PoE needs a difficulty factor setting

They already have it. 6 of them at least.

Normal
Cruel
Merciless
Atizri
Uber Atizri
Map mods (which could be infinite)

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

I am curious, in what manner would a difficulty setting not work?

Because difficulty sliders are 0% risk-reward, and 100% gearcheck-reward. You don't set the difficulty level to something which challenges you, you set it to the highest setting which still manages to be piss easy for you.

You mean how people use alt+f4 because they can, they use trade parties because they can, they use lotteries because they can, they overgear for content because they can, they snapshot because they can, RMT undeteceted because they can, scam because they can etc.

Evidently there are people who will use anything possible within their moral guidelines to be as efficient as possible.

Just because difficulty sliders will give another way for those people to find an efficient path, it doesn't mean that idea itself is bad.

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mazul wrote:

You mean how people use alt+f4 because they can, they use trade parties because they can, they use lotteries because they can, they overgear for content because they can, they snapshot because they can, RMT undeteceted because they can, scam because they can etc.

Don't change the subject. Each of those points should be debated on their own merits... elsewhere.

But even if you were right and each and every one of those systems subverted difficulty and trivialized content, that would not justify yet another system which subverts difficulty and trivializes content. Being in the frying pan is not valid reason to jump into the fire.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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mazul wrote:

You mean how people use alt+f4 because they can, they use trade parties because they can, they use lotteries because they can, they overgear for content because they can, they snapshot because they can, RMT undeteceted because they can, scam because they can etc.

Don't change the subject. Each of those points should be debated on their own merits... elsewhere.

But even if you were right and each and every one of those systems subverted difficulty and trivialized content, that would not justify yet another system which subverts difficulty and trivializes content. Being in the frying pan is not valid reason to jump into the fire.

The advantage of a difficulty slider is to let the people who want an appropriate challenge to scale the content to suit them. I know I am one of those who will bored to death if I play too easy mode.

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mazul wrote:

The advantage of a difficulty slider is to let the people who want an appropriate challenge to scale the content to suit them. I know I am one of those who will bored to death if I play too easy mode.

Maps are a better difficulty slider. Try playing in No Chaos Orb Mode. You have to run whatever the Alch gives you, and you have to get to /remaining 0. Trust me, you'll be challenged — perhaps not by every map, but some of them will sneak up on you. You'll even be rewarded; you won't be spending any Chaos on maps.

There's no need to open the game up to difficulty-subverting strategies when better systems are available. I'm not saying maps are perfect in that regard (for example, Alt until Hordes Mode), but they're less abusable than what you're thinking, and they get the job done.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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mazul wrote:

The advantage of a difficulty slider is to let the people who want an appropriate challenge to scale the content to suit them. I know I am one of those who will bored to death if I play too easy mode.

Maps are a better difficulty slider. Try playing in No Chaos Orb Mode. You have to run whatever the Alch gives you, and you have to get to /remaining 0. Trust me, you'll be challenged — perhaps not by every map, but some of them will sneak up on you. You'll even be rewarded; you won't be spending any Chaos on maps.

There's no need to open the game up to difficulty-subverting strategies when better systems are available. I'm not saying maps are perfect in that regard (for example, Alt until Hordes Mode), but they're less abusable than what you're thinking, and they get the job done.

If the drop rates are similar to Ambush ones, then the "rewarded by not spending chaos" is correct, but for Standard drop rates, 1 chaos is very little compared to what lv76-78 maps cost.

The ambush-invasion combined league was the best one GGG ever created. I could play that forever.

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Nightmare90 wrote:

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syrioforel wrote:

These kinds of systems never work out properly, and add too many degrees of freedom that complicate balance.

I'd rather say it would grant enough freedom to destroy build diversity.

If you increase the difficulty of content that way the perceived "valid build"-threshold might be increased to a level which maybe 0,1% of players will reach. Exaggerated probably, I know. But you know the drill.

