agency not determinism - how to trick a monkey

I'm listening to the recent interview with mark and jonathan on tavern talk and they're talking about the line between determinism and slot machines when crafting, how fine the line is, and how to ride it properly. Heres a little secret to how my brain works with regards to crafting.

GGG could nerf affixes and make the good ones rarer and make the tiers less likely to be good across the board, then add materials which buff the odds of a specific affix back to default rates and I would like it more than the current system.

Gambling can be fun and in my opinion the lack of determinism isn't the issue, the issue is a lack of influence. Ghazzy mentions this as "options", but more clearly we need to feel some degree of influence or agency. Let us work towards specific items even if its difficult. Even within gambling there are different kinds. There is a big difference between poker and a slot machine. You might be just as likely to lose money in poker, but its down to how you play it and the choices you make. slot machines don't have choices- this is my fundamental critique of the current state of crafting.

As is we're more passive participants in a craft than actual crafters ourselves. We're witnessing a craft play out as preordained by the rng gods. We need to be the ones crafting items, making the craft itself happen and controlling it. Even if that control doesn't give us the item we want, it should give us something different than if we made another choice. Unfortunately we don't even have choices now, but the important thing when more currencies are added is meaningful decisions when crafting, so an item isn't just crafting itself or "Identifying with extra steps" as some have said

From what I have seen, the mirror tier crafting is quite functional but of course absurdly expensive. Sadly they have completely gutted basic crafting and any form of beginner crafting.

Current crafting just seems like identifying items with extra steps. Being able to overwrite runes will help some at least tho. Most of the time I just want to add one determined mod to an item. I don't need crazy deterministic meta crafting

I also think the crafting can use more agency without getting anywhere close to full deterministic item editor status right now.

I think the ability to fail a craft is necessary but i think a series of lottery wins or your item is ruined (bricked) is not necessary either. Both are extremes I don't care for.

But its tricky; crafting can get too good, and scouring orbs and meta crafting bench in POE1 were a thing that murdered ground loot without question worsened the game. Influence bases buried the corpse 6 feet under and made giving a shit about ground loot into a newb trap.

Recombinators, on the other hand keep you caring about ground loot and give at least some chance to turn a brick into a win without it becoming an editor.

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I think the ability to fail a craft is necessary but i think a series of lottery wins or your item is ruined (bricked) is not necessary either. Both are extremes I don't care for.

But its tricky; crafting can get too good, and scouring orbs and meta crafting bench in POE1 were a thing that murdered ground loot without question worsened the game. Influence bases buried the corpse 6 feet under and made giving a shit about ground loot into a newb trap.

Yeah for sure. Personally I'm glad alts/scours are gone but I would like to feel like an item is different because I made it rather than ending up the same regardless. Ground loot is interesting and its hard to figure out the best ways to make it compete with crafting. personally i like drop only mods or tiers but thats not the only way to do it and its maybe not the best to rely on fully. I really hope they don't make crafting totally eclipse ground loot but rather allow us to enhance ground loot via crafting.

I think not having scours is part of the way to do this already since partially rolled items can be more important, but its hard when now white items are more valuable than mediocre rares, and people usually trash mid rares rather than try crafting them. I'm really curious to see how this plays out

crazy idea here:

crafting skill tree, you get XP the more orbs you use, then you have a bench with variety of tools which are affected by your crafting skills. heavy RNG, but you get to push your luck in some interesting ways without introducing bunch of orbs into the loot table

If I got Orbs of Annulment as much as Aug or Trans then the gambling aspect would be substantially more tolerable. I could blow a lot of currency on an item hoping to get the right mods/tiers.

We need PoE 1's map device mods (pay currency when you open a map to give it a league mechanic) and SCARABS.

Ideally the device mods would be the "more monsters and more loot" type stuff like Breach, Abyss, Beyond, etc. while scarabs would add mechanics that give you better crafting (Essence, Ritual, Harvest, Metamorph, Crucible, Delve, etc.)

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

crazy idea here:

crafting skill tree, you get XP the more orbs you use, then you have a bench with variety of tools which are affected by your crafting skills. heavy RNG, but you get to push your luck in some interesting ways without introducing bunch of orbs into the loot table

I like this idea. Shame they wont do it.

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Dmo90#6022 wrote:

Current crafting just seems like identifying items with extra steps. Being able to overwrite runes will help some at least tho. Most of the time I just want to add one determined mod to an item. I don't need crazy deterministic meta crafting

Yeah! Everytime they talk about the old crafting bench it sounds like they think it just let you build your own perfect item from scratch. Thats not true. It's never been true. You still need something good to start with.
In reality most people just used it to slap on one thing they really liked, or really needed onto an item.

Considering the changes to scouring and Chaos orbs, they could just put in that old crafting bench without much issue. And if they really needed to nerf the bench, just take out the meta crafting options.