PoE needs a difficulty factor setting

Why would you want difficulty slider when you already struggle so badly with the games current difficulty? You want to turn the slider down from where it is now?

Maps are the difficulty slider, if you want the game to be more difficult, actually try getting deep into maps and running them yellow. Its a million times better as a system, everything Scrotie has said is right.

I think less time spent theoryrafting how this game could be changed to accommodate bad players who dont want to put in the effort to get better and more time actually getting a character to lvl90 so you can fully understand this game is needed. Right now its like youre making suggestions on how a film could be improved, but youve only watched the first half hour.

I dont intend that to be mean, Im not trying to have a dig or be disrespectful, but given enough time to can drag any old inviable, badly built character to the low to mid 80s in a softcore league. If you cant get to 90 in softcore, u dont know for sure that youre even playing the game properly. Once you have a char powerful enough grind to 90 in a decent time frame, its like a completely different game. Im actually trying to help man, honestly, Im not trying to be a dick.

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Arrowneous wrote:

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.

they already did, this game shits on Diablo 2.


Diablo 3? lol.

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JIIX wrote:

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.

+1

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

Spoiler

Why would you want difficulty slider when you already struggle so badly with the games current difficulty? You want to turn the slider down from where it is now?

Maps are the difficulty slider, if you want the game to be more difficult, actually try getting deep into maps and running them yellow. Its a million times better as a system, everything Scrotie has said is right.

I think less time spent theoryrafting how this game could be changed to accommodate bad players who dont want to put in the effort to get better and more time actually getting a character to lvl90 so you can fully understand this game is needed. Right now its like youre making suggestions on how a film could be improved, but youve only watched the first half hour.

I dont intend that to be mean, Im not trying to have a dig or be disrespectful, but given enough time to can drag any old inviable, badly built character to the low to mid 80s in a softcore league. If you cant get to 90 in softcore, u dont know for sure that youre even playing the game properly. Once you have a char powerful enough grind to 90 in a decent time frame, its like a completely different game. Im actually trying to help man, honestly, Im not trying to be a dick.

"

Arrowneous wrote:

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.

they already did, this game shits on Diablo 2.


Diablo 3? lol.

good point, snorkle. I also have the impression that a whole lot of the suggestions here (in the forums generally) are made before even experiencing the game properly. So many feel entitled to say "improve this, improve that, this is bad game design, xy could be so much better if..., etc..."

But, at the same time I´d say part of this goes on GGG´s account because literally ALL the deeper, more detailed inforation you need to understand the game and how it works, is provided by 3rd parties via YouTube, Wiki, Reddit posts and whatnot.

I remember when I started in early Open Beta, that I had to literally "grind the Internet" for around 2 - 3 weeks until I felt comfortable enough to start playing the game, understanding enough of it that I´d stand a chance. And I usually get into things pretty fast, but PoE/GGG seem to leave all the "Manual related" things to the community.
I hope this will be looked into some day, because I don´t see the flood of "uneducated" suggestions ending anytime before that.

The game is way too good to not have a proper manual and introduction to game mechanics, a helping hand to get newer players through the pretty rough start it provides so far. I am personally only really glad that I didn´t give up early, because there is a lot to be discovered on the way from Level 1 to 90, and a lot to learn in between. The makers of the game should provide more of that stuff, and do it HERE, on the PoE Website, for everyone to see where they´re likely to look first.

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Grumlum wrote:

I remember when I started in early Open Beta, that I had to literally "grind the Internet" for around 2 - 3 weeks until I felt comfortable enough to start playing the game, understanding enough of it that I´d stand a chance. And I usually get into things pretty fast, but PoE/GGG seem to leave all the "Manual related" things to the community.
I hope this will be looked into some day, because I don´t see the flood of "uneducated" suggestions ending anytime before that.

its so true. Theres a lot more info out there now, but that in itself can be counterproductive cause you dunno where to look or what to really take seriously. You cant digest it all and a lot of it is bad info. At the start we were all shit together in a way, fumbling through, its been a long path to knowing what we know today.

In the past a lot of the builds on the forum were like yay, we found a way to make a viable build that clears maps using x skill, gimmie gimmie. Now its like the builds that get posted are so expert, so min/maxed around gear that did even exist at the start of open beta etc. Even the build guides are sort of fucked for people who havent already mastered beating basic content like maps in a competent fashion.


