Legacy items

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DalaiLama wrote:

The long term "implications" of legacy items is not bad and it is minimal in standard/HC league, and non-existent in current leagues.

Exactly, the impact on game design is minimal. That's why I'm arguing that the decision of keeping legacys in the game is a design decision and not a technical decision.

There is a negative long-term technical implication of keeping legacys in game - they will have to maintain their tables & data forever. This makes the database bloated, adds overhead and cost/time to maintenance. In the long term this is possibly worse than having to do some work on removing them and a slightly longer downtime for 1.00 release.

From a technical database managment pov, it would make more sense to wipe the legacys and replace them with nerfed versions, thus having a more normalized (less messy) DB.

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raics wrote:

Don't worry about me, I've probably read all these threads since silverbranch.

Sorry, all those are rock-solid reasons:
- Economy clearly is adversely affected, inflation isn't the only harmful economic influence, nobody even mentioned it.
- PvP is there, it's not relevant now but if it ever becomes so, it would do well for devs to remember there isn't a single game in existence that's serious about pvp and allows legacy items, it's not a question of balance, that's a basic rule. Sadly, I can't envision them bothering to implement the restriction.
- Player psychology does work both ways but only for players present at the time of nerf, and the other way work only for legacy item owners, influence on the rest of community and any new players is far more significant.
- Current balance aside, take a look at new uniques, a bland bunch, aren't they? Since they can't go about fixing them anymore they make them on the safe side, locking an aspect of the game halts development.

All you can try to do is invalidate those reasons, but you can't provide a single good one on 'why are legacy items good for the game?'

- Do you really think that PvP will be relevant ever ? that PoE's balance can be adapted ? How do you handle he fact that CI, RT, Sin Trek and such mechanism can completely ruin one's build ? For such reasons, I don't think that PoE's balance will ever be adapted to PvP well-enough to have a consistent PvP game.

- Player psychology would be the exact other way around if legacy's users would see their items getting nerfed. If you spend 100 exa in a legacy Kaom's Heart, and 2 weeks later it is nerfed to 500 HP, what would happen ? what would you say then ?
I prefer that GGG rewards players that invested a lot of time in the game already ( don't need to bring RMT, don't care ).

- There will always be balance issues, especially in PoE. I would not be surprised to see Aegis Aurora get a nerf for example, there will be other cases in the future for sure.


Dalailama has really good points on the why, and I completely agree with him.
I was referring to his post when I was mentioning the last page ( meant previous actually, not last ).

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morbo wrote:

There is a negative long-term technical implication of keeping legacys in game - they will have to maintain their tables & data forever. This makes the database bloated, adds overhead and cost/time to maintenance. In the long term this is possibly worse than having to do some work on removing them and a slightly longer downtime for 1.00 release.

Maintain what ? There are probably just as much data stored for the legacy items than for the non legacy version of those.
Nothing to Maitnain.

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Fruz wrote:

Maintain what ? There are probably just as much data stored for the legacy items than for the non legacy version of those.
Nothing to Maitnain.

Maintaining separate data structures for same type of items. Seeing that a divine orb wont properly transform an legacy Kaoms into a new Kaoms, they must have separate tables for both types of the "same" item. Having this legacy database structure, means you'll have to always have to account for it when writing queries, doing backups, cleanups, etc..

There's lots of "dead data" that will have to be maintained forever. Its not how much data is stored, its how and where is stored.

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morbo wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

Maintain what ? There are probably just as much data stored for the legacy items than for the non legacy version of those.
Nothing to Maitnain.

Maintaining separate data structures for same type of items. Seeing that a divine orb wont properly transform an legacy Kaoms into a new Kaoms, they must have separate tables for both types of the "same" item. Having this legacy database structure, means you'll have to always have to account for it when writing queries, doing backups, cleanups, etc..

There's lots of "dead data" that will have to be maintained forever. Its not how much data is stored, its how and where is stored.

Actually, afaik, divining a legacy Kaom should make a non-legacy Kaom.
I have not tried it though, so I might be wrong.
They probably just simply store the value of the item so that they don't calculate the raw result from the %modifier that change all the time you look at the item ( no impact for kaom, but they won't make exceptions ).

Yes it's pretty dumb that legacy items are still in. But there's a very simple reason behind this. Most of the people with legacy items are old players. Most old players who still play are supporters. GGG does not want to lose supporters. Therefore, GGG gives them what they want. Does it fuck the game up? Yes. But it prevents them from potentially losing money. And money is king.

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Fruz wrote:

Actually, afaik, divining a legacy Kaom should make a non-legacy Kaom.

There's a thread around here (E: link) showing the result of a divine on a legacy Kaom. it halves the life, but it doesn't add the fire damage affix. It becomes a bastard version without the affix that was additionally introduced. I would conclude from this that legacy & non-legacy items are stored differently in the DB.

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morbo wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

Actually, afaik, divining a legacy Kaom should make a non-legacy Kaom.

There's a thread around here (E: link) showing the result of a divine on a legacy Kaom. it halves the life, but it doesn't add the fire damage affix. It becomes a bastard version without the affix that was additionally introduced. I would conclude from this that legacy & non-legacy items are stored differently in the DB.

I see.

Well, we don't know exactly how they do, the only thing know is that unique as any other item have their values stored somewhere.
It is a possibility, that they changed the min/max range ( so 500 here ), but did not alter the number of mods ( I have no clue why but a potential technical issue ), and that each item has it's explicit structure stored, every single time an item is created.
For example, the operation resulting in using a divine would be : "check the min/max values of one item's mods, then randomize the current item according to those". This would do what happens when one divines a legacy Kaom's Heart.
The new Kaom's heart would also use the same operation, but since it has the fire mod, it would randomize this one also.

So there may be extra datas out of those legacy items as you said, but there also might not be any extra datas.
We just can't know that

No double entries in the DB, the value of a mod is stored in the item. Once you reroll it, it will get a value from the current possible range.

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Rhys wrote:

"Legacy" items are a natural consequence of our implementation of the mod system. When a mod is rolled, the result is stored in the item. The maximum and minimum values are never used except for the initial roll and any subsequent rerolls (Blessed Orb, Divine Orb, etc).

This means that if we change the max/min values for a mod, e.g. the +life mod on Kaom's Heart, this does not directly effect any existing items, only new ones that drop or old ones that are rerolled.
[...]

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Fruz wrote:

- There will always be balance issues, especially in PoE. I would not be surprised to see Aegis Aurora get a nerf for example, there will be other cases in the future for sure.

Yes, I'm actually expecting that one too. And that's just the thing I was saying some pages back - no matter how much any item in the future gets fucked up it will be there to stay, they can't do squat to it. If an item screws up some major game mechanics they will have to change the mechanics, because they can't touch the item.

And they had another opportunity to nip the whole thing at the bud, they missed it at silverbranch but even after that it wasn't too late, items in question were mostly pretty rare so not too many of them were in the game, the first mistake could still be rectified. If it ever becomes a problem in the future it will be too late, there will be too many of them and keeping legacy item has became a hard policy.

By the way, Lama would make a great libertine, most of his analogies sound like 'forbidding me to shag a goat in front of chock-full child theater is the same as forbidding me to breathe'.

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Lord_of_Error wrote:

No double entries in the DB, the value of a mod is stored in the item. Once you reroll it, it will get a value from the current possible range.

But if you divine a legacy Kaom, you don't get the fire damage affix. That means that for legacy Kaoms this affix doesn't exist even tho it currently exists for the non-legacy ones, therefore there must be a structural separation of legacy & non-legacy items, at least in the case of Kaoms.