RNG is good.

"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
Ladies and gentlemen,

We're not here to indulge in reality but in hack-and-slash fantasy. ARPGs have become a second-rate genre. Its player retention and community management problems are at nightmare proportions.


Never heard of Borderlands or Dark Souls? There are good ARPGs, they are just rare. The reason ARPGs appear to be second rate is because most companies are making second rate ARPGs, at least when compared to D2.

"
ScrotieMcB wrote:

Now, in the days of Diablo 2 when ARPGs were a top gaming genre, there was a concept of build diversity. The Breath of the Dying Necromancers, the Widowmaker Sorcereress, the builds which built this great feeling of wonder, were made possible due to a community commitment to variety. Today, players have no stake in variety! All together, those of you complaining on the forums consider maybe three builds to be viable. And where do those of you with considerable in-game wealth invest it? Not in rogue builds, or at least not enough. You could benefit from diverse play. That's right, you, the Path of Exile player. And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these copycat wannabes, with their build envy, their 5L and 6L formulas, their droprate buffs and self-found leagues.


The lack of variety is due to a common theme found in many newer ARPGs, the theme is "MOAR DIFFICULTY!" or as some may call it power creep, but in PoE's case its a bit worse. Variety is limited because everything MUST be optimized in order to progress later in the game, this goes double if you lack super good gear.

Sure, you can play whatever hairbrained combo of skills/passives you want, but you had better have really amazing gear, or it won't be fun. I think that is where you fail to see why people don't play random off the wall builds, its not much fun if it takes 10 years to kill an enemy with a less than optimized skill. Sure, you can probably beat Merciless with almost any build, if your gear is good enough, and after much ordeal, but what is the point? Your done, there's absolutely zero point trying to do maps with a build like that.

Perhaps you are implying that there are amazing builds out there that we just don't know about? I'm sure there are, will you, or I, or 99.999% of the player base discover that build first, and thus be able to claim that as an original build that no one has copied? No.

RNG is all fine and dandy, but there needs to be some amount of player control over it otherwise it feels like you are just wasting your time. Crafting adds some control, though it is RNG itself, but it at least lets you choose the base item you want, however, its much more effecient to just trade orbs for what you want, making crafting pretty much pointless, except to the super rich players.

A good example of how RNG should work is D2's loot tables. If you wanted X item, then Y boss had the best chance of dropping it, so the player can focus their efforts and this gives them a purpose, instead of just running around killing monsters and praying for a good drop.
Last edited by Mephasm#3703 on May 10, 2014, 12:23:52 PM
Still no mention of the difference between what a 6-link allows a player to do and what a highly gated top-tier rare allows a player to achieve.

Both have different effect's on the player experience.

The former allowing experimentation.

The later just buffing up the raw stats and diluting the player experience.(making somebody O P without a challenge if well designed.)

But ok, at least you tried to answer my question. To bad it didn't or you failed to miss my point.

A 6-link is not endgame.

Running around in a top-tier mods 6-link is end-game. The two can easily be gated behind different levels. They could even buff hp of monsters to allow this change if necessary.

(and again, this is coming from a player that play's like you do and is perfectly fine with how things are.)

6-linking is not the same as crafting(or gambling call it what you want) and you know this.

Peace,

-Boem-

(again a nice read do)
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
"
CharanJaydemyr wrote:
RNG is more than good. It's the absolute cornerstone of every ARPG, ever. Arguably, every RPG ever. And beyond that, any game that involves dice or card drawing.


Dark Souls 2 disagrees.
This message was delivered by GGG defence force.
"
JIIX wrote:
RNG is neither good or bad, it's a blunt tool with the sole purpose of giving a value that can't be predicted.


This.

To say rng is either good or bad is to miss the point about it entirely. It is simply a means to an end. Either you like it being used to reach that end in principle or you don't in which case ARPG's in general aren't the genre for you which itself is neither good nor bad but simply a preference you have.
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
Ladies and gentlemen,

We're not here to indulge in reality but in hack-and-slash fantasy. ARPGs have become a second-rate genre. Its player retention and community management problems are at nightmare proportions. Now, in the days of Diablo 2 when ARPGs were a top gaming genre, there was a concept of build diversity. The Breath of the Dying Necromancers, the Widowmaker Sorcereress, the builds which built this great feeling of wonder, were made possible due to a community commitment to variety. Today, players have no stake in variety! All together, those of you complaining on the forums consider maybe three builds to be viable. And where do those of you with considerable in-game wealth invest it? Not in rogue builds, or at least not enough. You could benefit from diverse play. That's right, you, the Path of Exile player. And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these copycat wannabes, with their build envy, their 5L and 6L formulas, their droprate buffs and self-found leagues.
"
He took the name of SFL in vain! Burn the heretic!
Fellow players, QQers, these forums have 33 different suggestions for making it easier to acquire the same gear as HvC. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing why you feel the need to build just like this guy, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that a lot of you feel stuck grinding for hours and hours, and I'll bet that half of the reason for that is that you're all trying to trade for the exact same gear. The new law of ARPG economies seems to be to crush diversity rather than foster it. Well, in my book you either have have a lot of possibilities, or you don't have enough of them. In the last seven builds that I've been involved with, I have handcrafted each of them without relying on any guide or streamer, have gotten to 87 with one of them, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. Thank you. Variety is not a destroyer of viability. It is a liberator of fun!

