I'm Unhappy I Put As Much Money As I Did In This Game

Thanks Rhys for your post, its very nice to discuss with the team things like these when the feedback is properly written.

While I dont regret spending money on this game (738 hours on steam since release, probably 2000h since I started playing lol), there are certain things that most people complain about and I agree with.

The very first one is desync. A lot of threads about this, a lot of discussions, we mostly know why we have it and why is hard to alleviate. But if you combine hard bosses, some of them balanced around having awesome/perfect gear with it, it leads to frustration, a lot of frustration when you die. Specially when you know desync is very notorious in this game because we have certain mechanics that should improve combat gameplay, but in the end those mechanics are more a problem than a good thing. Really, why we want monster collision if 50% of the times we touch a mob we get desynced from the server? Why certain boss upgrades just add another skill that is too much desync prone when developers know the main problem of this game?


Drop is the second problem for me with this game. I really dislike the way is balanced right now, trade-centric instead of with player in mind. How is even possible to don't be able to upgrade my gear from level 20 to level 50? On a game where gear is half of it? This should never happen. I ended rage-deleting that char and started from scratch leveling with ST, something that allow me to invest more skill points on life/resists and not depending that much on gear. Gladly I got better drops, but also bought some of my leveling gear. Had the same problem at Domination, from level 68 until 89 (ended there) I havent a single update. Nada. Without awesome gear, thrust me, rings, amulet, boots and gloves probably cost less than 10 chaos. The only thing that I could do is go poe.xyz and buy my gear, something I refuse to do most times.

At least with Rhys post I see that GGG is working on it, I hope it get better.

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fabio wrote:

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jaxxxson wrote:

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fabio wrote:

I think the problem here is a sense of ownership...

You have to take 2 things into account, the 4 month leagues and the permanent leagues...

To me the game is focused towards this new leagues.

It is always a fresh start with a fixed ending date... ...that great unique item or excellent rare set you got on your OP build is going to be merged to a permanent league and than another cool league will start which will have new mechanics...

The point is, the idea is, to play on the new leagues, to value the time spent enjoying getting through the content, and the only caveat is that your stuff goes to the parent league when it ends, so that you can hoard your items...

I sincerely enjoy the new races from scratch, inventory management is too painful when merging the items from other leagues, so much that I have stopped, I probably have a billion items stored that I will never use... like I've said before, either the ability to vendor directly from stash or the ability to delete a remove only tab that is not empty would be nice.

I myself tend not to trade a lot, since I have a group of friends, we made a guild and share the good loots, unique includes. And since this time there's no challenge to play all the characters, I can focus on one solid build, and have fun with that, less stash management.

I just think that GGG should separate Race mode from Story mode, to me, only the Challenge of the Champions, or Descent are fun, because is a content that you don't have regular access.

As far as difficult bosses they are there for the thrill, it is not something that you just wing it and go for it, sure, if you are in standard and have enough portals you can beat almost any boss in the corrupted areas, but the idea is not that. The idea is to give you a new layer of challenge, so that you can learn to adapt your party/char to resolve the situation.

Like I've said in a previous post, I almost never had a 5L (got one in the previous 4 month), never had a 6L, so trying to get a build from a website and follow it is stupid. Now playing and learning and planning, using the website passive tree, that's fun. And seeing good results in-game is much more fun.

So far the reward is only the Challenge of defeating the boss, I guess having a great loot would an extra challenge, but I really don't like the idea of a boss loot table, which chances of specific items dropping, that would be boring, repeating a content over and over.

And maybe that is a challenge of the end-game, I confess since I started exclusively on HC on closed beta, I have since migrated to SC, since I live in Brasil and my ping is 180-200ms, my game experience does not allow high risk play on HC, had some bad encounters with Vaal, and so on, and I was unable to "enjoy" the end-game, so I decided to go to SC to see if I could get there.

And one thing I was wishing for, was for GGG to introduce some way to map on lower levels, I mean, mapping was always end-game only, and since you have to clear 3 times the game it would be fun to have some lower level maps to do in normal and cruel. This expansion solved that IMHO, creating map-like areas during the progression creates a change of pace, and a break on the repetition of farming area X until you can progress.

Anyways a rambled a lot.

