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

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Sure, it would cost the game A LOT of players, probably a fatal number now, but getting rid of standard would have been a good move for the game's health from a purely metagame perspective.

Indeed, what (who) would then be still there? Only nolifers and other challenge/performance/competition players: a very minor number...

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Standard is all about permanence. Permanence is the opposite of what PoE is all about: online-only, dynamic, shifting, growing, and sure, 'correcting'.

Nothing's wrong with that 'permanence'. POE has a lot of goals which demand time if you have only some low amount of hours to spend per day and even week. And it even lets you set your own, private goals if you dont have to worry about 'what'll happen in 4 weeks ago with my actual progress'... what's "wrong" with the idea to own a piece of each unique at least, as example?

I didnt worry at all about the 'final wipe' after closed beta, and I never had issues with the reset of the ladders in D2 (as they last around 12 month or more...) But, D2 is "gone" and POE is (even with all that changes and additions that I more or less dislike and/or drops the performance) a lot more addicting than anything ever before. I participate in the challenge leagues (now mainly the non-hc types) for some non-challenge related reasons; but taking away the 'fallback' option of permanent leagues would definitively kill a huge part of the long-term addiction the game offers.

I'm sure, I'm not alone with this.

Isn't "PROMISE of massive overhauls" all we get. Instead of actual massive overhauls. That cycling rebalance is never massive, but very hurtful.

I agree with the sentiment that unique drop rates need to be increased significantly. They are still based on perma leagues, and having the same drops for 3-month league and permanent league is insane.

I played around 140h on Beyond with my TS ranger, and got ZERO uniques worth more than 2c (price comparison just to get a general idea of strength of dropped uniques).

I do disagree with the idea of uniques having a wide range of stats to roll. That's horrible. D3 tried it, and having the best 1H axe in the game drop for me, only for it to have Int roll instead of Str, and having no Socket, made it vendor trash. Imagine the feeling of seeing unique Occultist drop, only to realise it's Infernal mantle, and mupltiply it by 10x. I agree D3 took it to extremes, with items being able to roll completely different affixes, not just in a range of values, but I don't like that. Unique is a unique because you know what you are getting and can prepare your build around it.

I'm kinda boring myself at this point with constant reapeats, but I really, really feel like unique drop rates need to be increased. There's 300+ uniques in the game and we still have drop rates from CB. I once made an analysis on how many uniques drop for me in 3 years of playing, and it was arund 55%.

Why do I have to buy Devoto's Devotion, why can't it just drop, so I can then reroll a character around it? That was the best thing in D2, you play your character, and then Arreat's Face drops and you immediatelly get the wish to reroll.

in PoE it's grind 150h and give up on your character and reroll in frustration, only to grind 150h more, give up, rinse and repeat.

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Odoakar wrote:

That was the best thing in D2, you play your character, and then Arreat's Face drops and you immediatelly get the wish to reroll.

in PoE it's grind 150h and give up on your character and reroll in frustration, only to grind 150h more, give up, rinse and repeat.

a) I never had one of the "real impressive" drops in the years I played D2...

b) why cant people stay a bit away from that shitty envy and start to play games as they come - and THEN think about further possibilities as such build enabling items DROP (or be able to trade for them as the short way)?! A game I "like" only with one special ultra-expensive build, if I'm BIS equipped or scratch ultimate-maxed numbers - is NOT a thing I "like" for real in the first place...

When start people to realize, that the shortest way to rush through a game is the fastest way to bore?!

(should not mean that I couldn't imagine to have slightly better chances for unique drops; but with droprates that satisfy you with your 140 beyond hours - what about others that play this amount per week?)

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

I hope you realise you're responding to only part of what I said, cherry-picked by the OP. This is why I won't say anything other than 'you're missing the point here'.

The point I've seen, was that POE would be a 'better game' without the permanent leagues, and I tried to explain that this would IMHO neither true nor possible for real.

The situation back in CB was completely different; even then there was only ONE real wipe I remember (the final one at the end) - and some char resets here and there. The whole CB then, lasted for over one and a half year; not just as 3 month (okay, could be extended along with changed environment settings - but I can immediately hear 'them' crying: 6 month (or even more) is WAAAAAAY to long and boring...) And it even was CB for the reason to try and test and balance things; I cant imagine to cover this all now under alpha development and bring it into the game as patches in a way comparable to D2's system. And it wont work for real with the (still in future) planned custom leagues.

The only two aspects that should have been solved different: a) better item handling that sorts legacy items out and b) a 'ranking' in the permanent leagues that is

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Mr_Cee wrote:

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Odoakar wrote:

That was the best thing in D2, you play your character, and then Arreat's Face drops and you immediatelly get the wish to reroll.

in PoE it's grind 150h and give up on your character and reroll in frustration, only to grind 150h more, give up, rinse and repeat.

a) I never had one of the "real impressive" drops in the years I played D2...

b) why cant people stay a bit away from that shitty envy and start to play games as they come - and THEN think about further possibilities as such build enabling items DROP (or be able to trade for them as the short way)?! A game I "like" only with one special ultra-expensive build, if I'm BIS equipped or scratch ultimate-maxed numbers - is NOT a thing I "like" for real in the first place...

When start people to realize, that the shortest way to rush through a game is the fastest way to bore?!

(should not mean that I couldn't imagine to have slightly better chances for unique drops; but with droprates that satisfy you with your 140 beyond hours - what about others that play this amount per week?)

140h is only one ONE character. Take a look at my character list - I've played this game for more than 1500h probably. So far I have only ONE character that I would say is complete (BoR+facebreakers).

