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[PATV] Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 6, Ep. 10: The JC Penny’s Effect
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we examine the pros and cons of Firefall's loot system design.
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As for the crafting versus drops thing... honestly, I think the real problem is the grinding in the first place. Beating a dungeon once is fun. Beating a dungeon ten times is much less so.
I find the tension between the compulsion to grind endlessly in order to attain that one ludicrously rare thing and the desire for the instant gratification of "a cool little picture of something with stats that you can equip right away and see numbers go up" to be quite confusing. I would like to think that if you are the type of person with the dedication and foresight to invest time in both the big grind itself and all the little grind preparation for said big grind and are aware of the ludicrous rarity of the gear you want for your character, then it shouldn't be too big a leap to have the patience and strategic thinking that would come with an intricate crafting system for extremely powerful items.
@Brikoth: And I agree that color coding the materials based on rarity would help to provide the best of both worlds.
Sure from a casual glance it's fine to stick GW by WoW/EQ. But if you wondered how crafting over RNG is going to play out in an MMO, you don't exactly have to gaze into the future to find out.
In Path of Exile you still have weapon drops alongside the ingredient drops, but the weapon drops are far more frequent than the ingredient drops. As a result, most weapon drops are vendor trash, because the majority of weapon drops pale in comparison to the few that drop with 2 or 3 perfect modifiers for the weapon/build and the right colour sockets for your skills all linked together nicely and on the appropriate weapon/gear base type for what your class/build needs at the time. But the ingredients allow you to bypass the grind by removing some of the randomness from the process by allowing you to incrementally improve your weapon in a directed fashion.
So finding rare ingredients in Path of Exile carries much of the same charm as finding a great new weapon because it has so much potential to bypass the grinding system (even though it is a product of the grind in the first place!). And if you don't feel like potentially wasting the ingredients by rolling poorly, you can always trade these rare items to other players for the rares that they can't use. So it's still a win even if you never craft.
Finding rare powerful ingredients that can improve your game substantially still feels great, even if you can't just slap it immediately on your character. So long as the game sticks to this, and not "FIND 100 THINGS UPGRADE YOUR SORD" it should be fine.
Recettear is another game that was not adversely affected from rare ingredients instead of just standard adventuring gear. It just needed an inbuilt spreadsheet to help you learn how much you could squeeze out of all the Little Girls so you didn't have to do all the price recording yourself -_-'
Also holy shit, that outro song. I'm in love.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
Now, I realize this is part of what makes picking up a rare item feel special, but if you have to swim through eight thousand lesser items like in Diablo III or something like Dungeon Defenders you really begin to hate this system.
I have NO IDEA what the "best" way to use my materials is, especially now that they've released the modules that reduce non-core constraint costs in exchange for cores. Like, what's more important: good stuff or high levels of Mass and Energy?
There really needs to be an in-game "how to craft for MAXIMUM AWESOME" thing.
My method of making it more interesting would be:
That when you kill a boss you do not get a loot piñata(maybe something), but instead you gain access to a "forge" the boss was guarding. A place were you can craft and the items gain specific properties unique to this "forge". In this case i think you can have craftingItemDrop and still preserve the feel's of getting rewarded.
Another thought. This concept should work in reverse when fighting regular mobs, where you get rewarded with regular loot. Big turn of getting a shoddy dagger when you have a epic burning longsword. Maybe that is were crafting comes form in the first place, as an answer to the question. "All this crap i have and just keep getting more of, what the hell am i going to do with it?" In this case just getting the crafting materials would "feel" much better.
It also worth noting that even crafting games such as terraria have gear dropes, which are very fun to find.
I don't know what will lead to more success, but as a person who left MMOs super disgruntled because either the sword I wanted never dropped or I had to fight with more active players for the right to get the rare item. I don't think I ever got a set or weapon I wanted out of a raid. I have been able to achieve my goals in MH and going into the smithy and making a grocery list of new monster bits feels great to me.
garbage mineral > garbage drop (maybe I can do something with this)
good mineral =(ish) good drop (I wonder what's possible)
great mineral = great drop (what can I make/do to abuse this lucky find?)
Grinding for countless repeating* material to make something, however... is as you could say... saddening.
The metric we really look at in acquiring loot in games is time. With the components system there is very little derivation in time spent to acquire something, because of the very linear progression of component acquisition (unless there are rare drop components... which then functions very much like a standard gear system). If I want piece of gear X, then I can calculate about how much time it will take... and maybe that calculation alone turns me off of ever wanting to try.
