They gave us loot and....

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kumogakure#7381 wrote:

Player agency refers to the ability of players to affect the outcome of an in-game event.

Slamming an Exlated Orb has zero player agency, you get what the RNG gives you.

Now turn on an crafting Omen, you have gained some player agency, as your action of turning on that Omen has directly affected the result, in a way that you decide (via activating the corresponding Omen), by removing certain results from the RNG pool and making the remaining results more likely.

At the one extreme of player agency is deterministic crafting, where you simply dictate your result, subject to at most a roll of success/failure.

The other extreme is having zero player agency, where the result cannot be influenced by player action.

As another example, player agency can also apply to the Atlas. If players are able to use the Atlas passives to remove certain types of nodes completely from the Atlas, then it is said to have player agency. If all nodes from the Atlas are completely RNG and nothing a player can do will ever affect what node the player gets, then it is said to have no player agency.

It is important to note, however, player agency can often carry a slightly different meaning when viewed from different perspectives. A system that devs think gives plenty of player agency, may be felt to have zero player agency by a player, especially when the agency given by the devs don't really amount to a real difference in the result that players get.

On top of that, the degree of agency given is important, because giving players a 0.01% chance at getting what they want, is not felt as player agency because it happens too rare, even though technically it is giving player agency.

And because of this, player agency is influenced significantly by subjective opinion, frequently resulting in debates amongst players themselves.

Player agency is a very important concept in designing of games, including but not limited to computer games. It is an essential and relatively basic concept in game design.