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Your post is a bit verbose. Having read it, I believe you are largely arguing in favour of two things; that the game should be as fun as possible while people play it, and that the developers should be willing to âtrim the fatâ - that is to say, avoid artificially increasing playtime through the likes of repetitive gameplay and time-gating rewards.
Last Epoch is intended to be a live service game where (most) people play server-side (âonlineâ) characters, see others in towns wearing MTX which is effectively a form of advertising - and I think we can safely presume that the % of people not actively playing that choose to support the game financially will be quite a bit lower than the % of those logging in regularly who choose to open their wallets.
EHG will, due to their ongoing costs, therefore very much have an incentive to generate recurring income through encouraging people to 1) play more, and, 2) play online when they do play. While I agree with your point regarding âlow valueâ activities and the existence of other games in principle, I do not believe it is reasonable to expect EHG to act on this. They are a for-profit company courting investors & selling shares in the company. Money is priority #1. (Naturally, they will never say this themselves.)
While you are perhaps correct that there is an ideal version of crafting that substitutes something else in place of RNG, you havenât done much to ground this idea in examples and I canât help thinking such an idea would be massively time-prohibitive to work on.
Saying that crafting is already largely an item editor suggests you might not be quite interpreting the item editor arguments in the way they are intended. Crafting needs to be kept in check from a balance perspective, or else no loot would be compelling and the item hunt would be savagely curtailed. When people say removing the chance of failure would result in crafting being an item editor, that it would be quick and entail few steps is the point of the argument. ARPGs are, at their core, item hunts and making crafting guaranteed effectively removes the item hunt from the game.
Which leaves the question of why else would people play for long?
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I donât think that RNG in crafting is entirely there to provide âvalueâ, itâs also there to reduce the speed at which you acquire your desired gear. If you take the other end of the scale, no RNG in crafting at all, youâd be able to get your desired t20 gear very easily (assuming that the affix drop rates werenât adjusted to compensate for the lack of chance to fail in crafting).
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If you take away alot of the randomness most item acquistion will get even more grindy and most importantly predictable
Just for exampleâs sake, lets say all % chance or variation is removed, but you need 50 shards per affix tier upgrade (donât have to be accurate numbers).
The time it takes to get an T20 rare item might be the same, but you will slowly grind towards you goal, but the endresult will be very very predictable.
This will take away all the moments of dopamine rush and excitment out of the loot hunt and basically turns the game into a braindead grind simulator.
Having things like loot and crafting to have high variance will make crafting and loot unpredictable and will give you this OH WOW moments, when you totally didnât expect to make that T20 item from a T4 starting item. But on the flipside you have those T16 items running out of FP after 2 crafts.
But with all of this, the desired outcomes or even the totally unexpected outcomes will outweight the negative moments IMO.
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Itâs not that youâre surprised that you roll the max on a given tier, itâs when you manage to take a low tier item all the way up to a high tier item âbeating the oddsâ. Thatâs the positive moment that RNG-based crafting can give you.
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I have almost 1900h in LE with, about 8 chars at lvl 100 or almost and another handful of chars at about 50⌠if the campaign takes about 10h - I am roughly in for about 150h of story experience⌠the rest is entirely chasing levels and finding gear to improve my characters - either running via mono or dungeonsâŚ
That is WAY more than âisnt a very big fraction of the time spendâ
I think that part of the discussion here is most definitely historical design of arpg games - the item chase and everything it includes plays a very big part of the genre⌠Your idea of moving this enjoyment to the other side of the game (story etc) isnt bad, but I have a feeling you are aiming for more R in the arpg type game which then changes the focus considerably from what LE is right nowâŚ
Nothing against it as its exactly why i like playing games like Baldurs Gate, Witcher and others, but I expect there are many people who like arpgs, that play as I doâŚ
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My first and most powerful thought is that you need to practice writing succinctly. Thereâs a lot of words here but a noticeable dearth of substance.
