Help me get more people playing PoE!?

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jdilly23 wrote:

No tutorial, very minimal guidance - just wash up on a beach and try to piece together what the hell is going on.

It is what I might call a "stealth tutorial." While I may be recycling others' words when I put it, I like how it sounded: a good game teaches you about how to play it as you go through it.

So rather than a hard-prompt tutorial where they go "okay, not try clicking HERE while pressing THESE FIVE BUTTONS," they let the player follow their intuition and what seems obvious, and learn about how things work themselves.

Granted, I think it's a turn-off for some because they're so USED to the half-hour-long "hardline tutorial," or that if they dislike those, they tend to be afraid of any game with more than the most basic complexity.

But for PoE, it really does work well. It's arranged in such a way, really, that if someone just knew how to use a mouse but had NEVER played one of the Diablo games, they'd still figure out what they were doing in pretty short order. "Oh, I click on things to do stuff." "Oh, I click on enemies to attack." etc.

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jdilly23 wrote:

Are you guys suggesting that your characters power is low at the start? There is a lack of action?

That's quite possible. For a lot of "flat" games where there's no buildup in difficulty or complexity, they have to make up for the lack of any "personality" by throwing flashy action at you from the start.

Just seems like a really strange flaw to pick out of the long list of PoEs flaws.

I loved the beginning, guess it was kind of silly to assume everyone else did.

Im sure others love some of the major problems I have with the game too.

best thing to do with this game is....
remove regrets.. period.
give the players the ability to remove points at will on the passive tree..(grinding days/weeks to find/buy/trade currency to buy the regrets) puts off more players than you realise.. a lot of people have limited play time.
having got 30 levels into a creation and you realise its plain crap =)
experimentation.. but with a penalty, no no no.

this game also presumes new players have intensive understanding of the passive nodes (synergy etc etc).. well they don't, many don't have a clue doing the first char.. 99.99% of first chars are wiped.

now i'm going to say this, the same 3 acts repeated is plain tedious.. once you have tried all of the character types..
i know it would be a mammoth task to redesign act two and three.. rather than the current rinse repeat vaal 1 vaal 2 vaal 3.. with the only difference being increasing difficulty, ( different areas/scenery etc.. be more like an elongated story feel)
also why doesn't ggg have a donation option, i'm not into fancy flaming swords etc etc, but i wouldn't mind supporting on a regular basis.. like say £3 a month, i'd feel less guilty about playing poe =)

my 2 cents

If anyone would like to spend some time helping me get back into PoE I'd appreciate it (most of my guild seem to be offline atm, presumably due to league endings).

I stopped the day before Forsaken Masters was released, partly due to my frustration at things that were changing, frustration at things that weren't changing, not wanting to have to relearn yet another iteration of the skill tree, and sinking a huge amount of time in a failed attempt at getting my chest to the colors I wanted.

I tried to get back into it yesterday but didn't know where to begin. All my chars got resets, I have over a hundred ex but no useful currency because I traded it all for chroms that I ate, loads of OP shizniz that I no longer know how to make use of due to changes in balance n skill tree n stuff. Idk, I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.

I wish the game would get to a stage where things are merely added and expanded rather than fundamentally altered to the point that they have to be totally relearned.

Anyway, as I said, if someone could give me a quick recap on changes (skill balancing, tree changes, the whole masters/benches thing, any significant new items that were added) in terms of what actually matters I'd really appreciate it.

 As I see it after 2 years of playing PoE that GGG has no intentions to change the playing pace of PoE. Since there are about a couple dozen of the elite no-lifer players that can reach level 100 in a 3 month league that is seen as justification by GGG that the XP/time is balanced where they want it. That and the fact that GGG has always stated that the reason they created PoE in the first place was “We made the game that we wanted to play.” With that mindset going into the development of PoE from the start GGG founders are not going to make any radical changes to PoE at this time (November 2014).

 So and because of the steep time investment required to become proficient with PoE it is going to turn off a lot of casual arpg players. I don't see that ever changing. The steep grind time to take a build to level 100 polarizes arpg players. The hardcore camp absorbs it all and comes back wanting more while the softcore (casual) camp is mostly turned off by this steep path to achieving a high level build and even steeper and brutal time requirements if you want to take a build all the way to level 100. I too have a love/hate relationship with PoE. There doesn't seen to me that there is any middle ground. You either are willing to take the time to learn the game mechanics and really learn the game engine features and failures (such as desync) so that you can survive long enough to reach the endgame, and then are willing to commit to major time grinding to get to the higher levels, or quit early as the pay outs (better quality gear, orbs, and gems) don't come often enough. GGG's take on the "carrot and stick" motivation to continue to play this arpg is definitely at the low end of the scale.

 So many, many others (probably millions) of arpg'ers have not been able to get comfortable with PoE and have moved on to other titles. GGG knows this and must be ok with this (and financially ok too) otherwise we would be seeing a softening of the time grind for XP and better item progression by now. GGG sees the daily player stats and knows that the number of players per day is at an all time low. Some of the low count is that we've just ended a 3 month league and are going into the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season where our time to play PoE is more limited (for most who have a real life). But a lot of the drop off in daily playing has to come from the realization by many that the negatives outweigh the positives in PoE. Until GGG runs out of the hardcore fans willing to drop big bucks on microtransactions I don't ever see a softening of the time grind or any other loot drop improvement needed to incentivize more to come (or come back) and play PoE.