This game is a becoming a cheap indie d3 clone with every change they make. Of course who can blame GGG, they need their income. A hardcore game made by hardcore gamers...can someone please point me at the hardcore part of this game?
Making a "harcore game for hardcore players by hardcore players" was always going to lead to the community throwing a shitfit at any change made ever - because 'hardcore' means different things to different people.
Hardcore almost never means, "everything is randomly decided by things outside of your control" though.
This game is a becoming a cheap indie d3 clone with every change they make. Of course who can blame GGG, they need their income. A hardcore game made by hardcore gamers...can someone please point me at the hardcore part of this game?
Making a "harcore game for hardcore players by hardcore players" was always going to lead to the community throwing a shitfit at any change made ever - because 'hardcore' means different things to different people.
Hardcore almost never means, "everything is randomly decided by things outside of your control" though.
This.
Alteration Orb Union Local #7
"Alts are 16:1 Chaos. You got that tough guy?
This game is a becoming a cheap indie d3 clone with every change they make. Of course who can blame GGG, they need their income. A hardcore game made by hardcore gamers...can someone please point me at the hardcore part of this game?
Making a "harcore game for hardcore players by hardcore players" was always going to lead to the community throwing a shitfit at any change made ever - because 'hardcore' means different things to different people.
Hardcore almost never means, "everything is randomly decided by things outside of your control" though.
In this game, hardcore means what it means to the GGG devs.
Now, who are the devs?
- Diablo 2 fanatics
- all ninja looters
- disappointed with the current state of gaming/ARPGs whatever
You draw your own conclusions.
Mine are:
- my ex was a hardcore Luxor&Zuma player. My bet is that these guys are not in the same league...
- I was myself a hardcore WoW raider. Not the same hardcore league also...
I got into the closed beta and loved it. I played a ton and think that POE is a great game. I am a supporter and only want this game to be the best it can be.
I took a good time off, and recently started playing it again. And I am finding the experience significantly less engaging than it was several months ago.
The game as it is now is just not rewarding. It seems like drop rates of anything useful have been tuned exceedingly low, probably in an attempt to influence the trading economy and I think that is a huge mistake.
Trading for items should be entirely optional. The game should reward you for playing regularly and if you choose to trade great, if not well then an interesting drop is just around the corner. As it is now, it is starting to feel like the endless slog of grinding for no reward that D3 is, also because of trying to "balance" the in game economy. And this is a huge mistake.
D2 is obviously the biggest influence on this game and yet it is not heeding the way loot and itemization was handled in that game at all.
D2 was always rewarding. Right from level 1 through the entirety of the game you were always getting rewarded with interesting loot. Part of this has to do of course with the fact that D2 had so many more types of interesting drops: rares, three levels of uniques, charms, runes, gems, three levels of set items. More importantly though the drop rate of all of them were pretty high so you always were finding something new, and the Horadric Cube gave a linear upgrade path to higher level gems, runes and crafted items. Items were easily farmeable, maybe too easy, yet the really really great items were SUPER rare. I never ever found a Stone of Jordan, which was used as currency, but in probably thouands of hours of playing I was never bored and it never felt grind-y.
POE on the other hand always feels grindy. Really all you find are white items and an occasional orb. And POE only has orbs, items and skill gems to find. In beta you found rares all the time. Large chests were fun and some of the higher end orbs were not like trying to find ZOD. It never seems to be rewarding. Every few hours or days maybe you find a unique and thats cool but very rarely. It is just an endless grind.
I have no interest in the online economy, I shouldn't have to. I may struggle to find the best unqiues, but I should find interesting stuff all the time. I don't in the game now. It really feels a lot like playing D3, and with much of the same community attitude (few who are contributors as far as I can see) that plagues that horrific game.
POE really needs to address this or it will not receive the long term play it wants to have in my view.
I think the game is balanced with magic find in mind. I think this is a mistake. Atleast the level of magic find. It's kinda stupid that you have to waste atleast 1 gem slot to have item quantity/rarity to make a run worth while. The rolls on uniques are pretty bad, and to be honest the game isn't survivable at later levels without the equivalent of a 5L, and a near max stat weapon/wand. It seems stupid that you can't logicly progress using unique drops after 50.
