They don’t have a 1 click method to move it into a UI with endless storage. That’s the biggest thing. Picking up currency comes at a space cost in PoE which simply doesn’t exist in LE.
Hence with that alone the reason for itemization falls away from LE.
Then we could still say that putting them into a spreadsheet (like the Forge) is still doable in town or the hideout. Which yeah! Absolutely! But also it takes up space in the stash and GGG always wanted people to have a substancial need to buy into more tabs to keep server costs covered as easily as possible. Not nice… but a business decision rather then a design decision for gameplay measures.
Once more, LE doesn’t have those decisions behind their system, hence those things have to be taken into consideration.
Fair, I took it as ‘we won’t do a trading system’ back then. But that’s on me hence.
To a certain extend. Blizz is just a prime example because it’s backed by billions with almost free reign about whom to hire and whom not and still they manage to underperform by a lot. The ammount of stuff that is needed to be done is just mindscrambeling for me. It’s like somone who builds a machine isn’t caring if the tolerance is .000X or .X. I get it with a lot of room for error errors happen give the average failure rate of humans on a task they are experts in is still 4% (there were some studies on this topic, google it it’s fun ^^).
Then again it comes down to how big the need of changes are. imagine Blizz would’ve tried to fix everything wrong with the new class. It would’ve been 3 pages of stuff showing how much they messed up and how little they cared.
Yeah but still less
That wasn’t broken but a shitshow. They community had to clean up everything the devs messed up. The game was good basicly but so flawed it wasn’t remotly fun untill the community patches.
Trade is more important to people then MAC support, just to name one example.
Don’t know. I never had the same test done by X ammount of people and XX amount of people at the same time.
No it wasn’t . I just think both is better then only having one. I could’ve stated this more clearly. Sorry for that .
Cloning one isn’t doing the trick without a lot of work but cloning 10 or 100, given the ammount you made up, gives a good picture and makes things easier.
Sure It’s harder to analyse non meta builds then meta build. You are completely right saying so. Then again if someone wants to understand it they can.
Yes for a lot of data more participents are better but then again we come back to your upheavel build and if noone plays it or gives any feedback then there are only numbers to look at no matter how many participents have been there. So no matter how I look at it… they have to evaluate the data anway while more matching datapoints help to identify things instead of having only a 1 or 2. You are not wrong by any means though .
I just need to google if there is a corosponing term ^^… recognition value is a very big thing I get it. Then again the devs stated they didn’t want a PoE1 clone and make PoE2 stand out on it’s own and to me personly and to my taste it was a swing and a miss in that department. They could’ve started out in a smaller scale and increase the skilltree over time as in PoE1 (what they most likely do in PoE2 anyway at some point). This most likely would have little to no impact on people already drooling over the game and the fans but maybe… just maybe… would have made the game even more approachable. Don’t get me wrong I here I like PoE2 and the skilltree is already easier then the PoE1 skilltree, non the less to me it was a missed opportunity to make the game even more accessable without making the game unrecogniceable. That’s just a question of taste in the end and I’m used to stare at skilltrees for hours because I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed who relys on 3rd party tools in PoE. Non the less if the tree was less intimidating by it’s size and good for nothing shapes I guess in my friendgroup alone 10-20 people would’ve picked up PoE2. At the end of the day you are completely right but I simply look at it from a far more skilled perspective of someone not so smart who struggles already a bit without 3rd party software ^^.
To me, as a non native speaker, the whole thing sounded pretty much like “We scrapping it completely without a substitue.”. That’s why the trade thread exploded because many people sound alike. To me this seems a tad bit more then a missunderstanding. But who am I to speak maybe I got it all wrong and there was no deed to “riot” and they wanted to implement trade anyway. Still I’m under the impression they were about to scrap it completely and to force everyone into a SF enviourment with optional group play.
The problem is that ARPG systems are chaotic in nature. This means they can’t be predicted. The system is very complex with so many moving and interconnecting parts that making a small change can result in huge differences. Or making a big change can result in small differences. You can’t predict the outcome beforehand (which is what a chaotic system is).
That is why devs introduce a new unique for a specific purpose and it ends up breaking something else entirely. Or a new skill, or passive node, or affix, etc. The only way to actually know the effect it will have is to put it in the system and then see what the result is.
Which is what CTs/Testers/PTRs try to figure out. But since the possible outcomes are so great, stuff always falls through the cracks. And I’m pretty positive that in many games (even in PoE) there are still unintended mechanics lying around that no one has thought to explore yet, so they haven’t had an impact in the game.
Were they actually less, or did you simply not know about them because you didn’t have reddit, youtube, hundreds of gaming media platforms, etc?
Or was it simply that many of those games didn’t become popular at all, since there was no coverage of them, so you never heard of them? Whereas today every single game that is released, even an indie game, has some sort of web presence and is easier to come to the attention of players?
It wasn’t the only one, though. KOTOR2, Stalker, Sacred 3, etc.
You could even argue that PoE would have never become what it is if it wasn’t for the community creating essential tools like the trade site (before GGG adopted it for their own), PoB or Filterblade.
That’s why I think complex games like isometric hack and slash games needs to be developed in snails pace to accomodate to the chaos. Like babystaps… make the toon move… make the toon auto attack… baseline stuff. The add telegraphs of skills and so on and so forth. This is by no means a good thing to do but if you can’t handle the chaos you need to take it slow and get rid of as many as chaotic factors as possible. Then I come back to “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.”. It was a choice… a vision… a passion project… a wish to make a game they want to play. If this is the outcome something went south… a lot.
Yeah yeah complex systams… game development is hard… unfoseeable problems… I get it people don’t need to repeate this but then again… “If you can’t stand the heat…”. I have a lot of goodwill for EHG and I still hope LE will turn out to be aweeeeeeesome but don’t tell me you have sympathy for people who mess up their job again and again on a regular basis. In no other industry that plane would fly.
