The entire game cannot be 100% RNG based progression

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21

This. This. This.

The problem with most ARPG systems is that the RNG results in “chunks” of progress. Need a particular item ? The probability disctribution says it takes, on average, 100 tries. But that means somebody could come along and it takes them 300 tries.

that’s all very nice , but it leaves the unlucky player hating the game, because they just happened to be the one that took 3x as many tries as it “should” have to get something they wanted.

what you want is RNG that converges over time, i.e. people can get very lucky, but you limit how unlucky they can be. Easier said than done.

Say you want a particular unique. The game doesn’t know what you want. it might take you 100 runs, on average, but you’re not lucky so it takes you 1000, except by the time you get to 500 you’re probably going to go find something else to do.

However the crafting system is more incremental. earn crafting shards, craft your item bit-by-bit, so much more deterministic. But, then there is the cliff that is fracturing. so now you may have to craft 20 items, each of which requires a lot of farming to get the crafting items you need, to get the one item you want/need.

I think this is a very difficult problem to solve.

I just wanted to chime in and say please err on the side of making the game more deterministic.

22

I don’t think the game is ready for character 80+ yet (from 1 to 80+ at patch 8.1). Progression after that is tedious, boring and unrewarding. If I would created all my character in 8.1 i would have stopped at 85 max.

The game need many patches for real end game content and progression beyond 80+. 8.2 seems to be one of them. I’m quite existed to see what’s gonna happen, especially for all my 90+ characters

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23

The entire game is no 100% rng progression. It would be more accurate to say that 90% of the game is 0% RNG progression. The only way you could get to 75 without T15 of good mods in every slot is if you did not use the excellent crafting system that drops enough mats and bases to say that T15 good mods is 0% RNG (just a small amount of time, which you are spending as you level and gain passive points, both of which are 0% RNG).

We absolutely need and depend on RNG to make content replayable. If the devs make a nice map and a cool boss but he drops 100% there is very little interest in replayability. If the boss is guaranteed to drop 1-5 class-specific shards, 50% to drop a rare crafting mat, 10% to drop his unique and 1% to drop a ‘chase’ item, then you have content that can be farmed.

But the devs understand that critically people play the game in different ways and keeping everyone happy–the different playstyles–leads to a large and active community which supports the long term life of the game.

People who want to play their character for 10-20 hours need content. Playing like that you want to feel like you accomplished something and ‘won’ before moving onto another character. If you want to keep playing that character for another 20 hours, you need new things to do, and if you want to play for 100 hours, you need even more things to do.

If you are going to support different playstyles for the long term success of the game you need content (and rewards) for the 10 hour crew and you need different stuff for the 100 hour crew. If your playstyle is the 10-hour game by preference, you can’t look at rewards designed for people who want to spend 100 hours playing. Making those rewards easier to achieve it directly shortening the content for the people who like 100 hours.

I have more faith in the devs of this game to support all these playstyles than any other devs I’ve seen for a long time. It is very impressive how much of the long term vision is already clearly visible while we are in beta and the majority of endgame content and rewards haven’t even been revealed yet!

I’ve been experiencing exactly the same frustrations as the OP, and have been spending many hours grinding empowered monos. Yes, we want more content and things to chase for our progression, but I would argue that pointing the finger directly at the RNG process isn’t good if you consider the entire playerbase and the longterm life of the game.

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24

The crafting system isn’t too bad RNG-wise I think, and monolith boss trigger finally became deterministic so totally happy with that.

But the blessings, they are such a pain in the ass. Things such as crit avoidance, endurance, and resistance shred, to name a few, are an absolute essential in completing a decent build. Farming a single mod endlessly to no avail is simply a terrible experience and it’s the main reason I’m reluctant to put more time into this game.

They could maybe make it so that a mod that hasn’t appeared in a row accumulate a counter of sorts to raise their probability of appearing, that gets reset when they finally appear. If they want a time sink, they should at least make it rewarding.

25

Didn’t read the whole thread, so forgive me if it’s already been asked/answered, but…

What would be the harm in just letting people choose from all the available blessings? If the concern is about stacking too much of one thing, well…

a) Would that be so bad?
b) If so, they could offset this by making certain blessings only available from certain timelines.

Seems like it would help a lot. I’m super sketched out about how much RNG is in this game because it looks like it’s doing some of the things I hate about PoE (despite still really liking that game), and in certain areas doing them in worse ways.

26

This game is much more deterministic than most ARPGs or even looters in general, in fact a little to deterministic I think.

27

In some ways, but it still puts RNG in the places where it hurts most, and the trend I see it going is to do that even more.

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28

So true

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29

I agree that min/maxing can be pretty hard even with a lot of playtime in the current system. I got my void knight to 100 before the monolith rework strictly through monoliths (24 empowered rah’yeh and no chest :)). I was able to get full optimal t20s on optimal bases, but only successfully crafted 1 exalted piece that was an actual upgrade. The monolith rework makes it much harder to finish items, that % success change for t4/5 is a big difference.
On the other hand, the exalted nodes give a huge bump on finding crazy items. I think finding/crafting t20s with ideal bases is probably in worse spot, but gambling a removal on exalted bases is way more likely now.
I’d just give EHG some time to tune the craft rates and droprates on items. Maybe add some more crafting runes/glyphs too. I’d like to see some very rare endgame crafting tools available.

