The goods and the bads / Some thoughs

Feedback and Suggestions
34

But… None of those genres have metrics to compare you to everyone else either! Maybe some FPS games do that I’m not aware of, I suppose something like Elo in LoL could work if the game implements it. I know for a fact factory games don’t have that and beating a hard modded difficulty isn’t an accurate measurement tool as what constitutes being “good” at factory games? You could have beaten that modded factorio, sure, but did you do it optimally or did you brute force it? (this is rhetorical :stuck_out_tongue:), we also know that Diablo-clones don’t typically keep a metric to compare yourself to others, and neither do metroidvanias.

So your “record” is as solid as me saying that I’m in the top 5% of all Kingdom Hearts players and in the top 15% of all Ratchet and Clank players. BTW, I made those numbers up because there’s no possible way for me to know where I rank.

P.S. I hope you know I’m mostly just giving you a hard time.

35

As I mentioned, and apparently you don’t clear up, the way I read the whole thing (and apparently I wasn’t alone in that) was simply him asking a question and giving his opinion on that question. The whole 50% thing was part of that opinion and not part of the question.

But even if you take the 50% thing, you apparently don’t understand that it still depends on the type of player. A altoholic will have different goals than someone that focuses on a single character. What is 50% average between that? Someone that focuses on 3.5 characters? You’re using the same metric to talk about different things.

So you might use the 50% metric to determine the quality of the build, since you’re both so determined to make it a part of the question, but you still have to separate your metrics into different parts depending on the type of player, so that a decent build for a altoholic would be one where 50% of altoholics can do whichever metric they follow.

Lastly, I’ll also disagree with you that 50% is a quantified thing because you have no way to measure it. Can 50% of the players defeat Aberroth with ballista? Do you have any way of determining that?

As I explained in my previous post, all that was given was an opinion on the question asked. Never was it said something like “so from this point forward, let’s us all consider the 50% metric as a baseline for the question”.
I even broke down his post. After the question he follows with “I think” and “I’d say”. All indicative of providing an opinion. And apparently I’m not the only one interpreting it that way.

So maybe Typhon’s intention was to set the 50% as baseline, but that wasn’t apparent in the way he posted. Much like in the other thread, it looks like it wasn’t apparent what I was trying to say and he interpreted it in a different way.

It’s not about being right or wrong, but of reading something with different interpretations, apparently, or of not expressing that interpretation in a clear way.

With this I just meant that you can’t consider player skill because you can’t quantify what is the “average player skill”. We don’t have data or metrics to quantify this. All we can do is offer what we feel is this average, which is completely subjective.

36

No offense, but I think looking too closely at the gear is a misunderstanding (that makes a lot of victims), and that’s what leads to frustration.
With the exception of uniques bringing in special mechanics (usually clearly mentionned by the guide creator), the gear is not part of the build. It is an exemple of something to aim for in the very long run, but it is not needed: you can play the same build without it.
Odds are anyway that you will never get exactly the same items as the streamer, with all the same affixes and bases (hence the frustration).

Build guides are here to give you ideas about skills and passives synergy. The vast majority of them CAN be played while levelling, at least something extremely similar that you tweak slowly as you find more powerful gear.

37

To be fair to Baal, many builds don’t actually mention this. They just present the build as what you should use and don’t even mention either which uniques are mandatory or alternatives for the ones that aren’t.
It would be nice if they all did, but I’d say it’s a 50/50 chance that they do.

38

The devs would agree. Personally, my “standards” are a bit lower.

I’m not entirely convinced that player skill is too important on where the bar is for what constitutes a “decent” build. It kinda does 'cause a high/average/low skilled player would likely achive higher corruption with a good/op/whatever build than a bad/underpowered/whatever build. But that also feels, to me, like an argument as to why player skill is irrelevant as to what determins a good/bad/indifferent build.

