I was referring to the ambiguity of what is most efficient to do created by the FP system that ExsiliumUltra discussed in an earlier post. The reality is without knowing what the rates of success are, you could be wasting your FP not upgrading rare or exalted items to T5.
Moreover, the game could still be wasting player’s time if it isn’t more efficient to do so anyway. Consider: What if you were a player who just assumed upgrading rare and exalted items was more efficient when it wasn’t? The built-in ambiguity makes it unclear what the player should do, and the only way to remedy it is for the community to test it and put that information somewhere for them to find.
I didn’t say it was the biggest problem with the system, but yes it is one conceivable issue with it. I guess this is the one that people chose to take issue with because it appeared to be the easiest to defend, I dunno.
I didn’t know about the boss dynamic damage reduction though, that’s interesting. I’ll have to look into that. If it works the way I’m imagining, that does actually reduce the need for min/maxing gear in a way I’d agree with.
aRPGs by design are there to waste your time though thats the point of the entire system, they thrive off resets or having extremely almost never to happen odds of getting that ‘perfect item’
you do the same areas over and over to get slightly more powerful to do them slightly quicker and thats the gameplay loop. Maybe a boss here and there, to most people or gamers that would seem ridiculous and a pointless experience, lots of gamers chase new experiences constantly ie Elden Ring playthrough > move on to another game
I probably have vastly less expectations than you about time spent in these games
I dont know the mechanics, you do more damage they gain more reduction. the first hit(s) are generally unmitigated up to a certain% then your damage tapers off hard, thats why Kill% threshold is so strong in this game as the bosses seem in their last 15% hp live longer than their first 40% of damage received
Look at this video from perrythepig, in that part he shows the difference between not using Nightshade Briar (4% MORE) per poison and without, he applies roughly 15 poisons a second, thats at least 60% more damage increase per second, by the 3rd second 180% more. It didnt show the whole kill but using a passive that can give 1.8x your damage and you can see it doesnt really feel like that, imagine going from 180>200% increased damage you wont even notice it at all
Not quite. Bosses gain a stack of % damage reduction for a duration for every x% of health they loose. So if you kill the boss “too quickly” the stacks can overlap. That said, the initial implementation is probably what you’re thinking of when you say “your damage tapers off hard”.
2.8x, not 1.8x. I’d also think it should be more than just 15 stacks per second.
That’s because that’s only an 11% incremental benefit, not 2.8x.
That’s one of the primary things I criticize about these games in their current state, is that they’re basically glorified treadmills or slot machines. If you’re not being motivated by what you’re doing, but by random outcomes that happen afterwards, that’s a low quality experience, because what you’re doing is mundane and repetitive and is no longer fun in and of itself. The worst thing about crafting systems like the one in this game is that it primarily exists to waste your time while adding nothing except an additional button you have to press (or press a few times) to find out if a drop you acquired is actually an upgrade or not.
My hope would be that people would actually critique these mechanics and that content in ARGP’s would begin to improve. Being satisfied with what we’re given isn’t a great way to get better content in the future.
You can find out how it works here in the CGG. This information was compiled from previous patch notes & developer comments on the LE Discord. It may or may not be 100% accurate as changes to this system haven’t been reflected in any patch notes since its introduction. However, it should be close enough to give you an idea of how it works.
Oh don’t worry, I know all about what’s going on here. But I can’t really have out with it unless I want to get a warning for being uncivil, so I have to settle for letting our friend show what game they’re playing through a terminal inability to speak concisely.
I do think that aspect of all of this is really interesting, actually. The fact that there’s people who want to get uncivil about a rational critique offered for why this crafting system isn’t the greatest is fascinating. I guess it says a lot about how pernicious the classical training and schedules of reinforcement these games can create in people really are, that they can inspire that kind of defensiveness about them, at even the mere suggestion of taking them away. I realize now that this thread itself turned into a social experiment about the very problem I was pointing out.
Very interesting. I think this is something that is definitely worth more discussion everywhere.
I am not sure if you genuinely believe this or you are just trolling.
I cannot speak for everybody else, but I am not getting frustrated because I disagree with you. The problem is that discussing with you feels like a waste of everybody’s time, which is kind of ironic considering the arguments that you are making.
I mean, you have people openly admitting they’d like to become belligerent over the fact that they don’t like what I have to say about this crafting system and the effect RNG has in motivating players. If I wasn’t fascinated and eager to discuss what I was bringing up before, I totally am now. This was all the evidence I needed that this is a sore spot with certain players who weren’t ready to hear this. What more evidence do you need that this was worth discussing?
