Why I will quit last Epoch until it gets changed

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62

Live service engagement design isn’t fun, it’s addictive. It’s for the company not the player. If the game is good and gives you reasons why you’d want to come back to it, you’ll play it more. Or if it’s a game that’s short and sweet that’s good too.

When designers start thinking “How can we slow the player down so they spend more time than they’d want to in game?” We have a problem.

The kind of things that can be fun and make people want to come back rather than just being attention-hacking:

  • Fun base gameplay. Feels good to just do the basic actions in the game. If your brain gets happy when you see a bunch of enemies explode from your spell, cool.

  • Varied gameplay: This can mean content or it can mean other stuff. LE doesn’t really have very varied content outside the one new boss. But what it does have is a large space of possible character builds for players to think over and try. And they’re a lot more likely to do that if they can pick up cool uniques that they want to build around.

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63

Yep.
Like all video games are.
Video games (or games in general) are designed to provide swiftly happening reward for your brain, outputting dopamine.
That’s why the gaming sector has overtaken the adult sector in revenue, because both are highly addictive.

They do that with reward deprivation and gambling mechanics usually. MMO’s especially do that well ‘this time it can drop’. Many of the RNG mechanics hinge specifically on the ‘big hit’ feelings which gambling provides, which is why gambling has been heavily regulated.

There’s a reason why the country most prominent for those mechanics - china - has put it into their law that minors can only use gaming applications for 90 minutes per day on week-days and 3 hours on weekends. It’s because it has long-term ramifications when over-consumption happens and addiction tendencies come together.

It’s called ‘Spiritual Opium’ there and is something we’ll see upcoming in the west as well, and hopefully so. They were more extremely affected but it’s a major issue here as well.

64

This cycle I failed to slam one mod onto 3 LP item 5 times in a row :smiling_face_with_tear: please change this mechanic

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65

This is also very subjective, though. Some players like heavy RNG. Some don’t.
Many players find Dark Souls games engaging and fun and will return to it over and over again, whereas others like me wouldn’t even start them up.

As has been shown with D3 and PoE, 2 games with completely opposite systems and takes on RNG and also with completely different playerbases.
PoE players don’t enjoy D3, D3 players don’t enjoy PoE. Is one objectively less fun that the other?

66

Great! That is the correct answer. I expected you to say no, and I’m glad to be wrong.

It’s not weird when you remember that your reason for wanting to kill the boss - it’s the ultimate challenge - is not their reason for wanting to kill the boss. They don’t care about the challenge, they farm it because they want the loot from it. They want to kill it as many times as possible, as fast as possible, because they think in terms of maximizing their lever pulls per hour. If the boss didn’t drop anything, they’d never kill it.

Don’t think I don’t agree with you that games could all be designed a lot different in ways that would probably be more fun for the rest of us if they didn’t have to compensate for how many dysfunctional sweatlords there are. But it’s too late, the internet opened that Pandora’s Box decades ago, and we can’t close it.

67

I think it matters what’s random and how that randomness affects the player.

Randomness in games like roguelikes, card games, autobattlers, etc create novel situations you can’t perfectly predict, but can play around the probability of them happening and once they do happen, they create a unique game state that you must respond to in a way that’s different from normal. In these contexts randomness creates the variety necessary to keep the game feeling fresh enough to come back to. And you do still get that dopamine rush when you cobble together some OP but rare combo or something.

In an ARPG, randomness is all about the outcome and nothing else. You don’t play the game differently based on the chance an item might drop and while a key item dropping could change the way you play by allowing you to play a different build, most items don’t do that, merely improving what you were already doing. Also even when you drop build-defining items, the game is built in a way to discourage you from changing your build. The result is all you’re doing is waiting for the outcome you are looking for to happen. That could happen in the next minute or the next thousand hours. It doesn’t make the game more interesting, it just adds a random variable on how long it’s going to try to keep you there.

Incidentally this is why I don’t like a lot of rogue-lite design which has you set up a lot of build features before stepping into the run: It makes it so that you’re already hard committed to one type of run and you’re just hoping to hit those items rather than going with the flow.

Also, I think it’d be kind of cool to design an ARPG in a way to better capture that roguelike experience of rolling with the punches. So rather than go in with a build in mind and only look for those specific items, you see what uniques drop and then find a way to make a build around them. It couldn’t really just be tacked onto an existing ARPG though, too much design would have to be different.

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68

No, apparently I was conscious & talking & stuff, I just didn’t have anything recorded in memory, very odd. I even have conversations on my phone which I don’t remember having.

