Abuse our heuristics without interrealm interjections to the gameplay of course (:
I define successful here as in highly populated and rated game.
I saw a guy once say he wants to find a game to be good enough that it totally and completely ruins his life (literally), like WoW once did for him. I thought for a moment… that is an excellent way to put it.
I like Robin Hanson’s “Elephant in the Brain”. Probably because I love it when people have a cynical view of the utter atrocity that is the human being. Hidden motives are always fun motives for me when demystified, especially in public to the naive.
Jim Sterling and other freelance critics on youtube, as near to all of them to make no difference have been propagandized to for so long they can’t see behind the curtain. Thus they signal (unwittingly) the holier than thou shtick to nauseating degrees. Maybe you should have a talk with him, and see how far you get with these priests. 
Seems like a fascinating book! It’s great that you have interest in such a book - it shows that you value truth very highly!
Self-deception is a very interesting topic for me as well; I was starting an article recently on “Lies as a psychopathology” as I see lying as a very complex and interesting phenomena which requires great courage to even start to dissect but my writing has stayed in the “starting” state for quite a while for this very reason.
To have a truly truthful perception of the topic at hand, once you start dissecting your own deceptions and lies, you’ll have to start retroactively reconfiguring your whole past! How scary is that!?
One day I’ll take it on, right now I’ll just enjoy the Summer (:
This can be solved by framing things differently and I do have to admit that I intentionally make things as explicit as possible to conflagrate discussion.
Saying that your girlfriend loves you because you’re both made for each other does nothing for the discussion.
Saying that the reason why your girlfriend is with you is because her brain chemistry overrides her perceptions making her mentally too handicapped to see you objectively while you’re bribing her emotionally and materially through small favors to be more attached to you due to your insecurities of being afraid of loneliness paints a more thought provoking picture although they stand for the same thing : = )
This isn’t a good way to view the world and neither do I have a permanent vision of such but if we want to discuss about psychology, we should talk about psychology.
I know they exist and I know what they do but there are far more curious and exciting ventures to invest my intellectual wherewithal into : P
Small edit: I saw “Elephant in the Brain” having comments on Joseph Heinrich’s book “The Secret of Our Success” which I very highly suggest - he also has a lot of awesome and information dense talks on Youtube which I’ve probably sucked in half of them.
I completely understand just got a minor fracture on my chest with super rare affix of bones, so I cannot update it anymore and it’s just T2 and rest T3 
I love the game, playing a lot but I really wish there is a kind of super gardian glyph, can be expensive, just to secure more the super rare craft
Oh btw…
You won’t learn psychology at school or in books. Not the dirty stuff. The interesting stuff. Books and woke education is apt to be true (sometimes) where political correctness isn’t required and false where it dare not tread. Lies of silence.
There are worlds to which you probably haven’t even considered in your area. Go off trail to find the answers. Avoid the status seekers, authors and thus publishers etc. etc.
Onwards and upwards… I make a habit of not responding to replies. Don’t take it the wrong way.
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Ok, then I think we misunderstood each other a bit - I’m not opposed to RNG, the only point I try to make is that it has it’s uses and its limits.
I also agree with you that ‘abusing’ human mind’s way of working is a way to achieve a ‘successful’ game ( which depends a bit on your definition, but we agree about the 3 R’s I think (reach, retention and revenue) being a good summary of a ‘successful game’).
There are plenty of voices on the forums in the POE community that are dissatisfied with the huge amount of RNG involved, so I don’t believe I’m the only one. But, I also realize, that as someone who’s studied the mechanics of the games and how our minds work, have lost the true ‘naive gamer’ (and I mean that in a positive sense) that approaches a game without suspicion and looks into gathering knowledge about ‘good’ builds instead of trying to find out ‘how the game deceives me into playing more than I should’ 
I think it’s also good to mention my ethical struggle, that once you start to see what impact a ‘successful’ game can have on the lives of the players, that you wonder about how far do you want the game to be abusing our heuristics. It’s no longer just about ‘making a nice game so people have fun playing it’. This might also be the reason why I’m hesitant about too much ‘grinding’ and rng in games, because, even if they achieve better ‘RRR’ scores, my utility extends further that the business objectives of a game company, and it also encompasses the players. Maybe that’s another reason I dislike too much rng and mechanics that make you spend more time and money than is good for you. I believe game designers have that ethical responsibility, just as weapon manufacturers do.
