[POE] Hardcore

Time for some ARPG shenanigans.

I've been playing Path of Exile.

Its probably the best game I've picked up in a years. I could write pages and pages on why I love this game. The races. The skill trees. The complexity. But this blog is about being a video game data nerd, not persuading others to play awesome games. So instead: a video.

Great, now that everyone is playing, here comes the data.

Like most ARPGs, Path of Exile has a hardcore league. A single death kicks you out of the league, and into default. Since staying alive gets comically difficult, the hardcore league is super competitive. Players speculate on the best builds, watch the top characters, and get global announcements when a top 25 player dies. They debate whether duelists are viable, marauders overpowered, witches death-prone...

Of course, the best way to answer these arguments would be to track the progress of characters through hardcore, recording when they die, how quickly they gain experience, and whether class choice matters.

Fortunately, the PoE website lists the top 15000 characters in the hardcore league. By periodically recording this information, I can get a timeline of characters, as the league progresses.

Classy Breakdowns
Here is the breakdown of default and hardcore characters, by class:

While witches are the most second-most popular option on default, they're the second-least-popular class in the hardcore league. Hardcore is dominated by Templars, Marauders, and Rangers. Duelists, who have the weakest starting position, are the least popular class in both leagues. (They've recently been buffed, though.)

But why are there differences between the two leagues?  Is hardcore just harder for some classes? Are witches just too squishy? Or do players just prefer some classes over others?

Changing Classes
Minimally, if hardcore was harder for some classes, you'd expect to see dramatic changes in the proportions of each class over time.  So, if witches were really weak, at the start of the league there would be a ton of witches, they'd die, and the result would be fewer witches over time.

Here is the distribution of classes over the past month.

Over the past month, there have been small changes in the class distribution of players. Witches have increased their share, while duelists have steadily declined. Marauders have fallen in popularity, only to rise again. Rangers and templars have remained remarkably stable at the top.

Overall, though, class proportions have remained fairly stable. This suggests that whatever imbalances exist, they are small, and being amplified via player choices.

The Final Death
Another way to look at difficulty across classes is via deaths.  If POE is harder on some classes, then those classes should die more. In particular, if a class is harder in the mid or late-game, then there should be relatively more deaths for those classes at the higher levels.

Here, I'm looking at the average chance a character dies for every 15 minutes that they're online, by level and class.

Overall, gameplay becomes less lethal as characters level up. Characters in the 60s are less likely to die (per minutes played) than characters in the 40s.

While *slight* differences exist between the classes (witches die more frequently than rangers, for example), they're relatively small, and not large enough to explain overall class divisions on their own.

There are, of course, other ways to look at differences between classes: experience gains, survival analysis, etc... but for the moment, I need to keep leveling in merciless difficulty. =D

[GW2] Crafting Update - January

Time for another monthly update on the cost of legendary items in GW2. (First post here, update here).

Prices have steadily risen since my last look at the end of December.  From December 29 to Jan 29th the average cost of crafting a legendary has risen by 170 gold, or just over 5.5 gold per day.

Breaking down legendary weapons by type, I was surprised to find that the ranged weapons (Dreamer, Kudzu, and Predator) have risen in cost faster than the other legendaries, averaging a 240g increase over the past month.  Visually, here is the rise in cost of each legendary weapon, excluding vendor materials:

Breaking down legendary weapons by their components, its still clear that - for most legendaries - the precursor is the predominant cost.

This is particularly unfortunate, given news that the precursor scavenger hunt would not be in the Jan/Feb/March update.

Looking across all legendary items, the relatively steady prices across the end of December were driven by a decline in the cost of most components offsetting a rise in the cost of Globs of Ectoplasm. Since then, while the price of globs has fallen, the cost of all other components has steadily risen, leading to an overall surge in prices each week.

Happy hunting!

If you have any other questions, leave a note in the comments / send an email, I'll see what I can find.

[GW2] Crafting Update

Its been a month since I wrote about hitting GW2's legendary wall.

Since then, I've continued to track the materials* cost of crafting a legendary weapon using price data from GW2spidy. As I noted in an earlier post, the cost of crafting a legendary rose by an average 9 gold per day in November. In December, while some legendaries rose in cost (Sunrise / Twilight cost another 200g), for others, the price held steady (Quip continues to cost around 600g to craft).

