Mirror of Kalandra

imo says something about loot hunt games. at the heart of it you kill a monster, get xp and items as a reward, those make you stronger so you can then kill a more difficult monster. theres a loop there and it continuing requires that theres always a better item and a more difficult monster.


it becomes a problem if content is too rewarding or not rewarding enough, because doing a thing is competing for your time with doing something else. if it takes me 10 mins and 4 deaths to kill a hard boss but i get 5x more loot from just running a normal map deathless in 2 minutes then i might run it once just for the feeling of accomplishment that ive done it, but im not gonna farm that boss.

built into the game is a sense of efficiency. if i take this passive it makes me 5% more powerful, that passive does nothing for me and this other one i become 10% more powerful. so the game sets up a condition where you can be good/ok/bad at the game. with getting loot its similar, if one activity yields more loot per hour than another then its a mastery behaviour of sorts to work that out and farm the better rewarding content. the game sets up goals of getting the most power out of your character, getting the most loot out of your hour. working out the most rewarding option.

so if a bit of content isnt rewarding enough you dont have a reason to farm it. if a bit of content is too rewarding thats also a problem because then its bribing you to play that content even if you dont want to for the same reason. i spent all this league smashing abyss in trash maps because it was stupidly rewarding compared to any other activity. that renders other content irrelevant because is just bribing me to do this one activity.






im not sure you can really get away from this in this genre of games, its built into the fabric of the concept, or at least certainly when you go beyond a narrative campaign playthrough and into this wider community centred endgame farming thing, which i guess is like this genres equiv of adding the mmo prefix.






i think its important to the game to have items that are desirable and different ways to play. i dont like racing the campaign with a boss killer to be first in the league to beat it and market its drops, that doesnt interest me. but some people really dig that and it gives a different way to play the game. i have no interest is being the guy mass rolling sextants or crafting mirror items or doing 5 way carries or having my name in lights for first delve to X depth. but these are all little win conditions the game has set up, different people are doing all of these and feeling like theyve achieved their goals and won their own little game within the game.

i have been the guy who crafts jewels on a number of occasions and made what for me felt like a good amount of currency doing so.






so having to kill a boss that is both hard to access and hard to kill to get an item instils that item with an increased value and provides new way to play and master the game. i feel like an arpgs success rests on this, on finding a way to make its items feel valuable, its content feel rewarding and having a diversity of activities so that a wide player base all have a reason to do the thing they find more fun, be that mapping, bossing, crafting, trading. they all feed into each other, if your items dont feel valuable then the motivation to play the content or to trade them or craft them is lost, its all tied together.

i think this is what chris means when he talks about you want people to be able to trade, you dont necessarily want them to actually trade and it might be that they would have more fun if they didnt, but the ability to trade and the communal sense of value in items that brings is essential to the foundational motivations of playing the game for a large chunk of the player base, including a lot of people who dont trade.





i do agree stuff has to feel fun to play tho, tht has to be a factor too.

What if just mirrors are more common ?
So rmt is less worth it for those ppl, and more people can be happy bcs they can finally push their build on min max gigachad level ?

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LVagabond wrote:

What if just mirrors are more common ?
So rmt is less worth it for those ppl, and more people can be happy bcs they can finally push their build on min max gigachad level ?

people would ask for a higher mirror fee in return to get back the lose for more common mirrors.
Reworking the item entirely or removing it would fix the entire problem and also encourage players that want to min-max to craft items themselves rather than just duplicating an entire set.

The issue I have with this area of the game; the so called "high end crafting" is that it is just brute forcing random chance meta-gaming.

In other words it has got nothing much to do with a gameplay loop of killing monsters and being excited about their loot and everything to do with an item editor with dice rolling until you get the dice roll you want or start over.

In fact this system existing actively makes the ground loot less important and massively lowers the excitement for ground loot by raising the bar of what an "amazing item" actually looks like to well beyond anything almost ANYONE will ever drop while PLAYING.

Item editing with dice rolls bares as much resemblance to an action RPG's gameplay as the Dungeon Master of a D&D campaign rolling random loot to put in a random encounter. Its gameplay adjacent sure but its not ARPG gameplay.

Almost no one will ever drop a mirror worthy item not even close, because of course GGG has to make such drops nearly impossible due to the above item editing meta-game.