Which is related to your question:
Related to this, D3 is where I feel they struck a good balance between enticing the players to play, and the time required for players to reach (some or other) end goal. This is of course also a matter of personal opinion - how much time do you have for playing the game and when do you feel you’ve gotten what you want out of it (or maybe you never want to stop playing it, and are looking for a ‘life long partner’ kind of game). I think this might be one of the causes of so much discussion and differences in opinions about trading, balancing and crafting.
Of course, D3 is also balanced around single player, that is the time/effort required to find/craft your ‘end game’ gear.
In multiplayer games like LE, the objective is (I believe) to have this balanced around the fact that trading is involved, as this promotes interaction with other player’s MTX, which is one of the money making schemes. Like in POE, this leads to SSF players feeling ‘penalized’, which is an unfortunate but unavoidable (?) effect of this balancing strategy. I think Crafting might be the solution such SSF players turn to then, as the drop chances are based on a large population of players, so it’s expected 10 other people have an item drop, that you are looking for, but they have no use for. Unfortunately, having the crafting a legitimate alternative for this, also effectively diminishes the need to interact with others via a marketplace, which is bad for profits…
There are no failed crafts in GD, you have recipes for items you can craft, and the ingredients are often also lower tier (sometimes craftable) items. The result is determined by the recipe, with one random ‘bonus’ affix, which you can see as a ‘free gift with your purchase’ kind of deal. So no disappointments. What I also like about it, is that you recycle the items you previously crafted / found and used, making them a part of the new item you will now use, which feels more like an actual upgrade isntead of a replacement - this aligns nicely with the emotional investment you might have with these items.
Interesting discussions btw, though I think it’s clear now that many players feel unjustly ‘punished’ by the probabilistic approach to crafting and the ever present chances of failure. It’s also obvious the true probabilities and human expectations of outcomes are not aligned (which is a well known and studied fact). And, it’s also clear that opinions are divided on this front, with some feeling completely happy about the current system, and fearing making crafting less punishing/rng based, as it will destroy their motivation to play, while others feel the exact opposite.
This is the reason I suggested a non linear system, and one that focuses on the expectations, feelings and perception of the different kind of players, rather than pure math.
Finally, it seems also clear, that a solution to the crafting approach cannot be made without involving discussions of whether the game is balanced around multiplayer or SSF and the money making scheme chosen for the game. Then there is also the not insignificant preference of the designers to account for 
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I agree with most of what you say. To many times when i craft something goes wrong early while having great odds of not being bricked or not removing the only stat that i actually need. It seems always to remove my stat that is the most powerfull or iam just unlucky.
The same goes for the brick as you say. even with 86% chance to not brick it bricks a lot of times.
The thing i heavily disagree with is removing the chance of having zero negative outcomes.
It feels good for me to have a chance to brick an item and more exciting if it doesnt brick.
I love the gamble that they put in the game. And i had some good items with it. However it cost me a lot of gold to only get a few oke ish items so maybe it needs to be changed a little bit or i was just unlucky since it is gamble for a reason.
A solution for the crafting might be that you got a higher chance of bricking items when you try to craft higher tiers instead of bricking already at tier 1. I also had some bad experience with tier 1’s bricking already which left me with a bad taste in my mouth since i lost my crafting materials and the item again… so overall i agree that it would be nice if they tinker a bit more in the crafting department. Its to RNGish now at low tiers aswell.
