Current State of PoE - Summary

The current overall state of PoE is very good.

In recent days I did mistakenly follow the general 'upsetness' of the community (mostly trolls and whiners). This is a summary of things I have learned from both the community and the devs (from whom I received great feedback!), these are mostly but not entirely positive, but I believe very constructive.


----- Whining and bitching -----------------------------------------

Happy players don't complain, they are busy enjoying this great game (and I believe that the majority of players are very happy players), it is the sour and tired players that come to the forums and reddit to complain.

Like other players I personally found the official PoE forums to be very poisonous and this does affect overall player base, just like in real life, you can be a very positive person but if you are surrounded by pessimists you will start to think negatively. Just like Chris mentioned himself Reddit does a much better job at filtering through the posts. I am not sure how, but this does need to be addressed. Also reddit does much better job at making players realise their mistakes, they post something, they get totally downvoted and this is more likely to make them realise they were wrong. Also, reddit does give feedback, you do get notifications about replies, which encourages conversation and makes you feel your opinion matters, on the forum you might get 10 replies to your post in a big topic but never see them.

Another things I found out:

- GGG seems to like the dynamic meta game apparently based on MTG (Magic: The Gathering card game) and what Blizzard is doing with Heartstone - people need to know this is deliberate and not just an effect of hasty decisions.

- Steam to standalone client users ratio is changing for the advantage of the standalone client, therefore steam charts are more dramatic than the reality.

In general players are or can be unhappy about:

- Too heavy nerf hammer
- Difficulty (Invaders)
- Missing quality of life features
- Devs being hasty in their decisions (whilst dynamic meta is good, people need more stability)
- Lack of new content for end game mappers - seems the expansion didn't add much content for mappers (no corrupted areas in maps, vaal orbs not being popular, invaders too hard and not rewarding, Atziri needs to be challenging in terms of the fighting her not getting to her!)
- Drop Rates (currency and good items)
- RNG
- Having to use IIQ/IIR gear (players are torn between finding more items and being more tanky with more dmg)
- Risk not being rewarding
- EDIT: Graphical performance and ability to tone down / disable skill and weather effects.

People are HAPPY about:

- Huge re-playability value (word altoholic is very common and is FINE)
- Depth of the game and the mechanics
- Variety, the amount of active skills / passive skills / uniques, and their combinations / synergies
- Rewarding in terms of intricateness (the more time you invest, the more you know, better you can take advantage of vaious aspects and get further)
- Poe being very challenging, people like good challenge and feel even better after they beat it (as long as they don't have to fight against one shot off screen / desync deaths)
- GGG finally making a bigger distinction between softcore and hardcore, so people no longer feel guilty about playing softcore
- Very dynamic and action packed gameplay (mid / late game only though) - the biggest criticism from new players is that the game is laggy and slow, I would propose 5-10% move speed and 10-30% attacks speed for act 1 normal which will slowly decline throughout act 2 normal. Also people need to be taught that they cannot expect a caster to use melee leap slam very quickly / effectively.
- ... plus many more I missed or am to ignorant to list out here.

I would also like to make it clear that me and overall of players think the positives overwhelm the negatives, this post is only meant to be a constructive criticism, because something is very good doesn't mean it cannot be better.


----- Improvements ------------------------------------------

- While this is completely RNG based game and endless grind is just a part of it and is deliberate, 99% of rares being vendored without hesitation or people using UNidentified recipes without any regrets should make GGG realise that very hard Invaders dropping more items than rares doesn't mean they are getting better items and in effect risk is not rewarding. This is very hard to address, one of good ideas I heard is introducing the bottom cap on mod tiers, for instance very high item-level items cannot have the lowest tiers of mods, improving the chance of getting better items overall. But this is a completely separate topic. Here I talk about Invasion, I believe strongboxes an example of very good implementation of Risk and Reward.

- Quality of Life Improvements (I cannot stress the importance of this enough) crucial features below

- Nerf hammer is too hard, try to nerf things in steps, instead of 50% nerf, try three consecutive ones 30% (removing OP-ness), 15% (futher adjustment), 5% (finetuning) BUT ALSO players are fine with heavy nerfs if they are really needed, but they need:

- More feedback from GGG, the actuall reasoning that stands behind certain changes and nerfs (examples in a paragraph below)

- Skill tree being published much earlier before large updated, people planning to commit to weeks or months of play clearly need to know where they stand, especially with such expensive respec system. We want to have a surprise in a form of the content, but not in terms of not knowing if our build will be useless or not.

- Build of the Week - as much time it requires, I believe this is hands down one of the best marketing tools and gives HUGE inspiration to payers and improves the replayability and retention of players. There are already great guides however players do need inspiration in a form of live examples and a reliable source of builds. While the theorycrafting is huge in PoE, many players are not familiar enough with the game, they do want something tested. If they die / get bored with the current character they are much more likely to drop the game if they are unable to quickly find somehting to replace this character. I many times had situations where I wanted to play something but had no idea what.

