagues and put forth some major crafting orb and loot drop changes that by the fact it's a new league will require us to start with a new character and thus there is no apple cart (of existing characters) to upset. But since GGG is content to continue down their dead end path and not add new leagues then nothing new and exciting will come of all this talk. "You've got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone..."
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but poor QoP in PoE is the father of frustration. The perfect solution to fix Trade Chat: www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2247070 |
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" Nobody is asking to have RNG removed. At least I hope not. The problem is that there are no controls on the RNG. You can get a short bow with a tyrannical mod on it, and yea, it'll be an awesome short bow, but you won't be able to equip it until level 48 which marginalizes any utility that you would get out of it. Also, there is no way to skew the RNG other than by making certain ranges bigger. IIQ for example will make you find more items of a certain quality because it makes you find more items. Likewise IIR will make you find more yellows and unqiues because it forces the game to drop more blues. The stat really does nothing than occupying a prefix slot and allowing players with 5 other good rolls to charge more for the item. Nevermind the fact that the awesome short bow you can't equip until level 48 dropped from a level 72+ zone and it is a level 1 base item. The majority of the rares I find have like... maybe 1 roll on them ranging from level 48-70, and then the other 3-5 are levels 1-10 affixes. I'd say that allocation represents something like 80% of the items distributed. Then you get into that top 20% and top 5% of rares that you're talking about. I find 20 times more siege axes than champion kite shields. 20 times. That in an of itself signifies that how the game is handling randomness needs a bit of work, especially once people reach the endgame and are still finding base items with a level of 1 that have affixes ranging from level 1 to 10. So there could AT LEAST be a floor of like level 30 base items and level 30 affixes in the endgame and even then it wouldn't skew the results that much (extending the current top 5% to a total of 7% of drops). Likewise that would differentiate the end game content from the normal game content and provide a huge incentive for players to participate in that end game. I've already voiced my opinions and findings about how the RNG is not equidistributed in another thread. IGN : Reamus
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I agree with the OP completely. Having gone through this whole thread, it's one of the better ones I've seen. That said, here are some things reading through this has made me think of.
" Part of the OP's point to be that item drops aren't interesting enough. The problem with currency drops is that they're either a gamble if you want to craft with them yourself or just a trade item. Neither of which is as satisfying as drops in D2, which were often sidegrades or forced you into making interesting choices- inventory space, or that stonking big charm you just found? " In this clip at 1:15, looking back at the closed beta a year before the video came out Chris said "We also received a lot of feedback that players did not like to invest a passive point into something that wasn't of at least marginal use to their character." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHsw2zIafgg#t=75 Passives were changed such that every point provided at least a little bit of a bonus, and it worked out pretty well. The passive tree is exactly what draws players in to the game a lot of the time. This debate about items is the exact same situation, though. The actual stats needed for items to be useful aren't very dynamic but are pretty rare, so when a rare drops players stop being excited because it probably won't be useful and even when an upgrade is found, it doesn't change your character much. Currency items are rolling the dice on every use, and usually there is no benefit to using them. This is like using a passive point and receiving no benefit. In fact, it's worse because you can both lower the value of your crafted item and lose out on the value of the currency. Players are thus given an incentive to use those currency items for trading. And a lot of players simply don't find trading too fun because they either don't have the currency a seller wants or don't want to spend the time in chat or PoE explorer looking for items. They want to play the game. " How about building on the current craft system instead harming players by taking things out. What if more currency items were added to the game, such as an orb that gave +attack speed% to an item. The roll of the stat itself would be random and if the item was a rare, it would still be limited to 6 stats. Further, the orb drop would be random but at least the statistic would be assured. If there was a wide variety of these items, players could trade them around to get stats they want to apply to nice base items they've found. The better ones would be more rare of course...say, an orb that gave an item 6 links (if the item could have that many) would be a super rare drop, equal to a lot of exalts in today's economy. I mean, nearly mirror of kalandra level rare. Current orbs would still be applied to this system. A divine orb, for example could reroll the base values of an item that had perfect stats a player applied to it over a lot of work. These new orbs should be able to be crafted somehow, such as selling certain combinations to vendors for others. These recipes should produce side grades, not upgrades to discourage unlimited hoarding, to encourage trading for recipe items, and to be an economy sink. An extension of the idea of drops being more consistently beneficial is if maps could be combined and crafted into higher level maps. This would make every map drop important, even a 66 to someone doing level 74 maps because it's progress, even a little. Still random, but the drip feed of progress would keep players motivated. The next step would be to make more item attributes viable for players. As it stands, you can tell at a glance whether or not a rare is worth anything and if mapping, whether or not it's even worth inventory space. I don't think a lack of a large pool of attributes is the problem, I think it's that for any given base item there are very specific ones needed to be useful. This is not to say these items would fill the niche of uniques. I see uniques as enabling specific builds and having interesting effects, while rares help leveling and fill out basic stats a character needs to progress. " My whole point is that a lot of the time, players do things that don't give them any benefit, like get a bad roll using a chaos orb. There needs to be a system that encourages more playtime through small increments of progress, but skill would still be a huge factor in contributing to those increments. RNG makes arpg's fun, but (even limited) progress makes players come back to them. I'm not advocating for my hamster wheel to turn a bit more, I'm saying it should turn more consistently. Last edited by Monkestful#7937 on Dec 9, 2013, 12:20:10 AM
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Hmmm, not sure i agree with OP, cus when i am lucky it actually feels amazing and having that changed would not be to my liking, am currently mapping with a new char and sure there are unlucky drops, orb uses etc., but damn there are also plenty of good ones, never forget that.
