I Don't See Why Forging Potential Exists

Feedback and Suggestions
124

Well we’d have to take sealing out because it’s not possible. I know the general math behind the crafting system, and while any one session could go either way due to variance, over time it will always skew much in favor of the new crafting system. Just using high FP bases alone gives the new system a huge edge, and since exalted have more FP, that would be what I want anyways.

Anecdotally, on stream today I ‘accidentally’ created a tier 20 that I didn’t even want. I was trying to make a fractured crown but kept proccing crit successes. It’s so common that I predicted it would happen and that the craft I want would be ruined (due to the crit adding an affix to what I wanted to seal). It wasn’t even an exalted item, just good FP and a decent (not even especially good) numbers of tiers on it. I also had an exalted with so much FP that I was almost guaranteed to get whatever I wanted. I think that one ended at tier 22 and still had FP left.

2 Likes
125

The question is also if those items actually have the bonuses you would want or would constitute an upgrade from what you already had. I guess the other question would also be how long you actually have to grind for the materials. Now that monolith exists, it could be less overall time past a certain point, but I haven’t actually looked into that versus what it was before.

126

Yeah, so this problem also exists in the old system, and since itemization hasn’t really changed, the odds of being in this scenario are effectively the same. What isn’t the same are the options we have at our disposal. Here’s how it plays out:

Old System

  • Option 1 - Accept the bad affix(es) and craft around them. Guaranteed to have undesirable affixes
  • Option 2 - Use Rune of Removal. Adds instability. Chooses affix at random, so worse odds the more affixes are on the item. Effectively ruins an item if it selects the wrong affix

New System

  • Option 1 - Accept the bad affix(es). Same as old
  • Option 2 - Use Rune of Removal. Costs FP, otherwise same as old except removed affix returns as many shards as there were tiers on the affix. Not helpful for this scenario, but super powerful for affix farming.
  • Option 3 - Use Glyph of Chaos. Costs FP. Guarantees we target the right affix, but doesn’t guarantee we get the right stat. Also upgrades the affix by 1 tier.
  • Option 4 - Use Glyph of despair. Costs FP. Targets the right affix. If successful, guarantees an open slot. If fails, upgrades the affix by 1 tier.

In the old system, removing an affix was awful. Most of the time it failed the first time and made the item worthless.

In the new system, I basically never use removal because I have much better options. On items that could be good but need a better stat on an affix, I’ll throw some chaos at it and see what happens. This makes those items valuable when they weren’t valuable before, because removal would cost so much that it wasn’t worth even trying, but chaos also upgrades the affix, so it’s not wasted FP it it works. If it doesn’t, I wasn’t gonna use that item anyways, so there’s not really a loss since chaos drop like candy. These are all items that I know my odds aren’t very good on, but by taking shots I’m increasing the pool of usable items. On high value items that I want the best chance possible, I use depair. If the affix is tier 1 or 2, I have a very high chance of succeeding on the first shot. This immediately opens up the slot for me. If it fails, the affix will upgrade a tier and I can try again until I hit tier 5, which cannot be sealed. In this way, despair lets me target remove an affix without risking the other affixes, and usually has a higher chance than removal, while also giving me multiple shots at it when it fails, which removal doesn’t.

So that’s a whole lot to say the new system is vastly superior to the old when it comes to removing unwanted affixes.

6 Likes
127

The old system was simple… find a base with afixes you need and make it better. You mostly worked with blue items. With 2T3 mods on a blue item yoou had a good chance to get a 4T5 item.
I NEVER had the need to remove anything. With the new System I have far more Slots in the slot machine called crafting then before. To me it was easier to craft good items by quatermile and you’ve been able to craft a 4T5 item out of a white base.

The new crafting system is far less potent then the old one from my point of view and when I look at my results I see my view proofed. I craftem a few good items with the new system but i crafted a ton of perfect 4T5 with perfect base in the old system.

The new system is just more useless options that mimic evolution but the result is worse then before. At least that’s my experience.

2 Likes
128

You’re welcome to think this, but it sounds like a strategy issue to me. If you don’t like it because you can’t craft on whites so easily, well, that’s part of the point.

2 Likes
129

I certainly don’t have the time or materials to test but it would be interesting to see the FP usage rates of taking rare or exalted items, doing 2 remove affixes and then putting what you want on it and try to get those to T4 or T5. Then compare the FP usage to just upgrading what is there. There certainly would be a difference because your adding 2 extra steps that cost FP. Question is how much of a difference. Is that method heavily weighted towards failure to keep it from being a viable crafting method? It should be possible to get some successes that way I would think if the weighting is not skewed to discourage it.

