A Veteran's Proposal for a Self Found League - Poll Included!
" Neither. The pay-for-looks model remains the same, and makes the same profit for GGG. That's what he meant. " I've had the privilege to spend a few days on my friends XBox on D3, and during that time I found it to be extremely easy. It just rained good stuff all around, and my character became more and more extreme every hour. After a very short time it just became boringly faceroll. If SFL was added to PoE, I really hope/assume it wouldn't be made like that. It is supposed to be a long term or at least semi-long term league, and it should still take good effort to progress to the point of facerolling endgame. Descent leagues are far too short term to be taken seriously by those who dream of SFL. I do agree with the itemization issue paragraph. Life is tough... but it is tougher if you're stupid. Last edited by VenatorPoE on Mar 22, 2014, 6:08:25 PM
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" I'll just touch on this point. This is mostly false. SFL will actually limit skill tree exploration and build diversity. There is already tons of builds that have low gear requirements, the strongest examples are the ones that will populate such a league. The most creative builds also tend to be the ones with the greatest number of uniques. These are next to impossible to make SFL due to resistance requirements and of course needing those uniques in the first place. I don't really have an opinion about this overall topic so just nitpicking a point. Last edited by kasub on Mar 22, 2014, 6:17:55 PM
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" My apologies for misunderstanding your post. Not quite THE way I would expect that to be corrected, though... I never expected SFL to be available only as a paid-for, private league by player(s) (which I remember is an option GGG mentioned ages ago and can't wait to see implemented), and thought the point of this thread is to raise a discussion about GGG opening an official SFL - that wouldn't need to be paid to play, but would work on the same business model as the rest of the game currently does - microtransactions. Life is tough... but it is tougher if you're stupid. Last edited by VenatorPoE on Mar 22, 2014, 6:34:33 PM
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" If/When Chris gets off his high horse and allows SFL in private leagues I would come back and most likely pay or contribute to the cause! Crafting doesn't exist in POE. Gambling does...and the house always wins.
Velocireptile - I LOL'ed. Which made me fart. I wish the office were empty right now :( Hardlicker - I had to push the dog out of the way so I could get to the sexy quilt. | |
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I'm a bit confused by sometimes the issue being claimed that it will split the community (I disagree, I fundamentally believe it will stimulate a lot of new and renewed demand), and the argument that it appeals to too small a population. They seem substantively (but not theoretically) inconsistent to me.
P. Last edited by mrpetrov on Mar 22, 2014, 7:16:03 PM
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How big population does a CT league appeal to? I think the number of possible SFL players is way underestimated.
When night falls She cloaks the world In impenetrable darkness Last edited by morbo on Mar 22, 2014, 7:24:48 PM
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even slayer supports this league
when the white knights and trolls agree on something, sfl should be implemented ASAP. ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
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"1. New leagues stimulate temporary renewed interest; key word is temporary. In the short term, yes, creating a self-found league would draw players in. Every time GGG releases new leagues, new players return to the game in order to try those leagues out... and then they leave again a couple of months later, until/unless GGG releases more new leagues. It is the continuous release of new leagues which best maintains PoE's player population, and any one-time release of a new permanent league will only last for a short while, as long as it takes the novelty to fade (and don't say it won't). So, as far as this point goes, the question becomes: what type of temporary league options would one have with self-found leagues? This question is completely unanswered in the opening post. 2. It is not self-found, but trading which preserves the reality of progress and accomplishment as a league matures. You describe a phenomenon where, as you get to a certain point in a fresh league, you feel a stronger incentive to trade to progress. In other words, it's a point where players have a choice between trading and continuing self-found, and most choose to trade. This can essentially be seen as voting for trading, with the implied question "which activity best progresses your character?" What is trading, anyway? The best explanation is "collective farming." All traded items were born when they were farmed or "crafted," the same way a self-found player would farm or "craft" them. It is only the events in that item's life since that birth which differentiate them from self-found items. The point is, trading is not the opposite of farming; it is the collective version of farming, as opposed to the individualist and independent self-found. It is an itemization corollary to the solo vs party method for playing the PvE content of the game. Removing trading isn't magically going to make progression better. As a matter of fact, it will have precisely the opposite effect: it is nerfing progression, because you're taking the progression method most players deem most effective and removing it utterly. Thus, the boast "SFL preserves the feeling of progress and accomplishment" is an odd claim indeed, since the reality of it is a nerf to progression; one wonders what wool you'd pull over the players' eyes to provide such a feeling. One would have to be very clever to determine the proper way to compensate for such a nerf; something as simple as "let's just increase drop rates" won't really help, because you'd still be getting a lot of "good" items your character simply can't use. (More on this below.) 