Statistical customisation invites tinkering, and the passive tree does not allow it

Allow me to differentiate between gameplay customisation and statistical customisation.

Gameplay: enables different experiences and new tactics. You want to try it all.

- Skill gems
- The D2 skill tree
- Different champions in a MOBA
- Different guns in a shooter
- Keystones


Statistical: does not create multiple ways to play the game. Instead it just has good choices and bad choices and challenges you to find the good ones.

- D2 stat points
- Runes and masteries in LoL
- Statistical gun upgrades in a shooter
- Tuning sliders in a racing game
- The passive tree in PoE


Statistical customisation can be fun - you are tempted to tinker with it and squeeze out another 1% extra power.

But tinkering by definition means trying various options and oscillating towards an optimal solution.

If the game attempts to prevent you from freely tinkering with your stats, the result is 'whats-the-best-build syndrome': players have no opportunity to fiddle with the knobs and dials themselves, so they hope someone else did it for them and figured out the optimal solution.

......

This is a problem in League of Legends. While masteries are easy to change, runes cost a large amount of ingame points. The results are obvious: most players have their own personal mastery pages but everyone uses the same 'safe, good, viable' runepages as the top players. What idiot would spend 50 hours worth of points just to see whether gold bonus runes could be useful on a carry?

It is also a problem in PoE. You cannot experiment with passives because regret orbs have a very low drop rate. Trying out various options would have been fun, but alas, unless you have oceans of free time you cannot. So you end up looking for the 'safe' build, and once build guides become available you will go straight for the commonly accepted best build.

......

The ability to tinker and respec is not as important as far as gameplay customisation is concerned. If the game is at least halfway balanced, you can just pick the build you like to play and won't feel the need to respec.

But a set of minor statistical bonuses that clearly invites experimentation should actually allow experimentation and not punish you with a number of regret orbs whenever you decide to fiddle with it.

I'm hoping it's because the game is still in beta, and GGG are tinkering themselves still, but I find there are a lot of roadblocks to fun and experimentation in game currently.

It seems like everything in PoE is binary. The answer is always, start over, or grind for god know how long for whatever drop, only to ruin your gear when trying to improve it.

For example, nothing about gear matters to me in whether I pick it up or not. Level, stats, I don't care. All I want is a piece of gear that has the correct slots to let me augment my ability in the way I want. It never drops, the Orbs barely drop, and when they do, without a doubt, I'll just ruin the piece of gear and end up starting over with a scour (if they dropped) or..start over hoping for a drop.

This design extends to the skill tree. The game difficulty changes pretty radically, far faster than the points you earn to "shore up" a sudden weakness that wasn't there last map or act. Answer? Yep, start over, or hope you have enough regret orbs in your stash, or play ineffectively while grinding for regret orbs. I suppose I should feel lucky the regret orbs actually work, instead of a huge chance some random point changes instead!

I definitely agree with your point on the "best/safe build", players will see that changing is a hassle, starting over is a bitch, so they'll just take their build from the FOTM to avoid it all.

It's all very frustrating to me personally, but as I said, it's beta, so no biggie. A few months can be a lifetime of fixes for a game.

A case can be made in the other direction. If it's free to experiment on the grid people will find the optimal solution fast, after which everyone re-specs to it.

Everyone wants to respec to the optimal solution anyway. The difference is they have to delete their character and reroll.

The other difference is that it is nearly impossible to experiment yourself when respecs are this costly.

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BrotherLaz wrote:

Everyone wants to respec to the optimal solution anyway.

Everyone? No, even for me not being representative.

There is more than one possible, 'perfect' solution to build a char, and the way it would be perfect at the end of such a route, may be a much harder way than another; or even nearly unviable in some situations while building up.
As long as a build with, say, 95% perfection, is viable at all for endgame (and only takes a bit more care or time to kill and survive) everything shoud be considered as fine.
(beside swanking/bragging...) And thats the way a game should be balanced for (maybe except the very last endgame)

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Die_Scream wrote:

It seems like everything in PoE is binary.

The binary is a basic, simple rule covering all action games: Kill or be killed.

As long as you belong to the right side of this rule, whats the problem at all? Even if you encounter some situations which demand a huge effort to survive (called and demanded as "challenge"), you may not leave the right path.

The game doesn't punish or force you to do anything.

You can re-roll (just like players did for a decade in D2) or use regret orbs if you change your mind.

*Sairony makes an excellent point.

Anyways, this topic has been beaten to death, just like the "we want gold!" threads.

GGG is certainly aware of the fact that many people want respecs (Chris says as much in the beta manifesto discussion) however they also say that full respects aren't going to happen. So, their isn't much of a point discussing it.

"It's possible that changes will be made to the respec system. We've discussed many options which all have their advantages and disadvantages. Depending on what mechanical changes we make to the tree, some or none of these respec modifications may be needed. Regardless of what respec policy we settle on though, we want to make sure that players can't respec large amounts of their character trivially and are encouraged to start a new character if they want an entirely different build."

Did the league of legends comparisons really justify yet another "we want free respecs" thread (while GGG have clearly stated they want people to reroll for major build changes and it's not gonna change)?

You're not actually adding anything to the argument that hasn't been said before by saying things like "statistical customisation".

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Wittgenstein wrote:

]we want to make sure that players can't respec large amounts of their character trivially and are encouraged to start a new character if they want an entirely different build."

A subpar build that is inefficient at basic gameplay is not something trivial, and is not something anyone should be punished for. If I put time and effort into the game, I damn well better get something back, because if you tell me "Oops, those 40 hours you spent were all for nothing!" I'm going to either assume any amount of time I spend is worthless and find something better to do with my time, or I'm going to look up a build that actually works so I don't have to waste any more time figuring things out myself.

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kidshazam wrote:

those 40 hours you spent were all for nothing

for the very last time - those 40 hours spent should (have) be(en) worth 40 hours of enjoyment, if not: you're doing something completely wrong here (or with the game).