Loot game not being a loot game problem

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

i largely agree with the main points here.




i think its a rly difficult situation. when we talk about loot like this its important to acknowledge that loot is a comparative thing. there is how good is this loot i just got compared to my other loot and then how good is my loot compared to what i need to beat the content im facing. when u look at how good the loot needs to be in order to defeat the content the game is asking you to beat then we have to ask how hard is the game supposed to feel? are we supposed to struggle through the hard encounters or are we supposed to face roll them? builds then factor into this because if someone has a bad build that could manage ok against content IF it has op items, should that person expect to get those items consistently?




with current loot vs previous loot, if i get to maps in trash levelling gear then run a bunch of maps, if i find 1 pair of rare gloves in those maps its probably the best gloves ive got, its an upgrade, thats technically great loot. i found an item that made my character more powerful, thats a thing. if i run those same maps and find 100 pairs of rare gloves, 1 is the upgrade, the other 99 are vendor trash. so how weve gone from 100% of my loot was good to 99% of my loot was trash. but you still got the same upgrade... unless picking up and identifying 100 pairs of gloves is just super tedious, you dont loot them.


when people run content, see what drops and then say well its all trash, its hard to get away from the idea that the actual problem is that too much loot drops. the more you drop loot, the higher standard there is for loot, the less likely that loot is to be useful. but players are saying rewards suck, well what are they supposed to do? drop more items? if they drop more items then the power of the best of those items goes up, but theres an intended state of game balance so by making us all more powerful the content necessarily is made more powerful and we dont gain anything in actual performance terms. but now instead of identifying 1 item we identify 100, or probably not because that makes the game feel terrible and makes us FEEL like our loot is shit, so we stop even identifying it most of the time, and now how do you make a player feel rewarded when they are so fat and bloated that they already filter out 90% of the rewards you give them?





crafting then becomes a problem where almost all the really good items are crafted from scratch. so now you are looking to loot materials, not rare items at all. so players get loot, and its powerful loot, but its not actually an item its orbs which doesnt feel quite the same. its not rly how u picture a looting game, u think of looting the actual item.

again, the more materials drop the lower the chances of them doing something good have to be to maintain the intended difficulty so dropping more materials doesnt actually help, it just makes the game feel bad because were looting 50 little gumballs per map.





so dropping more items doesnt rly solve anything, its a power neutral situation because theres an intended level of difficulty that is adjusted to player power which is set by the items they have which come from the loot dropping, even crafting and trading, those items have come from the loot that has dropped in the game.

but when you drop more loot then while power neutral the other effects are you go from most loot being good loot to most loot being vendor trash loot with no feeling of reward or impact, AND the game becomes tedious with so much picking up junk.




so whats the solution? the solution is sort of drop less items and balance around it but thats actually the opposite of what most players instinctively think they want them to do. they want more loot, but theyre also running a strict item filter and theyre making videos like the one big ducks made where theyre saying we want better loot but dropping better rares does nothing for us.






better systems


i think where ggg have missed the mark big time is making crafting and looting rare items work together rather than as competing ways of getting a rare.

from what ive played of last epoch in that game you have a ton of potential to edit an existing rolled item, you have so many materials. BUT, you have a limited amount you can edit 1 item. So the game is all about finding an item that is 1/2 way there, 3/4 of the way there and then trying to get it the final stretch before you are unable to further craft on it. you dont run out of materials that much, you run out of the ability to edit this particular item any further.

that means its much more powerful to start with the item thats almost there, all the focus and potential comes from editing a fresh well rolled looted item not generating a new item from scratch using a white base. you dont just have 5000 alchs and 5000 chaos to keep spamming on 1 white base you found forever until you get the thing, or in poe more likely essences/fossils etc. it creates a gameplay loop where you get the fun of crafting, that feeling like you made the item and you have that connection with it, but the item originates from a dropped rare that you then tweaked. and you didnt get it perfect, so you go out and need to find more of those rares looking for ones with potential and you can keep crafting on them when you find them because you are really rich in materials, the pressure point in the system is finding those rares with 3 of the mods you want already on them.

so to be a crafter you need to generate a lot of rare loot through killing monsters and picking it up.



poe the crafting does not work together with looting rare items, it replaces it, the more you craft the less picking up existing rares is worth your time. this creates a really fundamental problem where once again you have a situation where players say loot isnt rewarding, which is the most basic aspect of an arpg as the op is pointing out, looter game, you kill monster you find item you can wear with stats that makes you stronger, but to fix rares being garbage we dont pick up you need to drop less of them and make crafting less powerful, then power the games expectations in terms of player power. but if you do that your entire playerbase rage quits because they think the loot sucks and the only way they can understand it getting better is to find more of it.


this becomes an almost impossible situation to fix when you then include the issue that youve let powercreep go too far and now the average player power is too high, content doesnt feel like you need to do much to beat it. the whole thing of loot feeling rewarding is that is makes you more powerful, but powerful is also comparative, if there isnt something difficult to beat then you dont need an item to beat it and feel powerful. the feeling of value in items is tied to game difficulty.

so you want to drop less rare items, and make crafting less powerful, and this makes characters less powerful but you dont actually want to lower the power of monsters because players were already too powerful compared to monsters...

This is a really good point. We getting nerf after nerf and monsters buff after buff.
GGG doesnt seem to notice that the gap between player power at normal levels and normal or okay gear is way off with the power of monsters.
How to progress if you cant kill the monsters? Playing Heist like everyone else does just for profit? Hell no, i want to do whats fun to me..

the solution to most of this is, unfortunately, to do the very things that players think is the opposite of what needs done. its sort of what they have done in a lot of ways. i dont think the implementation was the best, i dont think the communication of why and how was good, but i also dont think we as a community even want to understand and accept the reality of how all the systems interact so even if they told us really well, so many would reject the information.

its so impossible to fix because the game has slipped so far from where it should be and all out expectations, even mine, have become very warped and unhealthy.








the crafting system rly needs a look at tho, our ability to generate rares rather than edit them needs serious consideration and tied into this is the need to roll stupid shit like maps and the way ideas/mechanics like that have become the dev teams darlings that they will point blank refused to consider changing but really do they actually bring anything other than time wasting and some cheesy trash gotcha deaths when ziz forgets to check for reflect and instantly dies....?

rly? is that what passes for actual gameplay? what a total joke. but we need endless alchs and chaos to roll maps and that has a devastating impact on the situation with rare loot because now its a thing where were not stuck with this system because the players have blinkers on, now its a situation where the devs have blinkers on.



its all so frustrating to sit here and look at tbh.