So its a damn shame that basically no POE player should ever HOPE let alone expect to find a top tier item in the course of PLAYING THE ACTUAL GAME.

Thats a direct consequence of having a non gameplay item editing mini-meta-game that a few hundred people almost entirely RMT'ers ever interact with.

And so I have to conclude that this system existing is actually just detrimental to the game. Any theoretical "aspirational item" carrot on a stick is vastly outweighed by the permanent reduction in excitement for ground loot from actually playing.

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alhazred70 wrote:

Thats a direct consequence of having a non gameplay item editing mini-meta-game that a few hundred people almost entirely RMT'ers ever interact with.

i would start off by saying i agree with almost everything you just said, couple of little things id debate but generally yeah to all that.


i dont think its a few 100 people, i think its 10,000s of people crafting and mirroring really high end gear.

everyone uses currency to craft gear tho, from throwing a transmute on a flask through to spending 50 mirrors making the leagues best bow its all using the orb system. i think rng has to be in there, otherwise its just buying something, it trade its not a craft. i think theres enough knowledge of systems required to craft higher end items that it does qualify as requiring a level of skill, depending on how you want to define that word, certainly a significant knowledge base.

for instance theres plenty of room for people to craft things and then sell them for profit, and im not talking about mirrored synth weapons i mean you can craft something using even something as simple as alterations and sell it for profit consistently because you know how to do something a significant amount of players dont know or dont want to bother doing.

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alhazred70 wrote:

And so I have to conclude that this system existing is actually just detrimental to the game. Any theoretical "aspirational item" carrot on a stick is vastly outweighed by the permanent reduction in excitement for ground loot from actually playing.

i have mixed feelings about that. personally i like that its there, for me its not a net negative.

but yeah, i get what you are saying and its perfectly reasonable for people to think it is.

it could be better, a lot better. what we see in path of exile 2 is a move to what you are talking about, the crafting is tied to looting. its still there but most of the time youll be starting with a found rare item and trying to improve it, which is really rare right now.




i think the system has served poe1 well, arguably the best item and crafting system ever in an arpg. it has flaws that i think a game like LE somewhat solves. so much is built around it by this point i just think it should be left as it is. it works, so much is built around it.

i dont think theres a problem with the current system in poe1 that needs fixed. i think poe2 is there to give us these redesigns that follow a different philosophy. poe1 crafting is largely fine, people making mirror items and people mirroring them is fine. its an ecosystem that many people are enjoying and weve got 11 years of designing a game around it. the whole point of poe2 being a separate game is not redesigning the entire game like that.



if you remove that i dont think you change dropped rares to be better. you leave them as they are because its good to have the potential for wild swings in power. as said its a perception thing, the bar of what amazing means.

I think if the numbers were that high we would see hundreds of thousands of mirror items per league. Given lets say 10 mirror item brute force successes per person thats 100k mirror shop items.

I see the most heavilly invested players (streamers) and only a tiny fraction of them ever mirror craft so its a fraction of a tiny fraction.

You don't even see CuteDog or Baylor or other typical "ultra sweaty clear speed" guys doing it.

And "profit crafters" like Ghazzy only rarely make mirror shop items (at least thats my perception I don't watch him).

But I certainly can't prove any numbers its just my feeling on the matter. I'm sure many try and fail though, when you start spamming thousands of high currency on things and brick them multiple times... most people are going to nope out at some stage of "bad luck" (AKA mean average luck).

Anyway I agree its probably too late in the POE game for them to change and I'm not sure they would even agree.

A huge motivating factor of POE's development was them wanting $700 Ebay Bow like item valuation. Or weight like D2 had. It might be the best way to make the most extreme item weighting you can possibly make and that was their goal. That goal has obviously alwayts been more important that having the heaviest possible weighting to the gameplay loop.

I personally would contend that the best ARPG you can make would ALWAYS have the best possible items be more likely as a DROP from a monster and not a 100% deterministic "with enough currency" brute forcing.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

i dont think its a few 100 people, i think its 10,000s of people crafting and mirroring really high end gear.

Being nitpicky here....we know this isn't true because of the data we have. It's much closer to 100s, and possibly even LESS than 100s. The highest PEAK number of players ever in a PoE league is about 200k. Realistically, there are maybe half that number or 1/4 of that number that continue playing past the first few days. Now lets take the data GGG has provided us (less than 10% of players ever make to to maps), and then we need to take into account that only the people who actually know what they are doing, rmt or not, are the ones crafting.....AND THEN lets also take as truth all that research and web creating surrounding tft.....and we can glean that the number of top mirror-tier crafters is only a VERY VERY VERY select group of players.

