should she get a huge warning strobe light when she uses topaz gems on her monk? its a wrong choice after all and harms her character by preventing it from achieving maximum potential by wasting sockets.
There is an obvious, and massive, difference between "don't let someone use the wrong gems and don't let them out of town if they only have 3 action buttons assigned" and "design the game, on purpose, such that people have to spend *significant* amounts of time NOT playing the game to be successful at the game."
There *is* a danger of making a game that's about ACTION focus too much on... inaction.
Their reasoning for BoA was "killing monsters is fun." So why doesn't that apply equally to evaluating loot? Why shouldn't we be spending time killing monsters instead of pouring over spreadsheets? Why, when it comes to loot, are we told that we should spending MORE TIME killing monsters and LESS TIME in the AH or on websites trading... but when it comes to items, it's totally OK to spend MORE TIME on websites and in spreadsheets?
If it is just my opinion, then how did Diablo 2 reckon itself as such a thinking mans game? It was one of the most number-intensive, study chart games I've ever played.
Can we just drop this whole line of thought? It really reeks of "I LOVE TO DO MATH AND THAT MAKES ME SUPERIOR TO THOSE WHO DON'T" and not of actual discussion.
You wanna talk actual discussion and open with some shit like that? You always do this, you can't discuss things without quickly devolving to TYPING IN ALL CAPS AND GETTING SMARTASS.
This isn't about superiority or loving to do math. This is a discussion about whether or not too much user-friendly character building will eventually devolve the genre into automatic character building, taking the player interpretation out of the game.
This isn't about superiority or loving to do math. This is a discussion about whether or not too much user-friendly character building will eventually devolve the genre into automatic character building, taking the player interpretation out of the game.
This almost sounds like the argument against auto-mining and multiple building selection they had back in SC2. History shows who won out in the end.
This isn't about superiority or loving to do math. This is a discussion about whether or not too much user-friendly character building will eventually devolve the genre into automatic character building, taking the player interpretation out of the game.
The way you're romancing about spreadsheets and pouring over your character to make him effective it does, actually, sound like it IS about loving to do math and that you feel that anyone who doesn't follow that mindset should be gratuitously penalized for it. I apologize if that's not actually how you feel, but it seems to be the unspoken undercurrent in what you're saying.
As to the second sentence, I think you're just making a slippery slope argument. Like if a certain %age of information isn't obscured and hidden then the game will just start playing itself for you or something.
You and I both know that someone who doesn't do their research is probably not going to have a perfect build (because there ARE a ton of possible combinations of skills, runes, and passives) especially when you factor in the new legendaries and set bonuses. Therefore, I don't think the game immediately devolves into some level of "AHMGGGG characters just develop themselves and become sentient beings and then the T2000 comes back for John Connor" trap of chaos.
So, yes, on this subject you get my smartass side because I think your "the game becomes automatic, the players have no part in it" doomsday scenario is completely hyperbolic and paranoid.
This, ultimately, is a game. People want to come home from a day of work and PLAY a game not pour over spreadsheets and such. That's the essence of a game. It's a break from real life, it's a break from work. It's a way to have fun. This is why MMORPGs are having a hard time in the gaming market right now. Why would you want a game with such massive time overhead in the form of raiding and theorycrafting (to be an effective raider) when you can play a MOBA-type game which, while there may be theorycrafting, is infinitely more-accessible.
Blizzard has been struggling to make WoW more-accessible for years now because they correctly realized that the number of people who actually want to spend several hours per week reading websites and theorycrafting and going through spreadsheets to determine which items are upgrades is much fewer than the number of people who just want to play the game, get some rewards, and enjoy doing so with their buddies. Most people don't find that fun and don't embrace games that force them to do that to succeed. If so you'd see games like RIFT dominating games like WoW. You don't, though, and it's because the hardcore theorycrafting crowd is, absolutely, the minority of gamers.
Like I said the whole BoA debate mainly surrounded "killing monsters is more fun than alt-tabbing to websites to trade items." So if that mantra applies there it should apply equally here and the debate should be ended before it even started. If killing monsters is more fun than trading then SURELY it's more fun than plugging stats into a spreadsheet and having it spit out the answer for you..... to me that sounds like actuarial work and not "gaming."
EDIT
And all this ignores the immense amount of personal investment in gear that comes with enchanting. In RoS people *still* have to have a clue just to use the mystic properly. You have to understand what stats are good and bad for you. You have to assess which items are most-worthy of enchanting versus which ones will easily be replaced. It's not like this "player interpretation" is somehow missing if they make certain stats LESS CONFUSING because the player cannot understand them without a spreadsheet.
This isn't about superiority or loving to do math. This is a discussion about whether or not too much user-friendly character building will eventually devolve the genre into automatic character building, taking the player interpretation out of the game.
The way you're romancing about spreadsheets and pouring over your character to make him effective it does, actually, sound like it IS about loving to do math and that you feel that anyone who doesn't follow that mindset should be gratuitously penalized for it. I apologize if that's not actually how you feel, but it seems to be the unspoken undercurrent in what you're saying.
You brought up spread sheets, not I.
Nor did I mention loving math. Got my dumb ass kicked by introduction to algebra in high school. Not math proficient, actually. What I do enjoy in this genre is some semblance of mystery.
To truly clarify; The quicker a player figures everything out, the quicker he/she will get bored. Non-transparent effects resulting in non-sheet DPS/survivability can take years to fully master, especially in an evolving game such as D3. Remove that with easy-access in-game UI tables showing every affect and every affect of applying that affect to this affect..... affects stacking with X Y and Z........ logistically there are serious limitation anyways, in regards to full in-game summaries of all affects upon all other affects.
Again, people quit games faster when they know everything there is to know about it.