Breaking cost down by component, the difference seems to be the cost of precursors.

For each legendary, the components required to make the gifts have either stabilized or dropped in price (potentially due to ANet increasing the drop rates on many fine crafting materials). However, the precursor weapons have continued to rise in price, continuing to push legendary weapon costs higher.

Still a bit beyond my price range / interest.

Crafting
I've also continued to track the cost of following crafting guides, broken down by fine materials and the other gathered components.

Using GW2wiz's guides, the price of leveling professions decreased during the first two weeks of December, and then increased over the last two, ending the month at the same cost it started. Most of the change comes from the cost of fine crafting materials.

Of course, I probably shouldn't be using GW2wiz.

I put this into an update on the last post - but just to be clear - ErrantQuest's crafting guides are slightly less expensive to follow. Redditor Xanthic has a dynamic cooking guide that searches for the cheapest way to level the profession (again, much cheaper than the outdated guides).



*I'm omitting the vendor cost of a legendary, some 120g in materials.

[GW2] Crafting Cost

Crafting Costs: Even Scarier Behemoths

EDIT:  Update 1/2 - instead of using GW2wiz, take a look at ErrantQuest for crafting guides.  Much cheaper.  For cooking, Xanthic has a dynamic cooking guide (always chooses the cheapest route).

One of my favorite features in GW2 is the ability to level a new alt entirely via crafting.  Since each crafting discipline gives around 10 levels of experience, it is possible to level a character to 80 by advancing through each crafting profession. Leveling a new alt takes hours, not days.

In the early days of the game, this was fairly inexpensive. Alternating between crafting, story quests, and hunting down skill points, I was able to level 4 alts to level 80 for about a gold per crafting discipline. Recently, I've become interested in leveling another character via crafting, but wondered how crafting costs have changed since the early weeks.

To track the cost of crafting, I used crafting shopping lists from GW2 wiz and price data from GW2 spidy.

Here is the cost of each crafting discipline over the past few weeks:

Armorsmith, leatherworking, and tailoring have all dramatically increased in price over the past few weeks (and are much more expensive than I'd remembered!).  Breaking down each craft by materials cost, the culprit appears to be the fine (blue-quality) crafting materials:

While gatherable components (metal, leather, cloth) have held steady in cost, fine materials (scales, totems, blood,...) have risen at an alarming rate.

The rise in crafting costs is distributed fairly evenly across all tiers of materials, though Tier 5 goods have increased in price more rapidly than Tiers 1-4.

For the curious, over the past week, here are the average prices of leveling each crafting discipline:

armorsmith   artificer    huntsman     jeweler 
       7.80        8.69        9.30        7.59 
    leather      tailor weaponsmith 
       7.23        8.65       10.06 

This leaves cooking as the cheapest craft to level (estimated at 1g!), followed by leatherworking, jewelry  and armorsmithing.

Personally, it looks like I'll be leveling any new alts the old-fashioned way!

[GW2] Precursor Cost

I've hit "a Legendary wall".

Like many other players, I've hit the point where I'm interested in obtaining a legendary. Even my alts have exotic gear and ideal runes. What is left for the Tyrian with everything? A pistol that shoots fireworks.

Problem is, the cost of obtaining a legendary is rising faster than most players can obtain gold.

I tracked the cost of 6 legendary weapons over the past month, using price data from gw2spidy:

While I've been watching the price, the cost of obtaining a legendary has nearly doubled. Quip has risen from 300 gold (Nov 1) to over 600 gold (Dec 2). The legendary greatswords (Twilight and Sunrise) have risen in cost by over 400 gold over the same time period.* On average, the price of crafting a legendary has increased by 9 gold every day.

Even worse... with the Lost Shores patch, many of the items necessary to craft a legendary are also used to make Ascended gear (to gain agony resist in Fractals of the Mist). This has further increased the demand for those items... and therefore the price of a legendary. For example, the cost of obtaining Twilight has risen 19 gold per day since the Lost Shores patch, compared to 6.5 gold/day pre patch.

          before  after 
 bifrost  4.38    13.94 
 bolt     3.30    16.08 
 quip     8.35    10.17
 rogdort  9.89     9.58 
 sunrise  3.08    18.51
 twilight 6.48    18.99 

 In other words, with ascended gear driving up the demand for crafting materials, I need to make even more per day just to not lose progress.

