Game Mechanics are too convoluted with Insufficient Information for Players.

Like those "increased area of effect" nodes on passive which can be utterly useless if the secret rounding done upon the secret radius says so.
No wonder it's lost, it's in the middle of the jungle!
Last bumped on Aug 17, 2023, 11:26:47 PM
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It's just a game, what do you want? There are many casuals that only want to play the game. If you want insane amount of in depth information you can just read wiki. No reason to describe how integer rounding, server tick rate and other things affect various game mechanics in the game itself. New players are already scared from the complexity. Last thing they need is making every effect description 3x longer.
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Aredid wrote:
what do you want?

1. Make it so that the mechanics are better. If it says "10% increased area of effect then it should do that (to the actual thing happening on screen and not to some internal variable) and not something else.
2. Make it properly clear what things do. Like add a radius to skill descriptions of skills with a radius.

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Aredid wrote:
If you want insane amount of in depth information you can just read wiki.
Wiki does not have "insane amount of information". Unfortunately wiki has insufficient amount of information. Example: I want to know how much AoE the 3 Toxic Rain components have. Where do I find that information?

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Aredid wrote:
No reason to describe how integer rounding, server tick rate and other things affect various game mechanics in the game itself.
And where do I find that information? Lets take Elemental Hit. How much inc AoE do I need to get radius 22 if the target already has all elemental ailments on it?
No wonder it's lost, it's in the middle of the jungle!
I have always thought they shot themselves in the foot when they combine flat, percentage, additive, and mulitplictive modifiers.

I think they should just reduce everything to a linear number, so instead of 10% more aoe, make it +.1 radius or whatever. It would mean actually telling people what they are getting because poe always rounds against the player. Damage to us gets rounded up, damage to monsters gets rounded down. So attack nodes on the tree would be like +100 phys damage to weapons, or + 50 frost damage to spells, or even +300 chaos damage over time to spells.

This system would always let them have nearby mean nearby (3 units) and nearby (1 unit)

It also means unintended power spikes from having lots of more modifiers gets normalized. If everything adds the same way, the servers have less calculations, players don't need pob as much or at all. Essentially every build has like 600% increased damage multiplied by like 120% more, then added damage with a random effectiveness modifier. It gets so stupid that adding like 10 phys to a attack roll can be like 100,000 extra damage. Mods become meaningless in a system like what we have.

For example I don't have armor or evasion because I can use mantle of flames, implicits, corruptions, taste of hate, and a lot of flask effect to convert phys to elemental completely. The game just feels better because I know that I am reducing all damage by roughly 80% instead of having to rely on armor and evasion calculations seeing if I am dead in one shot or if I take literally no damage.

I would love if the entirely game worked that cleanly.
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Zrevnur wrote:

1. Make it so that the mechanics are better. If it says "10% increased area of effect then it should do that (to the actual thing happening on screen and not to some internal variable) and not something else.
2. Make it properly clear what things do. Like add a radius to skill descriptions of skills with a radius.


So it's sometimes less than 10% and sometimes more but who cares? Do you really need to count the pixels? Everything is based on internal variables and counting and storing decimals are expensive operations. You maybe don't care about losing 20 FPS to get your aoe be 1 pixel bigger but GGG needs to keep performance in some reasonable bounds.

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Zrevnur wrote:

Example: I want to know how much AoE the 3 Toxic Rain components have. Where do I find that information?


18 But why? Just shoot it and you will see how big it is...
Nevertheless there is also poedb that has much more raw information if wiki is insufficient for you. https://poedb.tw/us/Toxic_Rain

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Zrevnur wrote:
And where do I find that information? Lets take Elemental Hit. How much inc AoE do I need to get radius 22 if the target already has all elemental ailments on it?


22^2 / (10×1.8)^2 - 1 = 49.4% so you need 50% AoE ? Still don't get it why you care so much about it being 18, 22 or 25... there is literally nothing in the game that would require you to know these numbers.
Last edited by Aredid on May 9, 2023, 8:29:49 PM
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Aredid wrote:
So it's sometimes less than 10% and sometimes more but who cares?
Me.

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Aredid wrote:
Do you really need to count the pixels? Everything is based on internal variables and counting and storing decimals are expensive operations. You maybe don't care about losing 20 FPS to get your aoe be 1 pixel bigger but GGG needs to keep performance in some reasonable bounds.
This got approximately nothing to do with FPS.

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Aredid wrote:
But why? Just shoot it and you will see how big it is...
I cant see that. And I wouldnt trust the GFX anyway...

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Aredid wrote:
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Zrevnur wrote:
And where do I find that information? Lets take Elemental Hit. How much inc AoE do I need to get radius 22 if the target already has all elemental ailments on it?

(22/1.8-10)/10 ≈ 22% ?

Thats not at all how it works... Evidence that even on a crude level indeed this is hard to understand and easy to misunderstand. Your first most obvious error here is mismatching radius with AoE: AoE increases AoE and not radius. Then there are the rounding issues.

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Aredid wrote:

Still don't get it why you care so much about it being 15, 22 or 25... there is literally nothing in the game that would require you to know these numbers.
There is a lot in the game which requires me to know these and other numbers if I want to min-max properly.
No wonder it's lost, it's in the middle of the jungle!
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Zrevnur wrote:
I want to min-max properly.


But that's your problem not the game's problem. 99.99% of people never gets to the point of minmaxing. And those who do, they probably know about PoB and other things that help them with it.
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Aredid wrote:
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Zrevnur wrote:
I want to min-max properly.
But that's your problem not the game's problem.
What is your point in saying this? You can always say "its the players problem. No one forces you to play the game." Or some other such unhelpful thing.

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Aredid wrote:
99.99% of people never gets to the point of minmaxing.
And they will happily confuse AoE with radius? Meaning that the game mechanics and descriptions are even worse for them. Just read all those complaints about "random" deaths in this forum and on reddit. The game mechanics are convoluted or overly complicated and the descriptions are unintuitive and incomplete. As a consequence its bad for everybody.

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Aredid wrote:
And those who do, they probably know about PoB and other things that help them with it.
Does PoB tell you the answers to my questions? And what are those "other things"?
No wonder it's lost, it's in the middle of the jungle!
Can we just agree, that 10% more/increased should deliver literal 10% ?
PoE absolutely does lack sufficient information for players in many areas, and OP's examples not being good ones (no offense) doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. Here are some better examples.

There is a difference between when the game says, "added damage" "more damage" and "increased damage" that are very important fundamental differences that will make or break a build, but that information is nowhere to be found in game.

Players should be able to find out somewhere in game whether they can use increases to both damage types when using damage conversion effects, but they cant because the information isn't there.

The number of times you'll see people asking, "does such and such effect apply to my minions" is staggering because the game lacks any information explaining how specific it is about minion stats, then the game turns around and makes things like auras, which only say they apply to allies, not to minions, and makes them also apply to minions in direct contradiction to the "if it doesn't say minion, it doesn't do minion" rule.

On the subject of minion stats, every other build gets a dps indicator for their skills, but minions have no such indicator, instead players are expected to install third party software to get that information. (along with various other information you're expected to install third party software to obtain)

Trading is an integral part of gameplay, but nowhere does the game explain how exactly to sell items and there is similarly nothing in game to tell players that to buy items they need to go to the website.

I could go on but I think you get the point, there are TONS of examples of very basic information that is critical to gameplay on a fundamental level that the game leaves you completely in the dark about, whether you're min-maxing or not.

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