The conflicting Design of PoE (a long detailed read, my final feedback(for now))

So many great elements, yet, a few years in and most sworn arpg players cannot find incentive to play, or have left already. I find myself as the former. This is despite a lot of good content being recently added. This thread looks in-depth at some elements that can be enhanced to bring out the best qualities of PoE.


The conflicting Design of PoE

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

To me, it is now implicit that you should start over when there's a new league. Just like that. It is the only way to avoid grief, burnout, a sense of betrayal, futility...all the things that you will rightfully feel when the metagame fucks your hard work in the arse repeatedly.

As much as that is true, it also brings one of the biggest problems into light. It is right, the game is in many ways designed to be played in temporary leagues as described above, yet, at the same time, it is also designed to be a game you can play for years on end in the same league, by actually playing the game, as opposed to trading simulator, in order to experience the full spectrum of the game.

So a regular player needs to stay sveral years in the same league in order to experience the fullness of the game, while at the same time, the game is not well played that way for quoted reasons.

One may think that several years is a gross overstatement, but it really isn't, the game is that unrewarding. In fact it's so unrewarding i don't fathom how they don't see it. After now, what, a year, year and a half or how long it has been, there is still a very very small fraction of the potential playerbase, even the actual playerbase, that has gotten to experience the fullness of the game.

That leaves a very small audience of players who this game is really good for, when you have a game engineered for two conflicting ways of playing it. The trading people and the hardcore organized 24/7 gamer-achievers can possible experience the fullness of the game in the short term leagues that the game is best for, and then there are those who never really get into the endgame and just have fun redoing the earlier parts of the game, where the game is most rewarding. I would estimate that the game is great for 3-8% of the potential playerbase at best, the rest will eventually get alienated, not because they've experienced the game and have exhausted it, but because they realize the game will never be good for them. That is a problem, because that spreads by word of mouth.


Uniques, Rares, drop rates and crafting

I've said this for a long long time. We need several hundred percent increases on unique drops. Not some small 30% boost, at least 2-300%, at least. The game basically should be an intermediate between D2 unique droprates and PoE unique drop rates(although not as extremely rare things like some were in d2). That will give the game the mass attractiveness that people love, farming those uniques, getting them thangs. Then, on top of that, there are rare items.

Now rare items in PoE, unlike most good ARPG's can actually be beastly.That is exactly what you want, you want very rare rare items, like now, and then more common uniques, so you get the best of both worlds. You get the unique item style that made the ARPG genre so great, and you aren't forced to get your basic uniques that aren't that impossible to get, and then the game ends, no, you can still continue to chase rare items, a goal the masses cannot pursue to a very high degree, but will cater to the more hardcore grinders without ruining it for the masses. The best of both worlds.

Greatly increased unique drops will bring the two conflicting designs of the game together. There is a serious loot starvation going on, and the temporary leagues can have much much greater drop rates of uniques so people can achieve in them and play the game as it is best, without it ruining the game by flooding. Consider that sentence. That way, the two designs from a regular players perspective are more closeline aligned, with the one being the fullness of the game to be experienced and the other being that the game is designed for short term leagues.

I want to talk about about D3 also. See, D3 are starting to prove people wrong on a great many points. One, selffound did not ruin the game, in fact it made the game better. I do not say this easily, but i am impressed. It is closer to that old feeling of playing ARPG's when you keep grinding and grinding, and you may actually never find what you wanted, which keeps you going, and hooked. A lot of people said the game will just be trivial, way too easy to gear and completely casual, but i can tell you that i have seen more people with relatively more perfect gear in PoE than i have in D3. It is simply not true, and if you think about it, it's just about adjusting drops.

It really is very simple, in D3 some drops are simply very rare and you can go a thousand hours without seeing one, and when it drops, it may have rolled crap. There is no everyone has everything. Second, and this is why i brought up D3 again, they did something smart with drops. They gave them a greater range of rolls, there is a rather large difference between a well rolled item and a badly rolled one. That allows them to increase drops so that getting a sample of X item isn't impossible, but getting a near-perfect one is super lucky. That means, instead of you sitting 2k hours in and needing that one item for your build, and when it drops it's always nearly perfect, you could get 2-3 bad ones on average before getting that good one 2k hours in(same rng luck), which translated to you not being locked of of what you wanted to try for 2k hours, and not getting handed the best stuff any easier.

So that translates to PoE in the way that, as unique drop-rates are increased greatly, i think also the variables should be adjusted so there are a greater range of drops possible, from rather-bad to very-good, rather than always it being pretty much the same. For example shavronnes wrappings could roll 50%-200% ES, and 10-40% lightning ress. Disallow Divine orbs being used on unique items, that allows for greater drop rates. You could increase the unique drops 500%+ this way(making crap uniques a bit less relatively common, to still feel good when a unique drops). It should be said that I believe trading is a part of a good ARPG, but i believe in making some things tradeable, and others not.

