Some of you seem to hate maps, why?

Because in the past five years, maps have changed.

Maps used to be easy to access challenging content. With powercreep and GGG nerfing any hard content; maps are trivial, basically any char can run them.
this makes them less interesting.

They nerfed map drop rates, several times, and limited what tier maps can drop.
This makes maps have more value and inefficient play is basically pissing away your chaos.

At one point content was gated apart from maps. Initially players had to choose between running maps or collecting fragments for atziri runs.
this was good, there was a meaningful choice to make.

Now all interesting content is gated behind maps.
This is bad. We are being forced to speed clear maps as quickly and thoroughly as possible. it's boring and tedious.

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Pajdovo wrote:

Everyone wants everything without paying the price for it...

no, we're just tired of everything having the same price.
it's pointless, maps 'gate' themselves, you don't need to farm albino rhoa feathers or delve to get new maps. there's no opportunity cost to mapping, you're not missing out on diviner's strongboxes, master missions, sac fragments, elder/shaper gear, league mods. everything is in maps.

why not make other content like that? gate it with itself, gate it with a challenge. and maybe nerf what's available in maps a bit so there's some actual choice to be made.

they are not anything interesting. Just the same content, over and over again

There is just as much excitement as leveling a character from 1-maps, as there is from maps-end.

One of the main unhappiness with maps is I can't farm an item. Oh yes I can do 6000 burial chambers and get a couple of headhunter cards but not enough to actually get the item. Yes hh the top item. But I have to resort to tedium boring currency or item flipping if I want the good items instead of having fun Farming and grinding the items myself.
Also map drops suck unless u got 60 hours a week to spare

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Johny_Snow wrote:

I was about to write a long post why I love them but this thread is not about that, tell me why you hate them?

I don't hate maps per se, but I hate the mapping system with a passion:

1. Layout tied to difficulty. If there's a map I really like the layout of but it's only T1-T5, there's not much I can do to boost it. Sure, I can use an elder orb to get it to T16, but this is gated behind a bullshit/tedious questline, and there's only one of them.
2. Layout tied to rewards. Lots of maps are disproportionately better at sustaining then others, simply because they have better mob counts / mob densities than other maps. Popular example being Underground Sea. If the maps you like have "bad" mob density, you're out of luck as far as running them is concerned.
3. Location tied to rewards. Having more sextant candidates in range makes a map automatically better, simply due to its location on the atlas - further exacerbating the map imbalance.
4. Buying maps is an awful experience, and curbstomps what fund I would otherwise be having by continuously interrupting it with a shitty trading system.
5. Shaping my atlas around a map prevents me from completing any other maps of that tier, essentially also locking me out from group play - if that's ever the case in an online game you know you messed up hard in the design stage.

In summary, I simply can't play the maps I want - I have to do shit like UGS or other "optimal" maps, either because the ones I enjoy aren't self-sustainable or because they have a too low mob level. There are so many ways to improve the atlas system in a way that would keep me interested in maps, for example:

- Make the boss of a map drop the same map with a 100% chance. (Guaranteed sustain on any map)
- Make maps very rare, but make the map device no longer consume them. (Plus, this adds a crafting meta to maps - crafting a good map would be like crafting a good rare)
- Make the map selection independent of the difficulty (tier) selection. You unlock maps by completing adjacent maps, and to open it at a white/yellow/red difficulty will require consuming a (tradeable, stackable) white/yellow/red currency item.
- Add a zana recipe to exchange a map + small additional fee for any other map of the same tier.

And these are just ideas I can think of off the top of my head within the span of a few minutes.. It really wouldn't take effort to add a playable endgame to PoE.

I wouldn't even mind the imbalance in rewards between maps as long as I could sustain the maps I enjoy. The only reason I'm forced into shit like UGS is because it has a much higher chance of dropping itself. Maps being unsustainable by default is the one thing that's completely killing the fun for me. Just another example of GGG adding shitty content gating mechanisms to their own game to prevent players from having fun.

5. Shaping my atlas around a map prevents me from completing any other maps of that tier, essentially also locking me out from group play - if that's ever the case in an online game you know you messed up hard in the design stage.

I think this a very good point, i hate not being able to play with my friends just cos i want to do a shaped map strategy, seems a badly thought out design choice

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Pajdovo wrote:

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Cipp wrote:

I really wished GGG would have allowed us to grind for gear without "taxes" on enjoment this time, but, alas, that was not to be. Hence the disappointment.

Oh yeah, let me rephrase that:

...to grind for BETTER/UNIQUE/WORTHWHILE gear...

