On cake sprinkles, kisses, and curses

A developer of League of Legends Teamfight Tactics had this to say about his game's seasonal event:

"

One thing worth discussing here is that we don't really expect to learn much from the portals, as we mostly already learned those lessons in Set 3 and 5.

In Galaxies, we tried some that were positive (Treasure Trove, Trade Sector, etc) and some that were restrictive (Binary Star, Dwarf Planet) and it was SUPER clear that players didn't like restrictions. The designer who worked on them at the time said "I thought galaxies were supposed to be a puzzle for the player to solve, but by the end I realized galaxies were just sprinkles on the cake. Everyone loves sprinkles."

Shadow Items doubled down on this conclusion, with the kiss curse really being rejected outright, and most players not enjoying them. Soon as we flipped it to Radiant, instantly loved. All positive!

This makes me think about unique items in PoE and how different the devs of this game are (or are they...?) It seemed like GGG were drifting away from putting negatives on unique items, but they still go for it occasionally

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Blood_Price

So what do we think about this as it pertains to PoE? Is curse/kiss design a compelling puzzle for players to solve, or a bygone relic that devs should abandon in favor of an all-sprinkles-all-the-time strategy?

I'll take the kisses and curses - leave the sprinkles, I don't like them.

Kiss/curse can be fine, but it's when they change the curse to be rendered from "a hurdle you can find a way to bypass" to "welp, now you can't get rid of it in a synergistic way" that it feels truly bad.

Sprinkles all around with no curse can throw many things way off balance (take flasks like Olroth's Resolve or Dying Sun, or Void Battery) but when they go out their way to change a certain Unique's wording from "Spend # Mana" to "Lose # Mana" for example, you just know they wanted to quash any creativity stemming from the curse, or someone in any way neutralizing it. This sucks.

I don't know what you ppl are talking about, but that helmet sucks.

"

heaven0777 wrote:

Sprinkles all around with no curse can throw many things way off balance (take flasks like Olroth's Resolve or Dying Sun, or Void Battery) but when they go out their way to change a certain Unique's wording from "Spend # Mana" to "Lose # Mana" for example, you just know they wanted to quash any creativity stemming from the curse, or someone in any way neutralizing it. This sucks.

The disappointment following a few moments of disbelief when I realized how the voidbringer gloves were changed for no obvious reason other than to disable an already meme/niche build like Stormbind.. you just broke my heart again. It was gimmicky and required a ton of things to set up, and wasn't over the top or anything when it came online, only that it enabled a unique and (to me) very satisfying gameplay.. but no more, you can't do that for I still don't know what reason.

Was it collateral damage from some other build that utilized the gloves?

"

Blubbey wrote:

I don't know what you ppl are talking about, but that helmet sucks.

The thread is about design principles, not the helmet. Here, I'll link another item that these design principles apply to which are more popular.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Thread_of_Hope

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Zerphi%27s_Heart

It's not about whether any individual item that relies on this philosophy is 'good' or 'bad' - they can be either or anywhere in between. The question on offer is, is it fun to build around downsides in exchange for larger affix upsides, or this design space antiquated?

Implementation, implementation, implementation.

Some negatives on some items are interesting and actually provide a "puzzle", mechanically. Other items just have negatives in form of stats, which is more of a hassle/chore than a puzzle.

Mechanical negatives that actually alters your way of playing and/or building/planning? Yay!

Negatives that just forces you to add some extra resistances on one or two pieces of gear? Nay!