I rarely take chances. But today I decided to “Gamble”. I had a 1 % chance of damage and a 74% chance of success, with a 24% chance of shatter. The item was my best chest piece. The shard was a rare affix that I spent a good part of the last few days tediously scanning gear for. Thrilled to finally find one, ecstatic to have successfully extracted the rare shard with a shatter rune, I placed the chest piece into the Forge.
I was mentally prepared for a shatter. It would mean my efforts to find that affix were in vain, and it would be the end of the line for any further improvements for this favored piece. With one eye closed, my head angled away I watched through the corner of my open eye as I clicked the button. That awful sound, the clanking crunch of failure. CLANK! But this wasn’t just an ordinary shatter. I had somehow managed to hit that unlikely 1 percent chance of damaging the item. So instead of improving my rare affix to tier 3, I now had it at tier 1, and bricked.
I won’t pretend to be an authority on compounded probabilities but based on chat the general perception is, that the odds displayed in this game are bonkers.
Maybe the odds are spot on, but the negative perception is still there, if not by all, than by many. I think that is part of the problem I have with the crafting.
That is the “feedback” portion of my post, here is the “Suggestion” part:
It is painful and frustrating enough to feel the loss of an item’s potential in bricking it with 93% chance on your very first attempt with a glyph of stability. is there really any need to bring damage into the equation?
When I managed to hit that 1% damage the game stopped being fun. My enthusiasm left me like the air out of an untied balloon. Speaking only for myself, that is what the crafting system in its current form did to me.
The fact that I do have a respectable understanding of probability only makes this angst worse.
The amount of 80%+ success rate fractures that I experience leads me to undoubtedly conclude that the RNG pretaining to crafting is NOT ACCURATE. I don’t mind the gamble. I really mind when the odds are not whats stated.
Crafting is the only way to get far into the endgame. Please address.
Trasochi posted on discord that there are no hidden mechanics in the crafting system. Also they are not aware of any bugs related to the chances being displayed false or something else.
I have crafted a lot in this game. And I, too, had situations where a 85% success craft ended in fractures. But I also had a lot successful 60% crafts that not got fractured.
People expect that 80% crafting attempts could not fail. But that’s not true. Every 5th crafting attempt will fail, statistically.
Personally I’d say theres nothing wrong with the chances. It’s just rng and people tend to be remember all there bad attempts but forget that there were as much good attempts against all (statistically) odds.
Saying all this, I personally want to have a bit more control over the crafting system. I suggested a very rare “glyph of success” that make every crafting attempt successful.
I also like the idea of a glyph that prevents a damaging fracture. Its absolutely frustrating when not only your crafting attempt fails and fractures a high tier item, but in top damages it and makes it useless. I’d vote for removing the damaging fracures completely. It just hits to hard.
I, too, am not even remotely familiar enough for commenting on the actual ‘statistics’ of the system and their accuracy.
I do, however, have a hard limit on my risk-to-reward evaluation. As it stands, with the current system, and the limited amount of time I have to play, I NEVER gamble if there is even a 1% chance for it to be a damaging fracture (normal fractures I’m totally fine with.) I just won’t do it. Even that 1% for me is too high a risk. Which essentially means I will most likely never get many items that have tier 5 affixes.
In ways, I’m totally fine with this. It’s my measure of risk-to-reward and that’s a personal thing. I do wonder how many others feel the same way though?
If the system stays as is, I will absolutely still keep playing the game, so it’s not a deal breaker for me in the slightest. I will just have to accept I most likely won’t get BIS items with high tiers.
There’s a system in Diablo 3 where you complete a rift and get 3 chances to upgrade a gem to the next level. After a certain point the % chance of getting an upgrade drops to 1% so people used to do “1% runs”. It would take hundreds of tries to get upgrades at that point, but I actually managed to get two upgrades in a row one time. RNG is RNG I guess.
I completely agree though. The day when I’ve spent significant time farming for an item and then it bricks will be the day I stop playing.
Well, I’ve learnt to restore and alter save files, and for curiosity I’ve made many test how chances are calculated, ex, I have a piece with T4 affix, and I wonder how many times I’ll have to shatter to get 4 shards - it usually takes ~20 attempts. On comparison, other extreme which is just one shard occurs a way more often.
Similar is with crafting an affix, more often you’ll get a lower possible roll than higher one.
