I see a lot of people comparing rift rng with crystal rng. I'm not sure why other than a fundamental misunderstanding of why rng is used in games.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks comparing random events occurring 28-30 times is comparable to events that occur thousands of times. I should think it would be obvious, that the two are different. Yes, they each use rng but one is limited in its time to "hit" while the other is not.
Full disclosure, I don't like rifts. Never have, never will. This particular event I've pulled a cosmic awakening gem a skill awakening gem and a +5 sig stone. Still don't like them and that won't change my mind.
I've said before it's bad game design and I stand behind it.
I think it's poor game design for a boost of reasons but the biggest is becuase of why rng is routinely used in games.
Often, it is used to keep games fresh. That's a good thing. Another reason is to limit the best prizes while still making those prizes available. Resource balancing. Also a good thing.
They serve a direct benefit to players as well. Rng provides an out to the player for their performance which normally is also a good thing. Think incursions and some of the node combos with defenders. The player can use the node combos and defender as a built in excuse for their performance. They don't have to feel bad.
There are some other reasons rng are used but these 3 generally are the standard bearers
Rifts violate the third as stated above ( and arguably the first but that one is pretty debatable). Most players feel bad BEFORE the run occurs. That lens itself to a base that doesn't like the event much. And then there are many players who don't even recieve the rush when they "win" such as myself. All I feel is guilt that I got an awakening gem ( 2. In this case) and my ally mates once again pulled 🍬.
I'd argue that an event that makes your players feel defeated before it's even ran is poorly designed. Also, an event that makes you feel bad about winning isn't a best seller either, but that's more of a me thing.
All this to circle back to my original statement. A limited time event that uses rng is not the same as an event that happens over and over.
People are getting so caught up in getting the "candy" they forgot what a side quest is.
1. The candy store contains all the rewards one would normally get in a monthly side quest
2. The side quest is one path a day/7 per week. You would normally need to do all four difficulties ~24 or so paths a week for the same rewards as the candy store.
3. The RNG awards are among the best in the game. If you're lucky enough to get one then awesome, if not it is what it is. We are a long way from getting six star AGs as normal side quest rewards
4. The alternative is going back to regular side quest, with multiple paths per week with zero chance of top tier rewards.
It's like everyone is so caught up on not getting the AG that they forgot what a normal month is 🤦♂️
Ngl bro, your third point is one of the worst takes I’ve seen on the forum in a while. Imagine putting in the same amount of effort as the next guy but he gets a 6* awakening and I get…. Wait for it…. Candy. That’s laughably unfair to that person and anybody else who’s just gotten candy this whole time.
I think it's poor game design for a boost of reasons but the biggest is becuase of why rng is routinely used in games.
Often, it is used to keep games fresh. That's a good thing. Another reason is to limit the best prizes while still making those prizes available. Resource balancing. Also a good thing.
They serve a direct benefit to players as well. Rng provides an out to the player for their performance which normally is also a good thing. Think incursions and some of the node combos with defenders. The player can use the node combos and defender as a built in excuse for their performance. They don't have to feel bad.
There are some other reasons rng are used but these 3 generally are the standard bearers
I can't speak for all game developers obviously, and individual game developers have differing reasons for using random rewards in games, but in terms of what's commonly accepted, these are not the "standard bearers." These are "also"s. If you ask a game developer why random rewards, and they think you're fishing for a list of reasons, and they are going to be graded on the length of the list, these are the things they will rattle off. But there is one singular primary reason for random rewards.
They work.
If you're a reward systems engineer, that's the TL;DR. They work, the end. But in what way do they work? They work because they solve a gigantic set of design problems simultaneously in a way difficult (if not impossible) to replicate. The two biggest (and central) being a relative reward problem and a selective memory problem. The relative reward problem is simply this: nothing in the game is worth anything intrinsically. A 6* isn't worth anything in a vacuum. A 6* is worth more than a 5* champ on a relative basis, because a 6* champ is more powerful than a 5* champ in clearing content (among other things). We judge value based on relative worth, not absolute worth.
So there's no such thing as all rewards being valuable. That is impossible. If every champion crystal from Cavs to PHCs contained nothing but 6* champs, that would not make all crystals valuable, that would instead make all champion drops mediocre (at least in terms of rarity). Since every champion drop had the same rarity, that rarity would cease to be meaningful. All crystals would *lose* value rather than gain value, because their contents would be devalued. For something to be worth a lot, something else needs to be worth less.
