Accuracy – The Last Remnant of Action?

missing is a negative play experience, so is dying or not getting the roll you wanted with your jewlers orb. Simply because something is a negative doesn't mean it should be eliminated, or that it is indicative of a flaw in the system. You need to ask why a mechanic like accuracy is included, and start from there.

Also, considering the entirety of the game is getting rebalanced in 0.9.3 this is a pretty pointless thread to have been going on for as long as it has.

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Wittgenstein wrote:

missing is a negative play experience, so is dying or not getting the roll you wanted with your jewlers orb. Simply because something is a negative doesn't mean it should be eliminated, or that it is indicative of a flaw in the system. You need to ask why a mechanic like accuracy is included, and start from there.

Also, considering the entirety of the game is getting rebalanced in 0.9.3 this is a pretty pointless thread to have been going on for as long as it has.

Missing is a negative experience only because it can string together. The player has no control over his misses. You can spend points to minimize that, but even at 95% (the cap), miss strings occur and are not fun.

Death is a negative play experience, but is directly impacted by player skill. If you get killed, you did something wrong, and learn from it.

Not getting an orb is not a negative play experience. If on the other hand, every monster you killed dropped a "Miniature Treasure Chest", but 90% of the time when you opened it, you got nothing, THAT would be a negative play experience.
On the flip side, getting an orb is a positive experience, like Critical chance. You do NOT expect to get it on any given result, so when it does occur, you enjoy it.

And as far as crits, if you get to 95% chance to crit in a game, you don't feel terrible when you miss a crit or 3 in a row, because you can finish getting to 100%.

This thread is not pointless, as I highly doubt any major changes to Accuracy are in the 0.9.3 patch.

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And as far as crits, if you get to 95% chance to crit in a game, you don't feel terrible when you miss a crit or 3 in a row, because you can finish getting to 100%.

No, I don't believe you. In these circumstances, not criting feels like a miss, with little damage I admit, so it's less extreme. But you'll still feel terrible if you get a non-crit string.

It's the same as if miss in PoE did 25% damage, it's a negative experience.

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wyldmage wrote:

Another quality post that says I'm wrong without really making any valid points.

Define a "valid point" — would that just be one you agree with, or what?

Your claim was that Accuracy should be removed because it is "random" and "skill-less", and I pointed out that this is not true. You made an assertion, I refuted it. You have not responded in any meaningful way to this point. So I guess it's "invalid" that I want a game which challenges my character building skill?

Because that is what we are talking about here. Your Accuracy stat is not random: it is chosen by you, the player. You have control over it, you can improve it, and increase your odds of hitting. It is mathematically identical to damage. If you have an 80% chance to hit for 100 damage, or a 100% chance to hit for 80 damage, they are the same. Over time you will average 80 damage per attack (unless you want to get into a discussion on the quality of GGG's Random Number Generator, but don't go there unless you've done serious regression tests showing anomalies in the RNG output).

You still have not seemed to make any attempt to read what I have said. I am not defending Accuracy, itself — I know nothing about it. What I am saying is that if Accuracy is bad, it is for some other reason, not just because it is "skill-less", because it is not, in fact, skill-less.

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wyldmage wrote:

Misunderstanding of game mechanics and human psychology?
For point 1, which part of game mechanic am I misunderstanding? Does accuracy not go down as you level? Details you troll, details.

No, Accuracy does not go down as you level. Monsters get better. If the character screen displayed a "number of hits to kill" stat, and you made no effort to improve your damage, that number would go down too — because monsters' HP is going up and your damage isn't. Would you be complaining about that stat, too?

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wyldmage wrote:

For point 2, why don't you get in touch with Zileas. He works on this kinda shit at Riot games, used to be with Arena.net. He's even got nice big threads on fun vs anti-fun, and anti-patterns.

That's great, you're not him. Your claims have been that it's unfun because it's "skill-less", which is, in fact, not true — it's not skill-less, and not therefore unfun.

It may be unfun, but it's not for that reason. And your claims that it's unfun for that reason are incorrect, and misunderstand human psychology to the degree that it denies the existence of those who derive enjoyment from the challenge of creating a character with, say, sufficient Accuracy.

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wyldmage wrote:

I have yet to see someone point out WHY accuracy is better than scaled monster hp that you have to properly synergize your other passives to overcome.

You realize, if they made you hit 100% of the time, they would make you do less damage (or give the monsters more HP), so you'd just have to switch points from passive accuracy boosters to passive damage boosters, right? Are passive damage boosters somehow "more fun"?

Mathematically, it comes out to be about the same (which makes me wonder why you're so angry about this), but it eliminates the defense/evade/shield paradigm that GGG has going, which would be a shame as I rather like it.

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wyldmage wrote:

It boils down to accuracy is JUST a dps increase, like most other skills. Except classes like Witches get to ignore it, and laugh at everyone else.

That's a separate balance issue. Yes, Witches have an advantage there which is likely not (currently) balanced by other disadvantages (fairly common in RPGs). There are numerous answers to this problem, however, not all of which involve eliminating Accuracy (indeed, the easiest one is just to make Witches require Accuracy also).

