you find it ridiculous? thats fine. different people have different tolerances. to me, i’ve played poe for years and i seriously thought poe was the best game ever for most of my “gaming” life. then when i played other games i realized.
i was just wasting my time.
i dont feel rewarded enough and i m getting shit drops because i m playing in a game where drops are bad for the purpose of trade. i play tq, i farm everything i want in tq and i get everything i want from my own effort within reasonable amount of effort.
so coming back to LE, CoF is not really as great as i would want it. to me it is a consolation prize. its like playing a special league mechanic that only is available to you as a crutch.
you may scoff at me for saying CoF is work. but how different is CoF from say Prophecy mechanic in poe? you need to farm coins then you need to roll prophecies then you need to actually complete the prophecy.
creating an alva temple is work. finding the mastermind in the syndicate is work. all that are effort that you need to work for to get rewarded.
in such case CoF is just another league mechanic. you put effort to get rewarded.
shouldnt CoF just reward you for not trading directly? this is where i feel rewarded playing solo games like GD, TQ. GD on release was kinda tedious to farm stuff but it gave enough that players did not need to feel like they needed to trade. TQ2 currently has no real league mechanics and i m happy enough farming bosses and tailoring the game difficulty to my hearts content. i do not need trade and i never once feel like this game is not for me.
all because drops in those games do not consider the existence of trade.
if i m being honest, i m just putting out my opinion here just out of habit. i do know that LE has already gone in a trajectory that i do not like.
you can feel free to scoff at my opinion. I WANT to like LE but i simply see the game as not being made for me. it is made for people like you. you’re happy to gobble up such servings. but for me? i just learned that there are different cuisines that cater to me better.
i played poe for a decade. i have more than enough with the grind.
but in any case, CoF is not “free”. you need to engage in “Prophecy” league content in order to reap the rewards.
i respect kulze for him responding to my points one by one. but if i m being honest, my experience playing LE just had me feeling that its still too little for me to care.
GD doesn’t have trade. Not unless you talk to someone outside the game and make a direct connection to them or them to you. There’s no server.
The equivalent of trade in GD is using GDStash and editing your items in.
It will never have them. Like GD doesn’t. Because SP games don’t have leagues. They don’t even have servers.
It seems that what you like are SP games and not MP ones.
Not really, though? You do get a bunch of passive drop bonuses.
If you played before launch and are MG you have nerfed drops, which are supposed to be offset by being able to trade.
If you played before launch and are CoF you actually have way better drops than you did. Even without prophecies.
Prophecies are just a way to help you along the way. If you need to improve your unique chest, you do a bunch of unique chest prophecies so more drop in less time.
But even just playing the game and ignoring prophecies you already have way better drops than the base game balance had before MG/CoF were introduced.
i kinda took that for granted for a long time. lol. you’re right on that. its an inherent bonus for CoF when you rank up in the faction.
As for SP vs MP games. i think i prefer if games were balanced around single player experience.
if i m being honest, D1/D2 actually are quite stingy with their drops. players can go YEARS without getting a tyreals might.
GD/TQ doesnt feel that cruel. for sure everything is to make us play more. if we get everything we want too easily we stop playing sooner. the way i see it, games that have a trade aspect simply have a reason to make drops very… shitty. i dont craft in POE but i craft in undecemeber. undec’s crafting system is more or less the same as poe but the reason why i craft in undec is the same as why i craft in LE. the crafting materials are so much more generous in these games.
but then when it comes to getting item bases. LE seems to make it into a huge grind. getting double t7s is technically easy. but getting 2 t7s on an item base that you want and on mods that you prefer is just a huge roll of the die.
i think perhaps i just want more than what CoF currently offers. more tailoring to what items drop passively. they can take out the entire prophecy portion for all i care if we get more stuff similar to timeline blessings or weaver tree item drop manipulation.
I understand that. The issue is that MP games really can’t be balanced that way, otherwise getting gear becomes too easy.
LE is actually the closest to it with CoF. But since group play is a thing and drops can be shared, it will never be as easy as a SP game. Even more so when you consider that MP games have a competitive side to them.
To be fair, they’ve been adding things to help with that. Havocs made getting your exalted affixes easier. And the reworked insights have also helped in getting the right base (although it’s kinda baffling why it’s still a glyph when it should be a rune).
Before launch, getting your T7 affix on the right base was a matter of pure luck, since you had no way to affect it. But now getting a T7 exalted with the right base and good affixes is trivial. 2xT7 is the new normalized goal, with 3xT7 being a min-maxxers grind dream.
Eventually, 2xT7 will be trivialized and 3xT7 will become the new goal.