Separately, people tend to remember exemplars in their experiences. They don't remember the one hundred Cavs they opened with 3* champs. They remember the three with 6* champs. While opening crystals those hundred 3* champs feel bad, but that feeling dampens over time. We remember *that* we opened a lot of losers, but we just don't remember the losses proportionately as much as the wins. People need to win, and they will remember if and when they win. And as above, if every crystal contained nothing but 6* champs, none of them would feel like winning (again: speaking about rarity here, not about champion power differences).
Games (at least games like this) need rewards that are extraordinary, and higher value relative to everything else. That means unavoidably that they also need rewards that are both low value and common. Random rewards are the mathematical implementation of the solution to these two game design problems.
But is randomness required to satisfy these two conditions? Actually no: it is possible to make rewards in the game such that there's a ton of low value rewards and a few high value ones, and have everyone predictably go through those rewards. In other words, if we made every 30th Cavalier crystal contain a 6* champ, then everyone would get exactly the same number of them at exactly the same time (relative to the number they opened). What's the difference between predictable tiered rewards and random ones?
Grind.
When you make a reward system in which the only way to get the good reward is to plow through a ton of the bad ones, the entire exercise becomes very psychologically grindy. The only way to get X is to do a ton of Y. You know exactly when you'll get the reward you want, and exactly how much effort you need to do to get it. Which means you start treating that effort as work rather than gameplay. I need to do a hundred of these, now I need to do fifty, now I need to do ten, now I need to do five more. As you approach the goal this can have a positive psychological effect: you know you're getting close. But this is temporary and it contains a boomerang. When you reach your goal, you immediately know you're a hundred away from the next one. You go from one left to a hundred left. This is psychologically punishing.
Randomizing the rewards disconnects effort from reward. On average, you still will get X reward after Y effort, but only on average, But after getting Y, you aren't back to the starting line. Or alternatively, with random rewards you are in a sense always at the starting line. You never get closer, but you never get farther. Rewards just happen. With random rewards, you know you will get what you are after eventually with enough effort, but you have no idea how much effort it will take, so you stop keeping track of effort, because there's no benefit to keeping track.
Now, when I say "you" I don't literally mean you. I have no idea how you play the game or how you think about rewards. But the general "you" does think this way, because game designers have figured this out over time.
It has been brought up in the thread that there's a difference between, say, champion crystals and side quest rewards. Not really. Individual side quests might be time limited, but they are a part of the collective set of side quests overall. There is a structure to side quests and side quest rewards that is different from, but honors similar rules to event quest. EQ is different every month, but in terms of rewards they are the same. From a economic perspective, there's just one EQ that resets rewards monthly. Side quests are somewhat more loose, but similar enough that in terms of economic balance, we don't balance them as if the players are doing to do them once and never again. They are balanced as if the players are going to be running them continuously, with the rewards being reset monthly. So while players might only run 35 rift this month, the rewards are being balanced with an eye to players doing hundreds of side quest "things" every year, of which the 35 rift paths are just a few of them. In this sense, rifts are no different that crystals.
Now, there are exceptions. When a player is going to do content only once (or a very limited number of times) and the rewards are specifically designed to award a significant percentage of a progressional step, random rewards may be less appropriate because the consideration for such progressional rewards is individualistic: how they impact each and every player in that moment. But side quest rewards are balanced around the notion that side quests are pseudo-recurring content. One individual side quest is never coming back, but collectively they are a continuous slow flow of rewards to the playerbase, and thus can be averaged out over long periods of time across the entire set of them collectively.
We're talking about the same thing here. I do not have the inclination nor desire to write long comments on a forum ( that's legitimately not a dig, I just don't). As such I tend to be shorter. And I intentionally left out pretty much all references to gaming psychology. That's a big rabbit hole I prefer not to write about on a forum. I really should start a podcast to talk about all this stuff but alas... time.
Anyway, point 2 in my post comprises most of what you wrote about... briefly lol. Again not a dig, it's just in my experience, the person reading knows the intricacies of the subject and therefore doesn't need it explained... or they don't care enough to know all the details. Although there always exist those who for neither and would be interested.
Now what I do find interesting is that we approach this same subject differently.
I look at it that the average player would prefer more rolls to less, for the very reasoning you outline. Which event do you think the average player remembers more fondly. The rift where they got candy for an entire month or the month of poor pulls. The pulls go the way of the dodo 🦤, yet years after a particular rift players still carry the hate. I dunno seems poor design to me. And not even remotely similar to crystals.
