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.
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 (:
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
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.
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!
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.
When I do it I tend to get excessively lucky, hitting multiple 80 and 70 percents in a row. Though I have seen multiple fractures when I push my luck too hard.
After a sabbatical, and enjoying other ARPG’s and their crafting systems, I can now say that its official. I loath Last Epoch’s crafting system.
The endgame tedium endured to acquire the right items to even start the crafting process is bad enough. Having that progress removed or erased all together with a fracture/damaging fracture is just not fun for me and removes my motivation to play.
I would like a system where I could use the Rune of Removal on any stat, but could only use the RoR once per item.
Does anyone actually use Runes of Removal? I just watched a streamer try to remove the one affix he disliked out of the four stats the item dropped with and after three attempts, everything but the offending affix was removed, trashing the item. What’s more is that the odds get worse as the stats are removed.
Even if you are successful, you’re adding instability to the item, putting future upgrades at risk.
The only way to make that rune worth anything in my opinion would be to allow the user to choose which affix gets removed, or remove any instability created in using it (or both).
Rune of Cleansing, where you take an item to zero, removing all its affixes… is about as worthless as they come. Some might argue that cleansings are good for Items with perfect base rolls, but even then you’re just starting out with a white item that already has instability.
As time goes on, and as I’ve bounced back and forth between ARPG’s, I find last epoch’s crafting is the least rewarding and the most frustrating.
I’d put Grim Dawn at the top of my list. Recipe’s are dropped for everything from armor, relics, rings, necklaces, weapons, etc. I might get a sub par roll on an item, and be forced to make that item again to get a better roll, but at no point will I lose stats on an existing item when crafting.
You also need lots of gold to craft, so gold is never an afterthought. LE could learn a lot from GD.
I feel like the crafting system would be more rewarding if they removed the ability to shatter an item. Thus the gold sink would still exist (in its current form), and we’d still want to hunt (and spend) affixes. All the benefits without the dread or bad feelings of failing to upgrade an item.
edit
Sorry, I put down the wrong word I wanted to say: stop with the damaging & destructive fractures. I like the idea is that we don’t lose what we crafted, but we can’t upgrade the item any more. Sorry @doombybbr, I didn’t realize what I typed out till I read your comment.
This way, we can still do the hunt for afflixes, upgrade items, and what naught. It’s more the punishment for pushing the upgrades that hurts so much.
So only shards that drop can be used in crafting? That would certainly cure the need to go searching for items to shatter for shards. I wouldn’t be against that at all.
But how would removing Shatter Rune from the game keep “the gold sink”? I’m missing something.
) 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.
) and the kind words. Your replies have made me question some things for sure.
I wanted to say: stop with the damaging & destructive fractures. I like the idea is that we don’t lose what we crafted, but we can’t upgrade the item any more. Sorry