(Helping GGG in) Creating a unique item: a breakdown of the breakdown

Thanks for sharing. I love hearing about the custom unique process, good or bad. I truly regret not getting a diamond pack or two back when the queue was short.

As I was reading I was thinking maybe you could rework Unleashed into something viable for the 4 months. It would be a compromise of your vision but long term it might make you happier to actually see people discussing it and playing with it. But then I remembered how Chris said in the podcast interview that they were thinking of extending the expansion cycle to 6 months with two 3 month leagues. That really drove home you points about the difficulty of designing for an ever changing game.

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mucker wrote:

Thanks for sharing. I love hearing about the custom unique process, good or bad. I truly regret not getting a diamond pack or two back when the queue was short.

As I was reading I was thinking maybe you could rework Unleashed into something viable for the 4 months. It would be a compromise of your vision but long term it might make you happier to actually see people discussing it and playing with it. But then I remembered how Chris said in the podcast interview that they were thinking of extending the expansion cycle to 6 months with two 3 month leagues. That really drove home you points about the difficulty of designing for an ever changing game.

His point is that this notion of "viable" is the problem. What's viable for today wont be viable for tomorrow. Since the process of designing a unique takes years and the power creep to make them useless takes 4-8 months, it's silly to even start.

I thought you left? O.o

I was surprised and happy to see a new thread associated with your account posted, and it was certainly an entertaining read. Who could have imagined how stressful and anxiety inducing the design process could be? Even more confounding is the fact that so many paid for the 'privilege'...

What I considered to be the biggest selling point of a Diamond Supporter Pack was that sick kiwi with it's own spotlight. I figured 'design your own unique' was a throwaway where you gave a paragraph or two of a theme/concept/idea/art and you would have your name slapped on it. Hadn't really considered how engrossing the process would be.

I appreciate and share concern about how quickly the 'meta' of this game has been driven by GGG, and I too wonder if the ambitious timeframes rolled out at launch were too much, and if there will ultimately be a phase of relative stability where GGG can focus on sorely needed and much desired Quality of Life improvements instead of ever increasingly more powerful (colloquially named 'unbalanced') skills and uniques...

I hope that once your formal interactions/commitments with GGG end that you reconsider your self-imposed exile from Wraeclast and rejoin us exiles in Wraeclast and just play and enjoy the game. We all need a little escapism now and then. ^.^

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Catchafire2000 wrote:

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No need to bump a thread on the first page with a silly comment such as "b".

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Do a map if you can. This one's simple. Maps are much less subordinate to the meta-game, because they're optional content. A map will never be part of a killer build, but it might give someone with a killer build somewhere to have fun. My girlfriend designed a Map and it's wonderful. It was actually buffed recently, in fact. Virtually no custom design map goes unloved.

Except it's content that most of the population will never see and should.

I'll get into my post-mortem when my unique is in the game but the summary of the entire process as I mentioned to Charan privately was and is: I'm not particularly pleased as of late.

Were you one of the lucky few to design items early, you would probably be pleased but any upcoming unique designer will probably share the same sentiments as I have right now: You are forced to design around the meta-game.

The process started out pretty well but went south shortly after.

I can't have item slot restrictions because of Bringer of Rain. I can't have it as a crafting recipe because "economy" (when I was previously told it would be okay). I can't have two distinct affixes that define the item because they previously put "too many" affixes on a unique (I was also told that this was ok). I can't make it creative because of Soul Taker. I can't have it non-chanceable because it "differs from standard game rules".


The worst was probably skimming over my concerns and what I wanted to unique to do and telling me that my justification for wanting the two affixes were "not compelling enough". I think its currently on track to be Windripper v2 which I despise with all my heart.

The last few e-mails have just been "no"'s to most of my proposals really.


There is no worse feeling than being told "yes" for some design aspect of your unique and getting all excited about it only to have them backtrack and say "no" sometime down the line. And that is exactly what has happened non-stop throughout my unique's process.

Which is hilarious, considering the two most game breaking unique items in existence are not even user designed.

Love reading your walls of text, very insightful. I really wonder if and when GGG will slow down with turning the meta upside down. I agree that changing the meta is important to keep the game fresh, but with the way they're doing it they're upsetting a lot of people. I still have the impression that GGG doesn't believe enough in their own game. It was like this back when they weren't 'brave' enough to put a price tag on the game, and it is like this now where they feel the need to constantly give us new (often poorly implemented in one way or another) toys and metas to play with and force us behind huge RNG walls so we don't stop playing their game (the latter is a bit silly because RNG can motivate you to keep going, but it can also motivate you to punch your monitor and uninstall).