It's time for preleveled/preascended characters to enter the shop or be made available somehow.

Like I said, that's mostly a Lab issue, but it does contribute to people getting discouraged from playing more, and I don't see how they can fix it while Ascendancy points are tied to Lab--at least, as long as they refuse to address the issues with traps and Izaro collectively pushing out so many builds from viability.

This highlights an overlooked point. Whether you are an altoholic or only play a handful of characters, whether they start at 1 or 60, new characters are the lifeblood of player retention. Feeling burned out by the boring 1-60 grind, the repetition of playing through Normal and Cruel, and some builds being more or less stonewalled by Lab (being forced to pay for a run) creates a situation where the game is just not friendly to making new characters. Add on all the issues that individual temp leagues have (especially this one), and it's no wonder it feels so dry. It doesn't even matter if you are playing a "bad" build or a meta build. The problem is the same. The process of going 1-60 with 4 Asc Pts and starting over in Merc Act 1 just burns people out.

Let's think about someone who does just play a few characters to 90 and farms a lot. They spend hours and hours farming, finding gear, acquiring currency, leveling up... but this character is basically finished in terms of the skill tree and itemization. What else is there to do? What is the point of all that gear and currency if you aren't going to roll a new character to try another build? And if you can't stand the process described above in getting that character to a place where the build starts to emerge? If you get tired of playing in general because of the boredom involved with that process? Then why farm with the high level character? Why play at all?

It really seems to me that people have forgotten that the game is about how they enjoy it, not about how much time you're willing to sink into it, and there are many systems in place in this game that demonstrate this point too. One example: Regret Orbs. Your leveling choices actually don't matter because you can respec every single thing about your character if you have enough of these. The only question is how long it takes to farm that number. It's not a meaningful choice; it's a time sink. The alternative is to reroll the character to not have to spend those orbs, but the result is the same. Time sink.

Don't get me wrong. I have no issue sinking lots of hours into a good game. It just needs to be for the right reasons. GGG seems to have forgotten what those reasons were.



I don't think it's hard to see how this pushes players away. Do some people enjoy that journey more than the destination? Sure, but why does that mean those who don't should be forced to?

Let's make this somewhat quick :


- it burns you out, not people out, remember ?

- You never have to pay for a run if you really want to do it yourself, just adapt and overlevel a bit if your build is not well adapted. Merciless might be more difficult in this case but not impossible, and 4 ascendancy points are enough to power creep quiiite a bit already.

- "a few characters to level 90" ? you have no idea how much time it would take, for someone starting the game, most likely hundreds of hours, which is already a lot. After that, new leagues will be there, that players will still have tons of builds to try, and nothing tells us that he will be bored by doing the storyline again. It would be the opposite, after you've reach quite a high level, having a change from maps can feel nice, discovering another build can feel nice.

- time spent and choices are obviously related, since time decide if you can just make a new character or not ... what kind of new nonsense is that ? it's equivalent to "your choices don't matter because you can do it all again if you have time".

- You are not forced to play the game, there is nothing wrong with having a break.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

"

Albinosaurus wrote:

Just because you haven't been reading them doesn't mean I haven't been shooting down every counter argument. If you can't be assed to go read them, I understand, but don't make assumptions about what actually was argued as if you know what's going on. You simply don't.

The point has been made extremely thoroughly, and what's left is two or three regular forum trolls sitting in here trying to derail it, because they are out of arguments. That's all that's going on.

From you I see a lot more ad hominem posts by count than anything else, while you selectively ignore the actual constructive points which have been made. Protip: If you only swing at soft pitches, you're still going to strike out.

I popped back in to see if anything had changed, only to see page upon page of shitposts. Right now this thread isn't even popcorn worthy.

I could accuse you of the same thing, but accusations alone don't mean shit, especially when you have a selective bias against the idea. However, would you mind pointing out what these "actual constructive points" are? I haven't seen any in awhile, and if you're going to accuse me of evading them, I'd be really curious to know which ones you are referring to, because I've made it a point to address the points that were worth being addressed.

Top of page 36. It's the last post I made in this thread prior to the one you quote above. Oh, you didn't address those points because they weren't "worth being addressed?" Well, that's convenient, isn't it. ;) Like I already said, you still strike out if you only swing at soft pitches. Calling the hard pitches "not worth swinging at" doesn't change that fact.

And yes, you could accuse me of excessive ad hominems, but you'd have a hard time backing it up. Quote all of my ad hominem posts, if you choose to accuse me of that.

Because I DO accuse you of it, and am happy to back up my accusation, if you want me to embarrass you in that way.

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Fruz wrote:

it burns you out, not people out, remember ?

it burns me out as well, and technically more than one person is "people".

in my opinion Cruel and Merciless are redundant, and they are redundant because they offer absolutely nothing except "run the exact same way, do the exact same quests, monsters are higher level and hit harder".

maybe it's my years of playing ARPGs which did this, in addition to literally thousands of hours into Path Of Exile... but I can feel it.
this "I don't want to do this all over again" feeling slowly taking over.

but the solution as I see it, is not having people pay cash for the luxury of skipping.

it is making Cruel and Merciless relevant again.
investing into mid-game as well, even though clearly it isn't as sexy as the end-game Streamers keep displaying in Twitch and Youtube.

GGG already have the tools to make it happen. there is a ton of "dead code" that can be brought to life.
like having Nemesis/Beyond Spawns in Merciless, or Rigwald in Cruel, or more Vaal areas plus NPCs with missions, or turning the side-zones-I-don't-bother-with-anymore like Catacombs and Fellshrine, into optional "Uber Zones" in difficulties higher than Normal, using all of the above? with optional quests and challenges?

stuff to do.
stuff to encourage running through the game 2 more times after beating Malachai, instead of making it a Via Dolorosa from the point Normal Malachai explodes, to the promised land of Merciless Dried Lake and Streamer-RNG higher-than-yellow maps.

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johnKeys wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

it burns you out, not people out, remember ?

it burns me out as well, and technically more than one person is "people".

Then "some people" would be correct.
People like this usually refers to people in general.
It surely burns out more than one person, that is sure, not everyone likes the same thing, and not everyone has the same expectations about the game either.

We still need more acts, and I think that the goal is to have only one time through each act for the main storyline.
I was expecting GGG to drop one difficulty on the a4 release to be honest, I was a bit surprised they did not. Maybe for the next act ?
Cruel difficulty offers a slightly different experience because the characters starts looking like an endgame build, and the stuff becomes more interesting I would say, but I definitely agree that the < 60 content need some more interesting stuff.

Changing the quest rewards would be a first step maybe.
Some side quest only available in cruel or merciless would be a nice thing eventually, if it does not take too much of the development time.

Gibbous
As a matter of fact, those points weren't worth addressing because they already have been. Nice try.

John
The problem--and this is fairly the fault of the players too--is that you ultimately are left with, "Why do any of that content before maps?"

No matter how you dress them up, they are still the same three monkeys.

"

Lol lvling from 1 to 60 is so fast as it is, just takes a few hours. But here we are, a thread with over 40 pages of QQ over this 1 little thing.

That's called "missing the point." Congrats.