So you think you (/skilled player/whatever) could take a build without legendaries up to 1-2k corruption in 1.0? Do you honestly believe that only now the difficulty warrants good/best gear?

Yes, to brute force a static difficulty encounter. I’m just saying that verminrodent’s original assertion that lp gear wasn’t needed before 1.1 is demonstrably false given the infinitely scaling nature of corruption. Is it not a given that eventually you’ll need high lp/exalted gear to push to higher corruption? Does that need to be said? Really? I know player skill does come into it, but that just pushes the goalposts further back.

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Not what I’m saying.

I’m saying we have new content, core-content. That’s Abberoth.
Aberroth is harder then formerly the 300c cut-off line.
Hence by the time you get to him you’ll likely need 1 LP Legendaries to fight him as a mediocre player, at least.

Which means ‘Legendary items are not necessary’ doesn’t hold true like in 1.0, rather it shifted a little bit.
Not even remotely talking about BiS there.
Simply how content changed and the needed equipment for it, that’s all.

The intended cut-off line was 300c then. Now it’s Abberoth.

If we follow the logic that you need more gear for more corruption beyond it then by that logic BiS needs (And I mean actual BiS, hence 3T7 1 T5 sealed T5) needs to become available for players in a half-way regular manner even. And that shouldn’t be the case.

Which is why we have a cut-off line.

But @Amplifix actually made a really really good comment there. If 300c is the end-line… why have this whole already developed item-space above it on gear? Because the comment about time-investment to upgrade is right there, BiS needs to be at least possible to drop in a large community, not daily, not weekly… but a few per year.

Currently that status is that the drop-chance for that is as likely as a 4 LP red ring, which means it doesn’t exist and likely will never exist.

And yeah, perception-wise… that is actually an issue, and not a small one either. Usually developed space is expanded as the game expands, but EHG hence can only expand content more and more without adjusting anything for itemization at all since so sooooo much space is left open that needs to be filled that it’ll turn into a very static experience.
Imagine Path of Exile having so much space upwards leftover that they wouldn’t have implemented new base-types, then influenced items, then alternative crafting options to create more variety… and so on. Take +10 years PoE having only the base-types and crafting mechanics from 1.0… since it didn’t even have the content to fill that up to the limit.

Yes, long-term item hunting is great! Impossibilities aren’t so much… they need to be sparse, like a perfect rolled Omnis is allowed to never exist.

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To be honest, if the legendary has not a build defining feature, a good exalted with 4 times high stats you want is often better.

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Yeah, which is harder to get then at least LP 1 Legendary with a T5 of a rare stat on it, which is why likely you’ll have that sooner.

Finding a exalted affix fitting for your character on a top-tier base for your character which then has the crafted outcome for your character on top is surprisingly harsh.

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72

Seems like it’s working properly, then. If it’s better for your build, it should be harder to get. So if it is, it works as designed.

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73

This is where the process should end, and what a lot of us older school ARPG players take issue with. Because once you experience LE’s version of end game item chase, you are no longer excited at the item even dropping, since you know there are several more layers of RNG behind it. You’re only going to feel excited if the last RNG roll hits, and by then you’ve been worn down by the previous elements to the point where if it does hit, you’re not excited, just relieved you don’t have to go through that again.

Fabulous game, really enjoyed it all the way up until that. But I got my moneys worth and have moved on to something else.

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74

Magnitude. Hard != impossible/Unrealistic even with extreme effort of all players put together.

If the value of overall invested time in the game multiplied by expected playerbase (+ a bit of leeway) overcomes the chance of obtaining an item for another specific pre-set value in percent then that system has a so called ‘dead developed space’. Which is basically something which shouldn’t ever happen.

This is visible to a player, players automatically set goals in their mind (aware or not aware doesn’t matter) and hence loose investment when that goal ‘seems’ unobtainable. If you add the variable of it actually being ‘unobtainable’ then this is expected to happen with nigh guarantee.

Such things are a net negative in designing something, shouldn’t happen. Exceptions as usually apply. Core aspects are not allowed to have that because of this generally applicable psychological factor.

Exactly. Otherwise the initial enjoyment is turned into frustration. And that’s why I also take issue with the situation. Well said.

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75

Sure, I’m not arguing that. This whole thread is mostly just a discussion on the amount of RNG for the best gear and each has their own threshold for that. Some are even fine with impossible things in the game, like the 4LP red ring.

I’m just pointing out that the system itself is working as designed: each better tier of gear is increasingly harder. So that’s fine.
All we’re debating is just where our personal line in the sand is regarding RNG.

