"Crafting" Possible Solution: Determinism VS RNG
|
I did not play POE1 or the Diablo games, so I feel it leaves me in a better place to "Objectively" evaluate POE2. Keep that in mind if you attempt to respond with, "These other 'old' games did it this way." I don't care. 'Old' systems do a lot wrong and fresh takes need to be presented to bring one up to date with 'modern' times.
I have been critical of POE2 while at the same time attempting to give it grace as it's still early access. After over 300 hours of playtime and counting, I've reached the conclusion if they fixed ONE thing, that would solve the bulk of my complaints. Yes, it's crafting. Whenever I find myself up against a wall in defeating something, my first thought is "gear upgrade," so I automatically turn to "crafting" to "update" my gear. That inevitably leads to frustration and doesn't solve anything, and don't tell me, "You need to pick up the gear that drops." BS, I pick up EVERYTHING that's relevant to me, and it solves nothing. Also, increasing the loot drop rates will also solve nothing cause I'm already leaving much garbage on the ground, ie, loot filters. Also, I'm visiting the vendors frequently. NOT helpful. "Crafting" has two problems. 1: The crafting resources are also labeled "currency" in the game and are used in a barter-type system. This is bad, terrible, awful. "Currency" is a store of a person's labor that they can use to purchase things one needs. It's a more refined barter system. In a Barter system, your labor is more obvious. You raise a chicken, then bring that chicken and all the labor you put into it to another and ask to trade it to them for something they put their labor into. The 'currency' refines the process and stores the labor for future use. Flood the market with more currency devalues your currency and removing currency from the market increases the value of your currency. This is a rough explanation but good enough for here. A 'currency" should only have '1' purpose and that is as a store of labor. Some of the best player-driven economies recognize this and work to create, in essence, a real economy that follows all the real-world rules but in the virtual. POE2 drops the ball here and gives it a second purpose as a 'crafting' resource. This leaves you up against a wall. Crafters NEED this to craft the gear they want, but if you increase the drop rate to achieve this, you flood your 'market' with your currency and devalue it. If you don't, crafters are left SOL and lacking what they need. Don't talk to me about "just buy what you need off the market." What about those who play solo self-found? ISSUE 2: Crafting is nothing but gambling. yup, I said it and it's true. You drop a coin in a machine and hope for the best. If it hits what you need, you walk over to another machine, drop another coin into it, and hope for the best again. Rinse and repeat. For one, it's not fun and for two ... really? Gambling? The only real way to win at gambling is ...... well you don't really. The house always wins but you can attempt to brute force your way to success. walk up to a machine with enough coins to overcome the RNG. They can't do that here cause increasing the drop rate of the "coin" devalues the currency. NOT increasing the drop rate of the coin, crafters are hosed. SOLUTION 1: STOP USING YOUR CURRENCY AS A CRAFTING RESOURCE!!! This won't solve EVERYTHING, but it opens up options of things you can do without destroying another system, like increasing the drop rate of the resource. SOLUTION 2: CREATE A SECTION ON THE PASSIVE POINTS TREE THAT'S FOR CRAFTING Mind you, this is a rough idea and could be refined. Without any points into that passive's tree, you are left with ALL RNG. Drop one point into it, and when you drop a coin in the machine, you get a pop-up giving you a choice of two stats you can choose from specific to the coin you are using (prefix, suffix, etc.). Another point into the 'crafting tree' section, and the pop-up gives you 3 choices, etc etc. Up to the point where maybe you will be able to select from a list of a little over half the stats for the specific coin. The more points you put into the tree, the less impact RNG has and the more Determinism you have. If you've noticed, I stopped short of giving you the option to drop enough points into the crafting tree sections, which would give you a drop-down of ALL stats available for the coin that you can select. I'm not opposed to such a move exactly, and frankly, it would be a choice you have to make, drop points into the crafting or into strength or armor or regen, etc etc, but I was looking for a balance between those like myself who prefer "FULL DETERMINISM" and those who like RNG. Realistically, even an excellent crafter would make mistakes, and leaving some RNG gives that illusion. Like I said, it's a rough idea but ANYTHING that introduces some level of determinism into the game is a win cause gambling suck!! Leave your feedback below, maybe idea's on ways to refine the system. Thanks for reading this far. P.S. who said the warrior is bad! My totem warrior is kicking butt Last bumped on Jan 14, 2025, 12:44:17 PM
|
|
|
Bad take. There's plenty of ways to determine your crafting in poe1 and some of them are already in poe2. They will come with the other leagues before the release. What you have now is an incomplete system.
The market is broken at the moment, they will fix it later. But the rarer the currency is on the market usually means it's also the hardest to find. Everything will balance itself on release. I suggest you check how they did it on poe1 cause that's exactly what it will look like. You can get a PHD at how deterministic crafting can be. Same for the market, the prices are pretty fair and have good representation of the state of the game. |
|
" I stopped reading here. This is one the best things about PoE trading system - all currencies have a natural sink, so it massively counters inflation. |
|
" and yet, people are even now complaining about "inflation" in the market. Hell, at the recent Q and A GGG did with those steamers they mentioned it so... maybe " natural sinks" aren't working and maybe I'm right. Just saying. |
|
" I'm pretty sure I'm right and I doubt they plan to make enough changes by release to solve it. There would have to be a "significant" number of changes, and the "current" system would have to be HIGHLY incomplete. I've seen this time and again. Sounds like a lot of copium People are desperate to hang on to an "old" thing rather than change to a modern take. I've seen it destroy early-access games before. I actually spent 600 dollars on a crowd-funded game that I thought had potential but everyone there who had played the "prior game" said it needed to be this way, we did it this way over there blah blah blah, and I'm like, your wrong and if you don't recognize the error, this game will crash and burn.... guess what? game crashed and burned.... so maybe the "old way" isn't the "right way". |
|
" there will ever be inflation no matter what you do, due to the fact that currency gets more in the market over time. the problem is, where poe1 has multiple different sinks(mapmods, crafting bench, usage of currency on crafting general) in poe2 are way less. people are divining high end gear or unique items, but exalts arent used on crafting cause crafting sucks. |
|
" They brought it up for divines mainly as it currently doesn't have as many sinks as it should. You would know this if you played PoE1 and understand it. Inflation was due to some major game breaking if not one of the most economic damaging bugs ever in PoE. Which it seems you're not even taking into consideration. |
|
" Crafting doesn't suck. You suck. If you understand potential of the item you can get much bigger return on using exalts. You can also lose, but that's always been the nature of PoE crafting. It just became way too powerful in PoE1 over time due to feature creep and bloat. |
|