I can only talk about the stuff I played and there were quality titles and titles that were complete crap for sure. But back in the day when games have been bought on CD’s and internet wasn’t a widely used thing things were better.
I don’t know if engines got overcomplicated or if programming languages have their limits and whatnot. I simply want a functioning product with as little as possible bugs and problems. Going back to D4 as a prime example to not do things in my book while PoE2 is doing a lot of stuff right but still has some obvious flaws and problems. Non the less one product allready outshines the other when I look at it only in a “What is bugged or broken?” scenario.
Huh? I had almost no issues with stalker ^^. Sacred three was crap I dropped like a hot potato and I only played KOTOR not KOTOR2.
I can’t tell if PoE would or would not be where it is now if things happened differently… I’m no psychic
Oh, rather the severty usually was far less, so they could be ignored better.
I mean… there’s definite ‘broken’ builds in Diablo 2 or Diablo 1, Same with Sacred or Titan Quest. Balance is a precarious thing.
But we haven’t usually seen things like nowadays where games literally break because of badly designed interactions. PoE 2 is a prime example with builds that cause their servers to crash (1 tick re-applying mechanics into the thousands) or magnitudes of 1000+% in power disparity between a ‘normal’ build and a top-tier one. 100%? 200%? Sure, that’s already extreme, but if something outperforms other contenders by 10+ times then something’s off.
Which is a prime example with the 1k+ corruption builds relatively often. The basis for the game is supposed to be ~300 corruption for a ‘good’ build. Hence one with intensive time and effort invested. But some builds reach that simply by leveling without even getting anywhere far into gear. Not a good state.
Or Linux support… or any sort of those things. The amount of affected people is miniscule beyond any measure. A MAC is not a gaming machine, a linux machine is neither. Windows has the widest support (and bloat accompanying it) for it, hence branching out into making compatibility for systems which are basically unused is nonsensical. I also don’t buy a toaster to wash my clothes… they have simply other use-cases where they shine, gaming is not included.
Which I deem utterly wrong. There is no system that can’t be predicted. There’s only systems which need more effort and measures to do so.
GGG has not without reason tests for nearly every single thing… and they still miss some stuff nonetheless. In comparison most other companies ‘including AAA companies sadly’ are like little babies in a crib. There’s just no comparison.
Sure, a lot of that needs extensive resources and time to set up… but especially in a development environment ensuring that those things are implemented from the first second on is very very important. Because implementing them retroactively is a much higher resource and time investment.
I still don’t get why games don’t use proper testing machines for that with a respective environment. Sure, it takes ages to test, but you only need to do it 2-3 times to weed out a good 90% of the outliers.
How many possible interactions do we have when we go through the list? 1 trillion? 2 trillion? Any which goes beyond a specific amount of DPS gets axed in some way. ‘Logical’ combinations below a certain threshold buffed. Sure, a test takes 2-3 days for the machine likely but given a 3 month interval that would nonetheless allow several runs and allow adjustments towards a reasonable baseline.
What was the issue with Stalker? It was a great game for its time. A bit jank since indie studio but still… good game.
The problem isn’t the initial implementation (although even that is hard enough to accomplish with all the millions of possible combinations). After all, act1-3 of PoE2 are pretty well balanced, on the whole, outside of some outliers.
The problem is when you have your reasonably balanced game and then introduce new things. The snail’s pace you suggest would mean that you would get a new season every 2 years.
Which is, after all, what you see in Grim Dawn. And things are generally well balanced enough, although even then they still need some fixes right away.
I don’t consider not getting balance right as not doing their job properly. Players sometimes have unrealistic expectations because they aren’t aware of how things work. It’s like going to your auto-shop, ask them to build a car from scratch and then being outraged that you don’t have a fully functioning car in 3 months.
There isn’t a single ARPG so far that got balance perfect. You have several that, over an extended period of time (several years) managed to get a hold on their balance in a way that it’s acceptable to most players. PoE did this (after several years), GD did this (after an expansion), most games don’t even get there.
The only game I’m aware that got balance perfect is Starcraft and that is because you have only 3 factions, with a limited number of variations for each (units and buildings). And even then it required several patches and an expansion.
Games getting more massive is definitely a part of the problem. The code for simple animations is now exponentially higher, for example, than when all you had to do was move a sprite around.
Another part of it is that players are less tolerant to any small bug. Back then, if you were playing a platformer and it showed some artifact on a level while you were double jumping, you would ignore it.
These days, if your minimap has an artifact where your quest icon should be, everyone immediately wants it solved.
And yet, look at the massive amount of fixes they already had to do. And when they release the next major patch (with the economy reset), it will happen again. Much like it happens on every new league in PoE1.
It’s pretty much the same scenario as with BG3. The game was great, won GOTY, yet had thousands of bugs and fixes that needed to be made. The difference is that, since it was a finished product, they simply devoted their entire team into fixing bugs rather than implementing new things. And even then it was several months before that started to trickle out.
Stalker had (and still does, even with the community patch) a lot of bugs and crashes. Same for KOTOR2 and Sacred 3.
Just ask yourself this: would PoE survive without trade? Because that was the reality of the game. You had no way of knowing what was for sale, unless you used a 3rd party. So there was, for all practical purposes, no trade in PoE until the community chipped in.
You should google chaotic systems then. Even the 3 body problem (which only has 3 moving parts) can’t be predicted except for a small number of cases of initial positions. And that has the best minds in the planet going at it for decades.
There is a whole field devoted to this (Chaos Theory). Basically, when presented with a snapshot of a chaotic system where all the rules and values are known, you have no was to predict what the end result will be.
There was even a simple experiment where you had a piece in an infinite board of white tiles and you had only two rules:
1- If the piece lands on white tile it turns black, if it lands on a black tile it turns white.
