Is Complete/Limited Crafting actually a problem?

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8

Because I’m telling you what you already told me.

You wrote six paragraphs complaining about RNG in crafting and one sentence about “innovation”. You didn’t talk about “innovation” in any meaningful way until I disagreed with your complaints about RNG in crafting. That is not how someone behaves when what they want to talk about is “innovation”. It’s how someone behaves when they want to talk about RNG in crafting.

You have no interest in “innovation”. You’re just putting makeup (“iNnOvAtiOn”) on a pig (“I want crafting to be an item editor”) because you think nobody will notice it’s still a pig.

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9

That’s really no different than people wanting to put “challenging and interesting” makeup on the current lottery-ticket crafting/loot system pig, and think that somehow validates that position. Something about goose and ganders, and what’s good for them…

I’m actually confused what innovative would actually entail… Titan Quest/Grim Dawn’s class system? Sacred’s open-world, plus skill/stat system? People claimed Dungeon Siege 1 and 2 were innovative, for a variety of reasons. Hell, didn’t we even used to think using an actual 3d world would be innovative, but that was scrapped because of performance issues, so everything remains isometric top-down. Seems like most things considered ‘innovative’ end up being scrapped, and left behind, while we press forward with the same games, just using different graphics and skill names.

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10

Maybe, but I can only react to your version of that argument, and to that I’d say that you’re being hyperbole. If we’re talking about POE, yeah, spot on. But we’ve got enough control - more, and more broadly, than other crafting systems I’ve experienced - in LE’s crafting that it’s not really accurate to call it “a lottery ticket system”. To me, “lottery ticket system” sounds something more like only being able to reroll the entire item over and over and over.

Well, in this specific case, it’s just being used as a synonym for “Give me an item editor”. But in the more general sense, I agree, I don’t really know what it would entail either. Probably why I’m an engineer and not a designer :sweat_smile:

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Both POE and LE are very much gambling in my opinion, the main difference is what kind of gambling they are.

POE is more similar to a slot-machine. When crafting, you often end up repeating the same steps over and over again, and the chances of getting what you actually want are so miniscule that you sometimes have to try hundreds of times to get a single success.
And in doing so you consume an enormous amount of currency basically for every step of the way.

While, in LE, you get to chose what modifiers you get on your item. However, the success of the crafting is not determined by what modifiers you put on, it entirely depends on weather or not the item bricks before the end of the process.
You have very little control over the FP and it is random enough that you cannot predict if it will succeed. It is not a stretch to say that each base that you try crafting on is essentially a lottery ticket that you are playing in the hope of a lucky success.

As a side-note:

Are we talking about POE here? because crafting in POE has not been like this in years (If you ignore the latest patch - the latest round of nerfs has made this statement much more true ).

12

My original example was adding in a bit of both since having complete crafting trivializes picking up gear. lYet, the current and older iterations of crafting still leave players wanting. Now I don’t know where the bar/line is but I just know that something more could be done that doesn’t uproot what we already have.

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You have an insane amount of control of the FP that you use while crafting.

Crafts on earlier tiers skew lower, you can hold off on doing the T5 craft to hope to critically succeed it up, you can use despair glyphs instead of runes of removal, exalted and high tier rares drop with much higher base FP.

There are so many helping systems rewarding people who understand and use the crafting system that by endgame a completed craft can have upwards of 30+ FP remaining.

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14

The randomness is there to stop everyone from getting easy t20s and thus so that we actually have a reason to pick up loot. Without the looting one of the factors of the core loop is lost.

And if it isn’t random but instead has heavy affix shard costs for later gear, then it would become annoying to even get middle tier gear because of the time requirement.

As it stands you can get 2 or so t5 affixes per gear slot without much grinding.

15

Uhh…

Yes? lol.

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You seem to have misunderstood.
When I said that poe crafting has not been like this in years I was referring to the part about rerolling the entire item over and over, not the lottery ticket thing.

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I only pick up loot with affixes I want to get off of them, or the rare chance I get a good base with 2 or 3 T3+ runes that are useful for me. I’d wager over 99.5% of loot drops in this game are either filtered out, or don’t get picked up at all. This would be an interesting statistic to see.

The entire thing is just one big RNG simulator after another, with FP being marginally better than the old fracture system, and still an RNG simulator with minimal control on how much FP is consumed in your craft. I’ve had FP35+ exalteds brick after 2 or 3 crafts, and FP5 items get 5+ crafts out of that last tiny bit. It’s a crap-shoot, and doesn’t feel good at all. I’m never excited about crafting, but always more frustrated with having spent my ultra rare +skill/class runes and bricking at T2/3 on the other 3 slots, along with getting crappy roll ranges to boot.

