Open Letter to Qarl, regarding topics discussed in RMT thread

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sidtherat wrote:

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Splift wrote:

eases off and only shoot the big easy to hit fish.

check ladders, go do jsp, check poe section - compare names

Takes man hours still. We are talking about several hundred dollars per day per employee + more costs on top of that if they want to fish for the RMT source itself and this is a cost they would have to spend everyday for the rest of the games life.

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sidtherat wrote:

Spoiler

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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sidtherat wrote:

your design invites RMT

Ironically, this is true. But not at all in the way you meant it.

The main thing that draws RMT to a game is: players like the game. Some of these players have money and loose ethics. It's really that simple.

So if you really want to get rid of RMT, you have two choices: either get serious about investigation and enforcement specifically aimed at RMT, or drive away some of your playerbase by making the game worse. Remember, if you fiddle with mechanics and the results improve the game for legit players, congratulations, you've just invited more RMT. Both methods of RMT reduction are effective, but as a legit player, I'd like it if GGG's design continued to invite me.

legacy items - say hi!
drops-once-in-a-lifetime items - say hi!
... gambling - say hi!

I find all three of those things to be pretty damn exciting.

Winning the lottery is fun. Taking away someone's winnings from a previous lottery win is unfun. And a simple trip to any casino will confirm gambling is fun, at least to a great many.

Don't get me wrong, I've explained in this thread how there is a serious, fundamental flaw with the game's gambling system. However, the core design behind that system — the idea of, instead of using a universal gambling fuel like gold, splitting that gold into an entire slew of separate gambling materials — well, that's just genius. Such genius, in fact, that even with its ridiculous disincentive against using orbs, I sometimes find myself unable to help myself, knowing I'm losing value but sucking it up because I'm using a gambling system which, at the very core of its design, is truly amazing.

As such, I view PoE's gambling system not as something to hate, but as a beloved system which, unfortunately, has one hell of a monkey on its back. The only point I'll readily grant its detractors is: no, it's not a crafting system, it's a gambling system. But that doesn't make it bad; it just means you need to hold it to gambling system standards, not crafting system standards.

I guess bad drops aren't fun. But bad luck streaks are, I guess, just another one of those things about the otherwise fun-filled casino.

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Splift wrote:

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sidtherat wrote:

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Splift wrote:

eases off and only shoot the big easy to hit fish.

check ladders, go do jsp, check poe section - compare names

Takes man hours still. We are talking about several hundred dollars per day per employee + more costs on top of that if they want to fish for the RMT source itself and this is a cost they would have to spend everyday for the rest of the games life.

80/20 rule

ban all jspers from top20 of all ladders. account wipe, full, with all proxy-accounts. make it public

several RMT'ers to be are going to think twice. RMT'ing also costs time and money

and it isnt that hard to 'take days'. any intern with basic db skills and detective habbits can find these. then you need some from core ggg staff to confirm the findings and press the button. you make it sound expensive where it isnt. esp in case of poe rmt'ers that do it basically in the open without ANY fear of retribution

@ComradBlack

Sure, nobody is disputing you can craft something of value. The topic at hand is related to when you can craft something valuable. It turns out, under very specific circumstances, as your post demonstrates. A meaningful (difficult) choice, this does not make. And it serves to alienate players from the game more than enchant them. And it should enchant them, because it's a brilliant system.

So, to illustrate: You have enough orbs to 5 link a level 40 armor. Should you go for it or save until you have a high ilevel base? Obviously the latter. It's a no brainer and that's the crux of this discussion.

