Gamers see an inventory screen and lose it?
I guess I understand why one would have a negative reaction to damage numbers popping up on the screen, it's visual clutter. But also those can be helpful to understand how different builds work in-game.
I haven't played many games that came out in the last few years, can someone help me understand? I want to understand the psychology of the :soypoint-2: .
I think it's mostly about gear that gets better in very small increments or that interacts with so many statistics that judging the quality of something becomes a chore. This is mostly a problem when combined with the first problem, so you have do some real crunching to tell what's better and then it doesn't even really matter very much and also you'll get a new piece to evaluate in twenty minutes.
I enjoy a lot of number-heavy games. I'm playing Dominions right now which has like 20 different stats for every character and hundreds of pieces of gear and like a thousand spells. A lot of the math is knowable, but it's obfuscated within the game's interface. But it works in that context because it's a game about weighing which dudes to build and which creatures to summon and how to use them in pitched battles. You don't have to constantly evaluate what's better as it gets piped in - you slowly learn what works and what doesn't through playing while the stats remain mostly unchanged. You can go through and look for particular builds and niches once you know what you want, and that's super rewarding! But it would megasuck if you were constantly getting a different footsoldier stat array with marginal improvements and had to evaluate that for a slight improvement in performance.
It's the same for games that focus on a single player character. You don't want to be spending your time and brainpower constantly evaluating what's better at the same micro level - at some point you want to have mastery of a system and move on to learning an mastering how it works on a different level: how systems interact, how different styles of gameplay work with different gear, et al. There are different ways that the micro-improvement gear system tackles this. Sometimes it is critically important to understand what small, frequent, incremental improvements are worth it at the expense of others so you can stay on the power curve, which can be frustrating because it requires consistent focus on what quickly becomes a fairly mundane process. This can still be fun in some cases! It depends on the particulars. Other times, and I think this is more frequent than the first case, the incremental improvements aren't that meaningful and progression is more forgiving, but this makes the whole system feel unnecessary at times and still like a chore.
That's my read on it anyway.