Anyone else deal with this RNG?

General
102

I don’t think the trade removes the purpose of playing and looting; in fact I think the trade increases this factor, since you seek the loot not only to improve your character directly, but also to sell the items. Being able to buy items makes it easier to change builds and create new characters. Once the game evolves, there is a tendency for there to be even more suffixes and affixes, and there is no way the game can guess which ones you want (even because you may want to farm items for a character using another character that is stronger), so even if make the craft easier, you need the trade to compensate for that.

The only problem I see is that some bases have a lot of variation in the implicit ones and I think they should still better balance the distribution of affixes and prefixes.

Anyway, it’s a matter of opinion. I have no problems with the game’s crafting format and I think changing it now will cause problems with other things later. It is certainly something that they should consider at some point, since the opinion about it is very divided, but I think it is something that they should think about moving at a more advanced moment in the game, after working more on the bases, the suffixes and affixes and drops.

103

I don’t think knowing the odds makes something less RNG. The RNG is when the game rolls a dice to determin whether you’ve succeded at something or not.

1 Like
104

Easiest way to think of this is imagining a 100 sided dice. 86 sides denotes success, 14 denotes fracture. Roll that a few times and you can definitely run into situations where you roll into the 14 sides at a rate higher than expected. But as you keep rolling everything tends to even out at the expected rate. You’ll always get streaks of bad luck and that’s part of RNG. Unless they implement an algorithm to prevent such streaks, it’ll continue to happen although probably not at a frequency people think it’s happening. We all tend to remember the failures and not the successes. Failed attempts leave an outsized impression on us and affects our judgment.

105

Trade is not a bandaid. It’s a core pillar to itemisation.

106

no it isnt. it is a bandaid for bad RNG, and game mechanics where a group of people have a better drop rates than someone soloing.

it is no better than the gambler which imo i think they should remove.

107

I was going to reply to Jerle that one man’s bandaid is another man’s core pillar of itemisation.

You’re both correct.

2 Likes
108

Especially taking into account that some people play SSF and won’t ever touch trading. Being that it is an option to select that route ingame, it would make sense to have itemization that also favors strictly finding, and making your own loot.

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109

Yes, but if you the game is balanced around being able to find your own loot, then trading makes it significantly easier to get that loot (since everyone’s dropping “good” loot & then trading what they don’t need). If the game is balanced around trading then finding your own loot sucks because the drop rate is so much lower (D3 on launch).

They could do it if the SSF mode had a better chance to drop stuff compared to the non-SSF mode. But then that’s two different modes they’d need to balance drops around.

2 Likes
110

Right, maybe some sort of middle ground, not all out d3 smart loot. Something that makes it comfortable to progress on your own without trading, but not trivializing it by any means. This would probably come with ramping up the difficulty a bit (thoughtfully would be my hopes, not in the form of everything killing me in one hit) but hey, the struggle is part of the fun.

I’m not a designer so I can’t really offer much in the way of specific ideas, just vague thoughts of how things should feel perhaps.

That being said, all of my experience thus far with loot and crafting has been good considering we’re all technically playing SSF at the moment (not LE’s no shared stash solo, but generally.) My RNG hasn’t been great, but not so terrible that it takes away any of the fun I’ve been having. If I were trying to push arena it may be a different story, but I’ve just been farming monolith on different characters and it feels pretty good to me. (Yes I know monolith is ez mode compared to arena wave 80+ but I just don’t like arena)

111

It’s like trying to balance skills for PvP & PvE, it’s a lot easier if you can tweak them separately (like Guild Wars did with it’s skills & PvE/PvP).

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112

That’s because the sad truth that nobody will ever admit officially is that PoE is born for the sole purpose of being a f2p platform made not for the players but for the RMTers.

SSF is always going to be a misery while trades both ingame and “under the table” are a couple clicks away.
The whole structure of f2p with miserable ssf drops, unofficial RMT sites and the “supporter” packs make for a loophole that is like a dream.

What I’m afraid of is if EHG knows and wants to actually do the same or not.

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113

Saying trading would make it easier to get better base item doesn’t tell the whole story. Trade means a supposed equal exchange in value. To obtain a better base item means giving up something of equal value. If you’re focused on one character then it supposedly gets easy. Just trade another item of equal value that isn’t valuable for your one character. But if you’re planning on playing multiple characters you will feel the pinch if you trade. Something gained and something lost.