Remember the average player cares nothing about game economy. They care about results. I understand why designers do the things they do... but a player doesn't care beyond how that particular design choice impacts him or her.
We're talking about the same thing here. I do not have the inclination nor desire to write long comments on a forum ( that's legitimately not a dig, I just don't). As such I tend to be shorter. And I intentionally left out pretty much all references to gaming psychology. That's a big rabbit hole I prefer not to write about on a forum. I really should start a podcast to talk about all this stuff but alas... time.
Anyway, point 2 in my post comprises most of what you wrote about... briefly lol. Again not a dig, it's just in my experience, the person reading knows the intricacies of the subject and therefore doesn't need it explained... or they don't care enough to know all the details. Although there always exist those who for neither and would be interested.
Now what I do find interesting is that we approach this same subject differently.
I look at it that the average player would prefer more rolls to less, for the very reasoning you outline. Which event do you think the average player remembers more fondly. The rift where they got candy for an entire month or the month of poor pulls. The pulls go the way of the dodo 🦤, yet years after a particular rift players still carry the hate. I dunno seems poor design to me. And not even remotely similar to crystals.
Remember the average player cares nothing about game economy. They care about results. I understand why designers do the things they do... but a player doesn't care beyond how that particular design choice impacts him or her.
1. I'm not sure which one of your points is "point 2" but none of them are or cover what I discussed. If I guess that point 2 is "another reason is to limit the best prizes while still making those prizes available" then that's not specifically addressing anything I mentioned, and also it is false. It isn't the randomness that limits rewards in any direct way. In fact, exactly the opposite: random rewards generally allow for more rewards to enter the game, not less. But in the interests of brevity, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, as anyone who understands the intricacies of the subject would not need to have this esplained.
2. When you say you're looking at things from the perspective of the player experience, you're implying that I'm not, or the game designers are not. But that completely ignores literally everything I said in my post, where I explicitly talk about how the design decisions are driven by how the players experience them.
3. We can argue the philosophy, but this isn't philosophy, this is science. What you call bad design is just design you don't like, but it consistently succeeds. Success is the ultimately judge over the best game design outside of Utopia.
To put it more directly, the question of whether a design is a good design is whether it succeeds at its goal. All designs have a goal, and the degree to which it succeeds in fulfilling that goal is, and should be, the basis upon which any design should be judged, because the goal of all designers is to satisfy the goal they were given for their designs. The goal for most game designers is to ultimately make a successful game, because if they don't then they have to update their resume. It isn't to make any one particular person happy. That's incidental. A design is not a failure if I don't like it but the game itself is a success, and a design is not a success if I like it but the game dies.
None of this is really relevant to your statement: "why rng is routinely used in games." That's just a statement of fact which I'm pretty certain is false.
We're talking about the same thing here. I do not have the inclination nor desire to write long comments on a forum ( that's legitimately not a dig, I just don't). As such I tend to be shorter. And I intentionally left out pretty much all references to gaming psychology. That's a big rabbit hole I prefer not to write about on a forum. I really should start a podcast to talk about all this stuff but alas... time.
Anyway, point 2 in my post comprises most of what you wrote about... briefly lol. Again not a dig, it's just in my experience, the person reading knows the intricacies of the subject and therefore doesn't need it explained... or they don't care enough to know all the details. Although there always exist those who for neither and would be interested.
Now what I do find interesting is that we approach this same subject differently.
I look at it that the average player would prefer more rolls to less, for the very reasoning you outline. Which event do you think the average player remembers more fondly. The rift where they got candy for an entire month or the month of poor pulls. The pulls go the way of the dodo 🦤, yet years after a particular rift players still carry the hate. I dunno seems poor design to me. And not even remotely similar to crystals.
Remember the average player cares nothing about game economy. They care about results. I understand why designers do the things they do... but a player doesn't care beyond how that particular design choice impacts him or her.
1. I'm not sure which one of your points is "point 2" but none of them are or cover what I discussed. If I guess that point 2 is "another reason is to limit the best prizes while still making those prizes available" then that's not specifically addressing anything I mentioned, and also it is false. It isn't the randomness that limits rewards in any direct way. In fact, exactly the opposite: random rewards generally allow for more rewards to enter the game, not less. But in the interests of brevity, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, as anyone who understands the intricacies of the subject would not need to have this esplained.