2- If the piece lands on a white tile it turns left, if it lands on a black tile it turns right.
When they made the code for this and started running it, it started creating a simmetrical pattern. Which wasn’t really surprising. After a lot more moves it became chaotic. And after I don’t remember how many moves it would be stuck on a loop of 106 or something moves forever.
And this is a system that has very few pieces and rules. Everything is known. However, you couldn’t really predict what was going to happen.
Same as with the 3 body problem. Given a starting position of 3 bodies in space, knowing their mass, position and velocity, you can’t predict what will happen to that system.
All you can do with chaotic systems is to simulate them and see how they turn out (which is what we do with weather forecasting).
That will depend on what your threshold to ignore things is. If we’re talking simply pure possible combinations (5 skills, plus 100 passive points, plus all the combinations of gear affixes), it would be likely in the septillion or higher range for each class.
It only becomes feasible when you massively cut down on the combinations, which is where the unexpected stuff comes along.
I expect GGG and EHG do have a lot of these tests in place. However, there are way too many combinations to test everything properly. So you end up testing the expected only.
Depends on how far away from ‘right’ it is.
There’s acceptable imbalance and there’d unacceptable one.
For example the MF strategies for group-play in PoE are simply not acceptable to exist. A normal decently juiced map without MF brings in 1 div roughly in profit per map (over a period of 1000+ maps) while at the same time a 6 man group with someone focused on MF (and being utterly unplayable solo hence) buffed by the group and being the only one able to last-hit brings in roughly 5 div per person in the same timeframe, That’s obviously not acceptable to have a 400% increase in results, and it’s never been fixed and always rightfully criticized.
The same goes for power disparity. If you take a build which is basically showcased by the game, hence you’re being nudged into it by having… let’s say a core skill which converts into ice while having a secondary synergizing skill being ice as well… and you take it and it’s utter ass to play while in comparison a large portion of skills outperform it by 200+% with the same non-effort then that’s also… not acceptable. Not even talking about unique items or special surprising synergies there, just baseline ‘expected’ builds to take.
Mind you, going from the ‘baseline’ of power there, not the low-end versus high-end. Bit high-end versus mid and low-end versus mid. After all the outcome doubles when going from there, with those 200% into both ends accumulating to 400% disparity, which is ridiculous to have.
And it’s not talking about ‘perfect’ either, making everything roughly the same and enforcing basically no disparity to exist is also bad, makes choices senseless… a bit needs to be there anyway, which is fine. It’s solely about the extreme ends of the basics, not to speak of special interactions which are unintended. At least the basics should be handled properly.
That’s a choice to design the game with more focus on graphics. It’s always a downside to do so and has to be taken into consideration for the scale of the game.
It’s why so many indie devs work in the pixel-style, this allows creating animations with far less effort but nonetheless a very enjoyable visual style. The more realistic something is designed the higher the need for graphical fidelity and the more intense the needs for extensive animation-work as well.
I’ll be there and jump on the bandwagon of ‘if you can’t stand the heat…’ for that aspect definitely.
That’s an oxymoron. If you know all the values and rules then it’s not chaotic anymore, it’s become predictable.
If you have the abilities to predict it fully in the respective timeframe to achieve a substantial change is another topic, but with enough time you can guarantee a full range of visibility for any specific outcome.
I’m a firm believer that there doesn’t exist anything like actual ‘chaos’, only situations where we don’t - yet - understand the rules. And situations where the expending of energy would influence the outcome to a degree that it makes the difficulty higher while the needed timeframe to solve it would be longer then getting and applying a result to change it. In hindsight we would nonetheless be able to know it with a 100% chance given all measurement points are known in full.
It’s hence not that we can’t know it but instead that the energy expenditure to resolve the problem before it reaches the ‘end-state’ without influencing the test itself is exponential, nearing ‘endless’ hence. Which is the same situation as why backwards time-travel is impossible, forward though is (time convergence near light speed).
We only need to simulate the ‘relevant’ end-points though. Hence a reliable minimum range of gear and the reliable top-end of gear available. You ignore the values in the middle since they don’t lead to the outliers, which reduces the datapoints by magnitudes.
There are broken builds up to this day and people are happy with it. Then again I ask myself why they are still left in the game or why no other builds are elevated to the same level as it seems the “OP” builds are what the devs have been aiming for ^^. It’s kind of funny to me because balancing is an ongiong journey but mostly stopped before the final goal is reached.
To me it don’t matter if new stuff is much stronger then old stuff but I always hope for games to elevate underperforming builds at least to a baseline where the devs say: “This is our baseline and we try our best to reach this goal while it will take a lot of time and effort and can’t be done in one or two patches.”. Setting goal posts like Mike did in the past with the 300C aim that was regarded at the blink of an eye.
So as noone knows what normal performence should even be I feel like an idiot even talking about balance when there isn’t even a metric that defines what balance is considering the state of the game.
Yes but I give PoE2 some slack because they didn’t release the game. Right now PoE2 is nothing but a payed late alpha build without everything in place. So untill they release their game I look at it as kind of a beta branch… showing goodwill so to speak. D4 on the other hand is an example where stupid shit happens all the time and will most likely show this pattern in the next season as well. There are big differences between both game states because D4 is released and a mess and PoE2 is EA and a mess so to speak.
We can’t rely on 300C anymore. All we can rely on is that it was said if somone reaching 1k+ corruption EHG messed up. The 300C as a base was revoked by EHG as it never was said in the past completely disregarding it. So right now it looks that all builds are fine if they don’t increase over 999C what is a very big stretch.
Don’t beat this example it was a low hanging fruit and the first thing that came to my mind and not realy a smart thing to say. It was just there to make an obvious point. Trade is simply important and while I only wanted to be able to trade with my friends I played the game with back in the day we got 2 awesome systems… in theory. I guess if LE is devloped further and further the quirks will be sorted out over time but non the less both factions are stepping stones to overcome.