They could up the recipes and it also looks like thats where GGG is going to head instead. Tweaking RNG is one of the toughest things in aRPG's and looking at other companies you can see how easy it is to totally mess it up if your either are to punishing or to lax. The way it currently works, GGG have to be very careful to not make this game a casual throw away for the majority. PoE Wiki page: http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Path_of_Exile_Wiki
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I feel like a whole lot of people in this thread are very confused about basic game design mechanics.
The Individual player's attainable progression. Each player of any game has a ceiling of how far they can progress. It's usually limited by the following. Play time, willingness to obtain knowledge of the game and lastly mechanical skill. This is true of any human activity be it maths, juggling or whatever. The important factor in a game is the barrier to progression is set by the game developer. This has historically led to certain groups that fall in to a category of the above factors being at odds with each other(hardcore vs casual) and with the game developer. An excellent example of this in action was World of Warcraft. From TBC onward the game has increasingly lowered the three aspects of time required to raid, knowledge (big warnings that tell the player what to do in a boss fight) and potentially mechanical skill too. This had the knock on effect of the end game content being more accessible to the average casual guy. But also turned off a lot of the crowd that enjoys challenging content. This relates directly back to the same situation in this thread of the more casual players wanting crafting to be less RNG so they can progress further without putting more time into the game. Now I assume their interpretation of less RNG would actually involve making crafting easier. Where as actually keeping the game balanced as it is now would mean using 100-200 chaos orbs in one go to get a guaranteed upgrade, which I doubt would go down well with the player base considering the average drop rate seems to be one every 3-4 hours of continuous play. I get the impression those calling for less RNG actually mean "We want more powerful items quicker". The problem with giving powerful items to all players quickly and easily is simple. It drastically lowers the longevity of the game. Look at any other ARPG which isn't Diablo 2(which I'll get to in a moment). Torchlight 2, "Oh I want a new weapon to be stronger, easy just type in the command to the console and it drops out the sky." For an ARPG to have longevity it _needs_ to take a very long time to acquire great items and it needs to be impossible for all but the most dedicated to get the best items. For those saying how great the rune word system was in Diablo 2 how many runes above Ist did you actually find? I think in 2-3 years of playing I found one Ber one Lo and 3-4 Vex and Guls. I'm pretty sure Zod drop chance is lower than the mirror drop chance in PoE. Sure rune words were great but they were just as hard to obtain good ones (BoTD, hoto, enigma) as crafting good gear is in Path of Exile. If they were easy to obtain that game wouldn't have been anywhere near as popular as it was, because people would pimp out their character play for a day then quit because there is nothing more to do. The fact is people don't like an obvious barrier to progression. League of Legends is great because it obfuscates the barrier to progression due to the RNG elements which are the abilities of people on your team and the enemy team. The player doesn't feel like it's his fault if they lose because there are 9 other people involved. Equally the player doesn't blame riot because its not the developers fault if they lose because Teemo was bad. At the other end of the scale Starcraft 2 is all about personal skill as a barrier to progression. Speaking as someone who got to Diamond which I classify as the league that requires you to play regularly for 4-5 hours a day where masters requires you to play 6-8. The game is all down to your personal skill level so it's not very popular as a game to actually play (It's very popular to watch as a spectator sport though). Since it requires a huge grind to get better and the barrier is yourself so it's not like you have anyone else to blame. In Path of Exile the main barrier is time. Game knowledge and personal skill will get you to higher levels without dieing, but ultimately without a lot of time investment you will never reach the level 85-90 region which I would say is "end game" i.e you can do 72+ maps. People don't want to invest their time to do this, so they end up wanting the developers to make it easier to progress by making items faster to acquire. Lastly to address the self found argument and that people hate trading I want to say a couple things. The game is designed as a multiplayer environment from the core up. The result is crafting drops are balanced around trading. It's just pure and simple how the game is. If you want evidence of that just look at Eternal's there is no possible way a single player could ever invest enough time into the game to eternal exalt an item efficiently within a reasonable time period outside of being incredibly lucky. The same applies to Enigma runeword from Diablo 2. The chance of Jah and Ber both dropping for you is so astronomically low that you'd probably have to play for years every day for 8 hours a day for it to happen. So by adopting the attitude that trading is stupid then complaining about drop rates is like playing League of Legends but never last hitting and only going for player kills because its "more fun to kill players than grind for gold off minions". The game isn't designed to operate that way and you will be disadvantaged if you try to do it. Nothing prevents you from doing that in LoL and nothing prevents you from playing solo self found and using chaos orbs on random items you find. But it's not as efficient as playing in the way the game developer intended you to. Now If that is how you wish to play, all the power to you but it's stupid to then try and convince everybody else that is how the game should be balanced. |