As it is now, I really like the hidden non-sheet aspect of D3. Could use some air-brushing to clean up misnomers on the in-game sheet. But the sheet should remain as a guideline and not become something too transparent, in regard to the longevity of a loot grinding ARPG.
should she get a huge warning strobe light when she uses topaz gems on her monk? its a wrong choice after all and harms her character by preventing it from achieving maximum potential by wasting sockets.
There is an obvious, and massive, difference between "don't let someone use the wrong gems and don't let them out of town if they only have 3 action buttons assigned" and "design the game, on purpose, such that people have to spend *significant* amounts of time NOT playing the game to be successful at the game."
There *is* a danger of making a game that's about ACTION focus too much on... inaction.
Their reasoning for BoA was "killing monsters is fun." So why doesn't that apply equally to evaluating loot? Why shouldn't we be spending time killing monsters instead of pouring over spreadsheets? Why, when it comes to loot, are we told that we should spending MORE TIME killing monsters and LESS TIME in the AH or on websites trading... but when it comes to items, it's totally OK to spend MORE TIME on websites and in spreadsheets?
Pick a fuckin stance and stick to it.
you keep exaggerating that notion to drive home your point....people dont spend more time pouring over spread sheets in even the most extreme cases. even in games that make diablo 1,2 and 3 combined look like tic tac toe you still only risk studying the math for a portion of the time. and those "extreme" games exist in such limited quantities its hardly worth considering them...
I really dont think Diablo 3 is at risk of that being the case...
if adding bizarre math is so bad and risky then even adding the new affixes that add % damage to elements or skills could be seen as a harmful mistep, and I would love to see someone try to argue that point...they were added because many people felt that the "diablo system" was getting a bit bland....
the affixes werent kept on the cutting room floor so that my wife would not get confused to the point of insanity.....
This isn't about superiority or loving to do math. This is a discussion about whether or not too much user-friendly character building will eventually devolve the genre into automatic character building, taking the player interpretation out of the game.
This almost sounds like the argument against auto-mining and multiple building selection they had back in SC2. History shows who won out in the end.
I never played starcraft 2 actually....tell me roughly how the debate went down?
I never played starcraft 2 actually....tell me roughly how the debate went down?
In SC1, you can only select 1 building at a time, and hotkey only 1 building on 1 control group. You cannot rally your command center to minerals so that they automatically mine. I forgot to add that your control group size was at most 12 back then. (From what I heard, WC1 had 4!!) When these features were added to SC2, old school gamers raged against it pretty hard, about how it will kill the competitiveness of the game and what-not, despite the fact that many of these features already existed in WarCraft 3. (Yes, WarCraft was not always an MMORPG. In fact, if we want to go back to the roots of WarCraft, then WoW must die, so must DotA. Another reason that the argument about the "roots" of a game/idea should never be used as an arbiter on why something is right.) In the end, Blizzard added some minor "macro mechanics" to make macro a little harder, but the features stayed. The ragers remained a minority, and that's pretty much that.
And no, even after these features are introduced, most people still cannot produce units at maximum efficiency, or anywhere close to it.
To truly clarify; The quicker a player figures everything out, the quicker he/she will get bored.
I appreciate your clarification.
I would counter that with the fact that when things are TOO CONFUSING (ie: take too long, or too much effort to figure out) then the game becomes frustrating and annoying and people just give up. So there is a balance to be achieved between allowing people to "grow" into the game and allowing the game to allow the player to feel like they're not studying for the LSATS or something. This is the main problem PoE faces. The game is so unforgiving that after a failed character or two you start to realize that the only way to enjoy the game is to spend HOURS researching it before you play it. For most gamers that's not fun. A game should be playable without huge amounts of research. Forcing people to invest hours and hours into non-game activities so they can be successful at a game really circumvents the idea of it being a game and makes it feel more like a job.
There has to be some medium where people are expected to learn and become better but where they're not feeling like they are doing research for a 2000-page essay. As it stands "+fire damage" is already confusing enough unless you make a build that uses only fire damage. Even if it were somehow shown in the UI, you still would not know what percentage of your actual damage is bolstered by it. The same is for the skill-specific properties. How do you know what %age of your damage comes from frozen orb versus glacial spike? Surely frozen orb does more, but by how much?
There's already tons of obfuscation because we don't have a combat log to know exact numbers. We do not need MORE obfuscation on top of that just for the sake of making the game more punitive to people who don't have time to pour over web resources.
Your argument was that allowing people to see numbers is akin to flashing a huge warning if a DH attempts to use int gems in their armor. Your analogy, not mine. And then you have the audacity to tell me that I'm the one exaggerating to make a point? You know what a hypocrite is right?
I'm not disagreeing with your point. I'm disagreeing with the idea that they have anywhere close to the same magnitude. One would easily be seen by a huge majority of the players as too much hand-holding, the other is topic that has reasonable legs to be debated and clearly is nowhere near as cut-and-dry as you'd like to insinuate it is. You can't just say "letting people see how fire damage actually effects their character is the same as flashing up a warning screen that you're using the wrong primary stat." That's one of the more hyperbolic and exaggerated arguments these forums have seen.
Besides, that argument could be applied to anything. We shouldn't see ANY in-game numbers because that would be just like flashing up warning screens if you use the wrong primary stat! We shouldn't be able to respect either for the same reason!
But that's not true because they are varying degrees of "simplification." Like I said before, if "simplification" and "accessibility" were bad things then surely RIFT would be crushing WoW in terms of players because RIFT offers a much less-accessible game with much more complex "rotations" and such.
