The wall of real problems that prevent PoE from being a god-tier game

I have been taking a longer break from PoE and have had time to gather some of the thoughts i have been having lately on why PoE is not as good as i dreamed for it to become, and why i do not play much PoE anymore even though i love the content in the game.


1 - Your time spent is not rewarding enough

This is probably the biggest issue with PoE. The game is not very rewarding for just about everything you can do besides leveling.

The good drops are way too scarce. You cannot actually play the game, even if you play thousands of hours, and expect to have more or less the best gear simply by selling what things you find at normal prices and keep farming. Yes you read that right, drop rates are so bad that it is highly impractical/near impossible to get near BiS by just playing the game, you need to flip items. Item flipping will always be more profitable, the question is whether things are possible without item-flipping but by investing hours and the by far most common experience is that it is not.

Droprates can easily be doubled or trippled, the problem is there simply isn't enough good stuff around to gear people and that is only ever fixed by there dropping more or it being crafted.

I cannot emphasize enough how negatively the drop rates affect the gaming experience. It is near a game just for addicted players, which isn't exactly glorious.

It should also be said that amount of items dropped can be reduced in conjunction with making those that do drop much more likely to roll well. Vendoring time spent in a game is tiresome, it is far from ideal gameplay. it is great that there is a good use for items you do not need, but that doesn't mean the game gets better by having an excessive amount of crap drop all over.


2 - The crafting systems are badly implemented and too RNG reliant

First of all it should be said that there is no crafting system, there is a gambling system. I think there should be both.

Chaos orbs, exalted orbs, regal orbs, orbs of alteration and so forth are great gambling orbs, they are just right the way they are. Not all orbs have great functionality however. The biggest offenders are the fusings/jewellers simply because they are so instrumental to your power that you are left crippled without them. Chromes are the same, yet less complained about due to first and foremost being easier to acquire and second less impactful.

There are many ways to deal with fusings/jewellers. One way is to make them only able to add sockets/links to the longest existing chain while adding a recepi to break all links by vendoring item + 1 fusing, in combination with making each use add something like 0.0002% chance for 6L, giving it +0.2% chance to 6L per fusing after 1000 spent.

However, i think a better solution would be to implement an actual crafting system. Say there is a jeweller in town. He/she will add sockets, links or change the socket colors of an item for a certain amount of jewellers/fusings/chroms, depending on how rare the thing you are trying to achieve is. Let us say you want to have 5 offcolors in your 6S chest, that may cost you 1500 chromes or whatever is reasonable. At the same time, numbers of chromes/fusing/jewellers dropped and required can be reduced so that the easiest craft will cost 1 and others scale accordingly.

I know that devs have stated they love when people are happy to win the lottery and 6L something after a few uses, but it comes at the cost of game quality for all of those at the other end, where the current system simply malfunctions and does not reward them for their time. It adds more to the pile of game-ruining features made for addicted masochists, and it makes the game universally worse. It is the wrong area to target for RNG rewards.

Eternal orbs and Mirrors specifically hurt the itemization in this game heavily. Eternal orbs means people are piling up exalts rather than spending them and it also means there is little demand for otherwise good rare items. Mirrors means traders who have the early good items gain additional long-term market advantages outside the selling value of a good drop. It means people will not to the same degree want to use exalts to craft items, because once items get expensive enough you are better off acquiring a mirror.

Remove mirrors and make eternal orbs 6 times more rare, keep people spamming their things instead of hording and selling for items. This way everyone has a fair chance at rolling good gear, and good gear will sell better because there are no mirrored copies floating around. Also, everyone loves crafting items and getting some good roll. Spread the fun around to players. At the very least disable mirrors from dropping in permanent leagues.


3 - Inaccessible endgame content

For so long i have been fighting to make GGG understand that their map system is bad. Not because you cannot roll maps that are interesting to play, but because it demoralizes the player to see their wealth slowly diminishing by farming and it heavily favors groups for no defendable reason whatsoever, when it does not need to be so. The actual gameplay suffers to make a currency dump for, let's face it, in this case just chaos orbs, when in fact chaos orbs should be used to craft gear for the fun of players.