18

Yep, I did misunderstand.

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That’s why I figure that by just adding more non-rng mechanics to the crafting it would help in some way. Yet, everyone thinks it just to have some arbitrary gripe but we all feel that something could be done. What ever innovation would be I just dont know what else it could look be.

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I ask again, is have some form of innovation that involves some form of non-rng really a problem and if it is why is it a problem when the new system is moving towards it..
.

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The current system already has non-RNG components to it.

Making a new account to support your own argument is kinda scummy mate.

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22

Unfortunatly, EHG do not want players to be able to archieve their goals for their characters. It is true that having a non RNG crafting system would make this game better.

Let’s start on the very first thing which is balance. Does having T20 items (and these is not perfect items as some people might want to say they are, to be perfect they’d need to be perfectly rolled withing their range) breaks the game? The answer is no and the reason is simple. Content difficulty is infinitely scalable and with scaling comes better rewards (more on that later). The early mapping would be easier sure, but once we enter empowered monoliths and go down let’s say 150 corruption, most people even in T20 gear are going to be struggling.

Now, why would full control over crafting be good? Let’s start with perception. The perception of a player over what is happening shapes his enjoyment of the game. If a player feels he is not progressing his build because he just can’t find bases that are good to craft, that is, bases with very high affixes that he needs to the point that essencially he needs to find nearly “perfect” pieces (and I use quotation marks because perfect includes perfect rolls), then the player just feels his time is wasted, his build is not going anywhere and therefore he won’t have fun leading him to quit the game since the point of playing games is to have fun.

Moving on from the perception issue and into a more mechanical issue, LE has no gear direction. It seems that the idea of LE gearing system is to maybe find a random usable piece and craft it to be as good as possible leading itemisation to essencial not have a goal but rather be this transient mismatch of things that barely work when put together and that are not really what any sensible person would do.

In a well developed crafting system, you want to have natural progression points. First you aim to reach a very specific state, then you aim for upgrading to the next state and then you reach a point where upgrading is no longer something that realistically happen, it is instead something that is so hard to get that upgrading is aspirational content.

So how does removing RNG archieves this? Well, that is actually rather simple. At first your goal is to get T20 items on the right bases. That is the very starting point for your character upgrades. Once your character has T20 gear in all slots and they are the base you want them to be, then you reached the first stage of a geared character.

So now it time to move on to better gear. Now you need to look for that exalted gear with T6 and T7 mods on them and probably gamble a little bit to remove any mods you don’t want so you can craft on it. This is also bearing in mind that the item needs to be the right base. Once you got the item with let’s say a T7 on the right base and you managed to remove the unwanted affixes which was RNG, now you craft it to T22. Finding one T22 piece might not be that hard, you may in fact be lucky to get a single T22 before you finish getting everything to T20 considering class specific shards are hard to come by. Still that is one piece, upgrading every single piece to T22 and don’t forget, in the correct base is going to take a long while, however it is definitly archievable.

Now that you have all your T22 gear, you’ve reached what is called build completion. From here you have 2 choices. You either swap builds to try something different or you keep going for aspirational gear. But what is aspirational gear you ask? Well, anything T23+ is aspirational. You can have at best a T30 item. You also have the combination of uniques with rares which is very much aspirational gear since you are looking to bring the right modifiers or at least the better modifier if you don’t have an items that can take 4 affixes potential.

As you can see, doing it like that makes the players have more fun as their perception of gear is positive. It also makes for a sensible upgrade path as opposed to having a mixmatch of things that shouldn’t really be there but they are because essencially you can never what you want just because of RNG.

Before you say this is bad, there is an ARPG that gives player full control over crafting. Chronicon does this and it is by far the best crafting system ever developed in an ARPG. Their crafting system in universally praised by how good it is and all their crafting system does is give you full control over how you craft your items. There is a tiny bit of RNG in it but it is completly trivial that only makes you spend a bit more currency (and I do mean a bit, not a lot) early on to lock in the affixes you want in place. So we know a fully controlable crafting system works and it’s praised by everyone who played the game as the better crafting system in an ARPG. There are no escuses to justify RNG crafting systems anymore. RNG systems exist for one purpose, and that is to make the good players who have no life get all they want and wallow in a sense of superiority to everyone else who can’t. That is not a postive system to have in a game.

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23

How can you “ask again”, when this is your first thread? Multiple accounts??

Also your question is not very concrete. Nobody is against innovation. But I don’t get your point.

What is it you want to fix? What’s the concrete issue you have with the current system?

