Multiplayer when?

General
101

I’ll try and be civil. I have been playing computer games since the 80’s - probably before you were born so I’ll ignore that dig.

I stick by my opinion that trading ruins the loot chase. If you can just buy whatever you want or need in an ARPG then there is no need to grind for anything other than XP for skills and currency. If you can just trade for gear, then the game becomes purely a grind for currency to make the purchase. Arpg games are 100% about the grind for gear to play new builds and enhance your existing build - its a HUGE part of the experience - trading in an elaborate economy just ruins this key aspect of the game for me. I have played LE for over 2k hours now and I have hoarded probably 700 uniques (before you ask, yes multiples of each) and played multiple builds enabled by those uniques. It was fun running through content and grinding all the different bosses & content to get those drops. If I could trade for them, all I would have done was find the best currency earning approach and ignored all the content in favour of just grinding currency.

Thats not how I like to play my arpgs.

As I said before, trading with a playing partner or friend is perfectly acceptable but I do not believe that full trade economy is a good thing for a game like LE.

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102

I can’t count the number of characters I ran through Act I, only to get the “bridge will be repaired” message. Max level was 20(?)ish, I believe…

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103

But the loot chase is synergistic with trading. The best/mostest rareerest items cost lots of money, so you need to farm for either: a) a lot of money, or b) valuable items to sell, yourself.

The problem with the “loot chase”, is that there is no bad luck protection. So many people get burned out when they put in countless hours, and still never see the items they want/need. Trading at least gives them the option to translate their time into reward.

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104

I dont want bad luck protection. Its RNG and I am perfectly happy with it - its fair, its frustrating when its bad, its astoundingly fantastic when its good and something drops.

I dont want there to be a fairy godmother (i.e. trade) to help me bypass the cycle of this kind of up/down experience in a loot based game. I have big shoulders and if I cannot get what I am looking for I try something else. If I reach a point where I dont get those endorphin boosting drops at a decent enough rate (something the devs have to tweak and trade can impact this hugely), then I go play something else.

I personally equate trading economies to cheat/item editors - e.g. load up a cheat in any game and within a hour you begin to get bored because you know you can just hack in that special item you need or enable god mode to get past the boss you kept dying to. I see trade in exactly the same way.

Maybe thats just me.

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105

Hyperbole fortehwin! But everyone has their own opinions, and preferences, I suppose.

106

Im not against bad luck protection persay, perhaps a mechanic that allows you to farm shards that you can trade for any unique(non boss drop) your heart desires. this kinda system would be perfect for a dungeon where the reward is a currency that allows you browse a merchant who holds all uniques. You then are allowed to set prices for all the uniques as you see fit as the devs. This allows them to essentially “set” the grind level for each unique at a bare minimum.

Either way, the problem is that trade is so much more then a “Bad luck” protection, and ends more so as “the only option”

people say that “you dont need to nerf drop rates if you have global trade” but if you dont, then you will have the min maxers come in and go “well I spent 20 hours and my character has all exalted gear and every unique id ever want, games too easy”

Players like me fear trade because even if it does make life easier sometimes, It makes it way harder for everything else.

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107

What an absolute horse dung is this? RNG is bad and I would love to part with it, because one ignores 99% of the dropped loot. What’s the point of all that loot that goes nowhere? To just have a screen filled with colours and effects? Rubbish!

Sure, RNG is supposed to offer a progression to your character, but if it doesn’t it should be replaced with something else. And to be honest, I’d rather grind for resources and then put the control of the crafting into the hands of the player. Screw RNG in loot drop and in crafting.

I also see a contradiction in your post.

First, you say you are perfectly happy with the way RNG works.

Second, you say if it doesn’t drop what you want you go play something else. How is this any good? This argument of yours is actually a counter argument to your I don’t want bad luck protection. Odd that you don’t want to admit it, because, to be honest, it absolutely sucks when you can’t get the item you want. Why construct a system that grinds your nerves and eventually sends you off to another game? As a developer you want players to play your game and not send them to their competition.

Third, you mention the tweaking of RNG drop rate, which essentially means there is a problematic aspect with it if it doesn’t reward players enough.

Fourth, the trade cannot impact your drop rate if you don’t trade. Hence, it is irrelevant to you.

108

It does because games with unrestricted trade have their drop rates balanced around the assumption that you will trade because its easier. D3 on launch & prior to the removal of the AHs with loot 2.0 was the perfect example of this. Drops at launch were aweful because of the AH, and when they removed the AH they buffed the #### out of the drop rates to compensate.

This is what happens.

109

RNG is Horse Dung? Thats your opinion not mine.

RNG is part of every single RPG/ARPG game I have ever played. I dont want a non-RNG game, whats the point of that? Having no chance involved just means everything is boring and there is a specific way or process to follow to play the game. No excitement, no random drops, just cookie cutter ways to get everything you need or want with no variation created by RNG. Sorry, not for me.

