Bonus Stability makes the "zoomy" problem worse! Here's why, and how EHG could potentially fix this

General
21

Well, that’s just the inherent problem with how monos work, currently. The ONLY objective in them is to finish. There are no side quests, no ‘hidden’ areas, no special spawns and all the loot is the exact same randomly generated shatter-bait you get from every other source in the game. So why wouldn’t you just throw on the strictest loot filter and rush through as quick as you could? Heck, even the targetable-farm loot you get is only obtained after you complete the mono…

The game has plenty of scenery content at this point. But now it needs to flesh out that scenery with things that encourage the players to interact with it, instead of treating it like a highway to the final destination.

  • side quests (collect X items, kill X of mob type, hunt specific mob, get specific item… whatever)
  • hidden areas
  • something like cow level mini-quest in D3 to craft quirky item
  • special farms to create special crafting materials
    etc etc etc
3 Likes
22

I would imagine that people who like zooming would see any buff to a slower playstyle as a nerf to a faster playstyle.

1 Like
23

As I said in the other thread/post about game design - most of this is more psychological than technical… the key here is not to change anything with the playstyle you are trying to dissude… incentivise the alternative to the point where if anyone runs the alternative, they realise that there is no downside to stopping the zooming play and eventually they stop doing it…

24

Yeah you’re right. My bad. Sorry :pensive: Maybe with a block feature you won’t see my silly posts anymore.

25

What I was describing is my experience once 400 corruption is surpassed. The method hasn’t changed. The issue is, if you’re unlucky and do this to a timeline then suddenly your other timelines become really difficult to farm really fast due to the catch up mechanic.

The stability granted per node caps at some point. I think the initial node starts at 50 stability and increments by 1 at 300 corruption. At 400+ you start at 50 and increment by 2. Once this point is reached I do my best to avoid increasing corruption in order to keep my timelines casually farmable. It is more efficient for me to acquire stability with the new bonus mechanic in a lucrative node rather than expedite the reset. That isn’t to say I’m backtracking through the whole map but I do make a point to clear large packs and the area surrounding the objective.

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Well now I feel bad, sorry. It’s a good post, please don’t delete it.

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Ah I see, my mistake, I read your post with an eye to farming (items) as opposed to farming (Stability). English is not my native tongue such mistakes happen.

1 Like
28

Naturally fast builds are going to get stuff fast no matter how they go about it(does not matter if full clear rewards or not, they clear faster and get to objective faster). Without tougher arena areas and amazing arena rewards, you only need to be tanky enough to not die to one hit.

Trying to stop people from playing zoom zoom is never going to work - it is what killed PoE.

But what I DO think is needed is 1:Incentive to do full map clears(beyond just stability and kill numbers) 2:Actual choices in what you do when clearing map(as in there isn’t allways an optimal strat for every build, so that you may do full clears on one character, but deliberatly skip something with another either due to reward or difficulty) 3:Content in monos where you can optionally spawn a tough challenge for specific rewards(adds choices to the monos and keeps it from feeling samey) 4:In general increased stability gain, even at double gain speed it isn’t good enough right now, 20 monos to fight a boss is really too much

29

This would create an additional problem in that either zoom would be more efficient or slow would be. People will intentionally run in place in order to push things up an extra minute, even with the cap - if they thought it would have a higher stability gain per minute. They just would make sure to clear it at exactly 3 minutes in for example.

30

I am just full-clearing every map now, and I really like it.
I get the math, but the math doesn’t matter when you feel like you get something for the extra effort.
Plus, less nodes = less modifiers = easier monsters = faster clear

For the first time, I have discovered the “Your inventory is full” error message… :slight_smile:

3 Likes
31

This is a great post which has clearly garnered a lot of interest from the community. I want to take a slightly different approach while also echoing what some others have said. First, we have the premise that bonus stability is meant to fix the “zoomy” problem, which is a reasonable assumption given that it really is a problem with Echoes right now. But there are other issues with the echoes that also need to be addressed. Here are what I consider the four main issues with echoes before this patch (Not in order of importance. The numbers are just for reference):

  1. Getting to empowered felt too grindy
  2. Grinding Empowered blessings took too long (~1 hour for one boss kill on fast builds from vet players)
  3. Slower builds, or people who liked to farm more, were at a massive disadvantage over zoomy builds when it came to timeline completion and even general rewards (faster echo clearing gives more echo rewards per hour)
  4. There’s nothing to do in the echo other than complete the objective. Nothing exciting to explore or discover ever exists.

