anti-fun systems

PoE is a great game and most of it is really well done but it has a number of systems that may benefit you as a player to do but are distinctly unfun and a waste of time. I would like to see these systems removed or overhauled in some way:

* Chaos recipe. This fucking thing takes the time you could spend having fun killing mobs and allocates it to shitty inventory management and ilvl checking(to avoid regals). I did this recipe maybe once this league for the challenge because even though I know it helps build wealth, I'm just too fucking sick of it to do it anymore.
* Vendor runs. Every time you level, vendors reset. You then have an opportunity to run through the acts and buy/resell chromatic or 6S items. Sometimes you even get a lucky 5/6 link. Unfortunately, it is really fucking tedious(worse than the small chests in vaults of atziri). I stopped doing it ages ago because it's just so damn boring.
* Most master missions. These often involve backtracking, suboptimal play, or just standing around waiting for mobs to spawn. The only ones that are fun are vagan and unique maps from Zana. I stop leveling matters at 7.

I'm fine with frustrating content that kills you repeatedly and gives you a wall to climb. I'm fine with increasing time and effort into accomplishing my goals. However, I really don't like it when something that is neither challenging nor fun demands my time and attention. When GGG patched the chaos recipe to be ilvl 60+, it was because people were doing it with normal merveil and they didn't want something so horrendously boring to be a good way to play the game. This same reasoning should apply to the above as well.

So what are you suggesting? All that stuff is optional, with the possible exception of master missions if you want to level them. You just want the game to give you some jeweler's orbs and chromes each time you level so you can pretend you went to all the vendors?

Off-topic:

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mark1030 wrote:

So what are you suggesting? All that stuff is optional, with the possible exception of master missions if you want to level them. You just want the game to give you some jeweler's orbs and chromes each time you level so you can pretend you went to all the vendors?

PSA: If anyone ever feels the need to play the 'it's optional' card in their argument do us all a favor and don't post it, you've already lost.

Ahem, carry on. :)

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Off-topic:

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mark1030 wrote:

So what are you suggesting? All that stuff is optional, with the possible exception of master missions if you want to level them. You just want the game to give you some jeweler's orbs and chromes each time you level so you can pretend you went to all the vendors?

PSA: If anyone ever feels the need to play the 'it's optional' card in their argument do us all a favor and don't post it, you've already lost.

Ahem, carry on. :)

Except you know... it is a valid point. All of OP's complaints are about things that are not required except master missions depending on temp league challenges. I never get lvl 8 masters in temp leagues so far and think the people willing to farm the crap out of their masters deserves to profit off of it by being some of the few people that can offer multiple master crafting services.

GeorgAnatoly is right. It has been discussed many times before.
There's no point in saying "it's Optional" if it's optional but optimal. The optimal way to play should also be fun.

Speaking of "optional" and "playing that card", i knew someone would say that.

But, while i agree it's a lame thing to say in most cases, in this case it is not, in my humble opinion.

I know, because i do it myself and when i started doing it i found so much more enjoyment in poe - it was a few years ago and i was all worn out i just couldn't anymore, then i did some things to find my enjoyment again. The main thing was i never ever did chaos recipe again since then. Ever. Well i think one time for a elague challenge. A bit before then i also stopped "vendor runs", simply just doesn't make me feel good, same as chaos recipe. I only bring out 1 inventory(unless rare cases) from every map and always only jewelry really, maybe something else i id'd, essences, currency etc all the small things and then 6S/chrome3s for the rest.

Also for your info it isn't really for most humans worth doing it. For many who are wired like me, it will cause them to lose interest and actually prevent me farming, so it is more efficient for me to just keep going. What stops me to play and farm nonstop is inventory. Simply it kills my fun, and especially in this league with these retarded essences cluttering up my entire inventory after not very long is annoying i am forced to stop allllll the time to go and enter many stash tabs to put my shit in and organize etc etc. Such annoying i just want to farm.

I also like to call chaos recipe for poor mans gold - mega waste of time to scavenge something little.