39

Yeah, but speedrunning the basic game is :wink:
Also having an unfair advantage since I’m a electronics engineer and automation and electronics is literally one of the jobs I learned which I still have big interest in. If you build a friggin CPU while condensing signals through multiplexing then I would imagine you’re faaaairly high up in the metrics there if anyone ever provides one :stuck_out_tongue:

A lot of options to discern your standing compared to others in the other genres as well btw, Metroidvanias also speedrunning and memorization of pathways/item/unlocks, survival games have often public servers or also tournaments, FPS are self-explanatory (And to be fair probably not 35% anymore after how long I haven’t touched a single one and not been in the mood for it either).

But:

I would say the live-service ones actually provide fairly decent ways to compare yourself, especially since quite a few of the top-tier players tend to stream while putting in their unhealthy amount of hours in any tournament or new league/cycle/whatever.

Skill is the metric… what are you even talking about?
Is being a altoholic making you better or worse at the game? :rofl:

Playstyle has nothing to do with quality of a build, not a single thing. At best we can differentiate between type of content where a build shines or doesn’t shone.
Hence saying ‘Good for bosses, bad for Arena, mid for monolith’ for example. Not a single person cares about the ‘playstyles’ of people as it’s not a viable metric to use and nonsensical to boot.

No, Aberroth it at best a 5-10% thing overall in the first place. You seem to misunderstand how the metric works.

You take all players which have a minimum play-time (which is up for you to decide to get a as influence-less metric as possible) to remove ‘I tested it’ people.
That provides you hence with a picture of ‘overall level’ of players.

Then you split it up into any other metrics you want to have. Classes, builds, content.
Yes, PoE actually does that internally, it’s known they do all that for quality control and balance of their content. And partially the community has been given information of parts over the years as well, not the full picture though… but more then enough to discern how well people do.

So yes, there’s ways to determine that, even if it’s old data by now.
We don’t have it specifically for LE… but we can draw comparisons from the other game which did provide metrics to the community over the course of the years.

Yep, but otherwise it’s ‘arbitrary’ as Lama created the notion for, hence your argument is by design ‘arbitrary’ if you don’t provide the relevant metrics.

Could be right… could be wrong… but you got no way to know and anyone can simply say ‘Nah, not true’ or ‘I agree’ without a basis.

Hence why it went to be more detailed with the probably metrics in mind, since we lack details about the exact metrics there is no possibility to even discuss that, we can only guess… but the range of outcome gets reduced.

Not in this game.
PoE provides that luckily given the percentile of Steam achievements as well as a lovely one which states how many beat the campaign and how many went through Act 1 even :slight_smile:

So from there… yes… yes we can discern it, and it’s unlikely to be vastly different from any other game of the genre percentile wise. You increase it accordingly the more ‘casual’ the game becomes as it takes less time to achieve the same thing, then adjust that a bit since the attention span of players pulled in my more casual games is also generally a bit less. In other genres we’ve seen this method to hold true and provides at least a rough measurement.

40

No, but being an altoholic gives you different goals/objectives. Most altoholics consider a decent build is getting to empowered monos. Or low corruption. They don’t care about 300c or Aberroth.
On the other hand, a competitive player will only consider a build decent if it can reach 1k+ (as can be seen by multiple posts on this forum).

So you’re trying to quantify a build to fit into a definition that changes depending on the player.
I will give you that your quantification method can be used to determine the effectiveness of a build. But you can’t ignore playstyle when playstyle is a huge part on what a player will consider “decent”.

Even with your more “detailed metrics” it’s still arbitrary. Not just because the numbers you came up with are themselves arbitrary (why 50% of players in 3 tries? Why not 100% of players in 5? Or 50% in 5? Or 100% in 10 tries, which is the number of Aberroth keys that are guaranteed?), but because you have no way of assessing if any build can complete 300c in 3 tries by 50% of the players.

No it doesn’t. Almost no game gives you metrics for what you’re proposing here.
PoE gives you the metric for how many people completed a certain content with ANY build. So you can’t even use PoE to determine if build X can do Uber Maven in 3 tries by 50% of the players. All you can determine is how many have done Uber Maven as a percentage, nothing else.
Which means that even in PoE you also can’t determine if any single build is “decent” using your metric.