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24

ARPGs revolve around the hunt for loot, not the gradual accumulation of crafting materials. Crafting is a supplement to the item hunt, not a replacement. That player chose the wrong game genre if they don’t like how that works.

“I went to a pool party and don’t like that I got wet, so I took my ball and went home” is not a valid complaint.

It doesn’t matter that “everyone who plays Chronicon” praises its crafting system when “everyone” is approximately “nobody”. Holding up a game that nobody plays as a paragon of game systems design is an extremely weak argument.

-

As with many others, you may have written 10 paragraphs but the only thing you communicated was “I want an item editor”.

EHG has been very clear that they are not going to give you an item editor. It’s time to stop asking for it.

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25

Talk about being disingenuous. You are ignoring the fact that you are still hunting for exalted items on the right bases. You are ignoring the fact that you are still looking for unique items especially with good rolls and legendary potential and even more ignorant is the fact that you are saying that ARPGs don’t revolve about hunting for crafting materials which news flash for you, most of them are because without crafting materials, you cannot craft and crafting is still the way to get the best gear.

These nobodies include very well known streamers and top players of ARPGs including those you may potentially watch. Just to give a name I know for sure, ZiggyD but there are more.

The argument is by no means weak, you are just the are just the kind of person that rather than actually having an argument of your own why the current system is better, just attack someone else’s argument with completly disingenuous things in order to try and make it look like it’s not valid. Indeed the strategy of the weak who cannot even defend as to why you’d think that the current system is better. Because you know it isn’t and you can’t argue that with any level of credibility.

No, we asked for a way to make crafting something that is actually useful instead of a tool that beneficts only the top 1% of the player base which unlike you make it sound, it’s actually rather reasonable.

EHG maybe have stated that they do not wish to go in that direction but there is an important thing you are missing here. EHG has to do something to sufficinetly distinguish itself from the competition or they will never grow. This is not me saying they won’t be viable in the long term, just that they will not grow and be able to take their game and their company to the next level.

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Who says they have to grow and by how much is not up to the player base to decide. EHG has a very targeted plan on incremental scaled growth that succeeds in the long term despite what flaws we look at with ruby-colored glasses. Developers will only be able to satisfy so many groups before it costs too much to keep the core identity intact. It is the spiky growth and falls that doom so many titles that have come before and will be after LE. Each game has to earn the reputation by the methods they choose to engage customer feedback. Some stay some leave, but it is the reluctance to transition that causes that reaction, just because of change.

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27

What dictates the company’s growth is it’s sales. Now it is true that they may not wish to grow, but it is likely that they do want to grow if they want to actually be competition because at the end of the day you got to offer something that isn’t being offered or you need to offer the same but better, otherwise you are just a worse version of what’s out there and that leads to people starting to leave.

Right now we are not at that step, the game has isn’t released but as you talked about identity, what is LE’s identity as an ARPG? What are the things that sets it apart from the rest of the ARPGs?

It has a campaign that no one cares about, we want to get to the eng game cause that’s the fun part. The same is true for all other games like this and on this point it’s never going to change and it could in fact be said that if you like the campaign more than the end game something is very wrong because the end game is where you are supposed to spend most of your time.

Is it their mapping system? It is a little different but it’s not so different and as far as quality goes, it is much worse than PoE.

Is it their crafting system? Well, it’s different than most crafting systems out there for sure, but it does exactly the same as all the other crafting systems where only the top 1% can ever craft good gear and everyone else has to make do with trash gear by comparison. This is a case where you can say the more things change, the more they stay the same and why I say it needs to change into something that is actually different and better.

What is the targeted audience with LE? I think perhaps this is the most important question to ask. Most ARPGs out there are targeted at a hardcore audience. The kind of people who are extremely good and can put 12 to 16 hours a day into the game. Problem is, the people who are not being served are the casual audience which are the larger part of the market. But these are the people who can usually put 2 or 3 hours a day into the game and they are at best average players. Some might be better than average, might even have 6 to 8 hours a day to put in, but they are still limited by their skill to make it further if the content is hard. Unfortunately, LE doesn’t even has a place where it fits. It’s closer to being hardcore with the crafting rules and how easy it is to die and how hard it is to build defenses but at the same time, it is easier than games like PoE for example. However this just shows a lack of direction with the game. It doesn’t knows where it wants to go and is suffering as a result of this lack of identity.

In my opinion and an opinion is worth what it is, it would be better to cater to the casuals because not only they are the larger market but because the competition for the hardcore market is already too fierce and too entrenched. The fact of the matter is, trying to beat PoE at an hardcore game with the hundreds of talented employees they have and they years of game design they already put into place is just not realistic. The only realistic approuch is going for the casual players.