3. PoE is fundamentally designed around passive tree commitment. The idea of building around the items you happen to find, rather than itemizing based around a dedicated passive tree build, works about one time: before you've committed anything ever. After that, it requires currency, which even if you try to mess with the drop rates thereof, will always cost something, and thus the builds which stick to their commitments will have an advantage. I do enjoy the concept of building around what you find (and is a cool idea to start a race with), but trying to apply the concept multiple times for a single character only works in a Diablo 3 style of skill system where respecs are unlimited, or damn close to it. This is not something GGG will ever do. 4. A solo race, however, is a self-found league; it just has a shorter duration than you might like. To say SFL doesn't exist is kind of crazy, considering numerous SFLs have existed; the only thing is, as far as I know, none have lasted more than a day or so (since week races, IIRC, have always allowed trading). Descent and Descent: Champions are both SFLs, and admittedly fairly popular ones at that. 5. The reality of splitting the community is evident in how Hardcore league was abandoned last season. Virtually no one played in the permanent Hardcore league anymore, due largely to the fairly popular Nemesis league. This was and is a problem, which if you've ever actually played in Hardcore League you'd definitely notice; compared to the other leagues, it feels like a ghost town, much harder to form connections with other players to trade or party. This is very likely a reason why the current Invasion league seems to transcend the hardcore ethos and descend into pure, raw masochism; I believe GGG wanted, in part, to drive away some of the hardcore players from the temporary league in order to provide a new incentive to create permanent-league Hardcore characters. However, you'll notice there is still a lot of QQ about Invasion, and not a lot of players moving to permanent Hardcore; many are moving to Ambush instead, which seems to be contrary to developer intent. Getting players interested in the permanent Hardcore league is indeed a challenge, and one which GGG hasn't found the answer to. So as you can see, the dangers of splitting up the community with various leagues is a very legitimate concern, currently relevant in the game, and it's something which, once started, can be incredibly challenging for developers to rectify. The #1 thing you're neglecting here is the concept of affordances. If you're unfamiliar with the term, here's an Extra Credits episode on the topic. Well, GGG does throw good gear at you fairly often, but that doesn't mean it's good gear for your build. Because most players stick with just one character, such items are affordances — they tell the player "I might not be an upgrade for you, but I'm a good, don't treat me like vendor trash!" You can see the effects of this affordance on the game, from the popularity of extra stash tabs, to how players set up their shop threads, to the extreme packratting of some players, to those moments of hesitation in Descent where a rare item drops and one has to fight habit to avoid picking it up. This affordance puts an impetus on the player to either reroll a new character with those items, or to trade them away for significant value, far more than the vendors would provide; only a small minority reroll. None of the suggestions in the opening post do anything to deal with this affordance effect. Players would still go through the game packratting good items, feeling they can do something more than turn into Alt shards, but now they'd have less options in terms of actually doing anything with them. With even less options to make these good-but-unusable items into something useful, players would get even more frustrated with progression and drop RNG. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Mar 22, 2014, 8:15:44 PM
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" I don't support it because of lack of drops or crafting though. Let me be clear, I support it on the notion that the last bit of RMT that could be found will be the selling of accounts. Finding items good enough to justify this action from an organization would be near nil. Last edited by SL4Y3R on Mar 22, 2014, 8:25:17 PM
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"If we got rid of the Standard and Ambush leagues, that would also hurt RMT; bots which died even once wouldn't exist. Stopping RMT is a lot like attacking cancer. Both are stubborn infections, incredibly resilient against efforts made to remove them from the system. Chemotherapy does work as a cancer treatment, but it's a drastic measure and has huge side effects, and thus requires very careful application so as not to kill the patient. So although I see your point about RMT, I don't think that a suggestion is good just because it is anti-RMT. The most important thing, at the end of the day, is the level of enjoyment for the average player. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Mar 22, 2014, 8:32:53 PM
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