Is Complete/Limited Crafting actually a problem?

Yes, that is why I closed the book, but hey I am being called a liar and someone {WHO DOES NoT kNoW DoINg WhaT I aM?} it shows the toxic nature and I want no part of it. That will not stop me from commenting on posts from ones that have respect and show it to others.

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You mean those numbers that play for usually a week and then quit. How are those numbers that can be counted on? That is the reason we look at retention rates and not at peak players because peak players don’t actually mean much unless they actually stick around.

While PoE may have gained a few extra hardcore players (and I say few as in percentually) it completly lost it’s casual playerbase. They still come around to try out the new league, look up the best meta build they can and most of them disapear in the spawn of week because nothing really changed for the better, in fact it just keeps getting worse.

Prior to delve what was the hardest thing in game? Elder and it was doable by everyone. some people would say that uber lab was technically harder and it was definitely doable by everyone and the player retention was good.

This idea of pinacle content is more recent and started with the introdution of one of the worst bosses in PoE history, Sirius. That being said, I don’t hate the idea of having some specific bits of the content aimed at the top players so long as the majority of the content is easily doable in an enjoyable manner by the casuals. however that just isn’t the case with PoE. Even mapping isn’t doable by casuals because most casuals barely have the required gear to be able to do high tier yellow maps, let alone red and they can’t farm enough currency to get the gear they need. which is a similar problem to what I described the current crafting methods do in LE. It’s not as bad in LE because you can still do empowered monoliths even with T14 gear, but it just isn’t as fun cause the build will feel like it’s missing so much power and you feel like your build is stagnating on the gear progression side.

It varies a little less when looking at the relevant data or at least what most people consider relevant data. What we want in terms of data is not really the people level when we get to the last month of the league. Those are the “dying” stages of a league when everyone is (hopefully) satisfied with the league and is looking forward to the next one. The more relevant data is the first week, the first month and the second month.

Now, from ascendency or maybe not straight up ascendency but closely after which is when GGG started to give casuals the ability to play and thrive because they wanted to grow as a company (which they did massively, ascendency was the mark of the second growth spike for PoE, the first being when it got on steam), the player base grew but relatively to it’s old player base, the player retention was around the same and back in this time we didn’t even needed to look at the first week retention because you had a very gradual player retention loss of around 33% in the first month for most of the leagues and 50% for the second month after which we get to the dying stages of a league which the population never went bellow 66% except for the very last few days.

With all of the nerfs and difficulty increases starting in delve and moving forwads, in about 2 years, the player retention was in the gutter. Around 50% player loss in the first week was normally what leagues did and 66% on the end of the first month which was the stage of very end of the life of a league previously. There was 2 leagues that were an exception for this in 2020 and it was because of the covid lockdown. Game isnb’t good but people were suddenly locked a home with nothing to do even if it’s bad, they had nothing better to do. Past those 2 leagues it normalised again.

I’m not sure where you got that from or how to read that properly without a frame of reference, what I did was look at steam charts and go league by league and see what was the percentual player loss compared to the peak of the league at 1 week, 1 month and 2 months and the numbers I said were accurate. I had a need top gather this data before because as I said previously, back when I naively thought GGG still cared I presented the data and explained why it was happening.

Other games don’t allow this happen so I’m not sure what to say if this is actually something supposed to be hard to handle. it may be that my experience is coloured by that fact that other games are coded to not allow it but it may be a hard thing to code or it may just be hard to code in the way LE is coded. Regardless it should be possible but the main point remains. Things that end up only really being used as autocasts should either not be allowed by the coding of the game or accepted fully and simply be made instant casts. Either cases removes the clunkyness.

That has been one major complain for years and they gave you ways to automate flasks. it took them far too long and I don’t think the solution is perfect, they should have made utility flasks not flasks but an item you wear and it just permanently grants the bonus, but that’s just my opinion. Regardless, even PoE recognised the problem to an extent and addressed it if not in the best possible way.

What you are failing to take into account is that my filter is not important for the discussion, only the amount of crafting potential items have. You could say that in a few drops I might not find many so it’s not a large enough sample, but after playing many hours and getting several drops, the chances that it was bad luck is very unlikely. But to top that off, when I start monoliths I don’t have the filters at that restriction level, normally they are at 5 tiers of affixes I want until I cap the resistances, then I bump it to 7 tiers of affixes which is not a big bump. I did forget but I also always leave a filte to show any drops with 16 tiers of affixes or more regardless of what affixes they are cause it’s a case that it might be good with chaos and luck, but it never happened to get anything of those either which are extremely rare drops anyway.