From all these experiences I bet that RNG is biased towards less favorable results.
What ws your sample size & is it statistically significant? I’m not saying you’re wrong in that the chance of getting a shart is weighted towards the lower end.
I sympathise with everyone who had their crafts fail, especially when not expecting them to. The problem with probabilities are that if the chance is higher than zero, no matter how small, you can be the unlucky outlier on the probability chart.
The fact that rng adds the element of surprise and tension, and evokes positive feelings when it goes the way you want, does not negate the fact that if it goes badly, while you’ve invested too much effort into that one craft (as is the case here). Pure rng 'crafting (POE) is indeed silly, pure deterministic system is boring. The problem is that rng compounds (finding your crafting components is rng-based already), and people expectations are not rational to boot.
I think the suggestion to add expensive/rare components that just make sure you will not brick your crafted item, even with a penalty like ‘if you use this, the craft will succeed but also lock the item’ or ‘make the craft succeed but double the instability’ or some such, would be a good idea.
RNG systems should have their limits, especially with enough investment on the player part.
My problem is failing on 90+ consistently that’s my issue.
And agree with getting rid of damaging fractures all together that’s too much of a loss for the effort put forth into a item.
^^ Excuse me sorry but it was funny to read your feeling because is soo true , already happen to other people too, me included. I do understand and also think is rude.
I absolutely second this. I have very limited time to play. If I find a top piece at some point I would NEVER risk losing it, no matter how small the chances. Essentially, this removes the possibility for a casual player like me to gain the best items in the game! As soon as your post made me realise this I suddenly felt a lot less positive about this game. This could be a huge issue for me.
We do have a small suspicion that something related to Glyph of Stability, is messing with fracture chance. We’ve had too many reports of it happening above 90% to say that it’s pure Rng. So it is something we are investigating.
I would like to say that my experiance with crafting has led to multiple fractures at 90+% while few fractures <80%. I have multiple items that can survive multiple 25+% fracture rates over and over while I have had plenty of fractures either the first time or >90% success chances. There is definitely something that is not correct with either the glyphs or the rng system behind it.
We had the same topic in the past and I burned trhough a lot of Glyphs and did a lot of useless crafting and had 0 issues. 50, 90% crafts and 2 broke. If anyone is able to spawn 1k Glyphs into my inventory I’m happy throw my gold out of the widow and do 1k useless crafts for statistics ^^. From my observations some people are far to frustrated and have a to small testing pool of crafts to begin with. Shouldn’t the devs have the numbers anyway?
I uninstalled the game today for this very reason. I’m tired of feeling punished for trying to improve my gear. I would rather go play Wolcen at this point, because, at least I don’t feel like the game is lying to me.
With passive skills nodes that say they do one thing but are bugged and either do something else or don’t work at all?
It’s okay to not want to play the game because you’re having issues with the crafting system. But to say the game is lying to you and that you’ll go play a game (a released game, mind you, not a beta) that has a number of modes that are still bugged, c’mon, seriously?
Regardless, I enjoy playing Wolcen as well, though I do prefer LE (even in beta), so I hope you’ll consider coming back at some point. Until then, happy gaming.
I don’t doubt this. The problem isn’t statistics, it’s human psychology. Humans are far more likely to remember negative outcomes than positive ones, so the number of times a craft failed even with a high success rate are way more visible in our memory than the times it went just fine.
Also, compounding percentages dictate that if you’re crafting an affix from the ground up, it’s probably going to break. In 5 attempts, every single one must succeed or it’s a failure. So, a 100% chance, followed by 90, then 80, then 70, then 60 means that it is far more likely to fail than get to tier 5 - but that is not immediately intuitive to the user, so it feels like the probabilities are wrong when, in reality, the user’s understanding of probability is wrong. Either way, it doesn’t feel good and leads to a frustrating experience.
I am not a fan of any game mechanic that requires the player to gamble with very high stakes. That’s the same premise behind a slot machine, i.e. RNG gambling mechanics are skinner boxes that exploit human psychology in destructive ways. I would rather affixes be much rarer than to hide the real chances of getting a perfect item behind layers and layers of convoluted probability management. In other words, I would rather all RNG be removed from crafting and affixes to be rarer, or cost gold, or something else besides pulling the arm of a slot machine.
Source: Psychology/Sociology degree with a focus in research statistics
