I think for me the problem comes in that minmaxing is very weird currently.
lets say you are interested in pushing a build to its limits.
You get t20 gear in a weekend pretty much. or two at worst, its very easy to get rare gear with the right stuff, maybe not exalted but rares its doable.
Then you start going “okay I can add a 1lp legendary here” well once you have all your 1LP lengedaries what do you do? farm for 2lp? then 3lp? each step in this process rewards you maybe 10-20% more power but takes potentially hundreds of hours.
This ties into the “Gear does not matter currently” line of thought, but for me most builds are basically done by the time I hit empowered because 80% of your power comes from skill selection and passives and only a bit comes from gear.
They dont have to make the top end any easier to get, they do I think need to make gear matter more so that you progress up tiers more uniform. it does not help that like lets say your chest piece BiS is Skill affix/Strength/%health/Health, the difference between a item that has skill affix 5/%health3 and bis is actually really minor. So even for casual gaming where you dont plan to pass 300 corruption you are probably able to do 300 corruption with really bad gear if your build is capable of it at all.
bit of a tangent since it does not directly deal with FP, and I dont think crafting needs to be changed, rather they just need to find some way to make gear matter more for more builds.
This is because people complained about how “hard” it was to get gear. People kept digging and digging until T20 became common and now it is no longer considered high end.
The same will happen if those people get what they want again. It is a constantly moving goalpost. Even if T28 4LP gear started being commonplace, they would just yell about why there isn’t something beyond that.
The contradiction that they don’t understand is that they want the best possible gear more easily for themselves, but nobody else. If other people have access to it just as easily, they don’t feel elite anymore.
Asking for something new and asking for what is stated are two different things.
If a player gets everything in the game and loses interest in it, it’s a bad game design.
If there are declared but unattainable elements in the game (to artificially retain the player’s interest), this is fraud.
The rough odds of getting those items have been posted. If you can’t comprehend that, that’s on you. Those things aren’t meant to be gotten. They are just what happens when you put in a function for item drops that have compounding multipliers. I’m sure the devs could just add some code to make those things actually not droppable. Would that appease your unreasonable desires?
It’s not fraud. At no point were those things stated to be even remotely attainable.
Is this a popular opinion? I sometimes joke about this but I didn’t expect anyone to actually want that. Would you prefer it if we just did something like make items only able to have 2 exalted mods max and make 4xT7 items completely impossible to exist?
edit: I don’t want to push the issue so I won’t ask again and cause the topic to go off again but I am still interested in this question. If anyone feels this way, I’d be interested in another topic on it or hearing from you directly.
Edit 2: after getting a couple DMs about this, I just want to clarify something. I’m really just looking for a yes or no here. I don’t need a full version of how it could work, I’d just like to know if you want to see an arbitrary cap for max tiers on an item in some way or not.
Not sure if the devs talked about any of the other super rare chase uniques, but at least before they adjusted Ravenous Void in 0.8.5 they did gave us the chance for a 4LP Ravenous Void, which was 1 in 16000000000000000000.
Now after 0.8.5 it is much more likely to get any LP on Ravenous Void, but I don’t think we have any numbers for that.
And I also don’t think the devs would want to reveal any exact numbers anyway.
This number is just so astronoomical that you can’t even grasp it, which kinda makes it funny to even reveal it.
But to get back to the topic: I personally think its really cool, to have this “open end” and no definitive “best possible items”, because everytime you find an extraordinary item you really don’t know if this is “the best item that you will ever see”.
Also in the context of trade or sharing your loot with fellow community members, you really never know what other outstanding items they might have received already.
When there is a clear best possible item, that is also so (relatively) reasonable to obtain, it is just boring.
I would prefer things to be called by their proper names, without substitution of concepts.
If it is stated that “At no point were those things stated to be even remotely attainable.”, but at the same time use the existence of 4xT7 as an argument for something, then this can be considered manipulation.
I would like to return to the topic, we are talking about the FP limit.
We currently have a limit on crafting 4xT5, which causes confusion among players when they say that there is a 4xT7 in the game.
I try to convey my point of view in more detail, since English is not my native language and I use a translator for complex turns of speech. If there are contradictions in my text, pay my attention to this, I will rephrase.
I tried to depict a conditional curve of the player’s interest. The degree of curvature is a separate topic for discussion, but this curve only shows that the player’s interest is nonlinear, which in my opinion is true.
On the X-axis, the gradation is Tir.
There is a gradation of “points of interest” on the Y axis.
The blue square shows the area of restrictions of FP.
The yellow square shows the area of content restrictions (the theoretical existence of items of maximum tir). The areas of these squares can be conditionally equated to the feeling of the player’s reward.
The only difference between the graph on the right and the graph on the left is the maximum limit of the tir, 22 instead of 30.
By reducing the theoretically maximum possible tir by ~26%, we got a doubling of the effect of the FP limit on the gameplay, turning it from a hindrance to achieve the goal into a tool to achieve the goal
In other words, in both cases, when crafting, the player receives the same number of points of interest (8000), but the value of these points is different, since in the first case the limit is 27,000, and in the second 10,600.
In the first case, we get 30% of the possible points due to crafting.
In the second case, we get 75% of the possible points due to crafting.
I do not pretend to the accuracy of proportions, I threw this concept only for visual display.
This is without taking into account the possibility of obtaining legendary items in the game. If we multiply the possible tir items by the possible variants of the legendary potential, I think that the maximum limit of the player’s interest in this coordinate system can easily overcome the 300,000 mark. Thus changing the proportions of the feelings of being awarded.
On my part I like the current system and agree with what @Heavy stated earlier.