Even a simple search of all mirror+ rare gear available on the trade site shows that maybe the same 10 people account for 90+% of all mirror-able items. Jenebu (and ostensibly, his crew) amount for probably 75% or more of all mirror-tier items on their own.

It is SOMEWHAT speculation, but I think it is an incredibly realistic way to look at the crafting environment since we have so much data around these items actually available for us to analyze. And like Hazred said, if it was in the 10s of thousands.....there would be a LOT more mirror items on the market and probably the entire economy surrounding them would collapse due to too much supply.

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alhazred70 wrote:

I think if the numbers were that high we would see hundreds of thousands of mirror items per league. Given lets say 10 mirror item brute force successes per person thats 100k mirror shop items.

oh, i mean im including the people who mirror the items or craft almost perfect stuff. theres only so many item slots people would bother actually mirroring so you can have the best ele bow and the best phys bow for example. maybe theres a best dps one and then another that has explody on the synth implicit and that means theres 3 up for mirroring. people will make more top tier bows than that but one will be 2% better than another and that will be the only one actually 'mirror worthy'.

but at the same time maybe 100 people will craft their own using the same methods and get something almost as good and a few 1000 bows and quivers will be mirrored during a cycle.




i crafted these gloves for a build recently



theyre 4x T1 mods, 1x T2 with an open mod for bench. if the t2 hybrid es had been t1 they would have been perfect all T1 item with the exact stats i wanted. but something like this would never be mirrored now cause it cost me way less than a mirror to craft them. but im using the same methods and essentially making an item thats almost perfect. im sure theres 10,0000s of people making items like this all the time, whats the chances of dropping a T2 off perfect pair of gloves? even tho these items would never be mirrored theyre still in that area of nearly perfect in a game where finding something nearly perfect is essentially impossible.





people are complaining atm about the veiled chaos going, how its gonna hurt crafting boots, but the eldritch annul/chaos/exalt type stuff we have now with fractured items dropping like candy... what more do people really want? crafting rare armour is so accessible now and i feel like theyre not seeing the flip side which is what you are talking about now, how the easier it is to craft the more you screw item drops.

i hope ggg just doesnt bend, theyve kept giving crafters a ton of power and it seems like a 1 way street when it comes to appreciating that.

If there were 10s of thousands of players crafting or otherwise buying mirror-tier or even near-mirror gear.........the numbers of players who have beaten the game and beaten pinnacle bosses would be MUCH MUCH higher than they are.

What was the latest numbers released? Less than 3% of players have beaten the Shaper?

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jsuslak313 wrote:

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

i dont think its a few 100 people, i think its 10,000s of people crafting and mirroring really high end gear.

Being nitpicky here....we know this isn't true because of the data we have. It's much closer to 100s, and possibly even LESS than 100s. The highest PEAK number of players ever in a PoE league is about 200k. Realistically, there are maybe half that number or 1/4 of that number that continue playing past the first few days. Now lets take the data GGG has provided us (less than 10% of players ever make to to maps), and then we need to take into account that only the people who actually know what they are doing, rmt or not, are the ones crafting.....AND THEN lets also take as truth all that research and web creating surrounding tft.....and we can glean that the number of top mirror-tier crafters is only a VERY VERY VERY select group of players.

Even a simple search of all mirror+ rare gear available on the trade site shows that maybe the same 10 people account for 90+% of all mirror-able items. Jenebu (and ostensibly, his crew) amount for probably 75% or more of all mirror-tier items on their own.

im talking about people 'interacting' with the system, i meant people making perfect or near perfect items and people who then mirror and use those items.


peak players is just people online at once, theres multiple millions of people playing each league. i dont think the numbers really drop off that fast either they just stop playing at the same time.

im fairly sure belton made over 1000 mirrored copies of his bow from crucible, thats just 1 item, it wasnt even the only bow getting mirrored there were multiple bows and thats just 1 build type. there were attack wands, spell wands/sceptres, all sorts of caster rings, 12 link weapons for squire. im fairly confident that 1000s of mirror copies are made of items every league.