1 Like
130

I don’t know if you realize it but you’re pointing out an issue with systems like these in general, and that is that what is optimal to do with them in order not to waste your time and effort to acquire a particular item is ambiguous. This is what is usually referred to as an “information deficit.” Fighting games are notorious for this because there’s a lot of things going on that you can’t know right away and that the game doesn’t tell you that are implied by the meta and context. And a lot of times those things are things you need to know to even begin to be competitive at the game.

In this case, what item you should even start with to craft a particular theoretical item you want is unclear and only knowable from potentially hundreds or thousands of hours of testing that inevitably has to be outsourced to the community. It goes without saying that if a player can’t pick up a game and learn within a reasonably short amount of time what to do to accomplish their goals, the game isn’t doing a great job of informing the player.

1 Like
131

Outside of high level min/maxing, I think you’re exaggerating here. Basic knowledge of what stats you want and how crafting works is going to cover most people in most cases just fine. Like, you don’t need thousands of hours of testing to learn or infer that the closer an item already is to what you want, the easier it is to craft it into what you want, and that’s more than enough to make good crafting decisions.

Yes, but all goals are not created equal. If the game isn’t giving the player enough information to play through a reasonable amount of the content, then yeah, there may be an information deficit that needs to be addressed. But that doesn’t apply if the goal is “absolutely max out my character with the best possible items”.

132

End game items are primarily what you spend time trying to acquire from a crafting system, else you would simply level past whatever it was you were investing your real time and energy into, wasting it. Yes, I’m talking about end game item crafting. That’s what most of the item crafting in these games consists of. I don’t think that was in dispute.

All goals are certainly created equal though, if the player is motivated to pursue them. What it is or if one thinks they ought to is irrelevant. And players need to be able to make decisions that save them the hassle of doing things over again. If we’re talking about an ARPG that could easily demand 5, 10, 20 hours - or more - to acquire a particular item with the optimal stats on it, that time adds up quickly. This is a fundamental and core mechanic; The game should be at least as good at teaching you how to take advantage of it as any other core mechanic like movement, dealing damage, etc. Consider: This is your game; This is what you’re inviting the player to do. They have builds and stats and abilities to worry about. What kind of item is good to craft on shouldn’t be the slightest bit ambiguous, especially if you’re requiring them to do it properly in order to validate if the things that drop for them are valid upgrades or not.

Consider that it also adds no valuable experience or entertainment value for it to be ambiguous, except to confuse and frustrate the player. In general, the process taking an indeterminate amount of time is the goal, in order to pad playtime. But then on top of that, you’re making it difficult to know where to start without community intervention. This isn’t even to mention how future patches and changes to that system will have to be re-investigated.

Trust me when I say that this is stuff that nearly nobody who just wants to enjoy a videogame wants to deal with, and is one of several unnecessary barriers to entry for people who might have otherwise wanted to play ARPGs. That’s why I’m passionate about advocating for better content that doesn’t have these types of issues.

(Edit: Typo / Added an additional thought to paragraph 2)

133

There is actually one thing I want to take on in regards to this as a separate issue: You keep hearing in defense of having this crafting system, or indeed any crafting system in an ARPG, that it doesn’t exist for players to do certain things with it, such as max out their gear. In other words, it’s okay if the system doesn’t make sense or wastes people’s time because they’re not supposed to want to use it when it starts to not make sense and waste people’s time.

I’ve remarked on this a couple of times but it bears pointing out as this keeps coming up, that this is wholly and entirely irrelevant. What anyone thinks the crafting system is for or what the player ought to want doesn’t have any bearing on what players are actually motivated to do.

If, for instance, players are motivated by random loot to keep grinding until they get the best-in-slot items with the best stats on them, how I myself or anyone else happens to feel about that doesn’t make any difference. It’s not going to change the fact that this is what the game is training them to do. The evidence is undeniable: This is invariably what people spend hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to accomplish in these types of games.

If the crafting system that they use during that process is ambiguous and requires a massive amount of testing and data to even know how to use optimally during that process, then that is a problem that is artificially extending the amount of time it takes players to accomplish those goals. That’s what it’s doing regardless of how we feel about it.

I realize it’s hard to be objective about these things; Nobody likes to hear that something they enjoy is flawed or might be bad for them in some way. The same applies to me: I enjoy ARPG’s with crafting systems. But part of good critique is setting that aside in order to assess quality and ask ourselves if the content we’re getting could be better.

