Do you find GGG balance strategy acceptable?

I am critical about the insane trading. That needs to be fixed. But, having a "flavor of the month" gives incentive to try different builds and style of play. Perhaps a great number of folks play the same build in a particular league, but it is likely a different build then they played previously.

This league is very good i think.
There are so many ways to make currency with specialized builds. Carry peoole. Farming something specific or just mod your atlas to a moneymachine. I dont do either of this nor am i intrested in this. Way of making currency.
With the incursion i get enough drops to sustain my maping expenses and i even can profit. Not like 1 ex per hour like others but its fun.

Honestly, as a business practice, this "strategy" has proven not half bad. It definitely makes the game feel a lot less fulfilling. "oh ok they buffed x so I guess I should try x. Oh look, x is absurdly powerful." Not quite the same feeling as "Now hold on, if I combine a y with a z, I should be able to employ alpha combo strategy vs. one type of enemy and beta combo strategy vs. a second type of enemy, which will make for a completely different game experience than last league where I played x."

This is not necessarily a bad thing. People don't always need games to be fulfilling, and it's not necessarily a productive business strategy to create a fulfilling game, because games can only tend to be fulfilling for a certain period of time before you get tired of it. If PoE can provide 0.5 year to 2 years of fulfilling gameplay for a person, then become "choose which graphics you would like to play 'Click Next to Blow Up Screen' with" for a decade longer - maybe that is how one defines success.

Cyclone and 2h melee in general needs help

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Abdiel_Kavash wrote:

In a way, this is not an entirely bad thing. PoE is a game about optimization, about maxing out every possible aspect of your character. For there to be good choices, there need to be bad choices.

Sure, there must be "bad choices", but they should be about using wrong combinations of items, skills, passives, and not individual ones. If skill "A" simply outperforms skill "B" in every aspect, then why skill "B" exists in the game at all? Same for items. Every skill, unique or passive node in skill tree must serve a certain purpose. From developers' perspective, every "useless" item/skill/passive - it's just a wasted for nothing resources!


If every skill had equal performance levels (according to whatever metric you choose), there would be no point in playing a different build other than "what color particle effects to I want to spit at enemies".[/quote]

It's called "homogenization". Sure, it's the easiest and most sure way to reach balance. But it isnt the only one.
Let's take "Chess" and "DoTA2" as an examples. In chess, players have exactly the same units, so, obviously, game is almost perfectly balanced. In DoTA2, players have different units, with different gameplay, build-up, strategies, etc. Sure, DoTA2 isnt as balanced as chess, but it's still balanced anough to make tournaments in it! And it's far, FAR more diverse and interesting, than chess.
So why DoTA can have an adequate balance and great diversity, and PoE cant?

It seems that people have different ideas of what "discover" means, which strikes me as amusing given that the current League is Conquistador-themed and the Story of Colonization was White people being very proud of discovering places ...

that the locals had lived in for up to 60, 000 years.

I'm of the opinion that discovery ought to be "spades* finding out the content and sharing to the rest", rather than all players being given all content to experience themselves, and calling this "discovery".


*Explorers

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

So why DoTA can have an adequate balance and great diversity, and PoE cant?

1. There's no one in the office interested in achieving it. PoE "balance" is about drastic meta shifts and disposable content. And it isn't anything new, just escalated over time to become too obvious.
They want to "stress" the players every 3 months, to be able to keep the retention, hence the financial profit. As some players may say, "to keep the game fresh".

Saying that, most (of course not all) of the balance decisions altogether with newly added features and temporary events, are mostly finacially motivated.
Power creep/imba builds to make players return and feel mighty and winning with few efforts, so they can stay long enough to buy thematic MTX or anything in general.
Thematic/league related items to clutter your stash, to force you buy more tabs. These items also stay forever in game, hence the desire to get some more tabs intensifies the more you play.
Chase items.

It's safe to say that most of the "balance" decisions are about making players bite the hook and buy stuff. The damnation of F2P games.

2. There's more beyond cashing out. Not intending to be rude, but PoE balance team is fairly incompetent. Let's not forget these guys lacked any experience in making computer games and learned on the go, with all the consequences.
In addition, as long as company grew and new, poorly qualified members were hired, the incompetence escalated. I mean, the material is bad.

And now, when game got cluttered with so many power creep/disposable content, over time, it's literally impossible to get balanced properly. It's impossible. No way. So, why bother? Anyway, there's too much stuff and variables. Oh, and if you even intend to put some order in it, your brilliant ideas may get cancelled by finacially driven "balance" decisions of a big shot in charge. Just fuck it and forget. Braindead sheeple will eat and digest anything you throw at them. It's historically and empirically proven fact.
What's most important, whatever they do - it generates cash. That's enough for a company to know they are going just fine, and there shouldn't be a single reason to make them change anything, or invest in non-profitable activities.


Speaking of GD, it's a P2P game, made by professional game developers.
Speaking of Dota 2, it's a highly competitive team game with PvP elements, there's no option to not balance it or it's down the drain.
These are different games.

The moral of the story: no one in the office needs PoE balanced, nor cares much for this aspect of the game. As there's not a single reason to.
So their balancing strategy is completely acceptable. For ggg as a company.

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Abdiel_Kavash wrote:

Do you believe it has already failed? Or that it will fail - soon? What makes you think that?

Player numbers were at an all-time high at Incursion launch, according to GGG's own data. I certainly still feel challenged and interested; and judging by the volume of questions I help with every day many other people are as well. Of course, I don't have any objective historical data to compare against, so all I am left with are guesses.

I certainly don't recall the meta shifting anywhere as fast pre-3.0 as it was after the expansion. (To pick an arbitrary break point; not implying that GGG's attitude has changed precisely with the release of Oriath.)

The Meta hasn't shifted appreciably since double dipping got removed the best skills have remained the best skills and largely the buffs to ascendancies/items/league uniques have actually made those skills better not worse.

This is the biggest reason why I don't factor in GGG apparently meta shifting as an excuse for their poor balance, if they wanted to shift the meta RF/BF/MS/Barrage/TS/GC/KB would have received nerfs as they are substantial outliers that have consistently been on top for like the last 4 leagues.

The fact that they overbuffed arc and its become popular therefore doesn't excuse that a few skills massively outperform others or why when they buff some underused skills in such an insignificant way that they shouldn't have bothered.

To tell you the truth i've never managed to put my finger on what GGG's balance plan is, the only thing that fits is like 3 different people are responsible for balance and they have completely different ideas of what balance means.

You've got cautious Jack whose worried that Infernal blow was gonna be used by somebody so lowered its base damage when they gave it a secondary effect, Boring Steve who thinks small numerical boosts are enough for most skills and Super Sandra who thinks go big or go home and thinks the Arc changes make sense in context to the other skills.

These 3 styles are so different that I can't work out how they get in the patch notes together.

If Arc is the way then IB is garbage, if IB is the way then like 40 skills need gutting, if numerical man is the way wtf does it take them so long to do skill tweaks you could do the entire set in an hour.