Its just so hard when you see posts on the forums where people are obviously struggling, so hard to tell what the real problem is, so much could be going wrong. Its like you just wish you could plug them into your brain and download what you know to them cause something in there would fix everything for them. The only way I can describe it to people is to think about the first time they cleared Act3 inferno on D3, it took hours right? Maybe even days for some people. Then remember the first time you saw a video of a ww barb clear it in 5 mins... yeah, its a completely different game when you are playing it well.

Its not even skill, its just knowledge, anyone can do it. The problem is making people actually realise the problem is them and not the game. All the vids now are mjolner builds and ll spec throw and its so easy to just write that off as extreme gear, so hard to make people realise they can clear lower maps in a somewhat similar fashion with items worth 2 or 3 chaos each. I killed Dominus in a lvl78 palace map with a moonsorrow, the sort of gear you need to faceroll lvl66-69 maps is a joke, IF you got the right tactics and build.

Explaining everything you need to know to get from here to there though could take a week.

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Deankar wrote:

Difficulty sliders have never worked and will never work.

The /players command in D2 worked decently well.

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f3rret wrote:

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Deankar wrote:

Difficulty sliders have never worked and will never work.

The /players command in D2 worked decently well.

In terms of being OP, yeah. In terms of being a well-balanced mechanic, no.

I will grant one thing: OP can be fun. And I'm not such a balance zealot that I've forgotten that fun is good. However, I really feel we can do better. We don't need to rely on introducing OP mechanics into games in order to maintain fun. I guess what I'm trying to say is that a system like that is lazy, and sometimes a lazy system is better than no system at all.

But not no system at all. Because maps.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

Why would you want difficulty slider when you already struggle so badly with the games current difficulty? You want to turn the slider down from where it is now?

Maps are the difficulty slider, if you want the game to be more difficult, actually try getting deep into maps and running them yellow. Its a million times better as a system, everything Scrotie has said is right.

I think less time spent theoryrafting how this game could be changed to accommodate bad players who dont want to put in the effort to get better and more time actually getting a character to lvl90 so you can fully understand this game is needed. Right now its like youre making suggestions on how a film could be improved, but youve only watched the first half hour.

I dont intend that to be mean, Im not trying to have a dig or be disrespectful, but given enough time to can drag any old inviable, badly built character to the low to mid 80s in a softcore league. If you cant get to 90 in softcore, u dont know for sure that youre even playing the game properly. Once you have a char powerful enough grind to 90 in a decent time frame, its like a completely different game. Im actually trying to help man, honestly, Im not trying to be a dick.

"

Arrowneous wrote:

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.

they already did, this game shits on Diablo 2.


Diablo 3? lol.

 If the 0 to 100 scale started out at a little less difficulty at 0 than PoE is currently and ramps up to twice the current content difficulty at 100 this would allow newbies to get their feet wet in PoE (and not just by walking in the water) without having to scale a huge starting wall and also this would offer the seasoned veteran hardcore players the tough challenge they are desiring. Yes, that would mean that a very high setting would be a gear check but isn't that what playing an arpg is all about? We all would love to faceroll the mobs once in a while but then when that gets boring just slide up to a higher challenge as your PoE skills increase over time. One negative I immediately see is running a zone at a high difficulty factor to clear all content and then dialing down the difficulty for the boss at the end (such as Dominus for example). GGG would need to make it so changing the difficulty factor would immediately send you back to town and reset the zone or only allow you to change it when in town and always have a message pop up stating that the current zone is being reset. A positive for me is that I think that newer act 3.5 content is much harder than older CB and OB zones (Imperial Gardens, Hedge Mazes, Sceptre of God) and I could dial them down a bit and then dial back up for all other zones. This would make for a smoother progression from end of Normal through beginning of Cruel and end of Cruel through beginning zones of Merciless. Right now GGG gets negative posts that new zones are harder than older zones so the gradual increase in difficulty as we level up isn't as smooth and linear as it should be.

 We need new blood to feed the GGG business machine and get our new content regularly and also keep the veteran players from getting bored and quitting. A fixed in stone degree of difficulty is only going to satisfy a small subset of the total PoE players (or would be players). The "goldilocks" zone is different for all players so it's only logical that we should be allowed to dial in our "just right" level of content difficulty for playing PoE. This should also extend to our rewards of better drops and more exp gained at higher settings. We already have % increased rarity and % increased quantity so those stats can be removed from items and let the degree of difficulty factor take its place. 0% IR to 100% IR and 0% IQ to 100% IQ. We shouldn't have to forgo using great gear just to get better quality and quantity and visa-versa. This would also provide an incentive to push ourselves to create better builds to take on the tougher content as the rewards would be better.