What to do?

Purchasing items (instead of saving gold) is one way to reduce the problem of rampant inflation. (Its the gaming equivalent of hoarding goods.) But how much do I need to spend each day to make progress toward a legendary (instead of falling relatively behind)?

To check this, I simulated the results of perfectly predicting future prices and planning spending accordingly.

At 2 gold / day, I was an average of 272 days from each kind of legendary at the start of the month. At the end of a month of farming, I was 295 days from a legendary. At 3 gold / day, I only made 6 days of progress toward a legendary over the whole month.

Due to price inflation, players need to earn and spend at least 5 gold per day to make a month of progress after a month of farming.

Sad times indeed

The irony of this is that ascended gear was meant to "bridge the gap" between exotics and legendary items, providing intermediate-term progression goals for players dedicated to GW2.  Instead, its setting those players further back on long-term goals.

ArenaNet has promised changes to the process of making a legendary. Hopefully, they do more than just change the way precursors are obtained, and overhaul the entire system.

*And this rise is despite the drop in precursor cost around Nov 18 from the Lost Shores final event (with its chance to give a precursor from the final chest).

[GW2] Precursor Gambling

I feel for this guy.

On its own, a random number generator is not fair, moral, or kind. It is just random.

Which is probably why RNG makes for such terrible gameplay.

Much of GW2's endgame* focuses on the hunt for cosmetic improvements - legendary items with no stat bonus, but unique skins / animations. To keep these items rare, the precursor weapons to legendary items are low-chance results from mystic forge gambling.

Using mystic forge gambling to obtain precursors is a controversial mechanic (at best). The forums drama has been fairly intense. Fortunately, Arena Net heard the complaints and has some (unfortunately vague) plans to make obtaining a precursor both fun and legendary.
UPDATE [11/15]: So far, they haven't provided an alternative path to get a precursor, just 'slightly increased the drop rate'.  Booo.

But before the system is thrown into the dustbin of poor implementation, I wanted to take a moment and examine one reason why using RNG to gate progression is a terrible idea: the distribution of cost.

Luck and Cost

Some players get a precursor on their attempt... while others throw thousands of items into the forge with no result. I want to visualize that difference.

From the last post, I have a reasonable expectation that four rare items have a 20% chance of returning an exotic. I'm going to guess that this exotic has either a 1%, 1.3%, 2% or 4% chance of being a precursor. And I'll check three different ways of getting precursors:

• Plan 1: crafting rares, selling all exotic outcomes until a precursor is found
• Plan 2: crafting rares, reforging all non-precursor exotics
• Plan 3: crafting exotics, reforging all non-precursor exotics

Under these conditions, here is the estimated (average) cost of mystic forge gambling (in gold), using greatswords as a baseline, broken down the the chance for an exotic to be the precursor.**

1% 1.3% 2% 4%
Plan 1: 210.83 150.80 101.67 51.83
Plan 2: 278.88 210.91 141.47 71.36 
Plan 3: 693.11 524.63 346.16 174.87

These averages are (generally) reasonable. Under these assumptions, even at a 1% chance, a precursor is around a 200g investment, making it expensive, but attainable.

There are two things to note.

1. Crafting exotics to obtain a precursor is three times as expensive as crafting rares. This doesn't necessarily mean that using exotics to obtain precursors is a bad idea. They might have 3x the chance of yielding precursors - its just that nobody has the data to find out. Fortunately, in terms of puzzling out why luck is a bad way to gate progression, this doesn't matter, so I'll focus on plan 1 & 2 from this point on.
2. Given the current price of precursors... either the precursors are much rarer than I've assumed, or using the mystic forge may be profitable even at current prices.***

Luck and Extreme Outcomes

Average cost isn't the issue. Its the distribution of cost that is the problem.

And that is where luck hurts players.

Here, I've simulated the results of 5000 players using plan 1 to obtain a precursor from the mystic forge, varying the chance that an exotic is a precursor. I've plotted how much the luckiest 10% of players pay for a precursor by gambling, the unluckiest 10%, and two measures of the average player (mean and median).