In reality people simply don't like being caught up in tedium. They never have. That's why WoW "killed" EQ. As much as people love to wax poetic about EQ it was one timesink after another wrapped in a bigger timesink. If you have to put every item through a spreadsheet to figure out if it's an upgrade that's a level of tedium that is going to wear out most players and DECREASE the longevity of the game.
I never played starcraft 2 actually....tell me roughly how the debate went down?
In SC1, you can only select 1 building at a time, and hotkey only 1 building on 1 control group. You cannot rally your command center to minerals so that they automatically mine. I forgot to add that your control group size was at most 12 back then. (From what I heard, WC1 had 4!!) When these features were added to SC2, old school gamers raged against it pretty hard, about how it will kill the competitiveness of the game and what-not, despite the fact that many of these features already existed in WarCraft 3. (Yes, WarCraft was not always an MMORPG. In fact, if we want to go back to the roots of WarCraft, then WoW must die, so must DotA. Another reason that the argument about the "roots" of a game/idea should never be used as an arbiter on why something is right.) In the end, Blizzard added some minor "macro mechanics" to make macro a little harder, but the features stayed. The ragers remained a minority, and that's pretty much that.
And no, even after these features are introduced, most people still cannot produce units at maximum efficiency, or anywhere close to it.
interesting. id love to ask a few questions but the thread might become locked...:(
Your argument was that allowing people to see numbers is akin to flashing a huge warning if a DH attempts to use int gems in their armor. Your analogy, not mine.
And then you have the audacity to tell me that I'm the one exaggerating to make a point? You know what a hypocrite is right? I'm not disagreeing with your point. I'm disagreeing with the idea that they have anywhere close to the same magnitude. One would easily be seen by a huge majority of the players as too much hand-holding, the other is topic that has reasonable legs to be debated and clearly is nowhere near as cut-and-dry as you'd like to insinuate it is.
Ok teach me then Shaggy. lets all agree that my example of the things my wife does wrong are ok to leave in the game as is. You give me an example of another hidden number system that can fit in the game Diablo 3 and it makes things more confusing and you would agree with it being written into the game.
Can you think of one? using what you consider the best design concepts of the game?
Are you saying that the addition of a muddy number system of ANY kind is a negative trait?
I know from what your saying it will be subtle but can you describe one?
Are you saying that the addition of a muddy number system of ANY kind is a negative trait?
No, but I'm saying that these things have to be CAREFULLY weighed against the inherent frustration and "extra work" they create.
We can't have this discussion as if every gamer wants to spend hours ever week thrashing through websites and spreadsheets trying to better understand their character. We can't actually believe that every gamer wants to alt-tab out every time they find a piece of gear to check if it's an upgrade or not.
We already have obfuscated stats in the game. I've now mentioned several times that we cannot accurately determine what %age of our damage is from a single school, or skill. We are left to estimates. We know that, in general, mitigation > larger HP pool (although in the case of Paragon if you can get more of both it's obviously the best). Our "damage" and "toughness" statistics do not show these things though. Our "healing" statistic is only a rough estimate of how much healing/second we'll receive while attacking a monster and surely isn't entirely representative of actual healing/sec.
Advanced players WILL customize their gear to maximize their toughness, their healing, and even their damage. 1% IAS might be more or less valuable to a character compared to 1% critical hit chance depending. Your sheet DPS does not tell you this but an advanced player will know how to leverage it to his advantage.
What we don't need is further layers so that people need to math out how much 7% more cooldown reduction reduces their CDs or how much damage they actually gain if they sacrifice 6% crit for 18% fire damage in a multi-school build. That is tedium because it CAN, and SHOULD, be expressed in the form of tooltips. Why doesn't the CD on spells update when you socket a diamond in your helm? What is the harm in that? All it does is saves you the time of sticking a new value for CDR into a formula and letting a calculator/spreadsheet spit the answer out.
Using a spreadsheet to automate calculations doesn't make you smarter or any better of a player.
Ultimately, for me, the distinction tends to be somewhere around where outside resources become the NORM for gameplay. I shouldn't have to open up a spreadsheet to determine if an item is an upgrade or not. Alt-tabbing while you're playing a game shouldn't be necessary. If you want to read about the game during your lunch break, figure out how to play your Crusader a bit better... I see nothing wrong with that. But if you're constantly AFKing to evaluate all your loot... that's a really bad thing because it's disruptive to gameplay.
What we don't need is further layers so that people need to math out how much 7% more cooldown reduction reduces their CDs or how much damage they actually gain if they sacrifice 6% crit for 18% fire damage in a multi-school build. That is tedium because it CAN, and SHOULD, be expressed in the form of tooltips. Why doesn't the CD on spells update when you socket a diamond in your helm? What is the harm in that? All it does is saves you the time of sticking a new value for CDR into a formula and letting a calculator/spreadsheet spit the answer out.
This paragraph, I agree with 100%.
A good player is not someone who can do the maths as to what a 15 second cooldown becomes once you have 37% cooldown reduction, or what 40 mana becomes once you have 23% resource cost reduction.
A good player is one who can judge - through their experience of playing that build - how valuable it is to aim for cooldown reduction or resource cost reduction. A good player is one who has a good feel for how much of their damage comes from their various skills, and can thus judge the value of +x% damage to a given skill. A good player is one who knows that this balance will be different between single target fights and packs, and between trash and elites, and can make a judgement call based on which of those most needs a boost.
Give us these numbers. The numbers will not make the decision for you.
its apparent we view this differently so I guess each to his own.
I remember back in the mid-nineties I created a ledger of Arena rewards for Final Fantasy 3. Typed it up on a Tandy 1000 computer with 5.25inch floppys.
so I guess veering away from the game to do research on the game is something I have always enjoyed.
The alarming part is that compared to some people out there? im a lightweight. im nobody.