 I agree that PoE is better than D3:RoS (PoE would be knocking Blizzards socks off right now if there was as little desync and rubberbanding as RoS has) but since PoE is a David to the D3 Goliath it hasn't yet achieved critical mass appeal. I don't have any precise stats to be more specific but I feel that PoE is still the underdog arpg compared to D3 and RoS. Maybe GGG doesn't have any grand vision for their indie arpg and are content to stay in the shadow of D3 but it would be great if PoE could de-thrown D3. I know it's all subjective as we that play PoE over D3 already view PoE as the better arpg, but the daily stats of quantity of players playing PoE don't show this. It could be that PoE will never cross the desync ocean and be a smoother to play arpg (low desync) and thus will never be as popular a game but that's already been discussed to death.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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f3rret wrote:

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Deankar wrote:

Difficulty sliders have never worked and will never work.

The /players command in D2 worked decently well.

In terms of being OP, yeah. In terms of being a well-balanced mechanic, no.

I will grant one thing: OP can be fun. And I'm not such a balance zealot that I've forgotten that fun is good. However, I really feel we can do better. We don't need to rely on introducing OP mechanics into games in order to maintain fun. I guess what I'm trying to say is that a system like that is lazy, and sometimes a lazy system is better than no system at all.

But not no system at all. Because maps.

You are kidding right?
Because any sane person knows there's a difference between letting you set the bar for yourself, and letting RNG and "trade wealth" set that bar for you.

Can we do better? Yes.
Will GGG do it, in this game? Fuck no!
The next one. Maybe.

So the time has come to stop with the crazy day-dreaming ideas, and propose something real.
Something that takes zero time to implement, and doesn't touch their precious fucking RNG and Economy.
That something, is "/players x".
OP as hell, but I didn't see anyone complaining in D2.

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johnKeys wrote:

Because any sane person knows there's a difference between letting you set the bar for yourself, and letting RNG and "trade wealth" set that bar for you.

I don't see what sanity has to do with this, but:

Yes, there's a difference. However, "/players 8" and the map mod system both add in a level of player-influenced difficulty. Yes, the map system is more RNG-based, but you can roll blue maps pretty cheaply and reliably.

Having two in-game mechanics that do (mostly) the same thing is bad design, though. Any addition to the game should be done carefully. (GGG isn't necessarily adhering to this philosophy at the moment, though :) )

That, and difficulty sliders that only affect mob hp/ damage/ exp/ IIQ/ IIR are boring. Improving the already existing map system (in which I will admit to currently rolling blue until getting hordes + anything reasonable) would be a better use of resources.

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syrioforel wrote:

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johnKeys wrote:

Because any sane person knows there's a difference between letting you set the bar for yourself, and letting RNG and "trade wealth" set that bar for you.

I don't see what sanity has to do with this, but:

Yes, there's a difference. However, "/players 8" and the map mod system both add in a level of player-influenced difficulty. Yes, the map system is more RNG-based, but you can roll blue maps pretty cheaply and reliably.

Having two in-game mechanics that do (mostly) the same thing is bad design, though. Any addition to the game should be done carefully. (GGG isn't necessarily adhering to this philosophy at the moment, though :) )

That, and difficulty sliders that only affect mob hp/ damage/ exp/ IIQ/ IIR are boring. Improving the already existing map system (in which I will admit to currently rolling blue until getting hordes + anything reasonable) would be a better use of resources.

"Can roll cheaply and reliably".
For fuck's sake man.
You know, I have no orbs left right now. None. Zero.
I don't know there's a flea market where I can sell for orbs, flipping and scamming as I go.
And almighty RNGsus didn't give me any maps from the run with my last remaining map.
An extreme example, but a very real one.

Compare that to something an input-line away from getting your next challenge.
Gear check yes, but do you have any better ideas GGG would actually consider implementing right now?
I have none.
Got tons of ideas, but none that fit GGG's fucking lazy "don't touch mah economy" filter.

Bad design? Absolutely.
But with the fucking mountain of bad design the game already has, maybe it's time to add one that's actually fun?