I totally get it, because I feel the same. I dislike the prophecies mechanic because it’s boring and takes you out of the gameplay. I’ve suggested something similar to this before as well. Even before imprints.
But ultimately, getting your BiS gear in a MP game will always be harder than in a SP game. How much harder will depend on the devs. And in this case, EHG’s love for the D2 grind shows.
For trade, yes, not if you only play by yourself though.
Not really? Unless you view trade as an item editor… The equivalent of trade is agreeing to a trade outside of the game then joining a server & making the trade.
EHG_Mike has said previously in a livestream that the dev team’s approach to loot, is that they don’t want people to just be able to get what they want immediately, or even be able to farm exactly the type of loot that they want necessarily, because that would open the game up to being very clinical and having a “best farm location” or “best farm source” which would remove a large part of the game’s grinding and randomness. So the discussion about ‘CoF doesn’t allow me to get the loot that I want’ or whatever, has already been addressed by the dev team in their design philosophy.
I myself will admit that I don’t like teleporting back to the CoF temple to reroll prophecies and sift through the exact ones I prefer, which can take 10minutes+ if I have lots of open prophecies, and maybe the devs can address that issue by simply allowing you to have more prophecy spots (like double, or triple what you currently can have), or something like that.
I personally would like to see a way to convert Favor into Gold, just like you can convert Bones into specific drops with the primal vendor. Favor is rather useless for me currently, where as Gold is something I’m actively focus farming on my echoes.
thats a big part of why i feel its work and if i m being honest, its not rewarding enough. especially now that we have much more specialized gear drops such as weaver relics. i have very little interest with the regular relics ever since the weaver ones were introduced. they simply are superior.
yeah, tho it did help a huge lot, due to the games own crafting system, it can quickly result in failed crafts or incomplete crafts when you run out of potential. thus turning it into just another layer of rng.
yeah. and game devs seem to want to encourage MP more than SP. in poe for example, for sure you will take up portals when you play MP. but each player brings something to the table. more MF, more auras/dedicated aurasbots, dedicated cursers. etc. on top of all that the enemies now split their attention among different targets. it simply is superior. you can share costs for event keys and if someone dies, the others can continue on. if you die in a heist for example, playing alone means thats the end of it. but in a party, the rest of the team members still can complete the run.
it reminds me of why i quit d3. i love playing SP more than MP. but in d3, i forgot what they called it but players had to complete 5 objectives to get a reward. playing alone meant you needed to do all 5 by yourself. but in a team of 4, we could split and each run 1-2 objectives. it reduced the time and effort required by more than half. in d4 its beneficial to kill the world boss and other mp related stuff.
SP players are really the bastard stepchild of modern d-likes. its weird but some games at least try to balance it out abit like monster hunter which gives you palicos. ironically d3 did give single players some benefit in the form of followers, but the devs neglected to reduce the 5 objective requirement for single players. even if it went down to 3 it would have been at least more fair than just 5.
to me this is kinda is a balance issue. the jump from t5 mods to t6 and t7 is just stupidly huge.
i always subscribe to the idea that zooming should be difficult but some zooming should be achievable with the best gear and hyper optimization.
the problems is that game devs love giving players their power fantasy, so zooming becomes part of the process more than the end goal.
I’m on both sides of the spectrum. I like grindy games that make me ‘work’ for something. It’s important for me to enjoy the journey, though. The moment to moment gameplay needs to keep me entertained.
But I also like games with a more instant reward. That can be short, sweet gameplay like Brotato or Hades, but also a game like Baldur’s Gate or Civilization.
With SSF yes. But you can be CoF and still play in a group with shared drops. If you play with 3 friends and you all need different items, your drop rate effectively quadruples.
It was irony. And it’s ironic you missed that.
As far as I’m aware, no one really trades in the game. But I have never really looked too much into the GD community outside the forums.
Yes. EHG’s approach to helping you with RNG is giving you parallel RNG mechanics. You started with needing a natural drop. Then they added a parallel mechanic with Havoc where you could use the previously useless drops (which you would leave on the ground) to also be able to get your item.
They’re both RNG, but they’re parallel and you could get your item from either of them, effectively doubling your chances.
Then they changed glyph of insight to allow you to change bases. It’s another RNG system, but it’s also parallel.
Whichever delivers your wanted item first isn’t really relevant, as long as one of them does.
But it does force you to interact with all systems if you want your item faster, which can be exhausting in the long run, since each is still RNG with a small chance. Even though your overall chance of getting the item is bigger, you will also fail more crafts than before.