With gear drops you get to throw in serendipity. Sure, it won't always work in your favor, but now there is a meta-game with how much time I'm going to spend to get X. There is an unknown, and when that variable is finally resolved it could wind up being much shorter than the known quantity above.
So the big drivers for gear, in my mind, are the serendipity factor - the sense that I can get lucky and spend less time doing something; and the meta-game factor of random rolling - the sense that I can "win".
Basically, the idea would be to heavily depreciate enemy loot. A few things would drop and these could either be components, gear or other items, but the vast majority of gear would be found in fixed locations/guaranteed drops. Most pieces of gear could only be found once and would be fairly generic until upgraded.
The only game that I've seen do this is Dark Souls. I'm not entirely sure if it would translate well into an MMO. But, if it did, it definitely cuts out a lot of the grind and leads to a more dignified character. After all, when was the last time you read a story where the knight strips every body they come across?
Now If you excuse me I’m going to pre order rome total war 2 so that I can play as Sparta when it comes out.
@oblivion_necroninja: that would defeat the purpose of firefall's balance system. they try to make everything a give and take rather than this build is demonstrably better than that one.
@speedplay: are you familiar with firefall's crafting system? as far as i know there is – intended at least – variability in the components required for crafting an item. you can get a recipe and use low quality materials to get the item fast and cheap, or you can take the time to gather really nice materials, or a subset of nice materials that focus on a specific stat to raise the quality of the end product and influence specifically how it functions.
I suppose this also comes across in my playing of RaiderZ, where everything is crafted, but the quest tracker can be set to track the items you want to craft; the items you need are checked off on the tracker, and the game alerts you to when you can build things even if you aren't tracking them in the quest bar. This is something I love because generally speaking, every component or almost every component has meaning and a means of being tracked.
I'm not against super cool legendary item drops, but in that case the game should be programed with the player in mind, in other words having a script that checks for classes within a party and drops only what the party can use. Some might complain that that isn't realistic, but then again, how is a giant wolf boss that drops a sword and some gold in any way realistic?
Usually drops would be useful for only a subsection of the group, so those fewer people had to hash it out. With common crafting components available for everyone it'll be a bloody free for all.
The 'appeal' of getting a rare item drop (even a 'mage hat of wizardry +5' when you're a barbarian) is just what you said, an illusory emotional 'trick'...and that trick CAN STILL BE APPLIED TO THE COMPONENTS DROP SYSTEM.
You hit on some ideas - 'progress meter' for a specific epic item you want to make, or 'new component unlocked'...which could be taken a step further:
"NEW MATERIAL DISCOVERED: Unobtainium.
Unobtainium is a rare mineral that is only found in <locale players can't go to>. It is used in strengthening the structure of objects, and can be used to craft such things as <epic armor> or <rare vehicle> or <weapon of awesomeness>"
Whether you give the player finished items they may or may not be able to use, or raw materials that they can all use to make a variety of different items (that they still might not want), YOU CAN STILL ADD PIZAZZ AND HYPE TO EITHER SYSTEM to keep your players interested.
Depending on enemy type (monster/humanoid), a lucky drop can either be the centerpiece of a powerful armor tailored for any class or the armor for a single class itself. At best make it craftable on the spot with a bottomless components bag to carry around.
I see a different problem with the component system, and it is similar to "randomness in games". At first sight you would not want things like critical strikes and chances on success because its not fair and people in general remember unlucky situations more. But it also gets boring and repetitive if you always deals your average damage and get your average loot which is very important in time sinky games. In the long run, the old formula time = power would hit you in the face.
In addition MMOs are social games and the differences between players (classes, specs, and also loot) creates diversity and individuality. Players also should depend on each other to get stuff with individual value and not fight about every "purple" crystal because everyone can use it.
Depending on enemy type (monster/humanoid), a lucky drop can either be the centerpiece of a powerful armor tailored for any class or the armor for a single class itself. At best make it craftable on the spot with a bottomless components bag to carry around.
I see a different problem with the component system, and it is similar to "randomness in games". At first sight you would not want things like critical strikes and chances on success because its not fair and people in general remember unlucky situations more. But it also gets boring and repetitive if you always deals your average damage and get your average loot which is very important in time sinky games. In the long run, the old formula time = power would hit you in the face.
In addition MMOs are social games and the differences between players (classes, specs, and also loot) creates diversity and individuality. Players also should depend on each other to get stuff with individual value and not fight about every "purple" crystal because everyone can use it.