- Development manifesto and updates (the current one is offline) - current weekly supporters newsletter is great to see the internal processes - but we need to know which direction the game is heading, for example whether very dynamic meta game is deliberate or just an effect of hastily made changes/nerfs (this is especially crucial for dedicated players and good mood and unstarstanding of the game, as PoE is a huge time investement and we are in it for the long haul!) AGAIN: GGG already does the best job of communicating with the player base in the industry!

- Votebox - If GGG is unsure or unaware of things that need to be done, or are not sure how to prioritise the tasks and need to gage the public opinion, do introduce VOTEBOX system, where suggestions can be submitted by players and voted on, also there can be 4 categories: Popular, Newest, In progress, Completed. This is a great example of community's feedback improving a program: http://todoist.com/Vote/ and also the community seeing they are listened to. (Not for all aspects, GGG have they vision and some things shouldn't be influenced by the public).


----- Lack of reasoning from GGG ---------------------------------

Also I find the biggest problem are not the nerfs or changes, but the lack of feedback / reasoning from GGG standing behind the changes.

For instance, if you say that something was heavily nerfed (without any reasoning), the overall perception of the community will be VERY NEGATIVE (especially from the vocal whiners/trolls), however if you nerf something and give sensible reasoning, no-one will say a word. Compare these two:

"Evangelists were nerfed and smoke mine no longer works for summoners"

vs.

"Evangelists were nerfed and smoke mine no longer works for summoners - as the combination of both of these mechanics was completely abused protecting you from all damage taken during fights like with Atziri bosses. In practice Evangelists seam pretty much unchanged, and for 95% of the situations you will not notice any difference at all, now they are just slightly less reliable. In regards to the smoke mine, we had to remove the ability to teleport minions until we address the above issue fully, however we do have in plans more quality of life features for summoners." - obviously it doesn't need to be so thorough, this is just an example

**EDIT:** just as I was writing this post I found out that Blizzard just started adding 'Philosophy' section to the patchnotes explaining their reasoning behind the changes.

If you take something away from people without explanation they are always unhappy, but if you give them a valid reason so they understand, it becomes fine.


----- Quality of Life Improvements -----------------------------

Quality of life features. Mainly social, as social aspect is extremely important in a trading oriented game. We do need good tools to communicate effectively with others.
(below are the CRUCIAL ones from this 650 upvotes reddit list http://redd.it/1up7t6)

- I understand the trading system redesign and making trade pannel intergalactic is a major job. THEREFORE instance list (ctrl + left click on instance entrance and waypoint) needs to show instances with your party members in a different colour! I often find other players / buyers having huge problems joining my instance so we can trade. This seems small, but is a HUGE problem, often resulting in people going to the Coast / back to town and chaising each other, which is extremely frustrading to new players are they don't understand what is going on and also to experienced players when they want to do a quick trade.

- We need an option to disable the 'Frient has come online / offline' notifications, as they can be very frustrating, covering half of the inventory and item tooltips. Or have them moved to the different position on the screen. It seems like a small problem, but has been there for a very long time and is very frustrating when you have a larger friends list, and I believe can be fixed very easily. Also this is the book case example for haters proving ggg cares more about new content than polishing the existing.

- Account and character naming system requires a total redesign. We need to have one name attached to one person, this is the only way for players to recognise eachother and know who they are, give them a sense of familiarity. Account names need to be used in the chat, as the current reference to character names seems to be very confusing because players keep using many differently named characters in this game which is somewhat oriented on replayability. I am in not too big guild (only about 10-15 players online at one time) but whenever someone posts something on the guild chat i need to go to the guild list and see who this person actually is, the same thing applies to whispers, I often have no idea whether it is a message from a buyer or a friend, also when very buys I sometimes ignore messages, only to later find out I missed a message from someone important to me. I personally always use short fromy my nickname before the name of all characters DynSummoner / DynRighteousFire etc. Many people use Account_Character format. I believe the easiest solution for the devs would be to just always display the account name in brackets before the character name in all places, or just have it constructed this way AccountName_CharName (suppose they can force all char names to contain account name). This will significanly improve the social aspec within the game, sense of familiarity and belongingness.

- There are some bugs in relation to other peoples statues and messaging. (Reddit post with more details http://redd.it/229da9)
---- We do lose messages when in the loading screen, which causes chaos, miscommunication and often frustration.
---- Also when in the loading screen you seam to be offline to other people, so they receive message back saying you are Offline which is very confusing.
---- /whois command apart from the information on the particular character, needs to tell us the on/offline status of the account. I do find many many strangers adding me to their friendslists as this seems to be the only reliable way to tell if someone is online of offline.

- Formatting of the chat is confusing, when you talk to a few people at the same time it is really easy to get lost, the incoming and outgoing messages need to be made more distinguishable, I suggest making the arrow <- for the incoming messages bold, just more noticible, as we don't need to pay much attention to the messages we sent out ourselves.

