Crafting/Fracturing Mechanic

So if this was full release, you’d drop LE due to the crafting system only, right? Anything else about the game you wouldn’t consider staying for if this was the case? Would LE’s crafting be a make it or break it for you and LE? Sorry for all the Q’s but ty anyway!

It is a supremely emotional reaction. If you’re presented with a 90% chance of success but you then fail the instinct is to be pissed off because success was “all but guaranteed”. If you repeat that 10 times & the other 9 times you didn’t fail, you’ll still rememeber that 1 time you failed & complain in chat, or on the forums because you woz robbed! ROBBED I SAY!

As @Pauly99 says, he screamed because the item was damaged at 90%, that’s an emotional reaction to an entirely probable outcome. And yeah, it’s annoying.

Yes, but it’d be better, maybe it would be better enough that people don’t complain? Do people complain about PoE’s crafting not getting them the 6x t1 affixes they want on the first ~10-20 attempts?

I would argue that LE’s crafting is as “pro-progression” as PoE’s crafting it’s just different. LE’s crafting is “more” pro-progression that PoE’s because you can choose the affixes you want to put on an item, but “less” pro-progression because you run the risk of bricking an item (rather than having to spam eye-gouging amounts of currency at an item to get “good” rolls).

This was the previous reply I was referring to. Unfortunately that plateauing thing has happened to me multiple times. The crafting system itself has kept me away from the game for the last 2 weeks (plus the New World Preview tbh haha) but it’s just so hard to motivate myself to play when I know what lies ahead with crafting, sadly.

I love every other aspect of the game, the skills, the story, the looks, it’s all really satisfying, but the crafting fucking up again and again and again… when I was relying on said item to progress further just kills that excitement and drive to keep playing. Sucks the motivation right outta me lol.

I hated PoE crafting as well tbh, anything that has a chance of ruining an item to the point of it being unusable is anti-progression and nothing but frustrating.

At least with games like Grim Dawn and D3 you only suffer the frustration of the item not dropping for you, but it will eventually (as is the way with probability) and that is at least an eventual progression according to investment of time, strategy, etc. With this current system, there is a statistical chance that you may never craft the item you need and therefore not progress either.

Ya.

What I mean by “Psychology” is essentially “how things really are” so we could separate our wishes from the reality.

Philosophy is why and ought - important to inspect but doesn’t have to reflect the reality.
Psychology is how and everything else which can provide constantly reproducible scientific models.

Requirement by who? Human beings don’t need to be presented with a measured amount of information to have fun.

Not really but they also don’t have statistical expectations set as there are no percentages displayed by the system; which comes back now with a circle, that if there ought to be percentages then people would make complaints about it.
Most games that I know which allows people to know the odds has complaining about the odds being an integral part of the community discussion.

PoE - links, Doctors
Warframe - frame parts
Runescape - rare drop complaints are an annoyingly huge part of the dialogue there especially because they’ve set rare drops as a separate distinguished loot table so when a rare drop happens which isn’t what they wanted, players let their imagination go wild and complain how it couldabeen something else and how the system is flawed.

I would also add that almost nobody has the statistical expectations to get a Mirror in PoE from a map which they open, hence there are barely if any complaints about it but plenty of people do complain about exalt drops because they’re roughly aware of the drop rate.

I can agree with the statement, but (and I feel I might get turned on for this statement… not sure why.) I would like to see any item a player could craft that, if they absolutely didn’t make the perfect item, that their build would fail with another item of say all t3-4 affixes vs t5s.

I feel this discussion boils down to min maxing? I might be way off here, but if min maxing doesn’t come into play, this crafting system isn’t too bad. But… it is a thing, and players who love that are a thing, so this crafting thing likely needs some fine tuning.

omfg you just brought Runescape into this… Will post more later, time to be getting home all!

Well the problem is, crafting has failed me on multiple items, not just one item. When leveling up you find better items, better bases than before, that you want to craft to improve your build, and then when crafting said items they get bricked, you’re back at square one again.

