Genuinely trying to understand dev's attitude on DPS etc

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I’m a new participant in the community, and there is a likely a lot of commentary and discussion I haven’t seen, this is based purely on what I have seen to date.

I understand there is a lot of contention on two notable topics I care about, crafting mats QoL and quantifying your damage.

My intention is not to open up the discussion and repeat what many others have said and many more have debated. But I’m genuinely a bit baffled by what I currently understand the mindset of the developers to be.

There seems to be an indication that the devs believe:

  • crafting mats having to be manually stored somehow makes the game experience better
  • knowing your DPS would ruin everything

Again, I’m not here to re-open the debate the above, it’s been hashed out so many times.

What I want to understand is this:
If you create anything which you want to release to a large audience, especially something designed to be enhanced and perfected over time such as a piece of software or a game, why would you be so unwilling to listen to the opinions of so many of your intended audience?

I get that the developers have some strong beliefs, and that is their right. But I’m baffled that you would release something to the public when you’re not willing to let people enjoy it as they would like to.

Some people want to play COD as an inanimate random object that has to hide and whistle at passing soldiers (prop hunt). I’m sure the developers didn’t intend for their game to ever be used for this purpose, but it’s part of the rich tapestry of humanity that we all find different ways to engage with and experience the things we love.

A group of gamers once decided they didn’t want to play Warcraft 3 as designed and instead wanted to control a single character with more complexity and play head to head in teams of 5. This went on to become one of the most successful games and richest e-sports in history - Dota 2. Again, not how the developers would have believed their game should be played, I’m sure.

I dunno, I guess I’m just at a loss here trying to understand the mindset (if indeed the representation of the developer’s attitudes in community posts is accurate). Auto-store mats as an option just seems so easy and minor (especially now we’re getting 2-3 inventories worth of shards in a single Mono with the current loot drop quantities). And not allowing players to assess their damage output in a genre which is literally all about constructing the most powerful build possible seems like a strange hill to choose to die on.

If enjoyment of the game is the guiding principle behind these attitudes, how poorly the devs understand humanity and the diverse ways in which we all interact with and appreciate the world. Seems more like stubbornness to me.

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What you are explaining in your examples isnt what the issue at hand is.

Thats more of the offline/online thing which they gave us true offline. in the future there might be Mods for the game, because true offline would let you do that. And they have not been against that in the past. Stances do change sometimes though.

But as for the topic at hand, people are free to play the game however they want, if they want to minmax, they may. But they need to jump through the hoops to do so. Path of exile does not give you any exact numbers, you need to use a tool to figure that out, or do logical math by hand.

As for crafting mats, that will likely change some point soon, their logic on that was from a long time ago, they also said “we dont want you to filter by LP” which they have since added.

So I think the crafting mats thing will solve itself.

But as someone with lots of experience in the genre. I think you are wrong in this line of thinking.

Thats what extremely modern gamers do. That was not what the genre was born out of, and is honestly a pretty loud minority. its not a super minority, but if you think over 50% of players care about dps, no shot.

But for example, Path of building 100% warped PoE in a manner I think was for the worse. Now that the cats out of the bag you cant go back. But the game having more tool to “solve” it, means the devs will balance around those tools. And this pushes people out of the genre.

Things like weakauras, and parsers, and PoB push casual gamers out of the space and turn your game extremely niche. FF14 iirc actually bans you if you mention parsers, because they want to create a space where everyone is welcome, and if you start flaming someone for bad dps rotations cause your third party tool is saying they are only hitting 50% of their timings, you kinda deserve to get in trouble.

Its mostly about who they want to be playing the game. They want a mix of noobies, casual but experienced players, and mega grinders. if they allow easy optimization tools, they will then need to balanced around mega grinders and lose the other people they wish to cater to imo.

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A lot more people care about making a powerful build and seeing the fruit of their labor. This is a niche genre where that part is the driving force behind players playing these types of games.

It didn’t push anyone. The core audience got what they wanted, while the casuals can still make their own powerful builds which don’t reach the numbers of those who min-max, but still clear content easily.

FF14 is an MMORPG. You actively play with other players unlike LE or PoE which are essentially single player games with online elements. You need raids and groups of people to clear the content which is extremely different from what ARPG does.

FF14 doesn’t ban anyone using parses, nor will they ban anyone for saying they’re using parses even if they’re reported for simply using parses. What FF14 bans people for, is players actively bashing other players for their parse numbers. ← This is what’s not allowed. Not actually parsing. Also, not many people do this since they know they’ll get banned if they do it.