Today we have gamers who create games, who are professional gamers, who live in gaming communes and who are sponsored.
We have gamers who pump several thousand hours into any game they lay their hands on
we have board games that take teams of 14 people about 1200 hours of paper work to finish one single game
when I was 7 years old an older kid explained to me Dungeons & Dragons could be played "forever". I wrote him off as nuts. now I understand completely. the rules and the camplaigns are virtually limitless.
Stories like this are spattered througout my life and I love it.
what I hated was growing up reading about how all the good games were in Japan and America was living off of table scraps.
Countries outside Japan did not typically get the overload of Roleplaying/ strategy games that Japan did. instead we got action and fighting games.
I remember describing with glee to my mother that Ultima Online would have a thriving economy and social structure, and that this was a real landmark in gaming history. what I meant was "role playing fantasy games. She did not even give a shit.
I remember how the paltry and simplified Diablo, enjoyed by grandmas around the world, had more weapons and armor than any game I had ever seen up to that point.
and I remember slogging through the internet looking up weapons and armor and thumbing through strategy guides whenever I had the chance.
so today when I read about those things I grew up looking for, being on display, blooming and being villified to a degree, I remember my youth. I remember what it was like when number intensive games were rare and any other game was a dime a dozen.
I remember how they were not famous on a national level and as such were rarely released. All due to the niche "weirdness" associated with all the math-laden fantasy bullshit.
I remember how thirsty I was for a game with hundreds of weapons and types of armor when diablo 1 was released because for many years the games we were given featured far less.
All of the Diablo websites and spreadsheets and armor charts and strategy guides, I looked at and the ones I created for Final Fantasy 3 exist because of want. not because of need.
so while the stance that a person is not interested in those things cannot be refuted, the stance that people are interested in those things cannot be refuted either.
and when you apply that thinking to Role playing games as they have existed for the past 40 years....even though games Like PoE or Eve or Dwarf Fortress are unforgiving and raw examples of what a person might hate, they are also examples of what people love.
So I guess we're at a stale-mate and thats OK i guess.....I mean personally its a tiny bit discouraging....but ...its OK.
All of the Diablo websites and spreadsheets and armor charts and strategy guides, I looked at and the ones I created for Final Fantasy 3 exist because of want. not because of need.
Don't get me wrong, that stuff is GOOD and I greatly respect your past as a gamer and why that colors your present. But there has to be some kind of moderation. Ceasing your play session for 30 minutes to go look up some WD builds? Not an issue to me. Having to pull out a spreadsheet every time you find an item because you cannot tell if it's an upgrade or not? Major issue to me.
One is not very disruptive and can be considered "educating" oneself. The other is alt-tabbing to put the SAME numbers into an online calculator/spreadsheet to spit out a number that is necessary for your understanding of the game but that the UI doesn't provide. What do people actually gain from that? Disjointed gameplay? The feeling that they're copying numbers from the in-game interface into a website or spreasheet to get values that they need to make decisions but aren't supplied?
A basic tenant of game design is that players should be presented with all the information they need to make decisions WITHIN the game. WoW had this problem, and still does to a large degree. How would anyone EVER know what buttons to press in which order without going to a 3rd party site and reading about it? That doesn't give the average player a sense of accomplishment. It gives them this sense of overwhelming failure when they realize they've been playing the game "wrong" for months.
This is actually why they're removing reforging in WoW. Reforging is a lot like enchanting, but you can only move 40% of a stat as a tradeoff for being allowed to select the "destination" stat without randomization. Most people used websites and in-game addons to basically automate this process. It didn't make them any "smarter" than anyone else. All it did was make them aware of a resource that would go through all the permutations for them. It didn't actually add "depth" to the game despite greatly increasing complexity. It simply increased the number of resources you needed. If you weren't using a website or addon to do your reforging you were playing sub-optimally. Your skill had nothing to do with it. Your ability to find a resource that did the calculations for you was what made you a "better" player. To me that kind of thing MUST be avoided.
Thought exercise:
Would it be better if Blizzard removed the damage stat and you had to plug in your MH/OH damage, primary stat, weapon APS, IAS from non-weapon items, crit chance, critical hit damage bonus, and paragon bonuses into a spreadsheet just to find the stat we currently call "damage?" Or would that be considered "tedious" and a distraction from gameplay?
If you answered "yes" would it then be better if the UI didn't even sum these things and you had to enter them on a per-item basis?
What I'm trying to understand is what level of number-crunching has to be done EXTERNALLY for the game to be considered hardcore enough for everyone? Why does the number-crunching have to be done by a spreadsheet or website and why can't it be done by the UI? Ultimately I cannot wrap my head around why these stats have to be "muddied" by not being displayed on the in-game UI so that people can just make a spreadsheet that (unofficially) does the same damned calculations and spits out an answer. Why is it so evil if information is presented by the UI but so "awesome" if the same information is presented by a website/spreadsheet?
Back in the days of AH I remember I used to ALT-TAB to an opened excel file to input the numbers so that I could figure out if this item on sell is an upgrade for my DH and how much of an upgrade it is. I don't see how more tooltip information is a bad thing. I mean, I certainly could use 3d party tools to find answers. But was it convenient for me? Absolutely not. Hell, I'd go even more extreme and suggest a detailed tooltip for every currently used skill (PoE style), because right now I have this Xephirian Amulet with +20% arcane skills damage lying in my stash and I have no clue if it's an upgrade over my currently used ammy or not. And right now I have no will to test it: as in try to catch the 0.1 second long numbers over monsters in the middle of combat, write them down, repeat the process for the other item, think it over, etc. And I also don't want to return to excel spreadsheets. I'd rather go and farm some more legendaries, than waste my time with calculating numbers.