I dont think there is anything wrong with RNG provided its weighted correctly. I wouldnt like RNG if there were astronomical levels where you wouldnt be able to get certain drops in your lifetime but thats a fault of the RNG calcs, not RNG.

I am not contradicting myself.

Firstly, I do think that RNG needs to exist in games for the above reason.

Secondly, I said that if I dont get what I am looking for, I try something else - within the same game. IF I still cannot get what I am looking for then the game IMHO, is busted and the RNG around drop rates has not been correctly balanced and I need to find some other way to enjoy my efforts and play something else.

Thirdly, all RNG needs to be tweaked. There is no point in making something that is impossible to drop or something that has a probability of dropping beyond the playtime likely for a gamer. Its in the interest of the devs to tweak this to keep the endorphins coming.

Fourth - Trade WILL most definitely impact drop rates whether or not I trade - no dev wants their game flooded with extremely rare items if 1k players are all of a sudden trying to sell the rare items they found. That makes a mockery of the grind.

If you are going to offer a rebuttal, I would expect you keep this civil - I made no attack on anyone in my comments above and I expect the same respect.

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110

Not everyone wants to put 2k hours into game within few months as season last. You have to mind casuals as well and casuals are 90% of players now days.

111

Imo, there isn’t much difference. If the devs are designing the game to be played for a target number of hours then they base the drop rate to so that the majority of drops are likely (but not guaranteed) to drop within that window.

If the cycles (LE season equivalent) are going to be # months then the devs have to adjust their algorithms around drops to provide a sufficient number of drops based on the bell curve of the majority of players they want/expect. People who play for 10h and 2k hours are either not going to get their drops because they simply don’t play enough based on the devs design OR they are on the other end of the scale where they are ‘wasting’ or just being inefficient with their time trying to get the really rare things.

I do not tend to play seasons in arpg games because i do not allow game schedules to dictate if or when i play. I play when i want, not when the devs want me to play. Life is too short to have people telling when you can or cannot have fun playing a game. Even in D3, i think i played maybe one season in all the years its been around.

The key here is that the devs need to decide where the focus will be - if they want the game to appease certain groups of players then thats what they will do based on whatever factors they deem important ( financial, concurrent players, long term players etc).

If i as a player don’t like what they have implemented ( e.g. they make it so easy that casual players with 50h can get everything and there is no challenge ) then i simply find another game to play. To me its nothing more complicated.

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112

I know what you mean, but if seasons become a thing and 90% of the player base only play seasons, then this will be less of an argument.

Personally, I’d like trade with 0lp uniques, because it would allow to play the build you are going for without the frustration of not dropping the item you need. Especially when the time frame is reduced.

Yet, you still have progression by finding higher LP versions of that uniques + exalted items and creating legendaries.

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113

And what choice does RNG provide when 99% of items that drop are crap and you just ignore them?

For me, RNG already provides no excitement. I’m waiting a better weapon to drop, and when it does drop it is not for my class or it is weaker than the one I currently use. Hence, I end up on a level 80 with a weapon that’s level 20, frustratingly waiting for a better weapon in order to deal decent damage.

I understand that RNG drop is supposed to make you - Oh, wow! - but all it does is make me - Oh… It’s useless.

Then I guess I have yet to experience a game where this is factually true.

And what does this mean? Do devs just have to hit the spot of making sure the players get not too much nor too little drops? And what about the nature of those drops? Where is excitement and variation when you get the one and the same item 7 times in a row? How about dropping most items with the exception of the few that you want to play with and use in your build? Are you excited when you are 100 lvl and the game drops you item lvl 5? Is this the variation you are so fond of? I’m not.

Tomeitoes-tomatoes. The point still stands that RNG can drive you from the game, whether it’s in 5 minutes or 5 months.

How many people should say this for it to be true? What if RNGesus is not favouring you, but favours other players? Does positive player experience of RNG overshadows the negative player experience? How many voices are necessary to change RNG? (whether to tweak it or replace it with something else)

Agree. But when the same item keeps dropping along with low level items, I don’t see endorphin kicking in anytime soon. One isolated spike of it doesn’t justify the existence of the awful RNG system.

For trading, I guess I was wrong as per Llama8’s post, but then again I didn’t play D3, so it had no impact on me.

114

I am going to be entirely honest here. After all the time I have played LE , I do not agree with this statement. I regularly find things that are useful for one of my chars - be it the one I am current playing or another existing one or even an item that enables or inspires building a new char entirely. What concerns me tho, is that this kind of feedback needs to be quantified and evaluated because if its true for the majority then something is broken in the game. No ARPG wants players to have 99% of the drops be useless - no one in their right mind would design a game like that.

