I wanted to point this out in another thread as well - that human beings and especially younger and/or more emotive people who might not be fully aware or be capable of conceptualizing their negativity bias will be feeling that there’s something wrong with the game.
The problem with that is that we don’t know how the code is constructed and we might end up pathologizing completely healthy and constructive responses. There really might be something wrong with it - only the developers can confirm or deny these assumptions.
I used to have a problem with developers implementing so called “exploitive” psychological models but then you have to ask what’s the alternative?
If we ought to eliminate taking advantage of our heuristics and manipulative psychological models, we’ll end up with something really boring such as a game where there’s a guaranteed amount of gold dropped after every 60 seconds based on the amount of clicks you do to keep it nice and fair.
I personally advocate for the contrary - make the game use our psychology to it’s fullest to engage and entertain us - for us as human beings, being irrational is metarationally rational on an emotional level which is one, if not the most important level of analysis at least for video games.
I’m even willing to help the developers with that (:
Source: is the world energy of Rivellon, from which magic is born in Divinity 2.
Any RNG mechanic that doesn’t have a chance of setting the player backwards in progress. In other words, something other than gambling. Gambling with gold is whatever because that’s basically its only use, and you get gold automatically over time - what you say about guaranteed gold dropped is pretty much already the case, statistically. But gambling with an already good item and chance losing it - thus undoing progress and leaving you worse off than you were before - is the same premise used in casinos with actual money, and gambling addicts will tell you that it is super engaging and entertaining to play their game of choice right until it bankrupts them. Then, it isn’t fun at all.
That’s how I feel about the current crafting system. I don’t think the devs intended it that way, but I feel like I should advise people who like the current crafting system not to make a habit of visiting casinos.
This is an oxymoron as RNG by definition is gambling.
If you cannot lose, you cannot win - you cannot have a game where you don’t lose progress, be it either time or currency. I’m not even certain where from do you infer that this is good or useful of any sort? Aside from pathologies, I haven’t yet been exposed to healthy psychological models which are based on pure positive emotions within my half a decade of studying it. Maybe you could enlighten me?
As far as I know, this psychophilosophical concept cannot exist more than nominally simply due to our hedonic adaptation and due to our perception of positive emotions being exercised through juxtapositioning them with negative emotions.
This ad hoc exception is made on what premises?
Sorry but exactly the same applies and can be applied to items.
While this is already the case with gold, the lack of excitement towards it is palpable - it’s bland and boring - as already stated above.
You can apply exactly the same to gold except it turns from a qualitative loss to a quantitative loss.
This happens due to there being more implications to the loss than merely the loss itself. Your example includes loss of potentially everything which is dear to a human being, starting from socioeconomic status, ending with human bonds.
Your wife and 3 kids won’t leave you if you fracture your item in a singleplayer video game, I hope at least :S
A better example would be that if you try to mold a vase and it breaks, the situational emotion will be unpleasant but the whole picture including stories, social opportunities and emotional journeys related to your pottery craftsmanship will be improved by the very fact that this bad scenario happened.
This is very basic and it isn’t controversial either.
Depends on your definition of gambling. I assume to gamble, you must offer something of value with the knowledge that random chance could cause you to lose that thing. That’s how crafting works currently. However, flipping a coin is RNG, and you don’t have to risk losing anything to flip a coin, QED not all RNG is by definition gambling.
I’m not sure this is the best place to get into it, but there’s Carl Roger’s humanistic psychology.
I don’t know. That’s a common platitude, but I haven’t seen any evidence that positive emotions either require or are necessarily elevated by negative emotions. Opiates generate pleasurable sensations in absence of pain. So does sex. I think that concept is a way to justify negative emotions to make us feel better, but I don’t think there’s any inherent value in pain - that’s just something we tell ourselves to feel better about it.
However, I definitely agree that pain causes humans to seek pleasure more aggressively. That’s kind of the idea behind gambling, really. The pain of loss causes the player to want the pleasure of winning, and exploits certain heuristics to blind the player to what’s really happening statistically. Ergo, gambling addicts almost always end up in a worse emotional state leaving the casino than when they entered.
Here’s a paper published in 2001 that discusses the roles of positive and negative emotions. Essentially, the author posits that positive and negative emotions serve separate roles and influence separate behaviors, and really don’t have consistent points of interaction. This is a pretty common view (cited by over 600 other studies), though it isn’t the only one.
The exception is based on the premise that the effectiveness of my character does not decrease by losing gold. It does decrease by losing gear I’m currently using in the attempt to make it better. I should have made that more clear.