As for the idea itself, removing RNG from crafting makes it stop being crafting - instead, it becomes an item editor. The summary of what you took a lot of words to say is nothing more lofty than that you want to have a guarantee that eventually you will get a specific item you want by using the crafting system, and thatâs simply a non-starter.
Specific responses:
You are using âarbitraryâ incorrectly, as is often the case. You are using it to mean âI donât like itâ and âI donât have as much control over it as I want toâ, but what the word actually means is âbased on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.â There is a reason, and there is a system. That you donât like or donât understand the reason does not make the reason arbitrary. That the system has elements of randomness to it does not make the system arbitrary.
All those âsteps and delays built inâ are exactly what makes it not an item editor.
Theyâre not supposed to. This criticism is irrelevant.
You could say that any achievement in a game is arbitrary though. Managed to do Julra t4? Well done, youâve beaten a boss with arbitrarily high damage output!
And yet it still gives that endorphin rush to a lot of people.
But where the line between âmeaningfulâ & âgrindâ is entirely dependant on the player, some people do find it âentertainingâ & one would argue that in a loot-focussed game, the acquisition of loot is somewhat important.
Yes, but apparently we place higher value on things we have put more effort into obtaining, so if you finally get that item you want after a âlongâ grind, youâll value it more.
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Thanks for the response!
I guess part of this may be down to us all playing the games we play for different reasons, and looking to get different things from our time spent doing so. Often on the forums for ARPGs, for each post calling for more campaign content, there is at least one calling for the campaign to be made optional so that people can delve into the so-called endgame content right away. It would be interesting to hear which endgame activities in the genre youâve liked most. I think one thing many of them share is a focus on randomisation, which some prefer for a less predictable experience through subsequent playthroughs.
In some ways I fear your points may conflict; youâre interested in story content being greater in both quantity and quality, but this would significantly increase the cost of development - likely resulting in us being charged more. But as you say - the market is rife with other games.
I do hope you wonât mind me asking, but have you played Guild Wars 2? The world ArenaNet created does a stellar job of feeling more âaliveâ than most - and on top of the sizeable amount of levelling content with strong narrative elements, there is both a âpersonal storyâ (not particularly standout, imo, but gives you some choices, which is nice) and a lot of what they call their Living World content.
I would really love to hear your thoughts on the game if you have tried it. I donât mean to derail this thread - we could always take things to PMs or start a new thread if youâd prefer.
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Well yeah. If you drill deep enough into any anti-RNG argument, thatâs all it comes down to. They donât like that things exist in the game that they may never have. They want a guarantee that they can get everything they want.
Never really separated the grind from the item drops themselves - I suppose this is due to the endorphin loop or whatever the psy majors call it ⌠but I suppose you are correct to some degree - the time actually looking at new drops is low by comparison to the grind.
Removing this grind part of the process - no idea how to do this without making this a quest driven game like a more traditional RPG⌠which doesnt appeal in an action-rpg game tbhâŚ
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I can see why you vote against RNG mechanics in crafting in games general. But humans are conditioned in a particular way.
The first games childs play often involve rng, be it rolling dice (starting with colors) or picking cards. Later game mechanics get more complex. But 99% of tabletop games (chess is an example where thereâs no rng involved) are based on rng.
When pc games were created they copied these rng elements. Thereâs rng everywhere to simulate real life experiences.
One of the most predictable real life mechanics is going to work. In general people that have a creative job with unpredictable elements that prevent work from being monotonous are happier in their job than people that are doing the very same thing every day for years until the end of their life.
Playing games = random elements = ups and downs = emotions = memorable = exciting = fun
Doing work = predictable = normalized emotions = trivial = boring = not fun
The main thing I project into your post is that you want to turn playing into something that has more in common with work.
Because this will be the end result if you take RNG out of crafting. You would create a work simulator where you have to grind for hours for the predictable outcome.
Iâm currently fine with the crafting system. Itâs also very predictable while still having rng involved. No rng would need to put more rng into the resource hunt for crafting. Taking out the rng of the resource hunt would mean to make it grindy.
