POE: The Best of Games and the Worst of Games

I disagree based on personal experience.

The crafting system was designed too eventually provide the best possible items in game more regularly by adding in an extra factor rather then the drops theirselves. The game is as intended and as people know completely based on RNG. You cannot expect crafting to get any less random as it'd just create different problems such as longevity of the game, the amount of time it takes to actually ''finish'' the game so to speak. Games such as Diablo 2 were much less playable because of the simple dynamics and depth. Yes, there was crafting. But far more limited then in POE. I'm glad that this game atleast gives the opportunity to either trade your currency or use it. The fact is also that items with 6 links and max rolled stats are pure luxury that just open more spots to utterly destroy content rather then neccesary to complete so i think this is more of a luxury problem.

Crafting is still very fullfilling, atleast for me. Exalting thorns on your chest can be a huge dissapointment, but 6-linking your shavronne's gives just as much satisfaction. You can't have a game like POE give out random 6-links to everyone and their mothers, it doesn't work that way. Either you invest and eventually get what you want, or you hit the jackpot.

I played this game since OB and i've also invested highly in the crafting, but after several succeses, i have to say that i'm glad that the crafting system is so random because i wouldn't have felt the same if it were to be different or easier.

It's all personal experience nonetheless, i'm more patient and less attached to my currency then most people are.

I whole heartly fucking hate trading and the concept that it's necessary.

But you just have too....

Considering I have bought 10+ stash tabs, have played multiple characters and far more hours than molst games, have 6+ tabs for good items and play with friends... I can still go 20+ levels without finding an armor pgrade for a character which forces me to have to trade to progress. (Nemesis)

Content and Items are balanced around trading and to play self found is not feasible without endless MF farming and time grinding.

Once I tried MF farming for multiple hours to find a weapon upgrade for a character... once I got bored i paid a chaos for an upgrade which took 5min of xyz and 5min of bartering...

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ZeyroKJ wrote:

Content and Items are balanced around trading

thats not the 'truth' - in real the game as a whole is based on the idea to bind you, to stretch the gaming experience through keep you "busy" while seeking for better gear (you know that all this games are fully about finding better gear?); and the mechanic to do so is just RNG. The items and loot are balanced to be random, balanced to be mostly "bad" with just a slightly hope for the godly drop. But this takes time, named patience - a skill most people didnt know anymore today.

And trading is "their" way to pass the RNG, thats all - that simply. You dont need to trade for gear if you have patience... (skillgems are a bit different; cant understand for real the decision to have to play one char to level 60+ just to get one skill to use on another - my 'desired' - at the half point of this...)

As i've said in another thread, if you want "progression crafting" there's almost no way around "bound on character/account" or to overhole the whole game. I'd really enjoy BoA - just give the players certain orbs that add a fixed amount of value for quest rewards so they can craft items with it instead of the rare rings, belts, weapons etc. you get for one quest or another.

So, instead of a random ring you can chose "Orb of Damage" that gives flat 25-40 damage bonus to any weapon, which is then bound to your character. Other orbs may offer "Bonus energy shield", "All resistances" or "fire resistance" or "% bonus spell damage". Values would be lower than what you can obtain through currency crafting or drops, but it'd enable you to craft your own gear which will get you through the game if you chose carefully. You can get that "craft orb" back with a vendor recipe, for example "item + 5 orbs of scouring + alc orb" or something like that, and use it on another item later.
I don't think that this would cause a difficulty issue at all - as it is right now, you can use some alcs, chaos or whatever and straight out BUY the stuff you need online to rush through the story game. Remember, you wouldn't be able to craft "good" gear, just decent gear, and as you'd only get one "craft orb" at a time, you'd still have to rely on drops for most of your gear slots.

This would change nothing for the "end game", but would encourage new players alot more, just like "self found" players. I just don't like games that rely on RNGesus too much when all you want is some fun.

