Since there are people more knowledgeable than me that can explain it better, I’ll just shamelessly post the following:
Well again, I do agree with your first statement and understand that you were probably just trying to prove a point in your argument against meesterg claims of PoE’s crafting system being less based on RNG and more in the player’s control (which is just silly, imo).
SRS it was my job to calculate these figures IN MY HEAD for probs and diff calcs. Now you are getting into the split number line methodology which 0 to 10 is 5.5 not 5 as customary. This is resolved through true int and truncation. The traditional way to resolve that is to round up the even and drop the odd above the 5.
Python Random Number Function and Syntax.
The scholarly work behind it is the basis of how I implemented the system mentioned earlier.
Downey Random and Float points
but it…has exalted stat and survive 2 annuls, 2 stability and Guardian to T4. thats me giving an example of where rng was in my favor instead of just crying about the fractures at low %
doesnt change the fact this games crafting is too easy and complaining about it makes you seem kinda spoilt
I found a 14% crit Sovnya last night with T5 melee and guess what it received a Damaging fracture as I went to put T5 minion melee damage and lowered the Crit chance so it wasnt even an exalted item anymore
I guess I should make a rage post about how this game isnt fair etc
Nah bro, its cool. Those things happen. No risk it, no biscuit.
You made it further than many and that should be celebrated, not looked at with jealousy.
My only complaint was that the number of 3x T3 affixes breaking on applying the 4th T1 new stat was pretty awful. For a 90% success rate it bricked a full tab of Oil flask relics. At one point I had 70 but ran out of room. I asked Mike to give it a look, he did.
Mike gave a sufficient reply, that the number itself was true, but the system itself has a lot of room to be improved upon.
I think the player base wants a balanced system that has both elements of RNG and deterministic without such harsh penalties since the cost are near priceless to replace due to rarity of some affixes.
I think the term instability is not actually correct word to use. It should be impurity (as in smelting iron or steel). As you add or remove components from the kiln the mixture improves or degrades the forging process.
You can’t have deterministic crafting without heavy penalties. I mean you can, but at that point might as well play an MMO that rewards you for the time spent completing objectives. I can’t speak for everyone, but at least for me I enjoy ARPGs for the loot hunt. If I can continuously craft the exact item I want without setbacks then I’ll eventually get bored since I can easily make T20 items with enough time spent. Then it’s all of a sudden a huge jump to get exalted items. The curve is off.
The current system is fundamentally flawed. Straight up. POE does some deterministic crafting but they put it behind so many loops that it doesn’t feel like it. LE straight up does it from the get go. You can easily get a T9 - T12 item that has all the stats you want and I find that boring. I personally think the crafting system needs to take more of a step back and put more into drops being important. Exalted items being dropped only is a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough.
As ive said in tihs thread, its too easy but thats also being conditioned from 8 years of PoE rng where I just ragequit SSF because the game wouldnt give me a 6link chest and I just quit Ultimatum league for good
I spent a week farming for a chest piece, spent 80% of my materials rolling ‘+1 gems’ basically and then spent ALL my farmed fusings from that week on literally nothing, instead of being motivated to farm more I just ended that little journey
In comparison it would be like farming 100’s of Shards and wasting them on absolutely nothing. you feel robbed
I had no idea an exalted could lose the exalted affix from a damaging fracture. Thanks for pointing this out. In the long run, I feel this will add even more value to these items in multiplayer just for overcoming that obstacle to max craft an exalted.
There’s never going to be a fully deterministic crafting systam in a game, there’s always going to be some form of RNG touching it somewhere.
From memory, what options & when they become available re Harvest, Syndicate & Delve crafting are RNG, so following your logic, they aren’t deterministic. The only fully deterministic bits are the basic benchcrafts that you unlock during the story because they’re always in the same place & you will always encounter them at the same time. Everything has a pinch of RNG thrown in to mix things up.