I absolutely demolished D2 end content with my WW barb. And I ENJOYED it. It was the best fun I had in a game. When I got bored with him, I rerolled zoomancer and absolutely crushed the end game with the BiS gear. And I played that game for 12 years, simply bringing the character to its max and then rerolling.

In D2, farming meph and baal could easily net you end game gear. And I did just what you say, I didn't expect to roll a barb and get a barb unique that I need. I'd roll frozen orb sorc, drop buriza, and then reroll with amazon.

It's silly that someone can play 1000h and not come even close to having end game uniques.

Also, balancing a game around people who play 20h per day (your words), is just fucking stupid. But you got one point there, that's exactly the problem with this game. The advent of streamers and GGGs willlingess to balance the whole game around them and their 12-18h per day is just plain stupid.

So from what I understand you're just saying "Make this game Diablo 3 2.0". No thank you.

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Odoakar wrote:

140h is only one ONE character. Take a look at my character list - I've played this game for more than 1500h probably.

I play this game since end of 2011, without any longer breaks, cant say how many hours this may have been... it took me over 15 month to re-reach even map access after OB; and I dont missed anything. (not only because I'm kind of casual - I play for different goals like grabbing some stuff from race seasons, parallelizing chars etc)

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Odoakar wrote:

I absolutely demolished D2 end content with my WW barb. And I ENJOYED it.

I 'participated' in the "Our New Home" Challenge (never to leave act one) in MXL for over a half year and ENJOYED it - so what?

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Odoakar wrote:

In D2, farming meph and baal could easily net you end game gear.

Because there are nearly no endgame items they couldnt drop. Would be comparable to have merciless weaver drop andvariusses or having a full loot table at piety. Its not the case, for some reasons... ;)

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Odoakar wrote:

It's silly that someone can play 1000h and not come even close to having end game uniques.

Its "silly" that just playing the game is now the least efficient way - if you feel to need rare/expensive stuff, go MF farming for currency, go lucky farming for other valuable stuff, go tradeflipping to build up wealth or even better: combine all three methods.

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Odoakar wrote:

Also, balancing a game around people who play 20h per day (your words), is just fucking stupid. But you got one point there, that's exactly the problem with this game. The advent of streamers and GGGs willlingess to balance the whole game around them and their 12-18h per day is just plain stupid.

I'd rather call it crazy than stupid, but it IS weird indeed. Rushing to 100 within some handful days seems also very weird/crazy to me - or trading up stashes of wealth just because its shiny and possible... stupid?
The most weird thing (to me) is, that the streamers etc "show" what's possible if everything goes perfect - and the general availability of this "knowledge" sets more or less theoretical perfection as "the standard". How many ever cared about D2 speedruns, or tried to compare? Why does such a big majority today expect to be able to have everything?

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Crackmonster wrote:

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.

What exactly is the “fullness of the game”? My group of friends was mapping on Day 2 of Rampage. We killed Dominus and ran 75+ maps in the first two weeks. This is less than 50 hours of play to experience pretty much all casual content. Three months is plenty of time to do 50 hours of play… If you’re talking about running every build and using every item then it’s not going to happen regardless the time put in. If I play solo, I can kill Merc Dominus in about a month on pretty much any build with an hour or two of play an evening.

You make a point about the Unique rate in PoE being way too low, then you go on to talk about what D3 does well… I’d be very interested to know how often you are dropping legendaries in D3 RoS… I drop 1-2 an hour. In PoE I drop 1-2 uniques an hour. Your suggestions appear to portray the drop-rate in PoE as MUCH lower than D3. I find them to be identical and your suggestions are therefore somewhat pointless. Have you seen the prices for items in the new leagues? Everything is very, very cheap. This means that the market is flooded with these unique items. You can currently buy a 5-link Belly of the beast for 1.5 ex. In previous leagues the item itself cost more than that.

PoE has kept a decent drop rate for uniques AND it has kept its economy. Diablo 3 still doesn’t drop enough items and it murdered its economy.

The map system is not broken in PoE. However, I do agree with the one problem you posted about it being RNG based. Rolling and running maps is still fabulous and better than the D3 system. It sure does suck dropping from 78’s to 73’s though.

I guess to summarize, I disagree that players are locked out of the game. There are really no walls any longer. Even self-found players have easy progression avenues that take them past Dominus to mid-high maps.

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majesw wrote:

What exactly is the “fullness of the game”? My group of friends was mapping on Day 2 of Rampage. We killed Dominus and ran 75+ maps in the first two weeks. This is less than 50 hours of play to experience pretty much all casual content. Three months is plenty of time to do 50 hours of play… If you’re talking about running every build and using every item then it’s not going to happen regardless the time put in. If I play solo, I can kill Merc Dominus in about a month on pretty much any build with an hour or two of play an evening.

This is the problem. People have vastly different definitions of what is the fullness of the game. To me joining a new league, getting 85-90 on all the builds I want to do on them satisfies my game lust. Maybe if I really like a character I'll try to push it as close to 100 as possible (but I usually don't have time for that.) I want the best items, but don't need them and dont' sweat it if I don't get them on the way.

For people like the OP, the absolute possible best items in every slot must be acquired for it to be finished for him. This rarely happens in any online game but people feel so entitled. For example, how many tens of millions played WoW but were not in the 0.01% of top guilds that were able to get the best gear? Not many of them. Only static games typically have mechanics to let a player do that.

Example in PoE: Etup got to 100 first in Beyond and by that time he got absolutely amazing equipment to me, but still not even close to best possible. Should he feel cheated because he didn't get the "fullness of the game"? According to the OP, he should.

So we are listening to people with unrealistic goals in pretty much any game. He'll goto D3 and have the exact same complaints. WoW. Aion. Rift. Archeage. Any mmo with a grind. He'll want the best sooner than later. I've seen these type of people and they never change so good riddance.