risk/reward isn't coming. ever. [I give up]

"

johnKeys wrote:

[EDIT to clarify: this isn't a "quitting game" thread. I'm still playing.]


I've been thinking about this for quite a while.
judging from the nature of posts, I seem to be the only one in this forum right now, who still wants risk/reward, classic ARPG tiered gear with real crafting and recipes for all orbs, and less dependency on trade. preferably none.

I want risk/reward too. I just lost hope, like you.

Sadly this is the way it is with ALL online games, to varying degrees at different times. Look how long Blizzard turned a blind eye to bots and RMT because of the money they were making off of game sales. Trading invites an element to games that plays contrary to the fun of the game itself. It gives players the option of simply trading their way to an end that anyone else that wants to actually play the game has to grind through. And when the RMT kiddies buy their best-in-slot gear and start running streams about how great they are, the drops get nerfed and watered down to slow progression and everyone else suffers.

And trading also ensures that spammers will infest any outlet of communication in the game to shove their crap in your face for sale or valuation. They've taken over the public party system in PoE and they are constantly doing it in global. It's a virus.

it would have been nice for dual creamtorium boss with -max resist to drop something, even a shitty 74 or higher map by something other than chance.

"

not a valid point. you can still casually drop a Shavronne from some barrel in a white map, then casually 1 Jewel 1 Fuse it all the way to 6-link.
all the while someone who's taking on the game's most crazy challenges solo, gets nothing even near that.
and playing a copied OP build, being a trade-tycoon with mirrored gear that knows more about trade than about game mechanics - will get you to at least face Uber Atziri a couple times.
someone who just plays? well good luck with that.

I'm not sure how you put those points together. Shavronne also used to be map locked too and only dropped at higher maps but everyone complained so they put anywhere occult vestments drop. Almost all top tier items were map locked until everyone whined and GGG listened and made it were you didn't need to do 75+ maps to get the good stuff while map were ultra hard, less profitable and even worse back in the day.

But I'm sure that escapes your memory and GGG doesn't listen to people, but I find it funny how they did it so everyone can find it but now it's a complaint.

Also it's is completely unfair that the only standard you use is uber artizi which is "the ultimate challenge in the game" but your complaining that it requires extremely good gear and "good knowledge of the game to make a build that no normal person would be able to do it".

What do you want then? The ultimate challenge that isn't so ultimate? There is normal Atziri is for you.

"

semi-correct. it would be real crafting if their "prices" were in things you attain by doing their missions, or by beating content challenges.
when their "crafting" is priced in economy-currency, which forces you to trade (unless there are vendor recipes for the high orbs, I'm not aware of) - it's not yet crafting. close, but no.

There is no such thing as "economy-currency", your just making up shit to fit your needs. There are orbs that can be "currency" traded and now the niche to use your orbs to have 100% deterministic crafting is in the game. Just because it's not in your flavor does not mean it doesn't exist or is "half right' ~.~

"

the least we can agree about D2, is it actually had gear tiers. you didn't drop Caps in Hell Difficulty.

I'm not sure about you but the min base item for common 62+ farming levels is 48 which is around diablo.

"

MXL had crazy uber zones, crazier uber zones, and impossible uber zones.
you could do the crazy ones with gear from content, and they would drop you stuff you could then use to attempt the crazier ones, and so forth.
enough skill and determination, and you'd have the gear and build which could do a subset of the impossible ones.

That still isn't "risk vs reward" that is more fancy loot which allows you to do more fancy loot which all require extreme amounts of farming. If affixs are boring in PoE and need more of them I agree but that isn't "risk vs reward."

"

don't bullshit me man. TL2 is one of my favourite games, and if you think it's easy - I highly recommend actually trying it in Elite Difficulty. in Hardcore, where you actually fucking lose your character if you die. doing NG+ Uber Zones I never could do. doing Tarroch's Tomb I never had the balls to do in HC.
my only real gripe with it, is Elite didn't have better loot than a lower difficulty.
its amount of Risk/Reward is something Path Of Exile would never have, even if GGG wanted to.
the loot system in there, is a fucking masterpiece.
the monster and boss AI there (in solo at least), is an example how to challenge players without necessarily one-shotting them left and right.