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PleiadesBlackstar wrote:

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Off-topic:

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mark1030 wrote:

So what are you suggesting? All that stuff is optional, with the possible exception of master missions if you want to level them. You just want the game to give you some jeweler's orbs and chromes each time you level so you can pretend you went to all the vendors?

PSA: If anyone ever feels the need to play the 'it's optional' card in their argument do us all a favor and don't post it, you've already lost.

Ahem, carry on. :)

Except you know... it is a valid point. All of OP's complaints are about things that are not required except master missions depending on temp league challenges. I never get lvl 8 masters in temp leagues so far and think the people willing to farm the crap out of their masters deserves to profit off of it by being some of the few people that can offer multiple master crafting services.

Allow me to clear this up definitively.

Let's imagine a random person is led into a room as part of a social experiment. The room contains a computer with monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers, a large red button, a change machine - the type you might find at a video arcade or a car wash - and a window into the next room. The monitor displays a web browser directed at some forum discussing the experiment.

In the other room is another man, bound to a gurney, electrodes covering his mostly naked body, conscious and pleading into a nearby microphone which plays on the speakers in the other room. Pushing the large red button delivers a devastating electric shock to this man, causing him to scream in agony; simultaneously, $5 in quarters is dispensed by the change machine.

The forums appear to allow the person at the button to communicate with others who are in essentially the same situation elsewhere. Two of the subforums are "Gameplay Help" and "Feedback and Suggestions."

So now that the game is clearly defined, let's really examine the "it's optional" argument.

In Gameplay Help, convincing other players that pushing the red button is optional isn't merely okay, it's not merely true, it's the ethical choice. Championing the "it's optional" argument in that context might even elevate such a person to the status of hero. To some extent, you are advancing the view that human beings are more than pigeons trapped in a Skinner box.

However, making that argument in Feedback and Suggestions takes on an entirely different context. The subject there isn't gameplay, it's design. There, "it's optional" shifts responsibility away from the designers and back onto players. There, "it's optional" treats communication from players to developers as insincere, responding to it disingenuously as if a call for help - gameplay help. There, in reference to the red button and the change dispenser, "it's optional" is an apologist argument defending unspeakable horror.

The design truth is: the way that the design places reward clearly encourages behavior which the vast majority (unfortunately, not everyone) would find deeply unfun.

Bringing it back to the real world: when you say "it's optional" in THIS forum, what you're really saying is "learn to play." You are dismissing the other forumer's argument entirely and reducing their post to their alleged inability to make the correct choices - that is, to play the game properly. "It's optional" implies the other person is opting for options which don't serve them as well as other options.

I totally get that players have free agency, that optional isn't mandatory and "mandatory" is sometimes subtly suboptimal. Such things are obviously true to any observer who has the vocabulary to correctly identify the issues. However, to those who lack this vocabulary and just want you to stop standing between them and getting their feedback to actual game developers, "mandatory" is really just a fumbling way of telling you to please stop being a dismissive white knight.

I'm not saying it's totally beyond the pale to do such a thing to someone's feedback or suggestion; some feedback and, honestly, most suggestions are horrible and worthy of summary dismissal. But you should have a modicum of respect, or at least a basic awareness, of what you're really doing.

TL;DR: Keep that "optional" shit out of Feedback, and in Gameplay Help where it (sometimes) belongs. And try to avoid using "mandatory" anywhere, because without a context of a certain goal, it never is.

BTW, the problem is that it is not optional. If playing content was free, I might tend to agree, but playing content is NOT free. You need Chaos, Alchs, Chisels and Vaals to just play the game, it is not possible without them (well, technically you can grind Dried Lake to 100, but I guess we can agree that that is not really an option). So you either have to run the Chaos and Chisel recipes, or you have to trade.

And no, it is not fun. I am personally not running the Chaos or Chisel recipe any longer except in leagues.

Mapping is, strictly speaking, optional. But to, say, get to Shaper, certain things would require either absurd luck, absurd time to allow said luck to play out, or - most likely and certainly optimally - application of particular techniques to reduce the expected time to brute-force the desired outcome.

