RNG is good.

I highly doubt anybody has a problem with RNG, else they wouldn't be anywhere near an ARPG. It's when RNG is thrown into everything to provide a sense of difficulty, when it's not difficult it's just random which offers no skill involvement or anything of that sort. I just find it highly annoying and completely pointless to have RNG in your skill set up, how lucky you are with this random number generator dictates what skills you can use, how many you can use etc etc.. You could play HC level 1-90, be the best at the game, whatever, but if you don't have luck you COULD be stuck with mediocre skills and whatnot, this ruins it for me.. Being pigeon holed into certain choices because RNG is a major factor.

RNG is great, it is what makes awesome happen in aRPGs.


The problem with PoE, is that all the layers upon layers of RNG are, by design, circumvented.
Path of least resistance, leaving the situation where for those who play the designed way, the RNG is all but removed. For those who would rather not remove the RNG, it is brutal beyond belief.

"

TheAnuhart wrote:

RNG is great, it is what makes awesome happen in aRPGs.

The problem with PoE, is that all the layers upon layers of RNG are, by design, circumvented.
Path of least resistance, leaving the situation where for those who play the designed way, the RNG is all but removed. For those who would rather not remove the RNG, it is brutal beyond belief.

Ah, the subtle dig at trading.

And I'll have to give you the point: trading does circumvent RNG. Essentially, instead of having an archer and a caster, you can just have the caster and still get decent value out of any bows you happen to find; in other words, it's like rerolling — which is also a RNG circumvention method — but without actually needing to reroll. Which, by the way, can be viewed as either a blessing or a curse; I think a lot of players who complain about trading would improve their quality of life if they actually gave rerolling a chance. But if you give it a try, and you really do consider rerolling to fall in the curse category: yep, it's a benefit, because it's time saved from doing something you wouldn't enjoy.

The other factor is who trading circumvents RNG for. In order to trade for an item, it needs to be put on the market, which means two things: that the item actually exists, and that it's not in use by anyone at the moment. Generally speaking, this means those at the forefront of progression have their RNG bypassed less than those who are behind; this bypass allows those who are behind to catch up, and once caught up trading becomes less of a bypass and more of a factor. It's a rather egalitarian system, but a small and misguided group of players is bound and determined to paint it as precisely the opposite, focusing on a small number of abuse cases (themselves caused by naive traders who allow themselves to get "victimized") and ignoring the effect of the system as a whole.

It is said egalitarianism which motivates my acceptance of trading; I'm not particularly keen to buck against it. I think it's a great help to players who have less time and thus want a more casual experience, while keeping things as uncasual as possible for those with the higher time commitment (time commitment and casualness are not inherently linked, but this mechanic creates a link). That said, this thread is about how RNG is awesome, and as I said earlier, trading does circumvent RNG... so there are drawbacks. Those who trade heavily might find themselves enjoying the game more if they dial back their own trading, and any time you have a situation like that, it's actually not insane to wonder if such a mechanic should exist in the first place. I think the hand-me-down egalitarianism makes up for it, but I can see room for differing views.

The problem with this post is that it tries to sum up a multitude of aspects as though they are the same, which means whatever is said applies only to a portion of it, and is wrong for the rest, making this post just talk.

It would be more interesting to explore when rng is good, and when rng is bad.

And i can tell you why people want what they see others have; they only act according to the knowledge that they have, in other words, they do not know/understand better (they have lesser freedom of thought).

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johnKeys wrote:

there's no "enjoying the journey" when the destination doesn't fucking exist, and the carrot on the stick in front of you can just randomly drop in your mouth or move further away, no matter what you do.
and then GGG add insult to injury by balancing stuff under the assumption you already have the carrot, so being a good Donkey that runs fast doesn't even fucking matter.

LOL, this is one of the funniest things ive read here xD

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

You've trivialized this thread by oversimplifying PoE's use of RNG, flattening it into a single-minded rallying cry, with some in favor and many against. It's not a hard trick to pull off, since most players have already been misled into assuming that "RNG is RNG". But as I'm sure GGG knows, and you probably do as well, random number generators are not just one-dimensional crap-shoots, characterized by a single number that dictates your odds of success. They also exhibit predictable patterns of results over time, conforming to a normal distribution with a standard deviation, or variance, that is just as significant as the RNG's mean probability.

What this second dimension of variance determines is how extreme an RNG's range of deviation will vary from its average likelihood of success. A low variance produces results that cluster closely around the average. For example, an RNG process that produced a successful roll over a range from once every 80 rolls to once every 120 rolls, would have an average success rate of once in 100 rolls with a low range of variance. If it instead had a range of once every 50 rolls to once every 150 rolls, it would have the same average success rate at a higher range of variance.