To even out end game crafting, you could indeed add some vendor recipes along with some alternate crafting, like:

You've a cool bow, 120% phys damage roll, bus it lacks the flat #x-x damage. Find another bow with high #x-x damage, use a vendor recipe, get an orb that adds #x-x to an item WITH A MALUS. So, let's say you use the vendor to sell a bow that has 40-60 damage with the recipe, containing 1 exalt and 5 alcs, you'd get an orb that'd add HALF the flat damage bonus to your bow; in this case: 20-30. Add more exalted orbs in the recipe to make the malus smaller:

1 exalt in the recipe = 50% malus
2 exalt = 40% malus
4 exalt = 30% malus
8 exalt = 20% malus
12 exalt = 15% malus
20 exalt = 10% malus

... you get the idea. 10-20% malus would be the cap, so you couldn't lower that malus by adding more exalts. So with 20 exalted orbs invested, you'd get a 36-54 damage bonus guranteed on your item. That way you'd have an itemsink, would enable players to reach a goal within a reasonable timeframe, you'd also ensure that the best items are still drop or "real" craft only.

Other aspects to even out balance: make these craft orbs untradable (or even add the "stat transfer" into the recipe), add a itemlevel threshold, make it only usable on items that have 5 properties already or add to the recipe the chance that the added value takes away another random value that was on the item before, make sure that an item can only have one craft orb at a time and so on.


On a sidenote, apart from the not very encouraging crafting system UNTIL you reach the endgame, i think the system is good enough as it is now. I'm fine with trading for my gear, but let there be no doubt about it: being able to craft your own stuff is fun and it'd be great to have in the game.
But then again, i miss set items more.

I'm sure I am missing a lot of insider information but I take a simplified approach here. We play arpgs and in particular we are investing (sinking?) 100s or even 1000s of hours of our free entertainment time into playing PoE. We buy more stash tabs and bling to keep GGG in business for the long time (hopefully) and are happy to do so at the beginning of playing PoE. Now that we have played for months or over a year we are thinking that PoE is great in play mechanics but bad in crafting and item progression. Our interest in continuing to play PoE for the next few years is waning, not from having played through to endgame with multiple builds (there is always the newness factor of excitement that wears off), but from having played long enough to come to realize that the loudly trumpeted orb crafting system can't be used as we first imagined simply because GGG has decided to be so stingy with crafting orb drops that is isn't possible or practical to farm enough to do any crafting/gambling. So we take our alchs and chaos and other precious orbs and instead of using them for their crafting function we use them as currency to buy the gear we want.

So GGG has shot themselves in the foot. PoE doesn't have a gold based economy but at the same time the rarity of crafting orbs makes them the new currency and they are not used for their original purpose anymore. For example:

Regal Orb = Upgrades a magic item to a rare item.

Since they are so rare no one in their right mind would actually use it as a crafting orb so it becomes a currency orb for trading. Same with many other crafting orbs due to their scarcity. So GGGs decisions on defining orb drop rates has condemned most of the rarely seen orbs to be used as trading currency instead of real crafting orbs. With this situation GGG might as well have had gold in PoE and let the crafting orbs be crafting orbs. Some of these rarely seen orbs might as well have been called unobtainium.

Finally, it is frustrating to actually get a Chris sighting (he has a posting in this thread) and then he uses the same old faulty reason for why GGG can't make any major changes. Sure, if GGG changes Standard or Hardcore or the 2 four month leagues that a lot of players would be pissed that the economy has been ruined. But no one is ever proposing that GGG do that. The way it needs to be implemented is by adding 2 new leagues. To Chris and company the currency drop rates will be increased in 2 brand new leagues so that we all start over fresh and can play and amass enough crafting orbs to do our own real (or as real as it gets with RNG) crafting and have fun doing it.

Blizzard has seen the light on this and RoS should make the AH and commodity trading the last resort to getting better gear and GGG needs to do the same thing with PoE.

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Sonido wrote:

Crafting is still very fullfilling, atleast for me. Exalting thorns on your chest can be a huge dissapointment, but 6-linking your shavronne's gives just as much satisfaction. You can't have a game like POE give out random 6-links to everyone and their mothers, it doesn't work that way. Either you invest and eventually get what you want, or you hit the jackpot.

I know I've only had roughly 300 hours of gameplay on PoE, making me still an ultra-noob-whose-opinion-cannot-matter. However I have played D2, D3, touched TL2, and I've even played some older Dungeon crawl games (because that's what this game REALLY is, except with some action thrown in so they call it ARPG) such as Castle in the Winds (text based Dungeon Crawl) and many other flash-based 32-bit games.

