Feedback: Strengthening the Social Aspect, Enemey Strategy, Cleaner Graphics, and a move skill.

First off, thank you for the beta invite. As a result for your generosity I've taken time to make sure I give a detailed report of my two week experiences in Path of Exile.

Intuitive Social Interaction
There is a reason people love online gaming. We humans crave interaction with others. But, sometimes we also prefer to just play alone. Gaming is mostly a social activity. With strong social support games can last ages. But, the intuitiveness of social interaction in PoE is doing the opposite.

Strengthening the intuitive steps of social interaction.
1. Naturally, when you click on an online game on your desktop, is the first step to connecting with a community of players. Following by logging in.

2a. The next step obviously, is selecting the role or personality you wish to portray or be recognized as in the community. I know some individuals whom claim to spend hours on choosing just a name.

Do you want to be the honorable Scottie Pippin or the distinguished Michael Jordan in team play? The psychology of role playing itself adds depth to character creation which reflects the importance of online personality development and reflection. This is the second progression into the depths of the community. Who do you want to be and how do you want to be perceived by other players?

-By allowing players to develop and change these roles with a variety of skills(gems) and skill points is beneficial to community naturally unfolding. The Final Fantasy 7 style of Materia, Cloud could fill any role the player wished.
-The gauge of these roles are vague, and roles blend together so there is no pressure on one individual alone to perform. To elaborate, if you want to support your team you can also take part in other aspects other than just support.
-When selecting a character, I didn't know what to really expect. I would never of expected a somewhat fluid choice of role.

2b. Your character is injected into the community alone. Naturally, individuals want to get a basic introduction how to play before actually playing with the community. This is still a part of deciding who you are or want to be. This may also extend beyond introductory levels, individuals may not know what to expect later. Or, they wish to experience the game in its entirety and absorb all they can because they fear other players may rush them through the game.


3a. Bringing the community together.

Right now, the state of social interaction other than Global Chat function is abysmal, being such a critical aspect of online gaming in general.

The social tab and noticeboard is not intuitive for players, and encourages anti-social behavior of the community.

The game needs to assume players wish to interact together, and give an option to be alone. Global Chat for example, is naturally turned on, with an option to hide the chat. This naturally cultivates a social bubbles in the PoE community.

Intuitive social gaming be achieved by players selecting or creating parties before they enter the world or start playing.
- A larger expanded upon social tab providing mandatory selection of public party play with the option to play privately.
This can be done with a lobby, but, also, by using already in game tools. Ctrl+M1 a waypoint and you can see a list of instances of that zone. Instead, have that list pop up without having to hold down Ctrl; Providing a list of public instances, and all new instances are not created privately automatically would strengthen intuitive social play. Along with a new option to see all public instances. Note* It is important to have inactive instances with afk players removed from the list.


Expanding upon natural selection of social interactions by removing antiquated barriers to broaden and diversify the options in choosing public instance gives a broader scope for public cohesion.
-Expand upon removing all linear questing, we start to see a glimpse of this in Act2. Where as all quests are spread out, with non linear access to the bandits, weaver, and chamber of sin. Non linear questing widens the scope of intuitiveness in public play.


-Expanding upon a larger social tab with listed public instances and non linear questing. Instead, have the instance(ctrl+click) tab pop up first with lists of public parties sorted by whom has the most in common in terms of quests needed to be done or completed. Then if the individual decides to play alone privately they have the option to.

3b. Social Subgroups, and Bubbles.

It isn't enough to intuitively have players, packaged as one large social bubble. Quantifying the value of an individual to the player socially, is important in real life to in game. Most often, a stranger has no social value to an individual, other than what social bubbles they can be associated with.

These bubbles, can be artificial, or naturally produced. As follows; an example.
Myself
Friends/Family
Clans
Alliances between Clans
Factions, a larger bubble of alliances
Global

By strengthening and forging easily accessible social bubbles, communities of players develop strong rapport with other players.

3c. Party Cohesion
For the most part, party cohesion is very healthy socially up until, a point. When a players goal becomes net experience, or collecting items in a party, players can be seen branching off and soloing mobs instead of staying with the party.
-Farming for experience in popular felshrine, is an example when players become to strong for public play.
-Maps the item, allows players to create instances of variety of difficulties suitable for public play. Maps need to drop more often, even after the buff to their drop rates in non map instances to encourage things like felshrine from not happening.
-Item timers are a great idea for diversified playstyles, are entitled to their fair share of items. Slightly increasing the timer allows for greater artificial trust with teammates.





Diverse Enemy Synergistic Mechanics.
Very rarely do you encounter two mobs that work together to take down the player with synergy. Beating down mobs is fun, but, so is strategically selecting which mobs to bring down first.

Tar Zombies, and ranged crabs are probably the most basic of synergistic mobs. A slow with a projectile. Both mobs help each other to bring down the player.

Exploding squids mixed in with regular squids is another example. As if it were intelligently/strategically designed to attack the player.

But, when flicker strike specters seem to appear as the only thing to defend against, without much diverse strategical support from other mobs. It lacks any real fun strategical critical thinking.





Cleaner Graphics suggestion tweaks. Specular, Blur, Items, Curses and viewpoints.

Specular maps needs to be toned down in some cases it looks like plastic or bleeds the diffuse.


It's one thing to overwhelm the player with a lot going on. But, its entirely another thing by blinding them.
- Playing a high lvl map with a full party and almost 50% personal item drop quantity. It just becomes absurd with the amount of items dropped that it becomes impossible to even see what is going on in combat.
-The blurs of some animations can be so strong that it can distort entirely and hide players/mobs. Poison Arrow, Decoy Totem for example are extremes. The game is good looking, there is no need to hide it with absurd amounts of blurring. Do more to showcase your artists. Quality>Quantity.

Curses have no naturally understood animation, and don't seem as unique. I see a symbol on the curse, but, that symbol has no association to anything I understand in real life.

Finally, the way zones are structured, and the natural desired viewpoint. If you recall in Diablo 2, most of all the zones infact had a north west or north east direction of zone progression. This is because it grants the greatest scope of observation to the player, thus most desirable. An option to turn the camera facing a natural direction or, simply designing zones to most of the time have the camera facing the direction of the zone progression would strengthen the environmental experience of the player.






Lastly, a few final words.
- A move skill would be great. I have no need or want to use melee or wand, I just want to move around. I've died because my character was locked into attacking from a missclick, when I never wanted to attack move.
-Item progression, it would be nice to have 1-2 uniques on my journey to the end of merciless mode. I cleaned every zone entirely, and I was pretty disappointed with that, nothing special dropped.
-Gems should have their own stash. Just like in FF7, you have your normal inventory, and you would have your materia menu. A gem bag or slot specifically for gems would be nice.

Nice write up.

Lots of good points here.

Very very nice read. will have a go at analyzing in detail some of the points you mentioned once I have more time.

Great effort!

I have no point of complaint. All good points, though I don't know how the devs would feel about having the camera point in the direction you're supposed to go. I think they'd rather have it so that players need to find the right direction on their own, or perhaps they're concerned bots would have an easier time finding the exit to a zone if they knew which direction it was in.

Oh, and, your point on making questing more socially intuitive is a good one - but I don't know how feasible it is to implement. That seems like a core design decision that would have had to have been made well long ago in advance. Act 3 is probably too far in development for that kind of design as well. But I think that would be amazing design for Act 4.

Now THAT'S a beta tester. Will come back to this after work.

very interesting read. +1