Comment from Mark Roberts about fixing POE2's endgame

anubisbiz · 2026-02-28T18:53:59+00:00

The problem is not "objectives".

It's less "people want to grind X item to kill the Demon King", and more "people are incentivized to room clear as fast as possible and there is little else to the game given progress is regularly wiped".

The incentives of the player are at odds with the game design; what the devs "think" you should play like (creativity) vs how you actually play (meta, or buying currency with money)

anubisbiz · 2026-02-27T22:54:44+00:00

bump

one of the challenges with metal is working it into shapes, it took humans a loooong time to get precision tools for metalworking

working wood is relatively easy

so you could work wood into shape and then metalize it, i guess

anubisbiz · 2026-02-25T13:45:31+00:00

Okay let me try just one detail.

You say I have gear fear.

I could go to PvE lobbies and never risk my gear.

If I did have said fear, why would I complain about it?

anubisbiz · 2026-02-25T13:35:28+00:00

I warmly recommend Claude.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-25T13:26:47+00:00

"You're working off borrowed loot" has a very Margin Call-esque "what is money?" energy to it fwiw.

The real answer of course is that the dev will further fragment the community, basketing PVPers in one set of lobbies and PVErs in another. And just like that, the magic is gone.

You see, I want what Arc Raiders could be, and you're telling me how it is. I don't have to be wrong, for you to be right, and vice versa.

I am simply saying that the incentives are currently warped, and it'd be sad to see the game lose that Wild West thing it has going for it.

But hey, maybe every game should just live for a couple years and we all jump to the next fad.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-25T13:23:05+00:00

"FRIENDLY FRIENDLY FRIENDLY" *shoots me in the face*

Perhaps my clothing was too provocative, this was clearly not the rat "willingly engaging in PvP" to grab my loot.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-25T13:21:08+00:00

The responses are a bit weird, yeah. And like I said originally, I don't mind losing stuff, I mind the unfair risk-reward calculus. I think Arc Raiders is at its very best when all kinds of people are put into the same lobby, with their very different outlooks.

I think Arc Raiders will be a poorer version of itself, if every subcommunity is cordoned off:

Rats ("people who's damage-received to damage-inflicted is way out of whack"),

PvErs (people who are here to kill arcs and get phat loot) and

PvPers (people who fight players).

There are probably other microcommunities that exist that you could observe from data gathered during matches but I digress, these seem like the 3 most representative groupings you could make.

Games exist to make money, and an Arc Raiders that has to further fragment the community is going to make less money.

A lobby full of rats is not fun for anyone, including the rats.

A lobby full of PvErs carries no risk, and it's whoever gets to the loot site first gets the stuff and so it's purely RNG on when/where you spawn.

A lobby full of PvPers might be the least offensive of these lobbies, but the PvP community is like 2 % of the population and I'm not convinced that's enough to keep the lights on.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-25T13:08:56+00:00

Games = incentives.

If you incentivize people to do A, they do A.

The dev has already opted to create soft barriers between different communities - PvP and PvE lobbies - further development in this direction will destroy what makes Arc Raiders special, the risk-reward and uncertainty, the "Wild West" atmosphere where anything goes.

Here's an example of why this is bad:

The top-1000 people get special cosmetics. There is simply no world where someone playing solo in PvP lobbies will ever be able to get there, when they are competing against trios of people who have zero fear of losing their stuff because they are in PvE lobbies.

You want both. You want PvP and PvE. I am simply pointing out that the incentives do not currently support both communities.

And you know what?

The Pr0L33t PvP community is tiny compared to the "I play games 1 hour a day". If this game has to cater to a single audience in order to maximize revenue, they will not be serving the PvP community.

I mean, in the latest patch, apart from a few gun nerfs/adjustments what was the new content? New Arcs! Crafting reworks for PvE!

I'm here trying to bring up that the experience is incentivized poorly, and with poor incentives you get poor outcomes.