When players complain about how many hundreds of orbs they wasted on a fruitless attempt to craft an item, they are not complaining about crafting's average odds of success, they are complaining about its extremely high range of variance. In PoE we don't even know the odds, since GGG has refused to release the numbers. What we do know, however, is that the range of variance in PoE's RNG is effectively unlimited, in that there is no cummulative improvement in your odds of success no matter how many rolls you've made.

This is really the crux of the RNG issue, and it's not a black or white choice, there is a broad gray area that GGG has refused to acknowledge. While players understand that there is a randomized aspect of the game, they also want to have the sense that they can work diligently toward long-term goals and look forward to earning rewards from their perseverance. This would be the case if the range of variance in each RNG-based process was gradually reduced over many cumulative attempts, by some percentage that GGG tuned to their judgment.

But in PoE's case, the cumulative results of players' crafting efforts is zero. No matter how many attempts you make, your odds of success will never improve. With this policy, the implicit message that GGG sends its players is that your efforts are futile, it's all nothing but dumb luck, and no amount of persistence will make any difference.

IMO, that is one of the major factors that drive frustrated players to give up in disgust or resort to RMT. What's a shame is that GGG reaps no benefits from this extreme variance policy, yet refuses to implement improvements that would improve player satisfaction while maintaining current drop and success rates as they see fit.

Re: deviations (standard or otherwise)

I take umbrage at the suggestion that I'm oversimplifying or flattening out RNG, because I think it's far more appropriate as a criticism of those opposing it.

As an exercise for the reader, take the standard deviation of the results of this chart from the Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide (3.5). d% means "roll a 100-sided die." The funny thing is, although many of you will find this task ridiculously impossible, some people still manage to do it.

Your average person on these forums, who isn't intimately familiar with high-level D&D mechanics, lacks the means to do this. To such a person, the possibilities are incomparables — mutant rats and orc warriors are like apples and oranges. However, there is a system for evaluating the difficulty of a challenge, known in D&D as Challenge Rating. If you had quite a bit of free time, you could compute the CR for each possibility, weigh it according to probability, and get all those cool statistics values: mean, median, standard deviation.

Thus the core pattern is: incomparables + rubric = incomparables are suddenly comparable.

In Path of Exile, the rubric is the economy. The challenge here taking various items which seem incomparable at face value — for example, a badass rare belt and a unique chest — and converting them to fucking integers. The means: first come up with currency ratios so that all currency are essentially the same currency, then proceed to place all those items in terms of currency such that all gear is essentially currency.

And I believe my opening post did a decent job of communicating how I feel about the way the economy is currently evaluating items, and what sort of gaming satisfaction players feel when they evaluate their every drop according to such a rubric. But just in case you missed it: fuck the rubric.

This isn't to say that I'm against rubrics. I understand that each player needs some frame of reference for evaluating what gear they wear and which gear they don't; it doesn't necessarily need to be overly complex, just enough to answer the binary of "do I wear this?" This might seem contradictory, but the key here is the plural: rubrics, not The Rubric. Economies, not The Economy. Individual standard deviations, not a universal Standard Deviation.

How to do this? Also pretty clear from the opening post: more variety, more diversity, better balance, rather than trying to better shove the playerbase into the same copycat builds. Which means: increasing the variance of which economy they fall into in the first place.

How to do this? Two routes:

1. The Players. A lot of this is caused by a pro-copycatting inertia and a reluctance to innovate, as described in the OP. I want to clarify that I don't blame poe.xyz.is for this any more than I'd blame a bartender for an alcoholic's behavior; the pro-copycat rubric would exist regardless of whether xyz existed or not, they'd either go to a different bar or figure out a different way to booze. Although, on the other hand, one person's addiction to the copycat rubric isn't any skin off my nose, and actually makes my innovation cheaper.

2. The Devs. There's still a lot which can be done with build and itemization balance within the game. It's important that there is decent diversity at all tiers of efficacy: diversity in which builds are dominant, which builds are viable, etc. It would help if those who advocate innovation to the players can use more than fun as a justification, but also efficacy. And mean it.

Oh, and in terms of orb-specific standard deviations... the question there is which is most important, smoothing out the RNG in terms of fixed output (that is, 6L), or smoothing out the RNG in terms of the input (that is, per 1 Fusing). Changing the system from its current input focus to an output focus would mean different odds for the 1st Fusing as opposed to the 10th, the 100th, the 1000th. I believe the developer intent is to have each individual orb carry exact the same chance of success... which is their way of saying your gambler's fallacy is your own responsibility.

Still no answer scrotie?

Purposefully ignoring my post's or what's up? Given that you responded to others but not to my question.