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that RNG, for lack of a better word, is good. RNG is right, RNG works. RNG clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of a broad spectrum of diverse possibilities. RNG, in all of its forms; RNG for gear, for "crafting," for monsters, for area generation has marked the upward surge of ARPG entertainment. And RNG, you mark my words, will not only save Path of Exile, but that other malfunctioning entity called ARPGs. Thank you very much.
Spoiler
Side note: fuck Money Never Sleeps.
One more thing, which I couldn't fit into the Gordon Gekko speech pattern: everyone is pissed off at the coin flip right now. All you see is the choice between the one thing you want and the absence of it, the economy becomes a boring hierarchy of essentially the same affixes spiraling up with slightly better numbers, and your supposed solution to that problem is to put heads on both sides of the coin so it can no longer flip incorrectly. The answer isn't to limit the options in a binary pass/fail situation, but to increase the options so there are multiple different ways to pass. More viable builds, using a wider variety of different itemizations... and, as a result, less of a chance of getting any particular item you need, while a better chance of still getting a great item which someone needs. Free your mind from a monotone ladder of gear progression and embrace a plan for increased diversity... if Path of Exile has a problem, it's not too much RNG, but not enough meaningful RNG, meaning: a systematic conformity to a singular pattern of gear and Map evaluation.


Bored are we ?

Lumping anyone and everyone with a different view into the want it now crowd. lol
Last edited by Temper#7820 on May 10, 2014, 1:16:13 PM
"
Temper wrote:
Bored are we ?


I think i can answer this, no he is not, he was responding to a question i asked him in another thread, but felt it more appropriate for GD.

However nice the post, it did not capture what i was asking him.

Sad really, was looking forward to reading an answer when i clicked the link.

Peace,

-Boem-
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
"
GeorgAnatoly wrote:
"
JIIX wrote:
RNG is neither good or bad, it's a blunt tool with the sole purpose of giving a value that can't be predicted.


This.

To say rng is either good or bad is to miss the point about it entirely. It is simply a means to an end. Either you like it being used to reach that end in principle or you don't in which case ARPG's in general aren't the genre for you which itself is neither good nor bad but simply a preference you have.


I think it's pretty clear at this point, that we aren't talking about the 'ol "black box of code" rolling numbers.

I could give you a lengthy lecture on what is a Pseudo-Random Numbers Generator - Wikipedia links, articles and everything - but we aren't talking about it.

when I say "RNG" in Path Of Exile, I'm talking about GGG's design and actual use of that "black box".
what the numeric outcomes actually determine? what are their roles in the game? and how they are restricted or manipulated to allow the player a sense of progression, choice and a feeling that skill and actions matter?

that's what I think Charan's post was about, if I understood it correctly.

and the answers to the above questions are: everything, everything, and not at all.
Alva: I'm sweating like a hog in heat
Shadow: That was fun
"
johnKeys wrote:
"
GeorgAnatoly wrote:
"
JIIX wrote:
RNG is neither good or bad, it's a blunt tool with the sole purpose of giving a value that can't be predicted.


This.

To say rng is either good or bad is to miss the point about it entirely. It is simply a means to an end. Either you like it being used to reach that end in principle or you don't in which case ARPG's in general aren't the genre for you which itself is neither good nor bad but simply a preference you have.


I think it's pretty clear at this point, that we aren't talking about the 'ol "black box of code" rolling numbers.

I could give you a lengthy lecture on what is a Pseudo-Random Numbers Generator - Wikipedia links, articles and everything - but we aren't talking about it.

when I say "RNG" in Path Of Exile, I'm talking about GGG's design and actual use of that "black box".
what the numeric outcomes actually determine? what are their roles in the game? and how they are restricted or manipulated to allow the player a sense of progression, choice and a feeling that skill and actions matter?

that's what I think Charan's post was about, if I understood it correctly.

and the answers to the above questions are: everything, everything, and not at all.