I really do think it's as simple as displaying your single resistance and AR. Would you prefer if that take out those 'details' and have the player figure out how much single resistance they have for each elemental type?
No, that just sounds silly. Let's say they do list cool down reduction. It's no different then single resistance. You still leave the player to decide what that cool down reduction means to them. You have it. Now or you going to use it? How?
All of the Diablo websites and spreadsheets and armor charts and strategy guides, I looked at and the ones I created for Final Fantasy 3 exist because of want. not because of need.
Don't get me wrong, that stuff is GOOD and I greatly respect your past as a gamer and why that colors your present. But there has to be some kind of moderation. Ceasing your play session for 30 minutes to go look up some WD builds? Not an issue to me. Having to pull out a spreadsheet every time you find an item because you cannot tell if it's an upgrade or not? Major issue to me.
One is not very disruptive and can be considered "educating" oneself. The other is alt-tabbing to put the SAME numbers into an online calculator/spreadsheet to spit out a number that is necessary for your understanding of the game but that the UI doesn't provide. What do people actually gain from that? Disjointed gameplay? The feeling that they're copying numbers from the in-game interface into a website or spreasheet to get values that they need to make decisions but aren't supplied?
A basic tenant of game design is that players should be presented with all the information they need to make decisions WITHIN the game. WoW had this problem, and still does to a large degree. How would anyone EVER know what buttons to press in which order without going to a 3rd party site and reading about it? That doesn't give the average player a sense of accomplishment. It gives them this sense of overwhelming failure when they realize they've been playing the game "wrong" for months.
This is actually why they're removing reforging in WoW. Reforging is a lot like enchanting, but you can only move 40% of a stat as a tradeoff for being allowed to select the "destination" stat without randomization. Most people used websites and in-game addons to basically automate this process. It didn't make them any "smarter" than anyone else. All it did was make them aware of a resource that would go through all the permutations for them. It didn't actually add "depth" to the game despite greatly increasing complexity. It simply increased the number of resources you needed. If you weren't using a website or addon to do your reforging you were playing sub-optimally. Your skill had nothing to do with it. Your ability to find a resource that did the calculations for you was what made you a "better" player. To me that kind of thing MUST be avoided.
Thought exercise:
Would it be better if Blizzard removed the damage stat and you had to plug in your MH/OH damage, primary stat, weapon APS, IAS from non-weapon items, crit chance, critical hit damage bonus, and paragon bonuses into a spreadsheet just to find the stat we currently call "damage?" Or would that be considered "tedious" and a distraction from gameplay?
If you answered "yes" would it then be better if the UI didn't even sum these things and you had to enter them on a per-item basis?
What I'm trying to understand is what level of number-crunching has to be done EXTERNALLY for the game to be considered hardcore enough for everyone? Why does the number-crunching have to be done by a spreadsheet or website and why can't it be done by the UI? Ultimately I cannot wrap my head around why these stats have to be "muddied" by not being displayed on the in-game UI so that people can just make a spreadsheet that (unofficially) does the same damned calculations and spits out an answer. Why is it so evil if information is presented by the UI but so "awesome" if the same information is presented by a website/spreadsheet?
fuck me, im trying to answer this is as streamlined a fashion as possible LOL..
its taken all morning......:P
Lets try some bullet points.
- To answer your question? No I do not think it is better if you make players hope outside the game to do math is better. in that very specific request I am indifferent either way, however I feel that removing those calculations you mentioned would be a very drastic move hated by many more people than it might impress.
- The group of people who would support or desire such a change is alarmingly small. I think we are almost in the same boat here. you mentioned you appreciate the "research side" of things as do I. I agree that these decisions about layering in more math must be made very carefully as you say.
But I feel its really hard to pick a fucking stance as you mentioned in posts prior :P:P
The only stance I can pick will only be a personal preference. I can't assert that it is correct, nor accept that it is incorrect according to some universal rule (no matter how likely, heavily adopted or convenient) or pillar of video game design lore. I've enjoyed to many games that only just scratched the surface of RPG design andI've spent too much money on music that sounds like a brick being pulled across a parking lot for 25 minutes for that to be the case...and that music was being created long before I was ever born.
I suppose if your goal is to make money than yes patterns definitely emerge....but not so much when making an artistic statement.
I'm sure Robo Pit was a complete financial ass fucking...
so you can see that this is all gilded with my personal preference of generally unforgiving and obscure video games over polished ones.
My appreciation of complexity for the sake of complexity is proven a supported stance with the existence of Eve,the Campaign for North Africa, the Paradox Interactive back-catalogue....
You appreciation of streamlining the data displayed and delivered is proven true with...oh God....many titles, the evolution of the AD&D pen and paper rule-sets.......humanbehaviour....tetris....just countless examples everywhere.........
As far as wrapping your head around "why stats have to be muddied".
I don't believe you should be looking for a "have to be muddied";
you should be looking for a "could be muddied" and I sure you will find people who express "we like and sometimes even love when its muddied "
and once you have found that, and I'm sure you have long ago, you search is most likely over.
Why do you think that the amount of players who like that change small? Most player aren't spending 1000 hours on the game, they are spending 50 or 100. Those players will not want spreadsheets. There is no need for a long paragraph of argument. Just remember about the "silent majority", the ones you call "casual".
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There *is* a danger of making a game that's about ACTION focus too much on... inaction.
Their reasoning for BoA was "killing monsters is fun." So why doesn't that apply equally to evaluating loot? Why shouldn't we be spending time killing monsters instead of pouring over spreadsheets? Why, when it comes to loot, are we told that we should spending MORE TIME killing monsters and LESS TIME in the AH or on websites trading... but when it comes to items, it's totally OK to spend MORE TIME on websites and in spreadsheets?