I see crafting as a system which is a way to reliably get to where you want to be, given enough time/effort investment.
The alternative is the rng based ‘loot drop’ system, in which you hope to invest less but accept that the chance of obtaining the item is probabilistic. You do expect the chances to approach 100% of success, given enough time (sooner or later, that item will drop).
The third system is the market place, where you exchange your currency (time/effort) for items you want, and the supply & demand are the fluctuating levels of randomness (how much the item you want will cost / is it available).
What I feel the crafting system is missing now, is that limit of certainty, you have with loot drops. Instead is has an increasing chance of failure (a totally different formula, from the loot drop in fact: it seems modelled after some kind of ‘relaistic’ simulation, which is interesting, but not desirable in a fantasy game like this. If it was, then your character should age and each hour spent battling would increase the chance of your hero dying of a sudden heart failure 
).
Agree/disagree?
I sort of agree. at the same time i disagree that crafting should be 100% realiable.
Some unique items etc could be outgeared to easily if you make crafting 100% realiable in this game imo.
It should be way more rewarding however to craft in this game though with maybe extra crafting options which are more crazy and have an option to brick your item.
Just adding basic tier 1 stats already have a chance to brick which sounds crazy to me and doesnt motivate me to craft anymore. I think the biggest problem in this system is that they already let you break items at low tier crafting. I would understand this RNG system if they would only add the chance to brick the item at tier level 4 or 5 for example.
Then you still care about looking at items on the ground in maps and still care about crafting. There should be a balance if you know what i mean. Thats why i disagree with crafting being 100% about what you want. Even path of exile doesnt have all crafting options with a 100% chance of getting it. You can block some suffixes to still get it sometimes for example. However the most basic things are easy to craft in POE.
Last epoch is missing a basic crafting system which allows you to get basic crafts easily.
Instead you have a chance to get punished for even trying to get a basic stat which is a shame in my opinion. This problem could be easily fixed by:
- Making basic tiers 1 and 2 for example immune to brick.
- Change percentages at tier 1 till 3 to brick so fast.
- Check the system if it doesnt pick the lower percentages to often. What i mean by this is if they say it has a 3% to brick that it doesnt brick to often still. I remember with the game xcom 1 that enemies had a 1% chance to dodge and they dodge almost every shot. Thats when my friend and i quit the game. I hope this system does work like that aswell but sometimes it does feel like that, sadly enough.
That does not need to be the case, you can have a 100% reliable crafting where end results can not be better than 95% of a similar unique item, if you want uniques to be BIS. More likely, uniques will have certain affixes that outrange those craftable, but overall (on average) a crated top item will be a more ‘reliable’ / consistent , while uniques excell in one areas, but are weaker in others. This makes uniques and craftables complementary.
I see what you mean. My opinion differs, as I see crafting as a viable alternative to loot drops (or gambling, or market place), and wich this was a player’s choice which system of acquiring their items they prefer, rather than being dictated by the game (designers), as in: ‘we want you to do this in that way, and in order to get anywhere, you must utilise all thses tactics and systems we designed’, a.k.a 'you’re holding your phone wrong (Steve Jobs).
It’s inveitable that in a system where there is a non-zero probability for a binary outcome (brick or no brick), even that 0.1% chance of total failure will be annoying. You seem to be looking for a system that has more than 2 outcomes, with something in between I think. Tweaking probabilities will not take the frustration away, you need to decrese chances of ‘hard bricking’ your items in some way (and I believe it’s fair to have these chances reduced to 0%, but that’s just my opinion). Maybe a system where you can undo a bricked/failed craft, with some vendor recipe, special currency or occult ritual?
Yeah i wouldnt be against a 0% to brick as long as Uniques still have there purpose.
In this league in Path of Exile however crafting is way to strong which makes a lot of unique items etc useless. It was a try out that they did but even without this league crafting in POE is way stronger then ton of uniques they got. Now they are boosting a lot of uniques because most of them are useless. I think the devs of Last epoch try to prevent that from happening.