As precursors become harder to obtain (moving to the left), the average cost of creating a precursor for the unluckiest 10% of players grows exponentially. For example, if an exotic has a 1% chance to be a precursor from the mystic forge, the unluckiest 10% spend an average of just over 800 gold to get a precursor, compared to around 200g for the average player.

And that is the problem with RNG: extreme outcomes.

Extremes are great if you're lucky, but horrible for the person throwing gold away.

A simple fix would be to institute a progressively increasing drop chance once a threshold has been exceeded. Great way to fix the discouraging luck issue.

Legendary design

There are better ways to design legendary journeys.

Both Shadowmourne and the Fangs of the Father questlines were fun, and helped add to the status of the item forged. Shadowmourne's components: reforged weapon of the biggest evil in the world, hardened with the pure blood of an old god, drenched in the souls of the enemy, and decorated with fragments of the throne of evil.

Randomly throwing weapons at a genie just can't compete with that. (And the player-invented lore behind legendaries is a reflection of that.)

The problem with RNG is that players don't earn the item. Which cheapens it. And it cheapens the journey. Because there is no journey, just a slot machine. Imagine Arthur winning Excalibur at a casino. Not epic.

It isn't fun from moment to moment. Its preparing to have fun.



* Stuff-to-do at 80.
** The choice of greatswords here doesn't shape the cost much - while the TP cost of precursors varies wildly, most weapons have approximately the same crafting cost. I'm also assuming that exotics are sold to market in Plan 1 for 1g.
*** Of course, if they're rarer, then some of the cheaper precursors are tremendous losses.

[GW2] Demystifying the Mystic Forge

As it turns out, the mystic forge is actually the genie Zommoros. Strange new lifeform? Time for the asura to get investigating.*

The mystic forge serves three purposes:

1. Crafting via recipes. Placing specific combinations of items into the forge will yield a guaranteed result. This includes mystic weapons, some of the coolest exotic skins in-game, and legendaries. Unfortunately, Zommoros doesn't list recipes for the forge. They have to be discovered / looked-up on third-party websites (the wiki).
2. Upgrades of materials. Common, fine, and rare crafting materials can be promoted into a smaller number of higher tier materials [source].
3. Gambling. Placing four items into the mystic forge (of the same quality) will give one higher-level item, with chance to improve its rarity.

Fortunately, developer posts have noted that the mystic forge isn't affected by either diminishing returns or magic find. This makes examining these mechanics considerably easier.

I fed 2400 weapons into Zommoros to test out gambling, he gave me the data here.

Level Up!

Placing four items into the mystic forge will yield a higher-level item. How many levels higher?

On average**, the resulting items were 7 levels higher than the input items.

The forge seems to use average item level for determining upgrades. Four same-level (even identical items) had the same average level upgrade as four items of various levels, but the same average item level.

The pattern is the same regardless of input item rarity or level (usual stats-nerds tests applied).

Quality Nice.

Both comments on reddit and the GW2 wiki list a roughly 20% chance of upgrading rarity using the mystic forge. Sounds testable.

While four greens have an approximately 20% chance of yielding yellows, four blues have a 33% chance of yielding a green. (Usual stat nerd tests applied.) While they're included in the plot, since there are no yellow weapons below level 30, green weapons below level 20 have no observed chance of becoming yellow-quality weapons. I therefore excluded them from this analysis.

Take the increased chance of upgrades from blues with a grain of salt. While it is exceptionally unlikely I observed this difference from chance alone, most sources list the 20% upgrade rate as gospel.

Note: the drop-off in level 70+ greens is simply because I didn't record much data there. (Its expensive!)

A few notes on the mystic forge:

• Kamil234 examined mystic forge upgrades with dyes. I haven't tried it out, but he recorded the results here.
• Agronaute threw 1400 rares into the mystic forge and got 71 exotics back (with no precursor) - a 20% quality upgrade rate. More here.
• NonTrivialPursuit forged 50 minis.
• Sub-75 average item level yellows no longer have a chance to yield precursors.

*Now 100% more ethical. Sorry Malomedies.
**Well, I should say, on median. I - very rarely - obtained dramatically higher level items (up to 50 levels higher than the inputs). I'm guessing these are bugs. The items have no vendor value, and are soulbound on acquire. It looks like the item level of the result was just miscoded. Therefore, I excluded these from the analysis. More data required =D.