After reading through about 20 pages of this stuff, I think I have a response to all of it really, and I'll start with the most recent. You say "invest" implying that you have to burn through orbs obtained to "eventually" get what you want. The problem here is the orbs having an implicit or explicit value (given by the economy in trading). Crafting would be much less frustrating if these orbs had a much lower value (OMG DID HE SAY TO RAISE DROP RATES!?!?) Allow me a moment to explain (or a novel, sorry).

If currency were just combination materials, then losing them wouldn't lower your "equity," but rather it would only mean a decrease in your chances of obtaining the item you want due to a sink in your resources. In other words, if chaos orbs were ONLY useful in re-rolling a rare item into another, and not useful in saving them up so that you can buy an item with them, then they'd have much less value, and therefore would have much less pain involved in getting bad rolls. However, this is just the beginning.

Next, there exists two different natures among all of the currency. There are the "one-and-done" currencies such as alchemy orbs, transmutation orbs, chance orbs, and similarly exalted orbs. Then, there are the "re-roll until we hit our mark" currencies such as chromatic orbs, jeweller orbs, fuse orbs, chaos orbs, alteration orbs, etc. It's the latter of the two that provide the frustration due to fighting against the RNG (to 6L an item is actually 1/32 if every event is equally likely, however I suspect there are some weighted probabilities involved to make the 6L rarer). However, it is in the interest of the devs to keep these probabilities low because the "re-roll" type currencies can lead to the top-5% types of items quickly if these probabilities aren't kept low.

The question is and always has been "How do we make crafting feel less like gambling without destroying the integrity of the rarity of items?" Or equivalently we can analyze the question, "How do we reduce the amount of RNG in crafting?"

Method 1: Keep crafting the way it is - destroy "economic" value to certain orbs.
It's exactly the "re-roll" currencies that need to be "dropped" from the market and have no value. If you're questioning whether or not to save this currency for trade or spend them on items, then crafting has lost it's meaning at this point. These items should be reserved only for crafting. One way to do this would remove the ability to trade other players these types of orbs and therefore removing their value from the market (This would also help the problems with trading vs. crafting). The main problem with this is that it doesn't affect the RNG much at all, but it just removes the weight of the loss from bad rolls as if you were playing the slot machine without having to spend real money. This would encourage crafting. A continuation of this idea would be to then create areas that drop an accelerated rate of these specific orbs so you can continue crafting if you run out of resources. I don't foresee a huge increase in top-5% items achieved by these changes, but I would foresee an increase in the average player finding an upgrade to their level 40, 50, or 60 to-use items. You like a bow you just found? Let's try to match the sockets/links/colors of my old bow now! You found a 5L bow? Lets try to roll the mods on it to match the bow you already have. Both of these tasks are now much more simple to do with an abundance of these "re-roll" orbs. You can still leave the 6L chance and the "Has OP mods" to be ungodly low in probability and only to be obtained from the really high ilvl items, thus preserving the top-5% type items as top-5%.

A lot of players would argue that this would damage the economy in some way. Only thing this would do is make a change of currency. Instead of Chaos orbs being your bread and butter currency, it would be Orbs of Regret or some other orb to take over its place. A new currency would find its way to take over the role. For players that have horded fuse, jeweller, or chaos orbs... Ever make investments? Stock, shares, capital of any kind have volatile value. At one moment they're worth $.80 a share, then they're worth $.30 a share, then sometimes stock can be worthless (such as stock in outdated technology?). These kinds of changes aren't the devil.

Method 2: Change the way crafting works - introduce new ideas such as "ingredients"
Ever wonder why you have so many Active Skill gems and you don't bother picking them up? How about using them as ingredients to a greater scheme of probability control? For example: Red gems can be used as ingredients in a recipe to yield higher probability in STR-based mods (physical damage added/increased, life leech, reduced stun threshold etc.), blue gems can be for INT-based mods whereas green gems yield a higher likelihood of DEX-based mods. You can use the "rarer" support gems such as Multistrike, Greater Multiple Projectiles, or any other of the Siosa quest gem rewards to yield a higher probability of obtaining the high-end type mods (Life + tri resist + MF etc.). One possible flaw to this idea is that these gems would grow in value for the market and therefore stimulate trades all over again creating the problem we already have with Chaos Orbs. I have no ideas for how to continue this, just a raw idea!