TL;DR
- Play the leagues
- Don't worry about hoarding items/chars
- Pretend that every 4 months you have a new game to play
- Try other games from time to time, anything you do too much gets boring

Hey Fabio,

I like your thinking towards the game, it's a good way to look at it, and I believe that I mentioned earlier, I think that the game up until mapping has the most potential for fun. I also enjoyed racing and new leagues the most, inventory management is a pain and having everyone start fresh is fun. As for your comment about loot tables, I respectfully disagree, as people are already only farming Merveil and Piety for their orbs. Adding loot tables would help break that up, and you have the choice to farm those bosses if the loot interested you, as you could just as easily skip it.

And while I agree with you on the difficulty, the bosses shouldn't be easier or able to be cheesed out, they are through various methods, and often are imbalanced. The bosses that have cool mechanics are fun, but often non-accessible due to the quality of dropped items. For instance, the fight against Queen Atziri has a lot of attacks that are avoidable but highly punishing if you get hit by them. This is great! However, you have to have such immense crazy stats from doing stale content for a chance to even see that fight. If you're going in with less than 9,000 hit points and full fire resist, you are guaranteed to die on her, this is where the issue lies, stat bloat and being one shot.

As for

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fabio wrote:

- Try other games from time to time, anything you do too much gets boring

I completely agree, I was hoping this expansion would pull me in, but it happened to do the opposite. I would just like the fun parts of this game, not struggle with the luck or imbalanced content.

Jaxxsson,

Maybe the next time, instead of playing to win, try playing for fun... ...I mean, make a fun stupid build, just for the heck, maybe not to get to merciless, just for fun with friends. Heck if you add me ingame I would play with you, if our hours match that is...

Dunno make a shockwave totem build... ahuahauha I would like to see that work...

A group of friends make a discharge build with conduit for fun and go blasting monsters with never-ending charges...

What I've yet to do is try the PvP content, lag normally kills this mode of play for me, since the guy with 50ms ping has 3 attacks on me before I can react on a 180-200ms ping, but I dunno maybe it will be fun.

Maybe you could play on the Cut throat content that is coming in the next couple of weeks.

Look at my current char, it is a Witch, that uses Ice Nova, I stand in the middle of packs and keep freezing them, for party play is good enough since I help stop dmg to other players, and in solo play the dmg is good enough to kill most monsters, it is not a perfect build, but it is a fun build, which I made in the other league, trying to go for CI, and never got there. This time I've invested in life + eldritch battery and it is going well.

I am currently playing on the Ambush league, hope to play a little bit on the Invasion league as well, with a beefier lag-resistant character.

Fabio,

I only make unique characters, rebuilding ones is not fun, that being said, if you look through my profile, there's around 20, and I've deleted many, many more as they have died in an HC league or just weren't very fun. A lot of the charm from the game comes from the variety you have to dispose of countless hordes of monsters. This gets prohibited when your gear can't make the check through the content or the skills you're using are entirely lackluster.

The game in its current state is more about the journey rather than the destination, Hardcore is kinda nice for that because it allows you to play through the content on new characters if you happen to die, so you can explore new possibilities. These choices aren't existant however, what you do is make a build with around 240% life and as much damage towards what you're going for damage wise. Beyond this being needed for every character, it gets shadowed by the fact that you ultimately use the most effective skills to level up with, so you can bypass the gear checks that are in the game. It's not about playing to win, it's about wanting to progress and being blocked by non-fun walls.

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Burgingham wrote:

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Fabio wrote:

Maybe the next time, instead of playing to win, try playing for fun...

There are just different types of players. Power gamers need to win to have fun. ARPGs kind of cater to them perfectly. You cannot just force someone to have fun in different ways.

There is some rather well thought out articles on the net about different playertypes and the collisions between them in online games, which sum this up perfectly. I am too lazy to find them right now though :P

No problem, I understand I was like that in the beginning of PoE "No pain, no FUN!!!".

But anyways, the game should have a mode that is fun for anyone, those that want a really hard challenge, those that just want to grind, those that want to have some fun with friends on an afternoon.

The custom race anytime, to me, is what is missing for the last mode.

For a "free" (let's face it you need to buy stash tabs) game, it delivers great content, even though the learning curve is steep and forever changing. But I can safely say it is learn-able, hell I got my wife to play it with me, she played Diablo 1 and Sacred and enjoyed those titles, now she plays PoE, even though I have to help her with Items (like in real life, what is mine is ours motto) and the passive tree we have a fun time, and she is a casual gamer, so to me it is an achievement on GGGs side :D

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Burgingham wrote:

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ephetat wrote:

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Veta321 wrote:

Loot tables for bosses and uniques are a good idea. It allows non-trading and casual players to focus their energies on a target without resorting to trade while also giving players a sense of superficial control (something POE lacks and is a source of much consternation).