That was adventure mode. I used to run it with a friend where each of us would tackle an act on their own and we would clean up the 5 acts pretty fast.
This is mostly a progression issue. Players were getting BiS gear very easily. Which, at the time, was 4xT5 with a sealed affix. With a pretty deterministic crafting system, this was easy to achieve.
So they added the exalted system which was drop only to keep players chasing something. Otherwise they would be done with the gear in little to no time. Especially without a season reset.
Ultimately, the problem with LE’s gear is simply that it’s very easy to get your early endgame gear. And it’s also kinda easy to get your pretty good endgame gear. And then it’s really hard to min-max after that. It’s a huge jump.
Which if fine for most players that are the target of EHG, which are altoholics, since they will rarely push into that territory, but it sucks for min-maxxers.
its interesting where one reason why i love LE so much is that it does the exact opposite of POE where getting on your feet is much more generous and organic. you hit the ground running, quickly crafting whatever you need. its SO damn good.
but once you get to the end game, it becomes the opposite where in poe an end game item (not fully min maxed) can feel easier to get in POE rather than in LE.
ah yeah thats what its called. and we would also try to get the best RORGs too. i really do miss diablo as a franchise but i really dislike how its going.
diablo used to be an insta buy. now i havent even bought the spiritborn expansion.
What do you call an end game item? Rare uniques slammed with T7 is end game, you can clear all content with a good build only with single T7 slams. It’s ridiculously easy to get T7 slams you want with havocs and a guaranteed affix of your choice. If you are CoF then you even get a dozen of T7s per map from rank bonuses without ever touching prophecies. It’s uncomparably easier to get a single T7 slam in 1.3 than it was in 1.0.
Since T7 slams are so ridiculously easily achievable, nowadays people consider double T7 slammed uniques end game items but in reality those are closer to mirror tier crafted gear in PoE terms and the time gap between single T7 and double T7 slams is considerable but it’s not even close to mirror tier crafting in PoE in my opinion. (By the way with CoF you have double chance for all your slams because you can easily get infinite amounts of rune of creations through prophecies so you can make a copy of every single extalted items you want to slam.)
Have you watched Belton when he was crafting his top DPS bow a couple leagues ago? It took him a week to craft that bow even though he didn’t have to farm all the currency he used because he got lots of it from his community on the promise he would mirror a copy for them for free.
I don’t get why it’s a glyph, it makes no sense to be positioned that way.
I wouldn’t say ‘trivial’, but it’s gotten better. It’s still anything but trivial if you’re going into the territory of rare Affixes, then it becomes nigh impossible still.
I mean… I get it, it’s rare after all, but given the FP cost and the base drop-rate it turns into a massive chore since it’s so vastly different comparatively to two common affixes. It’s the difference between needing 5-10 items and 500-1000 items to get the perfect combination and not ruin your other Affixes along with it.
The issue is that you always have the potential to play in a group, and that group has the potential to spread their stuff even further along the chain of players.
That has to be taken into consideration.
Sure, not as much as when you have a clear-cut market available, but still has an effect on it.
I get the notion.
But it’s also absolute bogus sadly.
You always have this present, it’s just a question how exactly it forms. Currently the ‘clinical’ approach mandates to use CoF, imprint 7701 items with a sealed Affix, or rare uniques. Then you go and focus on loot lizards unless your build cannot handle them (at which point you’ve already gone away from being clinical as the build includes that, so we can ignore it for the example’s sake) scale them with champions and do every cemetery/tomb and otherwise rush through content. That provides the fastest way to get the results and is hella boring to play out like any ‘solved’ equation is.
Comparatively with target-farming options you have a clear-cut options available which doesn’t need as high of a bar to get into but allows devs to reduce the overall result-rate a bit since it’s targeted after all. Ultimately this means you still go clinically towards a specific reward, just that the approach to it changes.
Yeah, them addressing something and that philosophy upholding scrutiny are two different pairs of shoes though.
It’s like the mastery respec. That one for example upheld and had a distinct philosophy behind it. Then EHG decided to get rid of that and it led to one of the most fundamental core concepts of games not to be upheld anymore, which is preservation of value for gear related to a individual character while also reducing replay value of their game which has low retention value in comparison to competition already.
Philosophy upheld against scrutiny and was done in anyway… negative outcome long-term.
If a philosophy doesn’t uphold scrutiny then it will cause negative outcomes short-term.
They aren’t, they are the intro-relics which provide a decent result right away. There’s a good amount of rolls which can happen on exalteds though which are superior to what a weaver relic will roll as outcome. Also there’s non-weaver uniques which are extremely powerful and hence mandate the classic combination of unique+exalted to be present.