That brings me to crafting. I think some basic changes should be made. As written above, if that change is made, divine orbs should be prevented from working on uniques. I think also mirrors should no longer drop, or be changed altogether. Then eternals can be made more common, to encourage crafting. It isn't a problem that a few people have eternal-crafted a near perfect dagger, it's a problem that everyone runs around using that same dagger just mirrored. Removing mirrors will also increase sales of good items, crafting worthy items, and make everyones itemization more unique.



Map system

Then there is the map system. Hand's down, the map system sucks. I'm sorry GGG, i know you have invested a lot of time in trying to make it great, but the fact of the matter is that the system of D3 is superior to it in it's simplicity. Why is that? Because you aren't gated by rng, quite simply. You can easily enter maps in D3, access is trivial, and you can adjust the difficulty of the content as you wish, for increasing rewards. It becomes about the player and the character, pure game, no bullshit. The D3 map system is far from perfect, i am sure those affixes can still be used for good.

The way i see it, maps shouldn't drop tiered at the mercy of RNG, you should have a far greater degree of control over the content you wish to do, and builds should actually be balanced around the difficulty of the game to create a complete experience. Quantity and affixes on maps should not affect map drops, just how much profit you earn per map. Imagine the boss drops 1-2 maps always, no maps drop elsewhere, average 1.35 maps. You can then host any map at any level you want, however, you have to be able to kill the boss to sustain maps, and rolling the map for greater profit is also something to keep in mind. Add something like 10-25% experienced gained affix to maps to encourage rolling. Reduce xp gain from higher maps to compensate for better access. Start actually making a balanced game, read some of the mathed out threads myself and others have created.


Skills

Limit mjölner/cast on crit to a level where you are not burning off graphics cards from overheating. Shit like that, that other players can do to other players to fuck them up, shouldn't even have made it into the game.

Even more futuristic, start making specific interactions of active skill gems as supports. Yes i said it, trying to have supports have universal equal power only ruins the balance of skills, and means funny combos are just inferior. I have spent an excessive amount of time considering it, evaluating the work involved, estimated how it would turn out and if it was straightforward to balance, and come to the conclusion that it can easily be done, in fact just 1 person could accomplish the number balancing within a month of focused work. It's basically amount of active skills * average supports per active skill = amount of number-sets to adjust. Followed by a trial period where under/overpowered combos are adjusted again.

Specific interactions could be things like increased area of effect adding different amounts of increased radius to different skills and having different mana multiplier, mana cost and damage of multiple projectiles adjusted to whatever it was supporting or cast on critical strike have different internal cooldown depending on which spell was supported. There are so many funny combos in this game that just suck hard, and the only way to really make your beautiful gem system shine is specific support interactions. I have thought about it long and hard, there is no other way, and the work compared to reward is trivial.

And finally a few words about balance. Balance is crucial. Human nature is relative to all around us, balance matters and it matters a lot, we find value in what we do, compared to what those around us do. That is fact, despite some wishing that wasn't the case and consider themselves free, just that shows that they have defined themselves from that as all humans have. The best game has a hundred ways of achieving the same power for different playstyles, the worst game has just one that is always best.

You can search my latest replies to your answers.

However.There is some things i would like to bring up here.

I wont say anything bad in your judgement with coc and performance issues.Those are completely justified feedback.However aagain..

You say game is unrewarding.You provided the reasoning that D3 does it better.

In fact,you are not even describing what aspect you feel is un rewarding.

Also in WHAT timespan you want those rewards.

Are you of the people that prefers d3 1 hr to max level then "getting into the endgame?"

No seriously,i want to know what feels for you as rewarding and in what timespan.

And either you want your game to last long or you want it all real fast.I keep on wondering why even people bring d3 into equation.The game where you can have the endgame gear in literally day(s) then search (endgame) for 2 perent more attribute.

Games arent alike even into same categories.

And in all this long ass post,you never say anything on your foeshaken masters expierience.As if you havent touched it,to justify whether or not self found is here more than ever.For the same reason you will see the sfl posts stopped.

And about maps.Rng ofcourse play its role,but claiming you cant sustain maps,in the age of zana and carto boxes is utterly ridiculous.

When people talk of sustainability,do they talk about having infiniteamounts of 78 maps and fragments?cause that is only then cani jusyify their ridiculous sentiments.

See you on act 4.Or sooner.

@elwindakos

I've already answered that if you read.



@Charan

There short leagues(game focus) have no inherent problems due to standard standard, standard is the slave of short leagues. Standard has it's own problems, but it does not carry over into short leagues, only the other way around. GGG has demonstrated time and time ago they don't care much for standard and focus on short leagues as the optimal experience, therefore, drops should be adjusted for optimal experience in a 3-4month league, with standard getting flooded. It may even solve many problems as there is a great group of people who play standard because they cant achieve anything in the duration of a short term league, but then get slapped with the issues that burnt you. If drops are good enough, many of them will play short term when they are done experiencing standard. We saw this in D2 Bnet happen over and over.