EDIT: This is why I only tried to answer the original question “What makes a build ‘decent’?”. And I tried to provide different points of view according to playstyles. Because it’s a subjective term depending on the player and playstyle and you can’t quantify it, even using arbitrary metrics.

41

As said… a really senseless measurement.

If you’re good at running monolith content… you’re good at running monolith content. It doesn’t matter if your goal is 50c or 5000c… that has no meaning for your skill.
Same with other content.

Personal goals have no bearing on your skill as a player. I can have the lofty goal of beating the whole game deathless… but if my skill makes me die regularly even in Act 2 then it won’t happen. Simple as that.
The same the other way around. My goal is to make a baseline functioning build… but if I’m so darn good then everything will kill all content in the game and bring me to quite a high corruption level compared to others.

Personal skill and personal goals are two different topics. One is a metric for balancing, the other is not

But less so. As said, range reduced.

Also as for the numbers… because it was asked what the premise for decision was… that was provided.
What are you even arguing about? You’ve completely lost the topic and argue for the sake of arguing by now.

Nope, they did a breakdown a few times for their Classes. Not specific build, but they also mentioned they have it, didn’t provide it though.

42

I’m not talking about skill. I’m talking about the definition of “decent build” nothing else.
An altoholic or even a casual player considers a “decent build” one that can reach 100c.
An “average” player might consider it one that can reach 300c.
A competitive player only considers a decent build one that can do 1000c.
Within those, you can them apply your skill metric.

What you’re trying to do is not only defining an arbitrary metric, but also defining an arbitrary goal (even if based on what Mike said) that doesn’t apply to everyone.

Why would a decent build only be applicable for balancing? There was nothing in the question post about balancing only as a metric.

It’s the same thing. They don’t provide it. So you don’t have actual data to base your metrics on. All you can go on, even with a more specific metric, is gut feeling. So what is the point of imposing a specific metric for a subjective discussion when you can’t even use any data to quantify it?

43

Yes, exactly, that’s the point.

How do you discern if a build is ‘decent’?
You can’t do so by saying ‘it can reach xyz’ since that’s based on player skill purely as mentioned above.
Which pulled off the whole discussion about quantifying that to a degree to reduce the range in which we talk about.

That’s all it was, I still don’t understand where you’re going with your whole argumentation since that’s a part of ‘decent’ after all. You can’t discern if something is ‘decent’ if you don’t declare which range of players should reach said goal. 100% of em? The top 1% only? That’s the whole friggin point here :stuck_out_tongue: Nothing else.

44

Yes, and my whole point is that you can’t just define an arbitrary goal like reaching 300c as a requirement for being decent when many players consider builds decent either much lower or much higher.

So you’d have to break it down:
-Decent builds for altoholics/casuals: 50% of the players in the group can reach empowered monos with it in 3 tries (whatever that means, since it’s a metric that only seems aplicable to bosses)
-Decent builds for “regular” players: 50% of the players in the group can reach 300c in 3 tries
-Decent builds for competitive players: 50% of the players of the players in the group can reach 1000c+.

That’s all I’m arguing about. You’re making an arbitrary metric to measure builds and you’re also making an arbitrary goal to define “decent”. And you’re saying that applies to the majority.

At that point it would just be easier to pick a build tier list and say that decent builds are C or better, and it would probably be less arbitrary.

45

Wah?
That’s also a fairly nonsensical argument. You can’t even begin to discuss something like that!
So we need that ‘arbitrary goal’ to have a baseline. A universal… arbitrary… goal.
One which is the closest to what we know that the devs might see as a viable arbitrary goal given that 320c is the last direct corruption based content for CoF and 300 overall for Aberroth.

So 300c is a very good arbitrary goal-line. And saying that 50% of people should be viable to reach this core aspect unless simply quitting beforehand - hence solely skill-based - is also a very viable argumentation line.

Your notion is utterly… and entirely… baffling. Trying to cut it between different play-styles is not only making the whole discussion impossible as it splits into as many discussions as you design benchmarks for (in your case 3) but it’s also outright detrimental since the discussion is about baseline balancing here, not about targeted and specific content related balance. Corruption is the one core game mechanic which everyone followed, similar to maps in PoE or the - however they are called - timeline thingies in Torchlight Infinite.

