GGG - Fix this game first.
" ssssssssh! ;) IGN: SplitEpimorphism
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" of which having experience in artistic design distinctly prohibits additional knowledge of and their capability to contribute? I don't see how empowering employees to do more then their listed job functions is bad for either them or GGG... It's a small company and they need every resource they can muster and that includes cross department assistance like andrew posted that they already are doing. Last edited by Jiero on Jan 2, 2014, 5:06:05 PM
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" Have you ever worked in the software game development industry? You have only 10 or so hours in your typical work day to schedule all your assigned tasks, reports, and meetings. The kind of advice you're offering is what we used to hear at seasonal off-site retreats from the up-beat "team-building" consultants they hired to entertain us. | |
" I started out in just web design, tech support and customer interaction (business to business) for a hosting company, then for a while moved to remote installs, then trained in server administration, then in data base administration and now am starting my training in android and IoS programming soon and plan to learn additional tasks beyond that (already trained in drafting and design and minor artistic stuff). By learning more and being able to contribute more I not only was more secure in my position but was of greater value to the small company I'm employed with and helped aid it in growth. A lot of times I've found myself talking to those planning the artistic side of things and finding myself incorporating those experiences into my end projects. In a bigger faceless company that doesn't care and can just outsource on a whim it is just banter, on a smaller company scale it helps immensely. Those first years of obtaining funding and getting everything working were brutal and I'm not sure our company would've survived if we didn't all try to contribute everything we could like that. Last edited by Jiero on Jan 2, 2014, 5:19:33 PM
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I think the drops are fine if you enjoy trading. For me the current trading system is far too involved and time consuming that I rarely bother. I recently began playing nemesis and ripped at 82. Upon leveling new characters I became annoyed at the terrible drops, you really need to trade if you want to progress. I used to play the entire day, now I am discouraged after half an hour. Hopefully we'll see changes to the trading system eventually. I'll likely find enjoyment in the game again once that happens. /rant
"It's a harsh, difficult world. You have to be prepared for it. We're not babying the players."
- Chris Wilson - Producer, Lead Designer @ Grinding Gear Games |
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" you know that it is exactly the same stuff weve heard about 'release'? and we've got blatantly overturned act3x content, gear-check final boss battle, scion and legacy uniques with spice of absolutely broken and untested trigger gems (OP like cwdt/cocs and useless like cast on melee kill or curse on hit). good that the passive tree turned out better than most expected (cudos for that!) it is hard to buy this stuff again.. esp seeing stuff like 'barrage' or 'animated guardian' being borring or ostensibly underpowered. why nothing had been done to Animate Guardian yet?! this skill is COMPLETELY useless at this point. | |
" Ah, so you come from an IT background, good luck with your new career plans. | |
" Thanks buts it's not quite a career change and I can't reveal to much about the plans for the app I'm making beyond that it turns a device into something that can be given to a field tech to aid in diagnosing and repairing remote server issues, performing RFID w/ gps, receive health notifications from the servers, video calls, placing orders for replacement parts, scanning barcodes for order processing and restoring/recovering data. Pretty much turns a tablet into a all in one toolkit for our field techs. (well a LOT more then that but it's not finished being planned yet) But it would help my company grow to establish a app for internal use like that so they agreed to fund my training and the additional hours when I can create it, which makes me happy and might even be able to be sold as a enterprise level app for other businesses to use. But that is what I was talking about with going beyond an initial job listing to become part of the company and beyond your initial role. Last edited by Jiero on Jan 2, 2014, 5:36:37 PM
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I've found that most players giving feedback aren't doing a great job at explaining what exactly the problem is. Balance is always a relationship between terms, and it's difficult to figure out exactly what points about the itemization/currency/crafting are problematic to players. You can get gear for a handful of chaos that will enable you to do up to 70 maps quite easily. In any ladder league, people are giving this stuff away by the handful, with life, defenses, and a couple of resists. It doesn't take much time at all to either find or make the currency necessary to get these pieces and have a perfectly map-viable character. Yes, the requirements begin to go up a bit once you want to move ahead toward 75 maps, but you should be spending enough time in the lower tiers that it isn't an issue. I have never had a problem getting what I needed, even for fairly gear-specific specs. The gear available to you for cheap allows you to complete the content: in this sense, those two are balanced.
You are expected to trade. This is an economic game. GGG has reiterated this many times. Trading does not mean surfing trade chat all day and flipping items. It just means having some basic knowledge of what specs use what gear and trading away things you don't need for currency, and using that currency to buy things you do need. XYZ makes this bewilderingly easy to do on both fronts. I don't like trading either, but you can't really come to the game and expect to succeed if you reject one of its foundational premises. I get the sense that what people expect to be able to do is follow specs dependent on rare uniques with relatively little time investment and have the same success that they see streamers having. This is largely the fallout of being at a point in time where it's much easier to compare yourself against the top players of a game. This isn't reasonable in the slightest, and if it were, then those same exact top players would have moved on to other games already because GGG made the mistake of designing the game to top out too quickly. When you say "drops suck," you have to say what you're comparing them to. Against topend eternal/exalt crafted near-perfect rares? Of course they do. Against appropriate gear that allows you to complete content without trivializing it? No, not really. I really don't buy this "gap between the rich and poor" stuff that the self-found proponents keep peddling, and I wonder whether any such thing is backed up by GGG's statistics. I myself am a perfectly middle-class endgame player with a stack or fewer of exalts at any given time, who plays mostly solo, sometimes in small groups. Here are what I see as some of the legitimate imbalances in the game's itemization: Alchs/Chaos were designed and balanced before the map system came along. Because it's pretty easy to get a good map, but pretty hard to get a good item just by alching and maybe spending a few chaos, maps are by far the better investment of these currencies. Chris has noted that lower-end gear crafting like this is being performed much less often than they intended, so I'd wager that some fixes for this will come soon. Alchs and Chaos have to be more efficient for gear crafting for it to be rational for players to use them in most cases. It's Path of Exile's way of doing class-tailored drops, but right now it just isn't working. And it's compounded by the fact that an alch you find at level 1 is the same as at level 70, so you are strongly discouraged from using it on gear you will need to replace soon anyway. Self-multiplying rolls on gear create very high variance in value. You can have a perfect IPD roll, but without integer phys, it's pretty much junk. The same goes for ES/eva/armor flat and percentage. In one sense this is good, because most of the power at levels 85+ comes from upgrading your gear because you've already exhausted your most efficient passive nodes and leveling is much slower anyway. Having wide variance in gear enables you to still have impactful character progress without gaining levels every few minutes. However, this does create some issues. Economically, it means that finding usable or sellable gear is very streaky, and that a massive amount of time is wasted on identifying and vendoring mounds of rares that will almost certainly get you nothing. It's a bit difficult to understand why rares can't be much rarer and roll closer to the top of their stat pools. And for build balance, it means that some builds have incredible endgame scaling potential while others plateau. This can even go so far as making specs non-viable due to a lack of those self-multiplying rolls, as with elemental damage 2H melee weapons. | |
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I'm pretty certain that it's not a matter of time or effort, but a matter of philosophy. The things talked about in the OP are the way they are not due to time constraints or lack of attention, but because they were designed that way on purpose. Remember this game was in beta for two years, these sentiments have been aired before.
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