Sorry for the long post - if you're really interested in this topic then there's no such thing as TL:DR. Plus reading makes you smarter, I think.

-Charles

POE needs some sort of collectables that create a whole but are also useful singular.The nearest they have to this is Charans sword but they could consider creating a new item that was dedicated to collection(like Runes for rune words,or the Relics in Titan quest) to give something new to see in the loot pile.

Making more low level uniques part of vendor recipes not only makes the items seem more sparkly but also acts as a sink so you have fewer of them in your stash.

i, too, only play games to whine and complain about them.

stay classy op

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Kaysee wrote:

Can’t see how it is a “game mechanics” problem based on the examples you’ve provided. Whenever people are involved there is always good and bad. I’m sure if I were to try and buy a pint of milk in the UK with US currency I would be refused.

Then what is it if not a game mechanic? With a single currency sysyem that situation could not even take place. And again your expample has nothing to do with what I said, it more like trying to buy a pint of milk in the US with US currency, and then being refused because for some reason the shop keep only wants Japenese Yen.

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Kaysee wrote:

That is not what I said. :)

I know but you said its harder for RMTing and botting. How is it harder? If anything it makes player more likely to RMT and bot with orbs as currency because there no relible way for them selves to farm orbs. Only reiable way GGG can stop RMTers and botting, is by banning players and blocking there ip, which if am not mistaken that what they do now, why would this change with gold as currency?

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Kaysee wrote:

Yes we do and yes it is. Enjoy. :)

Diverse - adjective - showing a great deal of variety; very different
Oxymoron - noun - a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction
Enjoy :)

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Chris wrote:

On the other hand, if the currency items dropped extremely rarely, then players would almost never get the chance to create a rare or to add mods to one. They'd be relying *almost* entirely on item drops, so it'd be far harder for items to converge on the best rares.

Exactly the problem with the Exalted Orb drop rate. Almost no one gets to add mods to a rare item drop.

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Chris wrote:

Players play Path of Exile more efficiently than we imagined when we initially set the currency drop rates (which have remained mostly unchanged since then). Players are concentrating their item rerolls into fewer and better items than we intended.

Players are concentrating their item rerolls into fewer and better items because of the ridiculously low Exalted Orb drop rate and the addition of the Eternal Orb to the game. The Exalted Orb drop rate is so low one only has the resources to Exalt the best of the best gear, and that is only if you are rich. When you create a situation where you cannot find the Exalts, Exalts can fail at improving an item, and there is an Eternal Orb that is one, more rare than an Exalted Orb, and two can guarantee success at improving an item, what did you expect people to do?

In the current state of the game everyone is simply going to hoard the Exalted drops. The poor will hoard them until they have enough to trade for something they want, never use them for their intended purpose. The rich will hoard them until they have a best, top-end item and enough Eternals to guarantee crafting success.

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Chris wrote:

While this level of end-game item manipulation is often described as really fun, it has the problems that you've discussed in this thread. One way to address this would be to reduce the drop rate of higher currency and also make content easier. I am very aware that if we did this, people would complain that we nerfed currency drops and dumbed down the game difficulty. We'll find a better solution!

I partially agree. The Eternal Orb should be given the axe, removed from the game, because there should be no method to guarantee success. On the other hand, after the Eternal Orb has been removed the Exalted drop rate should be increased so people other than the rich can use the Exalted currency for its intended purpose. With the removal of guaranteed success, you should be able to increase the Exalted drop rate.

I hope you find a solution, because I for one would like to actually be able to find and use Exalted Orbs. Found zero in Anarchy League last season, so never got a chance at using one. Found two this Domination League, but I know how rare Exalts are and I'm not rich enough to waste them for their intended purpose. I don't have a rare iLvl 68+ item with mods I would want to add another affix. And even if I did, I also know how the RNG gambling system works. What does this mean? I'll hoard them until I find more and a best, top-end item.... because that's the game you created.