This also has nothing to do with my argument, which again, is not about Accuracy per se, but about character building skill and how it is not "invalid".

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zriL wrote:

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And as far as crits, if you get to 95% chance to crit in a game, you don't feel terrible when you miss a crit or 3 in a row, because you can finish getting to 100%.

No, I don't believe you. In these circumstances, not criting feels like a miss, with little damage I admit, so it's less extreme. But you'll still feel terrible if you get a non-crit string.

You know what friend, he will still feel terrible unless he gets 100% chance to hit, so i recommend you to stop exhausting yourself. And the funny thing is he says that i was mad, hahaha...

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wyldmage wrote:

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Wittgenstein wrote:

missing is a negative play experience, so is dying or not getting the roll you wanted with your jewlers orb. Simply because something is a negative doesn't mean it should be eliminated, or that it is indicative of a flaw in the system. You need to ask why a mechanic like accuracy is included, and start from there.

Also, considering the entirety of the game is getting rebalanced in 0.9.3 this is a pretty pointless thread to have been going on for as long as it has.

Missing is a negative experience only because it can string together. The player has no control over his misses. You can spend points to minimize that, but even at 95% (the cap), miss strings occur and are not fun.

Death is a negative play experience, but is directly impacted by player skill. If you get killed, you did something wrong, and learn from it.

Not getting an orb is not a negative play experience. If on the other hand, every monster you killed dropped a "Miniature Treasure Chest", but 90% of the time when you opened it, you got nothing, THAT would be a negative play experience.
On the flip side, getting an orb is a positive experience, like Critical chance. You do NOT expect to get it on any given result, so when it does occur, you enjoy it.

And as far as crits, if you get to 95% chance to crit in a game, you don't feel terrible when you miss a crit or 3 in a row, because you can finish getting to 100%.

This thread is not pointless, as I highly doubt any major changes to Accuracy are in the 0.9.3 patch.

You are just defining "negative play experience" in a way that makes your point. Following the definitions of the words, a "negative play experience" would be any experience that the player finds negative.

See how it works? Ex: Missing is not a negative play experience, it is a motivation to improve accuracy. See what I did?

The whole thread is based on the "feeling" of the individual poster which they sell as a fact, since just about any response from those few people contain "feels wrong", "feels worse", "feels negative" as the main "argument".

Its really just as good as saying that "I feel mobs HP should be decresed at least 5 times, because after lvl 30 I stopped one hitting them and by level 50 it took 5 hits to kill them, which is 5 times too much. That is a negative play experience". I could create a thread like that and it would be just as truthful as what you say about accuracy.

But I guess "arguments" like that are best you can come up with to put down a classic component of the rpg genre game mechanics.

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wyldmage wrote:

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shadowtwin wrote:

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It seems that what people are caught up in here is that accuracy is described as a percentage rather than just a number that you can add to -like attack speed and damage. You could use the exact quote you just stated, and put in place monster's chance to dodge for attack speed and it would say exactly the same thing:

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If the monster gains 1% [chance to dodge], and the player can spend a point to gain 1% [chance to hit], the player has control but it's a positive mechanic.

Can you explain to me why that statement is any different than the statement you made? The only difference is that instead of displaying attack speed and attack damage as a percentage you are only able to see a number that you can steadily increase. What if, for instance, instead of displaying dps as it does now it instead displayed it as your average damage divided by average monster health at your level? So if you are level 30 with an average of 165 dps and the monsters at level 30 have an average of 450 health your effective dps could be displayed as 36.6%. Now when you level to 31 if the monsters gain 10% health and you don't put any points into increased damage, your dps remains 165 while their health goes to 495, thus your effective dps could be displayed as 33.3%. So you have just gotten 3.3% worse through no choice of your own in one of the fun mechanics already in place. Can you explain in a logical, substantive way why this example is different than accuracy?

Simple. While they are both negatively displayed, taking 11 attacks to kill a mob instead of 10 feels like natural progression. There's no problem there. But if EVERY monster takes 11 attacks to kill, instead of "10 if you don't miss", then you remove something that only exists to frustrate players.

I would rather:
Monsters take 11 hits to kill, but I don't miss. Bosses take 55 hit to kill, and I don't miss.

Instead of:
Monsters take 10 hits to kill with a 10% chance to miss. Bosses take 50 hits to kill with a 10% chance to miss.

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What I was asking was for a logical, substantive reason why the mechanic was different. What you gave me was your opinion of the outcome of the mechanic without even attempting to answer the question. Your feeling that one is a natural progression while the other exists only to frustrate players is a perfectly valid opinion. However it does nothing to dispute the fact the mechanics -while displayed differently- already scale in exactly the same way. That's not my opinion, that's fact. I totally get that you don't like Accuracy, but to claim that it is mechanically different than attack speed or damage per second will require something other than feelings to substantiate.

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zriL wrote:

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And as far as crits, if you get to 95% chance to crit in a game, you don't feel terrible when you miss a crit or 3 in a row, because you can finish getting to 100%.

No, I don't believe you. In these circumstances, not criting feels like a miss, with little damage I admit, so it's less extreme. But you'll still feel terrible if you get a non-crit string.