Everyone wants everything without paying the price for it...

If I want something, I just go for it and accept the rules. It is my free choice to play this game under the given conditions and if I do not like them, I don't play.

I'm sorry, but you seem to have misunderstood the point. No-one is advocating that everything should just be handed to the player. There would be nothing to play for after that after all. Rather the point is that people want to grind in a way that does feel like a chore. So, not by mindless clicking on weakling mobs, but by fighting challeging monsters in interesting and varied settings. Delve could have been like that.

GGG makes up the rules. GGG also has an interest in having as many possible financial contributors (players) as possible. The current system does not make me want to play the league and I reckon I'm not the only one. There is nothing wrong in letting GGG know this.

Map drops suck unless you run a t16 elder map with full sextants, influence and a character that is immun to reflect.

I dont understand why maps are so hard to drop. People have mirror stacks (actual or potentially with combined currency) one week into league anyway. Changing map drops wouldnt make anyone even richer. You cant buy more than everything. But it would make the game much more fun for almost everybody. Massive trading and making the rich even richer with being forced to buy maps is not a good principle.

It doesnt even have to be a loot fest. Just put in a mechanic that makes map drops more probable depending on played maps. With every played map the chances of dropping a map of same or higher average tier of played maps increases up to 100% after no drop for 3 or 4 maps.

If you are lucky you still get 7 red maps in one but if you are unlucky you dont go through your whole stash in 1 hour and are left with white maps and frustration.

The point of collecting currency should not be being able to buy maps and actually playing the game but crafting stuff to be stronger. Delve is a good mechanic to encourage crafting and being as strong as possible. Most people just cant go that far because three quarter of their currency goes away for mapping.

Also low tier maps are a joke. I can play them with any build, any character and one shot everything with mediocre gear. With a semi-good build and gear everything below t14 is boring as hell and with good gear even guardians (except maybe hydra because of mechanic) is boring.
Map drops could stay as they are if the difficulty range would be higher. when maps up to t5 would be okish, up to t10 hard and to really play t15 and 16 i would need end game gear. So that Shaper and uber elder would be the crown on game. Atm shaper is nice but once you have the mechanic down not challanging (litteraly doable on any 3-4 link with ok gear). Uber elder is only hard because of the slow arc from elder. Otherwise also easy peasy. Just make the guardians feel like big evil monsters and t14 and 15 bosses (and mobs) feel like I am a hero when I kill them and not one shotable except maybe with full mirror gear. Maybe introduce more and harder phases. t15 Kitava is a chore just because the animated sequences take 10 times more time than the actual fighting.

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Prizy wrote:

I honestly don't think the majority of people hate mapping in general... I would vouch to say that a large group of people do not enjoy red-level mapping.

The tedium of mapping has gone way to far and can be annoying after a while.

There was a time that all you needed was chisel, alch, vaal and the occasional zana mod to sustain reds (like 1 zana mod every 5 maps).

Now?

Chisel.
Alch.
Vaal.
Bloodlines Zana Mod.
Sextants.
Check Elder/Shaper influence. Run Reds that have Elder for better maps.

It's too fucking much. You have to fucking analyze ever fucking part of the process to make sure you can sustain.

The recent changes to quant/rarity on maps is so fucking shitty now. Most alchs lead to 65 quant and 20 pack size. It's fucking annoying.

The over-nerfing of pack size and the relative contributions to map density of each map affix is all fucked up.

The one upside of all of this is that the drop rate of vaal orbs has increased significantly since incursion. If it weren't for that small adjustment, I wouldn't even be messing around with this league.

It should not be a struggle for players to get maps to drop after a certain level. There is no reason that level 93 characters should have to struggle to find red maps.

The other problem is that the RNG swing of map drops is so crazy that if you complain about map drops, the other side of the coin will berate you because their RNG was good to them:

"What are you talking about? Sustaining red maps is so easy. *proceeds to screen shot map inventory* You're doing something wrong!!"

There is no guarantee to map sustain. Only a false promise that if you "invest properly" it will work out in the end... the truth is that this is NOT always the case. You can invest til your eyes turn blue into your maps, and still hit long dry runs that will force you down multiple tiers in a span of 20 maps.

It's fucking annoying and stressful.

So this
+1

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Some of you seem to hate maps, why?
I was about to write a long post why I love them but this thread is not about that, tell me why you hate them?

I don't think that ppl hate maps but this league the map drops are completely fucked up aka it's a pain in the ass to sustain maps. And after more than 6 years maps do not feel that fresh anymore too. ^^