If you think less than 50% of players in LE or PoE care about DPS, oh boy, I don’t know what to tell you except that you’re massively wrong. Like you said, it’s a niche genre which attracts exactly those niche players that do care for DPS. Smh.

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I read this post 5 times. Read the responses. Eventually realized it’s just down to this thing I quoted.

Fine, decent point. I don’t even begin to get all the other extra paragraphs since they lacked cohesion.

Sorry if I sound harsh. My point is just that you could have made a very short succinct post to make the same point. This was VERY rambly/tangential.

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Personally I don’t see any problem with an inventory or two of crafting mats per map. As I am not forced to pick them up and neither is anyone else.

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I am just passing by to say that people (gamers, users in this case) should not always be given what they want, because many times, they think they know what they want, but they don’t actually.
Also, putting a “QoL” label on anything is a very sneaky way to ask for the game to become easier. It’s a slippery slope, and if you are not careful, you will start with “Give us auto-loot for shards” and before you know it will end up with “Why don’t you allow us to be insta 100lvl and kill all mobs on the screen with 1 click”

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Just like to say that this is completely unrepresentative of the whole process of building this game.
Last Epoch was born and raised based off their target audience feedback, which happens to be a little different from Diablo and PoE target audiences.

And this is what people don’t seem to get: they come from those games expecting a similar experience, only to find out they happen to NOT be a part of Last Epoch’s target audience when they start bringing suggestions from those games to this one.

We’ve seen it all around here… always the same “in Diablo I can respec” or “in most games things go differently”.
I’m not even talking about your suggestions, they’re both solid and would certainly be good additions to the game…

I mean, I feel like the auto-transfer for the crafting material is just around the corner, now that they decided to add loot lizards themselves, which gives us tons of craft mats. Now it will certainly do more good than harm and they should probably add that soon.

And the DPS meter, while I don’t think it’s necessary in a game like this, (like, we don’t know how much health monsters have, so knowing the exact dps doesn’t really matter) I think it would be a nice tool for testing specific functional interactions. But this is also such a secondary, minimal requirement for a game that it really should not come soon, if at all, because they still have a LOT of actually important things to care about and implement in the game.

Then again, your sentence I quoted really does not represent EHG at all. They’re all for listening for feedback, especially if it’s aligned to their core philosophy for the game. But they’re not a restaurant, which takes orders and demands.
You’re free to suggest anything, but they would only consider adding it if they think if fits THEIR game.

If you think a game that started off a thread in reddit does not care about their target audience’s feedback, there’s really nothing else to say.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/6bxo00/help_designdecide_the_perfect_arpg_diablo_poe/

But watchout! This might be a paid militancy post made only to derail your thread :zipper_mouth_face:

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Because sometimes the intended audience doesn’t agree on what they want; or intended audience wants something outside of your vision for the game; and thirdly, the intended audience may have a valid point but the implementation of their request would require a complete rework of the engine or systems already implemented and it’s matter of “is this small change worth redoing X many other systems?”

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I remember some blizz dev said the same thing. They released classic WoW and it was a huge financial success. Sometimes the gamers know EXACTLY what they want, and are willing to pay for it.

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Sometimes they do. Good thing Sartheris said “many times” and not “every time.” lol

But as I said in my comment, sometimes what the players want goes against the devs vision for the game. Like people bitching that Witchfire needs coop when the dev(s) literally said “this was designed to be a single player experience and we have no plans to ever add coop.”

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Funny of you to mention WoW, because that’s exactly the game that I had in mind when it comes to people pleasing.
I’ve been a huge fan since Vanilla, and watched how the game became increasingly dumbed down and easier with every other patch.
So no, people most of the time don’t know what they want.

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Thanks! This and your entire response is exactly the kind of perspective I was trying to gain through the process of writing what I knew from here + Google + Reddit was a contentious topic.

You’re of course 100% right that this is the case, but I fundamentally disagree with this attitude as a blanket rule (if that is indeed their attitude on either of these issues). I think once you create something like this you should be willing to take on board input that doesn’t necessarily align with your vision.

Didn’t know that. Attitude and biases adjusted, thanks :slight_smile:

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Yeah absolutely. I was hoping to get more of a sense of exactly what is in their minds with this post, since so much of what I had read to date was potentially either out of date or not an accurate representation of their mindsets. I was forming a view of these really inflexible creators and it just baffled me.

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Can I use the label “UX”? :smiley:
I’m a great believer in reducing redundant inefficiencies of interactions/processes via UX/CX hence caring enough post such a contentious/inflammatory post as my first post!

Points taken though, thanks for ‘passing by’ :smiley:

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Actually it’s about the bit in the middle in italics which I prefaced with “What I want to understand is this”.