Pick a fuckin stance and stick to it.
This isn't about superiority or loving to do math. This is a discussion about whether or not too much user-friendly character building will eventually devolve the genre into automatic character building, taking the player interpretation out of the game.
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This almost sounds like the argument against auto-mining and multiple building selection they had back in SC2. History shows who won out in the end.
As to the second sentence, I think you're just making a slippery slope argument. Like if a certain %age of information isn't obscured and hidden then the game will just start playing itself for you or something.
You and I both know that someone who doesn't do their research is probably not going to have a perfect build (because there ARE a ton of possible combinations of skills, runes, and passives) especially when you factor in the new legendaries and set bonuses. Therefore, I don't think the game immediately devolves into some level of "AHMGGGG characters just develop themselves and become sentient beings and then the T2000 comes back for John Connor" trap of chaos.
So, yes, on this subject you get my smartass side because I think your "the game becomes automatic, the players have no part in it" doomsday scenario is completely hyperbolic and paranoid.
This, ultimately, is a game. People want to come home from a day of work and PLAY a game not pour over spreadsheets and such. That's the essence of a game. It's a break from real life, it's a break from work. It's a way to have fun. This is why MMORPGs are having a hard time in the gaming market right now. Why would you want a game with such massive time overhead in the form of raiding and theorycrafting (to be an effective raider) when you can play a MOBA-type game which, while there may be theorycrafting, is infinitely more-accessible.
Blizzard has been struggling to make WoW more-accessible for years now because they correctly realized that the number of people who actually want to spend several hours per week reading websites and theorycrafting and going through spreadsheets to determine which items are upgrades is much fewer than the number of people who just want to play the game, get some rewards, and enjoy doing so with their buddies. Most people don't find that fun and don't embrace games that force them to do that to succeed. If so you'd see games like RIFT dominating games like WoW. You don't, though, and it's because the hardcore theorycrafting crowd is, absolutely, the minority of gamers.
Like I said the whole BoA debate mainly surrounded "killing monsters is more fun than alt-tabbing to websites to trade items." So if that mantra applies there it should apply equally here and the debate should be ended before it even started. If killing monsters is more fun than trading then SURELY it's more fun than plugging stats into a spreadsheet and having it spit out the answer for you..... to me that sounds like actuarial work and not "gaming."
EDIT
And all this ignores the immense amount of personal investment in gear that comes with enchanting. In RoS people *still* have to have a clue just to use the mystic properly. You have to understand what stats are good and bad for you. You have to assess which items are most-worthy of enchanting versus which ones will easily be replaced. It's not like this "player interpretation" is somehow missing if they make certain stats LESS CONFUSING because the player cannot understand them without a spreadsheet.
Nor did I mention loving math. Got my dumb ass kicked by introduction to algebra in high school. Not math proficient, actually. What I do enjoy in this genre is some semblance of mystery.
To truly clarify; The quicker a player figures everything out, the quicker he/she will get bored. Non-transparent effects resulting in non-sheet DPS/survivability can take years to fully master, especially in an evolving game such as D3. Remove that with easy-access in-game UI tables showing every affect and every affect of applying that affect to this affect..... affects stacking with X Y and Z........ logistically there are serious limitation anyways, in regards to full in-game summaries of all affects upon all other affects.
Again, people quit games faster when they know everything there is to know about it.
As it is now, I really like the hidden non-sheet aspect of D3. Could use some air-brushing to clean up misnomers on the in-game sheet. But the sheet should remain as a guideline and not become something too transparent, in regard to the longevity of a loot grinding ARPG.
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I really dont think Diablo 3 is at risk of that being the case...
if adding bizarre math is so bad and risky then even adding the new affixes that add % damage to elements or skills could be seen as a harmful mistep, and I would love to see someone try to argue that point...they were added because many people felt that the "diablo system" was getting a bit bland....
the affixes werent kept on the cutting room floor so that my wife would not get confused to the point of insanity.....
let me guess.....huge cavernous difference?
In SC1, you can only select 1 building at a time, and hotkey only 1 building on 1 control group. You cannot rally your command center to minerals so that they automatically mine. I forgot to add that your control group size was at most 12 back then. (From what I heard, WC1 had 4!!) When these features were added to SC2, old school gamers raged against it pretty hard, about how it will kill the competitiveness of the game and what-not, despite the fact that many of these features already existed in WarCraft 3. (Yes, WarCraft was not always an MMORPG. In fact, if we want to go back to the roots of WarCraft, then WoW must die, so must DotA. Another reason that the argument about the "roots" of a game/idea should never be used as an arbiter on why something is right.) In the end, Blizzard added some minor "macro mechanics" to make macro a little harder, but the features stayed. The ragers remained a minority, and that's pretty much that.
And no, even after these features are introduced, most people still cannot produce units at maximum efficiency, or anywhere close to it.
I would counter that with the fact that when things are TOO CONFUSING (ie: take too long, or too much effort to figure out) then the game becomes frustrating and annoying and people just give up. So there is a balance to be achieved between allowing people to "grow" into the game and allowing the game to allow the player to feel like they're not studying for the LSATS or something. This is the main problem PoE faces. The game is so unforgiving that after a failed character or two you start to realize that the only way to enjoy the game is to spend HOURS researching it before you play it. For most gamers that's not fun. A game should be playable without huge amounts of research. Forcing people to invest hours and hours into non-game activities so they can be successful at a game really circumvents the idea of it being a game and makes it feel more like a job.
There has to be some medium where people are expected to learn and become better but where they're not feeling like they are doing research for a 2000-page essay. As it stands "+fire damage" is already confusing enough unless you make a build that uses only fire damage. Even if it were somehow shown in the UI, you still would not know what percentage of your actual damage is bolstered by it. The same is for the skill-specific properties. How do you know what %age of your damage comes from frozen orb versus glacial spike? Surely frozen orb does more, but by how much?