2. When you say you're looking at things from the perspective of the player experience, you're implying that I'm not, or the game designers are not. But that completely ignores literally everything I said in my post, where I explicitly talk about how the design decisions are driven by how the players experience them.
3. We can argue the philosophy, but this isn't philosophy, this is science. What you call bad design is just design you don't like, but it consistently succeeds. Success is the ultimately judge over the best game design outside of Utopia.
To put it more directly, the question of whether a design is a good design is whether it succeeds at its goal. All designs have a goal, and the degree to which it succeeds in fulfilling that goal is, and should be, the basis upon which any design should be judged, because the goal of all designers is to satisfy the goal they were given for their designs. The goal for most game designers is to ultimately make a successful game, because if they don't then they have to update their resume. It isn't to make any one particular person happy. That's incidental. A design is not a failure if I don't like it but the game itself is a success, and a design is not a success if I like it but the game dies.
None of this is really relevant to your statement: "why rng is routinely used in games." That's just a statement of fact which I'm pretty certain is false.
1. If you weren't talking about game economy then I apologize. That's what I was referring to and that's what I got from your post. I thought for sure that was what you were referencing.
2. I never said you were not looking at it from a gamers perspective. Did i quote you? No must've been a statement directed at others who have asked repeatedly in this thread why some do not like rifts. That is more directed at them not so much at you. That's all on me. If I could dedicate more time to properly organize my thoughts, misunderstandings like the above would not happen but as I mentioned above, I can only write when time is available and thoughts come out fast and furious. I'll eat that one.
3. Agreed. The forum is a difficult place to have those discussions. I guess what it comes down to is how we define "success". I just don't define it the same as you. Maybe that's becuase I have no skin in the design game at all. I'm just friends with some so i look at it differently. I can tell you that my best friend who has been doing this a loooooong time sees your "success" as what has largely held games back from innovating. It works so therefore it good drives him nuts, but he's a creative type so... wouldn't want any of those pesky creatives to sully science. I know that's not what you meant but you took mine out of context and ran with it so I'm just returning the favor. But I'll be sure to pass along he sucks at his job j/k 😉
I even agree with you about design goals and success. For the game. For the team and even to some degree for players. My feelings about particular choices don't really have anything to do with that. There is certainly more to it than meeting a design goal to determine success and that's just where we'll depart on our outlook and that is fine.
Finally, the last part is uncalled for. It's one thing to call into question my integrity, I'll get over that cause I don't really care tbh, but you are calling my friend's into question and that is just uncalled for as he's not here to defend himself. I would ask that you leave the petty insults out of it. Thanks.
I agree. Stop hating on the rifts, the cav rewards are some of the best ones seen in the game. The candy can buy you tons of gold and catalysts, saving your glory. There is also a chance for 2 million gold(which, to put into perspective, is the amount of gold gotten from 100% exploring act 7. You can get 6* AG, sig stones, 10k 6* shards, and a t5CC crystal. One of the best side quests in mcoc history
Rewards on rifts can be great, and the candy store is definitely a nice addition.
But Rifts still can’t get around “feeling bad”.
Rifts make you feel bad at missing out on comparatively better items, and then still having to work to earn the comparatively worse item.
imagine if instead they designed it so you do a path, get to boss, then after you defeat the boss you have a chance to teleport to candy or the rare items. This should feel better than teleporting and knowing what you end up with before you do anything at all. And this is with it still being candy the majority of the time.
Comments
I'm not sure why anyone thinks comparing random events occurring 28-30 times is comparable to events that occur thousands of times. I should think it would be obvious, that the two are different. Yes, they each use rng but one is limited in its time to "hit" while the other is not.
Full disclosure, I don't like rifts. Never have, never will. This particular event I've pulled a cosmic awakening gem a skill awakening gem and a +5 sig stone. Still don't like them and that won't change my mind.
I've said before it's bad game design and I stand behind it.
I think it's poor game design for a boost of reasons but the biggest is becuase of why rng is routinely used in games.
Often, it is used to keep games fresh. That's a good thing. Another reason is to limit the best prizes while still making those prizes available. Resource balancing. Also a good thing.
They serve a direct benefit to players as well. Rng provides an out to the player for their performance which normally is also a good thing. Think incursions and some of the node combos with defenders. The player can use the node combos and defender as a built in excuse for their performance. They don't have to feel bad.