Your talking to a player that plays a hardcore a shit ton and I am telling you TL2 was neither hard nor "risk vs reward." Your still being extremely vague about "masterpiece loot system" because it was extremely shallow late game. Elite isn't "risk vs reward" it's just risk to have a more exciting game like hardcore in PoE.

"

I shamefully admit playing Rogue with my own "loaned" saves.
ask Shagsbeard how he played it. it had no risk/reward, but was fucking awesome.

~.~

"

strawman. and I do offer suggestions. some very detailed ones. mostly dating back to Open Beta when it wasn't yet too late.
I suggest you just go ahead and read these - mine and not - before expecting me to repeat all of it just because you can't be bothered to

It's strawman because I need to dig through 3+ years of content to find them.

Let's think about that.


--------

I think your mistaking "risk vs reward" to "feeling rewarded when you take a risk."

For example MedianXL the class charms, there was 0% no risk unless you played hardcore and you can try an unlimited time to get the powerful charm. The risk was "it was extra hard at the time." and you felt "rewarded" for finishing it because it 100% gave you a chance to use something.

It does not excuse the mod itself since your 100% recommended to roll a "twink" character that can faceroll the game easy with almost no gear and farm your way until you can fund your main much like an MF character in this game.

But inherently you are taking the best aspects of every single game that you like and want them all put together into a different game. Every good part of the game the design aspects make a negative, and PoE directly being influenced by D2 has the exact same weaknesses and problems within the gameplay itself.

Median XL was a different take in D2 which up things to the extreme and TL2 was their own vision of an ARPG, each had their own problems but your suddenly asking developers to take the best of every game and to make this game "it." When really their vision is a modern version of D2 which is what they made.

Looking at all online ARGPs and related games that are out there PoE - to me - has the best item progression system by far:

1: I can go from 0 to almost perfect items as a solo (not self found) player when I choose to put in the required effort. I am not a the mercy of the all mighty RNG. I am not forced to group. I can choose my own pace.

2: Even in standard the economy is sound. I can regularly sell stuff that I do not need and buy stuff that I do need. There is very limited inflation going on (except for items where changes in the game lead to changes in prices of items).

3: To me (!) items only "feel" like real stuff if I can trade them. Otherwhise they "feel" simply like an extension of my character. In PoE my items feel just right.

4: The balance between effort to trade and gain through trading is just right. It makes sure that even sub-optimal gear still can be traded. Essentially many prices for low end items are a "service" fee.

5: I still enjoy every aspect of gaining, trading, crafting items even after playing continously since closed beta.

I would like to challange you: name a game that has a better item progression system. Not some hypothetical stuff. A real game.

"

johnKeys wrote:

not a valid point. you can still casually drop a Shavronne from some barrel in a white map, then casually 1 Jewel 1 Fuse it all the way to 6-link.
all the while someone who's taking on the game's most crazy challenges solo, gets nothing even near that.

are u serious?
life is unfair cuz u can win more money in lotto than u will ever earn with hard work :D

"

Faendris wrote:

I would like to challange you: name a game that has a better item progression system. Not some hypothetical stuff. A real game.

Titan Quest.

Only one prefix, one suffix.
These affixes ranged from "crazy sexy" (like %damage, %attackspeed, %accuracy in one affix and such) to "pretty basic" (just %damage) or "hmmm" ("penetrate armor" and other more or less useless stuff).

You had to farm for some serious time to get a fitting weapon with "sexy prefix and sexy suffix", but you actually didn't need to.
Getting a weapon with "sexy prefix, mediocre suffix" didn't take too long and already got you to 75/100 possible damage.
If you really wanted to farm like a madman, you farmed for "monster infrequents", items that could have affixes, but also had fixed unique stats on top of them. With the right affixes, those items were god-tier, but about as rare as Shavs or a 500+ DpS Dagger in PoE.
With mediocre affixes, those still were great items, and they were "farmable". You knew which monsters could drop them, and they dropped them frequently.

Basic items themselves were slowly going up in damage/protection.
A white sword went from 10 to 150 DpS, with affixes adding about +75-100% (which was not local %damage, but got added to all the rest of your percentages).