 So how is that any different now with only 1% of players ever reaching level 100? So only 1% of players can play at the 100% difficulty factor. Right now we either have players rage quit over being one-shotted and/or die to a rogue yet again or others saying that GGG has nerfed the difficulty too much. With such an extreme range of players abilities and since everyone's desired level of content difficulty varies having a way to adjust the level of difficulty would be a way to accommodate our preferences better. Why force everyone to play with only 2 levels of difficulty (softcore or hardcore)? If millions tried PoE and quit over their newbie perception that it's too hard, then GGG has missed out on a ton of potential revenue. Also, if new players initial playing experiences are negative because they are new and thrown into the deep end and can't swim, by word of mouth with their friends PoE will get more negative comments.

 For me personally, I played PoE in CB (November 2012) and was/am hardcore enough to get past the newbie stage of playing and find my PoE "comfort" level. I played for over 1/2 year solo and finally talked PoE up enough to my 2 best friends that we have trio played Baulders Gate, D2, Dungeon Siege, TQIT, and TL2 to give PoE a try. We played last summers Anarchy League (read my Good News GGG...) and initially they liked PoE and we finished Normal difficulty level in about 1 month of pretty casual playing. We made it into Cruel up to the submerged passages. I hadn't died once yet with my ranger and with my PoE newbie friends playing a marauder and witch they had died a dozen times or so. Then we ran up against a rogue in the lower submerged passage that does poison rain of arrow attacks and moves super fast. Trying to move within the tight confines to get into a position to be able to attack was extremely difficult and we all were dieing right and left. I finally said that we need to go back to town and create a new instance and skip the rogue. My friends didn't want to do that but eventually gave up and we did that and moved on. I'm knowing that certain content may need to be skipped but my friends hated having to do that and told me that the play balance was way off and that soured their whole view of PoE. By the end of summer they stopped playing and I was back to solo playing since then. Now we are trio playing D3:RoS and because we can set the difficulty factor to a desired level they're much happier playing RoS. If RoS had a fixed level of difficulty and my friends found it too hard for their taste, then they would probably stop playing RoS same as they did with PoE.

 My point here is that with everyones desired arpg level of difficulty being different, only offering a couple of content difficulty ways to play PoE is leaving many players out and that is a shame that GGG is losing out on so much revenue potential by not having a way in PoE to dial in the degree of difficulty desired. My 2 friends quit before they needed to expand their stash space and only one of them bought a pet so GGG lost out financially. I'm sure this has happened quite a lot and for PoE to have a way to let us adjust the PoE degree of difficulty (similar to what RoS allows) would go a very long way to keeping the more casual arpg players from rage quitting.

note: Please don't troll post that if my 2 friends thought play balance was way off (that rogues are way too hard, a view that I don't share btw) that they shouldn't be playing PoE at all or any other "we don't need casual players here." I think GGG is making a big financial mistake by not providing a way to dial in the desired level of playing difficulty. I'm sure we would be trio playing Ambush League right now if their initial playing last summer had faired better.

note 2: I want GGG to succeed and be in the arpg game business for a very long time and continue to deliver new acts for many years to come. I'd also personally love to see GGG one up Blizzard at their own game and I know it takes a large amount of time and money to produce great arpg content.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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mazul wrote:

The advantage of a difficulty slider is to let the people who want an appropriate challenge to scale the content to suit them. I know I am one of those who will bored to death if I play too easy mode.

Maps are a better difficulty slider. Try playing in No Chaos Orb Mode. You have to run whatever the Alch gives you, and you have to get to /remaining 0. Trust me, you'll be challenged — perhaps not by every map, but some of them will sneak up on you. You'll even be rewarded; you won't be spending any Chaos on maps.

There's no need to open the game up to difficulty-subverting strategies when better systems are available. I'm not saying maps are perfect in that regard (for example, Alt until Hordes Mode), but they're less abusable than what you're thinking, and they get the job done.

Maps are essentially beside the point in terms of content. The actual acts/difficulty is what concerns most people. And I'm not really sure your talking about GGG when you talk about piss easy or difficulty-subverting. There is no way GGG would ever give the player the ability to make the game too easy. They would probably just cock their head to the side and look at you quizzically and say 'you want more rng?' lol

Also just because that's your opinion doesn't make it the only valid opinion lol. I still think my idea when applied to non-map and non-party situations would be very appropriate.

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Arrowneous wrote:

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Nightmare90 wrote:

I'd rather say it would grant enough freedom to destroy build diversity.

If you increase the difficulty of content that way the perceived "valid build"-threshold might be increased to a level which maybe 0,1% of players will reach. Exaggerated probably, I know. But you know the drill.

