Friction is becoming such a boomer thing

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Paradoxoglanis wrote:

There is good friction and bad friction.

An example of good friction would be socket colour weighting. It adds to the games complexity. It gives base items varying values depending on what build you are playing. It balances builds into certain archetypes, at least until you are rich enough to overcome the weighted odds.

An example of bad friction is something that just adds more clicks to a process you are going to do anyways. Some examples:

Remember when stash tabs didnt have affinities? That was friction. You had to decide what was worth taking the time to store away and what wasnt. You had to remember where you were putting you items and make an effort to organize them manually.

Remember when currency didnt drop in stacks? That was friction. You had to judge whether it was worth a click picking up a single shard or low tier currency.

I dont think any sane person would miss this friction because it was completely arbitrary. You WANTED to store items that had some value. You WANTED to pick up currency. You were going to do all this anyways. GGG just decided that there should be an arbitrary barrier that made you not want to do this.

And this isnt even considering how this affects people with RSI, or how it causes RSI. Its basic ergonomics. The user wants to perform an action. They are going to do it regardless of how many clicks it takes. There is absolutely no good reason to add friction to those kinds of actions.

the entire purpose of my thread is to highlight how theres different types of friction, exactly as you put it. good and bad friction.

i would agree partially on the socketing system. but i would say its now come to the point of being a time waster. i would say its how games evolve. in diablo we used to manually ID our stuff using scrolls, but in newer titles everything is ID'd at once.

my benchmark is along the lines of are the players "playing" the game doing this activity? trading as it is in poe1 right now doesnt feel like playing the game.

socket system works on the other hand could be subjective. for me i feel like its outlived its usefulness and now just serves as an annoying hurdle that players have to overcome every league.

game devs evolve along with their game. they grow old, they have jobs, they have families. and in GGG's case many of them are gamers. i find it interesting how in poe2 so much friction has been removed and in poe1 so much qol improvements are being made.

i m pretty confident in their selection of good and bad friction for now.

TLDR: Item ID is good friction in early game but bad friction in end game.

You can't really call item identification bad friction outright. It's bit of a grey area.

It has a purpose like it had in D2. You get used to it when you're new to the game or starting a new char where every rare is worth something to you.

Gradually as you progress and get fully decked out in decent rares, you're no longer thrilled when one drops.

By the end of the campaign you are rarely picking any rares.

Once you hit the maps, picking/IDing rares is downright hurting your progress.

If there were an atlas passive that says, 'dropped rares are identified' you might actually see a rare worth picking up in a dozen maps. Otherwise they are just there to slow down the game.

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hasatt0 wrote:

TLDR: Item ID is good friction in early game but bad friction in end game.

You can't really call item identification bad friction outright. It's bit of a grey area.

It has a purpose like it had in D2. You get used to it when you're new to the game or starting a new char where every rare is worth something to you.

Gradually as you progress and get fully decked out in decent rares, you're no longer thrilled when one drops.

By the end of the campaign you are rarely picking any rares.

Once you hit the maps, picking/IDing rares is downright hurting your progress.

If there were an atlas passive that says, 'dropped rares are identified' you might actually see a rare worth picking up in a dozen maps. Otherwise they are just there to slow down the game.

i agree, there still is some anticipation for ID ing items.

i would point out that undecember handles item ID in a different way.

everything is ID'd by default except uniques. gear that has top tier rolls are unid and may cost multiple id scrolls.

people actually run out of id scrolls in that game.

if you get basic loot, you can see it as is and decide whether or not to keep it. but if you find something unid, you KNOW its gonna at least have something strong on it

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Paradoxoglanis wrote:

An example of good friction would be socket colour weighting. It adds to the games complexity. It gives base items varying values depending on what build you are playing. It balances builds into certain archetypes, at least until you are rich enough to overcome the weighted odds.

I like this, when you have low odds to colour sockets as you want them to be, and it clicks, you make it work. Satisfying moment. Indeed add some value/meaning to item bases.

That's how it is in Ruthless BTW.