The rolling system of maps is good and it can still be preserved easily. Just change Chisels into items that only drop in maps, more drops the higher the map level and droprate unaffected by party size, while only having the function of rerolling maps. You will still have rewards for challenge with that system but maps will now welcome solo players and actually drop what you need to keep rolling them without consuming their currency. I imagine average drops per map something like:

66: 0.2
68: 0.5
70: 1.5
72: 3
74: 5
76: 7
78: 10


4 - Desync

I am not gonna say very much here. It is simple not good enough. This game is a desyncfest mega. PvP will never be good like this, good fights and monsters with delicate mechanics cannot function with desync.

We players are not stupid, we don't want to hear more excuses and we know it will not be fixed while you got your attitude going.

For example D3 that you compare yourself to as taking the shortcut to fix it, has little issues with gameplay and the feel of it. You can still dodge attacks for example mallet lords, you can still dodge projectiles, and in fact in that game, due to less desync, you actually dodge a lot of more things and it becomes an integral part of the gameplay to a greater extend than it ever could in a desyncfest.


5 - Leagues are inadequate

Now here is something i find it hard to comprehend. It is heavily tied to drop rates being too low as described above.

The short league is not a place where players who want to build insanely geared characters generally have time enough to get there. If you do, then that is one of those few seasons you will ever go all in, and at one point you simply stop because you cannot reach that level again, you lose interest in it because the grind is so mental that you already know what to expect and it is not worth 4 months of your life.

D2 ladders had it right, even if it was actually bots that made it so. There it was possible for players to start characters and get it to a really high level of perfection within 1-3 months, they would then continue to push levels on it, farm gear for other characters or take some time to play other games or handle their real life while waiting for the next ladder.

What i am trying to say here is that short leagues are made to reset the progression of players primarily, that is the deepest purpose of them, and they allow the game to be very rewarding without ending up in a flooded state where everyone has everything. In PoE this most important aspect is not utilized well.

You can severely boost droprates and players will have much more fun. Sure, there may be 3% of players who would rather they can farm everyday attempting to reach the carrot on the moon, surpressing their problems, but catering to them brings the quality of the game down for the other 97% potential PoE lovers. Make PoE a game where everyone do not quit because it is like a barren desert. Unleash the drops, make the game satisfying. I am not telling you to give everyone BiS items, but exercise some selfreflection here and realize just how bad the drops are.

That brings me to permanent leagues. So, PoE is supposed to provide both a short term league experience and a permanent league one. Clearly the permanent one is not cared for at all. Standard league is the dump league of both hardcores and newer leagues. The players who farm the most in standard league are the players not playing in it. The people not playing in standard inflate the prices and make the average drops of standard players much more useless, ruining their game quality as things get ever less rewarding.

I suspect that if drop rates were much higher, most people playing permanent leagues would play fresh leagues, but many many players play standard because that is the only place they ever stand a chance of getting somewhere. If you wish to provide these people with a higher valued choice for permanent league, make it a place that is not a dump from everywhere else. Granted not many people would play it, and maybe simply boosting drops in short leagues makes it absolete, but the current standard league is not respected as a choice of play.


6 - The game changes too much

This is from a community perspective. The game changes too much all the time, you cannot write detailed and specific guides spreading knowledge or they will be inaccurate and so require constant updates. That means it is very hard to create a library of community knowledge. It means your builds will be ruined after you log in after a long break, and it means you cannot play something you used to love which is essential as nostalgia plays an almost illogically large part of your appreciation.

Another way in which the game changes is the difficulty/brutality, it seems to grow ever more relentless with every major content patch, with more increasingly annoying/frustrating monsters, the latest wave being invasion and you all know how that has been received, in great part due to a desync combo. Before that was the sceptre of god which has been voted as the least favorite area by players, and the garden which was only one of the least favored zones.

If the game changes to become something different than what it was in essence it will make players leave, and those who tried the old and didn't like it but would like the new are not aware that the game has changed, and so you mostly just alienate your players.

Naturally there is no solution, change must happen if need be and improvement is change too.

-------------


Change these things, and you will carve your name even deeper into the history of gaming. Drop rates, desync, fusing/jeweller/chrom functionality and map access. Fix them all and your game will flourish.

"

I suspect that if drop rates were much higher, most people would play fresh leagues

Most players already DO play fresh leagues. Many people already do reach insane gear levels and eventually level 100. People have been wanting temporary leagues to be even shorter since many reach the point in these leagues where they've done everything they wanted.

So needless to say I disagree with that point.

The only thing that I think holds PoE from being a near perfect game is optimization/desync issues. Everything else is either minor compared to that or has been consistently improved to some degree and can easily be changed with future updates.