Thats why i said the balance needs to be right if they add 0% to brick an item. It is easier said then done to make great uniques that are unique, and strong but not to strong at the same time and at the other hand making crafting good but not to good.
Thank you for the detailed reply! I feel we’ve made quite a lot of progress in our dialogue and have a far better understanding of each other (:
Here goes another short reply:
One point that I was again trying to “set you up” with was that you’re never the only one and your ideals don’t always apply.
In fact, how can you even be sure that your psychophilosophical concepts represent 10% or 90%? These ideals should be met with scrutiny and investigation so we wouldn’t apply mere nominal philosophy as our psychological foundation.
I think when expressing ideas in the public FOR the public, we should abandon our own ideals and aim for models which have the public interest as it’s nuclei.
When it comes to balance, preferences and gameplay; I’ve come to realize that my personal preferences are a complete travesty in the eyes of an average player in the population. Me giving an opinion what I like which hasn’t examined the relation of it with the general population is counterproductive.
I’m a giga pro Mr. Merchant Richman gamer( but no no-life) in every game I play - solo mirror every ~30 hours in PoE but I fight Shaper naked for l0lz.
I don’t share this sentiment either, I am able to use our long/in-depth mode of thinking to analyze my state after the experience but during it I drool over my keyboard.
Of course when I see an especially vivid example of manipulation, I am able to recognize it immediately but most of my time my brain is simply “me want shiny sword, gimme shiny pretty sword”.
This is my strongest problem with your stance and expression on the whole topic.
Every time when I start formulating a value judgement, this snarky denigrating foreign voice echoes in my head - “What do you know!?”
So the question is - what do you know?
How do you know that the game is ruining someone’s life or enriching it?
How do you know if there are more players ruining their lives or playing together and making memories?
Do you go to casino and slap chips off from people’s hands because they’re addicted?
What’s wrong in being addicted to a video game?
I’m addicted to gym? What now?
What should people with very strong dispositions towards addictive behavior and hedonic homeostatic dysregulation do?
Should the genesis of the game consider them as potential “victims” as well?
Go to casino and mortgage their house or play Last Epoch and pick up shiny items?
You’d have to ask and answer 50 more questions with non-colluding answers in order to even have a some ground to walk on.
Further I would claim that there are metaethical questions which you’d have to answer after all this rigour:
Is it ethical to ask for ethical behavior when it degrades the entities well-being? Last Epoch’s team would make less money.
Is it ethical to ask other people to follow your set of ethics?
Is it unethical to have a dualistic set of ethics in your life?
etc.
My conclusive statement on this is:
Let us first dissect, declare and demonstrate truthfully and honestly what is effective and what is not. If there are overarching and overbearing philosophical conundrums, these can be solved after establishing the ground on psychology.
Mini personal remark: I used to conflate philosophy to psychology which brought me a lot of destructive and maladaptive results!
I’m sorry but I didn’t really read out what the answer to the question was. Could you reformulate it for me please?
Isn’t it just salvaging like in LE?
Again, I don’t remember the crafting system properly but if it is as claimed and I’ve seen so far - you can have different outcomes, some better and some worse; then the expectations and disappointments are all adjusted according to what the array of positive outcomes are.
If there’s an item that can have +50 bonus damage and you don’t get it, then you will be disappointed even though your bonus had +20 damage - you are not crafting a Fire Hammer anymore - you are crafting a +45 up to +50 bonus damage Fire Hammer
Our expectations and dissapointments regarding them depend on our ability to abstract future outcomes based on the knowledge we have.
In real world, if you spin the wheel and the reward can be $1000, $100 and $10; then you getting $10 will make you miserable but if the same scenario happened with $10 $9 and $8 then you’ll be praising the Sun for your unbelievable fortune!
