Thoughts from a game dev in the industry ...

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scale_e wrote:

Where do you even start? Wherever you like, but start somewhere. All you've done is say "I disagree. Here's a list of things I disagree with. I disagree so much Ive been struck dumb."

If you want to "agree to disagree" that's ok, but don't be a dick then leave me hangin'. Bro. Carn. Carn bro.

To be fair, you have been fairly dogmatic stating is impossible. You need a more convincing explanation, what you wrote is mere handwaving. And less strawmen (See handholding pseudo-RNG elements, that was a low level argument that is merely preaching to the choir). Maybe you are right, but it's still a low effort post.

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NeroNoah wrote:

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scale_e wrote:

Where do you even start? Wherever you like, but start somewhere. All you've done is say "I disagree. Here's a list of things I disagree with. I disagree so much Ive been struck dumb."

If you want to "agree to disagree" that's ok, but don't be a dick then leave me hangin'. Bro. Carn. Carn bro.

To be fair, you have been fairly dogmatic stating is impossible. You need a more convincing explanation, what you wrote is mere handwaving. And less strawmen (See handholding pseudo-RNG elements, that was a low level argument that is merely preaching to the choir). Maybe you are right, but it's still a low effort post.

I thought I'd adequately explained the benefits of unforgiving RNG in my previous post (The bit in spoiler tags) and assumed it wouldn't take too much of a cognitive leap to link that explanation to the statement that "You can't have both.
The former makes the latter redundant."
But if a more detailed explanation is needed, so be it.

Firstly, to clarify what I meant when I made that statement, I'll rephrase it:

A system with loot bias

and

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.

Should be considered mutually exclusive systems because they seek to achieve the same thing in fundamentally different, and conflicting, ways.


The benefits of the current system (that I've already mentioned i.e. "Just won the lottery, good friends, snapped up a bargain" etc etc) exist because the good items players seek have an element of scarcity to them. i.e. "This thing I want is hard to get, so when I do get it, I feel good." If you mitigate the RNG with loot bias, you remove the scarcity. Without the scarcity, there is no value. Without the value, there is no sense of accomplishment.

If you were more likely to get drops specific to your class/build/whatever, then you'd be less likely to need to trade/borrow/whatever. If you make item X more likely to drop in a certain place, players who need item X are more likely to go there instead of interacting with the community. Players stop trading, friends stop helping each other, the system falls apart.

Analogy time:
If every 100th lottery ticket you bought won the jackpot, it wouldn't just destroy the joy of winning the jackpot, it would also destroy the system. A business can't run a lottery game like that.

To address the one point John Keys did bring up, namely that
Well, that's like, as you say, your opinion, man. I would define crafting as: Item A + Item B = Item C. Pretty much every game with crafting follows that formula, or a variation of it, and PoE is no different. A and B in this case are base items and currency items respectively. C is a new, and hopefully good, item. How is it not crafting?

Finally, just so we are all clear, and so I'm not russling anyones Jim-dandies, all of this is in my, ever so humble opinion, and you're all free to disagree as you please.

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scale_e wrote:

A system with loot bias

what's that? honest question.

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scale_e wrote:

The benefits of the current system (that I've already mentioned i.e. "Just won the lottery, good friends, snapped up a bargain" etc etc) exist because the good items players seek have an element of scarcity to them. i.e. "This thing I want is hard to get, so when I do get it, I feel good." If you mitigate the RNG with loot bias, you remove the scarcity. Without the scarcity, there is no value. Without the value, there is no sense of accomplishment.

If you were more likely to get drops specific to your class/build/whatever, then you'd be less likely to need to trade/borrow/whatever. If you make item X more likely to drop in a certain place, players who need item X are more likely to go there instead of interacting with the community. Players stop trading, friends stop helping each other, the system falls apart.

That implies that adding loot bias would destroy scarcity enough to make trade useless, or that any increase to loot bias would be noticeable by people who trade. That's not as evident as it seems. Without any math done, I wouldn't even be so sure (specially because I wouldn't ask for D3 system or something like that). It could exist a tradeoff, an intermediate state where both parties can be satisfied. Crafting didn't stop trade (although eternal+mirrors was harmful) even if it should by that reasoning.

I admit loot bias would be partially redundant with crafting, but that gets reduced to a "farm vs. craft" question. Also, different purposes (crafting is mostly about patching items, farming is about searching for the almost perfect item).

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vio wrote:

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scale_e wrote:

A system with loot bias

what's that? honest question.

That means the probability distribution is influentiable by the player (at least in a non blunt way, like magic find). For example, imagine farming docks has a 50% increased chance of getting, let's say, flat lightning damage affixes, so if you wanted to get a weapon of that type, you'd farm there rather than other place. Not necessarily a good idea to implement, but it can give a feeling of control to the player farming. Scrotie is right when he says that players could end not noticing this mechanics if they are not heavyhanded, but we can't really know.

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scale_e wrote:

A system with loot bias

and

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.

Should be considered mutually exclusive systems because they seek to achieve the same thing in fundamentally different, and conflicting, ways.

The benefits of the current system (that I've already mentioned i.e. "Just won the lottery, good friends, snapped up a bargain" etc etc) exist because the good items players seek have an element of scarcity to them. i.e. "This thing I want is hard to get, so when I do get it, I feel good." If you mitigate the RNG with loot bias, you remove the scarcity. Without the scarcity, there is no value. Without the value, there is no sense of accomplishment.