You may not understand the OP, but i am right nevertheless, quality of thought is quality of thought, proper games are proper games and proper games brings players. PoE has basic problems, the OP addresses basic basic things you need to do right in a game, as well as absorbs the body of experience we have from D2.

It's funny, i have an uncanny ability to provoke the ignorance in people where they want to fight me just for principle, well unless they are really smart, the smarter the people, the more they understand what i said, and realize it's extremely logic. Just the other day i went back found some old posts in some classic games, and there too i was fighting the same. Same old ego people think they something coz they known but don't really know what they talk about. Now, years later as i read them, i realized the games were correctly fixed in pretty much the ways i said they should be years before. Story of my life. So that's why i'm not going to argue over obvious things. I'm leaving this post here in case someone wants to decipher it, anything else is futile.

Peace PoE's, gonna take a good long break.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

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Crackmonster wrote:

the smarter the people, the more they understand what i said

Enjoy that break.

I was going to quote that,but fuck me,you did it first.

Not gonna argue with a person smarter than me,ill lose.

Have fun rip away from Poe.

It is no solution to make uniques drop en masse and everything available to everyone such as in D3.

The incentives to play do not come from owning everything but from still being able to impove and find smth. with value and prestige.

Self found league would leave players being exposed purely to rng that decides what items they get. That only works well if you really let every item drop for every player after 1-2 months.


I agree to disagree 100% with all the op. PoE has issues, your solutions would make everything way worse.

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Crackmonster wrote:

Map system

Then there is the map system. Hand's down, the map system sucks. I'm sorry GGG, i know you have invested a lot of time in trying to make it great, but the fact of the matter is that the system of D3 is superior to it in it's simplicity. Why is that? Because you aren't gated by rng, quite simply. You can easily enter maps in D3, access is trivial, and you can adjust the difficulty of the content as you wish, for increasing rewards. It becomes about the player and the character, pure game, no bullshit. The D3 map system is far from perfect, i am sure those affixes can still be used for good.

The way i see it, maps shouldn't drop tiered at the mercy of RNG, you should have a far greater degree of control over the content you wish to do, and builds should actually be balanced around the difficulty of the game to create a complete experience. Quantity and affixes on maps should not affect map drops, just how much profit you earn per map. Imagine the boss drops 1-2 maps always, no maps drop elsewhere, average 1.35 maps. You can then host any map at any level you want, however, you have to be able to kill the boss to sustain maps, and rolling the map for greater profit is also something to keep in mind. Add something like 10-25% experienced gained affix to maps to encourage rolling. Reduce xp gain from higher maps to compensate for better access. Start actually making a balanced game, read some of the mathed out threads myself and others have created.

I have to disagree. The system can have streaks of bad luck, but strategies for map management exist and get complex with each expansion. It's a hardcore game, expect to put some effort to do things. Don't blame randomness for a bad strategy.

I really like the part about support gems. Would definitely be an interesting change if it happened ... The rest I think is bullsh!t. D3 has most of what you suggested, and you guess what, I got bored even faster than I do with PoE ... Making good stuff take some time make us strive towards it. That's also human nature ...

I really cannot understand the acceptance of the cyclic meta as we have it. It wouldn't be as much of an issue if it weren't, well, an upheaval every patch rotation. The design intention as I've encountered it, has been power creepy new things, and break a few old things. Thats not to say they haven't nerfed many thing well, because they have. But it is fairly transparent that there is little concern for long term stability, and I do not understand how you suddenly find that acceptable.

On some levels, I find the apparent apathy towards long term planning and development to be offensive; particularly when the alternative seems so forced, and it needn't be. Again, it wouldn't be such a problem if the shifts slowed down, and didn't invite so much upheaval.

Hi

Every league brings new levels of dsync and rubber banding, so tired of making a cool character and either getting hit by nothing or I attack something and find myself magically teleported to where the monster actually is. I am not asking for this issue to be 100% fixed because I know it can't but it needs to be severely mitigated just like balance with monsters/drops/etc... which some GGG dev's have no comprehension of.

This last league was the finale for me where I really have finally felt like this game is a run away train full of lit dynamite- can't wait to see next league...


That is what makes this CB'er cruise the forum more then the game till then.

cheers

I don't want D3. I'd like longer temporary leagues, better QA, a few months of consolidation where issues and performance matters are addressed instead of rushed new content being added, increased map drops, and tighter loot tables (if out of 30 uniques from level 74-77 maps not a single one has a higher level requirement than 20, something is wrong). But I do like that I can play for years and still find something I hadn't found before.