This goes against your statements from before as expectations, feelings and perceptions are based on our heuristics, quasi-mathematical brain systems and background capabilities which you advocate against in being utilized in their fullest potential.
Your wishes are also simply impossible on the premises of hedonic adaptation which I have deconstructed in the posts 24 - 30 above.
Very much so! While we disagree on some, we also agree on plenty; it’s just more productive to mostly dish out the differences as we both write novels here : ]
I have a feeling that many disagreements we seem to have are due to me not expressing myself well enough, and I feel it’d be a waste of time to conitue disputing these. I’m neither a native speaker nor as eloquent and well versed as you, and I mean the last as a compliment.
I also realize my knowledge and experience is more hands on-based (hence my poor understanding of distinctions between psychology and philosphy ) and yes, I am aware of the fact that all my statemetmens based on my beliefs stem from me observing a limited sample, and never a whole population.
I hope I haven’t suggested ever to know something ‘for a fact’ or to represent a majority of the population. All the statements of anyone here are opinions and beliefs, and so I feel it’s ok to assume this to be implied in every forum post. If I have led to believe otherwise, I apologise.
As to ethics, I know little of the theory and even less of the philosphy, my experience is that it’s a contradiction in itself, as you pointed out, and nothing can be called truly ethical - there is always some other party that pays the price (and in effect any living human being is unethical), but I’m perfectly OK with being entirely wrong on that subject.
Practically speaking, I think there are plenty publically available examples of what most would consider an unethical exploit of the human psyche, for personal/financial gain, be that in gaming or gambling, even though one can always argue to be blameless in any case, and the ‘who’s to say who’s right or wrong’ is a too easy way out (I believe).
Any more rhetorical or metaphysical discussions on the topic, however ‘fun’ it may be, is not really productive on this forum (I believe). That’s why I posted the last few replies, to try to steer the discussion to be productive and (I hope) accessible for a broader audience.
Personally, I am somewhat ok with minor fracture - but major fracture has got to go. It bricks the item regardless of your level of investment.
I would also like the stability rune to be consistent in the crafting instability added, there is no point if it rolls a 5 added instead of something lower.
Futhermore I think it would be better if we had the option to put multiple of the same shard in the same crafting instance, even if it massively increased failure rate it would still mean a lower rate of failure than going through 4 or 5 individual crafts.
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Why thank you!
I think your English is excellent! I’m not a native speaker either : P
Absolutely not.
I simply presented my best arguments against your suggestions in a hope to be proven wrong. As through chance, I managed to claim before that not all voices are equal and if there’s a behavioral psychologist who works in ARPGs and claims that RNG is not the way to go then his/her opinion should be considered more far more important than the rest of the posts in this thread, especially if there’s data to back it up!
Furthermore, the statement made by you went against the current science in psychology and neurobiology so I definitely wanted to know how someone reached such a conclusion; if the claim is true, then it’s a groundbreaking revelation.
If you’re interested, I got the man just for you! Let me introduce you to Rick Roderick.
Without him, I’m not sure if I would have even started studying philosophy.
I picked him up on a warm afternoon in June and I eventually relistened( this is a valid word!) to all of his lectures, all 3 series on every Summer month of the year at least once.
I also hopefully you don’t think I’ve taken a position that there is no correct choice - absolutely not - when I say that what do we know? I want us to first reach a position where we have fully examined what we’re about to innervate.
I have nothing but respect towards you and It was a pleasure conversing with you (:
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Thank you for the link (will definitely check it out, hope it’s not one of those awful ‘orchestrated to temporarily dazzle the audience’ TED talk ‘shows’ ) and the kind words. Your replies have made me question some things for sure.
Well, I hate do disappoint, but I never claimed to be an ARPG designer (my ARPG experience is purely from a player’s standpoint, I have been a game designer for over a decade, but we never actually made an arpg).