Items just don’t have enough crafting potential to realistically get into T16+ (assuming they are not exalted items) and the odds of making something T20 is nearly impossible. At least for a casual. I still stand by that T20 is the starting place, not the end. You have exalted items, you have aspirational gear. You cannot define T20 as being the end of growth, that would make everything that exists after wasted development time because no one (or almost no one) will get them.

After catching up, I think for me I would like to see the Dev’s create a more defined gear floor than ceiling. When making this I just wanted to state my feelings on a game I enjoy but couldn’t fully say what my problem was and how to give the best feed back to the Dev’s. After reading the back and forth I personally feel the current system while nice and mostly functional. Does not have defined points for players to clearly see. Personally unoptimized T20 gear should not cost the player as since T14-20 is the starting floor. Anything that is not removal should cost potential since affixes have rarity.

I say this because there are a lot of unique items that drop that just carry you through the game. Mono’s have farms that can also give you what you want with a bit of luck. So I asks is there a defined floor? If there is how does the current system show that?

As I see it gear floats around having rare items with most of what you want with some having potential to be crafted with runes and glyphs. I hope to gain greater understanding since gear is the foundation of the game and directly affects the player’s enjoyment with the content.

@Elhazzared Trasochi has given us the maximum FP items can have, just thought you’d want to know.

Cool, but that would be the theorical maximum.

Corruption plays a part in the range of min-max FP an item can have, or at least it would seem to acording to my observations from playing the game. So while you can have a rare with 44 FP, at 100 corruption you’re not going to get that, you’re going to get around half of that. At least at 100 corruption my items used to be on the lower 20s and on 115 corruption it was getting to 24 max. But that’s just my observation.

It really doesn’t, the devs have confirmed as much. It has an indirect effect by increasing the chance for an item to be a rare/exalted which will have higher FP. But an exalted dropped in a lvl 100 zone will have the same FP distribution range as an exalted dropped in a corruption 1,000 zone.

If you don’t want to believe me, fair enough, but I’d have assumed you’d have believed the devs. If you don’t want to believe the devs (you know, the ones with access to the code which you don’t) then I’ll have a serious think about blocking you since you’re obviously full of ####.

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Well, put it like this. The mechanics may be X or may supposedly work like X. But every single time you play it works like Y for you. What do you think at that point? Because for me, I’ve never, not once, not a single time seen a rare drop with higher than 23 FP at 100 corruption and never higher than 24 at 115 corruption.

Now couple that with a couple youtube or rare streams I’ve seen in much higher corruption where the drops were consistenly higher FP than that.

Now I ask you again, what am I supposed to think? Am I supposed to simply assume I have the worst luck in the world? But even so at some point it should break through bad luck. I’m not even talking about it evening out but rather just give 1 single drop that breaks the rule.

The correct thing to think is that what you have casually observed as an individual is irrelevant, and that the people who wrote the code know more about what it does than you do.

You are one person with a singular, extremely limited perspective on outcomes and zero insight into the underlying code. Trying to draw any conclusions about the functionality with that as the basis is completely invalid. You wouldn’t need to be told this if you were actually as astute as you purport to be.

How is it irrelevant? It is extremely relevant to me because that is my experience with 100% consistency. We’re not talking about 1 or 2 items that dropped, we’re talking several douzen items that dropped over a large number of hours and not one broke the rule which leads to 1 out of 2 options because I believe this to be well beyond bad luck scenario.

Either something in the code is screwing up and corruption is somehow affecting (even though it shouldn’t) how high FP an item can have or the odds of pulling higher FP are so bad past 23 that them existing or not are irrelevant.

I’m pretty sure it’s not the later case because I’ve seen plenty of people, again on high corruption, consistently pull out items with higher FP. But at lower corruption it just doesn’t happens at all for me.

Regardless of the why it is happening however, I can only say for sure that it is happening.

