Simply put: There are a dozen ways to complement the endgame mapsystem with tools that
a) motivate players
b) take risk/reward into regard
c) give a feeling of progress
other than the pure rng map only system that we have now. I have offered one good method to achieve this.
The map system doesn't work in poe as a very lot of players get lost in the process of stupid pure rng map farming and stop to play.
I don't care to what extend it works or can theoretically work.
The only important thing you must ask is: are there better ways to keep players (clients) sticking to the game and to motivate them to invest more of their time, nerves and money on it?
The obvious answer is: yes
Hence the map system doesn't do its job (it doesn't work), it is not best practise, it is neither serving the players (constant dissatisfaction = player loss) nor the developers(constant adustments = extra work and hazzle). It is in the end a stupid grind that is 100% based on RNG.
The column c) system that I propose does combine alot of elemental things for poe:
a) motivation for charackter development up to the higher levels (only if you prepared your charackter in order to survive 4 randomly rolled maps and then 2 additional map that might be over your char's potential even you get the advantage)
b) an expected gain for invested time and risk (instead of pure RNG, but on average with similar result as the pure RNG but more evenly spread)
c) a healthy combination of lower and higher maps available for players who work for it
d) good amount of alteration compared to usual rotations of one and the same kind of maps
e) no high end map only spamming needed and therefore lowering the demand of players for high end maps only to drop (= less complaint)
The question if a system works or works not can't be answered by theories and bullshit comparisons with poker.
Does poe lose the majority of players when it comes to endgame maps? Yes
Are there better ways to design endgame (and easy ones even)? Hell yes
Hence the mapping system doesn't work.
Just open a random thread about endgame and the map system and you will see why I am 100% right (just a few of them):
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I feel the same way. Before The Awakening I would tell everyone this is the best game of it's kind. And I was hyping up the new expansion before it came out thinking it would be even better with a fourth act and divination cards.
I was dead wrong. Killing map progression was the culprit in my case. I don't mind awesome loot being as rare as it is now, if I can level up my maps to have that one chance at excitement when I see a unique drop on the 79-80 map lvl areas. But now, they took that away, and the endgame is complete garbage to me now.
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Ye pretty much the same with me. I was ooooh new act, new cards, new items, new etc hype hype. I cannot describe how dissapointed i am right now only because of maps/endgame....
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Tell me then why on each bloody announcement I see dozens of "wow", "sweet", "great" hypes? Why the heck? I also think that maps drop is FUCKING joke atm. Really, it sucks so hard that I cannot believe. I have never had ANY problems in maintaining my maps pool till 78 in 1.3, never ever. It worked just perfectly. I'm wondering wether they even read all these complainings...
The content they released was amazing. I see nothing wrong with maps being difficult as you played already through 3 times the content once on 'hard mode'. I don't see anything wrong with 82+ maps being difficult, the expansion was a much needed thing for this game and bought about great changes.
I have two 77s and 1 86 in warbands atm.
My map pool consists of 72s and lower. I've run 50+72 maps
GGG's mapping system can lick my ****
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This patch pretty much pigeon holes me into playing self founded. Self found is reason I left d3. I like to trade, like to min max, like to see if I can do hardest stuff. Now there is no point to that.
I get GG and "I'm all dressed up with no place to go" running face roll mid maps forever.
Because PoEs core is better - I will stick it out to see if maps are corrected this season otherwise time to dust off the old expansion pack and go where drops are good and endless rifts over at Blizz.
D3 actually has a good end game with progression with a endless difficulty you'll hit and can keep trying to overcome. And if ima play self founded anyway might as well go where drops rain.
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thing is, yeah maybe they did it for a longer motivation, so people need much more time to build their characters out, but this method backfires, people will quit faster than ever because of this HUGE unrewarding feeling u get when playing the game (no maps -> no character progression, no item progression, no fun )
i have actually 1 stash tab full with 69/70
around
25 - 71
28 - 72
35 - 73
2 - 74
1 - 75
8 - 76
2 - 77
1 - 78
to maintain the pool above 75 i need to pump in currency like crazy and im f***** poor, drops only shit for me .... so -> no currency , no maps and im a****** tired of spamming maps 72 / 73, give them 1 more week, then im gone (not that they care)
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That's it.
I'm tired of a4 mobs in every map (low or high) one-shotting every character I throw at it while every other mob can basically be facerolled. This is imbalanced and unenjoyable.
I'm tired of characters hitting a brick wall on leveling and enjoyability sometime around level 80-90. It's boring as fuck.
I'm tired of every decent-level 100%+ IIQ map I run dropping complete shit for maps. I get excited when I see the border from my filter indicating a map drop from a boss, only to find it's 5 levels lower most of the time. And most of the time it doesn't even drop a map. This is imbalanced and unenjoyable. And
incredibly boring. If I want incredibly boring I will just play some Korean grind-MMO.
There's a very simple tell of how stupidly rare even mid-end maps are now. Back in torment, when I started playing, you could easily find free map groups running maps up to level 75 at virtually any time of day for almost the entire duration of the league. Now I'm lucky to see any map-running groups up in the social tab in Warbands, and most of the time that happens it's a 68 map group. I'm not an elite player, but I'd like to think I'm mid-tier or so. I'm not a social butterfly and I don't have a guild full of dudes I can always run a party with. I need to actually find them freely available. They basically don't exist any more. I'm forced into solo play far more than my own personality ever did, and you've made solo play progressively more frustrating and unenjoyable.
Despite my efforts to convince myself I just needed to find one more thing to do a little differently to get over the hill and back to this game being fun, I have not succeeded and I see no possibility of success in the near future. Your game design philosophy seems to be to force players to RMT or endlessly grind in severely under-leveled zones until three months later they can finally maybe run through content that would have been appropriate for them four months ago.
Maybe I should've known better. At first the game had everything I once liked about Diablo 2, but without the stupidly and needlessly frustrating endgame content, ubiquitous one-shots, and monsters seemingly designed to just annoy you to no end. Now it's just Diablo 2 all over again. I don't know what gaming demographic GGG was targeting with 2.0, but if it included me they failed miserably. 1.3 seemed to target me pretty well (well enough to put quite a lot of gameplay hours into it), but 2.0 is just completely off base. I guess my type of gamer just isn't what you want.
I don't want to play a game that thinks it's cool to make you do the same shit over and over for weeks or even months just to get the levels, and a small chance to get the gear, that makes basic content plausibly survivable. So I'm not.
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and thousands of others think the same way and leave the game if they haven't already left the game for exactly these reasons months/years ago.
The solution is not to spam them all with high end maps. The solution is what I wrote or similar concepts.
PoE is demotivating, 100% RNG based, unrewarding.
My concepts do help to fix some of these things at least to a certain extend for many players. And the best about them are that they are really well thought through and, if implemented carefully, do not have any impact on the map economy and grindspeed to 100.
Does anyone even realize that my journey concept exactly targets all these players complaints about mononony, unrewardingness and RNG dependence without allowing maps to drop everywhere?
