What happened to Zenocidegenius?

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raics wrote:
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Antnee wrote:
^ That's what we focus on now. What we get is "balance" designed for Pohx, and not the 99.99% of Antnees out there. This is fucked, and untenable. Ironically, by making gaming more accessible to watch, streaming drives gaming to be more inaccessible to play. The future of gaming seems to be more of a spectator sport, designed for the elite to participate in, and the rest of us slobbering masses to watch (in between games of Angry Birds).

And at the same time, games are becoming easier, not harder.


Maybe the future of gaming looks like that for you. Doesn't mean it should be like that for everyone. Games do require a non-trivial time and energy investment to reach a respectable skill level even if you're a casual. You either accept you won't be nowhere near competitive and have a life outside of gaming or you create unrealistic expectations for yourself and suffer.

It's the same with physical sports - no one in their right mind watches the top-level MMA or boxing fighters slug it out and expect to be able to do something even remotely similar. Of course, there are more than enough people not in their right mind, but that's another story.
The Wheel of Nerfs turns, and builds come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the build that gave it birth comes again.
Last edited by Bars on Aug 27, 2016, 10:55:50 AM
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Antnee wrote:
Maybe this is OT, but I kinda wish the whole streaming thing would disappear.
Spoiler
It's a double edged sword for game designers, one that ends up skewering the common gamer.

On one hand, you get free* promotion. On the other, people watch these damn things, and think the top-level gameplay should represent what they, the common gamer, will experience in the game.

Is that the case for most of you?

What ends up happening: waves of endless whiny feedback. Massive, unending waves. Cries that this or that is "unbalanced", because what they see as balance is just the snow at the tip of an iceberg.

Pohx cleared a Gorge in 20 seconds! Why can't I do that with my freeze pulser?

^ That's what we focus on now. What we get is "balance" designed for Pohx, and not the 99.99% of Antnees out there. This is fucked, and untenable. Ironically, by making gaming more accessible to watch, streaming drives gaming to be more inaccessible to play. The future of gaming seems to be more of a spectator sport, designed for the elite to participate in, and the rest of us slobbering masses to watch (in between games of Angry Birds).
/disjointed rant
While that is the illusion Twitch seems to paint, it's obviously not realistic. Who wants to develop a "spectator sport" game, when you could develop an "Angry Birds" which sells millions more units? Designing for the elite isn't an effective business strategy unless you can then egalitarianize the product.

For what it's worth, I feel some of the best games ever have aimed high, then find ways to lift up their playerbases to a more elite level. Lifting inevitably means learning. Above all, the biggest problem with today's games us that they're frightened to death of the tutorial, afraid to really teach their players, apparently believing the ancient trailer trash anti-wisdom that learning is inherently boring, and as such fail to train their players in new gaming skills.

The hardcore gamer cliche of this era is "git gud." The implication is: git it elsewhere. We don't provide the tools to git it here, we just expect, demand it of you. Hardcore games these days are like employers who require a bachelor's degree and 5 years experience; they are no longer willing to deal with noobs at all.

PoE is no exception. As much as it expects from players intellectually, it avoids tutorials and actually teaching new players as if the practice were a disease.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Aug 27, 2016, 10:59:00 AM
Yeah, maybe I'm wrong.

I still find it irritating that common players are subject to the whims of what streamers are exploiting. Remember Charan and his mine/trap rant? I don't think he was wrong there, at all.

I've had builds wrecked because "a streamer" made something niche popular, and the subsequent balancing affected me as well. That shit makes me enjoy the game far less, and in fact, I don't see myself playing for a great long while partly because of that.

Why would I try to make something creative when it's just going to get shit on for things outside of my control? I see streaming, and the associated clearspeed culture, as wholly to blame.
A comprehensive, easy on the eyes loot filter:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1245785

Need a chill group exiles to hang with? Join us:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1251403
@scrotie

Perfect post and very true. Cheers

Peace,

-Boem-
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
It's always been, and always will be, a clearspeed meta. You get loot and XP from kills. Maximizing kills per unit time is winning. It sounds to me like you realize this but are upset that public build designers realize it. That's a weird position to take.

I don't know how familiar you are wth my balance rant so I'll spoiler it.
Spoiler
Balance is an illusion. Literally. Balance is the condition of several options having values with margins of error such that ordering said options from best to worst is uncertain. Given a static situation, collection of evidence inevitably destroys balance; balance erodes as player knowledge grows. The advent of social media has made balance much more difficult than in games of yesteryear, as the "metagame puzzle" is now a communal effort rather than an individual one. For this reason, the only way to sustain balance is regularly occurring content changes/deletions/additions, resetting evidence collection efforts. Note that the playerbase has much more time to "solve" the meta after release than developers have to "solve" it before release, so this constant cycling of new content will involve developers creating puzzles they themselves can't know the answers to.
The thing I wonder about with GGG's approach to balance is that they cycle on discovery of - or, more accurately, on public reveal of - overpowered strategies, rather than on fixed intervals. It's a rather more reactive approach than usual. I'm very much against the "mid-league patching" approach, except in the most degenerate cases, because I feel a meta win should last a while before the inevitable reshuffle. It's also potentially frustrating that GGG reacts to public awareness of OP and not to secret OP; although this is solid reasoning from a "metagame as puzzle" perspective, it actively discourages sharing and makes publicizing an overpowered strategy a form of griefing others at worst, and short-lived fame at best.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Aug 27, 2016, 1:02:59 PM
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ScrotieMcB wrote:
It's always been, and always will be, a clearspeed meta.