Really, guys, "optional" is Feedback Forum Hitler; you lose your argument as soon as you use it.

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dudiobugtron wrote:

if it's optional but optimal. The optimal way to play should also be fun.

That seems incredibly difficult as a design goal. Especially in a free trade no-decay no-tradeskill-differentiation environment, which will naturally mean that the only reason one would give up money is payment for something that person doesn't want to do, implying activities that require compensation due to their unpleasant nature. But I'm not a game designer at heart, so I can't say for sure.

In any case, what I see as a problem of obsession with optimality in video games is also a problem of classical economics. Because personal utility of intangible benefit, such as from "emotions," "satisfaction," and "fulfilment" are difficult to measure, they are pretty much ignored completely in most models. Economic models can only capture it indirectly whenever intangibles influence spending, i.e. when it can be measured in dollars. This is already an advance over usual power gamer mentality:

Usual power gamer mentality often also fixates on one objective measure, in the case of POE usually xp / hour or currency again. But they usually fail to consider even the most simple of meta-analysis such as empirical comparison of xp / hour or currency with with other players.

All that was a fancy way of saying - if you don't like it, then doing it probably decreases your motivation, and if your motivation drops, then the other aspects of your play are negatively affected.

Crackmonster is the prime example in this thread. He hated inventory management, and was probably not advancing very far while doing it. When he "just couldn't anymore," how much xp or currency do you think he was making? I would guess not very much. In contrast, after he gave up inventory micromanagement, he could play much more and presumably is doing fine. This in turn increases his real xp and currency per hour, because he doesn't dread the thought of playing.

As for suggestions for game improvement - I really cannot think of anything, because unfortunately, I'm in the minority of forum posters. I love inventory micromanagement. The only issue I have with it is the strain on my eyes reading mods, but I don't think GGG could do much about that. Chaos recipe definitely feels fun to me, maybe because of the joy of collecting and/or progress towards the completion of each set.

I don't do the level up vendor check thing though, and honestly, I don't think it even matters that much. Aside from motivation, there's the cognitive load cost of each choice: ignoring cognitive load, level up vendors is probably optimal. But when factoring loss of grinding efficiency from the cognitive load (what am I doing again? Did I check? Oh shit I didn't notice volatile blood because I was worrying about level up vendors, I just lost 100,000,000 xp), level up vendor check is probably a net loss in my case and many other cases.

tl;dr the energy put towards raging against "it's optional" might be better put towards evaluating whether the extra 0.2 chaos revenue you get is worth the -1, -2, -50 chaos expense from the shit that micromanaging does to your brain, thus creating a different choice optimality when accounting for less objective factors.

EDIT: Because I love analogies. Let's take ScrotieMcB's excellent torture room example. Economists and power gamers are likely to say that pushing the button is optimal. People for whom a moral compass overrides primitive social science will probably think, "if I push that button, the choice will weigh on my conscience so much that my future productivity will be seriously hampered. So even if the objective function is to maximize profit, I'll be incurring a net loss here because my ability to generate revenue in the future will be lowered by a greater than $5 loss per button press."

Since this is Feedback and Suggestions, the objective function of the forum itself is presumably fun per player, and thus of course it is legitimate to point out that forcing participants to shock their peers is a horrible way of producing fun. So of course it is perfectly valid to point out what could replace the whole shocking mechanism.

Thus the point of my post may be enhanced by pointing out that there are other sources of profit in the world, both in real world and the game. When one introduces a green button that dispenses $4 a press but does not shock a human, many people will probably go for the green instead of the red.

Thus there isn't really a way to deny the validity of the original poster's feedback in so much as there are ways of claiming that it's not such a big deal as one may think.

So another way to interpret "it's optional" would not be "git gud," but rather "the objective optimality of this choice is low enough that subjective factors may come into play and divert a given player towards other choices, thereby causing the fun-ness impact of this unfun optimal choice to be negligible." So, something along the lines of "it doesn't matter" or "it's not important."