PoEs Greatness

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Chris wrote:

I understand why people are scared of casualification, but if a change that makes it 0.01% more casual-friendly is something that upsets people then they must really like it difficult!

Our balance isn't perfect. Some things are occasionally too hard. Others are occasionally too easy. We'll continue to change stuff based on feedback and data. Sometimes a few items may get more common, but that's due to them being really inaccessible.

grant_m: I'm trying!

Wow!!! A major understatement from the head of GGG. There are boss battles that I can't believe were that easy and then some that are such hard bitches (spider lair at the end of Valley map comes to mind) that I only take them on after I just level so I can die as many times as needed to kill the boss without losing xp. Of course that means no HC league for me. I do fully understand that with millions of builds comes millions of balance issues and that will make it impossible to balance boss' for all combinations so some boss' will be easier and some harder for any specific build.

You are dead right that there is an over amount of players ranting about patch 2.0.3 and 4 times the drop rates on uniques. The increased drop rates have been needed, like forever and playing 1000s of hours and getting few to no great drops in that many hours played is very frustrating and tiresome to the point of burnout and quitting play. I am no elite full time player but I was very upbeat about PoE in 2013 (just read my summer trio playing posts) even with high quantity of desync back then. Now today, with desync gone I'm burned out and have almost completely stopped playing PoE and this summer my 2 BFF and I are instead playing the 3rd and now 4th seasons of D3. Why? Not because the play is better and most certainly not because the build diversity is better. It's because GGG has made PoE so unrewarding that it has ruined the "fun to play" factor. Dozens of builds for me (just 1 each for my 2 friends and my female BFF even bought a pet in 2013) and very few rewards (high rares or T1 uniques) to show for all my time sunk playing here.

I do not believe that giving us "casuals" (I prefer time limited) more rewards to justify the time grind to level 100 is the best thing you can do to get us re-interested in playing again and is a move that was sorely needed for a long, long time. I know that if item progression was better I could have kept my 2 BFF interested for more than 4 months (June - Sept. of 2013) and would have convinced them to play The Awakening this summer. But after playing PoE v2.0 and understanding that Merciless Act 4 is much harder as designed (no problem with that) but that nothing was changed to improve item progression and that higher quality uniques would drop less (hell, I've never ever gotten a 6L to drop and only have a few "blue moon" 5L gear due to super low RNG drop chances) that I couldn't in good conscience recommend PoE v2.0 for our summer 2015 arpg trio play. I wish I could have recommended PoE but if we are forever quality loot starved then that kills the "fun to play" (sorry GGG but we will never ever play the PoE commodity market unless trading is much less time consuming. Where's the Public Stash trade system?).

Elite players have nothing to fear about PoE giving in to the "casual" (dark side?... Whimsey side?) side of the arpg force as it will never ever happen. But loosening the quality loot strings and letting a few drop more often is a must for long term enjoyment.

GGG, please always remember that in order for us to desire to keep riding the PoE merry-go-round we must catch the brass ring (great drops) more often. Also remember that you get back more (by way of mtx purchases) if you give more.

Thé change made is certainly not a shove off thé cliff into casual land. But complex systems suddenly being accessible tends to cause qq floods, which can lead to path of least resistance type changes(no pun intended but not entirely usless).

Phone flppex out. I really enjoy path. I make a lot of my gaming time for path, it is pretty fantastic game.

This seems to be the appropriate thread to say I am enjoying the game now much more than before Awakening. Things are good (for me) and I am glad they've been made better.

Of course, there are still a plethora of things to nitpick and armchair-gamedesign over, and that's where I find fun in these forums, so yeah, gonna keep doing that. The bettering must, after all, continue.

I dont even know why they comment on drop rates nothing good can come of it. As you saw with the shav holders pissed thier investment would be supposedly devalued to the 4x0=0 crowd. Just ninja nerf/buff and see if we notice.

Fundamentally, more people have access to some useful gear, but the game is not actually "easier" for anyone who already had great gear to begin with - the use of that word in describing economic changes like this is misleading. A larger number of players being more powerful doesn't have the same impact on the game as the players who are already powerful getting buffed (or having content directed at them nerfed).

Basically, nothing will change for the strong and wealthy players, but more players will have an opportunity to get strong and wealthy. This is a good thing, and exactly what PoE needs in the light of the ever-present problem of a huge divide between rich and poor and their experience of the game (not trying to be socialist here, just saying too few people actually see endgame content or fully fleshed out builds. It's a game, not a real economy!).