Also, I did not say ‘rng is not the way to go’ - I merely stated that rng has it’s place, uses and limits, and those limits are what we seem to be discussing here. If I ever said ‘rng is bad, period’, you may club me over the head with a bag of biscuits, untill I admit your superiority on the subject
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Going back to one of OPs main points, before we derailed into RNG: The feedback mechanism of the “chance to T1” mechanic is destructive and demotivating. The game would be a better, more enjoyable game if that mechanic were removed. The chance to fracture is sufficiently limiting; bricking the item too is just a fuck-you that does nothing to make the game better.
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I agree, though I’m sure the cough psychologically literate above would say that if there’s a downside then you get more of a pleasureable reaction to it not happening.
Personally I don’t think that it’s a proper science if the experiment gets to give the experimenter it’s opinion, tell you to go **** yourself or keel over & cark it mid-experiment.
I agree on that.
I would advocate for something opposite like a strong visual explosion and angels falling down from sky blessing your item with a guaranteed chance for the next craft to not fail - this should get gamer engines revved up real hard. Getting an “angel bless” for their last T5 would be a story which people would tell their grandchildren.
Deletion of major fracture and theoretically something opposite would mean of course that the current ratios would have to be decreased.
I think mathematically approaching this would be best right now, which I have also suggested before.
Another point to make is that I think it’s very bad for the players to see the success ratio % visually on the screen. As I’ve stated many times - the human brain is infamous for being bad at statistics but is good at patterns.
Repeated & multiple event probabilities are also something which the human brain can barely comprehend, much less make accurate predictions on.
3x 75% chance of success sounds like a 100% guaranteed “yeehaw I’m on a highway to hell” odds but in reality you should fail most items by your third attempt.
Even if you get 2x T5 item fresh from ground with 0 instability, your odds of success at 75% for 4x T5 are somewhere 7%.
The problem is that the instability is not 0 and your odds are not at a static 75%; your odds are at 55% for most of your crafts, meaning that 4x T5 should be sitting somewhere 0.5% - 0.1%.
This is extremely lazy maths but it should be something like that.
An average or even an experienced, statistically educated player is not able to cognize the fact that they will have to do this highest odds of possibility crafting for 500 times( or even understand how much time and effort crafting 500 items really is) before they’ll see their item; they just see 60% and think what an awesome day it is to enjoy guaranteed success!
I just came from swimming and my pizza arrived!
As fascinating as the 30 or so posts that deal with behavioral psychology and philosophy are, I propose that they be moved into its own separate thread called “RNG system philosophy” or something and leave the remaining posts to discuss the actual crafting system we do have and potential improvements / concrete changes (meaning not theory discussions) to said system.
Here’s some concrete math: let’s say you have a T5 affix that you really need to carry over from one gear to another (I don’t know the difference between T3 & T5, but let’s say it’s an important protection or the GB you need to reach 100%). Let’s also say that you want to fill the equipment up with 3 other necessary affixes. Using the crafting odds LE spreadsheet, the odds of getting 3 T3 affixes on that good item are roughly 15-20% using Glyphs of Stability up to 25% fracture and Glyph of the Guardian afterwards, assuming an initial 5 instability. If you have a crappy affix that you need to remove using Rune of Removal, that chance is further cut in half (even more so, since you have a initial chance of fracture).
Even more simply stated, if you have 3 backups, each having a good base, implicit rolls and the same necessary T5 affix, you have roughly a coin flip chance that you won’t completely waste your time without an upgrade. Now I don’t know which affixes have to be T5 against those where you can settle for T3 or T4, but if you’re looking to upgrade your protections or glancing blow so that you can survive Monolith runs, simply finding the same bases with decent implicit rolls is enough, much less finding 3 of them and having a coin flip chance to brick all of them before you get anything useful.
A big reason why players will remember having the 93% fractures much more vividly is because if you’ve already gone through 2-3 crafts without making a good upgrade, having the next craft be one of those 93% fractures is going to piss off the player that much more.
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