Map Drops in The Awakening

First the enlighten change and now map drops...

GGG seriously want us to RMT our way to the top.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

There's some points you missed, that paua ring you used as an example whether to ID or not, resulting in 1 chaos or 2 chaos and therefore an extra roll on a high base...

1) That paua ring isn't alone, there's another ring, an ammy, a belt and every other slot you sacrifice the ID roll for that 1 more chaos.

Aboslutely, and there's the opportunity cost associated with doing so. However, because the average rare jewelry/belt drop is not on a desirable base, those slots are filled with items that are highly unlikely to result in a good item anyway.

To be clear - if the rare drop is on the right base with the right implicits, it gets IDed, no matter what slot it may occupy. However, that's a rare occurrence (if you'll pardon the pun). So I'm not missing out on the opportunity cost by leaving those other rings/ammies/belts unIDed. It is not beneficial for me to ID the rare cloth or chain belt when I need the implicits from a leather or rustic, no matter how well they roll, in SSF play. All the slots you mention above are filled with rare items like this. Since there are more items that don't fit my build than ones that do fit it, this happens more often than not.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

2) Don't use the 1 chaos, or the 2 chaos, whatever recipe you chose. If you are going to craft that high base use an alchemy on a fresh white base each time, they are free and can then contribute to another chaos recipe every roll.

That's certainly how I get the ball rolling - on a fresh white base with max/near-max implicits, first order of business is applying an alchemy. However, in my SSF experience, those drops are actually rarer than yellow drops in the same slot with bad bases/implicits. Yes, they are "free" (if I understand the sense in which you meant that word). They're just hard to come by.

For instance, let's use the example above of belts. Say my build is looking for a rustic sash for the extra physical damage implicit. I will accept a roll of 23 or 24 on the implicit for my white base. Out of all the items that could possibly drop, sometimes a belt drops. The odds are about one in six that it's a rustic. Since the range of implicits on a rustic has 13 values, and 11 of them aren't useful to me, you can quickly see that I'll build up a pile of non-useful rare belts before I get a useful white rustic base to spend my one alch and multiple chaos on.

Applying a blessed orb is an option, but only so far as I have blessed orbs. Those seem to be about four times rarer in drops than chaos, with no known vendor recipes to generate them, so unless I'm really desperate to have that base white item, I'm going to pass that option by. The same for spamming blessed orbs at a rustic with great rare mods but an inferior base.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

3) You put the case forward as if you were halfing the cost of rolling this high item by doing an UNID recipe. Well at the rate them tradey folks put on chaos and alchs, I just halfed it (or 3rd?) and you get a free roll on 9 items to boot. Not to mention the ease of making alchs over chaos puts the ratio a lot more than 2 or 3 to 1 for self found. And you make 1/3rd of the chaos recipe or regal recipe bottleneck every time it doesn't roll well, extra.

Darn those tradey folks. Darn them straight to heck.

Since those 9 other items aren't on bases I need, they're better converted to chaos than as IDed items that I'll never be able to use.

You mention the regal recipe here, and without getting into the possibilities for Elreon's meta-crafting, I'd just like to point out that for crafting purposes, it would be so much more useful if a regal applied a new rare mod to items that were already rare, instead of only magical. This would seem to be the next logical step in the progression of farming orbs, after the effect a chaos orb has.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

4) Base type does carry very little weight in comparison to mods rolled in many, many cases. A pair of boots, for example with MS and life, leaves very little for armour and/or evasion, a good pair of rare boots, is mostly defined by the life, the MS, and tri-resist. Even when a strength or dex attribute roll is desired on a life based evasion character, IDing a pure int low base pair of boots with top life, top MS and 3 good resists is a win. Get the strength elsewhere, lose a tiny bit of EV, profit.

I was about to embark on a discussion of the shift in meta from needing an armor-based item in a build to use the CwDT-EC-IC-ID gem linkage, when I realized something about what you were telling me here. This may cut to the crux of our differences in approach.

Whereas my skill and ability to build and play a character tends to force me into very specific gear choices (for lack of a better term, a "min-max" strategy) to compensate for a lower level of skill, your ability to roll with more of what the game is willing to cough up randomly affords you the option of a broader palette to paint with.

With practice, and learning from conversations like this one, perhaps I'll get better. :-)

Apologies for quick response, Tao, and only picking a single part to respond to (have to dash off).

But did you ever consider not restricting yourself to a high rolled implicit (the result of your perceived shortage of items to work with and subsequent preferred method of directing chaos through them) but rather ignoring the implicit roll, thus massively increasing the number of free whites to work with, only using alchemy orbs, and depending on the result, either recycle back into ID'd recipe if a bad alch or rolling the implicit with blessed orbs if good?

After all, what other use would a SSF player have for blessed orbs?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Tao_Jones wrote:

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Chris wrote:

There are three goals for our changes:

• For players to choose to play harder maps (by rolling them to have more and harder mods)

I'm sorry, big fella, but you lost me right there. How does the data you collected tell you about how and why players choose to do any particular behavior?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

This is incorrect. Asking people what they'd do is usually accurate, but asking people to provide rationales for their behavior is scientifically established to not only yield bad rationales, but also corrupt preferences.

Scrote! Howthehellareya, man? Long time no talk.

I wasn't suggesting using direct questions (thanks for the links, BTW, I plan to use them in a marketing presentation I'm doing later this week). As The Mom Test (linked before) directs, those kinds of questions almost always result in bad data.

