For players whose primary goal is progression for the sake of progression, Diablo 4 offers only one truly deterministic portion: leveling. Get XP, spend your skill/paragon point.
Everything else is pure RNG; slot machine pulls, if you will.
Working towards a goal amounts to getting more pulls at that slot machine; therefore, for a player only concerned with those pulls, getting them as fast as possible is the only way to shift the overall odds in their favor.
If you do not like a game that encourages this sort of behavior, realistically you would need to support one or more of the following, or similar, to at least mitigate that issue. (I recognize this may not jive with how you prefer to play, just stating it in regard to how the game encourages you to play.) None of these are perfect, of course.
Determinitistic, or at least reducible RNG elements in progression (ie spend to choose, or to improve chances for your preferred outcome)
More loot (more opportunities for success)
Better loot (higher chances of items that could be or are simply better.)
Personally, I prefer the first, as it can add a purpose-based grind, keeping the retention aspect but with real, attainable goals, instead of carrots on sticks.
While you are not wrong the problem is that you do not actually have systemic risk.
Intelligently, by design, all of the tempers are additive bonuses meaning that you cannot produce an outsized effect by getting either a top or a bottom value. This means that the only risk is uncompensated risk, or said a little differently, min-maxing is toxic but generally speaking acquiring an average result has little-to-no negative effects on gameplay.
Masterworking is the same, even if you miss all three critical elements for the stat you want you have at least a +45% outcome to all stats on the item. There’s no risk/reward in the system itself. Since there is no systemic risk, that is risk inherent to the system of negative outcome there’s no way to produce any form of failure.
This leads to this conclusion, I believe:
Diablo 4 offers only one truly deterministic portion: leveling. Get XP, spend your skill/paragon point. Everything else is pure RNG; slot machine pulls, if you will.
I disagree. You have one system where rerolls aren’t allowed (tempering), two systems where you can reroll infinitely (masterworking / enchanting) making them just attrition systems, and you have a large number of avenues towards the canvas (loot) for the activities. In fact I would pose that the only non-deterministic portion of the game is tempering.
Everything else you directly control through sheer willingness to engage repeatedly. You can get a triple / quadruple GA just by going again and again and again. It sucks but you can. This is important because what drives the requests is this fact. Everyone knows you can get it eventually. So people want eventually to not take 12 days in real time which is understandable.
If you had systemic risk, i.e. you couldn’t just reset your masterwork and start over a million times until you got what you wanted, or items actually broke, or rolls could be negative, etc. you wouldn’t have this outcry for determinism.
I can see your point but as written it does reinforce mine. Drawn-out when, not if, mechanics like enchanting and masterworking do not make sense from a player point of view, as you seem to agree, or at least see why people feel that way.
Your argument surrounding risk, if I understand correctly, presupposes that risk should be present. I disagree. I feel a dropped item that looks like an upgrade should be an upgrade regardless of what else I have to do to it.
And, I don’t like the time sink of enchanting or masterworking. I would much rather grind for a moderate time and pick what I want with my mats than grind for a completely unpredictable amount of time and click a button over and over again.
Yes, tempering is the only thing that I cannot control simply by putting in enough time; and that’s a problem, because it can take an item that looks like an upgrade and change it to trash by either not rolling correct tempers or rolling correct ones but at a value low enough that the item is still not an actual upgrade regardless of other drop stats.
I could not disagree with you more.
Min-maxing is the defacto goal of any game where statistical progression is the primary motivator for continued play, and that is the point of games like Diablo 4 by default. The system does not need to enable perfection but it should enable growth.
I have played regularly since the introduction of GA with the exception of the second half of the VOH launch season and most of season 8, and have never found more than a handful of usable 2GAs and never single usable 3GAs. If I were to fail to produce an upgrade for one due to a bad temper roll, how is it acceptable in that timeframe to say “oh well, just get another?”
And the counter-argument that multiple GAs aren’t part of progression and are just “nice to get” doesn’t hold water either, unless we’re willing to accept that a game about item progression expects that to end a couple days after hitting max level (as it is very easy to get at least usable full 1GAs, sans amulet) despite also expecting the player to continue to engage with activities for quite some time.
So, in the end, if the game is like this, absolutely people who want to progress may very well push for ultimate efficiency regardless of if any other players want the content to be more drawn-out i.e. less one-shotty.
Alternatively, they should probably not play A-RPGs then.
I very much want lvling to be slower, making lvling a bigger part of the overall journey (and get rid of shared paragon!)
But it is fine that big part of the progression is based on RNG. That is the base concept of this genre.
Tbh, a big part of the issue with both itemization and dungeons/activities in D4 is that they are not randomized enough, Makes it all so boring.
And the few times they are random, it is in the wrong places (such as repetitive Greater affixes that do nothing but increase a number) or unnecessarily large affix ranges which do the same.
But for the most part, the game is boring because it is low on RNG. Predictable and fast progression is a killer for an A-RPG.
Yep.
Should not be possible to reset masterworking. Determinism is exactly what leads to players expecting perfection. Yesterday rather than tomorrow.
While I agree that min-maxing is an inherent goal of the genre, it would be perfectly fine to make perfection impossible. And more importantly, make it unlikely to get even anywhere close to perfection.
Imperfect items, imperfect builds, and how you play around the strengths and weaknesses your character have ended up with, are just way more interesting in the end.
As for GAs, basically delete the whole system. It is meaningless progression. Just bigger numbers on affixes you already got.