+1 Excellent post OP, and excellent reply Obsidus :
"
Obsidus wrote:
Spoiler
Amazing post. I didn't think it was possible to see such good feedback on these forums, because I thought it would quickly turn into a flame war based around the "go back to D3 then, you entitled scrubs" sentiment that can seem prolific on these boards sometimes. It's nice to see the best members of this community continuing to contribute their thoughts towards constructive ends (Moosifer, Courageous, Scrotie, etc).
I got into closed beta, but didn't play too much because I didn't want to get invested in any characters that I would lose, but have been playing a lot since the start of OB; therefore I cannot comment on any perceived difference between CB and OB drop rates. I can however agree completely with the fact that overall the loot in this game is not rewarding in the slightest. Most of this has to do with the fact that this game seems more ingrained with RNG on top of RNG than any game I have ever played before; the biggest culprit being the gambling system that is orbs.
Not only are good drops from monsters rare despite the rather decent volume of rare drops in this game (because of the huge range of possible stats and stat spreads, it's too easy for a decent item to be ruined by one or two garbage stats like +2 thorns), the orb system ranges from godly to item ruining in terms of what it can add to an item, and those orbs themselves drop way too infrequently, even with a ton of IIQ. I went from playing three characters to the high 50's with no IIQ at all, to leveling two characters to the same extent with over 100% IIQ, killing everything on every map + some farming, and the only difference I noticed was SLIGHTLY more Alteration/Transmutation/Augmentation drops.
I feel compelled to use the same IIQ item set that I purchased on every character I play (or else I feel like I'm screwing myself), yet the rewards for doing so are hardly apparent. I restrict myself to MF stats just to try to get some return, yet I don't. This is a huge issue.
So what we have is a game where:
- Good loot from a base standpoint is rare despite the acceptable volume of drops
- The orb system for attempted upgrades is constrained by really low drop rates on orbs
- Above system is further constrained by the insane spread of godly to garbage stats and values it can add to an item, which seemingly has no correlation to orb rarity (an insanely rare exalted can still very easily screw you with +1 thorns or +4% fire resist)
- Sockets, links and socket colors are essential to this games extremely good gem system, yet this system too is a huge RNG based grind/orb sink; where just like with stats, you'll often degrade an item far more frequently than upgrade it (spend 100 fusings to get a 4 link on a 6 socket going for a 5 or 6 link, the next 100 fusings bounce you around between 2 and 3 links, thus degrading the item and wasting your orbs utterly, still without attaining a 5 or 6 link)
- High level map drop rates, even the end game is dictated by RNG, which I have never seen in any game EVER
- Upgrading maps is essential and yet is ANOTHER huge orb sink, further compounding the heavily flawed orb system
Any one of these things by themselves might be fine in principle, but not all of them; particularly because they feed into one another and create a cluster-fuck of RNG that makes so much of playing this game feel like nothing but rolling dice that are loaded against you over and over. It's not fun, it doesn't feel progressive at all, it makes people feel like simpletons with little power other than to pull the arm of the slot machine again, and it will burn most out fast.
Overall it is easy to see why many people don't even bother to use orbs unless it's the lower level ones, or they're 70+ and have to on maps, or have 1-2 pieces of good gear worth burning orbs on; the risk vs. reward is way too lopsided. So orbs get hoarded and used as currency in the bartering system, except now the economy is drifting towards no one wanting anything except obscene amounts of GCP/Chaos and Exalts, even for mediocre items, which combined with the stone age trading system of this game is another issue (the economy + trade system) that I won't get into, and am frankly not equipped to.
Furthermore, little bonuses like "Wealth" mobs and "Large Chests" are also flawed; the former being even rarer than exalted orb drops, and the latter basically nine times out of ten being a box of whites and scrolls. Overall it makes a game where despite the fact that playing it is VERY fun in terms of combat and skills, the gear drops and gear modification system, combined with the bartering system, is all a huge, gigantic can of RNG stacked on top of RNG, stacked on top of very low drop chances, stacked on top of more RNG, with a side of frustration and time sink.