WoT

 So how is that any different now with only 1% of players ever reaching level 100? So only 1% of players can play at the 100% difficulty factor. Right now we either have players rage quit over being one-shotted and/or die to a rogue yet again or others saying that GGG has nerfed the difficulty too much. With such an extreme range of players abilities and since everyone's desired level of content difficulty varies having a way to adjust the level of difficulty would be a way to accommodate our preferences better. Why force everyone to play with only 2 levels of difficulty (softcore or hardcore)? If millions tried PoE and quit over their newbie perception that it's too hard, then GGG has missed out on a ton of potential revenue. Also, if new players initial playing experiences are negative because they are new and thrown into the deep end and can't swim, by word of mouth with their friends PoE will get more negative comments.

 For me personally, I played PoE in CB (November 2012) and was/am hardcore enough to get past the newbie stage of playing and find my PoE "comfort" level. I played for over 1/2 year solo and finally talked PoE up enough to my 2 best friends that we have trio played Baulders Gate, D2, Dungeon Siege, TQIT, and TL2 to give PoE a try. We played last summers Anarchy League (read my Good News GGG...) and initially they liked PoE and we finished Normal difficulty level in about 1 month of pretty casual playing. We made it into Cruel up to the submerged passages. I hadn't died once yet with my ranger and with my PoE newbie friends playing a marauder and witch they had died a dozen times or so. Then we ran up against a rogue in the lower submerged passage that does poison rain of arrow attacks and moves super fast. Trying to move within the tight confines to get into a position to be able to attack was extremely difficult and we all were dieing right and left. I finally said that we need to go back to town and create a new instance and skip the rogue. My friends didn't want to do that but eventually gave up and we did that and moved on. I'm knowing that certain content may need to be skipped but my friends hated having to do that and told me that the play balance was way off and that soured their whole view of PoE. By the end of summer they stopped playing and I was back to solo playing since then. Now we are trio playing D3:RoS and because we can set the difficulty factor to a desired level they're much happier playing RoS. If RoS had a fixed level of difficulty and my friends found it too hard for their taste, then they would probably stop playing RoS same as they did with PoE.

 My point here is that with everyones desired arpg level of difficulty being different, only offering a couple of content difficulty ways to play PoE is leaving many players out and that is a shame that GGG is losing out on so much revenue potential by not having a way in PoE to dial in the degree of difficulty desired. My 2 friends quit before they needed to expand their stash space and only one of them bought a pet so GGG lost out financially. I'm sure this has happened quite a lot and for PoE to have a way to let us adjust the PoE degree of difficulty (similar to what RoS allows) would go a very long way to keeping the more casual arpg players from rage quitting.

note: Please don't troll post that if my 2 friends thought play balance was way off (that rogues are way too hard, a view that I don't share btw) that they shouldn't be playing PoE at all or any other "we don't need casual players here." I think GGG is making a big financial mistake by not providing a way to dial in the desired level of playing difficulty. I'm sure we would be trio playing Ambush League right now if their initial playing last summer had faired better.

note 2: I want GGG to succeed and be in the arpg game business for a very long time and continue to deliver new acts for many years to come. I'd also personally love to see GGG one up Blizzard at their own game and I know it takes a large amount of time and money to produce great arpg content.

I agree in your core sentiment that GGG needs to work on accessibility of their title.

However I don't think that adding another difficulty scalar will help this without complicating the game and influencing too many factors at the same time. They better work on more tutorial messages like the first one you see in-game or expand the Twilight Strand on Normal to a more linear, tutorial like experience you can still rush through if you know everything. Maybe even guide the players into basic vendor recipe usage and gameplay principles like skipping (for your character) overpowered bosses.

GGG has a more Rogue-Like experience in mind for this game. This does mean that difficulty can be harsh sometimes depending on your character but it also means that people should be told early on that this is a core principle, I agree.

They could do the same for Cruel difficulty, hinting that they need to prepare (inform them about their resist weakness!) and so on. I do hope that they base their next expansion around making the new player experience lot off better.

I'd really like a difficulty factor setting.

While gearcheck-based difficulty slider is not the best, I'd still find it better than RNG-based-orb-sink difficulty slider.