Interestingly this is exactly what the Atziri fight is, if only for a small subset of exceptionally powerful uniques. It does make one wonder whether GGG has a plan like this in their greater agenda, without the exclusivity card the Atziri uniques carry.

Need to stress the exclusivity aspect here though. So far nobody on the new leagues has beat her at all and probably only a handfull of people will till the end of the 4 months.
So I really hope they expand this idea of loot tables to the rest of the game and stop catering to a handful of players only.

@OP, very nice thread. Sums up most of the biggest problems the game has rather well.

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Fabio wrote:

Maybe the next time, instead of playing to win, try playing for fun...

There are just different types of players. Power gamers need to win to have fun. ARPGs kind of cater to them perfectly. You cannot just force someone to have fun in different ways.

There is some rather well thought out articles on the net about different playertypes and the collisions between them in online games, which sum this up perfectly. I am too lazy to find them right now though :P

Thank you for stopping by, I appreciate your commenting here. I agree with your post, it's kind of impossible to see the results of the loot tables when it's in content that isn't very accessible for anyone.

"

RaGoNXIII wrote:

Thanks Rhys for your post, its very nice to discuss with the team things like these when the feedback is properly written.

While I dont regret spending money on this game (738 hours on steam since release, probably 2000h since I started playing lol), there are certain things that most people complain about and I agree with.

The very first one is desync. A lot of threads about this, a lot of discussions, we mostly know why we have it and why is hard to alleviate. But if you combine hard bosses, some of them balanced around having awesome/perfect gear with it, it leads to frustration, a lot of frustration when you die. Specially when you know desync is very notorious in this game because we have certain mechanics that should improve combat gameplay, but in the end those mechanics are more a problem than a good thing. Really, why we want monster collision if 50% of the times we touch a mob we get desynced from the server? Why certain boss upgrades just add another skill that is too much desync prone when developers know the main problem of this game?


Drop is the second problem for me with this game. I really dislike the way is balanced right now, trade-centric instead of with player in mind. How is even possible to don't be able to upgrade my gear from level 20 to level 50? On a game where gear is half of it? This should never happen. I ended rage-deleting that char and started from scratch leveling with ST, something that allow me to invest more skill points on life/resists and not depending that much on gear. Gladly I got better drops, but also bought some of my leveling gear. Had the same problem at Domination, from level 68 until 89 (ended there) I havent a single update. Nada. Without awesome gear, thrust me, rings, amulet, boots and gloves probably cost less than 10 chaos. The only thing that I could do is go poe.xyz and buy my gear, something I refuse to do most times.

At least with Rhys post I see that GGG is working on it, I hope it get better.

Amazing how talking professionally instead of posting on the forums "Dis gaem iz shet" makes it so people respectfully agree or disagree, while giving their line of thought about how the game is handled. I enjoy hearing people respectfully say what they feel towards this game.

While I'm not going to promote desync, it's too big of a monster for GGG to tackle, it's something that would have been fixed completely if it could. It's generally getting better, and heck, if more people like myself occupy themselves with other games, the connection for the players that are playing are at least benefiting haha. But I concur with your issues of gear struggles, sorry to hear you're effected by it as well.

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jaxxxson wrote:

Amazing how talking professionally instead of posting on the forums "Dis gaem iz shet" makes it so people respectfully agree or disagree, while giving their line of thought about how the game is handled. I enjoy hearing people respectfully say what they feel towards this game.

that's because you are speaking from a position of power, as a major supporter of the game.
the usual trolls, thread-derailers and "white knights" simply have nothing to grasp by, due to the fact your feedback is articulate and wise, and the fact you likely donated more to the game than they have. combined.

some of them are therefore forced to post respectfully, while others don't touch this thread at all. personally, I find this extremely positively refreshing.

that said, I'm enjoying the discussion in this thread. it's already in my bookmarks, especially after Rhys put on his serious cap and posted the devs' point of view.
so again, thank you for that.
oh, and sorry for my earlier sarcastic remark.