This is extremely demoralizing and off-putting to anyone except the sorts of people that are somehow able to robotically grind 8+ hours a day with little return without any complaint (every game will have these people, and they should never be the subset of players that games are balanced around), or the people that by the grace of the gods got two exalted orbs and a Dream Fragments on their first run through Normal, and so the system is "fine" to them.
Then come the combat issues; which can be summed up as "things hit WAY too hard, spike too often, and life trumps all". I won't get into this however as this issue seems to be more recognized by the devs, and is a much simpler fix (nerf mob crit chance and crit modifiers, make charge type attacks avoidable, fix desync, fix melee survivability somehow).
This game is amazing, and it really makes me happy to see that the world of video games is being saved by indie developers. I'm 29 and have been playing games heavily since the original NES, and I'm one of those people that is of the opinion that the industry has become way too corporate, way too focused on the end goal of making a profit and less on the art and quality of creating a great product that genuinely deserves to make a profit. I play far less games than I used to in the 90's and earlier in this century, partially because I'm an adult now, but also because games just aren't the same; one example being what I see as the fall of Squaresoft as a company that made GREAT games like Xenogears, Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, etc, into a mindless FF cloning machine for the sake of maximizing profit and nothing else.
The death of companies like Black Isle, Troika, and the degradation of Blizzard, the nickle and dime philosophy of DLC, the list goes on. I'm cynical, but companies like GGG give me hope that I can keep being a huge gamer for a long time to come, and so I say the above not because I want this game to be some easymode D3 clone, and because I'm some entitled "scrub", but because I think they need to balance vision with practicality, and I know gamer psychology, and as things are this game will NOT flourish at all, and will eventually become extremely niche and for the compulsive and fringe hardcore if some things aren't changed. I've already spent over $60.00 on this game, and plan to spend more, as I love the game and I want it to succeed, so I really hope GGG can take serious note of this thread and not just pay lip service to it like Blizzard would (I spent 6 years playing WoW and haunting their forums, I'm very familiar with how they operate in this regard).
Couldn't agree more, this x1000, leaves nothing for me to say.
What an interesting thread, I was compelled to read it all.
IGN : Drahmin (Legion SC League)
Timezone : GMT(+2:00) South African Standard Time
Legion Crafting Service thread : https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2568765
Standard Crafting Thread (For Vouches) : https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2207913/page/1
The mistake is placing the entire longevity of the game into the item grind. There needs to be some new and exciting competitive skill based and preferably player vs player aspects that imporve longevity.
Once you realize that your item upgrades/massive amount of time investment is only so that you can simply find items at a faster pace. Once your brain logics out the fecade of some actual end game. As dopamine releases when finding an upgrade become smaller and smaller and the item upgrade potential diminish's the game becomes dreadfully dull.
Items should be a sub focus, not the entire end game. The end game should revolve around team play aspects and competitive play as almost all top tier long lasting games do. LoL, counterstrike, starcraft, halo, call of duty, WoW, guild wars, dota... even minecraft.
This game has pulled so many great aspects from other arpg games, how about pulling some from other genres.
1. 5v5 mode where you send waves of monsters at opponents, mix of tower defense/dota aspects. With item/currency rewards and rankings. Possibly even have item's drop from monsters etc.
2. competitive team pvp with rankings and rewards
Basically anything that creates the randomness of facing new human opponents in one way or another as well a decent reward system that helps incentivise competition.
I am constantly stunned by how many people believe that PoE is 'hardcore'. As so many people pointed out RNG is not 'hardcore'.
There's a reason most E-Sports have one or two Arenas, tops. Because it reduces randomness. It's like American Football. The league has only ONE size of arena, 100 yards, the goal posts are at a regulation distance, and at a regulation height. The only random element are the players, their skill and how they're feeling that day.
PoE has nothing at an exact size, the maps change, the loot changes, even the players are different from one an other.
In PoE only EQ drops and gold (orbs) drops. Almost nothing more. Skillgems are basically worthless.
No charms, sets to collect, no socketables, no crafting materials, no jewels,
Some skillgems are considered high value.
Almost all gear is sockable... with skillgems.
Orbs is crafting material, and i've found plenty.
Jewels a.k.a rings and necklace drops all the time.