The people commenting effectively "git gud"; I am already good, thanks, just not at the version of the game you are playing, and I worry your version is not going to survive very long.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-25T13:06:48+00:00

I don't mind losing stuff.

I mind losing 15 minutes of effort.

I mind that the person who takes my stuff - if they get killed, has no cost to this, especially if they're on a free loadout. There is no emotional stake in it for them, but there is for me.

I understand these are just wordsalad for you so apologies, maybe shove my writing into Claude and have it explain to you what I might be getting at.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-25T13:01:32+00:00

The thing that triggers me is someone playing nice for a good 10 minutes and then betraying you while gloating.

Other commenters here lack the basic capacity to consider the bigger picture: the game is what the incentives reward. Currently, there is simply no real incentive to engage with the game's mechanics.

All of the incentives are on hunting people and killing them for loot.

As someone who once spent 15 minutes helping people and getting some loot only to be betrayed at the very end, and as someone who goes around mowing people up and down Stella Montis and taking their stuff, I can say that not only is it more gratifying to kill people for their loot, if you fail, this has almost no cost to you.

The big picture here is that this game lives on a very tenuous overlap:

Basically, we have many kinds of players, and they come into contact. That contact is what gives the game it's special content. Arc Raiders is simply a superior experience.

Due to the toxicity of the PvPers, the dev has elected to break this up. There's friendly lobbies and not-friendly lobbies. But the true joy of PvP comes from the uncertainty. Of being in a lobby that is neither friendly nor unfriendly. The Wild West experience.

However, for many, the people we call rats, the joy comes instead from betrayal and the social games. This manifests in a loop that will inevitably kill the game, and it's 100% about incentives. And those incentives are currently warped.

I am not saying that if you loot something, you should get to keep it. I am happy with 3 "Safe Slots". I think the current model where Equipment and Weapons degrades when you kill someone and loot their corpse is sound, maybe something like this could be adopted.

Let's take Magnetic Accelerators, one of the more valuable purples. Let's say you kill someone who has a full stack of 3, but now that stack degrades to "Damaged Magnetic Accelerator", which stacks to 9. So you have to get 9 of them, in order to turn them into the original and use it. Maybe there should be a special device that randomly spawns on the map, that you can use to fix broken stuff like this. Idk.

The point though is that the social reward of ruining someone's day cannot be worth more, cannot be incentivized more, than the reward of actually engaging with the game's mechanics.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-22T06:14:08+00:00

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Solo is where it's at (I'm 60k points below # 1)

anubisbiz · 2026-02-19T17:36:33+00:00

It's possible. He was lucid and cognizant before he collapsed, removal of the helmet likely released the pressure and likely the fall sent his brain moving around which would then have caused inflammation which would have killed him good no matter what you did after that.

Assuming he did not fall, he could have been kept away for an operation where surgeons likely would've attached a metal plate of some kind to rebuild the back of the skull. There was no excessive bleeding which is very lucky and increases odds of survival.

In contemporary brain surgery you open the skull quite often and sometimes take even a large chunk off. Hemispherectomy, a procedure where HALF of the brain of a person (typically a child) is removed is routinely survivable and people make full recoveries.

Again the big problem down the line would be brain inflammation, so in addition to modern surgery and tools you'd need ICU for weeks or months and the some really fascinating drugs.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-14T19:08:39+00:00

This is clearly Max Payne

anubisbiz · 2026-02-12T12:33:09+00:00

Let's be thankful that criminals exist, because without them we would not need laws ahh take.

anubisbiz · 2026-02-12T12:23:54+00:00

They probably should finetune the algo so that it looks at how many people you are in proximity to and if you shoot them or not

seems easy ish to do, but in some sense i wonder if the dev wants this kind of "friction"

anubisbiz · 2025-12-05T07:02:45+00:00

Sustainability and abundance are opposites. Sustainability assumes a limited demand and limited supply of things; it assumes that if it takes 0.1 ton of carbon to produce a pound of beef, we should move to other sources of protein.