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johnKeys wrote:

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jaxxxson wrote:

Amazing how talking professionally instead of posting on the forums "Dis gaem iz shet" makes it so people respectfully agree or disagree, while giving their line of thought about how the game is handled. I enjoy hearing people respectfully say what they feel towards this game.

that's because you are speaking from a position of power, as a major supporter of the game.
the usual trolls, thread-derailers and "white knights" simply have nothing to grasp by, due to the fact your feedback is articulate and wise, and the fact you likely donated more to the game than they have. combined.

some of them are therefore forced to post respectfully, while others don't touch this thread at all. personally, I find this extremely positively refreshing.

that said, I'm enjoying the discussion in this thread. it's already in my bookmarks, especially after Rhys put on his serious cap and posted the devs' point of view.
so again, thank you for that.
oh, and sorry for my earlier sarcastic remark.

It's okay John, for what it's worth, I didn't lose sleep over it haha, I appreciate that everyone has been very objective in their ideas towards discussing the pros and cons of what is offered by this game and company. I will admit I thought this thread would die very fast instead of prospering as well as it has. I'm trying to keep up with replies, but it's rather difficult to get to everyone.

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Veta321 wrote:

Loot tables for bosses and uniques are a good idea.

We already have loot tables

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Veta321 wrote:

It allows non-trading and casual players to..

Nvm.

Oh this post was supposed to be here:

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Even though we've been continually increasing the amount of drops( via Strongboxes, Invasion bosses, rogue exiles, shrines, Vaal secret areas, etc.)

Oh oh here.
They drop garbage just like the random chests and there isn't a Rarity shrine

Remember in CB when rares/bosses couldn't drop white items?
Remember when random Chests weren't trashcans for white junk and id scrolls?
Remember when there was a quantity gem.
Remember when drops were based on player Quantity?
Remember when players used fillers to boost quantity?
Remember when modrolling had equal chances for each mod?
Remember when chance orbs didn't suck?


Remember when you decided to decrease the drop rates to MMORPG level because some nolifing MMORPG player suggested it?

Stop claiming you increased the amount of drops when you made them 3 times worse than any Asia Grinder with OB. There is a reason I quit OB after 2 weeks. I was literally getting level 79 on Docks!

Everybody playing CB knows how good drop rates were back then I remember maps I was solo and had to use all six Tps to sell or drop loot in the lab.
That never happened after OB.
You had some uniques you could only find at high level maps that time.
But now you added random uniques(most of them aren't even good) as maps uniques.

Design level 71+ uniques and everything level 71+ req is map only just like back in CB.
Just throwing some random uniques into a league because they are popular isn't a good solution.

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The balance guys keep making tweaks and such; can't really give much details on it since I don't work on that stuff myself really.

Maybe you should I don't think they do a good job :(

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Hmm. Is this just a symptom of that first point? I don't think this is mandatory, though. Dunno about "best".

The best is to ripoff players via Trading.

There is also RMT like the high end players do.
You fail to ban them you even fail to ban streamers who should have "cheeze" renamed with "cheats".
How blatant can anybody cheat?! There is no way he can leave without showing the Menu because all reactions on PoE are based on ms.

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We actually hired a new balance/design guy to do a lot of this and kinda chucked him in the deep end.

And told him to add BIIIIG numbers in the damage table right?

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there's only like 6 or so bosses that are a bunch tougher than they should be,

Looks like you read my corrupted area bosses posting.
I didn't do any Atziri(midnight fragment and believe me I will only use them to generate orange messages) stuff but I can tell you that 2 of the original Top 6 of stupid bosses will all be replaces by Atziri.

There are only a few bosses I consider as good design, such as the Vaal Flesh Maker fallen or Atziris Chosen(if he wouldn't keep warping every 1,5 seconds in melee range)

But most are either One Shot or barely hitable if certain conditions aren't given(most of the time the condition is cursed) or one shot(and don't come with 60 hits a second aren't one shot)

"

Like, they were given cool skills but aren't using them for whatever reason. Those are also being fixed up (and they won't be OP... I hope...).

Good thing I killed thin useless Hillockclone bla the Impaler before you gave him some speed or fast one shot abilities.

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It's OK to have a few that are a real challenge, that players learn not to mess with unless they're properly prepared.

NO you don't understand the difference between Skillbased games and Gearbased games.

PoE becomes more and more like D3.

For example the resist node nerf in some areas. Resist nodes were a good way to counter lack of resists on EQ.
Nerfing them destroys the options for players without epic items!

Limiting the amount of Auras by increasing manacosts only creates more of an MMOPRG feeling.
There are proper ways like Aura limit, aura limit based on stats/charges.
And then we get hilarious Claims "BM is more powerful than ever"
Nobody will ever use BM because the left amount of reserved costs is much higher than the 100-500 life you reserved before the Aura change.

