Thoughts from a game dev in the industry ...

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Sure_K4y wrote:

I think getting mods on rares that you can only obtain by putting in currency is fine, like, "tier 0 mods", with +150 life, or +50-ish resists.

But when I look back to Talisman, where, in a tier 14/15 map, you were hoping for that tali to be rare to begin with, and have good rolls to top it all off, it makes me shudder. That was not exactly good in my book, but not unbearable, at a certain point I just picked them up and stashed them, hoping to get something good, once I "sacrificed" them.

Well, some types of crafting (eternal+mirror) have made people complacent, :P

Honestly, I can't understand how is ok for some to gate a low life build behind some exalts (before was even worse) to have a valuable unique (bah, there is Lorica, maybe not the best example but you get the idea), and to want easier talismans at the same time. In my mind, getting powerful should be expensive/require more effort, getting your build going shouldn't.

Ah, grinding gear games will be grindy.

The Varunastra Vaal blade is an example of an item that ought to be CORDONED OFF at level 85, and made much more powerful. It's got great build-enabling potential, but it's so meh on stats. Sure, I get that GGG wants people to look at the level number and say "well I can try that out in 3-4 days if i play a lot. i'm gonna try that out" but damn, it just makes for a queen's forest full of queen's decrees.

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johnKeys wrote:

but to "chaos" there should be some form of player control or apparent player control.
if you can farm specific places for that specific thing your specific build desires.

Too much of this is a bad thing. Let's imagine Docks was significantly better for farming bows, Catacombs for farming daggers, and Dried Lake for farming scepters. If you think the only effect would be that less people would farm Dried Lake, you'd be wrong; a lot would stay there, and flood the market with decent scepters. Which, in turn, would make budget caster builds more meta... and so on. At the same time, daggers OP, so you'd have a lot of people in Catacombs. Really, the main losers would be people relying on item types which aren't really farmed, as the market for those items would be smaller... niche non-meta builds could become more expensive, unless the least meta bases were carefully assigned to the best farming zones.

One action creates a chain of consequences. Now, I'm not saying these consequences couldn't be managed, but the amount of developer effort required to properly balance everything would be astronomical. (There is a very good reason why Divination Cards have a relatively minor effect on farming.)

GGG's answer to all of this is: instead of heavily investing in complicated targeted loot systems, let players trade, and allow them to transform loot they don't need into loot they do. It's a self-regulating system. The Economy is the yang to RNG's yin, smoothing over its spikey edges. Why do you not love it more?

"Oh no, I spent currency on this item and it is a shitty rip! I feel bad!"
Congratulations, you just increased the value of those currency items simply by using them. You are effecting the economy and engaging with the community. Also, the high probability of rips will ensure that when you eventually do get good rolls it will feel great.
If you get the good rolls from economy items= "Yay! My persistence paid off!" or "Woohoo! Feelin' lucky!"
But that's not te only way to get those items. For example:
If you get it from a drop= "I feel like I just won the lottery!"
If you buy it from another player= "Snapped up a bargain there! ;)" or "I just made a sound investment!"
If you borrow it from a guildie/friend= "What a great community!" or "I have great friends!"

All of this is made possible because the RNG system is unforgiving. It's hard to get good items. It's an accomplishment. If you take that away and bring in pseudo-RNG loot, crafting, or specific places to grind specific gear, etc etc you harm that reward system. If you make it so X number of hours = X reward, then a lot of the mystery dissappears. The joy dissappears.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm sentimental. But that's just what I reckon.

RNGesus is love.
RNGesus is life.

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NeroNoah wrote:

"

Sure_K4y wrote:

I think getting mods on rares that you can only obtain by putting in currency is fine, like, "tier 0 mods", with +150 life, or +50-ish resists.

But when I look back to Talisman, where, in a tier 14/15 map, you were hoping for that tali to be rare to begin with, and have good rolls to top it all off, it makes me shudder. That was not exactly good in my book, but not unbearable, at a certain point I just picked them up and stashed them, hoping to get something good, once I "sacrificed" them.

Well, some types of crafting (eternal+mirror) have made people complacent, :P

Honestly, I can't understand how is ok for some to gate a low life build behind some exalts (before was even worse) to have a valuable unique (bah, there is Lorica, maybe not the best example but you get the idea), and to want easier talismans at the same time. In my mind, getting powerful should be expensive/require more effort, getting your build going shouldn't.

Ah, grinding gear games will be grindy.

I never had too much love for Eternal Orbs and mirrors, in my book they might has well have kept eternal orbs and tossed mirrors away, would have been "interesting" as well, let alone that it would have gotten much more people into crafting, rather than just multi-mod-benching. Not saying benching is bad, just saying there might have been another way.

The thing about low-life builds is, that you don't do dmg just because you're low life, your build can be perfectly fine, even prior to transitioning to low-life, which means as far as my understanding goes, that low-life is more or less the final, finishing touch to an otherwise solid character.