114

PoE has had issues with RMT since it was in beta. It takes no time at all in LE to get a character started and farming monolith. In my opinion, you’d be crazy to spend real cash on items in this game. PoE is notorious for (depending on what build you play) making it feel like you’re a single mom supporting 5 kids going through Harvard to make your build work. That kind of struggle makes people want to cheat.

115

Agree.

I made this comment on reddit (and got downvoted by SSF fanatics), I think part of the reason why items dont feel exciting to me now in LE, is that I basically can very effortlessly grind to fill affix needs for any build. Of course, for SSF folks, this is their paradise. No need to engage other people and trade.

But for me, part of the excitment and fun in ARPGs is knowing there are extremely rare and valuable gears that enables interesting and overpowered builds. That these gears take time and investment to acquire. The SSF folks will curse me for making such a view - they dont want to be gated from making any builds. But to me, every build being readily accessible and trade only impacting immaterial min-maxing of defenses and offence - this makes me lose interest in items and hence the game.

To the SSFs, items is the means to an end. For me, the items is the end itself.

1 Like
116

I don’t think it either. But that was not my point. My point is that people should understand a mechanic first before stating something is broken. If I make false assumptions of how a system works, I can’t fix it. Maybe I can band aid some symptoms, but not the root cause of a problem.

This!

LE is designed as a ARPG with an online economy. This is one of the design pillars and is clearly shown on every forecast and preview of how the game would look when it is released (Kickstarter, website, dev blogs about bazar,…)

The next thing is that crafting also is a design pillar for itemisation. The whole system is based on that shard thing where you can improve gear and shatter items.

People can choose to play solo, not trade, skip the crafting… But this would be like never using a two handed weapon on a melee warpath build. You can do so but then all the 2h nodes are useless. So you could say “make an optional warpath tree for people who want to play 1h, with different nodes”.

You can’t balance a game around Multiplayer, SSF, Hardcore (gamemode), Hardcore (playtime) casual at the same time and make everybody happy.

For me it is obvious that if a game has multiplayer and trading, the economy hast to take this into account. If people play SSF they have a lot harder time to find items. That’s just how it works.

In the current state if the game, where you can end your SSF challenge everytime you want, having a higher chance to find uniques would be highly abusable.

The implementation of trading won’t fix any issues that people have with crafting. It just makes gearing easier if you skip crafting (because you don’t like it) and buy items from people that do the crafting for you.

Edit: Just think about why EHG named the SSF game mode a “Challange”

1 Like
117

I really dont understand this. I play SSF only atm because it takes more time and investment to aquire the optimal gear

Same for me, the items is the end, but by playing SSF i can prolong the journey, as i feel its too easy by playing SC/(trading)

Maybe its just too early in the morning, and i didnt understand your thread correctly, or maybe im just different than the average SSF player :grinning:

1 Like
118

I agree, but someone not understanding a thing is in itself feedback that the devs need to take into account and I think that’s why the devs changed from protections to resists. If they don’t change the thing then they clearly need to explain it better.

IMO PoE’s crafting doesn’t suffer from this particular problem because they don’t show the odds (in-game) and that isn’t a problem because if you don’t get the affixes you want you can just keep chucking currency at your item until you do.

The essential problem with LE’s crafting is that it is possible to brick your item through crafting, and the more you craft the more likely that outcome becomes. That’s why they tell us the likelihood of it happening. Unfortunately people generally don’t “get” probability so you get threads like this (and alllllll the other ones).

So while the RNG isn’t broken or not working properly or anything the fact that a lot of people don’t get it is the problem that the devs need to “fix” (and I think that’s what Mike was referring to when he said it was working but not necessarily as intended).

IMO, the two modes (trade and SSF/Solo) are of different that they need to be balanced separately to give each a good experience vis-a-vis drops. Keep non-SSF as it is now (or potentially tone the drops down a little when multiplayer and trade is introduced) and give SSF a buff to item drop rates. Then never allow a character to be moved from Solo to trade.

IMO that’s the only way for both modes to have an enjoyable experience without ****ing over the other one.

1 Like
119

This is true. But often the SSFs I see want their cake and eat it too. SSF gears take more time and investment to acquire, but they don’t want it take too long to acquire, so when trade league folks like me say I want super rare chase items that is difficult to obtain even in a trade league, they curse me for it. Because they basically have no realistic chance of acquiring such items within the constraints of SSF.

120

Which is why I think the two modes should have their drop rates balanced separately.

121

This would probably mean you couldn’t ever move a character from SSF to normal. Hypothetically, would you want to be able to move a character from SSF to normal? (one way trip) I’m not saying you will or won’t be able to do this, just curious what you guys think about it.