If you create a definitive ceiling, everybody will feel forced to reach that ceiling. For me it’s the opposite with the current system. I know about the odds of getting a t28 item and thus I also know that it is not reasonable to actively farm for it. But I like that there might be a lucky drop to get such an item. I really feel excited whenever I find an item with 3 exalted affixes. Never found one with 4. But that’s ok. They are out there. Some day I might see one and post it on reddit to become famous .
I’m also with @darkdeal regarding his argument for the always moving goalposts.
If there is a maximum tier of gear obtainable people will always want to obtain it, regardless of how practical that is and when they learn that it’s “improbable within the lifetime of the universe” some of them will feel deceived. You could make t100 gear possible and people would want it.
Are you serious? Are you somehow personally, or financially, vested in LE’s interests? Why would you include items, or tiers of items, in a game, and then make all but virtually impossible to ever obtain? And you’re perfectly fine with that? It’s not even like it’s a matter of time investment either (as would be with the case of severe diminishing returns on XP gain or the like), where you can just grind and grind, knowing that time is the only gate to obtaining the prize.
And no, I realize these items aren’t required. But, as I said, I personally dislike shelving a character with ‘good enough’ gear. These games are about the hunt, and the grind, and min/maxing. We could all beat the game without LP, and we’ve all beaten it without Exalted items as well. I guess, using your logic, LE should just remove those, or make them impossible to obtain since they aren’t necessary, right?
In a genre that’s about obtaining items and upgrades, it makes no sense to have those types of cockblocks. And that is what annoys me. Not being unable to finish the game without them, but that they are there, but you just can’t get them… well, have no reasonable chance in hell of getting them, I should say. I’ve just never seen a game do that, especially in this genre.
It’s just math. An item dropped rolls for the affixes. It has a % chance that a T5 will become a T6 (I don’t remember what that % is). If it actually succeeds on that roll, it then rolls to see if it upgrades to a T7. So even if it were like rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die twice in a row, it isn’t THAT common. Now do that for all 4 affixes on the item. The way the formula works in this game, the odds of that item dropping is astronomical.
It has nothing to do with whatever conspiracy theory you have cooked up in your head.
*insert Michael Jordan “stop it! get some help” meme here.
I’m sorry to derail this topic even more but this is actually really interesting to me and I think it’s a valuable discussion. I might just be completely desensitized to this from playing way to much D2 and I’d like to get some more information on it if you’re up for it. So I’d like to try and draw some parallels and find out where the line is for you.
For the purposes of this comparison, I’d like to pretend we are playing D2 in offline mode or at least just solo so we don’t have trading. Let’s take a look at the process of getting a perfect Last Wish runeword from D2. It is super not necessary to beat the game and is more of a show off piece than anything. It has an astronomical cost of Jah + Mal + Jah + Sur + Jah + Ber. most people who play D2 don’t play enough to ever find a Mal, let alone the rarer Sur, let alone the even rarer Ber, let alone the crazy wtf rarer 3 Jah runes. Then we also have to find a base for the item, a perfect 6os 15% ED Phase Blade should do nicely (I don’t think PBs can get enhanced durability because they are indestructible but it’s been a while). Luckily because we aren’t accepting anything other than perfect, this piece is actually reusable if we are ok destroying the runes inside. Then we have to get perfect rolls on the item itself. Because the chance of hitting any one spot in the range is equal, you have a 1/46 chance (2.17%) for the ED roll and a 1/11 (9.1%) for the CB. This is a 1/506 (0.198%) chance of getting a perfect roll on the unbelievably expensive item you’ve just created.
So I do want to point out that there are several differences in this system and getting that perfect T28 exalted item because it just has to drop as is right out of the gate. You can re-roll the mods on it though so you have a few cracks at the perfect version which is nice. Both of these hypothetical items are non-deterministic to find. You might play either game for a decade and never get them.
This isn’t an attempt to refute your points at all. I would like your opinion if these are similar cases or if they are different in the item acquisition flow. If they are, what is the key property that makes them different and why?
So I didn’t play D2 back in the day, and have a very small amount of hours in it now, but as you described it, let’s break down a few things and maybe we can figure out why they feel so different.
If you were to really really try to get the Last Wish runeword from D2, and not have it roll perfectly, how reasonable is that? If someone played for thousands of hours, do they at least have a shot at making one at some point? Are there people out there that actually have a perfectly rolled Last Wish that we can point to and say “Wow, they’re so super lucky to have that. I didn’t get so lucky, but at least there’s a chance!”.
If the answer to either of those is ‘yes’ then that’s a distinct difference with that system vs. both the exalted and the LP system. There is no rational chance that anyone will ever own a 4LP Ravenous Void, and that has nothing to do with how well it rolls. There is probably no rational chance that anyone will ever own a T28 exalted of any type, nevermind that it’s on a base the player wants with the right affixes and perfectly rolled. And since there’s no rational shot that either of those will happen, we can’t even fathom the odds of having both of those items and smashing them together. I think the overall point of this discussion, to me, is that the system is so chock full of of absurdly astronomical drop rates, that even getting an item that is multiple steps away from resembling perfect is effectively impossible for everyone who will ever play the game in totality, and that just isn’t fun, exciting, or compelling to players who like to chase after the kind of loot that makes a player jump out of their chair in excitement because OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT ACTUALLY DROPPED. We can’t even get jealous over the random person on Reddit who got it because the numbers are so ridiculous that it’s impossible for them as well.
D2 offline, it is also quite easy to setup better loot chance, so any player can setup it to match with the time he can invest in the game.
When you play 2h/week, such drop rate become even more ridiculous compared to player who can spend 8h/day…
I had a lot of fun with LE, until it become really to much time consuming and no more rewarding.
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