I’m sorry you struggled to understand or if I rambled, but you didn’t have to be rude instead of being constructive. My suggestion next time is you leave the thread after the first reading.

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LE with it’s vacuum shard pick up has ruined my POE looting experience, picking up million currency shards is now physically painful, once I tasted the forbidden fruit.

I’m playing Dwarven Realms now, and it has mats auto-loot, an dps dummies. I just can’t understand, why other ARPGs don’t add those features, it’s so convenient.

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I’m not fully getting this, could you explain this point in more detail? I’ve played a few ARPGs but am far from an expert and don’t really understand the implications of online/offline when it comes to assessing DPS (I assume that’s what you’re referring to in this section). Is it because of the Arenas and not wanting the minmaxers to just DPS up their build to the point where they auto top the leaderboard?

My counter to this argument would be that there would not be so many build guides if people didn’t care about powerful builds. Are you including RPG in this statement, or only ARPG? I feel like the whole ARPG genre is geared for a progression to ‘late game’ which requires high damage and high survivability, which is why (it seems to me) the stories are often much weaker than other genres. So it feels so much more about the rush to late game and the grind for a pinnacle build. But, I know only a few people who play the genre and maybe their approach has skewed my impression. Totally open to being wrong on this!

I like this point, but actually I think I’m somewhere between noob and casual but experienced and I really want a real DPS or total adjusted damage figure to help me assess which of my less-than-optimal slammed uniques are better to carry around, since it can feel very borderline sometimes.

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I will start out by pointing out that you don’t need to make a new post/reply for each person. Usually we just make a single post and reply to all we need to reply to.

It’s not a blanket rule. For example, they were against adding LP to the loot filter, but community feedback made them change their mind.
However, stuff like mastery respec is something that, despite lots of feedback from some of the community, they won’t budge (rightfully so).

His point was simply that saying something is just QoL isn’t necessarily true. Not in this case. Shard autopickup (and especially shard autotransfer) seems to be one the few topics where the majority of the playerbase agrees.
But it’s like the build loadout suggestions (won’t happen) that then say “If you don’t like it you don’t have to use it” which is a disingenuous and dishonest argument at best.

If something gives you an obvious advantage, even if you don’t like it, it becomes the actual meta and mandatory.
It’s like WASD. You might not like it, but if you get 50% more DPS with it, which you do, then it becomes mandatory to use.

Again, not saying this is your case. This was just about discussing the topic itself, not the way it applies to your suggestion.

DPS dummies are a different issue than shard autopickup. The problem with DPS dummies has been discussed a lot already and mostly it boils down to: it causes builds to be judged by their DPS alone. If a build does X DPS and another does X+2, then the first one is clearly useless. You can see this a lot in PoE. PoB DPS is the #1 metric in deciding good and bad builds.
Whereas without the DPS dummies you just have approximations and you judge the build with different parameters.

It should also be noted that this affects a single player vampire survivors game (whose single objective is, after all, higher DPS) a lot less than it does an online diablo-clone.

Actually, it would be the opposite. If people only cared about powerful builds you’d have a dozen builds only because those would be the powerful ones. But since the majority actually doesn’t care that much about meta, you end up with hundreds of builds because they are fun to play, rather than just OP.

If it feels borderline, then maybe if you had a real DPS it would change between 12223 and 12243. You could clearly see one was better, but by an irrelevant margin. So in either case, with or without a clear DPS, if it feels borderline, then maybe assess it by its other attributes.

As I mentioned before, having a DPS meter will simply reduce the game into build does X DPS. You can even see this in PoE where every single build guide will mention how many millions it does on ubers.

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The majority of all players don’t reach the endgame, or at least stick around for it for long.

I am a ‘the journey is the goal’-gamer, not a ‘I work towards a goal’-gamer.
I don’t look up builds, I love exploring the mechanics and combinations while I play.
Therefore, I rarely continue deep into the endgame once a character is at the stage where the gameplay is set and one only works for small incremental changes so you can beat the same level in the same way, just with a slightly higher corruption number.
I rather start another character and build it around some unique I found or some idea I had.
There is still a long list of ideas I want to try.

The most efficient combos or strategies are often absolutely boring. Fun > efficiency.

If it is so close, why does it really matter? If you can’t feel a difference, maybe there is none that has relevance in practice. Whether you overkill by 900 damage or 1900 doesn’t matter, usually. Sometimes, less damage in faster intervals feels better and is overall more efficient, even if you lose overall DPS.

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Without DPS dummies players judge the build by how fast it can kill Julra :laughing:

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