30

I think it’s going to take more than time and tuning to solve this. The system has fundamental issues outlined in a few other threads here.

31

I understand. At the time of writing the blessings were the major incentive to finish monoliths (I don’t know about the current state - will pick it up again soonish). When the end game expands to a multitude of things to do I think your suggestion is perfectly feasible.

32

Would they though? All the last Epoch streamers must have dozens of stash tabs of such items and they still play regularly. I have zero stash tabs of such items and no intention of even trying to obtain them, and I still enjoy playing… that is, until this mentality of “Players must grind” kicks in.

33

For many people playing these games “CharLv, Gear, some Boss” are big goals and maybe get bored after ‘finishing’ these.

Streamers have another reason to play games… making money.
Ofc many also like the game they play but ‘normal’ players get bored + quit faster then them.
Not a good comparison.

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34

Isn’t the point of this thread about getting bored before finishing these?

Focusing on the choice of comparison misses the point entirely, but no problem, let’s compare with a hypothetical instead:

A ‘normal’ player starts Last Epoch as a Rogue, and beats the final boss with lots of kickass gear they crafted. They enjoyed playing the game.
Do they then quit the game because their gear is too good? Do they say - oh well, no use trying the Acolyte because I crafted gear too easy?
I’m saying this is unlikely, and I’m saying that the evidence is in how many players have lots of good gear and yet choose to keep playing - be they streamers, normal players or people who just played their first run through.
Hence, in a thread full of good points, I’m simply challenging the assumption that making crafting universally less frustrating will lead players to quit.

35

Looks like many in PathOfExile do stop after finishing (personal) goals of a League, after some weeks. And that would be faster with ‘easy gear/progression’. While streamers play that much longer or for the entire league.

36

Read up on the ‘harvest nerf’ threads on the POE forum, and you could easily conclude that lots of people are quitting before even setting personal goals, and that easier gear/progression would make them play longer.
You might also read up on the many who prefer standard, purely because the items they want are already in their stash tab, and they can avoid grinding/trading and simply run the character they want.

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37

The entire game cannot be 100% RNG based progression

100,000% agree. I was just thinking about this yesterday. It’s a false dichotomy. You can have both A and B, you do not need to choose only one or the other. It’s possible to have RNG and also, in parallel, have a deterministic way to achieve a goal. If the deterministic way is very, very, very expensive then that keeps the achievement value high, and also means that you still get that “WOW!!!” moment when an item drops via RNG.

To reiterate: believing you can only have one or the other is a false dichotomy !!!

38

I agree 100% with JC40MAIN.

Many games use several RNG layers for farming. This was yr 2000. You would assume that by yr 2021 developers would come up with better ideas to reward time spent playing the game. But no. It is much easier to continue a broken trend than be innovative.

I have news for you: RNG does NOT add replay value, it kills the fun.

After running 30 echoes and defeating the final empowered Boss, we should get some type of rewards, even a minor one. Getting nothing is frustrating. I’m surprised the developers do not understand that. Perhaps they should play their game more.

A casual player may get Empowered Blessings close to 320+ armor or +800 block effectiveness or 100%+ physical damage on one of his first runs whereas a dedicated player who runs the same monoliths may get useless Blessings again and again.

Suggestions: give us a choice (a Table) between a flat +15 armor, or +25 block or +3% physical damage or 1.5% critical strike multiplier or 1% endurance, or 1 health gain on kill, or 0.2% melee damage leeched as health, etc. after killing the final boss. That would be a guaranteed reward and be my choice, not the RNG god’s choice. If I decide to run 900 echoes, to meet the final Boss 30 times, it is my choice. But I know I will get something out of the 30 kills. That’s my incentive.

Same for gears/crafting. The final Empowered Boss, or Arenas (say at wave 100, 200, 300, etc.), or some other end-content, or a 10-step quest chain, could drop mats that give a small increment, a small boost, a tiny increment, to a piece of gears of my choice. At least, my character would be progressing based on my choices. Atm it is mostly grinding.

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39

What I would assume is that a person who has been playing games for 21 years would have learned to stop buying games with core systems they find intolerably frustrating, such as loot acquisition being RNG based.

I do not understand the behavior of buying a game with systems you know you don’t like and then trying to browbeat the developers of that game into changing those systems. It’s like buying tickets to a horror movie and then blowing up the director’s Twitter about how he should have made a comedy instead.

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40

^^^ THIS. Crafting, blessings, and farming monoliths is SUPPOSED TO BE RNG - That is the essence of the End Game. There are guaranteed drops for certain items in the game not to mention guaranteed passive point rewards via questline. In addition, the crafting system allows you to CREATE a build-specific item/weapon to use until you get something better.

Oh…and this game is in Beta… R.E.L.A.X…

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