I guess he ment chaotic in way like “I increase stat A so skill A makes more dmg.” while thw outcome is that skills B,C and X skyrocket because there is an interaction that can be easiely overlocked and therefor it’s chaotic. (If I’m wrong kick my butt but that’s what i got from it, sorry if I was wrong ^^)
Sure I’m with you on this topic that bigger projects need more effort and if you are unable to do your job you should resign but I think EHG will be capable of evening out the problems that come with development. The question is if it is early enough and if they have the capacitys to do so. I’ve not given up my hopes for LE even when I’m not hyped about the direction they are heading and the state the game is right now.
That’s very true buuuuut if something breaks you can step back to a former version and do it again untill it works as it should. That’s what I ment with snails pace and babysteps. On top of it someone told me that everyone is coding stuff in their own style any many ways lead to rome but to complications as well. If this is true for working with unity then things obviously go wrong at a certain point. I just think a big system needs a slow approach and a flaweless foundation to be build apon. I have no idea about developing and I worked in an industry building machines to do very specific tasks in a nanometer range and with a very complex design given the tasks at hand. Some machnies were uniques only built once and guess what… noone gave a shit and it needed to be done flawelessly because when the machine was delivered it needed to work.
Sure a machine, while crazy complex, is most likely not as delicate as programming I learned the stepps nessesary to produce them while we always build it on a solid foundation. If something wasn’t working it was taken appart and made new or designed new or the errors in building it up were solved. maybe it’s this experience that makes me blind if there are tasks that are so easy to mess up even by experts in the field. All I know is that I was 10 minutes late one day and got firered because coming late was a big nono ^^… not that I damaged or messed up a producct.
100% correct. On the other hand as a customer I can complain if the product is flawed while balancing is a part of it. I don’t even pressure anyone in solving this problem instantly I point it out.
Noone ever spoke about homogenisation or perfect balance… kind of mood.
Oh come on that’s a bit of a stretch isn’t it? Who gives a crap about something like that? You can point it out and that’s that but I never heared anyone going into babyrage mode about an artifact.
Sure but at least I understand GGGs approach to things while other developers leave me clueless.
Sure but guess what it trickled out. Babysteps mentioning again. If you build a product and leave the foundation flawed or in a “chaotic system state” then the devs are to blame.
Take LE for example they made a big MP overhaul so all systems and skills work to build the game on further. Now there are still bugs from god knows when tormenting LE today. In my book I can evolve somthing further when I dealt with the quirks first instead of putting systems in place to keep the quirks in check.
When Cyberpunk was released people complained about it nonstop while I made my first runthrough on the third day after release without having one issue besides clipping here and there. Same goes for Stalker… I had 0 issues with the game outside of the stupid AI that made it easy to kill enemies where I shouldn’t be able to and get endgame gear early on.
First of all I think GGG would’ve done something about trading if they were forced to do so. I look at it this way. PoE strifed and become a greate game even with the shittyes most fucked up stupid beyond belive trading system in place. I ran out of swear words there but imagine I would’ve liked to go on cursing PoE’s trade system for 10 minutes non stop.
This I agree with. But when you know how hard the task is, you have a higher tolerance for how long it takes to get it to a desirable place. Hence, I don’t think badly of GGG for taking several years to close the gap. Or for occasionally still dropping the ball on a new league.
These days it’s not that much of a choice. Other than some indie stuff, like you pointed out, that gets popular, or the occasional outlier like Minecraft that leans into it, players expect better graphics these days than back in the day.
I know several people that refuse to play D2 LoD simply because they can’t play something with graphics like those. Even if the game is mechanically good, some people won’t play it if it doesn’t look at least decent for today’s standards.
As games evolve, so do player standards. Which is why you now have a significant portion of the playerbase that refuses to play ARPGs if a game is gender locked. Or more recently, why they refuse to play it without WASD. Graphics is just another part of this.
Did you even read the rest? You have a very famous example with the 3 body problem. Chaotic simply means that the end result can’t be predicted from a starting point, even when you know all the information from the system. Because the interactions within the system are too complex to properly predict.
All you can do with a chaotic system is to simulate it. Which, like I pointed out, is what weather prediction systems do.
You should post a paper and get nobel prize. After all, you’d be undoing the work of a whole field of mathematics (Chaos Theory).
As with the experiment I mentioned, where you only have 2 rules and have a totally known system, where nothing is hidden and yet it’s impossible to predict how it will turn out after x moves, unless x is very very small.
That is the basis of Chaos Theory and why introducing a bunch of changes into an ARPG is impossible to predict with any accuracy.
What are the relevant points though? First you’d have to test everything simply to check for DPS. You could assign some acceptable range where the DPS should land, but for any given skill, the DPS will change wildly depending on your choices.
You can make choices where static orb will only deal 1k DPS rather than 1 million. Is static orb broken and needed to be buffed? How many high DPS combinations would be required for it to be good?
Not to mention that, even ignoring combining with other skills, there are plenty of things that can change the DPS. Ailments, for example. Your buffs.
So in the end you end up with 1 million different combination tests for static orb alone. Where 950k of them fall below your “minumum range”, 40k fall within your range and 10k falls outside your “maximum range”. You’ll then have to analyze all that and figure out if it’s acceptable or not for that skill.
Then do the same for every DPS skill. Then do the same for every DPS skill in combination with support skills.
Then do the same for defense.
The number of cases is exponential (and grows exponentially when you add new stuff like uniques, affixes, skills) and very soon gets out of hand.
Not to mention that, as I said, I’m pretty sure both GGG and EHG (and pretty much any company) already have a huge bunch of unitary tests set up for a really high number of cases, which all get run when you add new stuff.
The problem is that those tests will never be enough, due to the staggering amount of combinations available. So you test for the expected stuff. And the outliers will always come from the unexpected stuff.