If it was kept, it should be capped at GA1. At least then there is a tiny bit of choice on which affix you want GA’ed. Instead of the aforementioned perfection goal.
Remove tempering from blacksmith as well.
Keep the tempering affixes, but just let them roll when an item drops. Bring back the RNG to the game world and item generation. Not when clicking a bunch of times on an NPC in town.
There’s a quote, I can never find it anymore, but it says if you give a player a choice between fun way to do something, and an efficient way, they’ll choose the efficient way.
Looter ARPGs always devolve into metas, best farming methods and routes, etc. There are always players that want to play their own way and take their time (I am one of them most of the time,) but the reason pushes for these things exist is that plenty of players are happy interacting with the game in that manner.
This isn’t a D4 or even D3 thing. You want to do 1000 Baal runs, you are absolutely going to do them the quickest way possible. Want a lot of loot? /players 8. Looter ARPGs live and die on the acquisition of loot, with varied preferences, I’m sure.
Personally what I want is not to have something that drops that looks like an upgrade turn out to be trash. That is no way to design a game. I don’t need games to (outside of story) help me accept loss; real life is full of it, thank you very much.
Whether that means upgrades are deterministic or there are no upgrades at all, I’m also not playing for 400 hours to get them; I’d much rather spend 100 hours playing with them. Let me use the fun stuff a bit, not spend months trying to get them.
Yeah, lots of devs have said some version of that (while at the very same time failing at it).
To be fair, it isnt like people will ever agree on what is fun.
But I bet most people can agree that diversity beats repetitiveness (varied content vs. killing Baal 1000 times in a row) at least.
I agree, albeit it might be from another direction;
I dislike all the focus on gear upgrading. For the most part an item should be what is when it drops. That would also make it much easier to see if an item is an upgrade vs. the first part of a 500 step plan.
Getting us back to the actual slot machine gameplay, where a great item suddenly drops.
I somehow dont think slot machines would be popular if your reward was a piece of metal and a guide on how to create your own coins (merely 50% chance to be thrown into jail for counterfeiture!).
I am quite fine with having items that you might not see in 400 hours. But they should be sidegrades, not upgrades. items that just open up some quirky ways to play existing builds.
And in the other end of the gameplay journey; make it more possible (but still not very likely) that items found early on can remain useful in endgame.
First, I apologize for the late reply. I missed this in the inbox.
Yes.
But this is where player agency actually resides. Let’s look at tempering for a moment. You have an item that rolled 129 in a range of 65 - 130. Rolling it again will likely result in a lower number and you do have a limited amount of tries. The risk here is indeed present; it’s permanent, unfixable, and likely to fail to try again. Is that 1 point worth the risk of it all? Now you have an active question and a reason to engage your critical thinking skills.
Conversely, enchanting allows you to pick up anything and convert it into a shape you want at an increasing cost for as long as you wish. You can shut off during the process just clicking the button until you get what you want so you can move on. If it has two perfect affixes for your build you can manufacture the third and max out the roll with enough time and resources.
Completely agreed.
I disagree with this primarily because affixes added by tempers do not impact the base item. So unless you got a carbon copy of something you have equipped and the only affixes to be improved are the temper affixes there’s no real loss or risk of loss. The base item is what should be the functional changing point in that decision. I would need to see a distinct example where taking on an item that is better at the base is ruined by a temper. I’ve had many tempers come out against me but I’ve never once had it be the thing that killed the item’s value.
I’m confused. Min-maxing is perfection. The system has to enable perfection if min-maxing is the goal. That’s part of why it is toxic. Min-maxing from the Dev side is designing things well above the 90% threshold and min-maxing from the player side is just calculating and enacting the highest value of the game possible (i.e. “The Meta”) and there’s nothing else. There is only one build that is the best build after all.
I think I understand the spirit of what you’re saying; the goal is to achieve the best outcome you can given the resources you’re given within the confines of your ideation of what that looks like. Sure, I can agree with that, but that’s not min-maxing. Min-maxing is specifically grinding a system down to a pulp and extracting everything you can from it regardless of psychological elements like enjoyment. It’s the absolute highest number.
It’s not the absolute best your A-tier build can do. It is the absolute highest number.
They’re different.
I never know what to say to this because the whole game is to make use of what you find but if you did find a very healthy 3GA item I cannot imagine a scenario where the temper would be the break. Please paint one for me if you wouldn’t mind? A 3GA BIS item being trash relative to a zero, or 1 GA item in the same slot, due to tempers? I mean I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep because the masterworking alone would be sufficient to make up for whatever minor additive bonus I didn’t get. But I am always open to being shown wrong.
Agreed. GA is part of progression. I never held that they weren’t. I have held that not getting what you want isn’t a failure of the game but I don’t think that GA is an arbitrary or unnecessary piece of traversing the game’s architecture. It’s designed with some GA in mind for sure.
And that returns me back to why we need a risk/reward system. Efficiency is hollow is the end-goal achieves nothing. So in the case of 1-shot bosses, if you do that on T1 to move to T2 and continue that until T4 you’ve achieved almost nothing because there’s naught up on the roof that wasn’t on the ground floor. S9 might fix that with higher drop rates for GAs though. But overall I agree with this on the monotonous nonsense of repeatedly gambling forever being a good thing but still disagree that the fundamental idea of limited interaction creating active decision making in the game is a bad thing.