I feel you're exaggerating here. You don't remove scarcity, you reduce it... from an individual player perspective, not necessarily a macroeconomic perspective. If the factors which create loot bias are balanced throughout the overall economy, then the macroeconomic loot bias averages out to no bias at all. If this macroeconomic bias would start to stray from zero, the oversupply of that gear type(s) would encourage traders to seek out biases for another gear type(s), meaning that unless there was a strong pull shifting the system away from zero bias, it would harmonize back to zero bias and retain homeostasis.

You're also exaggerating the point that smart loot and trade are "mutually exclusive systems because they seek to achieve the same thing in fundamentally different, and conflicting, ways." On the individual level, trade and smart loot conflicting depends on character goals. If a build desires items which get a favorable bias, it lessens the need for that character to trade; if a build desires items which get an unfavorable bias, it increases the need for that character to trade.

If smart loot were to exist, its main purpose would be to improve the self-found experience for players assuming they play archetypal builds for their class. The idea would be: if you don't want to trade, and you're a Ranger, you get more Ranger items and less Marauder/Witch items.

I'm actually for smart loot on a theoretical level. I think it's fine to give a slight bias to benefit self-found, and all it requires in terms of extra work is:
1. Ensure the triggers for loot bias are well-balanced against each other, and
2. Ensure the bias-applicable loot is well-balanced against each other.
Both 1 and 2 are things worth doing on their own anyway.

HOWEVER

#1 is why I'm particularly against area-based loot bias; balancing all areas against each other won't work, and the harmonics will fail.

#2 is why I'm against loot bias effecting weapons in Path of Exile. Go ahead and try to tell me an increased chance of mace drops is balanced against an increased chance of dagger or bow drops. Even if somehow all weapon types were balanced, it's an asymmetrical core design, with many more Str/Dex weapons than Int, so it's likely you could never really balance smart loot for weapons.

Thus, the one way I'd like to see smart loot implemented is:
* effects nonweapon socketed gear bases only (no impact on affixes)
* class-based trigger (Marauders have more Armour gear, and less EV and ES, gear drop, etc)
* does not apply to unique items

Such a smart loot system would only apply to defensive build archetypes (the Armour-based Marauder, the Evasion-based Ranger, etc), the triggers (non-Scion classes) should be balanced against each other anyway, the loot impacted is symmetrical... so it would help self-founders gear up, wouldn't adversely impact trade (unless there is major non-Scion class imbalance), and if you wanted to play a non-ES Witch you could just trade for your gear instead.

Oh, and by the way: crafting bias should never exist, I'm only talking about drops here. Crafting biases would simply be exploited with dedicated crafting characters.

TL;DR: where scale_e sees smart loot as a minefield to be strictly avoided, I see it as a navigable minefield.

I think if we speak about rng, we also have to speak about other areas of the game.
I will write it in form of questions, because english to bad.

- Why there are useless troll item-affixes?
- Why there are not more item-affixes?
- Why there are useless class-item Combos? (Marauder+esgear)
- Why are certain roll´s a lot more powerfull than others? (internal 190%phys.dmg)

RNG and crafting could work together, if the ""power gain"" would be split on both.
Therefore, certain affixes could only be achieves throght crafting and the other from drops.
I would say, flat dmg boost from crafting and ""exotic"" rolls from drops, the former could happen step by step, for example with a ""bench"" or currency that spezificly rerolls the
""50 increase spelldmg, 80% phys.dmg"" Affixes.

So with this talk about loot bias, and how smart loot won't work well in PoE - I agree, but there's a perfectly good solution for these. And D2 used it, and it worked, and is one of the reasons we loved D2, and had no problem with one character on one build farming gear for another five or ten different characters/builds.

Bias loot by drop level. Base, and affixes.


So a T3 map, say, would favour bases of 60+, and strongly biassed to drop bases of 50+, and maybe wouldn't drop simple robes and rusted swords at all.
(Maybe special rules for uniques... maybe not).

And similarly the affixes rolled - or added via YOLO orb - would favour the 60+ pool, very likely be 50+, and not come up with level 0 garbage like +2 thorns or +4 life. Or maybe a sub-1% chance of any such, if GGG must still randomise to that extent.

What's so wrong with that? The higher affixes on low bases are totally pointless, since low-level characters can't use them and characters of a suitable level generally want the better bases (occasional caster weapons are probably the exception, but theuy take no hurt from the base being good rather than bad).
Nor should it mean monsters have to get tougher - they're already designed for the top-end of the player power curve: it'll mean more of the playerbase have something closer to the better gear, if they're wlling to put in the effort. The really good rolls need not drop much more often, but the average-good weapons and armour will be far more common. Elite stay where they are, rest of the curve comes closer to them.

If the answer is "but it would ruin the economy", then you're valuing said economy over less frustrating and more enjoyable monster-kill gameplay. More important to have a trade game than an ARPG game. And I do question whether that's at the heart of OP's main complaint and what will keep PoE and GGG from ever getting the success they really deserve.

And, as a bonus, we won't automatically lose the 98% of the player universe that ISN'T inclined to build a gear-independent caster every league, just to try and farm out the gear-dependent melee mara they actually want to play.

tl:dr, area-level-appropriate drops should make it a better game.

Add enchants to the labyrinth for jewelry that increase drops of certain base items a la Perandus Signet.

"3% additional chance for Slain monsters to drop Wands"

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mark1030 wrote:

Add enchants to the labyrinth for jewelry that increase drops of certain base items a la Perandus Signet.

"3% additional chance for Slain monsters to drop Wands"

Reroll until daggers for min-max. Even if not using daggers oneself.

Well, that's because daggers are not well balanced compared to other weapons (no, balancing by making things rare is not the way to go).