PoE’s crafting (bench notwithstanding) is a blended system leaning towards the RNG because when you hit that craft button you aren’t guaranteed to get a specific affix (but as I said, there are ways to skew the odds in favour of a particular set of affixes).
LE’s crafting is also a blended system leaning more towards the middle or deterministic side (certainly compared to PoE) 'cause you get to choose what affix you want.
You’re also very limited in the number of those bench crafts you can use on a single item unless you have specific currency that lets you do more (and that dropping is RNG-based)
Harvest crafting was still quite RNG-y, though on the side of what seeds/mobs crafts you got.
Because when you use that transmute/alchemy/chaos/exalt/alt/delve currency what you get is fully random. Even if you use delve currency to make it more likely that you get a specific set of affixes, what you get is still random it’s just choosing from a smaller pool.
From memory, this forum has seen this exact discussion as to what counts as random with the rune of removal. Just because a thing is choosing from a different set of results, doesn’t make it not random. And just because you get to choose a specific thing doesn’t mean there was no randomness involved in what options were presented to you.
You can in LE as well. I start crafting at lvl 1-2 & the only thing I’m paying is the costs…
You are speaking my language. I love the hunt as well. And we all know that a hunter is nothing without the prey. It’s BECAUSE I get so many fractures, that I keep crafting. If I hit max on everything all the time, I wouldn’t craft anymore. It would be very boring.
There’s a spectrum where on one end you want it to be relatively easy to get (6 link in POE is pretty mandatory) and the other end really difficult (all T7 perfect stats would be an extreme example). POE botches that by making 6 links fucking god awful to get.
This discussion is probably going to be moot hopefully by the next major patch. They already acknowledged the current system is problematic. I just hope they move away from or lessen the ability to pick and choose your stats as well as incrementally increasing stat tiers. Do away with bricking items and add diversity to the item hunt (i.e. valuable base items). It’s too stale and monotone currently.
I agree that something does need to be done to make both crafting & not-crafting as your source of items feel better. The loot filter has been a significant improvement to the not-crafting side of the loot hunt since it allows you to tune what you see to a very high degree.
I think part of this is also based on where the devs want crafting to sit in terms of
- do they want you crafting to act as a minor fix to items that drop (D3), whereby you can use it to replace a small fraction of the affixes on the item?
- do they want crafting to exist in parallel to item drops as a valid source of where the player gets their (non-unique/set) items from?
- do they want to allow the player to be able to craft up a “good” item from scratch (& what good is is a separate conversation) like in PoE?
- do they want crafting to lean towards the RNG side of the spectrum (PoE’s currency crafting) or towards the deterministic side (where LE is at the moment)?
Personally, one of the things I really like about the current crafting is being able to choose what affixes you have, that’s different to everything else in aRPGs (as far as I’m aware, though I do remember a mod for D2 that had only lvl 1 items drop & then you craft up from materials that dropped from mobs) & I really like that difference. But it needs to come with a cost which is currently fracturing items.
Many different suggestions have been made, so it’s not like they don’t have a lot of things to work with in terms of making it feel better.
I’m personally not a fan of picking and choosing stats and the ability to upgrade. Have both be random, but give tools to tackle the randomness. Keep the ability to add stats, but randomize the stat and the tier. Have crafting options that influences your chances to a certain stat. Have crafting options to increase the rate to get a higher tier. I know it sounds awfully like POE but all game mechanics boil down to the same core mechanics. It can always be implemented differently and dressed up differently. Being unique is nice until it doesn’t work.
My experience with LE so far has been underwhelming when it comes to the item hunt. Almost no T6 or T7 items worth using and the ones with the stats are on the wrong base or with really crappy side stats. The jump from relying on crafted items to getting high tier items was too much.
This sounds terrible. I’m so tired of ARPGs doing this. There’s already too much RNG in them. It doesn’t have to be fully deterministic, but I don’t feel a sense of “hunt/chase” with RNG–just gambling and time sink with very little payout. There’s a balance that needs to be struck. I don’t want this to be a PoE Clone–and I think most of this community doesn’t want that either.