- Make an option to remember the last used Loot Allocation, this is very important aspec for people and can be very frustrating to have it changed every single time they create a new party.

- Show basic str/dex/int without bonuses from gear in character panel + also requirements for gear/gems (like the resists in brackets). Maaaany new players overlevel their gems whils having atribute bonus from gear and later end up not being able to use their skills, this is extremely frustrating.

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

I believe all the above will make this already great game even better.

Just started to read it, but looks very promising.

+1 sir.

Edit :

"

Like other players I personally found the official PoE forums to be very poisonous and this does affect overall player base, just like in real life, you can be a very positive person but if you are surrounded by pessimists you will start to think negatively. Just like Chris mentioned himself Reddit does a much better job at filtering through the posts. I am not sure how, but this does need to be addressed. Also reddit does much better job at making players realise their mistakes, they post something, they get totally downvoted and this is more likely to make them realise they were wrong. Also, reddit does give feedback, you do get notifications about replies, which encourages conversation and makes you feel your opinion matters, on the forum you might get 10 replies to your post in a big topic but never see them.

I agree with more forum functions, however i fully disagree with the bolded part.

Opinions are opinions, they are neither wrong nor good. They are formed independently from one another and are perceived in light of past experiences, this gives them a connotation of either being positive/negative while in reality they are neither.

The only result of a upvote/downvote system is to promote group mentality and downvote anybody not walking between the lines or having a different opinion then stated in the OP.

Even if that opinion holds valid feedback/criticism it will most likely be downvoted by the group-mentality since they cannot view this information from the same perspective the poster obviously does in that situation.

Say for example we had this option here and you posted a thorough post filled with "valid" criticism and feedback, yet it is immediately downvoted because it attacks the picture some "rose tinted" people have and in this situation they are in the majority.

It would be foolish for GGG to implement a forum structure like this, ensuring all valid criticism would be downvoted.

On the topic of getting poisoned by a poisonous community, this is entirely once owns fault for getting caught up in the drivel. People should be aware when communicating on a board like this that others will disagree and some are capable of expressing there disagreement with very heinous words.

This just means one should be selective when placing value on an opinion, while not disregarding every opinion formulated by the "troll" since it can in time hold valuable feedback as well.

Other then this personal beef i have with a reddit forum structure, very solid post sir.

bump and +1

"

We need to have one name attached to one person.

100% agree with this suggestion. In the current state, we can't even recognize clanmates properly, because only their nicknames are shown, not their account name.

Fix it next patch please, GGG.


Btw, +1 it was a good read, and it's really good to see a forum post with good content once in a while, too many whiners defiling the forums. :p

Read it all and it's a very good summary adressing many valid complaints, some others could fit on the list but it's well done overall.

Not really agreeing about that reddit part that boem quoted either, if it existed we'd never get a chance to read tinko's posts :)

But I'm all for using account names in conversations, suggested the same myself a couple of times, also for doing something about character name database, getting harder and harder to get make up a good 'un.

My favorite part is probably 'the lack of reasoning from GGG', I feel a detailed explanation for certain decisions included in patch notes is a terribly good idea, some reasoning would prevent many a 'battle of sudden flame'.

On that note I've seen a conversation about new character screen recently in Grim Dawn announcement thread, one of the devs posted some screens of upcoming details panel and a few pages later one of the players posted that the letters are too bright (was thinking the same thing myself by the way). Soon after that they posted a new screen with darker letters and everyone was 'much better'. It's maybe trivial but still a very nice example of communication between players and devs.

A fine post.


I'd like to add something to "In general players are or can be unhappy about":
RNG gated content instead of difficulty gated content.


@raics
:P

"

Dynuel wrote:

The current overall state of PoE is very good.

Arguable.

"

Dynuel wrote:

- Steam to standalone client users ratio is changing for the advantage of the standalone client, therefore steam charts are more dramatic than the reality.

[citation needed]

"

In general players are or can be unhappy about:

You forgot to add desync to that list.

"

I believe strongboxes an example of very good implementation of Risk and Reward.

From what I've seen, strongboxes = easily avoidable risk (smoke mine after you opened it), too much reward.

"

Votebox - If GGG is unsure or unaware of things that need to be done, or are not sure how to prioritise the tasks and need to gage the public opinion, do introduce VOTEBOX system

Voting is not gonna work, people don't know what they want, but system like that would be good.

I agree with everything else.

I'm generally happy with the game but increased communication of design decisions and reasoning by GGG would definitely make everything so much better. Problem is that the entire team is probably too busy to devote any time to explanation or design disclosure which is quite understandable.

GGG would do good to hire/train a community manager for this kind of thing -- or just get the new guy Nick to do it :)

Big no to reddit-style forums -- the PoE subreddit is where GGG goes to feel better about the game, themselves and life :P and although part of that is because the forums are quite toxic and they do need the comfort, the fact is reddit in general is an echo chamber, and as such not really conducive to (at times) unpopular criticism.

+1

Am I the only one who never goes to reddit?