Yes, but that’s the issue I mean to illustrate above.
See the first point. Negative experiences do not inherently elevate positive experiences from a psychological perspective. I would say that the inverse is, in fact, a controversial statement.
It feels far more than 1/5th the time. The issue might be that you stay at the higher success rates for a while, but you roll so often that you’re bound to break something crafting that “perfect” item.
My post is a bit older now. Meanwhile there was a post from Mike Weicker that they investigate the crafting system because of the numerous reports of odd behaviour.
I don’t know if they found something.
It’s not the first game where people have the feeling that rng is not working correctly and demand further investigation. In most cases it’s just a subjective and negative biased point of view of some people that feel the game mechanics treat them unfair.
Don’t get me wrong here. Maybe there is a bug that only occurs with certain requirements met. Because if there is a bug, it seems to not apply to everybody.
Absolutely certain is that any odd behaviour must be a bug and is not intended. I say that because there were/are people that say that there are hidden mechanics that influence the success rates but are not displayed.
here is some helpful advice, dont bank on crafting on once piece of gear, if its your best piece. get some pieces to craft on with higher implicit rolls, that have potential to be greater then your choice a craft. It’s called the A, B, and C options, because the probability of you failing a better craft on just one good piece item, is FAR less, then if you simply had multiple pieces of the same type of item to craft on, at once. Saving and storing pieces to craft is what has gotten me to near 100% success rate on my crafts, because i’m not limiting myself to just one good options, I open it up for multiple good options, so option B,C (i actually have 5 back up craft options) makes it very easy for me to get good upgrades to choose from.
In the scenario of just your reward being smaller or bigger based on the number the RNG is providing you, you’re still gambling with your time and emotions.
If you know that your prize pool is gold between quantities of 1 to 1000 and your 100 lottery tickets have provided you with 100 times only 1 gold, you will feel bad due to randomness.
The reason why we do get excited over lottery and random chances is because we’re able to cognize abstractions of the future which involve positive outcomes but the positive outcomes also have magnitudes and if sufficient magnitudes are not met, disappoint will sink in.
You’re mistaking empathy with hedonism / positive emotions - they’re not even in the same category.
Eating mud can generate pleasurable sensations in absence of pain.
Opiates are a good example of hedonic adaptation and do not generate endless pleasure. Sex also is subject to hedonic adaptation.
There’s no argument made by me that you have to have immediate pain accompanying a momentarily experience in order to feel happy. My argument is that your emotions surrounding your experience(s) are orchestrated by the comparison of previous experiences of the same kind.
Pain is an extremely broad term now which can belong in dozens of categories but I assume you mean emotional pain? Correct me if I’m wrong.
If that is the case then how are negative emotions and emotional pain different? I’d state that even if they are different then emotional pain would still be a subcategory of negative emotions.
Everything you do in life is in the name of improving your condition, whatever the direction you might wish to pursue - this only happens if there’s a reason to do so and the reason most of the time is a loss or a perceived loss of some kind.
Yes, we’re good at patterns and bad at statistics but our emotions or well-being is in no way tied to us experiencing statistical fairness.
Again, I would not use casinos as an example because these involve hundreds of factors more other than simply experiencing a loss in a game.
Items get fractured in this game meaning that they cannot be crafted on any further.
Extreme majority of the crafts aren’t done in such a manner due to items eventually fracturing, it’s exceedingly rare to upgrade your in-use items.
This means that the player has to seek out a completely new item to craft on it. The player won’t be set back on anything else but the time itself.
If this wasn’t the case, the player would have a learning lesson from losing an item and would keep a back-up - I did this already once with my shield which I needed shock shards for. In any regards, even if I did get a major fracture on my shield, I would be set back very minimally.
In real world, it’s simply not possible to forever upgrade your mood / experience from the previous state. You can slow the progress down by not buying a Ferrari as your first car, but you will be met with a dead end.
Inverse or not - the modality doesn’t change and semantically it makes no difference.
If we have only two positive emotions, one will be less positive and the expectations will be set based on the more positive emotion. If a new, third experience will not match up to the previous best emotion, we’re likely to be disappointed or frustrated or angry or anything else negative.
With our brains, ability for sustained positive emotions necessitates juxtapositioning and experiencing of negative emotions - the only people who are happy all the time are mentally ill with mania.
If we manage to somehow become happy little butterflies who never feel bad, our brain will regulate our dopamine levels to a level where homeostatically happiness will shrink close to non-existence / nihilism.
