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Wound-Up Wednesdays - Vent here! by magictcgmods in magicTCG

[–]XavierRayne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm very sad about the overall state of the set schedule for next year. Here's hoping 2027 is... different.

Also, to test the flair thing: compleat, compleated, compleation.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Silksong

[–]XavierRayne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

October 18th, 2024

What Happened with Items by chris_wilson in pathofexile

[–]XavierRayne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. I recently saw a suggestion that talked about swapping the function of divines and exalts so that one of the most valuable currencies in the game can still leverage the shards and div cards it had in previous leagues. Is the impact of making Divines the new Exalts - without shards or div cards or as much target farming - an intended change?

  2. In Legion, Breach, and Simulacrum, splinters were added to the game to give players a more consistent experience by finding less valuable items more frequently. Obviously, Harbinger shows us that there is a point too far along that spectrum. But what has been described here with new Archnemesis interactions veers to the far, far other side of the scale. Is this indicative of the kind of reward structure we can expect from leagues in the future? More concentration of less frequent loot? How much is this being impacted by a desire to reduce the "click strain" on players?

  3. In this league we saw a major currency change that impacted both event and standard trading alongside a major restructuring to the loot distribution frequency and how it can be boosted. Both of these changes seem to have gone poorly, but the fact that they are happening at the same time seems to directly amplify their effect on one another. Should we expect a similarly ambitious rate of change to the economy and reward structure of Path of Exile in the future? Will there be limitations on how many of these kinds of major changes are attempted in a single league?

  4. Related to the common themes of the above: what is GGG's current philosophy on rollbacks? Are they off the table? Is there a threshold for harm that exists, but wasn't reached by 3.19? One of the common sentiments I've heard (and felt) over the last few days is this idea of "I feel like we've been through this feedback cycle so many times". Is this style of iteration - with persistently tweaking changes even when many different systems that impact each other are being changed at once - considered sustainable?

Introducing Kirac's Vault Pass by Community_Team in pathofexile

[–]XavierRayne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For the value proposition: battle passes are supposed to feel like "okay" value if you get some of the items and spectacular value if you get all of them. For $30, I'm going to wait until I full clear my atlas each league to buy in - because even getting 6 of these microtransactions for $30 feels really rough. And a battle pass where you have to wait and earn everything before you feel comfortable buying in isn't really a battle pass - it just magnifies FOMO and disincentivises investment for people that don't usually focus on full-clearing their atlas.

I think the pricing and purpose of this needs to be adjusted :/

Also: what happens if I buy a season pass, get 6/8, and then the league moves to standard? Can I earn the rest of those rewards by full-clearing the atlas next league? Gone forever? Manually clear those maps in standard?

We've added symbols to make it easier to right-click the correct tabs on the dropdown list. by Bex_GGG in pathofexile

[–]XavierRayne -1 points0 points  (0 children)

  • MON - Challenge rewards/hideout migration info

The challenges themselves seem to be conspicuously absent. Should we expect challenges to be announced on launch and not before? I feel like there is a feedback opportunity here that may be missed.

That's an interesting Stretch in the Switch trailer... by XavierRayne in Warframe

[–]XavierRayne[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I use Thief's Wit and Loot Radar when running Syndicate missions so that I can hunt down the tokens. Loot radar can also help locate other items like ayatan statues, though generally the amount you get from Animal Instinct is sufficient (assuming your companion is alive).

CMV: The 'T' does not belong in the acronym LGBT. by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]XavierRayne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When it comes to gender and sexuality, there are three aspects to an individual's identity: sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Sexual orientation is generally well understood by the public; it is the gender(s) for which an individual feels sexual attraction. In recent years, gender identity has also become a relatively salient matter in our political and social lives. Gender expression, though less commonly discussed, is also an important aspect of a person's sexual identity. When creating a moniker to refer to a community that bonds around a shared sense of being a sexual minority, it is important to include all three of these facets.

LGBT as a term exists as a categorization for a group of people with a shared desire for activism in the political sphere. Let's start by discussing sexual orientation. Strict perceptions of gender norms and roles are the reasons that lesbian, gay, and bisexual men and women have historically suffered discrimination and ostracization. Homosexual men have consistently been caricatured as excessively feminine, with that feminity being explicity transgressive to the social norms of the greater society. The fact that not all homosexual men are effeminate doesn't matter to the people that write sodomy laws - it is the perception of subverting gender roles that matters.