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And I’m not even talking about that actually.

The aspect of ‘core gear’ hence the basic of basic build progression being limited before the design-space ends is the one issue I have with it.
The one thing which makes motivation go ‘poof’.

Obtainability for absolute top-tier should be possible… for the whole community put together.
There needs to be a mathed out situation to say ‘Yes, every year roughly ‘x’ items of that style will drop in the game’. Or even better to tie it to cycle-time, since that’s a good measurement.

So for example there should be ‘a’ item (not a specific one) with 3T7 1T5 1T5sealed affix dropping per ‘x’ amount of time, related to community size or expected future community size.

Before 1.0 this was excusable since neither the community size with interest was known nor any expected variance visible, though now we know that returning customers per cycle will be at around 100k peak (less then release, more then 1.1). So this design-space can be adjusted accordingly to make the progression curve reliable for every stage of the game, including vast post-content.

It’s a balancing baseline. You get that via looking the overall expected playtime of people, the power level maximally possible acquired and the time-investment for gear in relation all to each other.

From the player retention rate you can hence derive the expected item drop rate needed to remove unused design space (which will never be seen, it’s beyond jackpot of a jackpot area) and from that you can adjust both enemy power and skill power accordingly as well.

We’re not talking about the core framework, we’re talking about the magnitude inside the core framework.

A working core framework with faulty variables does function but not produce the desires effect anyway.

That’s not even personal line. RNG without space to happen is useless, by design. You can’t srife for things which can’t possibly ever exist, no matter how hard you try. You have nobody getting it, you have the most invested no-lifer sweatboy not being able to get it despite getting the whole community at once on board to help solely him out for purely altruistic reason.
It’s a ‘impossibility’.
You can’t strive for the impossible since it’s impossible, you can only strive for improvement, and this system doesn’t allow improvement after a specific point despite dangling it in front of your eye like a carrot on a stick.

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77

I disagree with you there. I feel like LE actually has it right. Let’s just use some made up numbers that sort of sum up the feel I have with LE item progression:
-Getting a nice 1LP unique (common one, not rare): 100h
-Getting the next improvement tier: 1000h
-Getting the next improvement tier: 10000h
… and so on and so on.
So yes, eventually it becomes unattainable, but that is something that wll be reduced over time.

PoE had the same issue. For a long time, perfect gear was nigh impossible to get. But as the leagues went on it became easier and easier to get it, to the point where now it’s attainable for a few people.
Some leagues even made it run-of-the-mill to get, like Harvest and Necropolis.

So as more stuff gets added to LE, obtaining the impossible gear will gradually become possible. Up to the point where 4LP red rings will also seem attainable. Same as happened with PoE.

So for now I feel that it’s fine to have such incredible odds that it’s pretty much unattainable, since the content we have doesn’t require it.

Aberoth is currently the hardest content, but even that can be beaten in a reasonable time, as shown by the multiple people that already beat him in several different builds. Even pet builds did it.

That’s how I feel about it, anyway. I know not everyone agrees and that’s fine. But it is a personal line in the sand. It’s all about the time it takes to complete the available content and how each person feels about that timeframe.

78

I think what you just said doesn’t make ANY sense.
10k hours? That’s the same playtime that my friend has in PoE over like 5 years.
1000 hours / 24 = 41.6 days.
10k / 24 = 416 DAYS.
A cycle is 3-6 months?
That’s simply not attainable.

I’m not sure how much you sleep, but you are human right? The amount of hours you just stated, is IMPOSSIBLE for a human. Even without sleep you need more than a year.

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79

Yes, I know it’s not attainable. Which is fine because that level of improvement isn’t required for the current game content either.
And some of the players that play 1k hours will still get it, due to outliers.

EDIT: Much like a 4LP red ring requires centuries of play to get, currently. And it’s fine because nothing in the current content requires a 4LP ring.

Only the required improvements for the current content need to be attainable. The rest doesn’t yet.

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Did you even read the post and reasoned it? Or did you just see the big numbers and lol’d?
Because everything written below is way more important than the “made up numbers” he used as an example.

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81

You missed the point completely. The point is that if it’s UNATTAINABLE, people will simply quit. You can’t balance your game around things that are not attainable.

What you guys want is a game where I have to walk around for 1000hrs with subpar gear, I’m simply not playing that game. I’m sure that with me are A LOT of other players who won’t even touch a game like that.

There NEEDS to be some kind of PROGRESS for people to keep playing. You can’t expect them to chug on for weeks with the same gear. Remember guys, time/effort equation EXISTS.

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