No, what you're talking about is your personal experience with it and whether or not you feel like you get the shaft too often. Which is why sir scrotes brought up someone comparing themselves to HvC at all. You're talking about rng in a relative sense, I was talking about in an absolute sense. Maybe you should think for yourself why you felt the need to qualify your argument to include rng in a relative sense because even as a dedicated SF player I feel no need to as I enjoy the game perfectly fine with the rng the way it is.
"
GeorgAnatoly wrote:

No, what you're talking about is your personal experience with it and whether or not you feel like you get the shaft too often. Which is why sir scrotes brought up someone comparing themselves to HvC at all. You're talking about rng in a relative sense, I was talking about in an absolute sense. Maybe you should think for yourself why you felt the need to qualify your argument to include rng in a relative sense because even as a dedicated SF player I feel no need to as I enjoy the game perfectly fine with the rng the way it is.


while it's true that my posts come from (bitter) personal experience with RNG, I want to ask you a question:

do you feel like your progress in game is a function of your playing skills? is it possible to do something gameplay-based (not trade/RMT/bro-giveways) to improve a current -bad- situation? how about feel like you genuinely earned a current -good- one?

that's RNG in the Path Of Exile sense, and no - that's not relative. it's absolute.
it's by design.
Alva: I'm sweating like a hog in heat
Shadow: That was fun
"
Mephasm wrote:
Never heard of Borderlands or Dark Souls?
Of course I have, and I'm not knocking them. However, while I'm unsure exactly how to genre them (or DS2), pretty sure they're not in the same category as Diablo and PoE.
"
Mephasm wrote:
The lack of variety is due to a common theme found in many newer ARPGs, the theme is "MOAR DIFFICULTY!" or as some may call it power creep, but in PoE's case its a bit worse. Variety is limited because everything MUST be optimized in order to progress later in the game, this goes double if you lack super good gear.

Sure, you can play whatever hairbrained combo of skills/passives you want, but you had better have really amazing gear, or it won't be fun. I think that is where you fail to see why people don't play random off the wall builds, its not much fun if it takes 10 years to kill an enemy with a less than optimized skill. Sure, you can probably beat Merciless with almost any build, if your gear is good enough, and after much ordeal, but what is the point? Your done, there's absolutely zero point trying to do maps with a build like that.
First off, I'm not saying "bad" builds shouldn't exist. Actually, I'm emphatically saying they should, and sometimes they can be ridiculously cool while they're viable, even if they do eventually peter out; it's okay to be "done" and go back to rerolling, as long as you had fun playing. Nor am I saying all builds should have the same gear requirements; some should expect a fatter wallet and some trading to work, others shouldn't.

Second, although I believe that alcohol lowers inhibitions, I don't necessarily conclude that a night of knocking back beers will end in jail for assault and indecent exposure. By which I mean: I don't believe increasing difficulty necessarily leads to culling viable builds due to the difficulty transition, nor that it necessarily leads to power creep. I'm not blind to the problem, and I'll agree to a general trend in that direction, but I believe the effect can be mitigated through smart game design choices.

And by "smart game design choices," I mean embracing the maximum possible amount of build variety... which, in turn, means more RNG. And also clever unique design.
"
Mephasm wrote:
Perhaps you are implying that there are amazing builds out there that we just don't know about? I'm sure there are, will you, or I, or 99.999% of the player base discover that build first, and thus be able to claim that as an original build that no one has copied? No.
By the same logic, six-linking your chest is impossible.

Every build was an original build at some point in its life cycle. I imagine you're free to speculate any nonzero probability, no matter how infinitesimally small... but a definitive "no" is the only obviously wrong answer.
"
Mephasm wrote:
RNG is all fine and dandy, but there needs to be some amount of player control over it otherwise it feels like you are just wasting your time. Crafting adds some control, though it is RNG itself, but it at least lets you choose the base item you want, however, its much more effecient to just trade orbs for what you want, making crafting pretty much pointless, except to the super rich players.

A good example of how RNG should work is D2's loot tables. If you wanted X item, then Y boss had the best chance of dropping it, so the player can focus their efforts and this gives them a purpose, instead of just running around killing monsters and praying for a good drop.
The proper form of control is usually not crafting, because, when compared to slaying monsters, crafting is not as directly linked to the core ARPG activity of slaying monsters. I actually think it's a good thing that PoE has a much stronger gambling focus than a conventional crafting focus.

That said, I'm fully behind loot tables. I mean, I'm a supporter of Chromatic socket color bias, so I'd probably feel hypocritical if I didn't.
"
GeorgAnatoly wrote:
"
JIIX wrote:
RNG is neither good or bad, it's a blunt tool with the sole purpose of giving a value that can't be predicted.
This.

To say rng is either good or bad is to miss the point about it entirely. It is simply a means to an end.
...except that end is increased replayability, putting the player in diverse situations, and overall fun. Okay, yeah, means to an end, but best known means to a desired end equals good.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on May 10, 2014, 3:37:28 PM

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