I'm currently reading up to beat the act 10 boss for the very first time (excitement !!), and I'm still picking up whites to sell (when convenient, by now), and of course I pick all the blues (much less yellows !), but then have to pick and choose which ones I sell for scroll fragments, and which ones I identify.

Which is probably a good thing, but I'm starting to get a bit annoyed that the drop item filter functionality doesn't also work for inventories too... and the inventory search-highlighting cannot really be automated, can it ?

P.S.: Then there's the D2 way, where (IIRC) yellows are limited to tier 2 affixes at best, while only blues get to have tier 1 ones - but this is not the case in PoE1, is it ?

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BlueTemplar85 wrote:

That's how it is in Ruthless BTW.

I'm currently reading up to beat the act 10 boss for the very first time (excitement !!), and I'm still picking up whites to sell (when convenient, by now), and of course I pick all the blues (much less yellows !), but then have to pick and choose which ones I sell for scroll fragments, and which ones I identify.

Which is probably a good thing, but I'm starting to get a bit annoyed that the drop item filter functionality doesn't also work for inventories too... and the inventory search-highlighting cannot really be automated, can it ?

P.S.: Then there's the D2 way, where (IIRC) yellows are limited to tier 2 affixes at best, while only blues get to have tier 1 ones - but this is not the case in PoE1, is it ?

i havent actually played ruthless, but i did play d2. back in the, friction was the gameplay. we LOVED friction, because we havent gamified everything yet.

when i play monster hunter i used to be at awe out how the monsters attacked or behaved. but nowadays i have to jedi mindtrick myself into forgetting that its programmed or how some monsters actually share the same skeletal rigging/attacks.

i actually wouldnt mind if in poe2 blues would commonly be better than yellows. thats how it used to be. players should not become godlike.

There is a huge difference between incorporating problem solving in a game, and adding tedium to waste the players time to keep them playing. Seems some people can't tell the difference.

Sure, Legend of Zelda would have been a lot easier and faster had I not had to find hidden locations and the NPCs would have just told me exactly where to go. But then how would that have been fun? What fun is the game if there were no puzzles to solve?

Figuring out worth while puzzles is a good thing for the human brain, we need to use our brains or we turn into whinny people who want to be spoon fed with instant log in and "Hey, I'm at maps in 5 min".

Giving you a quest requiring you to run around a mountain for 20 min to pick up and item, then running back, to turn it in and be handed another quest to run right back around the mountain and pick up another item that was right next to the first.... Well that is wasting a players time. That is a huge difference between actually having to solve a reasonable puzzle. But also, making the puzzle so complex and time consuming having to search 5 web sites and use 3 web tools just to be able to solve a puzzle is also wasting the players time.

So it comes down to how does a developer respect the players time and not making a game hard just because they think hard = fun. Just like Asmond said the other day, Blizzard's idea of hard was "Hey we gave the boss 100% more life and 100% more damage, and they thought that equaled fun". You beating a reasonable challenge and solving a reasonable puzzle what fun is, not beating your head against a wall longer.

Where the problem comes in is what is reasonable in who's eyes. To tell the truth Neon and Chris Wilson are much better players than the vast majority of the player base. So to them reasonable is nearly impossible for the average player. The higher your skill level is what is reasonable to you becomes very hard or impossible for the average player. This is where the disconnect comes from in most of the community today. Players with a very high skill level who think everything is easy are actually in the top 1%, but think they are average players.

Oh, also, not having to identify items would however allow for a much more specialized loot filter, allowing you to even highlight specific affixes (that you are looking for) and their ranges !

IIRC the new Median XL has implemented something like that ?

You can't find the excitement you seek in a game against AI, especially in our era where everything is a keystroke away (from a faq to build or the famous "services").

Only games against other players could give such thrills.

And to be honest only POE with so frequent introduction of new leagues (good ones or even bad ones) could keep someone's interest even for a while.

I agree this partially.

I think too many conveniences will wreck the gaming experience.So the artificial inconveniences created in POE is still necessary. But after more than a decade, so many contents were added to the game. So those artificial inconveniences definitely need a review and to be brought to a reasonable level.