If I had to list POE's few remaining obstacles to perfect itemization, the areas where the game could add much depth with little complexity, they would be as follows:
-To encourage real choice with early game currency: fiscally sound low level crafting
-To mitigate the depreciating value of loot over the long term: some form of top-down item consumption, perhaps super charging an item that eventually causes it to break. Thus encouraging playing the game and generating items, over trading and accumulation.
-To encourage meaningful (difficult) choice in preferred affixes: additional powerful but specialized properties, at least 4 affixes and 4 suffixes equally desirable for any type of build

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Veta321 wrote:

If I had to list POE's few remaining obstacles to perfect itemization, the areas where the game could add much depth with little complexity, they would be as follows:
-To encourage real choice with early game currency: fiscally sound low level crafting
-To mitigate the depreciating value of loot over the long term: some form of top-down item consumption, perhaps super charging an item that eventually causes it to break. Thus encouraging playing the game and generating items, over trading and accumulation.
-To encourage meaningful (difficult) choice in preferred affixes: additional powerful but specialized properties, at least 4 affixes and 4 suffixes equally desirable for any type of build

Although I feel you might be (slightly?) underestimating the size of those obstacles, that's a pretty fucking good list.

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sidtherat wrote:

80/20 rule

ban all jspers from top20 of all ladders. account wipe, full, with all proxy-accounts. make it public

several RMT'ers to be are going to think twice. RMT'ing also costs time and money

and it isnt that hard to 'take days'. any intern with basic db skills and detective habbits can find these. then you need some from core ggg staff to confirm the findings and press the button. you make it sound expensive where it isnt. esp in case of poe rmt'ers that do it basically in the open without ANY fear of retribution

I would gladly fund GGG if they can produce weekly bans on high level players as this is far more important to me than shiny cosmetics.

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gr00grams wrote:

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Qarl wrote:

Do you believe hoarding and never using currency is the correct choice? If so, why?

Yes. Absolutely.

I can tell you why in four simple reasons;

1. My odds of rolling what I want are nill.
2. I can let some other fool/rich folk blow all his orbs, and buy it.
3. It can potentially ruin my character if I run out of orbs before I return my items to 'usable'.
4. There is no loss in hoarding.

I agree with this 100%.

This isn't complicated. Markets allocate resources efficiently. Currency is merely liquid resources and it's going to flow to the place it has the most utility. The fundamental structure of the ARPG guarantees that this place is end-game itemization.

All RNG driven loot-based games run in to the same situation:


Now, on top of that, you allow for a trade market that allows for value to be spread more efficiently across the player base along with a currency that makes the market drastically more liquid. And let's say you stabilize the value of the currency by weaving it in to the game's RNG mechanics.

At the end of the day, most POE currency is just a store for the value of an extra roll of the RNG die which itself is a shortcut for playing the game, a unit of time. But because of the limits of the ARPG's loot-centric design, there is no point in the game where the value of an RNG roll exceeds the value what currency can buy on the trade market with said value until you get to the point where what you want to buy cannot be reliably bought on the market.

And that's what it comes down to. When I'm progressing relatively quickly, currency provides little marginal value in terms of time savings. In the end game, progression is either extremely time consuming, extremely expensive, or requires immense luck.

I think ARPG designers tend to fail to appreciate just how much of the game experience is tied up in the idea of building towards some "perfect" end-game character. Yeah, it's fun to play along the way. It's fun to level and get new shiny things. But those shiny things are transient, extremely so in early game, and they don't tend to drastically change how quickly I can get to the end-game or they'd be considered "game breaking". If at any point in the game I am given a choice to spend or save something, I'm going to do the delayed gratification math.

I want to get rich so I can buy nice things when I'm older and have the time to enjoy them. Sure, spending some money now helps me get there. It gets me educated or buys me the car I need to get to work. But if I get a $20,000 bonus, using it to buy a slightly nicer car that I'm going to have to replace again in a few years anyway is just plain silly. Unless spending money today produces a positive long-term return, I'm hoarding my pennies.

Want people to use their currency? Make it provide them something that provides significant present-day payoff.
- Have currency improve the item's base stats notably beyond what can be found via looting so that it provides a real boost to progression (e.g. Each roll includes a guaranteed increase the item's quality)
- Provide a greater degree of control in terms of what it does so that the benefit is less random (like the new D3 crafting system)

Alternately, make unused devalue over time. The obvious way is through a wasting mechanic, where it has some chance to degrades/disappear. I don't think that would go over too well. Then there's my current pet idea, "residue".