There are some other reasons rng are used but these 3 generally are the standard bearers
Rifts violate the third as stated above ( and arguably the first but that one is pretty debatable). Most players feel bad BEFORE the run occurs. That lens itself to a base that doesn't like the event much. And then there are many players who don't even recieve the rush when they "win" such as myself. All I feel is guilt that I got an awakening gem ( 2. In this case) and my ally mates once again pulled 🍬.
I'd argue that an event that makes your players feel defeated before it's even ran is poorly designed. Also, an event that makes you feel bad about winning isn't a best seller either, but that's more of a me thing.
All this to circle back to my original statement. A limited time event that uses rng is not the same as an event that happens over and over.
They work.
If you're a reward systems engineer, that's the TL;DR. They work, the end. But in what way do they work? They work because they solve a gigantic set of design problems simultaneously in a way difficult (if not impossible) to replicate. The two biggest (and central) being a relative reward problem and a selective memory problem. The relative reward problem is simply this: nothing in the game is worth anything intrinsically. A 6* isn't worth anything in a vacuum. A 6* is worth more than a 5* champ on a relative basis, because a 6* champ is more powerful than a 5* champ in clearing content (among other things). We judge value based on relative worth, not absolute worth.
So there's no such thing as all rewards being valuable. That is impossible. If every champion crystal from Cavs to PHCs contained nothing but 6* champs, that would not make all crystals valuable, that would instead make all champion drops mediocre (at least in terms of rarity). Since every champion drop had the same rarity, that rarity would cease to be meaningful. All crystals would *lose* value rather than gain value, because their contents would be devalued. For something to be worth a lot, something else needs to be worth less.
Separately, people tend to remember exemplars in their experiences. They don't remember the one hundred Cavs they opened with 3* champs. They remember the three with 6* champs. While opening crystals those hundred 3* champs feel bad, but that feeling dampens over time. We remember *that* we opened a lot of losers, but we just don't remember the losses proportionately as much as the wins. People need to win, and they will remember if and when they win. And as above, if every crystal contained nothing but 6* champs, none of them would feel like winning (again: speaking about rarity here, not about champion power differences).
Games (at least games like this) need rewards that are extraordinary, and higher value relative to everything else. That means unavoidably that they also need rewards that are both low value and common. Random rewards are the mathematical implementation of the solution to these two game design problems.
But is randomness required to satisfy these two conditions? Actually no: it is possible to make rewards in the game such that there's a ton of low value rewards and a few high value ones, and have everyone predictably go through those rewards. In other words, if we made every 30th Cavalier crystal contain a 6* champ, then everyone would get exactly the same number of them at exactly the same time (relative to the number they opened). What's the difference between predictable tiered rewards and random ones?
Grind.
When you make a reward system in which the only way to get the good reward is to plow through a ton of the bad ones, the entire exercise becomes very psychologically grindy. The only way to get X is to do a ton of Y. You know exactly when you'll get the reward you want, and exactly how much effort you need to do to get it. Which means you start treating that effort as work rather than gameplay. I need to do a hundred of these, now I need to do fifty, now I need to do ten, now I need to do five more. As you approach the goal this can have a positive psychological effect: you know you're getting close. But this is temporary and it contains a boomerang. When you reach your goal, you immediately know you're a hundred away from the next one. You go from one left to a hundred left. This is psychologically punishing.
Randomizing the rewards disconnects effort from reward. On average, you still will get X reward after Y effort, but only on average, But after getting Y, you aren't back to the starting line. Or alternatively, with random rewards you are in a sense always at the starting line. You never get closer, but you never get farther. Rewards just happen. With random rewards, you know you will get what you are after eventually with enough effort, but you have no idea how much effort it will take, so you stop keeping track of effort, because there's no benefit to keeping track.
Now, when I say "you" I don't literally mean you. I have no idea how you play the game or how you think about rewards. But the general "you" does think this way, because game designers have figured this out over time.
It has been brought up in the thread that there's a difference between, say, champion crystals and side quest rewards. Not really. Individual side quests might be time limited, but they are a part of the collective set of side quests overall. There is a structure to side quests and side quest rewards that is different from, but honors similar rules to event quest. EQ is different every month, but in terms of rewards they are the same. From a economic perspective, there's just one EQ that resets rewards monthly. Side quests are somewhat more loose, but similar enough that in terms of economic balance, we don't balance them as if the players are doing to do them once and never again. They are balanced as if the players are going to be running them continuously, with the rewards being reset monthly. So while players might only run 35 rift this month, the rewards are being balanced with an eye to players doing hundreds of side quest "things" every year, of which the 35 rift paths are just a few of them. In this sense, rifts are no different that crystals.