That it’s pareidolia or something similar, as I said some days/weeks/whatever ago. This exact conversation/viewpoint came up years ago vis-a-vis the chance of fracturing in the old crafting system & people swore blind that the “actual” chance to fracture was significantly higher than the one given in-game. But Mike use the same code to run through millions of crafts & can you guess what the outcome was? The chance to fracture was reasonably close to the stated chance given LE doesn’t use an actual RNG.

So, I reiterate. If a dev says that corruption has no effect on the FP of an item then I’d believe them rather than a rando on the internet (& that’s a nice way of saying what I’d like to say that would make the mods sad).

Well, given the other threads you’ve posted in, you’re probably filtering out the items with higher FP.

Is always possible, & if you think that is happening then you should post in the bug forum with your statistical data & analysis, not just anecdotal evidence.

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If you need someone to explain the most fundamental basics of statistics and random number generation, I’m sure there’s a local college course you can take. But if you want me to spend several hours saying the same thing with different words at you over and over, I’m going to need a paycheck for it, because when you say a thing like this…

…like it isn’t total nonsense or has any weight or value whatsoever, I already have a headache.

You can believe what you want, but I wouldn’t complain if it wasn’t a problem. Generally, people don’t complain about problems that they don’t have. This is all still disregarding that I do believe that a system with no RNG would be better. Even just looking at the current system as is, I complain because this is a problem as I am unable to get items above T14 since the FP is always extremely low.

That is non-sensical. Any rare item that is shown by my filter will have the same chances for FP as any other rare item because if items simply have a random FP amount, then how I filter my items has no influence whatsoever on the FP they can have, just the amount I find.

I didn’t posted it there because I’ve always assumed it to be so. When something is so consistent and doesn’t has any aspect of being a bug, people don’t tend to report it as a bug, they tend to basically suggest that it needs improving which is what we see here. Regardless I am sure the Devs are paying attention to this so no need for an extra post, especially since I do not know if it is the case or not. As far as I’m aware, items above 23 FP can just be 1 in a million drop too (yes exageration but you get the point) so it’s hard to know how it is working in absolute full details. What I do know for a fact is that high FP items don’t drop for me even at 100 corruption and that no RNG crafting would make the game much better.

No, that went out the window the moment crafting became an option. Just because you like to define it as “supplementing” the item hunt, instead of “complementing” it, doesn’t change the fact crafting is now a huge part of the ARPG (and MMORPG) genre(s).

You really seem intent on dismissing any opinions that differ from your own as “wanting an item editor”. Do you just have that macro’d someplace to make it easier to respond?

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Huh, must have skimmed over that bit. That explains a fair bit. That’s not even slightly a statistically significant sample.

Oh, the irony.

That’s fair enough, and the only way to balance it would be to have the materials cost increase with higher tiers. I’m not sure where I sit on that particular fence, I kinda like it, I kinda don’t.

And people with significantly more knowledge, skill & way less tin foil hattery have been telling you how to do it better you just don’t want to take their advice, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to complain (let alone give “advice”) if your response to others is to stick your fingers in your ears & go “Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalala I can’t hear you”. But you do you…

They’d need want proper data, not anecdotal evidence, as I said. If you want to have someone pay attention to you & investigate (given they’re working on MP), you’ll need real facts not just your “feels”, feels are for feedback, not bugs. If you think stuff isn’t working as expected then that’s a bug, not feedback, feedback is for things that are working as intended (which is what you’re saying isn’t happening) but you don’t like.

So if you want to see some actual change, put your money where your mouth is & post your data in the bug section, otherwise it’s just screaming into the void.

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You don’t. Like I said before, you just assume that T20 is the base items for when you start mapping (and even then you won’t have all the bases you want since you won’t have the level for them all). Full T22 is going to be archieved somewhere between 1 and 2 months of the league for the average player and after that there is inspirational items.

Besides this there are 2 considerations. First is the good and highly efficient players. Those players have everything by day 3. They already do it in PoE and other games, it would be foolish to believe that no matter the game it wouldn’t happen. In the case of those players it doesn’t really matters what you do anyway.

For the majority of the players however, things will already be slower because once multiplayer comes in and more important, leagues, everything wipes in a new league and so, as you are starting from 0 gear, even the amount of shards you will have is going to be a problem early on.