I think the accusations of malicious intent with the system is what might be rubbing people the wrong way. This style of system is one of my favorite things to do in ARPGs.
Making an unavoidably uncivil observation about someone’s behavior and motivations is not the same as belligerence. Here, let’s demonstrate.
If I were to say, just hypothetically and for the sake of example, that what I don’t like about someone is that they waste the time of everyone they engage with by using extreme verbosity and gish galloping as cover for an inability to either have or express cohesive opinions, a fact that they’re unable to realize due to a preoccupation with signaling high intelligence to others while doing nothing to actually be highly intelligent…
That would not be particularly civil, would it? Which is why I’m not going to say it. But it would not rise to the level of belligerent, either. Now if I were to instead pepper some cursing and name-calling in there, that would be belligerent.
Well, they and you have misapprehended that. I don’t think that Eleventh Hour Games necessarily knows about the psychological effects of RNG on players or how players are motivated by schedules of reinforcement. It’d be malicious if you intended the game to be addictive, but I’m not asserting any evidence of that.
I would definitely encourage you to look into it and take it seriously though. It behooves developers to take an ethical approach towards the way people interact with and use their software.
Wait, so am I allowed to have the opinion that this is bad and something developers should avoid or not? I mean, I’m being sincere here. This is one of the factors I use in assessing the quality of content.
Never said that. You accused us of intentionally creating a skinner box. I said this style of comments might be a reason some people are not happy having this discussion with you. You claimed this was not the case. I backed it up.
I also refute that we have created a skinner box at all.
That might be the reason you’re upset with me, but I don’t think the others are. What it seems to me is that they don’t like me personally, or the length of my posts, etc. These haven’t been attacks on my actual argument for the most part.
I feel like I’m at a disadvantage here, so I’ll only offer one suggestion on what you’re saying: Go back and look at how long people grind for items in the same areas or bosses after they’ve exhausted the main story / other content in the game. If that’s a high number, then, well. There you go. Is that fair?
I bowed out of this conversation because it was getting way off course and no longer felt productive, but I do feel compelled to just point out a few things that were bothering me that others were trying to point out, because I think you have some interesting thoughts on development but the structure of the discussion felt to me like it was preventing us from getting to the crux of the argument. Here are my thoughts:
Some of the use of language felt like it was being chosen not for how well it conveyed the point, but because it sounded like you were coming from a position of expertise and authority. You’re clearly a smart person and well read, but instead of going for a more concise and ‘layman’ approach to your thoughts that may have made them more easily digestible, the choice to use more grandiose and somewhat technical language kind of came off as condescending. Like you know all of about these psychological traps and anyone who didn’t agree was a sheep who just doesn’t understand and is falling for the system. I don’t think you meant for this, but I think that’s how it was being perceived.
I was a little bothered by how you condensed the game down to a single principle from a psychologist who, himself, had a very narrow view of human behavior. Sure, schedules of reinforcement are real and can even be used to an extent in video games, but that doesn’t make the crafting sytsem, or loot, or ARPGs in general simply explained as one big skinner box. It’s also not the case that simply because something reinforces behavior that it’s necessarily bad. Many of us are aware that video games in general tend to be reinforcing through ‘dopamine hits’, and that’s actually a big reason why we play them. We want those sweet loot drops, and we don’t want them to be too spread out or too often because it ruins the experience for us. We want it to be a nice balance between rewarding, but not too rewarding, and we’re fully cognizant of this desire. Just because a game has that, or has it as part of a mechanic, doesn’t make it bad. There are definitely ways in which this behavior can be exploited and abused, but it would take a further step of showing how the system is actually abusing it’s player base (i.e. creating an addictive system that is meant to extract money out of the player through gambling) to show that the system is truly a problem.
I hope I did a decent job of summarizing the frustrations that I was noticing here. Again, I think you have some interesting ideas, but it would probably take a lot to piece them apart from the language being used and I think we would need to in order to really get at the crux of the issue. I also think we would need to dive a lot further into the psychological structure of gaming to see how you think the schedules of reinforcement in ARPGs are far worse, and in fact detrimental, in comparison to other games. Maybe this is something that would be better suited for a different forum post and with a disclaimer that it’s going to be a more technical deep dive into psychology in gaming.