Another point to make about the issue of poor quality drops (not just drop rate) is the issue that I have brought up in other thread about understanding LE and how gear progression works as you play and get farther into the game. For example, when starting the game, almost everything that drops is an upgrade. By the time you are at mid levels (probably 2/3 the way through the campaign) drops require basic crafting to improve on what you already have - e.g. a tier or two here or there. By end game, you are exclusively looking for crafting base items with high tiers of appropriate affixes (usually good rares, then exalteds) and crafting takes over as the critical part of min/maxing gear vs drops that would otherwise not be an upgrade anymore.

If someone assumes drops are going to be good throughout the progression of the game, then I would guess that they would definitely be annoyed and say that 99% of drops are useless - because depending on your build evolution, drops very well would be because the other mechanisms in the game that are intended to be used are not.

Yes. Exactly this. This is a core fundamental of Loot based games like Arpgs. Oversimplifying it somewhat, the algorithms employed would do two things. Firstly, ensure that the quantity of drops are at an acceptable level - no one wants to open a chest and one health potion and a common weapon drops but also, you dont want to open a chest and have a loot explosions across the screen because that devalues the loot chase and causes untold number of other issues.

The second part of the algorithms is to ensure quality of the drops - either simply as per general item rarity or more specific like more sentinel drops if you are playing a sentinel or boosts like more drops of a specific type of gear. It may be that th algorithm is weighted too much in a certain direction so you end up for example, too many sentinel items while playing a mage OR the algorithm is not weighted enough to ensure that drops are closer to your character level OR the algorithms are not dropping items mid/late game that are suitable for crafting.

All of this takes time and testing to balance and figure out. Its probably one of the hardest things in ARPGs to do - especially when you are trying to build a new game without any statistical data to work from - like trying to to see how many Ravenous Voids are dropping across the player base of # players.

Definitely - thats why its so important to balance it correctly.

True - this is difficult - If I were the developers, I would not base changing things on what people are saying because everyone is subjective and you need objective data to manage RNG properly. I would simply use people saying this as an indicator that perhaps an investigation into this is appropriate. Mike W (one of the senior devs) did exactly this for the crafting system (I think it was the crafting system) a while ago where he tested the the chances of things happening into the millions to ensure the probabilities were within the range they wanted.

RNG is critical to the game, without it, there is really no point in playing a loot based arpg game. Everything is based on RNG, weightings and ranges to provide variation in the game and YES, if its implemented BADLY, then people will not want to play either from boredom because they can get everything or from frustration that nothing drops. Imagine how boring the game would be if every interation was defined. There would be no crit chance, every hit of a certain skill or certain type would have a fixed damage value, every hit your char took would be predicatable and every playthrough would be the same.

If you dont want any RNG, then you have to go play Chess.

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115

I think you’re going off-rails too much.

The Devs said that they will mantain the game as SSF friendly as it is now. So drops shouldn’t be a big issue, right now other than 2LP specific gear and very bad luck with a few very rare items, nothing is off-limits in a SSF environment.

If they apply full trade economy is not the end of the world, you could still play SSF and get as powerful as your time dedication allows. Any build right now can be 90% done in a week of play, is extremely easy to have fairly polished builds with a mix of T20s and Exalteds with an unique here and there.

116

To be fair, as your current gear improves, more of the drops will be useless. So if 99% of the drops are useless you’re therefore in the top 1% of possible drops for your build. This is a simple mathematical inevitability of how drops work in aRPGs if you play long enough.

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117

The problem with this, as has been stated many, many times before (such as here), if there’s unrestricted trade then the drop rate has to be reduced in order to keep the rate of item/power acquisition in the rough zone of where the devs want it. If not then players gain their desired items/power much faster than intended.

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118

They also stated how they want to keep the game SSF friendly, I don’t think they go the full free trade economy route based on their last messages related to trade, but as they didn’t pick sides with it because… reasons, we will see.

There’s too much of posts dedicated on how trade should be, if they already decided wouldn’t be a hot spot in the forums…

119

Indeed, but you can’t have both unrestricted trade and SSF-friendly drop rates was the point I was trying to make. So if they went with the former then “just playing SSF” wouldn’t mean that you weren’t affected by the necessary drop rate changes.

Yeah, they don’t, they want mobs to be the primary way to get items, not vendors, not the gambler (which is why the normal gambler was capped to only give item bases up to lvl 40) & most likely not trade either. But as you say, we’ll need to wait & see where they land & what we end up with.

Yes, but then there would be people that don’t like whatever they choose & they’d be complaining. So it’d still be a hot topic.

120

That assumes you wouldnt consider playing a different char that would benefit from the drops and only focussed on the build you had. And by the time the drop usefulness gets to 99% useless drops, you have pretty much maxed out that build. all depends on how long it took to get there whether or not you “got your monies worth” for the entertainment.