Context
When 0.9e was released, I started a new character for online, standard, no challenges. I’ve now played around 77 or 78 hours on this character. (That’s 81 hours playtime, but I’m sure I’ve gone AFK a few times without closing the game.) During this time I’ve formed some new thoughts about the crafting system in LE and crafting in ARPG’s in general I thought I’d share here.
First, this is not so much a suggestion about how to change the current system. As close as we are to release, I don’t think there will be any further overhauls anyway. These are just my thoughts on the philosophy of it and what I would change if I were to do it differently. And this is basically for your amusement / discussion.
Having said all that, let’s get into some raw numbers first: I picked up every exalted, unique, set, key, idol and crafting material that dropped, save the handful I couldn’t because I died or missed them somehow. Below are what those drops amounted to back at 74 hours:
Item type--------------Totals
Exalted-----------------326
Unique-----------------130
Set-----------------------20
Keys---------------------47
Idols---------------------424
Shards------------------3880
Runes-------------------437
Glyphs-----------------615
Now during this time, I crafted 3 or 4 times I can remember to fill some gaps in my stats. In total I’ve crafted right at about 10 times. I’m close to level 93 and have done most of Monolith, including Empowered Age of Winter. I just wanted to get all of this out of the way as context for what I’ve done and where I started thinking about this.
When Do You Craft?
This is my first thought: When do you craft in an ARPG? There’s really only two times:
- When a new item is too good not to
- When you’re stuck at the end of the game trying to force upgrades
So for the first case, you’re usually getting a really good item that you want to fit into your build, and having to plug gaps in your stats on other items to make it work. You might craft a little on the item itself, but swap out and craft on others, or change your idols, to get the resistances and other bonuses back that you’ll lose for swapping it out.
For the second, you’re mostly capped out and grinding the system to try to make a new item you found better than an old one. You’re still finding potential items that could be useful, but the improvement is vastly more marginal at this point. You really need the maximized outcome to get the improved gear. And this only gets more unlikely the more that you do it.
Having Fun
So in either case, does crafting actually make the game more fun? Let’s think about this in two scenarios - Crafting that has a chance to fail and crafting that doesn’t.
In the scenario where crafting has a chance to fail, in case one, you might not lose the item that is an upgrade or the desire to use it, but crafting failure can impede you from being able to use it without losing bonuses it doesn’t have versus the item it’s replacing.
But look at this: In case two, you lose the chance to see an upgrade entirely if the crafting fails. And you might need multiple lucky successes on the item for it to work out to be an upgrade. This increases the likelihood of failure exponentially.
If you know how statistical probability works, chances multiply each other because of branching outcomes. So if you need a 1 / 4 roll and then another 1 / 4 roll, there’s only a 1 / 16 chance you will succeed in seeing an upgrade per item that drops you can use. If it takes you 1 hour to see an item that you could potentially craft into an upgrade, that’s an expected 16 hours per valid crafting. If it takes 5 hours to see that item, that’s 80 hours expected. That’s just for two 1 / 4 chance rolls. As the next item you need becomes rarer and rarer, of course this goes up.
Now you understand why players rack up thousands of hours grinding at the end of the game trying to min-max certain builds in these kinds of games. It’s a developer decision to pad playtime. Mind you, the player is mostly doing the same thing over and over, and they’re most often being disappointed for their effort. Players interestingly will mistake the eventual relief of success from the previous failures for elation, and decide the entire experience was fun but this happens after-the-fact. During this grind, there is no additional fun or valuable experience being added to the game, except the stakes of hitting one more enemy to get one more item to try one more time to craft an upgrade, knowing you’re more likely than not to fail. (Korean MMO’s and mobile games are especially notorious for this.)
In the scenario where crafting can’t fail, in case one, you can swap out the item immediately if you have the materials you need to replace it. In case two, you know right away if an item is an upgrade or not and can swap it out if you have the materials you need to replace it.
However, to think about this scenario some more, does having to take the extra step to craft that item add anything fun to the player’s experience? You might have build flexibility by being able to change the item, but if you can’t craft it again then that flexibility goes away. If you can craft it indefinitely, then really crafting it at all is a formality because there’s nothing at stake if your build changes later. You might as well just have the stats you add to the item built into your character in the first place.
Potential Answers to Crafting
So my conclusion from examining either of these scenarios is this: The best way to fix crafting in ARPG’s in the end is to make it largely not in the player’s way on their way to their goals. Neither crafting that has failure nor crafting that doesn’t can add anything other than extra playtime or a menu to the experience if it’s mandatory to see an upgrade. And I can say from my personal experiences this patch that this is the case. The less I had to craft, the more interesting what I was doing actually was. The more I did, the less I had left to look forward to.