It substantially reduced their perceived value though, that is true.
That example is kinda the worst though
If you do any form of bossing-content or singular-reward content then time investment wise the results are a net-negative for everyone.
After all Heist gives 1 reward, bosses give 1 reward.
Comparatively you’re right with the MF and group-play at normal content. If set up properly you can scale rewards to a ridiculous degree, as well as group power.
Which comes with issues for the market as well again, which is a inherent part of PoE and hence prices get pushed down because of those group farmers, which means each individual farmer in relation gets less reward for the same effort put in.
That’s the downside of those group mechanics and why they are commonly not allowed to exist.
Aura-stacking rather then basing aura-power off of the amount of targets in reach and dividing it through that has always been a downfall of the genre’s MP gameplay. The scaled rewards are not a problem if the power wouldn’t also accordingly rise in a group in a exponential manner.
But since it does it’s doubling up the upsides, which provides a overall better experience compared to what a solo-player can ever have.
Yes, that is 100% true.
The magnitude of acquisition difficulty immediately goes through the roof, and unless that is handled in some way the situation will stay bad.
This is why ‘drop only’ implementation was one of the worst choices EHG did for their game.
While the overall chance of RNG based systems working in parallel can cause it to normalize to a common outcome in the end it also means that the RNG can stack up in the worst or best possible ways.
That’s why you commonly have a RNG mechanic and then use a mechanic to actively cut down the outliers of that RNG mechanic in parallel, to allow the option to get a guaranteed result versus a RNG based risky but ultimatily long-term more effective outcome in total.
PoE for example has that with jeweller orbs and the crafting bench. You can 6-Link any item personally, and it takes 2000 jewellers commonly to achieve it. But with quality it only does take 1600 (each % quality increases success chance by 1%, hence 20% of 2000 is 400 and results in commonly 1600 for a 50% chance hit)… or you can bypass the risk of needing 3000 and use the direct craft for a 6-link which costs 2000 jewellers flat.
Similar systems need to be in LE, the issue is not that RNG exists… it’s that there is no way to bypass it. Long-term it evens out, but for a short-term situation you can be entirely screwed over as the law of large numbers cannot apply for individual outcomes, only for repeated ones after all.
Which means that the chance to achieve the outcome was too high, hence a significant nerf was needed instead to get it to the wanted stage.
Adding T6+T7 is also fine as long as it has the same underlying fundamental carfting progression system as it allows drop-rate to crafting success to stay functional. All it does it reducing the chance to achieve it, could after all make T6+T7 ‘craft only’ rather then ‘drop only’. That would’ve sustained the crafting mechanic far better and allowed proper balancing for reaching the top-end of items.
Currently it’s fully hinged on the drop-system though, and that means acquisition rate substantially drops between the state of campaign and early monoliths… as suddenly at the level 90 monoliths exalted items get introduced and all goes to hell
Yep, and that’s a issue.
LE is not supposed to be in this state, it doesn’t align with the expected target audience. No matter if single-character or altaholic. If you want to reach a specific spot before doing a second character (which is a part of being a altaholic, not every altaholic has a extremely low base expectation before creating a new character) and that spot tends to be close to or after the turnover point where it gets harder then PoE to acquire then it doesn’t uphold the market position anymore of being ‘harder then D3/4 and easier then PoE’.
You cannot with the vast majority of builds. So unless ‘good’ is ‘OP and broken comparatively’ then this doesn’t uphold.
Not even remotely. That would be 2T7 + T6 for CoF, or even 3T7, which all exist.
2T7 is currently the top-end item area and is simply a mess in several regards.
Given the prevalence of legendaries currently, I was mostly talking about slamming. Getting a T7 to slam on your unique is now trivial (relatively speaking) with Havocs. Even more so for 1LP slamming where every other affix is irrelevant.
You don’t currently use more than 1-3 exalteds on your gear in endgame.
Unless you’re taking into account being able to seal an affix, there isn’t anything an exalted relic can have that a weaver one can’t. It’s just much harder to get.
It’s actually even easier to get a 2xT7 in a weaver relic than in an exalted one. Whether those affixes are actually useful is another matter, though.
It can, but it is much more unlikely to happen for a negative result and more likely to happen for a positive result.
If you want item X and all 3 layers can provide it, as soon as one succeeds you’re done with it. So a positive outlier in any of the 3 systems effectively reduces your required outcome.
Whereas you need a negative outlier in all 3 at once to get the negative result.
So if you have a 20% chance to succeed for all 3 systems, then your total chance to succeed is 48.8% and chance to fail is 51.2%. That’s more than double the chance to succeed from previously and a significant drop in the failure rate.