Which you then add to your new unitary tests. Until it breaks somewhere else. And then you add new tests. And on and on while you can still run those tests in a feasible time.
Yes. As I explained above, chaotic systems are systems that can’t be readily predicted.
I don’t expect EHG to get balance tight enough to be “acceptable” until at least 2 years from now. Not only because it’s an extremely complicated task, but also because they are still adding a bunch of core stuff, that further exacerbates this issue.
Nor do I think that balance not being tight yet detracts that much from LE. Their target playerbase just wants to have fun with builds. They want to create something new or that is a meme and have fun building that up. They don’t care if build A does 100x their DPS and is immortal. In fact, the fact that a build is OP is reason enough for them not to try it.
LE is very clearly targetted at altoholics. People that like to create builds.
You can, unless you have a seaonal model for your game.
Which is why GD has a new release every couple of years (and even then there are still bugs and balance issues that need to be addressed fast).
And why PoE releases new stuff every 3-4 months and then has several pages worth of fixes in the first week.
For a seasonal model, what’s expected is that you fix things fast. For a standalone product, what’s expected os that you do things right.
Which is why the server issues on 1.0 was a clusterf*** that took a week to fix, but the server issues with 1.1 were fine because they took 2h to fix.
Certainly. I’m not saying you’re wrong to point it out. I mean, I’m pointing it out as well. And the devs will point it out as well. We’re all aware of it.
The difference is that some people will demand great balance in 3 months or they quit, while some people are aware of the enormous task and have a higher tolerance for the current state.
Same with WASD. Several people want it right away (some want it even if it’s a crappy implementation) or they won’t play, while others are willing to wait for it to be done right.
Yes, but getting it perfectly right is just another point in the spectrum from Completely unbalanced to Perfectly balanced. Where you draw your line will depend on your personal preferences.
There are plenty of people that are happy with PoE balance these days while there are also several that aren’t happy with it and think it should be better.
My point was simply that if you keep working on it, especially for non-seasonal games that are more “static”, then you would expect someone to eventually get there, or at least very darn close. And yet no such game exists.
I have heard several people raging about the state of the game and pointing out the white square you get on the minimap instead of the quest icon.
Sure, no one will quit over that single point, but it’s the accumulation of things like that that will cause people to quit. It’s rarely ever only a single issue.
But back in the day you had a higher tolerance for bugs. You played buggy games as long as you had fun playing.
These days people quit playing because of these issues even when a game is still fun.
That’s not how development works, though. You do that when you have a finished product, not a product that you’re still expanding.
Fixing all the issues, bugs and quirks would likely require the whole team stopping everything for many months just to focus solely on that. And plenty of those fixes would likely break something else somewhere, so then you’d have to also fix that.
Being a little over half a year without releasing new stuff is already bad for the game. We all hope Season 2 content will make up for it.
But stopping for over half a year just to not release anything new and then a few more months for something new to be added (which would likely also have its own bugs anyway), would be a death sentence.
GGG also has a bunch of bugs that persisted for many years and even some persist to this day.
When you have a list of thousands of fixes to do, along with dozens of things to add and dozens of things to change, many bugs are simply deemed as non-priority. You focus on the ones that are most important and/or fixable in a certain timeframe while the rest of the team works on the new stuff.
When 1.0 launched I was able to login almost always and play with very little disconnects. Does that mean that the launch had no server issues?
Yes, and the leeway for well-known pre-release issues end the exact second a product releases.
Welcome to LE, that’s the state, hence why I have no tolerance for them in that case.
Absolutely not true. Yes, high graphical fidelity is enjoyed by many, the hyper-realistic style is a sort of ongoing thing, but the focus of companies on it is actually a detriment more often then not. Sure, the end-product looks amazing… but it comes at the cost of extreme amounts of resources needing to be spent there which otherwise could be used in the mechanics. Which given that ARPG’s of thise style with the fast pacing gives it a hard time to aling with.
As for overall games which are definitely not ‘graphical intense’ but have taken on a surprisingly large playerbase for their respective genre: Stardew Valley, Hades, Blasphemous, Avorion, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Breathedge, Core Keeper, Dead Cells, Dinkum, Dyson Sphere Program, Grim Dawn (it has a great style, but a simple one), Terraria, Starbound, Shapez 2, Songs of Syx, V Rising (also stylistic, not graphically intense) and surely many many more ‘big’ games which did it well.
Graphical fidelity is not a reason to succeed, it’s first and foremost left for those companies which have massive monetary backing to support the needed personal to upkeep it, and solely them, otherwise the exact reason we see at LE are creeping up. ‘We can’t do it because animations’, ‘it would take us a long time’.
Yeah, no shit Sherlock! That’s the downside of it.
The graphical scope of the project is beyond practical. While gorgeous a more stylized direction - which is hence pleasing to the eye but simpler to make for the designers - would’ve likely solved some of those issues and opened up resources.
Pixelart for example is timeless.
Several other styles are also timeless.
If you put in Zelda: A Link to the Past then it’s not really discernable from a modern game besides the controls, simplistic limited music (no cartridge space) and some engine issues you can from time to time see if you look out for them specifically which happen because of memory limitations back then.
The only differences would be inherent 8 directional movement rather then the classic 4 directional one as well as accordingly adjusted enemy movement to align it with modern titles.
And yes, Standards have changed, both in the mechanical aspect as well as the visual aspect.
What has also changed are the possible tools to create those visuals (reducing the work-time by magnitudes for many of them) as well as models for 3D games (as LE is one) and the mechanical implementations are majorly knowledge based by researching and learning not only the standards of the industry but also the positive outliers of each aspect.
As for the gender locking… I agree that some games - the ones merging you with the character for the immersion so to speak - have a need for that, where that notion is viable. ARPGs - and LE as well - usually go with the direction of telling a pre-determined story though. The shortcoming is in not properly fleshing out the backstory of the respective character classes and the people you’re actually playing, this leads to ambiguity which the game though isn’t focusing on, the personal immersion into the character is not in the foreground or even relevant enough to demand it and could’ve been avoided.
