PoE needs a difficulty factor setting

"

johnKeys wrote:

"Can roll cheaply and reliably".
For fuck's sake man.
You know, I have no orbs left right now. None. Zero.

You went broke rolling blue maps? I can definitely see burning currency on yellow maps faster than you'd get it back.

"

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?

Not really?

"

Got tons of ideas, but none that fit GGG's fucking lazy "don't touch mah economy" filter.

Adding "/players 8" or an analog of that would make a big change to the game. Why would it not affect the economy? That's a strong claim -- most changes affect the economy in one way or another.

The whole game economy kind of makes me cringe at this point anyway, though. The officially supported methods for trading are heavily dated, and it's off-putting that if the indexing sites could just decide to shut down tomorrow (or, worse, start charging subscription fees or some nonsense).

When you talk about maps you are ignoring the reality that for the majority of players the map system is completely beside the point. Something like this could potentially help new players get comfortable with the game's difficulty possibly increasing new player retention and could increase solo rewards if implemented correctly.

For me personally I'd be more interested in something like this to improve QoL for new players so it might be easier for them to have fun and therefore get hooked.

 I've always placed trading at the bottom of my arpg feature wish list and I'd much rather find better gear while playing the arpg monster killing game and be excited to get a great drop than have to fill out a search form at POE.XYZ or any other such trade search site. I play an arpg to quest and kill the hordes and bosses and do not want to have to play the commodity trading game (boring). Blizzard learned that the hard way and it's too bad that GGG can't understand that too. I'm not advocating as drastic a measure as Blizzard did and eliminate trading completely but making it so the emphasis was on getting great gear from playing PoE over trading for the gear is tops on my wish list for any arpg.

 Improving the new player experience is crucial to sustaining a healthy GGG and anything done to ease the new players initial forays into Wraeclast should be placed higher on their "to do" list. Failure to attract new players will be their downfall. Us veteran players don't want PoE watered down in its content difficulty (and neither does GGG) but if my 2 casual arpg player friends are any indication of initial players response to playing PoE for the first couple of months then GGG has more of a problem than they realize. Failure to ease new players through the initial newbie phase of PoE should be setting off alarms and GGG should be a lot more concerned about new player retention than they currently do. A game mechanism such as a difficulty factor setting (slider) from 0 to 100 is one way that GGG can be more accommodating to new players and ease their learning curve while not watering down the content difficulty and pissing off the veteran hardcore players.

If they ever were to introduce this, the baseline for easiest should be the current state of the game.

"

SL4Y3R wrote:

If they ever were to introduce this, the baseline for easiest should be the current state of the game.

 If GGG were to add a difficulty factor into PoE then the baseline difficulty should be slightly less than what PoE currently is in Standard League (somewhere around 10%) to allow everyone to set the factor to say 20 to get the same level of difficulty as the current hard wired PoE. That way the newbies can, if they want to, start out with an easier way to learn the PoE ropes. We must remember several things here. First, we can't go by our current level of PoE skills (unless you are a first time player reading this) to gauge where to set the baseline difficulty bar. We were all newbies at some point in the past and our PoE learning speed were all different. Second, we need to be able to start with the factor at say 20 to get the same level of difficulty as the current hard wired PoE so that we immediately get 20% IIQ and IIR. Then if we choose to go higher then the level of difficulty ramps up so that at 100 we are facing 100% tougher monsters than current patch 1.1.4 PoE and getting 100% IIQ and IIR. The whole point of an adjustable difficulty factor is to open up PoE to a larger arpg audience and let us dial in our "just right" level for our playing skills and comfort level.

 Of course, I can talk up this until I'm blue in the face and I seriously doubt that GGG would ever do anything as logical and good for business as adding an adjustable difficulty factor to PoE. GGG is way shorthanded when it comes to programming new immediately useful features that will benefit everyone. GGG seems very content to plod along their current path of limited accessibility. It's almost as if they deliberately want to be unaccommodating and make PoE unfriendly. I think GGG has hard to use confused with hardcore. I game that is hard to use because of its inflexibility does not make for a better hardcore game. While it makes for a harder to play game if doesn't add anything to the "fun to play" factor and actually turns off many who would be playing today if PoE was more accessible and accommodating to their individual play style. This is evident with the just released 1.1.4 patch with only new incremental features (new skill gems), another vendor recipe (we can never have too many), cosmetic fluff, some performance tweaks (we always need tighter, faster code), plus one real change with a buff to duel strike, and of course the usual list of bug fixes.

"

Arrowneous wrote:

"

SL4Y3R wrote:

If they ever were to introduce this, the baseline for easiest should be the current state of the game.

 If GGG were to add a difficulty factor into PoE then the baseline difficulty should be slightly less than what PoE currently is in Standard League (somewhere around 10%) to allow everyone to set the factor to say 20 to get the same level of difficulty as the current hard wired PoE. That way the newbies can, if they want to, start out with an easier way to learn the PoE ropes.

Except you're going to have massive numbers of very non-noob players exploiting the hell out of the easier difficulty in order to get better farming efficiency.

Slurms, you should know better than to encourage these folks. The ideal difficulty setting for the game is one which is not alterable.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

"

Arrowneous wrote:

"

SL4Y3R wrote:

If they ever were to introduce this, the baseline for easiest should be the current state of the game.

 If GGG were to add a difficulty factor into PoE then the baseline difficulty should be slightly less than what PoE currently is in Standard League (somewhere around 10%) to allow everyone to set the factor to say 20 to get the same level of difficulty as the current hard wired PoE. That way the newbies can, if they want to, start out with an easier way to learn the PoE ropes.

Except you're going to have massive numbers of very non-noob players exploiting the hell out of the easier difficulty in order to get better farming efficiency.

Slurms, you should know better than to encourage these folks. The ideal difficulty setting for the game is one which is not alterable.

This could easily be countered with a MF penalty to the easier settings.

"

GeorgAnatoly wrote:

This could easily be countered with a MF penalty to the easier settings.

But then someone just breaks out the spreadsheets and figures out exactly at which breakpoints which difficulty levels give which players the most MF. It's actually just pure, raw math.

For example, check out my work from back in the day with 1.05 Monster Power in Diablo 3. The TL;DR is that if I watch what percentage of the time you move compared to the percentage of time you DPS, I can scientifically tell you which of those (old) Monster Power levels you'll farm best in.

"

GeorgAnatoly wrote:

This could easily be countered with a MF penalty to the easier settings.

I'd rather traverse in Rhoa Hell than take a MF penalty for an easier way out.
Just imagine the wonderful loot after killing a rare or boss.

Such a penalty might do more harm than good to the first impression around the game.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

"

Arrowneous wrote:

"

SL4Y3R wrote:

If they ever were to introduce this, the baseline for easiest should be the current state of the game.

 If GGG were to add a difficulty factor into PoE then the baseline difficulty should be slightly less than what PoE currently is in Standard League (somewhere around 10%) to allow everyone to set the factor to say 20 to get the same level of difficulty as the current hard wired PoE. That way the newbies can, if they want to, start out with an easier way to learn the PoE ropes.

Except you're going to have massive numbers of very non-noob players exploiting the hell out of the easier difficulty in order to get better farming efficiency.

Slurms, you should know better than to encourage these folks. The ideal difficulty setting for the game is one which is not alterable.

I'm actually trying to dis-encourage the idea of making the game easier.