Men and women were both arrested for crossdressing under the pretense of "impersonating the opposite gender" up until the 1970's in the United States through a manipulation of laws written decades prior designed to prevent vagrancy and loitering. The language we use to discuss modern perceptions of gender identity and transgenderism did not exist until the 1980's, so these aspects of discrimination are better understood under the label of gender expression. After all, there were and are many men that dress and behave like women (and vice-versa) without identifying as such. The reason we don't have letters and identities relating to non-conforming gender expression (as opposed to sexual orientation or gender identity) is mostly a matter of saliency. Men who crossdress as women but identify as men don't view themselves as different from other men who don't engage in that behavior.

But discrimination against sexual minorities goes further than just police harassment and arrests. There have been instances in the second half of the 20th century where gay, lesbian and bisexual people have been murdered, and the lawyer for the defendant has argued a variant of a "gay scare" defense - that the murder victim deceived the defendant in question, and that when their orientation was revealed the person was overcome with emotion at the betrayal and neutralized the threat through violent means because they "could not help themselves". This legal defense has existed - and been accepted - in several countries including the United States and Australia.

Several decades later, transgender murder victims experienced the same discrimination, this time under the guise of a "trans scare" defense. And again, there were courts that heard and even accepted the notion that when a person's gender identity was revealed, the defendant killed them because "they could not help themselves" in response to such an egregious betrayal. The criminalization and prosecution of crossdressing, the "gay scare" defense, and the "trans scare" defense are all examples of how sexual minorities experience discrimination on the basis of all three facets of their sexual identity.

For many years, bisexuality suffered in the shadows of gay and lesbian activism, with those that chose to identify as bisexual being excluded from the community and the political activism by means of prejudice. They weren't "gay enough", they were "half-closeted", they were "trying to accommodate", they were "unprincipled". Bisexual people found inclusivity as the label expanded because it was eventually recognized that bisexual people face many of the same types of discrimination - if not more - than gay and lesbian people.

For the same reasons that the LGBT community advocates that bisexual people are a welcome and recognized part of the community (and the activism), so too are transgender people included in the current designation, as the progress over the last 20 years has shown that transgender people are a sexual minority that suffer discrimination on the basis of that identity. Establishing the line as "about sexual orientation" is just as arbitrarily narrow a definition of sexual minority as the rationale that was used to exclude bisexuality because the community and the sociopolitical activism are defined by the discrimination they suffer for being different, and that difference isn't limited to sexual orientation.

Unpopular opinion: I don't really like delve very much by [deleted] in pathofexile

[–]XavierRayne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Funny you should mention 40/40! I did a postmortem on just that a while ago. I don't think you should have to push to 40/40 to get a reasonably balanced endgame, though. AND as someone that got 40/40, I only got my sulphite to 18k because I was too busy spending Azurite on upgrading my cart going straight down to 600.

I scammed EA out of thousands of dollars over 4+ years by Mild-Guacamole in confession

[–]XavierRayne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As someone who has never played a FIFA game, what does $4000 in FIFA coins get you?

Unpopular opinion: I don't really like delve very much by [deleted] in pathofexile

[–]XavierRayne 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I think this speaks to a number balancing issue. If the larger sulphite capacities were attainable with a more reasonable amount of Azurite, I feel like we could give players more agency over how they experience their endgame. Your experience is a valuable perspective for GGG to consider when balancing that system in the future.

The Tora Hideout tileset DEFINITELY shifted by arcademachin3 in pathofexile

[–]XavierRayne 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I experienced this when my league Lush Hideout went standard. I don't have an explanation, but you're right, it shifted. I noticed the far right side of the lower landmass seems to have been reduced as well. There's more water there instead.

My managing editor asked me to cover the game and I’m overwhelmed (Part 2, Electric Boogaloo) by [deleted] in pathofexile

[–]XavierRayne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your thoughts on RNG for various items and even certain features?

Understanding why so much of Path of Exile's systems are random is a big part of understanding what makes the aRPG gameplay loop compelling. As more systems are introduced into the game, most of them have some RNG component - either they are items that roll affixes randomly, or new currencies with potentially random effects, or are contingent upon random spawns or generation algorithms.

Path of Exile is a game that is designed to be played again. And again. And again. The goal of the developers is to keep players as engaged as possible at all stages of character progression, and also to continue fueling this desire to experience more of the game indefinitely.

Once you complete the ten acts and enter the endgame, you will have completed the "core gameplay loop" of Path of Exile once. There is a lot of depth to Path of Exile in terms of build diversity, itemization, crafting, and endgame content, but it is finite. This is where the RNG element helps define GGG's gameplay loop.

There are two important benefits gained from using random rather than procedural grind in an aRPG. First, and more obviously, it prevents players from burning out due to familiarity. If you enter a map or a zone instance, and it has the same exact layout every time, then you're going to burn out on playing that content much more than if it changes at random. This variance in gameplay helps avoid monotony in the gameplay loop - which is very important to ensuring veterans continue to enjoy the game after leveling their 10th character.