The WASD aspect is very often a health-based reasoning (RSI with WASD or controller is substantially less likely, PoE 2 failed to lean into it by creating a area-based pickup method via hotkey though to fully implement it though, combined with the click-based option) and a well implemented version simply being superior to keyboard and mouse (reaction speed and upsides from movement by walking backwards while attacking for example).
It’s not because it’s ‘a new fad’ but because it has similar reasonings as controllers implementing sticks over time rather then solely having a D-Pad (more precision and overall options) as well as trigger buttons (more options once more).
Then you don’t have all the variables available.
What sort of RNG was used to decide the movement? Which millisecond of the clock-status caused the respective seed? Which seed causes which outcome?
Know all of it and you know the end-result before starting the program to showcase it.
We don’t have all the variables for weather though, hence it’s a unsolved equation, we have a lot of ‘x’ in it which we don’t know the details of.
That’s not chaos, that’s just the unknown. Chaos would demand that even while knowing every single aspect (which we don’t) the outcome would differ.
To date in the history of mankind not a single experiment has had the possible circumstances to deem that a realistic situation. Maybe in the future with sufficiently advanced technology, but that’s even with our rapid progress at least a few hundred years away.
Chaos Theory.
Welcome to the scientific fields of ‘theoretical science’ where humanity goes along to make a educated guess because we don’t know shit, hoping to find fitting solution to existing issues that need to be solved and deeming it ‘good enough’ when it at least works.
Doesn’t mean that’s actually how it works, it’s just our best guess.
Counter to the Chaos Theory stands the Butterfly Effect which demands pure determinism. In this theorem we no actual ‘free will’ since every little electron in our brain has been pre-determined to move this way from the second our universe came into existence (or before that with an unknown starting point).
Which makes determining what will happen also an impossibility as the needed expended energy to derive a perfect answer would be more then the universally expended energy to get to this outcome in the first place… and since you expend energy to get an answer that expended energy would also need to be equated into it, hence needed exponentially more… and more… without a chance to ever get the outcome.
Doesn’t mean it’s ‘chaos’, it’s deterministic nonetheless, just without the option to view the result prematurely. But if there’s any limited amount of outcomes then the energy to derive the respective outcome for any singular situation can be derived with respective energy expenditure over a substantial amount of time.
Exactly, DPS. Hence why I said ‘reasonable choices’ for the lower end.
The upper end is not to be limited in choices though, the theoretically possible end-point is determined by the law of big numbers, hence when someone is in the 0,001% lucky range of possible equipment drops during that timeframe then it can be ignored, below not though.
Hence you have your testing range.
This removes likely around 900k of your 950k possible options and the limit on the upper range reduces the septillions of options to trillions of options total. Then removing any value which is neither combined minimum nor combined maximum to derive the most extreme cases is simply trashed right away reducing it substantially further again, leaving likely a few million to billion possible combinations.
The only hard aspect of it is picking the respective limits on both the upper and lower end.
Which is absolutely fine! And expected after all.
But it’s a bit of a problem if the beta 0.1 to 0.1.1 version update of PoE 2 includes roughly the same amount of total points of change in the presented patch notes as what LE had since release, including the 1.1 patch notes without the content additions.
The big question is if you want to have such types of customers even, which I would argue ‘no’. A certain threshold to handle shortcomings is demanded by design. Voiced and and in need to be fixed obviously but not a ‘dealbreaker’. Otherwise you have a ‘impossible to please’ customer and that’s a bad customer.
It IS true, though. Deus Ex was an excellent game. And yet many players these days would not play it because of the graphics alone.
Deus Ex has a great story, has excellent mechanics and level design. And yet, if you released Deus Ex as is in today’s market it would flop completely.
I agree that many games don’t need as much graphical polish as they get, but they do need polish.
This has always been the case, though, and players never cared about this. D2 has none of that and yet there was never any outcry requiring Blizzard to add this option.
However, many games have since added that option and now many players expect it to be present in any game like this. It’s a clear case of raised expectations.
The whole point of Chaos Theory is that you know all the variables. But because the interactions are complex, you can’t predict what will happen.. I already gave you examples of this, namely the 3 body problem.
Seriously, go google Chaos Theory and the 3 body problem. If you don’t understand the issue there’s no point in continuing this discussion.
This alone shows you don’t really know what you’re talking about. The Butterfly Effect is part of Chaos Theory. It’s the very basis of it.
You’re getting stuck on semantics without knowing the underlying subject. Chaos Theory was the name given to the field studying deterministic systems that are unpredictable even when all variables are known.
There is no real “chaos” in nature.
Just like “Theory”, in science, doesn’t mean an actual theory but a series of properties that have been repeatedly tested and corroborated. The theory of Evolution isn’t an actual theory. It’s a set of very well established laws and properties that are considered fact.
It doesn’t remove anything. You can have a combination that is bad and underperforms (which is one that you would remove since it would be outside of the range). But then you add a new thing and now it overperforms. But since you already had removed it from your tests, you’ll never know.
Again, that is why you have tests for the expected cases (which, like I said, I’m sure EHG has, same as GGG and Blizzard and Crate and all the others). Because those are the ones that should be caught before release. The unexpected ones are the ones you fix afterwards.
And yes, some still show up that should be expected. But that’s because even reducing the possibilities only to expected cases, you still have way more cases to test than is feasible for a modern computer to achieve in a timely manner. So you have many cases that should be expected that aren’t included.
Not to mention that any new thing you add increases the number of test cases exponentially.
So what you end up with are a limited number of tests just to make sure the most common stuff doesn’t break and you try to catch everything else during CTs/PTRs, or early into a new release.