At this point it’s not even about min maxing, it’s about upgrades that you try to improve becoming useless, therefore halting progress of the build. Like an Acolyte that needs more armour or GB to not get one-shot, and said armour piece gets bricked. And you have to not take on harder content until you find a valid piece again and then hope that doesn’t get bricked too. That just screams anti-progression and stagnation to me lol.

I mean I do love min-maxing, not gonna lie, but at this point I can’t even comprehend min-maxing as there’s a good chance it’d just set me back further lol.

I happy to answer your questions. Since I started playing this game I feel the similarity with POE games, I think Dev was inspired by that game. And of course the crafting system is very important for this genre. In addition to a great skill system The item creation system is also an important part. I like this game and I don’t want the game make mistake with a fail system that is make many unhappy players. At this point, I’m only going to mention the crafting system, as I haven’t played all the characters yet.

At least the frame parts are just a question of time, like eventually you’ll get them, and if you play strategically then you can earn all parts rather quickly (picking up runs with the parts on offer, running with multiple people trying to get the same parts, trade for them, etc.) That’s similar to D3 and Grim Dawn in the way of it’s just a matter of time investment.

Hell even New World that is still in Alpha had a crafting system that I loved, and if you didn’t wanna craft anything you could earn money and buy what you need off the market, etc. All these examples don’t come off as anti-progression because there’s no chance in any of them to be set back to square one, (or worse than square one in case of bricking a good item) and yet they are all enjoyable and competitive. Having such a “destructive” (get it? Lol) crafting system just feels very anti-fun, anti-progress, etc.

How is this different from Last Epoch?

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Because in Last Epoch, you have the chance to break said parts and lose them, meaning you have to search again and won’t likely find the exact same thing again, or maybe not even find anything similar even. At least with frame parts they are always a set value and you can target farm them (or anything in the game) or trade for them. Many, many less variables involved really.

The formula which you presented for reaching your goal is exactly the same though.

  1. Eventually you will get your item
  2. If you play strategically, you can earn all parts rather quickly

No?

No. A bricked item immediately makes this comparison in Warframes favor.

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Yes but one small difference, with most other games I’ve used as an example, you don’t have to go through losing your items multiple times before you get said items. There’s no loss involved in those other games/methods, no anti-progression. No-one likes experiencing loss. You only end up going forward, eventually at least, whereas with Last Epoch you can potentially set yourself back, or at the very least end up staying where you are, when you should have been progressing. Especially if you try to improve an item you are wearing, which I wouldn’t do, but some people might…

Those other games/methods have provided mutliple ways of avoiding stagnation/plateauing, and admittedly when trading comes to LE it might have a similar effect, but that still doesn’t stop the crafting system being anti-progression in my opinion.

Hard to feel like you are going forward when things are breaking and failing left, right and centre lol.

You could avoid it by taking another item of the same base and crafting on that instead if you’re afraid of a major fracture.
You still:

  1. Eventually get your items
  2. If you play strategically, you can earn all parts rather quickly

I’ve had major fractures but I’ve always had back ups and I got 2x T20 BiS, one of which is with T10 class affixes crafts with the best base once I completed the monolith.

You could make exactly the same complaint in almost any game - you unlinked your 5L, should have used a backup.

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Yes but that example is anecdotal as hell, just because you did well doesn’t mean everyone is or should be able to do well.

As has been mentioned multiple times, the way probability works is that there are people out there, like myself, that with the current method, every item they find and try to craft gets bricked, and they can’t progress, due to a run of (or constant) bad luck, as is an innate possibilty when probability is considered.

You may just be an exception to the rule too. Or just the other side of the coin at least. But that’s what you get with such a coin-flippy crafting system. Some people will get screwed right out the door as they walk away from the game with this current system. Some people will craft a full set of t20’s and not understand what the complainers are going on about. Perspective is everything.

Do you really think those unlucky few have to suffer just to keep this crafting system? The ultimate aim of a game developer is to provide people with a fulfilling and enjoyable game, to provide fun for people. If you are not doing that with your current crafting system in a game, if there are people that are unhappy with it, if it feels anti-progression in any way, wouldn’t you at least try to make a better system? Sure, you can’t make everyone happy, but you can try.

