Around few dozen items/craft, over hundred likely.
I sympathise with everyone who had their crafts fail, especially when not expecting them to. The problem with probabilities are that if the chance is higher than zero, no matter how small, you can be the unlucky outlier on the probability chart.
The fact that rng adds the element of surprise and tension, and evokes positive feelings when it goes the way you want, does not negate the fact that if it goes badly, while you’ve invested too much effort into that one craft (as is the case here). Pure rng 'crafting (POE) is indeed silly, pure deterministic system is boring. The problem is that rng compounds (finding your crafting components is rng-based already), and people expectations are not rational to boot.
I think the suggestion to add expensive/rare components that just make sure you will not brick your crafted item, even with a penalty like ‘if you use this, the craft will succeed but also lock the item’ or ‘make the craft succeed but double the instability’ or some such, would be a good idea.
RNG systems should have their limits, especially with enough investment on the player part.
3 Likes
My problem is failing on 90+ consistently that’s my issue.
And agree with getting rid of damaging fractures all together that’s too much of a loss for the effort put forth into a item.
^^ Excuse me sorry but it was funny to read your feeling because is soo true , already happen to other people too, me included. I do understand and also think is rude.
I absolutely second this. I have very limited time to play. If I find a top piece at some point I would NEVER risk losing it, no matter how small the chances. Essentially, this removes the possibility for a casual player like me to gain the best items in the game! As soon as your post made me realise this I suddenly felt a lot less positive about this game. This could be a huge issue for me.
We do have a small suspicion that something related to Glyph of Stability, is messing with fracture chance. We’ve had too many reports of it happening above 90% to say that it’s pure Rng. So it is something we are investigating.
10 Likes
I can tell you with 100% certainty the percentages shown in-game are impossible given the % fracture results. Blatantly obvious… 
1 Like
I would like to say that my experiance with crafting has led to multiple fractures at 90+% while few fractures <80%. I have multiple items that can survive multiple 25+% fracture rates over and over while I have had plenty of fractures either the first time or >90% success chances. There is definitely something that is not correct with either the glyphs or the rng system behind it.
We had the same topic in the past and I burned trhough a lot of Glyphs and did a lot of useless crafting and had 0 issues. 50, 90% crafts and 2 broke. If anyone is able to spawn 1k Glyphs into my inventory I’m happy throw my gold out of the widow and do 1k useless crafts for statistics ^^. From my observations some people are far to frustrated and have a to small testing pool of crafts to begin with. Shouldn’t the devs have the numbers anyway?
I uninstalled the game today for this very reason. I’m tired of feeling punished for trying to improve my gear. I would rather go play Wolcen at this point, because, at least I don’t feel like the game is lying to me.
With passive skills nodes that say they do one thing but are bugged and either do something else or don’t work at all?
It’s okay to not want to play the game because you’re having issues with the crafting system. But to say the game is lying to you and that you’ll go play a game (a released game, mind you, not a beta) that has a number of modes that are still bugged, c’mon, seriously?
Regardless, I enjoy playing Wolcen as well, though I do prefer LE (even in beta), so I hope you’ll consider coming back at some point. Until then, happy gaming.
1 Like
I have no proof that this is true. That’s why I said “feels like”. With out proof, it’s just an opinion. I will completely admit to this.
1 Like
I don’t doubt this. The problem isn’t statistics, it’s human psychology. Humans are far more likely to remember negative outcomes than positive ones, so the number of times a craft failed even with a high success rate are way more visible in our memory than the times it went just fine.
Also, compounding percentages dictate that if you’re crafting an affix from the ground up, it’s probably going to break. In 5 attempts, every single one must succeed or it’s a failure. So, a 100% chance, followed by 90, then 80, then 70, then 60 means that it is far more likely to fail than get to tier 5 - but that is not immediately intuitive to the user, so it feels like the probabilities are wrong when, in reality, the user’s understanding of probability is wrong. Either way, it doesn’t feel good and leads to a frustrating experience.
I am not a fan of any game mechanic that requires the player to gamble with very high stakes. That’s the same premise behind a slot machine, i.e. RNG gambling mechanics are skinner boxes that exploit human psychology in destructive ways. I would rather affixes be much rarer than to hide the real chances of getting a perfect item behind layers and layers of convoluted probability management. In other words, I would rather all RNG be removed from crafting and affixes to be rarer, or cost gold, or something else besides pulling the arm of a slot machine.
Source: Psychology/Sociology degree with a focus in research statistics
2 Likes
I wanted to point this out in another thread as well - that human beings and especially younger and/or more emotive people who might not be fully aware or be capable of conceptualizing their negativity bias will be feeling that there’s something wrong with the game.
The problem with that is that we don’t know how the code is constructed and we might end up pathologizing completely healthy and constructive responses. There really might be something wrong with it - only the developers can confirm or deny these assumptions.
I used to have a problem with developers implementing so called “exploitive” psychological models but then you have to ask what’s the alternative?
If we ought to eliminate taking advantage of our heuristics and manipulative psychological models, we’ll end up with something really boring such as a game where there’s a guaranteed amount of gold dropped after every 60 seconds based on the amount of clicks you do to keep it nice and fair.