Except you don’t always have the time to analyze 10 or 100 players. That’s why you want them to come forwards with their thoughts themselves.
Can you? And is it as simple as understanding why everyone ran Profane Veil when Warlock launched?
And more importantly, can you do it with the same amount of data collection and effort?
Because if you have the resources to analyze every single build yourself, why even both with either CT or PTR at all?
Except it was an extreme case of an existing trend:
I picked Druid, even as human form, because it was better than picking Shaman (what I actually wanted)
Yes, the data showed very little people played Shaman at the time. But if people don’t even play the class, you don’t have any data about what they find somewhat decent or just outright bad in it. Because both values are at 0.
If 99% of Shaman players are totem Spriggan builds, which Shaman passives do you buff more, the melee or caster ones?
PTR data is good for knowing what people’s #1 choices are. CT is good to know when players see such a massive gap towards #2 or #3, they are playing #1despite not being their favourite. A QA guy you can force to play a specific build and then sit down in a meeting room to ask their feedback for over an hour. That’s what I mean with different levels of quantity vs quality.
I mean, I get that PTRs can be valuable. And when you have millions of players like WoW, you will have the capacity to analyze the top & bottom 5 performers as they’ll be statistical outliers, no matter what. But I don’t think LE needs to invest in PTR support at this point. Not only because they need more in-depth mechanics and I doubt PTR is a good fit for that… but also because they probably don’t have the resources right now to analyze all that raw data and reverse engineer the thought processes behind player choices. Not to mention that at this moment, there aren’t enough active players to gather such statistical data on.
Because it is dated. Stylistic styles aren’t getting dated though, see the ‘Zelda: A Link to the Past’ example. I took it for a reason.
Deus Ex has the same issue which many other games had over time… trying to be at the peak of graphics for the time, which will naturally fall off substantially as time progresses.
Which is why I’m saying that instead of a high graphical fidelity a stylistic direction likely would’ve done the game better. Simply for the reason of saved resources and funds while also ensuring that graphical updates are mostly directed towards the graphical presentation itself (auxiliary systems like lighting systems and increasing the texture qualities over time) rather then the need to upgrade the models themself.
And I’m fully on your side with the graphical polish, but fidelity itself isn’t the only way to do that.
But… as I said, you don’t.
So it’s inherently a wrong statement.
We don’t even have the variables available for heating up water to boiling. Yes, it’ll boil at 100C° but only when the pressure is 1 bar and it’s 100% pure water molecules without including any deuterium or tritium molecules. So you would need to guarantee that to be the case, which we have no option to do, so we don’t even perfectly know if that’s the case or of it’s 99,9C° or 100,1C°.
Our world is far more complex then you might imagine.
And for a simulation of your example with the movement of specific bodies we would hence need to analyse the machine simulating it in such detail to derive the knowledge of the exact happening at the exact time. Which is based on the quartz frequency, purity, moisture, temperature, pressure, surrounding temperature, background radiation levels.
Basically the knowledge of every single molecule interfering with our experiment at any given nanosecond in full.
Welcome to the world of science and why we have something called ‘Sigma’ since at times even reliably reproducible experiments show a different outcome then expected.
Is that chaos? No, it’s interferences we can’t control and know about or even things we have no clue yet that they might even exist.
So seriously, go to google and learn the basics of science first before you try to throw Theorems around which have as established theorems which go completely counter to your theorem. Both exist in the scientific community at the same time btw. But the chaos theorem itself is deemed less likely to be the actual ‘truth of the world’ then the Butterfly Effect for a good reason.
If you can’t control things then you have no reason to advance, it’s not a possibility for you to change it, so why try to handle it if it’s pure ‘chaos’? In comparison the Butterfly Effect demands furthering the knowledge and a deeper understanding of the world around us as well as measures to get more detailed readings of everything. Why? So we can get closer to the results we seek.
But that goes towards philosophy already and the approach to problem solving in different mindsets.
First of all, it’s not the ‘basis’ it’s an ‘aspect’ of it besides several other bits.
The Butterfly Effect simply depicts nonlinear dynamics, which then lead to the creation fo the Feigenbaum constant which describes that in a seemingly chaotic environment there’s a form of order on a frequency basis which is always half the frequency of the step before it.
This led to a split in the scientific community between those believing in the ‘pure chaos’ part of the Chaos Theorem (Hence no underlying reasoning for something to happen, in that fork of the theory anything could potentially with a endlessly small chance happen, like spontaneous combustion of our planet for no reason at all… in theory) and the other part were those believing that it’s solely the complexity of the system and the outside interference causing a ripple-effect which makes proper observation impossible with any method which doesn’t take into considaration all the ripple-effects caused by said overvation.
Which are the people believing in pure determinism, hence an unbreakable but impossibly complex underlying system that would need at any moment more energy expenditure to derive a guaranteed result then the total combined energy inside any part of the system.
So the two forks differentiate between ‘we know all variables but nonetheless we can’t come to a solutin’ which is a narrow-minded sight in my eyes and the ones saying ‘we have a nigh endless amount of variables by which there is no possibility to ever guarantee a complete understanding but at least coming close to it’ on the other, which is the side I’m on.
And yes, a Theory with enough returning results is considered a ‘Fact’, you’re right. Formerly theories like the ‘Emission Theory’ or that the ‘Relativity Theory’ is a universal truth with nothing being able to move faster then light, which the ‘Gluons’ which are massles and are information transmitters between quarks in the current understanding of physics as we have it. Those can transmit information between quarks beyond the speed of light as experiments have shown (or suggested, as everything related to quarks is a bit murky) and hence breaking the Relativity Theory of Einstein to a degree as it would mean that gluons cause a universal distortion in space-time at basically any given time.