This is simple neurochemistry which applies to everyone healthy.
I very much dislike some modern psychologists / professors due to commonly mass gaslighting students / general population with a sick joke that “being happy” is the nuclei of a functional being and if you’re not happy every day then there’s something wrong with you which is just flat out false on every level.
Shoving that idea down completely healthy peoples throats who display full range of emotions is the easiest way to put them into a DEFCON 1 state and open the door to mental illnesses.
I’ve also written some psychology tips / models to developers, maybe reading them will improve the frequency of this channel.
Hehe, this reminds me of the current POE league, which I summerised in this picture:
P.S. The fugly bloom is an intentional critique of their new bloom implementation in the game btw.
And yes, I agree that any crafting system that is heavily based on RNG is not the way to go, having worked in behavioral psychology + gaming for a couple of years has tought me that. Not to mention the couple of thousand of hours spent playing ARPGs
An analogy that comes to mind when thinking about LE’s crafting is a Jenga tower…
I love the flexibility of the crafting system. I started a new character last night and his ideal weapon was a low level base with a high implicit on elemental damage. I was able to cleanse it, then use glyphs to stack T5/T4 damage rolls on it before it fractured. I basically had the best possible damage (weapon slot) from level 15 moving forward. While its rare to be able to get into the T15-20 range on cleansed items, I have had 2-3 hit. It’s great to be able to make your own items from scratch.
Of course, the RNG when you get a great base item with the right affixes and it cracks early is painful. But, when you roll that T20 item the joy is equally great. I wish they would remove damage fractures from the game; I think regular fractures is punishing enough. But, if there was no risk of downgrading tiers, everyone would push from T10+ with Glyphs of the Guardian and have no fear of losing anything (just not gaining as much). It’s the risk of damaging the item that makes the process so frustrating, but also so rewarding.
Plus, once you have a relatively good item, trying to incrementally make that slot better becomes a lot less stressful. If I’m wearing T15 and I brick something shooting for 16-20, I’m still comfortable with my gear level.
Don’t forget every crafting attempt costs resources. People tend to forget that, not only is there an increasing risk, you also can’t just spam the craft button till it succeeds, as you’re limited by how many resources you have. The more time it takes you to collect the necessary ingredients (or the less time you have to play, which equates to the same feelings at the end of a crafting session), the more frustrating a failure is. People who play a lot, tend to value their resources less and worry less about failures - someone mentions spares for example. If you play little, you count yourself lucky to get one semi good base, and can count the good ingredients you want on one hand. For those, the crafting experience is different.
I understand what you’re saying. But, the more casual you are as player, the lower your expectation should be of ever reaching ‘max’ gear. Glyphs of the Guardian drop like candy. If it was low risk or easier to get T20 in a slot, ultimately the problem would shift from the risk of gambling to the boredom of having nothing left to shoot for other than the super rare T6/T7.
Sure, the casual players shouldn’t expect to reach the same level of power as the ‘dedicated’ ones, but the crafting experience is far more punishing/negative to those casuals compared to the dedicated ones. What I’m getting at is that the resource is a natural gateway to how powerful an item you can craft, and it’s linked to the hours of playtime. No need to compound this with additional risk/rng, is what I’m saying.
The risk you speak of is shared equally by casual and experience player alike. Enough glyphs drop for each subset to roll decent gear (for the sake of this post and the amount of time the game has been out, I’m calling T10 level gear ‘decent’).
The only differentiation is how many different characters you can outfit or how many attempts you can make at pushing past T10 into the ‘exceptional’ gear range (T10-T20). Crafting isn’t ‘more punishing’ to casual players anymore than the game itself (e.g. you find less resources because you played less time).
In other words, if I play 500 hours and you play 50, I may have 10x the number of glyphs you do, but for any one given item my risk is going to be the exact same as yours. I’m on board with removing damaging fractures, but the basis is not because it’s ‘unfair’ to casual players.
That can be balanced and addressed by additional mechanics, where playtime investment can be (deterministically) translated into an increased chance to get those top tier items/affixes, and increased chances of success. This does, however, mean the crafting system cannot be linear as it is now, and needs to take into account your playtime (and even though it would be a vastly improved system, it does require more coding). Linear / simple solutions are always problematic when you have a huge difference between player’s skill, time investment and the like: you always ‘break’ things for some when you improve it for others. It’s like trying to fit a line to 3 points that are not aligned: you need a curve for that, otherwise it will allways be winners and loosers for every ‘tweak or balance’ change.