Imagine being able to run RF at level 50, how big a difference would that actually be? I don't see it being so huge, that it justifies putting in more development time, which might be needed elsewhere.

The problems with talismans were, you could do nothing about the rolls, plus, at some point, they took up at least one entire stash tab, if not two, and thus became annoying and time consuming to manage, the latter being probably my biggest quarrel with them, now that I think about it.

Other than that: "scale_e" is on point.

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Sure_K4y wrote:

The thing about low-life builds is, that you don't do dmg just because you're low life, your build can be perfectly fine, even prior to transitioning to low-life, which means as far as my understanding goes, that low-life is more or less the final, finishing touch to an otherwise solid character.

Imagine being able to run RF at level 50, how big a difference would that actually be? I don't see it being so huge, that it justifies putting in more development time, which might be needed elsewhere.

The problems with talismans were, you could do nothing about the rolls, plus, at some point, they took up at least one entire stash tab, if not two, and thus became annoying and time consuming to manage, the latter being probably my biggest quarrel with them, now that I think about it.

Other than that: "scale_e" is on point.

I tend to think about the potential mechanics GGG could add. Imagine a world where players can be easily switch to low life, not for the power, but because of the mechanics (so you have reasons to go CI or HP alternatively). A lot of uniques that use the low life modificator right now could become options for playing, also the Guardian class would become more interesting. There is a lot of design space there to just put it at higher levels. It's my opinion, of course. Again, there is Solaris Lorica, so maybe it's not the best example.

About the talismans: maybe that's because of the way the game spawns items (compared to, let's say, Diablo 2) that makes more items feel like shit? Honestly, I miss more the league mechanics than the talisman themselves, and Rigwald.

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NeroNoah wrote:

I tend to think about the potential mechanics GGG could add. Imagine a world where players can be easily switch to low life, not for the power, but because of the mechanics (so you have reasons to go CI or HP alternatively). A lot of uniques that use the low life modificator right now could become options for playing, also the Guardian class would become more interesting. There is a lot of design space there to just put it at higher levels. It's my opinion, of course. Again, there is Solaris Lorica, so maybe it's not the best example.

About the talismans: maybe that's because of the way the game spawns items (compared to, let's say, Diablo 2) that makes more items feel like shit? Honestly, I miss more the league mechanics than the talisman themselves, and Rigwald.

In my book there is no mechanic in this game that is not power of some description. CI is chaos immune and offers the highest possible amount of HP possible in this game, even surpassing legacy Kaom's RF builds. Life based builds can be flasked back up and have other defensive mechanics a CI build does not have, for instance armour or evasion, so there is the benefit to that mechanic. Low life has less possible ES compared to CI for which they get to run 1-2 more auras, said auras resemble power, for that matter. If going low-life was "that easy", for example I could hardly imagine any summoner who would not consider to go LL at the soonest available time, for example.

Quite a few of those uniques seem more like "gimmicks" at this point, I can see why that creates a certain interest in having better versions available, but on the other hand some things are best left as is, Sadima's being a prime example. They grant you the highest IIQ possible on gloves, not that there is much competition in town, but otherwise they are lacking pretty much anything else. This is good, because you want mf builds to have weaknesses after all.

The randomization in D2 and in poe seem rather compareable from my point of view, poe however has the better balance between rares and uniques, and for that I am more than glad. The issue with Talismans was, that even if you got an ilvl 84 rare drop, they could be utter garbage, and no amount of currency could change their stats. Which basically led to Talismans just being stashed away until the "34th septobre", and don't get me started on having doubles drop for seemingly endless streaks, which forced you into trading if you wanted to progress at a decent pace. Not saying I don't like trading, just saying forcing players into trading, while gating decent progression behind it, is not exactly the ideal way of doing things, as far as I am concerned. But this is certainly subject to individual opinions and stances.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

It's a self-regulating system. The Economy is the yang to RNG's yin, smoothing over its spikey edges. Why do you not love it more?

I don't see PoE RNG as balancing the PoE Economy.
rather, I think it is feeding it. enhances it at the actual game's expense.

when the experience a player gets shifts so violently, with such high variance from "oh my god a Shavs! / 6-link / T15 Map out of nowhere" levels of joy, to the utter despair of farming and accumulating scrap for hours, days, weeks without seeing anything remotely beneficial to you ever drop - and absolutely nothing in between...
... coupled with the lingering feeling nothing you do in-game can ever change that... aside from superstitious Baba Ji Voodoo magic like linking your stuff next to Kuduku while listening to Shopkeeper ...
... well then I guess only a dimwitted masochist like me will keep standing there with that dumb look on my face, spinning the roulette wheel again and again.
others will not.

economy provides refuge from RNG. that's the best term I can think of, to describe it.
it also provides a risk/reward ratio so much higher than the near-zero of the actual game.
the simple truth: if you know how to play economy, you'll get somewhere.
so no wonder some choose it over questing and farming and leveling, and no wonder these are "the 1%" who can get anything and everything they want, any time they want it.