The fact that people are upset about changes like this, and other potential changes that are aimed at the goal of broadening the elite playerbase without necessarily making the game easier for that group, betrays their value of personal status over what's actually good for the game. Sorry, but the oligarchic grip on PoE's economy held by a tiny group of no-lifers is actually a serious problem that drives away many people, not a "feature" or a divinely mandated system those oligarchs have some kind of "right" to.

Let more people get better gear (hell, I'm all in favor of blanket drop improvements) without making the best gear any stronger and you'll have a broader playerbase around which the game's content can be balanced more effectively.

I'm pretty happy with these changes.

I remember a period i was really against trading i wanted to find all gears / uniques myself and then build around.

I remember hoping everydays to see a soul taker drop i really wanted to get it for a tree i had built and after 1k hours MFing with broken MF gears ( except a low roll andvarius i had found ) ... still nothing.

Sooo after that i've been forced to jump into the trade machine and finaly ended to appreciate it ( barely i still not agree with many things about trades but that's an other story ).

Bought a soul taker and it was cool but not has if i had found it myself.

It was in domination league i'm now at more than 6k hours played probably and today thankfuly to this patch i'm really happy even if i'm not " SF " anymore i dropped my first soul taker :D

Jumped from my chair and opened a beer wich is something REALLY casual in my case specialy at 8 am :D

Thanks for this patch.

Most of the people with some kind of issues really need to see that they are asking for PoE to change and become a different game.

I really dont get the comment about some bosses being easy and some too hard. In my opinion, it is a knowledge test. You gain knowledge through experience.

When i first saw jungle valley boss he destroyed me.I was not mad, but confused. My confusion led to questions, and my questions led to better understanding. Some maps are nice to farm but hard to get the boss down. Others are a pain but the boss is cake. As with anything, some are totally hard and some are completely easy.

This is not an issue in my opinion, but a landscape filled with peaks and pitfalls. They all contribute to the "knowledge" you can attain here.(same goes for trade, OHK, box deaths etc)
Sure, a first time player could get enraged. But this is not the game for quitters(imo), or for people who want instant gratification.This is what makes PoE the game that we(people who take things as a challenge rather than a design flaw) enjoy.

If you have issues with that, i would put forward the notion that you do not enjoy the "type" of game this is. The devs are not idiots, they do see our complaints and praises. They are definitely not perfect, or hit every nail in the head on the first try. But it is a bit pretentious to constantly keep pushing this idea that the game is doing something wrong. It is as it is for a reason(most of the time), and it is in our hands to say" Yeah, this is something i can dip my pinky in" or " This is not my kind of a deal".

Feedback is great, but as always, we should strive to put it into perspective.
I love PoE because, for me, it shares some of the traits of real life. Some things in life are a lesson hard learned, and PoE does the same thing. The good side is that we have the option to try things again.

Again, i ramble. But hey, not everyone is concise and has a sense of proper form.
Cheerio

I rarely build around a unique. Don't care about getting a specific unique. Most uniques i use are weapons, since they tend to be stand alones in the usefulness scale.

If i had a shav drop it would probably rot in my bank. All low life uniques never get used since i don't build for it.

Unique jewelry and belts sometimes fit into a build i'm working on.

But weapons almost all of them get milage at one point or another. So if a mjolnir dropped sure i would use it one day.

I would rather have better odds at higher level rare mods than uniques.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Can't we just stick to #clickshitkillshitgetshitfun?

Charan nails it again from his second screen.

@ OP - Yes great game, great company and No it is not raining Shavs as all the no-life doomsayers would have us believe.

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DorenAlexander wrote:

I would rather have better odds at higher level rare mods than uniques.

Same. The odds being what they are for a decent rare has nothing to do with knowledge or skill, just wasting tons and tons of time that only addicts will bother spending. Bad drops are not attractive to people who are skilled and dedicated but also want a life.

I really do want a shift in PoE towards skill and knowledge-based difficulty rather than time-based difficulty (which shuts out so many players who would otherwise be here). I think the increased combat difficulty in 2.0 would have been a good step in that direction, if it were coupled with further economic changes that allowed more players to access tough content/good items (but didn't make the content itself easier).

But people say that's "casualization" and whatnot, so here we are: me haunting the forums with a petty chip on my shoulder but not playing because I find the game to be too much of a trade simulator these days :)