There's already tons of obfuscation because we don't have a combat log to know exact numbers. We do not need MORE obfuscation on top of that just for the sake of making the game more punitive to people who don't have time to pour over web resources.
I'm not disagreeing with your point. I'm disagreeing with the idea that they have anywhere close to the same magnitude. One would easily be seen by a huge majority of the players as too much hand-holding, the other is topic that has reasonable legs to be debated and clearly is nowhere near as cut-and-dry as you'd like to insinuate it is. You can't just say "letting people see how fire damage actually effects their character is the same as flashing up a warning screen that you're using the wrong primary stat." That's one of the more hyperbolic and exaggerated arguments these forums have seen.
Besides, that argument could be applied to anything. We shouldn't see ANY in-game numbers because that would be just like flashing up warning screens if you use the wrong primary stat! We shouldn't be able to respect either for the same reason!
But that's not true because they are varying degrees of "simplification." Like I said before, if "simplification" and "accessibility" were bad things then surely RIFT would be crushing WoW in terms of players because RIFT offers a much less-accessible game with much more complex "rotations" and such.
In reality people simply don't like being caught up in tedium. They never have. That's why WoW "killed" EQ. As much as people love to wax poetic about EQ it was one timesink after another wrapped in a bigger timesink. If you have to put every item through a spreadsheet to figure out if it's an upgrade that's a level of tedium that is going to wear out most players and DECREASE the longevity of the game.
Can you think of one? using what you consider the best design concepts of the game?
Are you saying that the addition of a muddy number system of ANY kind is a negative trait?
I know from what your saying it will be subtle but can you describe one?
or are you saying no to the whole Idea?
We can't have this discussion as if every gamer wants to spend hours ever week thrashing through websites and spreadsheets trying to better understand their character. We can't actually believe that every gamer wants to alt-tab out every time they find a piece of gear to check if it's an upgrade or not.
We already have obfuscated stats in the game. I've now mentioned several times that we cannot accurately determine what %age of our damage is from a single school, or skill. We are left to estimates. We know that, in general, mitigation > larger HP pool (although in the case of Paragon if you can get more of both it's obviously the best). Our "damage" and "toughness" statistics do not show these things though. Our "healing" statistic is only a rough estimate of how much healing/second we'll receive while attacking a monster and surely isn't entirely representative of actual healing/sec.
Advanced players WILL customize their gear to maximize their toughness, their healing, and even their damage. 1% IAS might be more or less valuable to a character compared to 1% critical hit chance depending. Your sheet DPS does not tell you this but an advanced player will know how to leverage it to his advantage.
What we don't need is further layers so that people need to math out how much 7% more cooldown reduction reduces their CDs or how much damage they actually gain if they sacrifice 6% crit for 18% fire damage in a multi-school build. That is tedium because it CAN, and SHOULD, be expressed in the form of tooltips. Why doesn't the CD on spells update when you socket a diamond in your helm? What is the harm in that? All it does is saves you the time of sticking a new value for CDR into a formula and letting a calculator/spreadsheet spit the answer out.
Using a spreadsheet to automate calculations doesn't make you smarter or any better of a player.
Ultimately, for me, the distinction tends to be somewhere around where outside resources become the NORM for gameplay. I shouldn't have to open up a spreadsheet to determine if an item is an upgrade or not. Alt-tabbing while you're playing a game shouldn't be necessary. If you want to read about the game during your lunch break, figure out how to play your Crusader a bit better... I see nothing wrong with that. But if you're constantly AFKing to evaluate all your loot... that's a really bad thing because it's disruptive to gameplay.
A good player is not someone who can do the maths as to what a 15 second cooldown becomes once you have 37% cooldown reduction, or what 40 mana becomes once you have 23% resource cost reduction.
A good player is one who can judge - through their experience of playing that build - how valuable it is to aim for cooldown reduction or resource cost reduction. A good player is one who has a good feel for how much of their damage comes from their various skills, and can thus judge the value of +x% damage to a given skill. A good player is one who knows that this balance will be different between single target fights and packs, and between trash and elites, and can make a judgement call based on which of those most needs a boost.
Give us these numbers. The numbers will not make the decision for you.
its apparent we view this differently so I guess each to his own.
I remember back in the mid-nineties I created a ledger of Arena rewards for Final Fantasy 3. Typed it up on a Tandy 1000 computer with 5.25inch floppys.
so I guess veering away from the game to do research on the game is something I have always enjoyed.
The alarming part is that compared to some people out there? im a lightweight. im nobody.
Today we have gamers who create games, who are professional gamers, who live in gaming communes and who are sponsored.
We have gamers who pump several thousand hours into any game they lay their hands on
we have board games that take teams of 14 people about 1200 hours of paper work to finish one single game
when I was 7 years old an older kid explained to me Dungeons & Dragons could be played "forever". I wrote him off as nuts. now I understand completely. the rules and the camplaigns are virtually limitless.
Stories like this are spattered througout my life and I love it.
what I hated was growing up reading about how all the good games were in Japan and America was living off of table scraps.
Countries outside Japan did not typically get the overload of Roleplaying/ strategy games that Japan did. instead we got action and fighting games.
I remember describing with glee to my mother that Ultima Online would have a thriving economy and social structure, and that this was a real landmark in gaming history. what I meant was "role playing fantasy games. She did not even give a shit.
I remember how the paltry and simplified Diablo, enjoyed by grandmas around the world, had more weapons and armor than any game I had ever seen up to that point.
and I remember slogging through the internet looking up weapons and armor and thumbing through strategy guides whenever I had the chance.
so today when I read about those things I grew up looking for, being on display, blooming and being villified to a degree, I remember my youth. I remember what it was like when number intensive games were rare and any other game was a dime a dozen.