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We also definitely want to give some of the more boring bosses a makeover, too.

Before you do that you should racer try a legacy league with CB settings and just modify the mod pool a bit and you will see which league will contain more players.

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I'm not entirely clear on your exact point, but I'm guessing something like you feel pressured to trade, which you don't like? Well, you certainly can play and enjoy the game without trading, or with minimal trading, if you so choose. You'll need to temper your expectations accordingly, of cours

You are compelled to trade because the balance guys decided that mods don't roll equally anymore.
A weapon rolling 100+ ed is far less likely than rolling a weapon with 20 ed.
This is the reason why players say crafting if broken.

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Um, I don't think that's correct. You're not supposed to be 1-shot out of nowhere, if you have reasonable gear. I'm not saying it never happens, but it isn't intended.

See you use gear as an excuse.
And yes you will be one shot out of nowhere because you center the character and have blind spots right and down.

To fix that a solution would be in for example a 5x5 field to not to place the character at (5,5) but to place him at (4,4)
The player needs a feeling to be in the center and there aren't blind spots.
The other fix would be to have a selective AI checking X<X_m and Y<Y_m for example and let it act based on the position so the AI reacts on an oval distance and not on a circle.

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Huh, you sure he wasn't just joking around or something? I haven't seen the vid, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't actually feel that way, and I know most of us at GGG would disagree with those statements. I mean, I know a bunch of us really like the thrill of hardcore leagues, and also trading, and strongly feel these are important aspects to the game, but... we ain't so harsh.

His quote is inaccurate and mixed up with another statement.
The origin of this is that according to Athene players only watch HC streams to see the streamer die and there is a really elitilist community.
And he is right. After PoE added One Shot mechanics nobody watched Anarchy streams anymore.
After streamers died they will be insulted by their views as "Scrub" "you suck" etc.
Same thing in the forums several never passing normal/cruel in a HC league pretend to be better players than actually good players.

Then Chris said something like players not liking trading play Default/HC and not on the challenge leagues because they can't keep up to hardcore players.

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Yeah, having such a small team plus the onus of continually adding more content can do that. Though sometimes we deliberately put off certain things until the end of the 4-month leagues, for example.

The best is not to piss many players off. This means you keep old settings on Default and HC, such as items always drop in their legacy form there.
Several games do that and sometimes start a short timed Legacy League with old settings, where players adapted to newer settings usually suck.

Overpowered builds could be tested in PvP or a PvM arena on a weekly for example by removing support on certain ability. Such as overpowered spells not being able to penetrate resists, or being pushed by concentrated effects.

You can use 4 month leagues to test settings and add or don't add certain features into the game based on community feedback.

And also you should consider that Act 3 still has massive issues such as GPU Load, Multithreading(it literally fried my laptops GPU, so it got permanent damage)

I'm both saddened and glad that people are still making these kinds of posts. I had hope considering what Grinding Gear did with loot allocation in parties, but as each new patch is released I lose a bit more.

I think I quit out of frustration with gear dependency, defensive balance, and the gambling system back in July of last year. This quote probably sums up how I see the game now.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Take a break.

but what would that solve? I could come back and the same problems would probably present themselves to me.

I haven't even tried any of the new content since then like Dominus or the Scion since threads like this tell me exactly what to expect. :(

Of course, I still clicked on the email I was sent about this new patch, and I'm posting this now, so I guess my hope isn't completely gone.

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VaultzInex wrote:

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Veta321 wrote:

Loot tables for bosses and uniques are a good idea.

We already have loot tables

Spoiler

Maps gated.

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Veta321 wrote:

It allows non-trading and casual players to..

Nvm.

lol

"

Hilbert wrote:

Remember in CB when rares/bosses couldn't drop white items?
Remember when random Chests weren't trashcans for white junk and id scrolls?
Remember when there was a quantity gem.
Remember when drops were based on player Quantity?
Remember when players used fillers to boost quantity?
Remember when modrolling had equal chances for each mod?
Remember when chance orbs didn't suck?


Remember when you decided to decrease the drop rates to MMORPG level because some nolifing MMORPG player suggested it?

I think this reaffirms the reality GGG was facing before the introduction of an item sink. I can only hope they will expand on the corruption mechanic, add additional sinks and free themselves to revert those economically driven changes, among others.