I think questions that are unique to your experience are most valuable for this AMA, if only because no one else can realistically answer them. You have a lot of valuable input in other topics regarding issues in tech as a whole, but I think your time will be best spent regarding the specifics of your unique experiences such as being a whistleblower and international exploitation of social media to sway a population. I think people underestimate the severity of that exploitation and how hard it is to solve with tech.

Purpose can change too. They aren't a lost cause just because they are in a place that society considers bad or unhealthy.

Great question because I see this problem in Path of Exile constantly. You're essentially punished for playing multiplayer, unless you do it to the extreme with a six man party including an aurabot and a magic-find culler. That and some league mechanics just do not work well with multiplayer. Hopefully it's answered.

Hi Judd, thanks for hanging out this morning.

I'm sure you guys have played a fair bit of Path of Exile and perhaps you're even aware of the drama surrounding deterministic crafting in regards to Harvest. For anyone unfamiliar with the topic, basically you could run end-game zones and have a low chance of an event happening that provided random extremely powerful deterministic crafts. This was the primary way to incrementally craft a penultimate piece of gear stat by stat given enough time and people would sell their deterministic crafts to other players outside the game using a Discord community.

Obviously there's heavily deterministic crafting in Last Epoch and I personally think it feels better to have targeted agency in desired outcomes opposed to just severe RNG (Diablo 2 comes to mind for the latter). Even though it feels amazing when an almost perfect item drops for your build, having to grind for it for 100 hours with a stagnant feeling of progress until it drops doesn't feel super great.

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Actual Questions

1) How do you feel about deterministic crafting in terms of game philosophy in what's ultimately an RNG game genre?

2) Do you have any specific thoughts on the topic of people selling "unsanctioned services" in multiplayer (this was happening in POE with harvest and happens with other game systems as well) and is this a concern for your multiplayer implementation? Obviously the bazaar is a trading system, but if there's something desirable that's not itemized, people will set up communities around trading that commodity. Diablo had transmogs and boss-killing services etc. Are these kinds of things a threat to the vision you have for multiplayer trading?

As an aside, you also have the problem of loot fatigue in that the overwhelming majority of items that drop aren't even worth looking at. Loot filters are nice for that, although it is an interesting problem even with loot filters. Essentially if almost every item is being hidden anyway, what's the point in them dropping at all? It's kind of an interesting situation that I haven't really seen a super elegant solution to yet, but maybe the solution is loot filters. Anything else might require changing the core design philosophy. Is 100 items dropping on screen in a loot-based game what makes it fun, even if you wouldn't pick up a single one of those items because they are bad? I think we're at a point in ARPG history where we're iterating on predecessors and trying to balance that fun vs. utility situation. Like those items might as well just drop as crafting materials if that's their plight in the end anyway. Or maybe the power comes from the player having to make that determination whether it's worth their time to convert all of those items. It's a weird problem.

I'm just rambling at this point, thanks for doing an AMA.

I'm pretty sure Best is best upvote ratio or heavily upvoted while not being controversial. Top is most upvoted regardless of downvotes, hot doesn't apply to comments.