I remember how they were not famous on a national level and as such were rarely released. All due to the niche "weirdness" associated with all the math-laden fantasy bullshit.
I remember how thirsty I was for a game with hundreds of weapons and types of armor when diablo 1 was released because for many years the games we were given featured far less.
All of the Diablo websites and spreadsheets and armor charts and strategy guides, I looked at and the ones I created for Final Fantasy 3 exist because of want. not because of need.
so while the stance that a person is not interested in those things cannot be refuted, the stance that people are interested in those things cannot be refuted either.
and when you apply that thinking to Role playing games as they have existed for the past 40 years....even though games Like PoE or Eve or Dwarf Fortress are unforgiving and raw examples of what a person might hate, they are also examples of what people love.
So I guess we're at a stale-mate and thats OK i guess.....I mean personally its a tiny bit discouraging....but ...its OK.
-Shurgosa
One is not very disruptive and can be considered "educating" oneself. The other is alt-tabbing to put the SAME numbers into an online calculator/spreadsheet to spit out a number that is necessary for your understanding of the game but that the UI doesn't provide. What do people actually gain from that? Disjointed gameplay? The feeling that they're copying numbers from the in-game interface into a website or spreasheet to get values that they need to make decisions but aren't supplied?
A basic tenant of game design is that players should be presented with all the information they need to make decisions WITHIN the game. WoW had this problem, and still does to a large degree. How would anyone EVER know what buttons to press in which order without going to a 3rd party site and reading about it? That doesn't give the average player a sense of accomplishment. It gives them this sense of overwhelming failure when they realize they've been playing the game "wrong" for months.
This is actually why they're removing reforging in WoW. Reforging is a lot like enchanting, but you can only move 40% of a stat as a tradeoff for being allowed to select the "destination" stat without randomization. Most people used websites and in-game addons to basically automate this process. It didn't make them any "smarter" than anyone else. All it did was make them aware of a resource that would go through all the permutations for them. It didn't actually add "depth" to the game despite greatly increasing complexity. It simply increased the number of resources you needed. If you weren't using a website or addon to do your reforging you were playing sub-optimally. Your skill had nothing to do with it. Your ability to find a resource that did the calculations for you was what made you a "better" player. To me that kind of thing MUST be avoided.
Thought exercise:
Would it be better if Blizzard removed the damage stat and you had to plug in your MH/OH damage, primary stat, weapon APS, IAS from non-weapon items, crit chance, critical hit damage bonus, and paragon bonuses into a spreadsheet just to find the stat we currently call "damage?" Or would that be considered "tedious" and a distraction from gameplay?
If you answered "yes" would it then be better if the UI didn't even sum these things and you had to enter them on a per-item basis?
What I'm trying to understand is what level of number-crunching has to be done EXTERNALLY for the game to be considered hardcore enough for everyone? Why does the number-crunching have to be done by a spreadsheet or website and why can't it be done by the UI? Ultimately I cannot wrap my head around why these stats have to be "muddied" by not being displayed on the in-game UI so that people can just make a spreadsheet that (unofficially) does the same damned calculations and spits out an answer. Why is it so evil if information is presented by the UI but so "awesome" if the same information is presented by a website/spreadsheet?
No, that just sounds silly. Let's say they do list cool down reduction. It's no different then single resistance. You still leave the player to decide what that cool down reduction means to them. You have it. Now or you going to use it? How?
fuck me, im trying to answer this is as streamlined a fashion as possible LOL..
its taken all morning......:P
Lets try some bullet points.
- To answer your question? No I do not think it is better if you make players hope outside the game to do math is better. in that very specific request I am indifferent either way, however I feel that removing those calculations you mentioned would be a very drastic move hated by many more people than it might impress.
- The group of people who would support or desire such a change is alarmingly small. I think we are almost in the same boat here. you mentioned you appreciate the "research side" of things as do I. I agree that these decisions about layering in more math must be made very carefully as you say.
But I feel its really hard to pick a fucking stance as you mentioned in posts prior :P:P
The only stance I can pick will only be a personal preference. I can't assert that it is correct, nor accept that it is incorrect according to some universal rule (no matter how likely, heavily adopted or convenient) or pillar of video game design lore. I've enjoyed to many games that only just scratched the surface of RPG design andI've spent too much money on music that sounds like a brick being pulled across a parking lot for 25 minutes for that to be the case...and that music was being created long before I was ever born.
I suppose if your goal is to make money than yes patterns definitely emerge....but not so much when making an artistic statement.
I'm sure Robo Pit was a complete financial ass fucking...
so you can see that this is all gilded with my personal preference of generally unforgiving and obscure video games over polished ones.
My appreciation of complexity for the sake of complexity is proven a supported stance with the existence of Eve,the Campaign for North Africa, the Paradox Interactive back-catalogue....
You appreciation of streamlining the data displayed and delivered is proven true with...oh God....many titles, the evolution of the AD&D pen and paper rule-sets.......humanbehaviour....tetris....just countless examples everywhere.........
As far as wrapping your head around "why stats have to be muddied".
I don't believe you should be looking for a "have to be muddied";
you should be looking for a "could be muddied" and I sure you will find people who express "we like and sometimes even love when its muddied "
and once you have found that, and I'm sure you have long ago, you search is most likely over.
Why do you think that the amount of players who like that change small? Most player aren't spending 1000 hours on the game, they are spending 50 or 100. Those players will not want spreadsheets. There is no need for a long paragraph of argument. Just remember about the "silent majority", the ones you call "casual".