It's the same as if miss in PoE did 25% damage, it's a negative experience.

Then change a miss to be 50% damage instead of 0%.
That's what happens when you "miss" a crit. You do half damage.
At least then, "unlucky streaks" hurt less.

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DragoonWraith wrote:

Define a "valid point" — would that just be one you agree with, or what?

No, plenty of valid points in this thread, just not by you.

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DragoonWraith wrote:

Because that is what we are talking about here. Your Accuracy stat is not random: it is chosen by you, the player. You have control over it, you can improve it, and increase your odds of hitting. It is mathematically identical to damage. If you have an 80% chance to hit for 100 damage, or a 100% chance to hit for 80 damage, they are the same. Over time you will average 80 damage per attack (unless you want to get into a discussion on the quality of GGG's Random Number Generator, but don't go there unless you've done serious regression tests showing anomalies in the RNG output).

Then set the cap at 100%. As long as the accuracy cap is 95%, then it CAN be dictated by the RNG.
League of Legends switched from a true RNG to a pseudo RNG. Why? Because getting crit 3 times in a row at level 3 by some guy who had 15% chance to crit was very not fun in a PvP experience. Now the odds of that happening at infinitesimal (not a third of a percent, which happens regularly with that many people playing).

I'm not saying GGG should do the same. Just using it to illustrate the point that RNG-dictated systems can have very anti-fun moments. And accuracy is THE showcase example of that. If Accuracy 85% meant that I would hit 17 times and miss 3 out of *every* 20 attacks I made, it wouldn't be so bad. But getting strings of over 3 misses in a row is frustrating as hell.

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DragoonWraith wrote:

No, Accuracy does not go down as you level. Monsters get better. If the character screen displayed a "number of hits to kill" stat, and you made no effort to improve your damage, that number would go down too — because monsters' HP is going up and your damage isn't. Would you be complaining about that stat, too?

Again, I go back to streaks. If monsters get 5% harder to kill, it feels natural. If the get 5% harder to hit, it drastically increases the number of "whiff whiff whiff" streaks.
All stats in PoE are going down as you level, because they are relative to monsters of the new level. This isn't made clear in the character screen, but it is true.
However, only accuracy actually makes a significant impact on the *feel* playing the game. Missing sucks. It feels terrible. Unless you get 1 or 2 shot, taking more damage doesn't feel nearly as bad. Shooting a mob twice and it having 4% health left doesn't feel that bad.

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DragoonWraith wrote:

Mathematically, it comes out to be about the same (which makes me wonder why you're so angry about this), but it eliminates the defense/evade/shield paradigm that GGG has going, which would be a shame as I rather like it.

No, it doesn't eliminate the defense/evade/shield paradigm. Accuracy = 100%, multiplied by a monster's evasion. Hell, give all monsters 5% evasion as a base stat. You've removed half the issue with accuracy (you don't have to spend points to keep your accuracy on level). 5% will still have streaks, which sucks. Evasion monsters will still be annoying. But under the current system, stacking accuracy doesn't defeat evasion. You still add your evasion to their miss chance.

If accuracy was just simply 100%, and your target had 60% evasion, you'd have a 40% chance to hit. But that would be THAT monster, not every single monster.

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BrecMadak wrote:

You know what friend, he will still feel terrible unless he gets 100% chance to hit, so i recommend you to stop exhausting yourself. And the funny thing is he says that i was mad, hahaha...

Plenty of viable solutions that don't involve the absolute removal of accuracy. 50% damage "on miss" would go a long way to mitigate bad streaks of RNG "fun".

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Wittgenstein wrote:

You are just defining "negative play experience" in a way that makes your point. Following the definitions of the words, a "negative play experience" would be any experience that the player finds negative.

See how it works? Ex: Missing is not a negative play experience, it is a motivation to improve accuracy. See what I did?

A negative play experience is one that uses Negative Reinforcement to encourage a behavior, or Negative Punishment to discourage a behavior. This is directly related to Positive Reinforcement and Negative Reinforcement (psychology terms).

Accuracy is penalizing the player by removing their ability to hit. Hence negative (you take something away). It does this if the player does not spend half their points in accuracy (so it's Punishment).

If instead your chance to hit began at 5%, and you could spend points to raise it (and it never decreased), it would be Positive Reinforcement. It is *giving* you the reward of more hits, IF you do a behavior (putting the points in.

But accuracy does that as is to!
No it doesn't, because you start at the maximum. The only things that can happen are "no change" and "get worse".

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shadowtwin wrote:

What I was asking was for a logical, substantive reason why the mechanic was different. What you gave me was your opinion of the outcome of the mechanic without even attempting to answer the question. Your feeling that one is a natural progression while the other exists only to frustrate players is a perfectly valid opinion. However it does nothing to dispute the fact the mechanics -while displayed differently- already scale in exactly the same way. That's not my opinion, that's fact. I totally get that you don't like Accuracy, but to claim that it is mechanically different than attack speed or damage per second will require something other than feelings to substantiate.

Attack Speed and Damage do not create streaks based on the RNG.
THAT is how it is different on a mechanics level.