But that's enough rambling from me....

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Veta321 wrote:

If I had to list POE's few remaining obstacles to perfect itemization, the areas where the game could add much depth with little complexity, they would be as follows:
-To encourage real choice with early game currency: fiscally sound low level crafting
-To mitigate the depreciating value of loot over the long term: some form of top-down item consumption, perhaps super charging an item that eventually causes it to break. Thus encouraging playing the game and generating items, over trading and accumulation.
-To encourage meaningful (difficult) choice in preferred affixes: additional powerful but specialized properties, at least 4 affixes and 4 suffixes equally desirable for any type of build

Although I feel you might be (slightly?) underestimating the size of those obstacles, that's a pretty fucking good list.

Probably. The only thing I omitted was a robust and sundry selection of progression-based crafting recipes. But that seems to be on the agenda, even if progress is slow.

I was having a cigarette and something occurred to me, and I realized I should probably address it directly, rather than waiting on someone else to bring it up.

It's something I call the Infinite ChargeBeam problem. Which I guess doesn't make sense unless you've played one of those nice 2D sidescrollers with someone in a suit with a ray gun for an arm — Samus, Megaman, doesn't really matter. Point being, there's a common attack there were, the longer you hold down the button, the more damage your shots do when you actually release the button, but it also takes up time.

So imagine if you got 1% more damage (calculated PoE style) for every 8 milliseconds you charged up, and your default attack speed was one attack per second. In the time of one attack, you'd get a 125% more bonus, which means it would just be more DPS. (Yeah, even 2D sidescrollers have DPS.) 250% more for 2 seconds of charge, which is more than the 200% of two attacks. And so on. With no cap whatsoever; you could charge up for a full hour and do 450000% more damage.

If you extrapolate this math and lose touch with reality a bit, you might make the following argument: "Since value is always gained over time, there's no reason to ever stop charging up. You just hold down the button forever." With a few formulas and such to back you up, you could make a really convincing argument for this.

But that argument is obviously erroneous; at some point, you have to release, because otherwise you simply don't kill things. The point of the ChargeBeam is not to be charged up forever, but eventually released for some kind of payoff.

You may have noticed my argument that, if you trade, then it may be true that your orbs are always gaining value; I still stand by that, and I actually believe the more heavily you engage in trade, the more true it is. But there is still one fundamental fact: an orb which is literally never used is of no value to anyone. Like the infinite ChargeBeam, an hoarded orb is mere potential, and no actuality; thus, it must be fired at some point to justify its existence.

However, this doesn't mean I think my critique is invalid. It just means that I do acknowledge one fundamental reason to actually consume your orbs: impatience. You simply don't feel like waiting anymore for them to accrue value, so you pop 'em.

Well, that, and in a trading environment, you also have to worry about RMT's currency dumps into the economy devaluing your investment.

The point being, that kind of "more damage" mechanic I described for the ChargeBeam isn't exactly a good system. It's one which doesn't motivate releasing the button except in one specific instance: you're pretty confident you're going to one-shot what you're dealing with. This is very narrow gameplay. It would be much better to ensure that the more bonus was less than 100% more per second, which would still allow for charge-ups (say, when moving from one combat to another), but would ensure some other types of shots were also fired at least some of the time. For very similar reasons, it would still be nice if the currency system could be reformed to making hoarding orbs a little bit less of an optimal strategy.

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Like the infinite ChargeBeam, a hoarded orb is mere potential, and no actuality; thus, it must be fired at some point to justify its existence.

Potential behind a layer of rng that will likely cause many to rq because they couldn't fuse with 2500 fusings or create a god tier item with 50 exalts worth of currency. I think that was what eternals were for and look how that turned out.

The very orb intended to breathe life into crafting was ultimately what killed crafting soundly when you could simply swap x sum of orbs into a guaranteed bis item without any rng layer. This would be equivalent with chargebeam being charged to an optimal point where it could be released and instantly clear the entire level.