GDC Talk - "Cursed Problems in Game Design"

So. An interesting talk from GDC that’s directly applicable to Path of Exile is this one, entitled ‘Cursed Problems in Game Design’.

GDC Talk

The idea is that there are problems which are hard – i.e. they take careful work or a shitload of effort to solve – and there are problems which are cursed – an unresolvable conflict between two fundamentally opposed promises the game is attempting to make to the player. The former are just design issues, but the latter CANNOT be “solved”. In order to resolve a Cursed Problem, you need to sacrifice at least part of one of the opposed ideals you’re attempting to live up to.

I find this interesting because one of the examples the speaker brings up as an explicit idea of a “Cursed Problem” is “Looter games with efficient trading”, calling out Diablo 3’s auction house in specific. He points out that one of the fundamental promises of a looty game is that loot is exciting – finding an awesome new item is super freaking cool, it’s a burst of dopamine that makes your day or possibly your entire week, depending on how cool the item is. Any particularly awesome new item opens up entire avenues of gameplay you may not have had before.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut….

In a game with efficient trade, any item is only worth whatever you can get for it at marketplace. As the speaker puts it, “monsters basically just drop gold, and that’s not exciting.” Very rarely in Path of Exile is a drop exciting because of what it can do for you – it’s ‘exciting’ because it can sell for a lot and maybe let you buy something you actually want, instead.

The impulse towards an efficient, player-driven marketplace and the impulse towards exciting loot are mutually opposed an antagonistic. They cannot coexist, and thus are a Cursed Problem.

The speaker outlines why these problems cannot be solved, but only sidestepped or appeased, and talks about four methods to do so. One of them is Gating, by which an undesirable behavior is made more difficult or prohibitive to do in order to lessen instances of the behavior and steer players more towards desirable behaviors.

Which…frankly, sounds an awful lot like current Path of Exile, doesn’t it?

People know my stance on The Trade Issue, and I’m not really trying to reignite that debate here (though I know I’m going to and am resigned to it). More, I’m hoping that people will watch this video and realize that some game design problems really are rock-and-a-hard-place Cursed Problems – there is no good solution, anything you do requires sacrifice, and making the wrong sacrifice can not only make your life harder, it can scupper your game.

Grinding Gear’s caught squarely on the horns of this particular Cursed Problem – they cannot eliminate trade entirely the way Diablo did, but they cannot just “solve” the problem either as any ‘solution’ irrevocably destroys something else they’re trying to do. Framed this way, some of what they’ve tried to do to get off these particular horns is interesting.

Suddenly the over-proliferation of “crafting” makes a lot more sneaking sense, given that creating an amazing item is every bit as rewarding from a psychological standpoint as finding one, but it’s much more difficult to do and furthermore tends to be a self-controlling problem. Nobody tries to craft items they don’t want, whereas getting drops you don’t care about/need is a constant problem of these types of games. Really excellent crafting results tend to stay with the player who created them, which keeps them off the market and decreases the Efficient Trading, “everything is just gold” issue. Still means drops suck, but the logic is becoming clearer.

I dunno. Just seemed like something interesting to throw up in here for ten minutes in between threads bitching about whatever this cesspool is most upset about today.

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The speaker outlines why these problems cannot be solved, but only sidestepped or appeased, and talks about four methods to do so. One of them is Gating, by which an undesirable behavior is made more difficult or prohibitive to do in order to lessen instances of the behavior and steer players more towards desirable behaviors.

Which…frankly, sounds an awful lot like current Path of Exile, doesn’t it?

no not really, it sounds like WoW and Final Fantasy 14 and any other MMO with a very locked down economy that forces you to log in to do daily quests or raids to get the gear score you want, conveniently in time for the next expansion to come out to repeat the cycle when they add +100 to the maximum item level

Most of us who work outside gaming just call this cursed problem a trade-off.

They are easy to resolve as long as only one person matters, since that person will have, well, personal preferences as to what is more important.

But there are always many people with different preferences, and so there is that old saw, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but...

Oh wait, ... ::scratches head::

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1453R wrote:

they cannot eliminate trade entirely the way Diablo did, but they cannot just “solve” the problem either

Well, they could.