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" I don't think you were referring to my post specifically about the ability to add specific stats to items, but I agree that crafting should not be easy. However, the problem for players as I understand it is not any barrier to progression. Barriers are fine. The problem is progression that stalls until they get a lucky RNG roll, either from a drop or crafted item. So sure, trade. But I think players are given too much incentive to trade, to the detriment of crafting since you have to choose between one or the other what to do with a particular currency item you own. |
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" Very well-written post, I totally agree with almost everything you said, even though I definitely would fall under the group of people who prefers to find all my own stuff. One thing though that really does differentiate between the rare drops like Zod runes in diablo 2 to say an Exalted Orb in PoE, is that, when you found a Zod rune, it was immediately and intrinsically valuable and useful for what it was. You could socket it into an item and make it indestructible, or you could build a runeword out of it (as long as you could acquire the other rare runes of course) or you could trade it to someone for some other awesome piece of gear or several lesser runes. The problem with an Exalted Orb is that it is both a rare and lucky find just like a Zod (I know Zod was rarer but it's a fair comparison for argument sake), but also quite disappointingly useless 99% of the time that you actually use it on an item. So people end up trading it away, even though they'd REALLY like to use it. D2 didn't put people in such a quandary at least as far as I can recall. |
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" I'm sorry but this is such a subjective post. You took your own experiences and your own opinions and extrapolated them as some general truths. What makes it enfuriating is that you manage to do it in a way which is so confused and so rife with ego that I would be laughing if I didn't actually care about the balance of this game. (general tone : stop whining casuals) If you really think you are the only one intelligent enough to realise that by practice you can get better, you must be joking. Also your comment about SC being a lot more "skilled" because it all comes down to individual skill is also pretty damn silly. I've managed to reach "professional" level in more than one game when I was younger and I can honestly say that the games which involved actual teamplay were a lot more deep and harder to master because of this extra dimension. On any level, but mostly on a high level, other people aren't skill limitations or scapegoats, they are...teammates. You say that time is the "progression barrier" in Path of Exile. No shit. That's how most games with levels work. The difference is that in Path of Exile even with enough time it feels like the gear progression isn't really there. I had logged on over 100 hours last two weeks (broken foot) all done maps and some on Piety. At the end, I had nothing to show for it and I was all out of currency. The RNG is so bad that even time doesn't warrent progression. I don't want to compare PoE with D2 but since you brought it up. Aside from runes, comparing things like Boss loot with the Boss loot in D2 is a joke to be honest. In D2 I actually found most of the endgame gear on my characters after a lot of farming, can you honestly say you think this is possible in PoE? I agree with the OP though. This game has so much great aspects and so many original ideas. Honestly I think the core of the crafting is actually very original and still promising. It just need some balance. Perhaps more rare amulets and rings should drop to make the chaos recipe more efficient. Things like that might actually make the crafting system more viable. EDIT : on a sidenote, I actually think GGG is doing their best at balancing the game. The game has gottan A LOT better compared to a few months ago. So eventhough I'm not logging on that often at the moment, I'll probably give the game another shot in a few months. Last edited by Ivonbeton#0624 on Dec 9, 2013, 1:01:06 AM
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" Some people have jobs and so they post from work when they can't play because they aren't fortunate enough to do whatever it is you do for income. I find crafting much improved since the 1.0.0 changes to 4L/5L. It's still nonsensical that some people will get a 6L after 10 fusings and others not for 4,000, but as far as chaos spamming for rolls and 4L/5L, it seems pretty good to me now. I am much more discouraged by the randomness to map drops and the fact that uniques are now gated to maps, but if you run those maps, you are still far, far more likely to get redbeak, blackgleam, kaom sign, shiversting, etc. Anarchy/Onslaught T shirt
Domination/Nemesis T shirt Tempest/War Bands T shirt |
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