as for your suggested "targeted loot" implementation, that's just one of many, many possible approaches. and personally I like Nero's "farming for rares with specific sets of modifiers" suggestion more.
but we aren't there yet. to even discuss the pros and cons of each implementation, we first need GGG to actually start thinking about the concept.
a concept that while far from easy to implement, is not that much of a galactic-sized effort as you present it.

and for fuck's sake the "troll mod sets" as seen in Casval's example, the "+1 life" Tier-9000 bullshit on high item-level items, the low-base 1-socket crap in said high level Merciless+ difficulty, the "reset to single socket/no links" regardless of item quality/level/how-many-jewelfusings-already-wasted... should all just stop.
no game does that. it's driving me fucking insane.

1 of 2000 rares worth exalt or two
1 of 150-200 makes it to sell tab
1 of 30-40k is mirror worthy(if you dont id it- it's your prob :) )
you need on average 1000 fusings to link stuff
and you need mf to make currency


aand you dont need infernal mantle on summoner

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johnKeys wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

It's a self-regulating system. The Economy is the yang to RNG's yin, smoothing over its spikey edges. Why do you not love it more?

I don't see PoE RNG as balancing the PoE Economy.
rather, I think it is feeding it. enhances it at the actual game's expense.

It is the other way around: The economy balances RNG

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johnKeys wrote:

when the experience a player gets shifts so violently, with such high variance from "oh my god a Shavs! / 6-link / T15 Map out of nowhere" levels of joy, to the utter despair of farming and accumulating scrap for hours, days, weeks without seeing anything remotely beneficial to you ever drop - and absolutely nothing in between...

Sounds like you waste a lot of valuable grinding time on chump change, no offense intended, but as far as I can tell: Clearspeed > Variance

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johnKeys wrote:

... coupled with the lingering feeling nothing you do in-game can ever change that... aside from superstitious Baba Ji Voodoo magic like linking your stuff next to Kuduku while listening to Shopkeeper ...

BWAAA-HA-HAAA... Yeah, never believe in time sinks like that.

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johnKeys wrote:

... well then I guess only a dimwitted masochist like me will keep standing there with that dumb look on my face, spinning the roulette wheel again and again.
others will not.

I am still trying to get my third 6 link for this league... Takes time for sure, can be frustrating, but can be done. Just don't make the mistake of going all-in...

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johnKeys wrote:

economy provides refuge from RNG. that's the best term I can think of, to describe it.
it also provides a risk/reward ratio so much higher than the near-zero of the actual game.
the simple truth: if you know how to play economy, you'll get somewhere.
so no wonder some choose it over questing and farming and leveling, and no wonder these are "the 1%" who can get anything and everything they want, any time they want it.

Not everybody who is to be considered "rich" plays the economy exclusively. Most rich players are part of well organized guilds and have developed very efficient farming and mfing methods to generate crazy amounts of loot. One example being "vacuuming", AKA "Ghostbusting", search on youtube for reference videos. You can even do these things on your own, but it takes a little longer for that matter.

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johnKeys wrote:

as for your suggested "targeted loot" implementation, that's just one of many, many possible approaches. and personally I like Nero's "farming for rares with specific sets of modifiers" suggestion more.
but we aren't there yet. to even discuss the pros and cons of each implementation, we first need GGG to actually start thinking about the concept.
a concept that while far from easy to implement, is not that much of a galactic-sized effort as you present it.

As for the current state of the perandus league, you would be surprised what you could reap there if you just grinded coins. Certainly not my kind of style, but players have success doing so, let alone that you can, for the right amount of coins, buy pretty much any top-tier unique you can imagine, if it is being offered to you, including league exclusive gear.

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johnKeys wrote:

and for fuck's sake the "troll mod sets" as seen in Casval's example, the "+1 life" Tier-9000 bullshit on high item-level items, the low-base 1-socket crap in said high level Merciless+ difficulty, the "reset to single socket/no links" regardless of item quality/level/how-many-jewelfusings-already-wasted... should all just stop.
no game does that. it's driving me fucking insane.

*Ahem* other games do that too. If you want consistancy, bench 6 sockets, and start bombarding with fuses @ 20q...

As far as rares go, the issue is the removal of the eternal orb. If we still had that, we could work our way to really good gear, now chaos spamming, YOLO-exalting, or (multimod)benching are all that's left. And that is a huge issue in my point of view.

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mezmery wrote:

1 of 2000 rares worth exalt or two
1 of 150-200 makes it to sell tab
1 of 30-40k is mirror worthy(if you dont id it- it's your prob :) )
you need on average 1000 fusings to link stuff
and you need mf to make currency


aand you dont need infernal mantle on summoner

hehehehe....

You can do well without mf though, if you have insane clearspeed.