One more thing just as a side note. Prior to the crafting changes I never said that RNG should be removed from crafting. Back then I just said that crafting needed to improved by lowering the RNG a little bit, especially at the lower end of crafting. This is because back then there was only T23-28 as aspirational gear. You didn’t had much to look past T22 because it was very unrealistic to get an item above that. But then they introduced the new crafting with the abillity to lock one affix making it a lot more accessible (though hard) to craft a T26. You also had the legendary item crafting added. Because you had so much added to the top layer of crafting that is going to be hard to get but some of it still within relaistic realms of archievement, you now can have non RNG crafting (except for the special runes with RNG, just the crafting potential should be removed which is the worst of it).

You keep bringing this up regardless of how many times I’ve already said. I did that. I did it and it didn’t work for me. There is a difference between not accepting advice and saying I’ve already done that and it doesn’t works so I’ll say it one more time. The reason these advice works for you is not because you know better since as I already said. I tried it! The reason it works for you is because you play far more efficiently and run 3 maps in probably less time than I run one. You probably don’t even have 1/10th of the time I spend in between maps when I am checking stuff and vendoring stuff because like I said, I don’t play that efficiently nor does the casual player. We play to have fun, not to treat the game like a job. Also I realise that playing like this is not the same as treating the game like a job, but to me and to the casual player it is.

You realise that when I was still playing before I quit after being completly disapointed with both the state of minions and the item progression, I wasn’t exactly taking screenshots of every single item drop I got right? That is not something that you expect a normal person to do. You also don’t expect a person to taken douzen and douzens of screenshots just to prove a point especially since with the way people seem to be around here, the next answer would be that I’m just showing the bad ones I got. Because it seems that people are more keen to disprove and disagree with someone’s opinion or ideas when they are opposed to theirs rather than actually accept that when someone says, this is what is happening, it’s because it’s true.

Here’s the funny thing. I gain nothing with lying when I say that the current state of FP on item drops are what they are. The only thing that I am doing is at worst wasting my time to give feedback and at best helping address an issue.

Try as I might, I am unable to restrain myself from chipping into this conversation. I will touch on a few comments above caught my attention and which I felt are, based on my experience and 2000h of playing LE, incorrect assumptions or do not match which my own findings while testing LE.

As I believe this to be totally incorrect, I decided to run a statistically irrelevant test - I say irrelevant, because I only collected 450 rare items in 20 Echo runs and I dont consider this a mathematically adequate sample size. The person making the statement mentioned that they are unable to find higher FP items in a few hundred items so I figured I would collect a few more…

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
FP Average 31 31 29 27 30 28 29 29 27 29 28 29 28 29 28
Rare Item Count 26 10 19 24 27 19 25 18 27 27 21 26 10 21 31
Highest 41 37 37 33 38 39 44 38 38 42 42 43 34 42 34
Lowest 22 23 23 22 22 22 22 23 22 22 22 22 23 22 22
# 40+ 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 2 1 2 0 1 0
# 30-39 13 8 10 9 15 7 11 9 7 9 5 7 3 11 12

How this information was collected:

  • In this batch of 15 echo runs, I collected as many Rare items as to fill my inventory
  • No filters at all, no evaluation of rares - I just picked up any rares till I could no longer.
  • I used a lvl 100 character and ran corruption level 100 empowered monoliths only.
  • Rarity depended on modifiers but was usually around 100%
  • This ONLY tracks Rare items and their FP, nothing else.

Observations:

  • The range of FP for rare items is 22 to 44 - as expected
  • The number of rare items with FP above 30 is, on average, 30-50% of all drops.
  • The average FP of all rares found per run ranged from 31 to 27.

After reading this statement and others that confirm what devs have said over and over again, I decided to run a few more runs - this time at 376 Corruption on empowered Monoliths with a lvl 100 char - using the same process as above.

1 2 3 4 5
FP Average 29 27 27 29 29
Rare Item Count 21 18 32 18 23
Highest 37 34 34 44 43
Lowest 22 22 22 22 22
# 40+ 0 0 0 1 1
# 30-39 10 4 10 6 10

Observations:

  • After only 5 runs at an exaggerated corruption level of 376, I already saw virtually the same pattern emerge
  • As with corruption level 100, the number of Rare items with FP higher than 30 is significant - sometimes almost half of all rares collected.
  • the same range applies
  • the same average FP applies

Conclusion - While the sample size is too small to be statistically relevant, its pretty obvious that there is no influence of corruption on FP.