And it’s important to do this because it will keep our hobby going. If we don’t have some sense of quality, we can’t demand better content in the future that will inspire new titles and attract new players. I don’t want a world where people only play Fortnite and mobile games. That’s why I’m passionate about critiquing ARPGs and RPGs in general.

(Edit: Spelling)

3 Likes
134

Saying Nearly nobody is a very neat way of completely invalidating the opinion of the people whom you happen to disagree with.

It is totally reasonable to desire a system that guides the hand of the player, without a particularly steep learning curve.
However, I don’t think it is fair to assume that your opinion is universally shared or even prevalent.

Besides, how few barriers of entry should there be?
I am curious as to what your ideal system would be.
A system that is completely and perfectly straightforward has no room for creativity, if the best way of crafting something is obvious there is no decision to be made.

If I come across a puzzle, its design did not artificially pad out the game time by obfuscating the solution. In the same way, figuring out how crafting systems work and the best ways of using their tools to their fullest potential can also be a meaningful gameplay experience.
This line of reasoning puts the crafting system as something that is not part of the gameplay experience, strictly a tool that just funnels players from one gear piece to the next provided that they invested the prerequisite amount of time.

1 Like
135

I think you’ve misunderstood the spirit from which that statement was made. This wasn’t an appeal to majoritarianism or concensus. I was merely pointing to a well understood fact, and that is that interest in ARPG’s isn’t increasing alongside other formats of games that have been becoming more popular recently. This is a fact that I believe need not be the case.

As to how few barriers of entry should there be or what would the ideal system be, that is an interesting question. Personally I think there should be as few as necessary. I don’t dislike the crafting systems from games like Diablo 2 or World of Warcraft, but both of those are opaque in their own ways. If we’re talking about ideals though, I more lean on the side of crafting mattering very little except as a way to acquire specific items for certain builds. I think it’s more ethical, if nothing else, that things be straightforward and progress be fairly linear. There’s plenty of other ways to challenge the player besides random loot and crafting failure.

So, to your second objection, that is actually an interesting way of framing the discussion. Let me ask you this in this way: Is a puzzle that you have to farm out to tens or hundreds of other players to solve in a spreadsheet really a puzzle? Indeed, is it a puzzle for that player individually? I recall specifically raising this in the previous post you cited, that making a system that is this internally ambiguous doesn’t add any meaningful experiences or entertainment value, other than to confuse and frustrate the player. It also has to do with the nature of what it is you’re doing; Whereas with the interactions of different abilities, you might produce unexpected and interesting outcomes, with crafting you might be wasting your time and never even know it.

See, a puzzle is something you can solve, typically on your own. You have all the pieces that you need, and it’s on you to solve it. When you arrive at the solution you go “Ah-ha!” because you put the pieces together in the correct order to find it. Making it impossible to know how you should act without widespread community intervention (and then the player looking it up,) isn’t so much a puzzle as just a conundrum - One sufficiently confusing and indiscernible that I don’t think it is appropriate or serves any purpose to present the player with in the first place.

(Edit: Grammar / Clarification / Spelling / Additional thought at the end of paragraph 3)

136

As I previously pointed out, this makes crafting not a meaningful game mechaninc, but merely a tool that carries the players from one mechanic to another. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, but it is not what I personally would enjoy. I should say that I do not think that this is necessarily more ethical than the alternative, but this is not really a discussion I am inclined to engage in, so I propose that we agree to disagree on this matter.

With regards of the discussion of puzzle, I used the term puzzle in a very loose sense. When I say puzzle I mean puzzle in the same way Zachtronic games are puzzles. You are asked to complete a complex task with a set of tools, which you need to learn and master. In these games there are different degrees of suceess, getting a solution is an option, but you can also challenge yourself to getting the most optimized solution either in terms of time or resources. Sometimes this implies creating spreadsheets and such, but these games are not worse for it. In these games it is rare that you land on the solution to the problem, what you get is a solution that you are satisfied with.

In the same way, in a sufficiently complex crafting system, there is the first challenge of being able to craft the item in the first place.
But then there is also the additional challenge of making it in the most efficient way possible, or maximizing the chances of success, or improving the outcome.
In most cases different items are going to be similar enough that a lot of what has been learned can be carried over, but still require some ad-hoc decision making for the specifics of the item you are trying to create.
But in order for such an experience to happen, the system needs to be not completely straight-forward.
If there were an Item creation wizard that tells you exactly step-by-step how to create every single item there would be no room to problem-solve, you just follow what you are told, and you get your item.