Say with D3 (while they still got plenty wrong, this is at least something I think they did right) you farm and farm and eventually get your item you wanted, the rolls may not be ideal, and you can at least change one roll to be slightly more ideal. You then use said item to keep farming and eventually either find a better version of it (ancient, primal ancient with non-ideal stats) or find a perfect version (primal ancient with ideal or ideal rerolled stats). That is a path of progression and movement forwards.

With Grim Dawn, you know where to get most green items as they have specific mobs they come from, then you just have to get killing and farm those mobs til the item drops with the stats you want on it, and hope they rolled well too lol ultimately this was a little too grindy and they made it even easier to get the right affixes too by upping the chance of getting rarer affixes on the items. It was still quite a grind even after that though lol but eventually you would get it. And it didn’t have to be ideal because you could balance stats with components/augments afterwards too.

With Last Epoch, you farm for a while, get the item that’s mostly what you want, then attempt to improve it, it gets bricked, back to square one. Then back to farming the same levels over and over to try and find another item. That already is a total halt of progress, not to mention the next item I find might get bricked too, halting progress once again.

Shit, I mean, I had one build where I used level 10 items til the final boss fight because everything I tried to upgrade just got bricked and the build was super strong regardless of items (poison drain life build) but eventually I started getting randomly one shot and needed upgrades, and low and behold, every item bricked. I was still stuck in lvl 10 gear at lvl 40 something becuase crafting constantly bricked my items and to me, that does not seem like it’s a friendly system built towards progression. That was the build that I stopped playing on due to this crafting system.

To me the difference is so stark, with all the other games mentioned it is just a matter of time or farming or trading, etc. You don’t need this kind of risk in your crafting system to make it feel satisfactory, it will achieve exactly the opposite when things fail and break. It’s very easy for a system like this to kill hope and motivation for people. It is the innate problem that comes with making things too heavily reliant on probability. Some people will luck out and you can kiss their support or patronage goodbye lol.

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No, it is the actual probability of at least one of those being a fracture.

1 - (.95 X .9 X .85) = 0.273

If you want to contest the assumption that it tends to go .95 then .9 then .85 go ahead, but I was working off of what I saw and not 1000s of different crafting attempts all put into an excel spreadsheet - which I didn’t have the time to do. Keep in mind that the example I used was actually when you are getting lucky with your instability gain rate via the glyph.

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I think I agree with what you’re saying, but D3 doesn’t have any crafting IMO, not like PoE & LE. Yes, you can spend some mats & have anther random item generated, but you won’t be using those items at max level after you get your set items/uniques, then you’re into the grind to try & find (from mobs, mostly) better versions with the occasional gamble with Kadala.

If they removed the crafting from LE completely, then you’d have something like D3’s item grind, but with added low tier bases.

Yes, it’s an anecdote but if you follow the way I played and crafted the same way, it’s very unlikely that you won’t be able to emulate a similar outcome.

It can take from 1 to 100 crafts to craft a T20 item from 2 affixes with 99% probability.
It can take from 1 to 100 runs to acquire an Equinox with 99% probability.

If Last Epoch is unfair then what will you tell the Warframe devs?

Unlucky exactly how? Give me a tangible example.

Too hard for a player = not fun.
Too easy for a player = not fun.

I don’t know D3 and I don’t remember GD.

You also have 5 - 20 craftable highest tier bases dropping every hour - not a minutiae part of the system. I will be able to craft multiple T20s faster in Last Epoch than I will ever farm some of the frames in Warframe.
Don’t want your currently equipped item to damage? Pick another one which will be dropping roughly every few minutes in your monolith.

Seems like an exaggeration. We’ve all played this game and if you haven’t bothered to craft til then - it’s your problem. It’s statistically very probable to craft or even just pick up T6+ items at level 50+.
Not to mention:

What was the item which was unachievable for you?