Thoughts from a game dev in the industry ...

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Sure_K4y wrote:

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.

I mean, yes, mechanics give power, but the situation where one mechanic is dominant (straight up upgrade) seems a waste of design space (because GGG balances it making it hard to access). Be Life, CI or Low Life, they should have their own reasons to be played rather than one being seen as superior (I think CI gets the short stick currently, but that's another subject). I'm not arguing for giving easy power, but rather for not introducing too powerful mechanics and balancing them by making it expensive to access. If a mechanic exists, it should be easier to access it, and hard to make it broken.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Also, as a wise man once said, it is the other way around: The economy balances RNG. Although I'll add that the economy doesn't generate items, it merely redistributes them, and without farming it would have nothing to work with.

The economy doesn't balance RNG, the economy generates the most efficient resource allocation given all the drops are being traded. If GGG screws up drop rates or game balance, the economy is not going to save GGGs ass (yes, this is a command economy).

John is asking for loot bias (a way to influence outcomes). It's not necessarily a bad idea, but it can be tricky. Now, I imagine a universe where each map or area has a bias towards some affixes and people specialize in farming some areas and trading becase comparative advantage or some shit...yet Divination cards failed at it and were exactly that.

What about this: each map/act area has more likehood of getting some rare affixes. For example, some areas are better to get weapon elemental damage while other ones are good for getting physical damage. Or some areas are good for ES gear, others are for AR and EV, or hybrids. So affixes would work as natural resources, and the farming frequency in each area would depend mostly on the game meta. If an area gives less profitable stuff, there will be less people farming it until the cost of the items goes up enough. The problem will be if there are few incentives to farm some kind of items (getting good rolls would be tough), but at least we have masters as a safety net.

Having an area favor a certain currency result (such as affixes) isn't a good idea. Currency should do its thing anywhere.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Having an area favor a certain currency result (such as affixes) isn't a good idea. Currency should do its thing anywhere.

Not that you are necessarily wrong, but that requires a little more explanation. Also, I'm not talking about something heavyhanded, just enough so one can notice, but you can still expect other kind of stuff.

The traders are always going to notice before the farmers for things like this. They might have no idea why or how, but the effect will get them first.

Take Mirrorgate, for example. Before it was revealed how to combine Master Suffixes/Prefixes cannot be removed" with Scourings, the trade community nevertheless knew that Exalts were much more valuable than they were before, and QQed all over the forums about the crazy exchange rate changes. So even with zero understanding of the underlying cause, traders had the clues to guess, vaguely, that someone was up to something.

In order to get farmers to feel it, beyond the usual random superstition they create for themselves to rationalize unbiased RNG to themselves, you'd need to be more than heavy-handed enough for traders to be heavily impacted.

That's an information problem (complete markets vs. oligopolies). That's on GGG to make transparent mechanics for once. High level crafting obviously was going to have a knowledge wall, but I don't think it should apply to this.

Hey, do you remember that time GGG buffed map droprates, and said they buffed map droprates, and in the next couple weeks there were a bunch of Feedback threads saying GGG didn't buff map droprates?

I don't think transparency is really the issue. Or, at the very least, subtlety has a high chance to have its impact ignored on the individual player level.

I guess it's fairly subjetive. I said not heavyhanded, not subtle, :P

You can have loot bias

OR

You can have a wonderfully open-ended system of character creation that balances out poor drops by having a complex and unique crafting system and a community that is willing to trade for items.

You can't have both.
The former makes the latter redundant.
Given that there are a metric dick-tonne of games out there with these hand-holding pseudo-RNG elements, I'd rather PoE stay, and expand on, it's current model.

As I've previously said:


Scarcity due to harsh RNG is a feature, not a bug.

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scale_e wrote:

You can have loot bias

OR

You can have a wonderfully open-ended system of character creation that balances out poor drops by having a complex and unique crafting system and a community that is willing to trade for items.

You can't have both.
The former makes the latter redundant.

I disagree, but it's not that I feel as strongly about this as John (I could live with the status quo, and as you said, there is crafting). I'm talking of something truly weak compared to, let's say, D3's loot system. Also, trade is not going to appeal to the people that prefer self sufficiency never.

I think that scarcity of the good stuff is ok, but having no way to influence what kind of stuff you want is not necessarily ok.

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By the way, map drop rate increases are not noticed because the problem has always been the variance rather than the average.

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mark1030 wrote:

In PoE, if you find a good item that doesn't fit your build, you trade it for something that does. The player is the smart thing in PoE, not the loot.

Is this an action rpg or a trading simulator?

Currently To progress you need to trade because you cannot find everything you need for your build 100% self found. I want to level, not spend hours finding the value of items and then have to post them and pray that someone buys it so that I can finally get the item I need.

There is ZERO gaming enjoyment in trading (at least for the average player) - GGG needs to wake up and smell the coffee

It is like the labyrinth traps - wtf were they thinking adding that crap, at the very least reduce the trap damage by 95% across the board