As I mentioned in my previous post, LE is still very young, so its crafting system does not really have the depth that I am describing, and instead heavily relies on RNG.
It is not even a given that this will be the direction the crafting system will go, however I would be my personal choice.

I find this quite hyperbolic, especially when refferring to LE.
But also, what is the problem with relying on community resources?

137

On the contrary - The current system actually lacks the character of a meaningful mechanic, in several respects: First, you cannot know for certain (without assistance) which item is best to start with to achieve the desired final item. Second, there is a permanent indeterminate amount of effort required in order to produce the item from the process. Third, all the equipment you receive in the game must be funnelled through this process before determining if any of it is a valid upgrade in comparison to what you already have. All of this actually serves to make progress non-linear and to create an information deficit, so as to reduce the meaningfulness of both efforts players make and the rewards they receive within the game. Creating a more obvious and direct relationship between crafting and its rewards would only serve to remedy this.

With regards to the puzzle analogy, if you’re not proposing an activity that produces a setup and payoff for the player, then you’re not talking about anything that adds entertainment value. I’d much rather solve a puzzle myself than look up the answer. A big part of what playing games is about are the acts of judgment and problem solving.

No I do not enjoy looking things up. If I have to stop all my forward momentum, stop everything, in order to look something up in a game about fighting monsters and getting cool items from them, then to me that is the game failing to be very good at being that game. I don’t even get any enjoyment from looking up builds until I’ve played the game enough for myself to be satisfied with my own effort. There was a time not that long ago in which this was part of the enjoyment and content of playing the game. Plenty of people still play games that way today.

So let me tell you an interesting anecdote about this. I don’t know if you play trading card games or not, but there was actually a point in time at which publishers started printing previews for upcoming sets that hadn’t been released yet. This was in the mid 00’s, I believe. It took a massive amount of enjoyment and expectation out of those games, because people knew what the good cards were and what the meta was before they ever opened a single pack. The mystery and intrigue of getting a new card or playing against one you hadn’t seen before vanished. Prior to that it was a joyous discovery process everyone went through with their friends, discussing new cards they had found and ways to use them. Really tragic that it went away.

Incidentally, if you remember a time like that, there’s a card game that kind of simulates this called Epic Card Game. It’s a resourceless game and you can shuffle and deal the cards to players randomly and they have what they need to form combos and strategies just from what they are handed. This makes it where nobody can predetermine what their opponent’s strategy is going to be, since what they receive even they can’t know until they play. So you can know the mechanics, but you can’t know how they will be used. Super fun. If you like TCG’s and you haven’t looked into it, very much recommend checking it out.

(Edit: Grammar / Typos / Spelling)

138

And until you’re playing at a very high level where trying to optimize stats makes a difference, it’s not ambiguous. It’s very simple and requires minimal thought and strategy. By that point, you’ve already involved yourself with external sources of min/maxing information because that’s what you do when your goal is to play at the highest levels. At that point, it doesn’t matter what the game has told you (or not) because you are the kind of player who was already going to be strategizing with external sources and research. All of that min/maxing is superfluous - not required to enjoy or even complete the game. The content you can handle with just simpleton level effort to optimize your items is just about everything.

:roll_eyes:

Again, this is pure exaggeration and hyperbole.

For one, what person, where, has ever been hovering over a “Buy Game” button and thought, “Hold on there, does this game tell me everything I might need to know about how to get the best gear possible? If not, NO DEAL.”? I honestly don’t know what you’re on about with saying that end game level crafting concerns not being explained in-game is going to turn people away from playing ARPGs, and I’m not convinced that you do either, because this smells less like a real opinion and more like a gish gallop.

For another, the kind of deep consideration of crafting you’re talking about is absolutely not relevant to somebody “who just wants to enjoy a videogame”. Agonizing over the process of acquiring items with optimal stats is not something that kind of player does. They don’t have any need to and often don’t even have the desire to. Whether or not they can do it doesn’t affect their ability to enjoy the game.

For yet another, the idea of a player who worries about what the best crafting base to create an optimal item from, but is also totally repelled by learning how to make that decision from any source other than the game is just… nonsensical. That isn’t a real person. You’re describing two diametrically opposed attitudes and then combining them into a single entity that could only exist through dissociative identity disorder. …Is that what’s going on here? Are we all just an unwitting audience to an internal struggle between a Hardcore and a Casual gamer occupying the same gray matter?