To expand a bit on this, I don't think the flak 'clearspeed meta' gets lately is because the concept of getting more XP per unit of time in somehow alien. It's because 'speed meta' = 'clearspeed meta'.

The problem is this: XP per minute equals XP per kill times kills per minute, obviously enough, a nice linear equation. The problem is it's missing the upper half, you can't find enough content in game that gives enough XP per kill to rival killing a million 1XP boars. If we had the option to kill hard stuff slow and come out on top at the cost of increased risk to die that would be a different story.
Wish the armchair developers would go back to developing armchairs.

◄[www.moddb.com/mods/balancedux]►
◄[www.moddb.com/mods/one-vision1]►
Last edited by raics on Aug 27, 2016, 1:46:32 PM
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raics wrote:
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ScrotieMcB wrote:
It's always been, and always will be, a clearspeed meta.

To expand a bit on this, I don't think the flak 'clearspeed meta' gets lately is because the concept of getting more XP per unit of time in somehow alien. It's because 'speed meta' = 'clearspeed meta'.

The problem is this: XP per minute equals XP per kill times kills per minute, obviously enough, a nice linear equation. The problem is it's missing the upper half, you can't find enough content in game that gives enough XP per kill to rival killing a million 1XP boars. If we had the option to kill hard stuff slow and come out on top at the cost of increased risk to die that would be a different story.
Let's say you designed an ARPG such that the XP awarded per kill was h^1.1, where h is enemy hp. Even then, you'd see clearspeed behaviors due to rounding; you can't kill enemies in 1.1 hits, it's either 1 or 2, so the 1-hit method is, at least temporarily, optimal.

I think the apparent issue with PoE is that "temporarily optimal" becomes forever. But the real issue is: why is there a map meta at all? Because that's the meta we're really talking about here, and it should be blatantly obvious that incentives to run the same content over and over are anathema to replayability.

When everyone's looking at Atlas of Worlds and thinking "how am I going to chain the exact same map, repetitively, as efficiently as possible," you know a deep corruption has taken hold.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Aug 27, 2016, 2:39:10 PM
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ScrotieMcB wrote:
Because that's the meta we're really talking about here


I think the meta most people are talking about when they say 'clear speed meta' is 'that guy clears way too fast'. Some of that is jealousy, and could be rephrased as 'that guy clears faster than me and I don't have the time/currency to do it too!'. But I think some of it is legitimate criticism of game mechanics, rephrased as 'that guy is clearing so quickly and safely that he's not playing an ARPG anymore'.

Clear speed meta gets conflated to those two ideas and more. But I do sympathize with the second viewpoint. They've nerfed things for being too strong in the past, but people see <X seconds> Gorge runs and think 'so all those things that got nerfed in the past were bad, but this is acceptable?'. We're left to guess at what kind of standards GGG has for balance since we have nothing concrete: we're piecing together the fragments of nerfs and buffs past into a picture that looks very murky still.

This is how you end up with a situation in which 7 disparate groups are blamed for ruining balance in the game because 'GGG listens to them'. You can find a puzzle piece that looks like it belongs in that picture if your mindset is focused that way.
I blame the cryharders. Whatever happens, buff or nerf, always a massive overreaction.

'They nerfed my build, game ded'
'Not enough loot, game is shit'
'400% unique droprate buff, game ded'
'400% droprate buff not enough, game still sucks'
'Nerf coc!@!1!1'
'Coc nerfed, gg I'm out of here'
'lab'

etc.

A large part of the community is involved into a crying contest with the unspoken rule that whoever cries the hardest might get to sway the devs into whatever their agenda is. Since everyone is crying about everything, sometimes they cry about legitimate problems which do get fixed (or overadjusted) and this creates the illusion the crying actually works, which encourages more crying in the future. Over time, it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy and actually start to work - I think the incoming coc nerf might be a good example, although I'll wait and see exactly what they're going to do to.
The Wheel of Nerfs turns, and builds come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the build that gave it birth comes again.
Last edited by Bars on Aug 28, 2016, 6:36:26 AM
take the extreme case of balancing: "shattered enemies or one hit kills drop no loot", you balance alot of clear speed with that change.

it's even better than repelling players with elemental / physical reflect.
age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill!

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