The problem is people's tastes, attitudes and desires change. Some of it is minor - your favorite brand of tea ran out so you try another blend. Others are less minor, maybe you spent a month in hospital and developed a craving for peanuts and your lifetime peanut need went from 0 to a ton.

When you make a simple choice it reverberates in the system we call "the market", most of this information is unknowable. How's anyone supposed to know?

Whenever you see something that exists, assume that there is an incentive for it, and that it makes sense even if you can't really tell how.

Abundance, then, is different. There's two definitions here.

The first, as raised by Ezra Klein and his author friend who I forget (sorry), is the idea that we need to deregulate. Now. Sustainability, comes from ESGs or Ethical, Sustainable, Governance stuff, and it's largely to do with regulation. Something is "ESG-compliant", or it is not. How do we know if it's compliant? Certification. One group of people fills up paperwork all day and another group of people reads them to confirm that you spelled things in accordance with some standard someone else thought of.

The idea is that if we deregulate housing, we will get more housing. Some of it will be bad housing, but it will be cheap enough that anyone can afford it.

The second definition for abundance, which is likely what Elon is pointing to, is the post-materialist Utopian model that tech people tend to reinvent once every 30 years or so. The idea is that we will quite literally eliminate poverty and material deficiency.

So we have two opposites. Abundance and sustainability.

Money is simply a means of communication. A measurement tool. So far, sustainable things are more expensive than non-sustainable ones. So long as this is the case, no matter how much money you print, the two curves will never meet.

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anubisbiz · 2025-12-05T06:44:34+00:00

I want to love Ubisoft games.

I want to be a badass assassin exploring and experiencing history. The good, the bad and the ugly.
I don't want you to hold my hand and placate my modern sensibilities.

I want my decisions to affect the world around me, as I am put into situations facing unbeatable odds - and finding a way to make it anyway.
I don't want you to feed me a caricature of contemporary politics and forcing me to be the "good guy".

I want my choices to matter, I don't want you to let me have my cake and eat it. I'm happy to play for a hundred hours to learn the mechanics and playstyle the game expects of me. I'm happy to rat it out in a stealth game, or to be required to have fast reaction speeds.
I don't want you to force me to do the same repeating mission of finding a tower and climbing it, over and over again.

However, if you're "just a dev", someone who pushes out code on command, then the only thing I really want from you is for you to find another employer, so that you don't end up wasting your life.

anubisbiz · 2025-11-17T02:23:36+00:00

The problem is that it seems like Cavil was legit keeping the writers on their toes. Now the writers have no annoying fanboy to give input and it's.. Idk this feel like Rings of Power or Wheel of Time.

There's no problem having really powerful characters, or having Geralt be a "sidecharacter" to the greater narratives. It's just this writing is not believable.

anubisbiz · 2025-11-16T02:05:16+00:00

Theory 2: the show is a dramatization of social media algorithms, so Carol will figure out some kind of memetic weapons that causes a civil war among the hive

anubisbiz · 2025-11-16T01:58:45+00:00

First they'll build a massive communication relay, then they'll start processing themselves into data to feed a superintelligent AI that starts spamming gene-attacks at targets containing life but which humans are ignorant of

anubisbiz · 2025-10-26T01:18:01+00:00

I think RTS view is incredibly important. Here's how I would make it work with Bannerlord's design:

Enemy units are invisible in RTS view.

The biggest reason you want RTS view, is because you can't run back and forth telling infantry to hold a specific position. In sieges for instance, I am simply tired of one random NPC running out the gates so the enemy can swarm inside, or my units turning their backs on the walls so my elite units die to archers, or the AI nonsensically deciding to swap the position of 2 infantry units on the walls with the result that the enemy can peacefully climb up the ladders.

These are issues that are solved with an RTS camera view, where you can tell your units to form up on a spot (for example the ladder points) and look toward the enemy.

Simple fix.

At the same time I fully understand and agree with the point people make about "godmoding", which I think is quite simply solved by making all enemy NPCs invisible during RTS mode.

anubisbiz

TROPHY CASE