Because it is. Full stop, you are literally just describing what POE already does. If that’s what you like in a game, cool! Get it from POE.
POE has extensively explored the avenue of a 500 lever slot machine - it is an avenue filled with the smell of garbage and bodily secretions. LE does not need to delve further into that territory in the hopes that some lonely alley will have a pile of undiscovered gold, or conduct an experiment in how much digital ammonia it takes to deaden the nose to the stench of dung.
The control of picking specific stats balanced by the RNG of how far you can upgrade them is a good system that’s player friendly without being a “Print Amazing Items” button. It is a breath of fresh air that feels good to use. The balancing and tweaking of the existing core concept to see what feels even better is the avenue that should be explored here.
I don’t want this game to be PoE, I’m really hoping for a middle ground between D3 and PoE to hit that sweet spot. That being said the current system of crafting I don’t feel is a good one. The devs seem to partially agree at least as in the dev streams recently they have also talked about changes coming that will render some of the crafting components we currently have obsolete.
What confuses me though is the perception that the current system we have now is a breath of fresh air or player friendly. This crafting system we have is pretty close to the system used my many Korean grind MMOs except instead of cash money items to reduce the risk of crafting failures we have in-game glyphs.
The system further presents problems for trading (ie. why buy a piece to craft with if odds are good it breaks and is a waste of gold). You also can’t be excited about a perfectly rolled implicit base because unless it has stats you want already on it, the item will break before it’s usable most likely.
I’m hoping in this crafting update they are teasing they get rid of fracturing all together. I’m not sure what to replace it with to continue to have friction in gearing up but I really hope we are heading decidedly away from the current system.
Reminds me of trying to craft anything reasonable worthy of “end game” in PSO2, actually.
I wonder if it would be okay to just dump the fracturing in favor of higher chances of the deleveling from more severe breaks. Not necessarily saying this is the better approach, but maybe worth trying out.
Great logic. The other game has it so get it there. Never mind what I said about different implementation. I’ll also add to a different degree. What often sounds and looks the same can be drastically different depending on how it’s implemented and to what degree.
The ability to pick and choose your stats and upgrade with % chance shown to your face is not going to work in the long term. Yes, the current system can be tweaked to feel different. But fundamentally it goes against what an ARPG is - the exhilaration of getting that one drop that takes you to that next level. Instead, what we have right now is the relief the item didn’t break or the rage when it fractures. Hey I got this perfect T7 with the stat I want and on the item base I want. Let’s try to craft it and bring it up. Chances are it’ll break and more often than not it’ll break early. It’s not a good feeling.
You can’t have deterministic crafting without introducing certain penalties. Right now it’s fractures. EHG can change it to something else, but the penalty has to exist. Penalties will always feel terrible especially when the chances get higher and higher that you’ll have to deal with the penalty. Low chance of a good item dropping can feel numbing when on a dry spell, but great when you finally get it. Low chance of your crafting succeeding is rage inducing when it fails, but relief when you do succeed. The emotional roller coaster is too wide in the current system. Especially when getting a proper exalted item on the proper base is not that easy to get.
Just to clarify I don’t want something similar to POE. But it doesn’t hurt to study other games and learn the good parts and understand what to avoid (which I’m sure they’re doing). The current system obviously doesn’t work. What’s critical is they need to figure out what’s the main issue - is it implementation or is it the core mechanic/concept? We can harp all we want here based on what we want and it’ll hopefully end up as feedback they can use to make a decision along with the other tools and data they have. I can be wrong and I hope to be proven wrong if it ends up with something brilliant. I’d just hate to see it go down this path and be a blemish on an otherwise outstanding product they are building.
I’ve thought about this it probably would be better need better balancing of affix shard acquisition. A system like this would be trivial if you were trying to get like a resist or stat affix up because they are so plentiful but I could see class specific ones or skill levels being a real pain.
It might be okay for more generic stats to be easier.