The way we divine motivation in marketing behavior studies is to look at the series of actions the user took in achieving goals. What I'd do in this specific case is find out what the player was hoping to achieve with his/her actions, what actions they took to reach that goal, and if the result of those actions was what they'd hoped to achieve. This is precisely the kind of research that would answer the questions I asked of Chris/GGG in the previous post.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but asking people "what they'd do" is actually a very bad way of finding motivational data, since you're posing a hypothetical. Asking "what do you want?" and then "how did you try to get it?" is better. Past behavior indicates future behavior, as they say.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

The average player has, at best, a foggy idea why they play the way they do.

Possibly the truest thing ever said on these forums, but I'm not suggesting asking a player outright about why they play the way they do. You're too likely to get "vanity metrics" from questions like that, as you assert.

"Like" and "hate" can be fraught with peril as well, unless it's tied to specific behavior. One looks for attempts to find saddle-points in strategy ("player always takes the easiest path") and avoidance strategies ("player steers away from the inconvenient/expensive path"), then asks the player about those specific behaviors, in context.

Here's an example of what I mean, using questions styled this way:

GGG: I see here in the data that you rolled about 50 level 72 maps, and ran them blue. What were you looking to achieve from those maps?

Player: Well, I wanted XP, some good items to use on this or another character, some items for the chaos recipe, and of course more maps to keep my pool up.

GGG: Okay, so you had multiple goals. Did you get the XP that you were seeking? [narrowing down to one goal at a time]

Player: No, I died too much, which mostly wiped out my XP gains. [data point]

GGG: I see. So, for your second goal, did you find items that you later equipped on this or another character? (not "would use" or "could use", but "did use")

Player: I found a unique bow that I thought might work for my elemental ranger, but I ended up using a rare I had in my stash already instead. [data point]

GGG: Gotcha. So I see in the data that you used some of the rares you found for the chaos recipe.

Player: Yes, I completed two recipes out of those runs. It was hard to find the amulets I needed. [data point]

GGG: The data here supports that - only two rare amulet drops out of about 50 maps. How did that make you feel?

Player: Well, I sorta felt like that part was a waste of time. I really wanted the XP more than the chaos, but any chaos I get are just sort of extra bonus for running the maps. [data point]

GGG: I see. So, your final goal was to maintain your map pool. How did that work out?

Player: You have a lot of data there, so you probably already know that I got 4 level 74 maps, 6 level 73 maps, and 15 level 72 maps, which is what I was running. I converted 9 of the level 71 maps I got to 3 more level 72 maps using the vendor recipe, for a total of 18 maps at the same level I was running, and 10 above that level.

GGG: Right. Now, on average, you spent a little less than one transmutation per map, and about 14 alterations per map, when you were rolling them.

Player: Some took more, some less, yes. I remember I had like seven temporal chains mods in a row when rolling one map.

GGG: But you kept rolling that map.

Player: Yes, I had to. Temporal chains isn't a real problem for my character to run, but it's a monumental pain in the backside. Boring and slow. [data point]

GGG: Do you trade?

Player: Not a lot, but some. Since I started maps I have to trade a lot more. [data point]

GGG: What did you buy the last time you traded?

Player: I bought those 50 level 72 maps from some guy for 25 chaos.

GGG: I see. Looking back at what you gained for your 25 chaos, plus the approximately 50 chaos in crafting materials you spent rolling them, did you feel like you got a good return on what you spent?

Player: Not really. I mean, I got to play some fun maps, but I didn't really reach my goal of a new level. I died too much, which was a shame, since I'm only two steps away from a keystone I think would really help me. [here the players is revealing what he/she was really after, which was that keystone - big data point and potential pivot point for our business]


That's enough for us to get the flow of how the customer interview works. You look at specific behaviors and drill down to the motivations by completing the goal-action-result diagram.

For a game, the desirable end result for the player is to have fun, and for the developer to make money. Aligning the product to the desires of the player is finding the product-market fit.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Well, there is one obvious benefit of players rolling maps to have more mods - variety of play is increased. I think it's a totally valid goal to encourage players to run as many map affixes as possible, because picking 6 affixes out of the pool is much more random than 4 or 5 affixes.

It's valid so long as it aligns with the player's desires, yes. In your case, that's obviously true. It may not be true for the majority of players - that's an assertion we can only make through truthful player data.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

PS Please update the Dictionary thread.

Oh, I have plans for that, my friend. Forsaken Masters wasn't as big an update as I'd hoped, but this one is going to be a monster. I look forward to some participation from you, if you're so inclined.

Will this change mean that rares cannot drop items with +2 ilvl at all or just not maps any more?

and map drops are going to be nerfed compared to the current live rate eh!!
i hope hard maps are going to be REALLY more rewarding

just finished this... got a villa and academy from this map...

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Daresso wrote:

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Making map bosses more challenging and more rewarding to fight. They will drop more items (and maps) than they currently do. Note that they will now be the only monsters that drop maps two tiers above the current map level.

Really smart decision imho. This is a direct nerf to magic/rare being two of the three ultimate affixes to roll (with packsize being the remainder).

... it doesn't nerf pack size or magic monsters at all. It just makes magic monsters and pack size clearly win over rare monsters, and makes the Zana nemesis mod only good for experience and headhunter instead of raising your map pool from 76 to 78.

Anyway, I like these changes.

this is the completely wrong approach. if anything, the drops of LOWER level maps need to be cut down. that garbage clutters your inventory and you can't get rid of it cause there's still no AUCTION HOUSE.

1. make trading viable
2. cut down XP needed on the early levels so players can get to the endgame quicker
3. -> then we have a game that's worth getting into deep.

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Chris wrote:

On the Closed Beta, the drop rate for higher maps that we've been testing recently is lower than the live realm. While there are several mapping groups in Beta happily sustaining the highest tiers of maps, it took them a lot more effort to get there than it normally does. We want to bring this experience to more players.

In other words:
We increased the disparity between single players and groups even more - single players gets it in the butt again without lube!