IMO, of these four issues, only 3 and 4 are directly related to the zoom meta. Of course, zoom builds could improve their speed grinding to empowered and farming blessings (1 and 2), but even then it was still an issue. It still wasn’t fun to grind these out no matter how fast the build was. I believe this patch was targeting 1, 2, and 3, and was intentionally not trying to slow players down (yet), but also somewhat closing the gap between the faster and slower builds. In fact, I think it was trying to speed everybody up to deal with the criticism of the more grindy, and less rewarding parts of the MoF.

That, of course, still leaves the reality that echoes aren’t worth anything beyond running to the objective (problem 4 and the second half of 3). If there were reasons to explore, it would help to slow builds down, since a more ‘full clear’ playstyle becomes more rewarding. Slow builds will never be as good at farming as fast builds, that’s just the nature of efficiency in ARPGs, but the gap is so wide now that it needs to be reigned in without making fast builds feel bad. I believe EHG is aware of this, and they intend to do something about it in the future by making echoes more rewarding to explore in the first place, thereby not punishing fast builds, but instead slowing them down naturally, and in a way that is enjoyable for the player.

So to summarize, you’re absolutely right that this doesn’t fix the ‘zoomy’ problem, and you’re also right that it’s a legitimate problem in the game right now that needs to be addressed. But I don’t believe this patch was meant to address that problem. Instead, it was addressing other issues, and laying a foundation to address the problem in the future by making the echoes more engaging and worth exploring. Here’s to hoping I’m right, and we get number 4 (and also 3) addressed in a significant way in the near future so that the ‘zoom’ meta can slow down a bit and echoes can become more enjoyable.

5 Likes
32

Sure… any ideas will have issues if you look hard enough… us humans like to cheese everything as much as possible…

thats why I indicated a bell curve mono run average duration… no matter what you made the calc time based on, someone would find that optimal 2.2345678 minutes completion time target… but lets face it, youd be an absolute moron to run in place for a minute to get better XP… if thats a players attitude then nothing anyone could ever do would work and quite honestly those people will, one would hope, go do something more productive with their leisure time… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

33

The purpose of these changes was specifically to narrow the gap between rushing to the objective without killing enemies and taking a possibly less direct route while killing enemies on the way. Most importantly it’s meant to avoid a situation where killing enemies feeling like a waste of time in echoes.

The intention is not to encourage full clearing echoes as this would likely get frustrating if you missed pockets of enemies in a more linear zone and needed to backtrack through areas that you’d already cleared.

In terms of the remaining gap between farming on the way to the objective and just rushing to it, that can definitely be narrowed further or even flipped in favour of farming by just reducing the base stability gain from echoes and increasing the bonus. The reason why the ratio’s currently the way it is is that we did not want to reduce the base stability in the initial hotfix, but this is a change that we’re definitely prepared to make in future.

I agree that it’s a problem that the bonus stability particularly rewards the playstyle of balling up a large group of enemies and killing them all at once. Changing how de-aggroing works so that it scales with the distance from where the enemy spawned or was originally aggroed is probably the right solution to this. However, this style of de-aggroing introduces the danger of players cheesing enemies by attacking them at the very edge of their aggro range, so it’s something we need to be careful to implement in the right way.

9 Likes
34

Altering base stability and increasing bonus stability does nothing for the problem you yourself mentioned - missing things and having to backtrack. It might even make it worse.

Maybe you can alter the bonus mechanics. The skill tree has the concept of a bonus you only get if you spend X points in the skill. You can take that concept, and apply a bonus to monos that you only get if you get X% of the total available bonus (and nothing if you fall short of that). That could be enough incentive to clear “a bit extra” but not be saddled with trying to vaccuum the entire mono clean.

  • 25% monster clear: 25% bonus
  • 50% monster clear: 50% bonus
  • 75% monster clear: 75% bonus
  • 95% monster clear: 100% bonus

You get a tier bonus only if you reach it. i.e. 20% clear is no bonus, 39% clear is a 25% bonus, 88% clear is a 75% bonus, etc.

Instead of displaying “12/20” in the quest tracker, you’d display “Tier 1: 25% bonus”, “Tier 2: 50% bonus” so the player knows when they hit each tier.

2 Likes
35

I didn’t read every single post ITT (but most of them) and I thought I’d share my take on the “zommy” discussion and probably hurt someones feelings lol.