Now, there are exceptions. When a player is going to do content only once (or a very limited number of times) and the rewards are specifically designed to award a significant percentage of a progressional step, random rewards may be less appropriate because the consideration for such progressional rewards is individualistic: how they impact each and every player in that moment. But side quest rewards are balanced around the notion that side quests are pseudo-recurring content. One individual side quest is never coming back, but collectively they are a continuous slow flow of rewards to the playerbase, and thus can be averaged out over long periods of time across the entire set of them collectively.
Anyway, point 2 in my post comprises most of what you wrote about... briefly lol. Again not a dig, it's just in my experience, the person reading knows the intricacies of the subject and therefore doesn't need it explained... or they don't care enough to know all the details. Although there always exist those who for neither and would be interested.
Now what I do find interesting is that we approach this same subject differently.
I look at it that the average player would prefer more rolls to less, for the very reasoning you outline. Which event do you think the average player remembers more fondly. The rift where they got candy for an entire month or the month of poor pulls. The pulls go the way of the dodo 🦤, yet years after a particular rift players still carry the hate. I dunno seems poor design to me. And not even remotely similar to crystals.
Remember the average player cares nothing about game economy. They care about results. I understand why designers do the things they do... but a player doesn't care beyond how that particular design choice impacts him or her.
2. When you say you're looking at things from the perspective of the player experience, you're implying that I'm not, or the game designers are not. But that completely ignores literally everything I said in my post, where I explicitly talk about how the design decisions are driven by how the players experience them.
3. We can argue the philosophy, but this isn't philosophy, this is science. What you call bad design is just design you don't like, but it consistently succeeds. Success is the ultimately judge over the best game design outside of Utopia.
To put it more directly, the question of whether a design is a good design is whether it succeeds at its goal. All designs have a goal, and the degree to which it succeeds in fulfilling that goal is, and should be, the basis upon which any design should be judged, because the goal of all designers is to satisfy the goal they were given for their designs. The goal for most game designers is to ultimately make a successful game, because if they don't then they have to update their resume. It isn't to make any one particular person happy. That's incidental. A design is not a failure if I don't like it but the game itself is a success, and a design is not a success if I like it but the game dies.
None of this is really relevant to your statement: "why rng is routinely used in games." That's just a statement of fact which I'm pretty certain is false.
Terrible event which comes every year sadly.
2. I never said you were not looking at it from a gamers perspective. Did i quote you? No must've been a statement directed at others who have asked repeatedly in this thread why some do not like rifts. That is more directed at them not so much at you. That's all on me. If I could dedicate more time to properly organize my thoughts, misunderstandings like the above would not happen but as I mentioned above, I can only write when time is available and thoughts come out fast and furious. I'll eat that one.
3. Agreed. The forum is a difficult place to have those discussions. I guess what it comes down to is how we define "success". I just don't define it the same as you. Maybe that's becuase I have no skin in the design game at all. I'm just friends with some so i look at it differently. I can tell you that my best friend who has been doing this a loooooong time sees your "success" as what has largely held games back from innovating. It works so therefore it good drives him nuts, but he's a creative type so... wouldn't want any of those pesky creatives to sully science. I know that's not what you meant but you took mine out of context and ran with it so I'm just returning the favor. But I'll be sure to pass along he sucks at his job j/k 😉
I even agree with you about design goals and success. For the game. For the team and even to some degree for players. My feelings about particular choices don't really have anything to do with that. There is certainly more to it than meeting a design goal to determine success and that's just where we'll depart on our outlook and that is fine.
Finally, the last part is uncalled for. It's one thing to call into question my integrity, I'll get over that cause I don't really care tbh, but you are calling my friend's into question and that is just uncalled for as he's not here to defend himself. I would ask that you leave the petty insults out of it. Thanks.
But Rifts still can’t get around “feeling bad”.
Rifts make you feel bad at missing out on comparatively better items, and then still having to work to earn the comparatively worse item.
imagine if instead they designed it so you do a path, get to boss, then after you defeat the boss you have a chance to teleport to candy or the rare items. This should feel better than teleporting and knowing what you end up with before you do anything at all. And this is with it still being candy the majority of the time.