-

I keep trying to figure out what you think you’re arguing here, but every time I read a new paragraph my bead on the point you’re trying to make blasts off to another planet. You say you’re talking about end game crafting and optimal items that take 20+ hours to acquire, then in the same breath you apply that concern to players who are so casual that they would get lost, confused, and frustrated if they’re faced with “even the slightest bit of ambiguity” (a word you for some reason keep using as a synonym for “decision making”). You talk about the difficulty in being competitive but then equate it someone learning how to play the game at all.

The only position I’m able to distill from these word salads is that you want to be Among The Best but don’t like it if you have to think about how to do it. And that can’t be right, because you also keep dumping on the established solution to that goal - use of the community. So, succinctly, what is your actual point?

3 Likes
139

Well it’s precisely because players are motivated to continue to play past the point at which the unique and novel boss / story content of the game has been exhausted that this becomes an issue. I’ve spent a lot of time here and elsewhere pointing this out. I mentioned in a separate post after I replied to you that it is undeniably the case that what people spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours doing in these games is trying to get the best items at the end of the game. What they should or shouldn’t do, or what the crafting system should or shouldn’t be used for according to anybody is irrelevant. You or I’s opinion on this matters not at all. What truly does matter is what players are actually motivated to do in the game.

If we can’t agree that ambiguity in a core game mechanic that requires community intervention to understand, and then player research to learn how to use without confusing them and wasting their time, then I think I’m satisfied not to agree on that issue.

I would also say it’s not hyperbole at all to say that ARPG’s are not growing at a similar rate of other more prominent games and game formats. Even the most popular ones don’t have a fraction of the players or attention games like Apex Legends and Fortnite are getting these days, let alone mobile games. This is a tragic fact that I think could have been averted and might be reversed someday if ARPG content were to be critiqued and improved, which is why I’ve taken the time to do so here. That’s what the statement you mentioned was speaking to.

You’ve also overlooked one of the reasons I later gave for why this matters, and that is that this is artificially extending the time that is required for players to reach their goals, often without them even realizing it. Put aside the experience in the actual game for a moment: It turns out that people’s time itself is precious. If a mechanic is unnecessarily extending the playtime required to reach player’s goals and isn’t adding any additional unique or interesting interactions to the game, (crafting is merely a pass / fail with a lot of other convolution at the present,) then why would you want to ask players to spend that time doing it when they could be doing something else more entertaining or more meaningful? This is why I point out over and over again like a broken record that grinding is a low quality experience. If we’re doing the same things over again merely to get different results and what we’re doing is mundane and repetitive, why not do less of it? There’s hundreds of games out there we could be playing and having new fun experiences in, if we value our time properly. I believe that if players valued their time more, it would lead to better quality experiences in games and higher quality content. That’s essentially what I’m advocating for.

I’ve made all of this as clear and concise for you as possible. I hope it helps. I do like to go on a little bit, but I try not to anyway.

I will wrap this up by mentioning, you said something earlier in the thread that I very much agreed with, and I think you should consider more deeply when it comes to games and game criticism in general. I don’t think you grasp quite how profound what you said was. It has deep implications worth pondering. That was this:

“Some people seem to want to have a reason to continue playing games long after they’ve stopped actually being fun, and I think that’s really weird.”

This statement might encapsulate my entire philosophy about content quality that I’ve laid out on this forum.

(Edit: Grammar / Typos)

2 Likes
140

Bronco, there’s no point, that is what I concluded a while back so I stopped feeding the troll.

1 Like
141

I’ve been pretty consistently laying out the point. The point is that I disagree with the crafting system, for specific reasons that you two may or may not disagree with.

As for brevity, ideas take time to lay out and discuss. I’ve tried to mostly lay out what’s relevant, with a few anecdotes here or there. Enjoyed speaking with you guys.

142

In english im assuming you mean there is no ingame resource to tell you what bases are good which is incorrect, you have an ingame loot filter which has a list of all Bases and their implicits and level requirements

You dont need to know shit, you only need to know ‘I want a 1h Axe with base crit’ and the game tells you and then you adjust your filter accordingly and about 10 minutes later you find a T1-T4 base with prefixes you want with 4% base crit and all your item hunting for that axe is probably done which is actually the biggest issue with a loot hunting game - getting a REALLY good (not perfect) item takes almost no time and getting a perfect item is virtually impossible

So theres no point to any of it, just craft T5’s and be done, theres no way an extra 20% increased damage matters much anyway with the boss dynamic dmg reduction its mostly meaningless anyway

3 Likes
143

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.

(Edit: Added thought to the end)