Crafting: some measured criticism

I'm not here to just complain about crafting. There are already a thousand threads about it, and adding another one to the pile would be hardly constructive. I'm writing this thread because I realized that the approach taken for crafting in Poe2 is fundamentally flawed, and no amount of numerical buffs to loot are going to make a difference until the entire course is corrected. This is especially true for solo self found, which risks to not be a viable way to play if this issue persists.

Crafting right now is based on the infinite monkey theorem. In this mental experiment, for people who may not aware of it, a certain amount of monkeys type randomly on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, with the aim to compose the entire work of William Shakespeare. The experiment aims to show that any event which has more than 0 chance of happening will happen if infinite time is given.

Right now, crafting is basically that: players are "monkeys" rolling affixes on items randomly with the aim of producing usable equipment. There are very few (and prohibitively rare and expensive) ways to manipulate affixes, so most people will resort to random chance instead to produce at least something usable to either sell or use.

Since it's completely random what you will produce, it's much more likely you'll end up with something good for another build you're not using (since there are a lot of builds in the game and you'll likely just have one or two characters). That's why on the trade site there are a lot of items: every "monkey" rolls items and sells the ones they do not use. In this sense, trading allows players to "share" their rolls (and, inherently, the time and currency they spend to perform those rolls), making it possible for players in trade to be "unlucky" and still get the items they want.
To connect it to the infinite monkey experiment, it would be like allowing the monkeys to trade coherent paragraphs they wrote: a monkey whose aim is to write Hamlet can trade their Macbeth paragraph to then buy the pages they need.

What happens if there is a single monkey? We return to the initial theorem: in a huge amount of time they will for sure succeed in their goal. The problem in this is that people generally do not have a huge amount of time to play videogames. If they cannot exchange their results with other players, a piece of gear rolling well for another class is still a worthless piece of gear. The monkey writing Hamlet has to decide wether to start writing Macbeth from the start or just scrap that paragraph and start over.

The second issue is more fundamental: this isn't fun. When I think of the infinite monkey problem I don't imagine primates gleefully typing on a keyboard, I imagine a grey room in the middle of the void with chimpanzees bound to chair with a keyboard in front of them. I imagine the repetition and meaninglessness of their goal. The entire thought experiment has that goal in the end: if random chance can write Shakespeare, how much is Shakespeare worth? How much are we worth?

The answer is, it doesn't matter. Infinite time doesn't exist, and if I was given the goal of randomly type something in a game, I would play another game. It's not entertaining, it cannot be entertaining and putting flashy lights and cool exploding orbs will not make it entertaining for anyone but gambling addicts.

TL;dr: non-deterministic crafting is terrible, gacha-tier design and it needs to be rethought completely.

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Sharknightling#5449 wrote:

non-deterministic crafting is terrible, gacha-tier design and it needs to be rethought completely.

it's almost as if they designed a gacha game but didn't put in the real-money transactions to get the goodies.

you're right that increasing currency is not solution. let's assume we both speak of SSF, because trade in this game - as it stands - is like skipping 95% of the grind for the cost of a few exalts. I didn't pay for a game to play 5% of it, so I will be playing SSF.

increasing currency is not an effective plan.. because the RNG game is not a fun one. deterministic is the key for sure, in some shape of form.

I can only ever think of D2 which to me got it right, especially with runewords. the runes were incredibly hard to come by, but you knew which ones you needed to get the item you want. so it was a matter of collecting loot to eventually acquire the runes you needed. you had a goal and every sellable piece of loot was a step towards that goal.

in PoE2, nothing ever feels like a step towards a goal, in fact I don't feel excited when I get some currency, I feel afraid and apprehensive because I know most likely it will ruin my item and now I lost the currency and the item.

I wonder if Jonathan finds it fun to just roll random stats. I guess since it's in the game, he finds it fun.

If you're playing ssf with this kind of system there's something wrong with you.

+1

Here's my two cents for how I think it could be fixed/substantially improved with somewhat minimal legwork - compared to tossing everything they currently have, that is.

1) Remove the 'Disenchant' option from the vendors and roll it into the Salvage Bench's functions. One click, and you get all artificer shards, quality shards, and alteration/regal/chance shards. You can still keep the quest to get Renly's tools - doing so simply adds the quality and artificer extraction functionality to the baseline a/r/c shard extraction.

2) Make it so any time you salvage an item with modifiers, the game rolls a percent chance for each modifier to generate an essence matching said modifier. Higher tier essences are produced from higher tier items/mods.

3) Create a crafting bench in town - or a free-floating crafting UI accessible anywhere - with slots for items, orbs, and essences. For the first three mods, essences and orbs are an either/or proposition, but once you get to the exalts you can slap an exalt *and* an essence to control for the affix/suffix added.

Maybe you haven't found the essences you need, or maybe certain affixes/suffixes don't have essences: then you still slam exalts and pray. Otherwise, the system above would give more deterministic control over the process, AND make otherwise trash loot actually meaningful.

Or:

4) Increase the variety and number of Rune drops, and increase the number of sockets each item type can hold. Anything with two slots now becomes 4, anything with 1 becomes 2.