Thank you for this well thought out, time-invested thread. However, its going to get pooped on by all the dumbasses and forum trolls.

I predict:
☐ 1. Go play d3.
☐ 2. RNG is RNG
☐ 3. Party up. Farm Piety and roll the maps up. I don't have this problem so it doesn't exist.
☐ 4. I've never had this problem so it doesn't exist. Learn to play. Play a ranged character.
☐ 5. Then don't play them.
☐ 6. Your just mad because your OP Meta character got nerfed.

Will checkbox each as seen.

Indeed they do, i was talking about those who play permanent already, ill clarity it.

I disagree with every point you brought up with the exception of desynch(which we are stuck with).

1) time is very rewarding so long as you dont have excellent gear. If you really wanted to fix the 'not rewarding' aspect of the game you would have to disable trading/stash and reduce(yes REDUCE) the chance of good drops. Not gonna happen. All the power hungry short-sighted kids would rage quit.

2) crafting is fine. you simply want more power for less time invested. It relates very heavily with point 1. To attain the best gear possible is to basically win the game leaving players with the seemingly lack of rewards.

3) end game is somewhat more accessible now with with cart strongboxes. but lets ignore that for a moment. Once again, this relates to the base issue with point 1, you want more power with less time invested. If the end game becomes very accessible, it no longer has the same perceptual reward. It will simply become something thats expected to be always available. The other result would be that more players would quickly achieve max level and have nothing left to strive for, thus basically winning the game.

4) yeah, desynch sucks

5) yet again you complain about time invested per reward. leagues are very much enjoyable to many people as it puts everyone on an even level.

6) change is good. change is perhaps the best part about actively worked on games. It keeps things fresh and adds new dynamics. It often nerfs the most OP of shit to help prevent everyone from playing the same cookie cutter shit. It gives new goals to strive for. Of all your points, this is by far the absolute worst one. Wrong on so many levels(imo).

"

SkyCore wrote:

I disagree with every point you brought up with the exception of desynch(which we are stuck with).

1) time is very rewarding so long as you dont have excellent gear. If you really wanted to fix the 'not rewarding' aspect of the game you would have to disable trading/stash and reduce(yes REDUCE) the chance of good drops. Not gonna happen. All the power hungry short-sighted kids would rage quit.

2) crafting is fine. you simply want more power for less time invested. It relates very heavily with point 1. To attain the best gear possible is to basically win the game leaving players with the seemingly lack of rewards.

3) end game is somewhat more accessible now with with cart strongboxes. but lets ignore that for a moment. Once again, this relates to the base issue with point 1, you want more power with less time invested. If the end game becomes very accessible, it no longer has the same perceptual reward. It will simply become something thats expected to be always available. The other result would be that more players would quickly achieve max level and have nothing left to strive for, thus basically winning the game.

4) yeah, desynch sucks

5) yet again you complain about time invested per reward. leagues are very much enjoyable to many people as it puts everyone on an even level.

6) change is good. change is perhaps the best part about actively worked on games. It keeps things fresh and adds new dynamics. It often nerfs the most OP of shit to help prevent everyone from playing the same cookie cutter shit. It gives new goals to strive for. Of all your points, this is by far the absolute worst one. Wrong on so many levels(imo).

+1

This is all depending on your definition of 'rewarding'. It appears your definition is similar to what D3 is catering to, something where it is super quick and easy, but end of the day is over quick when you reach the cap point again

"

SkyCore wrote:

I disagree with every point you brought up with the exception of desynch(which we are stuck with).

1) time is very rewarding so long as you dont have excellent gear. If you really wanted to fix the 'not rewarding' aspect of the game you would have to disable trading/stash and reduce(yes REDUCE) the chance of good drops. Not gonna happen. All the power hungry short-sighted kids would rage quit.

2) crafting is fine. you simply want more power for less time invested. It relates very heavily with point 1. To attain the best gear possible is to basically win the game leaving players with the seemingly lack of rewards.

3) end game is somewhat more accessible now with with cart strongboxes. but lets ignore that for a moment. Once again, this relates to the base issue with point 1, you want more power with less time invested. If the end game becomes very accessible, it no longer has the same perceptual reward. It will simply become something thats expected to be always available. The other result would be that more players would quickly achieve max level and have nothing left to strive for, thus basically winning the game.