Which is why I said ‘running it several times’. You go ahead and fix stuff, optimally find a pattern to solve more things and then re-try. Commonly it’ll reduce the amount of cases (win condition for the function), sometimes it does stay roughly the same and sometimes it’ll cause more issues (rollback and a datapoint for future pattern recognition methods to find outliers).
PTRs have some serious downsides as well. They kill the hype (since new stuff is already known) and they reduce the number of players that join the actual launch. I saw this in D3 a lot. A bunch of casual or semi-casual players started playing, saw what it was all about and when the season actually started they wouldn’t play because they already had.
Did you even google the 3 body problem? It’s a system where every single variable is known. We know the initial positions, we know the mass, we know their vectors and we know how they interact with each other. Everything is known. And yet it’s impossible to predict how they will behave.
Did you even stop to consider the 2 rule system example I provided? I gave you a closed system where everything is known. And yet, it’s impossible to predict how it will end.
Yeah, that’s one of the cons of PTR as well.
Just like CT has some downsides compared to PTR (like it having an NDA which potentially excludes minors, biased towards more avid fans, …)
Sometimes it’s worth the cost though. I remember how bad D3 endgame turned out to be because beta only let people play to level 13 … so you wouldn’t get the spoiler about Tyreal.
Even the entire concept of sets went completely untested and the positive feedback on runes for skills was absolutely wasted because skills without sets just weren’t viable but nobody in beta could’ve tested that.
Yes, so you start to discern the ‘why’. Not say it’s not possible.
It wasn’t possible for humans to take to the skies. It wasn’t possible to break the sound barrier. It wasn’t possible to leave earth’s stratosphere. All was disproven.
And while in the 3 body problem there’s several solutions available the Puiseux series is commonly seen as the ‘solution’.
The problem is not solved because the precision to prove it is nonsensically high and not worth to do, computing 10^8000000 terms is kinda a hard deal even for Google’s data centers in total after all Currently there’s 12407 distinct solutions for the problem available. Also there’s numerical solutions approached via numerical analysis.
Unsolved doesn’t mean chaotic, it just means ‘answer not known yet’.
I hope when this problem is definitely solved with a singular fixated answer in our lifetime your picture of the world won’t shatter because of it
You still seem to not understand the issue. It’s not a computing problem. You can create computer simulations of any 3 body problem and find out how it resolves. What you can’t do is predict it beforehand.
So we’ll go back to the most simple example I already provided:
A board of inifite white squares with only 2 rules:
-If the piece lands on a white square it becomes black, if it lands on a black square it turns white.
-If the piece lands on a white square it turns left, if it lands on a black square it turns right.
That’s it. That’s all the rules and variables. Everything is known. There are no unknowns in this case. And yet, you could never have predicted the outcome from this starting position. It’s called Langton’s ant, if you want to google it.
It’s the simplest case of a fully known, fully deterministic system that can’t be predicted and is thus what is called a chaotic system.
The Puiseux series is not an actual solution, it’s an approximation with high enough accuracy to provide the desired results.
Not even a 2-body problem has an unconfined solution. And Newton literally invented calculus to try and solve that. Yet here we are, 250 years later.
It’s like hearing someone say “You can’t prove the absence of God” and then respond “Well, he’s not on Earth, so that’s a close enough proof for my personal life!”
Except those are not the same, even if the end result makes no difference to anyone on Earth.
Yeah, we don’t have the variable to determine where the pieces land, so we can’t come to a solution. So it’s finding out what decides the landing position and hence derive the outcome from that.
It’s an undefined state there, so obviously it has no solution since it lacks a definition. Which is a missing variable to come to a pure deterministic outcome. The chaos element is the unknown but which is not assessable by us, but that doesn’t mean that component is not also 100% deterministic, we just don’t have the method to determine it.
And depending on the program to simulate it we can absolutely create a pre-determined outcome, we get a guaranteed same result when the same seeding is used. Much like in reality if the exact same circumstances would exist the outcome would always be the same. Just that the same circumstances to exist are basically non-existent as on a solar scale the relative position of everything shifts with every second.
Which is why I put the provided example of the 10^8000000 cycles was there, as in the example that’s how long a theoretical end-term result would take to get every possible solution.
Which is not an apt explanation of what I’m saying here.
Yes, you can’t prove something doesn’t exist with guarantee, it’s one of the prime foundations of the scientific approach anyway. You can only showcase the likelyhood of it being near infinitely small.
In the same manner you can only proof a method brings a specific outcome, you can’t ever proof the complete underlying principles, they’re also approximations… as it’s the closest we have at the current respective time when working with them.
After all… as much as you can’t prove something doesn’t exist… you also can’t prove something exists. The best doable thing is that the perception of existence is shared with a substantial amount of other individuals, which makes peer reviews so important as recreating environments in as much detail as possible - and deriving new findings from that - is such a big deal.
So, all that can be done is finding out underlying principles leading to a specific outcome, and then the underlying principles of those principles… and so on and so forth, creating more precise and stable ways to guarantee any sort of result under proper handling given the right situations and tools are available to allow recreation.
The issue with the realistic approach to the n-body problem is that there’s basically never only 2 bodies available. The next issue is that it relates to the shape of them being spheres and our measurement methods not sufficing to be detailed enough to guarantee a fixed outcome 100%. The next issue is the disorder theory, which has been smoothed over since computers have been invented (which isn’t that long mind you, and even with modern technology not precise enough to measure with a basically guaranteed outcome yet).
The 2 body problem is a theoretically solvable problem if we have the knowledge about the exact shape and force distribution.
In reality the sheer quantity of influences and hence the complexity of the equation leads to far too little precision. After all we’re talking about over 50 objects in our solar system alone which have a biger diameter then 500 km. In comparison the moon has a diameter of not quite 3500 km. That’s big stuff flying about and influencing everything else simply by existing.
Not to speak of not knowing the makeup of them in detail, or at times the precise shape and makeup of materials at specific positions which influences the respective outcomes.
