Open Letter to Qarl, regarding topics discussed in RMT thread

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morbo wrote:

Just one question for you Scrotie (and that dev, who said that you dont need to trade): which tier of maps have you been able to reach with your self-found orbs? I'm not interested in theory, just your practical experience.

Just saying I reached to level 75 maps playing solo without buying any of them in anarchy. You shouldn't expect to reach top end content while gimping yourself (with no trading).

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Nephalim wrote:

The drop rates for high end orbs are balanced around the existence of bots which is why you will never find more than 5 eternals in your entire lifetime.

There's really a very simple solution:

Make high-end orbs drop primarily from rare maps.

Bots can't run that shit, they're meant to do simple and predictable tasks. And if they want to run it they'll be blowing the currency they could have sold on an RMT site trying to roll decent maps.

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almostdead wrote:

Just saying I reached to level 75 maps playing solo without buying any of them in anarchy. You shouldn't expect to reach top end content while gimping yourself (with no trading).

And I was playing 75 - 78 maps for two months in Domination, solo, without ever buying one map, grinded the pool myself from 66s...

But I was buying orbs. That is my whole point.

Maybe this is a MMO design, I don't have experience with MMOs, but I have never played a game where content is gated behind trading.

For someone who doesn't like trading (it breaks immersion into H&S ARPG), I can even accept I will never do hi-tier crafting or own godly uniques. But I cannot accept being walled off from content.

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morbo wrote:

Maps are primarily gated by trading, not by partying, because someone has to roll them, right?

Perhaps it could be more accurate to say maps are gated by rng and that one can be circumvented by trading.

While on maps, seems another suggestion from players got implemented, I've seen a lot of them suggesting portals to random modded areas throughout the game as another way to boost experience and drops, even made one thread myself. Admittedly, the suggestions were a bit more complex than this but the basic premise is there, we'll see how far will levels of these corrupted areas reach.

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Qarl wrote:

I certainly have no issue with players having currency in their stash. In this thread it seems player indicate they keep currency because its trading value is higher than its crafting value (keeping the currency because they might want to spend it later), or because its best used in large amounts later (keeping the currency because they want to apply it to items later, in volume).

Both of these intentions indicate investment and interest in the game. I do not consider that a bad thing.

Qarl, I want to state just one thing.

You're making extrapolations based on statistics. But what you're not gauging is the current mood of the player.

Here's my counter-argument: All of my guildies are currently invested in the game, and hoard their currency to try to either use it or buy good items.

Why is this not a positive...? It's because they're not happy with the current state of the game. There is constant disappointment expressed either through whispers or guild chat. Comments along the lines of "If this isn't improved, I'm quitting." Etc. And it's not just talk, I've seen a lot of people leave the game already as a result of simply unrewarding design decisions that you guys have taken.

I love the game and am pretty addicted, but it's not a good addiction. I keep playing because this is what happens when people have a vice--like gambling or alcohol. I could be doing a million productive things with my life and instead I'm spending every night farming for fusings that don't give any results. I'm pissed that for four weeks I've been trying to 5L a piece of gear and can't do it, or that in 950 hours of playtime I've discovered that orb drop rates are so low to the point that what I want to do--craft--is simply not viable!

I understand you guys want a hard game, but you have to be more lax. At nearly 8 hours a day, this is like a second job, but the game is designed in such a way that my time investment is worthless. This is not good for retaining a player base. If you guys are happy with that, fine, but I think in the long run you'll look back at all this feedback on the forums and say, "Yeah, we should have probably changed this."

Lord_Kamster the extrapolation wasn't even correctly done (also I choose to not trust GGG on this unless they release all the data from their extensive 'research' to be peer reviewed, which won't happen). What Carl forgets is that a lot of people reading him have a science background. You just can't draw conclusions about causality of player behaviour just like that, it's just wrong, I doubt their experiments have any external validity.


So far on the topic of loot/drops/itemization/randomness and how all this affects player behaviour, satisfaction, retention etc. all I've read is a bunchload of theories (sometimes conflicting with more worthy scientific word) with hardly any good empirical back up usually with convoluted rationalization to reinforce each individual vision on "how it should work".



Maybe GGG should consider some professional (non-biased) polling to gauge playerbase psychology along with behaviour and try to understand the underlying motivation behind that behaviour. Or maybe they just don't give a fuck because they are "building the game they want", and they want it to be just like that (layers of RNG upon layers of RNG), although I doubt anyone on GGG staff besides Neonspyder (which is only ONE player archetype) has the experience to have an informed opinion on how the game feels, specially in later game.

I wish the game moved more towards player being proven by sound character building, certain degree of skills (limited by the current combat mechanics, but still) and sound tactical decisions, and less weight on gear; but the game has been moving the exact opposite direction since OB started in many regards. There are also more things that could be done to help out with what you talk about, like softening the power curve, to improve character progression perception, instead of the long times of character stagnation we have now.


GGG has said several times that what matters is the path, not the end result. They are quite right about that, the problem is the way you have designed the path is so bad that the majority of the people get frustrated or bored and just quit, there is no sense of accomplishment anymore or you don't even care when you get there because you are burnt. But if GGG is entrenched and thinks the current way things are fine and they are happy about current behaviour, there is not much that can be done.

To supplement Lord_Kamster's post, I will share a story from my first POE playthrough.