4) yeah, desynch sucks

5) yet again you complain about time invested per reward. leagues are very much enjoyable to many people as it puts everyone on an even level.

6) change is good. change is perhaps the best part about actively worked on games. It keeps things fresh and adds new dynamics. It often nerfs the most OP of shit to help prevent everyone from playing the same cookie cutter shit. It gives new goals to strive for. Of all your points, this is by far the absolute worst one. Wrong on so many levels(imo).

1) What i address is not the normal distribution of gear, i am talking about is the spectrum of gear levels, and how far you can practically go by regular play.

2) The crafting issues address stability, not reward rates.

3) You want to read what i write again. The real purpose of that change is to give map rollers a series of "free" rerolls every map to reduce the impact of party size on map access, and also to prevent maps from being demoralizing. The amount of free rerolls should be less than what you need to optimize map farming, but enough to make solo high-level mapping more viable. It's all in the balance. Free rerolls should be so scarce that bad builds have real problems affording mapping. There is nothing advantageous to solo mapping even if it is possible, it will never be easier than it already is in groups now. Groups are faster and safer.

It is possible to entirely stop chaos orbs from being used on maps, making it even more important to have builds that can handle a variety of map mods in order to reach high level maps, but it will be more about the players than the party size. That can make it even harder to reach higher maps depending on how many chisels drop, so you see, it really is all in the balance even though you wish to disregard that.

Well gnight it is time for me to vanish.

Nothing new but it is an excellent collection of common and reasonable complaints about PoE.

+1, OP.

"

SkyCore wrote:

2) crafting is fine

lol

"

SkyCore wrote:

I disagree with every point you brought up with the exception of desynch(which we are stuck with).

1) time is very rewarding so long as you dont have excellent gear. If you really wanted to fix the 'not rewarding' aspect of the game you would have to disable trading/stash and reduce(yes REDUCE) the chance of good drops. Not gonna happen. All the power hungry short-sighted kids would rage quit.

2) crafting is fine. you simply want more power for less time invested. It relates very heavily with point 1. To attain the best gear possible is to basically win the game leaving players with the seemingly lack of rewards.

3) end game is somewhat more accessible now with with cart strongboxes. but lets ignore that for a moment. Once again, this relates to the base issue with point 1, you want more power with less time invested. If the end game becomes very accessible, it no longer has the same perceptual reward. It will simply become something thats expected to be always available. The other result would be that more players would quickly achieve max level and have nothing left to strive for, thus basically winning the game.

4) yeah, desynch sucks

5) yet again you complain about time invested per reward. leagues are very much enjoyable to many people as it puts everyone on an even level.

6) change is good. change is perhaps the best part about actively worked on games. It keeps things fresh and adds new dynamics. It often nerfs the most OP of shit to help prevent everyone from playing the same cookie cutter shit. It gives new goals to strive for. Of all your points, this is by far the absolute worst one. Wrong on so many levels(imo).

And I couldn't disagree any more against most of these points.

1) Time is not rewarding. You could spend 600 hours farming fusings to try to 6L a particular chest and not be any closer at the end of it. This is the only game I've ever played where all your effort can end up meaning nothing.

2) Crafting is inaccessible to 99% of the playerbase because orb drop rates are nerfed to hell to combat RMT. This is the opposite of fine.

3) The level of people who quit before seeing a 78 map is much higher than those who sit through to the end. Everyone I know gets fed up of the grind before making it even halfway there. GGG has to realize that in the long term this will not be a viable business decision. Furthermore, gating difficult content behind RNG is cheap, lazy, and a crutch. Difficult content should be gated solely behind the difficulty of the content itself.

6) Change is good. Bricking builds people have worked for is never good. GGG takes balancing to the extreme without fully testing out their patches, making things go from OP to unviable. The fact leech is currently unusable for many builds--especially magic casters--and the fact there's so many one-shot mechanics is all testament to the fact they rush decisions and consider balancing nothing more than an afterthought. "Did we fuck it up? Eh, we'll balance it some more in another patch." Meanwhile, people get pissed that their builds stop working and leave the game.

Also, the changes GGG makes only further move the game into cookie-cutter territory. By eliminating the viability of most of the builds out there, you get things like searing bond being used by just about everyone running in a league.

Balancing is not an easy job, I'll give you that. But if there's a team I hold responsible for making the game as unenjoyable as it currently is, it's the balance team. With every patch, things just get worse.