On the side of no trade, you could have a way to turn in the uniques you get for the uniques you want, with rarity accounted for. You can already swap between currency at vendors, so thats not an issue. Would it be straightforward? No. Is it possible, yes.

On the AH side, this already exists its just clunky, unpleasant, and stupid. So just remove that part of it. Yes, more people would trade, but again trade already exists. A crappy, poorly made AH already is there, it just sucks to use.

Aaaah, a 1453R thread. Always a joy to read, always a solid though process behind.

The balance between trading and looting/drops will always be "cursed". It is - and will always be - close to unsolvable.

Most players (with ~46 chromosomes and between 50 and 200 IQ) know this. What separates players, is the amount of fucks given. Some players care a lot about loot, and long for that awesome feeling of finding that superb upgrade for your character, while others get as much - or even more - satisfaction from buying said item. The fact that you can trade, also gives value to those drops that do not fit your character.

Now, in PoE, we have this compromise, with a rather clunky, limited trading system that, frankly speaking, was never meant to be as "efficient" as it is today. Pretty far from, actually. Some players tend to forget/ignore this while debating this topic. They also seem to forget/ignore that this "clunky, limiting" trading system actually lets you hold on to that hope of a nice, good drop.

This will always be a "scale". You can't have 100% of both, while at the same time have a progression-based (and difficult?) game. Is the "scale" perfect in PoE? Far from. But I've yet to experience any other ARPG Hack'n Slash game doing it better.

I would love to see even more restrictions to trade, while improving loot. Others might want more efficient and open trading, and a little "less" loot. We as players can whine and debate, while GGG have to make PoE appeal to all types of players. And no, SSF isn't the answer to everyone.

i hope poe never gets wow-like timegates


sit down for an 8 hour session but done with everything in 2 hours, yikes.

timegates are the bane of video games, the result of laziness ; casuals love that stuff though.

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Phrazz wrote:

Now, in PoE, we have this compromise, with a rather clunky, limited trading system that, frankly speaking, was never meant to be as "efficient" as it is today.

Its funny to me that it exists at all, or that they made it exist with the intention that it be even worse.

Was it designed so friends/guild mates who found something cool could trade?

Or that it would be trade chat driven? Even the people who hate the AH idea seem to dislike spamming trade chat even more.

Whats the thought process there? Honest question - the manifesto just says "we knew we would need trade".

I wonder in what capacity they expect it to work.

@Phrazz/Lensman

I'm aware that it's not an earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting revelation. That said, viewing old problems through new lenses (eh? Ehhh?) sometimes reveals new insights, and I figured it was a worthwhile watch either way. Couching the problem in terms of promises and expectations opens up new ways of thinking about it, or at least it did to me.

I think this particular devil's fork is twisted even harder in Path of Exile's case, given how incredibly stream-driven the game has become. Streamers are lauded and celebrated, held up as champions and paragons of the community - and I mean by Grinding Gear, not necessarily the community itself. GGG does interviews, spotlights, and many other bits showcasing its streaming community and bending traffic and players towards those streamers, but this comes at the cost of holding those people up as expectations of "The Norm" in Path of Exile.

This is a problem when a typical streamer can build three or four builds from 1 to 95 in the space of a week.

The pace is brutal, unrelenting, and unsustainable for anyone else; people who want to try out all the coolio-awesome things the streamers are doing can't keep up. 'Bad trade' only slows them down more and gets them even more riled up, when they're potentially already frustrated by not having the time to do everything they'd like to do. Loooong gone are the days of playing one or two builds a league and allowing yourself the time to savor them and build them up, unless you deliberately choose to play that way despite the rest of the game telling you it's Bad For You(C).

Ties back into other sections of the talk, where a desire for mastery conflicts with a desire for 'Winning', and a desire for expression conflicts with a desire to attain goals. path of Exile runs into a lot of these landmines, and their relentless focus on "MOAR LEAGUES FASTER LEAGUES MOARFASTER FASTERMOAR" makes it even more difficult.

Such is the life of a mature ARPG, I imagine. Heh, come to think of it, the talk touched on that, too. Man, no wonder it resonated so hard with this game's issues to me. They've got a thousand plates in the air, and spinning any one of them almost inevitably leads to knocking half a dozen others over.

WoW is not a looter. Loot isn't the driving force of the game. One-upping your neighbor is.

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