I’ll give you extremely thinly veiled at best.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Ok, thanks for the feedback.
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You bet. Enjoyed speaking with you.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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Out of curiosity, why do you think that you haven’t? Aren’t all arpgs (and games in general probably) skinner boxes in that you do a thing (kill mobs) repetitively for a reward (phat loot in the case of arpgs)? Is it possible for an arpg to not be a glorified skinner box given how the genre works?
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Had to do a google search since I’ve never heard the term, but I found this for a definition of Skinner box: “A Skinner Box is a often small chamber that is used to conduct operant conditioning research with animals. Within the chamber, there is usually a lever (for rats) or a key (for pigeons) that an individual animal can operate to obtain a food or water within the chamber as a reinforcer”. Assuming that, within this context, skinner box is referring to something that encourage or rewards repetitive behavior, aren’t all games skinner boxes? I’d say sure, some are better at hiding it though.
All aRPGs are skinner boxes, they are fundamentally just complex gambling games but at the end of the day the end result of that slot machine/card game/boss drop - you basically can only slightly influence or cant at all
PoE even has the perfect analogy - ‘This boss costs you 1 exalt to try…but you have a 2% chance of winning 50ex…want to play?’ ok…ill do 5…no drop, Ill do 8 more … no drop
Ok im 13ex down, I made 40c back. 5 more and thats it. Oh I found the Amulet on run #16, so now ive made around 20ex back. What should I do? I know ill buy more boss fragments surely ill get another in 20 more tries. No you dont back to having no currency until I ‘work’ it back in maps for a few days until I can gamble again - this is probably someones life at a casino every week but you get to experience it in PoE from the comfort of your own PC, while also having the OPTION of spending endless cash on MTX to look better while doing it
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I also did some research and it is less clear if you Google “skinner box games”. The definitions are very different and go from “contain random choice” to “conditioning for financial spending”.
The term is also often associated with shady mobile game practices or MMOs. So depending on the underlying understanding of skinner box games, I can see why Mike does not want to be put in the same “box” as those games.
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That was precisely my point and why Mike’s denial that LE is a skinner box. I mean, I don’t for one second think that they’ve done anything maliciously (they aren’t EA or Activision after all), but its a bit difficult to get away from the basics of the genre.
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Hot take: Society is a skinner box… sending people to work every day instead of letting them play last epoch like they want to…
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and, as usual, he demonstrates his detachment from the experience of “average” players. that kind of crafting takes resources that i haven’t accumulated IN TOTAL in many years of playing.
I only bring this up to provide a note of approval that crafting in LE is much more accessible and really needs to stay that way. I know that i’m preaching to the choir, but it’s good to keep that goal plainly in sight.
as for the OPs point, i actually like the FP as a mechanism, but i also agree that we need an “affix sink” as was mentioned by @TehGrief
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A lot has gone on since I checked the thread. Discussion on the skinner box seems to be taking things off track… even if there is operant conditioning going on, often times the reward mechanisms used in games only become a problem when they pose a problem for players.
Like costing them IRL money (a la lootboxes), or conditioning them to endure tasks that inhibit them (reinforcing a long grind which takes time away from their IRL commitments).
All ARPGS I’ve played have an element of RNG drops. Few of them have struck me as truly problematic… maybe PoE is a contender.
Back on the point that FP in LE seems to stand as a roadblock to reach that goal of your desired item, I feel I’ve already said in the thread my general view on having less restrictive systems. While I understand their is motive to not ‘give everything up for free’ to a player and reward genuine achievements and playtime, I think it probably drives more players away to not give them that feeling of freedom. It would be better to create content with its own unique rewards than to inhibit crafting potential on item drops. It gives players a feeling of freedom and creative control on their builds which can be a huge selling point.
Of course, this comes with all my early caveats regarding playtime, and how far I got into the campaign. But I think @SolidMetalKnight does have interesting things to say if you look past the language that people seem to be upset with. Generally I agree with their sentiments here—I think they’re in alignment with all I’ve just said (if I understand them correctly).
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Are we talking about god tier items or any usable end-game item?
Because the problem with POE is that almost all items that are worth using are crafted from whites, and not only the ultra-top-tier ones.
i was referring to god-tier as that was the language used in the original post.
Although i didn’t go attempt to find the original quote by Chris Wilson, i think it’s fair to say that PoE has an extremely significant problem in that they nerf stuff because of what the 10-hours-a-day players are doing, in turn significantly impacting the average player. Generally they just seem to not be that worried about beginners or “average” players.
designing a well balanced crafting system is hard.
back to the OPs original point, i have a lot of sympathy for this point of view:
i have a bazillion affixes, like everyone else, and it seems like a design problem that we all accumulate a bazillion affixes and have nothing to do with them. i really liked the gold sink dungeon idea. not thrilled with the execution, but there are many other forum threads on that subject.
typically the way you would handle that is that some criteria of success would be probability based, i.e. you could potentially burn through crafting material to get the desired outcome. this is essentially what PoE does.
this immediately creates a system where, if RNG is not kind, you are screwed in terms of being able to do something without the game being a ridiculous time sink. it also, to a certain extent, encourages trading. if you need 2000 alts in PoE, you trade for them, you don’t farm them. you then, however, have to farm something to trade. and generally that means more time spent in the game. or less time playing and more time using it as a trading simulator.
to a certain extent that’s ok, UNLESS, it starts blocking off portions of the game from lots of people. the argument has always been, in PoE, that if you want god tier stuff, if you want to do the annoying fucking content hidden behind RNG, you’ll just have to get gud and play a lot.
that’s a valid “design decision”, but that’s also why i’m playing LE instead of PoE (well, technically, i’m playing PoE, but much, MUCH less).
So, again. as a system i think FP is ok. i disagree with the OPs assertion that it shouldn’t be constrained. it should require some amount of time/farming investment to make ridiculous OP gear. it’s just not reasonable that it should be “easy” in any sense of the word. FP creates that constraint, but i’m sympathetic to the argument that it’s a somewhat clumsy way to do it. i find it to be “abrupt”, as does the @RJCA (I think).
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To some extent, I always felt that POE is kept into a somewhat tolerable state by the existence of bots, because someone will have to farm these 2000 alts.
I know that it is arguable weather or not poe is even tolerable in the first place, but, in the interest of going not going too much off topic, lets go back to the main topic at hand.
I wholly agree that there needs to be some sort of shard sink into the game, a while ago I even made a post on it: Add a Shard Sink (Maybe as a dungeon)
Personally, my main problem with the FP system is that all failures are a complete brick, you can never recover from a almost successful craft, you have to start from a new freshly dropped exalted item every time.
The problem for me is that a lot of the failures are not really bad items, they just fall short of being an upgrade for my current character. It is a bit frustrating when getting a decent item still means that you are left with absolutely nothing of utility in your hands.
Writing this, I also realize that this could be really really bad for any future of trading.
The current system leads us to create almost perfect items at an industrial scale, if trading were to be allowed globally, this would mean that almost perfect items are going to be cheap as dirt, which would completely invalidate any early game progression.
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This is the exact point I have been making. Cheap, easy to obtain, perfect leveling items trivialize the experience and can be made for any leveling area desired based on the selected bases. At least one thing EHG got right is to limit the total number of tiers and item levels to equip it.
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Just a comment on the Skinner Box thing. Most skinner box experiments are performed on animals using a task that the animals would not do, nor want to do, otherwise. People, on the other hand, play games for fun. There is a reason to play the game anyway.
Grinding inside of the game could be argued to be a skinner box type of system, but there are a lot of people that quit the games once they start to feel like a job and are no longer fun.
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