Outtake - While no-one has to believe my test figures are authentic, I think people who I have interacted with over the years here would be inclinded to believe me when I say I am confident in the results and that they confirm what us veterans (@Llama8 et al and others in other threads) already know and the devs confirm.


While on the same topic of crafting, I belive that the views express by the same person I have quoted above are generally misguided.

Comments like the above simply indicate a total lack of understanding and flexibility when approaching crafting. There are MANY ways to craft in LE, but optimal crafting requires a varied approach and one that plays off the strengths and weaknesses of the current system. Crafting also has stages in LE, how you craft in early, mid and late game vary greatly… As does crafting for min/maxing purposes. The same approaches do not work effectively. For example, crafting a normal item to T15 or even T10 is unlikely to work. Trying to use deterministic crafting by manually adding affixes to empty slots doesnt work for more than one affix without using up most of the FP. Starting with good crafting bases (not item bases) also plays a significant role in crafting - you cannot start with an item of a total tier count of T8 (eg 4x T2 affixes) and expect it to get to T20 without a SIGNIFICANT amount of luck. Clever sequence use of the various runes & glyphs play a very important part of crafting and can affect the how successful a craft can be. Some of these interactions are subtle but very important.

Crafting could use a few tweaks here and there to specifically address some issues but generally most people find it very refreshing and superior to the previous iteration. New players from other arpgs are generally positive about it too - as are most of us veterans even though we are the ones that know where it needs work…

Opinions are opinions but sometimes opinions can be wrong because they are based on flawed experience.

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While I don’t doubt you got all of those after testing, this is completly different from my own experience.

For example, your absolute lowest rare item is 22 FP where for me it’s very common to get 21 and 20 FP, I’d say in fact those are actually the more representative FP average for me with 23 being the highest I ever found. Now I didn’t mentioned hundreds, i mentioned douzens which yes, it’s a small sample size, but you’d think that in several douzens at least 1 item would roll above 23 FP, especially since in your cases, 22 or 23 are literally the lowest you can find. However that is not my experience at all.

Now crafting may have it’s own nuances, I’m not saying it doesn’t. I’m saying that the way crafting is right now, me an a few other people have already said, getting items past T14 is a problem. That’s where we get stuck.

There are then 2 types of voices in this whole situation. one that says, this is a problem and here’s a possible solution like what I did. And the people who says, this is just fine, don’t touch it it. But if it was fine people wouldn’t complain nor would they be getting stuck.

Therefore these opinions which are not so much of opinions as they are facts cannot simply be summed up to flawed experience. Because if someone experiences a problem and nothing is done to address it, what do you think is going to happen? They quit the game, leave a bad review and tell everyone who asks their opinion of the game to not play because of the problems they had in their experience.

That is way having a good experience for everyone. Smoothing out all these edges that create really bad issues like a player feeling stuck and unable to progress are of vital importance to any game. It is not something that should be dismissed.

Oh man! If that’s true it’s definitely a bug! Rare items at level 100 shouldn’t be able to drop with less than 22FP. It would be a huge help to us if you could submit a bug report with a video showing it in game and note which OS you’re using. If you’re running any 3rd party tools or anything like that, it would be helpful to know.

We take the credibility of our systems pretty seriously, and would want to investigate if possible. Any info you can provide is hugely helpful.

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I can’t really do any video right now. I don’t really know what software to use or how to be honest. Usually if I need to show something in real time I tend to stream on discord which isn’t really going to work here.

My OS is Windows 10 and if you need the rest of my PC specs I can look them up really quick too, but trying to test anything at corruption 100 now is actually impossible. The game is chugging really hard for me when I was trying to do a minion poison build and unless dot calculations might cause that, I figure that may be my PC as it hasn’t been formated in 3 years and when I did the void knight aura bomber it was running smoothly months ago. I’m going to be formating it wednesday and I can test after that with one of my older characters that is still already on empowered monoliths.

That being said if you say it’s not even possible to drop less than FP 22 on empowered monoliths that does makes a lot of sense as for why I wasn’t able to progress my gear. I may have hit a bug indeed.

Anyway, if you need the rest of my specs I can gather them, just tell me what you need to know, other than that I can probably test things wednesday or thursday after I format my PC and make sure everything is running smoothly.

Empowered or not and corruption levels have no effect on it.

If you get to where you can get a video of it happening, I would be very interested to see it.

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