Really what feels good in an ARPG when it comes to items is the progression. Finding a better item, swapping it and a couple others around to get your build right, and getting to play with it to see how it changes what you can do. The rewards being immediate and somewhat frequent, (let’s say at least one or two times an hour,) are what makes the early and middle parts of the game fun. What often makes the end fun is getting all the rare and interesting boss drops. It feels like this is what your playthrough has led up to and all your gameplay is paying off.
Crafting that is standing between you and that progress is making that fun take exponentially longer and longer to happen. Crafting that is only a formality is just making the rewards less immediate. So, how do we solve this, in either case? Well, I think I have some ideas. Here are a few ways crafting can still be fun and not in the player’s way:
Crafting that can turn an otherwise not-useful item into a different potentially useful item creates extra loot for the player to anticipate. Rune of Ascendance is kind of that in LE. I’m very much for this. Maybe being able to reroll or scale up lower level rare items in general is a worthwhile mechanic because it would give the player more ways to achieve their goals without slowing them down or becoming a formality.
Crafting that lets you pick from various bonuses you can’t obtain other ways that go on specific item types, (think enchantments like in World of Warcraft,) would add extra choices the player can make after they get an item. Maybe this is a bit of a formality but it doesn’t impede the player from immediately benefiting from their initial luck seeing an upgrade drop. This would give the player a way to choose something that would change the way they play the game, so I think this would be positive if it were in an ARPG.
I think for LE itself, the one thing I’d probably change is removing affixes subtracting from forging potential. If anything, it should probably add a little back. I would probably make this a point total system where forging potential doesn’t change based on random outcome, but the randomness is entirely in how much you start with on an item when it drops. This, to me, seems like the best way to respect the player’s time and effort under the current system. You could also add a way to reroll this value that is extremely rare so you don’t have to get the same drop two, three, four times or more in order to confirm an improvement.
It’s not strictly crafting but I would also consider tilting the loot table towards the class you’re currently playing at least a little bit. I would probably imagine less than 20% of the loot I got was actually useful to my class, despite my class being 20% of the classes available. And of the many shards I received, a vanishing number of them were unique shards for my class. It would make sense to intentionally give the player crafting materials they will find useful more often for the class that they’re playing, since they’ve selected it as what they really want to do in the game by choosing that class in the first place. Consider that in 74 hours I only saw 326 exalted items; the odds that two of those items would have similar stats was extremely small and indeed, was basically never the case. Having to grind until you get another specific exalted suffix or affix you need on an item with the implicit bonuses you need because crafting didn’t succeed is far more time consuming than anyone currently realizes. This is only compounded by the fact that the lion’s share of loot isn’t for your class or build.
I also really like the idea of there being a coded puzzle that you have to try in order to figure out how to add certain bonuses or get certain items, vis a vis the Eternal Darkness spell rune combinations or the Horadric Cube in Diablo 2. But I know people generally don’t like this. I think it could be interesting, especially if it’s slightly different every time you roll a character. But it depends on how many things there are and how badly you need to figure them out / how costly it is to do, etc. That’s something I think someone could play with more in the future and make it fun again.
Conclusion
The one thing I care most about is having fun experiences across time. I haven’t said this so far in this post, but I have many times in the past: Grinding is a low quality experience. There are something like 50,000 games on Steam. There’s another couple hundred coming out every year. There’s content being added to games we already own constantly. There is no lack of new fun experiences out there to be had.
So why do we get stuck not having them? Why are we doing the same things and making the same efforts over again trying to get slight upgrades that don’t change the way we play the game? I’d argue that we probably shouldn’t be. We should probably be starting new characters or playing a different game at the point at which we’ve started doing that.
Crafting in ARPG’s has largely been a way to keep us doing the same things over again, not really adding to the fun. Whether it’s crafting that involves failure or crafting that is just a few extra clicks, you’re not really choosing a new or different way of doing things while you’re doing this. All you’re doing is asking for more luck or changing a spreadsheet. I think people fail to put this in context for themselves sometimes, because we do things out of peer pressure or shiny-new-thing syndrome and never stop to think about what it is that we’re doing.
I hope this post has helped you stop and think about what it is that you’re doing in ARPGs, and whether or not you’re getting fun for your time and money. I also hope this post helps future developers think about ways of adding more fun experiences (and fewer not-fun ones) to future games. Very excited to see the impact LE and the community here has on that going forward.
-SMK
Edit: Clarified one thought at the end. Added one about LE itself. Mistakenly referred to “uniques” as “legendary”, corrected this.