So having parallel systems will effectively reduce the amount of negative outliers by making it more unlikely to happen, while increasing the number of positive results at the same time.
It’s not simply a balancing mechanic, it’s effectively power creep.
I’m assuming he means every content excluding Uby. Since you cannot kill Uby with most builds even if you had everything 3xT7.
Yeah, in 1 LP it’s absolutely trivial, that’s right. Beyond is where it becomes… problematic.
Exactly, as you not only need the high weaver value itself but also the RNG to have it happen.
Hence it’s just unrealistic to acquire comparatively to a relic with potential to become a decent craft.
But you’re right with the prevalence of 2T7, and also with them being 99% crap combos
That is not quite in our situation though. It’s more likely to happen in the middle-ranges, the further along the chain you go with more and more RNG systems the more likely law of large numbers applies to it and pushes it to the absolute middle.
Neither good nor bad are as prevalent.
What you describe are pure parallel systems, we don’t have those though in a sizeable manner, we got only glyphs/runes for that.
What we have though and is implemented systems layered on top of each other mostly by now, that’s what the most impactful ones are.
We got the LP system, which is a top-layered one… first acquisition, then crafting, then slamming.
We got the Attribute changing system, first acquisition, then crafting, then attribute changing… and potentially LP slamming.
The experimental one. First acquisition, then crafting, then slamming, then potentially attribute slamming, then potentially LP slamming.
It gets more and more and more along this way. While each is individually improving the potential outcomes of the end-result they usually also cause conditions to apply.
For example, formerly - when exalteds weren’t introduced - your baseline was ‘drop acqusition’ and if that’s deemed viable enough to start you crafted. Done. Easy and no issue, too easy though.
Then we had exalteds, so now the minimum requirement at acquiring them makes it so that rare = fail-state. Immediately.
Then when you have your T6 for a specific slot it becomes Rare + T6 = fail state.
Which lands us in T7 territory, we’ve already removed 95% or so of all drops this way as they’re inherent failing states.
Now we have the next segment, crafting. An actual parallel system with Havoc or Redemption. Havoc though causes another layer of having to prepare the respective Affix as a cost, more powerful though.
Then if it reaches immediately the desires outcome… great! If we need attribute crafting a 0 FP would be a fail-state again. For experimental crafting we would have another RNG layer instead.
It just adds up over time as quite few parallel systems exist, most are serial systems currently. Consecutive on top of each other.
So the example with:
Sadly barely applies.
It’s just not what we have at most. But I get the gist.
We need such systems implemented direly, in appropriate amounts.
Yeah, but you either have ‘all content’ or you have ‘most content excluding xyz’… which is kinda not the point as we have nigh no content besides aby/uby anyway And some of the weaver nodes definitely acquire more then 1 T7 items as well to be reasonable.
That’s in the application. At least in Oracle we usually store number as number() which has the length before and after the decimal seperator as arguments.
That is for float/numeric, which is a different type of number.
I don’t know how Oracle separates these, but on SQL Server there are equivalents to programming variables.
So there’s short (int16), int (int32), long (int64) and then there’s numeric(x, y) (equivalent to decimal/double) where x is length, y is decimal places. There’s even tinyint (int8).
If we’re storing a number that will always be smaller than 30k, there’s no point in using int and we store as short instead, since that takes less space.
I don’t consider Uby when I say “all content”. Uby is an anomaly, it’s a dev tool to determine which build needs a nerf because it’s so overtuned that, as you say, most builds can’t kill it even with 3xT7 gear.
On the topic of storing numbers, the offline save files store everything in JSON, I wouldn’t be surprised if they used a document based nosql store like Mongo or Couchbase because you don’t really need an SQL database for this because you basically never use any function of SQL as you don’t want to search for characters that are between level 60 and 80 and have 12 items that has double T7 affixes or something like that. If I had to design a backend for this I would never store characters in an SQL database because it doesn’t make too much sense.
Sure. But the thing is that you’re not storing just characters. You’re also storing everything else, including stash. And you do search there. Quite often, even.
Of course, you could store everything in the same format you store offline saves/stash. You could even just use a single text field that holds the json which is then converted into an object in memory. This isn’t very efficient, though.
It’s one thing to do that to a single player that’s playing offline. It’s another to do that to 100 players in the same server.
Stash can be stored in a document as well. You can fetch the whole stash by character id, by group or by tab, that’s all the search you practically need, the regex searches players do are done offline. Why would you pay for the CPU power for stash searches of thousands of players when it can be done on their computers?