I personally advocate for the contrary - make the game use our psychology to it’s fullest to engage and entertain us - for us as human beings, being irrational is metarationally rational on an emotional level which is one, if not the most important level of analysis at least for video games.
I’m even willing to help the developers with that (:
Source: is the world energy of Rivellon, from which magic is born in Divinity 2.
I’ve resolved to lower my expectations. I rarely craft items with less that 12-15 tier lvls to start with.
I’m just searching for that perfect combination of affixes for each item and hoping that they land with a decent tier levels to start with.
Crafting otherwise has brought me mostly heartache and frustration.
1 Like
Any RNG mechanic that doesn’t have a chance of setting the player backwards in progress. In other words, something other than gambling. Gambling with gold is whatever because that’s basically its only use, and you get gold automatically over time - what you say about guaranteed gold dropped is pretty much already the case, statistically. But gambling with an already good item and chance losing it - thus undoing progress and leaving you worse off than you were before - is the same premise used in casinos with actual money, and gambling addicts will tell you that it is super engaging and entertaining to play their game of choice right until it bankrupts them. Then, it isn’t fun at all.
That’s how I feel about the current crafting system. I don’t think the devs intended it that way, but I feel like I should advise people who like the current crafting system not to make a habit of visiting casinos.
2 Likes
This is an oxymoron as RNG by definition is gambling.
If you cannot lose, you cannot win - you cannot have a game where you don’t lose progress, be it either time or currency. I’m not even certain where from do you infer that this is good or useful of any sort? Aside from pathologies, I haven’t yet been exposed to healthy psychological models which are based on pure positive emotions within my half a decade of studying it. Maybe you could enlighten me?
As far as I know, this psychophilosophical concept cannot exist more than nominally simply due to our hedonic adaptation and due to our perception of positive emotions being exercised through juxtapositioning them with negative emotions.
This ad hoc exception is made on what premises?
Sorry but exactly the same applies and can be applied to items.
While this is already the case with gold, the lack of excitement towards it is palpable - it’s bland and boring - as already stated above.
You can apply exactly the same to gold except it turns from a qualitative loss to a quantitative loss.
This happens due to there being more implications to the loss than merely the loss itself. Your example includes loss of potentially everything which is dear to a human being, starting from socioeconomic status, ending with human bonds.
Your wife and 3 kids won’t leave you if you fracture your item in a singleplayer video game, I hope at least :S
A better example would be that if you try to mold a vase and it breaks, the situational emotion will be unpleasant but the whole picture including stories, social opportunities and emotional journeys related to your pottery craftsmanship will be improved by the very fact that this bad scenario happened.
This is very basic and it isn’t controversial either.
Depends on your definition of gambling. I assume to gamble, you must offer something of value with the knowledge that random chance could cause you to lose that thing. That’s how crafting works currently. However, flipping a coin is RNG, and you don’t have to risk losing anything to flip a coin, QED not all RNG is by definition gambling.
I’m not sure this is the best place to get into it, but there’s Carl Roger’s humanistic psychology.
I don’t know. That’s a common platitude, but I haven’t seen any evidence that positive emotions either require or are necessarily elevated by negative emotions. Opiates generate pleasurable sensations in absence of pain. So does sex. I think that concept is a way to justify negative emotions to make us feel better, but I don’t think there’s any inherent value in pain - that’s just something we tell ourselves to feel better about it.
However, I definitely agree that pain causes humans to seek pleasure more aggressively. That’s kind of the idea behind gambling, really. The pain of loss causes the player to want the pleasure of winning, and exploits certain heuristics to blind the player to what’s really happening statistically. Ergo, gambling addicts almost always end up in a worse emotional state leaving the casino than when they entered.
Here’s a paper published in 2001 that discusses the roles of positive and negative emotions. Essentially, the author posits that positive and negative emotions serve separate roles and influence separate behaviors, and really don’t have consistent points of interaction. This is a pretty common view (cited by over 600 other studies), though it isn’t the only one.
The exception is based on the premise that the effectiveness of my character does not decrease by losing gold. It does decrease by losing gear I’m currently using in the attempt to make it better. I should have made that more clear.
Yes, but that’s the issue I mean to illustrate above.
See the first point. Negative experiences do not inherently elevate positive experiences from a psychological perspective. I would say that the inverse is, in fact, a controversial statement.
It feels far more than 1/5th the time. The issue might be that you stay at the higher success rates for a while, but you roll so often that you’re bound to break something crafting that “perfect” item.
My post is a bit older now. Meanwhile there was a post from Mike Weicker that they investigate the crafting system because of the numerous reports of odd behaviour.
I don’t know if they found something.
It’s not the first game where people have the feeling that rng is not working correctly and demand further investigation. In most cases it’s just a subjective and negative biased point of view of some people that feel the game mechanics treat them unfair.
Don’t get me wrong here. Maybe there is a bug that only occurs with certain requirements met. Because if there is a bug, it seems to not apply to everybody.
Absolutely certain is that any odd behaviour must be a bug and is not intended. I say that because there were/are people that say that there are hidden mechanics that influence the success rates but are not displayed.