In PoE, the problem is "local" damage and how it is composed by RNG:
The base damage also scales, but it doesn't scale enough.
If and only if I roll several spefific affix classes in high tiers, a weapon is interesting. If only one stat is missing (or blocked by a shitty affix so you can't mastercraft it), it's trash.

There's so many items in PoE that are "pretty close", but that doesn't help, they are still vendor material.

Im not sure what your complaining about, Masters put a huge dent in trading, and making it so much easier for the non elite, its rather depressing just how easy they made it, LOL.

"

Peterlerock wrote:

I actually like gear-checks and overgearing.
If I wanted a game to be challenging, I'd play a challenging game (ideally against humans).
In games like PoE, I can equip some crazy gear... and murder harmless and innocent poor little monsters. With one hand. And then I loot their corpses. That's quite entertaining and all this genre is about (to me): "Get geared up to a point where everything is trivial and there are no more challenges."

This is what ails PoE in a nutshell. It's not so much that players who just want to faceroll and trivialize the game are rampant, it's that GGG panders to them to the point where you pretty much have to play with contrarian discipline to avoid being sucked down that Path of Exalts. Even if you don't flip or rmt your way up to BiS beatitude, you still must face the fact that the gated pay2play endgame is balanced on the multiplicative scaling of pay2win gear-checks.

"

Poutsos wrote:

1) There is ZERO skill based combat in the game. ZERO. The only "skill" people are talking about, is moving out of the way on telegraphed attacks. Sure this is is nice but it does not require SKILL. And desync, for some people eliminates the chance to even do that consistently. This is not Dark Souls. The fights, NOT ONLY IN POE, but ALL D2 style Dungeon Crawlers were gear checks, which brings us to:

2) When you have a certain level of gear, there is ZERO RISK involved. You can faceroll 99% of the content within minutes. My lv96 flicker striker, could solo everything with zero risk of dying, except some unfortunate situations with extreme desync happening. The only dangerous encounters, were 1) Aluuring Abyss and 2) 3-4 bosses with ridiculous mod combination.

In terms of cause and effect, I think you listed those two points in backward order. It is because you have acquired "a certain level of gear" (which trivializes all threats), that there is consequently zero skill left in the game. The fatal flaw is not that such gear exists, but that it is readily available for purchase. A truly hardcore game would require not only skill, but dedication to reach such heights, and would award its most coveted trophies only to those who have personally tread the path.

Many scenarios in PoE actually do demand skillful playing, but only when you face them outnumbered, and without using outlandish gear or over-leveled characters. What that requires are diversified builds that balance offense and defense with the ability to kite as well as handle both overwhelming hordes and overpowered bosses. But that runs against the grain of PoE's skill gem design, which offers multiplicative rewards to over-specialized builds that spam one or two maxed out mega-dps attacks. This leads directly to max clearspeed syndrome, which trivializes not only the content but the experience of actually playing the game as well.

"

RogueMage wrote:

"

Peterlerock wrote:

I actually like gear-checks and overgearing.
If I wanted a game to be challenging, I'd play a challenging game (ideally against humans).
In games like PoE, I can equip some crazy gear... and murder harmless and innocent poor little monsters. With one hand. And then I loot their corpses. That's quite entertaining and all this genre is about (to me): "Get geared up to a point where everything is trivial and there are no more challenges."

This is what ails PoE in a nutshell. It's not so much that players who just want to faceroll and trivialize the game are rampant, it's that GGG panders to them to the point where you pretty much have to play with contrarian discipline to avoid being sucked down that Path of Exalts. Even if you don't flip or rmt your way up to BiS beatitude, you still must face the fact that the gated pay2play endgame is balanced on the multiplicative scaling of pay2win gear-checks.

Ummm... what?

How is your post related to mine?

Even with my very mediocre gear that surely didn't force me to play a "Path of Exalts" game or even "farm disciplined", I still faceroll the content.

There's no "pay2win" here, you don't need fancy stuff to laugh at 90% of what the game throws at you.
The only thing you can "pay2win" for is "laugh at the remaining 10% without any adaptation in gameplay/gear/whatever".

Get a 5L.
Get your resists capped.
Get a 300/500 DpS 1h/2h or equivalent casting stuff.
Get 4000+ life.
...Game is beaten.

And that stuff is so common and costs so little you can pay it with the stuff that lies upon the way, or even do it without any trade.