Now i've taken the time to carefully reread your OP so lets get to it.

I believe nearly everyone wants and fully expects heavy RNG from an ARPG, also those claiming too much RNG, they already know RNG is good when applied correctly.

Now to the fundamental flaw of your reasoning. Similar to most PoE defensive posts you assume it's the players fault due to lack of imagination and independence. That line of thought will betray your reasoning.

More than anything, it is lack of simplicity, transparency and accessibility that limits exploration of builds and the building of community knowledge. You cannot blame people for exhibiting normal behavior, they always will statistically do that. To blame them for it leads nowhere, you cannot change them.

There are also more things that slow the exploration of the game. Less rewards will lead to less people being there to explore the content, adding to a negative spiral. Also, it is impossible to establish a library of community knowledge and write guides, as the game always changes and guides become tiresome to update. Trust me i tried with just a single guide and it constantly needed changing to reflect the changes being made, which caused me to simply stop updating it and let it rot. Do not underestimate the impact of guides being nearly impossible to maintain in PoE, it is massive. The guides that are there are overly simplistic and lack depth of information. To unlock the real power you need to know every damn thing in the game, and there is quite a lot.

The meta changes all the time, which is also why streamers who push their boundaries faster than most players will be among the first to explore the new limits. That the meta game changes paired with the complexity, lack of transparency and inaccessibility means that less people discover builds to rival the popular ones than if the game had been more accessible, simple and transparent.

You are right that it should't just be a two sided dice roll the whole time - do i hit the jackpot or not? They are doing some good things such as corrupted zones, that gives you something different to hunt. That is also why i do not think they should add corrupted zones to maps - that will make it more like "just one thing to do in game".

As it stands now, people will eventually realize that this game is about farm 100-200+ hours of the same, non-endgame content, then try your luck at linking something or maybe buy some item. It's simply not particularly satisfying, there isn't enough to keep most hooked, not enough small victories over time to keep the normal player satisfied, not enough different things to do for a change.

As an example, something as simple as getting your gems to ding frequently while leveling will keep you hooked. It is that sort of progressional feel that is lacking too soon before you start being satisfied with your gear level in terms of what is possible. Getting started on your next several hundred farming hours block for some small gain, potentially just a chance for it, gets old fast in a game focused on 4 month leagues.

I also want to point out that fun is the ultimate goal of any video game, while it may seem cliche that actually is the true top quality of any game. You play games to have a good time, in other words to have fun.

"

And RNG, you mark my words, will not only save Path of Exile

HAHAHA! Did you not see the playercount tanking hard after the beginning of these leagues? Monday a month and a half ago PoE peaked at 14k on steam. Now on a sunday it peaks at 8.7k.

Truth is people hit 75, look at how much it takes to 6L an item or buy one, look at their currency/h doing 71+ maps or split dom and go "FUCK. THIS.".

As an example take me. I started map farming with the occasional dom split run at 180 hours played on steam. I stopped at 235 hours without a single...

- lvl50+ unique
- max life + tri res rare
- any item worth over 2 chaos.

If I were to sell every item in the shop tab (oh yes, 55 hours and I have yet to make a "shop 2" tab) of my stash for a chaos I couldn't buy enough fusings to have a good chance at a 4 link.

This kills your playerbase as surely as would the addition of a pay-to-win cash shop. Only with a p2w shop this game might actually make enough money to survive past the next year.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

As an exercise for the reader, take the standard deviation of the results of this chart from the Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide (3.5). d% means "roll a 100-sided die."

chart

The funny thing is, although many of you will find this task ridiculously impossible, some people still manage to do it.

Your example is bogus, as the results do not fall in a normal distribution that has a calculable standard deviation. This is because like PoE's use of RNG, each roll of the die is completely independent and no cumulative effects build up over multiple rolls. Consequently, the likelihood of any particular outcome is simply its assigned proportion of the 100 equally possible results.

In this case, however, all you're doing is making a random choice among monster types. You're not trying repeatedly to "craft" a particular monster, you're just generating an unpredictable assortment. I don't recall anyone on these forums complaining about monster randomization in PoE, it seems like an aspect of the game that GGG have done well.

With crafting, however, there has been a constant stream of complaints from a wide range of players about PoE's extreme range of variance in RNG-derived results. People are not complaining about the average odds of success, they are complaining about streaks of bad luck that vary dramatically from that average. It is in crafting where players want to see a more normal distribution of results, with reasonable standard deviations that do not vary in such an unrestrained manner. I think GGG should engineer more restraint into crafting outcomes, not to the point of guaranteeing absolutely predictable results, but to instead reduce the range of variance cumulatively as the player makes repeated rolls to achieve a desired result.