Finding loot is also random. Yet, people donât complain too much. There could also be just progress bars that reward you with a specific item after hours of i.e. killing a specific mob type.
A core element if playing games is rng because it adds replayability. The simplest game will be replayable by adding dice rolls. Just image Patchesi where there are no dice and everybody would move the exact same amount of fieldsâŚ
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Every experience in a game being novel or meaningful is not a reasonable goal.
No one is being compelled to do anything. A person who cannot say, âI am not having fun playing this game anymoreâ and then solve that problem by walking away from the game is a person with an unhealthy mental/emotional relationship with games, and that dysfunction is not a valid basis for an argument.
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Yes, I know what you mean, and as I said I donât consider it valid.
Hunting for food and shelter to survive is nowhere in the ballpark of hunting for a made up item in a made up game. You cannot walk away from the former because you die. Literally nothing happens to you if you walk away from the latter. They are not the same in any fashion, and people with healthy emotional relationships to games can make the distinction. Put another way, I will never feel compelled to do anything in any game, because I understand that games have nothing to do with my survival and never will.
People with unhealthy mental and emotional relationships to games should not be a basis for game design.
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I dunno. Crafting, in rgps/argps is normally an complete blind-dick thrusting in the darkness, just hoping to hit pay dirt. Meaning, the player really has 0 control over the outcome. Sure, theyâve given us some runes that allow us to modify the success rates (potential degrade in LEâs case), but those just become the new baseline. Who crafts without using ANY modifier runes â not to mention many of them are mutually exclusive, so not all outcomes can be âcontrolledâ?
I think a big issue with how LE does crafting, is it sometimes discourages its use. I have, on many occasions, not crafted with an affix I really wanted because of the rarity of the affix, combined with the shitiness of the crafting potential system, combined with the RNG of getting the right base, with the right potential, with the right existing affixes. To me, that screams design flaw⌠I should be encouraged to improve my gear, not have to hoard mats until the perfect storm of item base + crafting potential + existing affixes (not to mention exalted status and/or affix range rolls) just happens to fall into my lap⌠without having any control over it, whatsoever.
It can be better. But how? I donât really have the answer for that⌠I am always fond of incremental improvements that the player has control over. Either through breaking down items for components that can be used to upgrade stats or quality/rarity, or having the ability to merge âlikeâ items and result in an upgraded outcome (combining 2 Legendary Boots of the same kind, and the result keeps the higher stats from the 2).
There are many indi games out there, that are really hitting the crafting well with me â Chronicon and Slormancer are 2 that come to mind.
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And yet, certain developers/publishers are quite happy to do just thatâŚ
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You can take it in both directions, and I would agree with both of these statements:
- Game developers should not design games deliberately to abuse/take advantage of dysfunctional people for profit
- Game developers should not remove or change their designs based solely on the existence of dysfunctional people who are not being harmed by them
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Do you frequently ask for pay rises? 
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I donât. Not until the âaffected negativelyâ starts to enter actual, real consequence territory, such as âtricked into spending thousands of dollarsâ. But âaffected negativelyâ here doesnât rise past things like âI felt sadâ or âI punched my chair arm in frustrationâ. Somebody who spends 100 hours a week playing a game is probably extremely dysfunctional. They should get help and support in treating that dysfunction, absolutely, but thatâs way out of the realm of responsibility for game design.
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After playing Grim Dawn from beta until I accumulated several thousand hours, I can tell you that one of the greatest moves Crate Entertainment made (and they made a lot of great moves) is that they introduced affix âpairingâ into the game, meaning if an item rolled Fire based affix there was a greater chance that remaining affixes would roll something fire related. This way they mitigated RNG somewhat but didnât decrease its value as a game mechanic. I believe PoE did something similar (not knowledgeable enough about this game so feel free to correct me.). Maybe EHG could try experimenting on this in the (not so distant) future.
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