How "honest" do you feel the RNG in POE actually is?

I honestly think they balance it around no lifers who can play for 20 hours a day for months on end.

The meta build is always boring and anything actually fun to play gets nerfed.. Power creep ensures no fun will be had going forward either.

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alhazred70 wrote:

GGG has stated publicly that they can and do "turn down" the loot of known botters this means our accounts contain a variable that can lower loot drops.

I don't have time right now to make a real response to your entire post, but I have never heard this part and would like a link so I could see it for myself.

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ArtCrusade wrote:

From my experience the seed has to be based on the system clock. Reason being, when I roll items I'll more often than not see the same mod twice or the same combination of mods twice or thrice in a row when I go quick. When I go slower I don't, so that's suspicious.

However, in regards to "is our RNG rigged" I have to say: no - and if you do believe it is, you should find a better use for your tinfoil hat.

Wrong, it was already admitted to being rigged in certain scenarios and had to be patched fixed before. There is no tin foil hat when it has already been officially admitted to needing to be fixed once in a patch. If they can break it, they can change it. It's not hard to code at all, many games code for weighted RNG in the first place from single player to online games. Most mobile phone games are designed around whaling and you should watch the video I posted earlier about a seminar about what businesses should be doing with free to play games to maximize profits. Tin foil hat is not needed when the VAST MAJORITY of games on the market all do this to various degrees. The question isn't whether GGG is doing RNG manipulation, the real questions are to what degree, how, and what for. I am speaking as a developer who has written code like this and has been a developer for 30 years. I've programmed what I've felt was some shadier logic just to nickle and dime customers in my humble opinion. That doesn't what I felt was true if the customers are happy with the product produced for them. Again, there are no laws around this anywhere in the world.

I am not stating what GGG is or is not doing. I am stating they have already said they have the ability to change the RNG for player accounts. https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2217749/page/1#p15813696

First line mentions the fix done before for a broken problem with it once. Don't have the link off hand, but they stated what was broken was the account seed for the RNG for some players at the time when making characters then.

That proves they can do it and to some degree do. It was also mentioned they try to detect bot accounts so as to tune down the RNG to not favor drops for those accounts. If they can go down, they can go up. I also stated that it is majority industry practice to do stuff like this for various reasons.

There are a ton of Extra Credit game design videos about this to watch on youtube as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry2xz5yYZwY

This is a decent one. Extra Credits has gone a bit off the deep end lately in videos and politics instead of the game design principles they used to talk about, but the older videos are still good to watch. Basically every game with randomness has to code/balance for it. ALL games code to weight RNG balance. It is done for a multitude of reasons. Most of them are to enhance the player experience and not exploit player behavior for profit. However, the later does exist as well.

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beaniac wrote:

I don't have time right now to make a real response to your entire post, but I have never heard this part and would like a link so I could see it for myself.

Well... Chris mentioned as much when open beta began:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/548288/page/6

But... that was a long time ago. I imagine it was easy to detect with a bot and not too time consuming to just make a new burner account and get to more botting for the cheater folks. But it appears to have caused quite the headache for GGG staff rechecking these account-specific adjustments when people found out and e-mailed support.

I know Chris later mentioned accounts having their trade capabilities turned off. I just assumed they switched to that type of shadow-banning method instead of lowering drops.

Edit: some of the people in the thread where Chris talks about turning down loot as an anti botting measure who are also found to NOT be guilty of botting but also got their drop rate "fixed" also reported that currency wasn't completely turned off just turned down. So its unclear if they were completely turning off quant related stuff or just turning it down to a trickle. Be we also know this based on something Chris said in a podcast years later when asked about banning botters. he said (paraphasing) they turned down drops instead of banning so they could continue to track their accounts and interactions with mules/RMT. I don't recall what podcast but he said very casually that he could just turn their drops down and why he would want them to continue playing and tracking their activity instead of outright banning.

Edit: on a COMPLETELY unrelated note it is really interesting to see just how many people in that 2013 launch era thread have modern supporter packs and little green and black Metamorph challenge numbers. POE is an amazing game, just wish I felt more positive about the honesty of the games RNG.

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alhazred70 wrote:

Right now we have empirical evidence of unintentional fuckery (Delve loot seed bug), we have admitted capability (anti botting measures). We have multiple good motives, including marketing the game, attracting players with immediate success and then stretching it out; tuning the item economy; gathering scientific metrics etc. etc. and we have lot of plausible reasons including bugs, industry practices and past industry examples of this sort of fuckery happening. And maybe most of all we have Chris Wilson publicly talking about how much he loves "multi axis randomness" which a drop rate variable in our loot seed that we KNOW exists (but in fairness we don't know if it varies outside of botters getting it turned down) certainly plays right into.

I think skepticism is healthy but in the face of evidence outright dismissal is just naivety.

Here's the thing: Delve is one aspect of the game and loot in Delve obviously works differently from the rest of the game.

With your reasoning you should start a career in the chemtrail conspiracy line. You call me naive but the one "evidence" you have is a bug you can barely find info on and some hearsay.

If a big driver of PoE's visibility is through YouTube and Twitch, then it can make sense to give your biggest advertisers a little extra bump in RNG goodness. Do they do this? I don't know. But it would make sense if they did.

https://clips.twitch.tv/HelplessFaithfulChowderCoolStoryBro

The issue isn't whether GGG is putting their thumb on the scales when it comes to RNG (I suspect they are with certain small things, like affixes being weighted for annuls, but with loot in general, I don't know), it's that players have enough mistrust of GGG that wild conspiracy theories have an audience in the first place.

If it did turn out to be true (based on statistical data, not "feels"), it would hardly be the first time a game company was caught rigging the casino. Which is stupid, because the house always wins, even when the games are run "fairly".

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themrpid10 wrote:

I honestly think they balance it around no lifers who can play for 20 hours a day for months on end.

The meta build is always boring and anything actually fun to play gets nerfed.. Power creep ensures no fun will be had going forward either.

THERE İS NO ANY RNG OR DROP SYSTEM İN THİS GAME İTS NOT WORKİNG

AND GGG NERF DROPS WHEN THEY WANT HOW THEY WANT

FOR META SYSTEM THATS JUST SHOWİNG TO ME

META LEAGUES
+
META BUİLDS
=
????????

--META MTX ---

BALANCE OF THE GAME OR META MTX SHOP <--------------------------------------

The RNG feels quite consistent in POE actually. The game seems to weight drops by rarity and how valuable it is and consistently yield "valuable" stuff on set period of time spent playing. At least it is how I feel it works.

It s especially possible to notice it in metamorph where there are some valuable affixes to organs (such as valuable gem affix, 6 link weapon and armor affix, etc).

One need only to measure time spent playing between 2 valuable drop to notice there is some consistency. Even if it isn t always straight ex orbs, it is something of equivalent value.