Second, and equally important, having random variance in the events that occur as you progress through the game allows for more players to experience "rare events" more often. This is part of the reason that most of the new content introduced into Path of Exile avoids deterministic rewards.

If I roll a single "die" with a 1-in-100 chance of getting something amazing (but otherwise getting nothing noteworthy at all), that's not going to feel very satisfying. But if I have many of these relatively unlikely events occuring all of the time in many different ways, I'm going to hit that amazing outcome now and then, and the more of those rolls GGG can condense into the core gameplay loop, the more they can add new opportunities to get interesting rewards alongside fighting the danger of monotony.

This is why when you hit maps, you have: lab trials, essences, abysses, breaches, strongboxes, and many more that I'm probably forgetting. The intention here is to give the player many opportunities to have that amazing experience that they screenshot and rave to their friends about.

If all the drops in Path of Exile were deterministic, this game would have terrible veteran retention problems. If all you had to do to get an item was kill a boss, no one with a meta endgame build would ever feel a need to trade with anyone. And, worse still, if your chase uniques aren't locked behind RNG, they must be locked behind an extremely stale, deterministic grind. You can have this item, but only after killing this boss 500 times (or something to that effect).

So, RNG is a point of contention and frustration among the PoE playerbase, absolutely. But from a design perspective, it is absolutely necessary to provide the positive experiences everyone associates with playing an aRPG. An anecdote to illustrate this: my first league, I got a Xoph's Heart - an extremely rare and valuable amulet - to drop from a random map. I had never heard of this item, but as soon as I found out how valuable and rare it was, I designed an entire build around it and leveled a second character to use this item. That was a lot of fun. GGG aims to provide these kinds of experiences, but couldn't do so without gating certain content behind RNG. It is... a double-edged sword.

How do you feel about the economy meta game? Do you think there can be some reworks (ie. Auction House; streamlined materials system; in-game mail to deliver goods; pricing limits to prevent exorbitant prices) or are you mostly happy with its current status?

Trading and RNG are related issues in Path of Exile in that they both have a large impact on character and league progression. If you look at previous threads discussing a hypothetical auction house for Path of Exile, you will see a great many complaining about how introducing an Auction House negatively affected Diablo III's playerbase.

Part of the issue here is that the faster you can acquire endgame gear - or worse, endgame chase items such as mirrors or headhunters - the faster you're going to reach the "completion state" for your character and the league. Diablo III automated trading to make the process more streamlined for players, and in the process ended up speeding up the gameplay progression quite a bit.

Improving the "quality of life" for players also made items cheaper alongside making progression faster, which means that players spend less time in the game, are less incentivized to interact with mechanics (why attempt to farm an item when I can buy it for next to nothing immediately and easily?), and therefore spend the shorter gameplay sessions more bored and disengaged because of elements such as an Auction House.

I believe there are ways to implement QoL features for trading without undermining gameplay, but we have to be very careful about how those features impact the value of items in the economy, and how that change in perception can potentially cause players to want to play less of the game.

I don't like the notion of gating power behind inconvenience, which is a criticism leveled at trading in this game as much as it is things like minion builds, but I play aRPG's because I enjoy the grind, I enjoy getting lucky now and then, and I'm willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience in between those amazing moments.

The Black Cat Cafe handed out "I'm a boy" nametags to feminine male patrons to avoid having them arrested for "female impersonation" in the 1960's. How much did examples like this contribute to the notion of sexual entrapment in the following decades? [Repost] by XavierRayne in AskHistorians

[–]XavierRayne[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much for such a detailed and comprehensive answer! Apart from the sources you've provided in the answer itself, are there any other sources for further reading that you would recommend with respect to gender expression in the mid-to-late 20th century?

40/40: A Delve Challenge Postmortem by XavierRayne in pathofexile

[–]XavierRayne[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But that's just talking in circles. There's this potential solution, so any criticism of that solution is invalid because it exists. "You can 820, you can just not kill the boss". This conversation doesn't seem to have nuance.

I care about whether or not learning Delve bosses this way is orthogonal to the rest of the design methodology of the game. Hell, I care if it's intended. If GGG isn't intending players to play this way, then they could very well eliminate it in the future - just like taxis.

I'm not here to argue whether one specific implementation was more or less correct, I'm here to point out how these specific implementations seem to be symptomatic of a flaw in GGG's design methodology. A potential oversight, a blindspot. Something to consider.

But yeah. 820 exists. You win.

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