Reading the mono changes makes me think that this is actually a good way to solve the “zoomy problem” even tho I don’t think this game really had a problem in the first place.
I can understand the people that said grinding for blessing is too grindy because it is.

I can’t however understand the people that cry about “zoomy” characters having an advantage when it comes to clearing monos and farming items. Yes, they do have an advantage (in a way) because they are faster… that’s the whole point! They don’t get more drops than slower build, at least not in the strict sense of “more”! How? Pretty simple: Imagine having two characters in exactly the same echo (this is theoretical obviously) that are exactly the same, except one has more movespeed and attack/cast speed. The layout of the echo is the same, enemies are exactly the same at exactly the same position and drop exactly the same items (again, this is theoretical!) and both characters use exactly the same route (basically like a tas run).

Who will get “more” items from the mono?
Nobody! Obviously. They both get the same items.
It’s just that the “zoomy” character gets them faster.
But again, that’s the whole point of the character!
So this isn’t like in Delirium where you had a timer and “zoomy” characters had a HUGE advantage regarding item drops.

If you play a slow character you have no right to bitch about getting “less” items than a “zoomy” character! If you really enjoy the slower playstyle and playing a slow character like you claim, then why would you cry about “zoomy” characters? Maybe you don’t enjoy the slow playstyle as much as you say?

Again, this is just about people saying they get “less” items than “zoomy” characters, because of course you do - over the same amount of time! That’s the important part!!! - because the other character was designed to be fast! If this game had a mechanic like Delirium I would totally agree that slower characters get penalized too hard, but it hasn’t.

Sure, even with the changes the faster characters will still clear monos faster and progress faster, but again, that’s the whole point of a fast character! Just ask yourself, do you really ENJOY playing a slower character or are you just salty because your character isn’t better in every way than the other character? Because if you truly enjoy it then people playing faster characters shouldn’t bother you. If you really enjoy it you wouldn’t mind making slower progress because you would actually enjoy the time you spent playing, regardless of the speed you progress through monos!

That’s just my opinion. People really need to check if they actually enjoy the game and the character they play. They should also understand that faster characters will (usually) always be faster, I mean that’s why they are fast lol. They are designed that way. That’s kind of like saying a character with very high magic find has an unfair advantage because they find more magic items…

So basically I agree that mono progression was slow and grinding blessings/bosses/corruption was unpleasant. I do not however think this game has a “zoomy problem” at this stage.

4 Likes
36

To clarify, the purpose of reducing base stability and increasing bonus stability would not be to avoid having to backtrack. That is already avoided by being able to reach maximum bonus stability without having to clear the whole zone.

The point of reducing base stability and increasing bonus stability would just be to more strongly incentivise killing enemies rather than ignoring them on the way to the objective.

5 Likes
37

Sorry, my response was not meant to invalidate your original post, or imply that it’s a non-issue.

I think your post was well researched and generated good discussion. As a pierce of feedback, it was particularly useful for highlighting the issue that the bonus stability system currently rewards rounding up large groups of enemies while rushing through a zone and only killing them once you reach the boss. That will likely have an effect on what changes we prioritise for subsequent patches to refine the system.

The data comparing stability gain over time for rushing compared to killing enemies on the way to the boss was also helpful as it shows that we probably need to shift more of the total stability reward towards bonus stability rather than base stability if we want clearing enemies to consistently be the optimal strategy.

Feedback is always appreciated, regardless of whether other players disagree with it, and regardless of how much experience the person giving the feedback has. We’re not making the game only for people who have spent 100s of hours in endgame.

2 Likes
38

No, players will do anything no matter how unfun if it is optimal strategy. And your solution is to a problem where players are doing something unfun because it is optimal strategy.

The solution to this is to make the optimal strategy something fun, such as bonus objectives in maps, full clears and rewards of varying types so that the player must make a choice of what reward they want(or even to skip a bonus objective because it rewards uniques when you are idol farming).

Time based bonuses don’t encourage anything except waiting(if extra for each minute) or rushing(if extra for fast clear).

2 Likes
39

And you did it again. You deleted your whole OP just because… I don’t know… Are you that thin skinned that you can’t live with somebody not agreeing with you? I don’t get it.

This was a good post. A lot of people agreed with you.

I really don’t like that and since you aren’t able to stand by anything you say (or write), responding to any of your posts is just a waste of time.

That’s sad.

5 Likes
40

Yep :+1: What a weak-willed little bitch I am