Hence by mandatory design of the topic it follows the ‘regular’ player benchmark by default, anything else would be quite useless to even start with…

And…

How would you decide if it’s ‘C’ though? After all you don’t have any data, right? :stuck_out_tongue:

46

It is already impossible since you have no way to reliably say that build X can do Aberroth in 3 tries for 50% of the players.

That is what you added in the last few posts. The original question said nothing about balancing.
The whole thing started with Typhon asking what is a decent build and then proceeding to give his opinion on it, providing metrics for narrowing down his personal definition of it.

Not even Mike talks about decent builds. He always simply said they are “successful” if they can reach 300c. Because “decent” is a very sunjective term that will change based on personal preferences and goals.

So you can’t just decide that if a build can’t do 300c it isn’t a “decent” build because a large number of people will disagree with that. You’re trying to force multiple arbitrary parameters into shoehorning something that is a subjective term globally (it’s usually not so subjective in personal terms) into an objective term.

What you’re doing is the equivalent of saying that if a game has less than x players, it’s objectively a bad game. Or that if it has more than y players, it’s objectively good.

It’s still less arbitrary than saying that decent builds have to reach 300c by half the playerbase.

47

Really? That’s very bad.
I was under the impression that almost all build guides talk about gearing… Must be because I never (ever) watch videos, I only look at written guides. They are probably more detailed.

[Side note, my post was not meant to be an attack towards Baal. More like general advice to everyone following builds, I have seen many threads where people say build guides aim too high because they focus on the gear.]

48

Yes, written build guides do tend to be more specific about this type of information. And, to be fair, so do some video guides. I know AaronRPG mentions it on his guides and so do a few others.
But there are also plenty that don’t and some players that aren’t aware of there being alternatives or if it’s important for the build or not are often put off by it. There was even a post about this a month ago.

I, at least, didn’t take it as an attack, so no worries from my part.

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49

The second the baseline was mentioned to be ‘arbitrary’ the only metric which can be used is player skill, which together with balancing is directly causal to the outcome.

So if they are not ‘successful’ then they ‘failed’

A ‘decent’ build obviously isn’t allowed to ‘fail’ as a baseline, which yes… I would say holds up quite well?

I still don’t know what you’re on about.

How does it differ? Explain.
The ‘C’ has to come from somewhere, what’s the metric for this decision making?

Sadly so, the majority of build guides for LE are quite sub-par still.

50

I assume so, yes, from their point of view.

I don’t know why not? I’ve played several decent builds which aren’t successful by EHG standards. However, it’s decent by mine.

It differs that it contains only one arbitrary decision, rather than several.

Anyway, I don’t want to keep escalating this. I’ve explained that I’ve read that post as a simple introduction to discussing what people consider a decent build.
You and Typhon apparently are interested only in discussing builds that fulfill several arbitrary metrics.

I gave my opinion on what I consider to be a decent build. I don’t have much to contribute to the side-discussion you both apparently want to have because I don’t agree with your arbitrary metrics. Especially because you’re trying to objectively quantify something that is subjective and dependent on personal preferences.

Lastly, I just want to point out that if you’re using the 50% of players metric, then decent builds are builds that can finish the campaign, since that is where 50% of players stop playing. Any further goal like empowered monos or 300c will fail because 50% of the players won’t reach it.

But I’ll excuse myself from this particular discussion. There’s no point in escalating this further when we’re obviously discussing 2 different things.

51

‘You failed decently’? :stuck_out_tongue: That’s why. Should be self-explanatory.

52

I only failed by EHG standards, not my own. I’m not worried about balance (I usually actively avoid OP builds) or doing all content (haven’t even killed half the harbingers). I don’t have to use the standards EHG uses, nor the standards competitive players use, nor the standards you want to use.
My standards are: Was it a fun build to play and did I reach empowered monos? Then it’s a decent build. If it does more than that, then it’s a good one.

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