Tiering Stories

Hey everyone, I hope you're doing well in these unprecedented times.

The next league is drawing closer and of course we've been busy working on new features and improvements. 

Over the past days I've been particularly busy with improving some of aspects of the automated tiering and I've found some elegant solutions to long-standing problems that you might find curious as well.

All of these changes are coming for the 3.18 league.

Crafted Influenced Items

Predicting the basetype value of influenced items (I'm talking about shaper, elder, warlord etc items) has always been one of the toughest challanges.

PoE.ninja provides some data, but it's very noisy. You have around 700 basetypes, times 6 influences, times 6 indexed levels. Entries are often missing and data is inconsistent and if someone lists his Hunter Shabby Jerkin™ for 3000c you definitely need to factcheck that price. If my filter ever bamboozeled you by claiming that some redeemer quiver is super expensive and the price is actually 1c, you know what I'm talking about.

I've been employing a buch of methods to solve this problem, but despite considering levels, stats, patterns and some rather advanced algorithms some items have eluded me. 

Often the best solutions are the easiest one though. A few days ago I felt inspired and added a very simple rule:

"If an influenced item seems like a noteworthy drop at level 75-84, it also should at LEAST meet the same criteria at level 85 or 86". 

There are a few more safety checks and nuances to it, but this rule single-handedly was able to filter out a lot of noise and problems. 

New League Tiering

How  to tier items at the start of a new league? This is always a bit of a tricky scenario. You might find this problem overly trivial, but truthfully this has a MASSIVE impact on the  economy in the first days.

Unique items in particular are always tricky. You can't just take the latest "economy snapshot" and apply it at the start of the next league. Ye good ol' Kaom's Armor is currently worth 2c. That doesn't seem right.

What I'm doing (and what I improved during these days) is a hybrid approach.

First of all I take an economy snapshot from a fairly early state of the league, usually 3 weeks after start. On top of that I imitate a significantly lower exalted orb price to imitate early league conditions. 

This however creates a new type of problem. Items that were "discovered" to be useful over the course of the league would now be dragged down to lower tiers.

This is where the "Early League Mode" comes in. When checked items that were previously in T1/T2 won't be dragged under the T2 tier (unless marked as "nerfed").

The early league mode also has a dozen of other effects, such as marking certain uniques as "early league interesting" and moving certain currencies back to higher tiers (alchemies and fusings for instance), until we have a stable economy snapshot again.

The result is a decent tiering setup that is the best of both worlds.

Don't touch the alchemy orb

You probably noticed that most currencies in the game shift their tier in the filter depending on the market price. Fusings orbs often start out in the alchemy tier, then go up to Chaos Tier and later drop to low tiers, such as chromatic or even lower.

There are some exceptions though. Some items are disallowed from being tiered. In some cases, it's due to the massive (potential) value of some items. Unique leather belts, heavy belts, exalted orbs and mirrors of kalandra (the list goes on) will never change their tier. Not taking risks with those.

The Chaos Orb will never move, because it's always worth 1 of itself (unless: insert Rick and morty reference here)

An interesting item is the "Orb of Alchemy" though. It is entirely disallowed to change it's tier. Even in the face of it's price dropping. 

Is this market manipulation? No, it's protection.

The orb of alchemy is the most important endgame item (yes even more than the Chaos Orb).Players rely on a steady supply of these and require dozens or hundreds of them per play session to roll maps. On top of that many players play SSF or challenge leagues. 

Many other orbs and drops are optional are often trade goods. Often players just want to see money efficient drops when they run maps. But they need to run maps in the first place. Running out of alchemies is very disruptive.

With the alchemy orbs, I want players to make a *conscious decision* to hide them. (such as hiding it on filterblade or using high strictnesses).

Otherwise I won't touch it and they can always rely on seeing those.

--------------

If you have questions or opinions I'd love to hear them!

Best Regards and thank you for your support,

NeverSink