It was the very end of CB. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was finding a slew of tchotchkes, which from Kripparian's videos (good health tropicana kripparino) I gathered were "currency". These currencies, as I understood them, were used to modify items while you progressed. Wishing to familiarize myself with the mechanics of each I started crafting gear. Keep in mind, I'm only around level 30 and this is all self found. I managed to get good implicit properties on most of my gear and 5 Linked my sweet grove bow. Then I used a couple Chaos and Eternals to finish it off. I had made a powerful item and the whole process was a lot of fun. So you can imagine my dismay when I later found out how valuable exalted currency was and what a poor use of that wealth my learning experience had been.

I summarily changed my ways and didn't craft anything for the remainder of CB. I think that first pleasant experience with the orb system is why I fell in love with the game. And why I still check back in every few months. I only wish the game encouraged playing like that, it would please a lot more players.

@knac84

I can't help but feel that's in part directed towards me, given my dogmatic analysis of financial self interest and its role in POE.

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I wish the game moved more towards player being proven by sound character building, certain degree of skills (limited by the current combat mechanics, but still) and sound tactical decisions, and less weight on gear; but the game has been moving the exact opposite direction since OB started in many regards. There are also more things that could be done to help out with what you talk about, like softening the power curve, to improve character progression perception, instead of the long times of character stagnation we have now.

Indeed.

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Veta321 wrote:

@knac84

I can't help but feel that's in part directed towards me, given my dogmatic analysis of financial self interest and its role in POE.

Not really, was talking about the topic in general whenever it's commented in ARPG communities, and the developers perspective. And if anything, about GGG comments (lack thereof sometimes) about it, which are what would worry me more.

As players we can opine on stuff, but developers should be more systematic when approaching these things. I found your OP interesting and can agree with lot of it, but yeah, we don't have the need to back up our claims thoughtfully. Now, if my income would depend on that...

I don't expect any single change to be done about this as long as the playerbase decay gets stronger. If participation ratios and interest over time after league rerolls diminish (which I expect to happen), we may see some real changes. The four-month reroll is a nice addition, but balancing your game around that is a bad decision, if you can't keep a balanced economy in long term leagues, or keep up the interest of players to go with their characters until they feel complete, you are failing with your current design and you shouldn't design your game around having an economy (is baffling that ARPG designers haven't yet understood this, but at some point they will).

Also as I said before, I find quite interesting that GGG has abandoned the idea of having a barter economy and has fully endorsed a monetized economy. We will virtually have a full monetized trade economy with an unofficial persistent AH (XYZ) when the planned trade systems are released. Is my believe that this is an absolute failure on GGG front (as is, indirectly, a total failure on the war against RMT/FG; but this could be used to destroy permanent leagues and shift focus on temporal leagues even more as a way, which will fail, to keep player interest).

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knac84 wrote:

Maybe GGG should consider some professional (non-biased) polling to gauge playerbase psychology along with behaviour and try to understand the underlying motivation behind that behaviour. Or maybe they just don't give a fuck because they are "building the game they want", and they want it to be just like that (layers of RNG upon layers of RNG), although I doubt anyone on GGG staff besides Neonspyder (which is only ONE player archetype) has the experience to have an informed opinion on how the game feels, specially in later game.

Oh this?

Should GGG use some of its money to buy videogame Psychologists Expertise ?

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Lord_Kamster wrote:

You're making extrapolations based on statistics. But what you're not gauging is the current mood of the player.

Oh it's simple. Just analyse further statistics.

The use of orb%(and no use of them% + time spent playing T + supporting the game $) vs leaving the game%.

I beg Qarl to continue reading this thread and continue communicating.

ok i haven't read through the whole thread, just the first page and what i got from that is that some people would like to use the orbs as a valid form of crafting much earlier than end-end game (80+ levels).
Now let me tell that I'm someone who would be described as casual played in CB during servers testing open week and then played with breaks from start of OB - i had level 79 char in domination (now standard) and stash worth of about 12 ex in chaos + uniques. - i don't think that is something to be described as wealth in this game).
So why I dislike increasing drop rates of orbs so you can craft yourself gear:
1) You can craft yourself gear even now, leveling untill say merci A3 is IMO completely viable with self found rares or crafted magic items.
2) One of the big reasons i like PoE as a game is its unique barter trade economy. Seriously there were times when i didn't even farm, just had fun trading currencies and slowly accumulating wealth. I fear that if everybody would be crafting for themselves the economy and trading would be moved aside (of course it would be still used but less).
3) I see currency as a currency, not a crafting material. So the idea that i would be crafting myself gear via say eternal exalt method when i can get myself equally good stuff for something between 0,2 - 2 exalts seems wrong to me.
4) Game as such starts for me at levels 65+(basically maps) - any build can make it into endgame, maps is where the bad builds begin to fall off. Everything before that is just a rushlevel-with-any-gear-you-have type of game (or geoffrey's baptism until level 60) so why should i use currency before maps time?
5) Main reason for my disagreement with increasing currency drops is that you can get about 2 - 4 chaos on average from every 70+ map in items and orbs (with some magic find of course). I believe this is enough as it is. Increasing drop rates would help at lower levels but it would also flood economy because maps would become super profitable.

I hope there is logic somewhere in that and bless you if you read through it all.