You break the game, or the game breaks you

I had a talk with a friend. He just finished his 30th or so full playthrough of Baldur's Gate 2 and said, "people whine how bards are useless but that's nonsense; I made this and this build and broke the game; I was overpowered". I replied that, in my experience, you can find a way to break the game with any class or combination. We started discussing various "overpowered" builds and quickly arrived at the same conclusion: you can pick any class and, if you know what you're doing, you can destroy everything.

All classes in BG are broken. Therefore, none are. It creates a rewarding gameplay experience where good decisions have a guaranteed payoff and many replay the exact same content over and over again just to find new ways to break the game. It is enjoyable. It is interesting. It is rewarding. The same can be said, in a general way, about Diablo 2.

Fast forward to PoE in its current state: it feels like PoE is the devs' child and they are outraged and offended when someone finds a build which breaks the game, so they immediately nerf it. Anything which makes your character feel truly powerful eats the nerf hammer. And it's not only skills or items, it's a general feeling about the game. Everything is done to prevent the player from becoming powerful: drops are atrocious; good skills, items and interactions are nerfed; arbitrary and impossible to prepare for killing mechanics are introduced with each big update; high level content is gated behind a mind-numbing grind to prevent quick leveling.

The result is a deeply unrewarding experience which quickly turns the game into a mindless grind where people replay the same level-inappropriate content and get the same laughably bad drops. You want good items? Grind your brain off and buy them with currency. You want high level? Grind your brain off. And, even at the highest gear and experience level, GGG is consistently trying to stop people from breaking the game, case in point - the destruction of endgame lowlife builds, ES in general, shotgunning, leech, the repeated gutting of block and eva/acro, the list goes on.

Seems to me, GGG are scared of people breaking the game because they think "oh, they will get bored and quit". So they try to prevent or slow it down by any means possible.

This couldn't be further from the truth. People play an ARPG with one goal in mind: to break the game. Their definitions differ - for some, successfully completing the storyline in merciless may constitute breaking. For most, it means having a high level character who can do the highest level content in the game with relative ease.

If there are lots of different and interesting ways to break the game, players don't quit when they reach their goal - they think "hey, that was fun - I created a well-made hero and was rewarded by the feeling of success and completion. Let's try that again with another build!". Thousands of hours later, when you've tried and done everything which interests you, you can sit back comfortably and think "well, that was fun!". And the best part in that theoretical scenario? New content! You get to seek new ways to break the game? Yay!

However, if the game feels incredibly hostile, and not like a good enemy, but as a cruel and unjust entity, it quickly turns people off. You can't break the game? Perhaps you aren't good enough. You try to improve and overcome the difficulty. But when you have the knowledge and the experience, you know you are doing everything right and you are unable to break the game because of arbitrary barriers (class/skill/item pigeonholing, gated content, bad drop rates), this is an instant turn-off. Interest dies, playing becomes grinding, players quit.

Something must be broken - and if it's not the game, it will be the player. If we explore the whole spectrum of player vs. game power balance, it goes like this:

- extremely punishing: it is impossible to break the game. You can never build a character who feels overpowered (example: Diablo 3 in the first 2 weeks after release). This is a terrible option. Players quickly realise the game can't be broken and they quit.
- punishing: it is theoretically possible to break the game but it takes an enormous grind and even then your character might be nerfed from godlike status to "meh". This is where I feel PoE is currently. Not rosy at all.
- difficult but rewarding: the game punishes mistakes and rewards good decisions. There are various way to achieve godhood. This is, IMO, the best option. Players love these games and play them for years on end - examples, Baldur's Gate 2 and Diablo 2.
- too easy: it's so easy to break the game that it becomes trivial and insignificant. Players quickly lose interest. Examples: Torchlight 2, Diablo 3 one month after release.

To sum up my wall of text, I have an appeal to GGG: please stop trying to "balance" the game and stop players from breaking it. I believe this design policy is deeply flawed and your game suffers from it. Let us break it - in as many different and interesting ways as possible. Let us enjoy ourselves and feel rewarded and you will be rewarded in turn with a loyal and growing fanbase.

With deep affection for a flawed but beautiful game,
yours truly.

I think you have the right approach but wrong outcome.


You see balancing as the source for problems, I think the problem with poe is that it is still not balanced well enough.


E.g. melee vs ranged:

If a ranged charackter can break the game, why should melee not be able to? Why should a ranger with tornado shot break the game and a 2hand-melee with cleave not? What is bad about bringing both extremes closer together, what is called balancing?




But you are right in this sense that poe doesn't need to be perfectly balanced and that actually every build should be able to break the game at some point.

What is required for this, though, is balancing again.

@CaptainWARLORD: thanks, sir.

@LSN: I think you missed my main point. My main point is not specific game balance (i.e. ranged vs. melee), it's the entire PoE design and balance philosophy and what I perceive as a serious flaw in it.

What I was saying in my post was precisely what you want: let everyone break the game. Ranged, melee, this build and that build - let them. It won't be the end of the world.

I like the fact that I have not been able to break the game. I would probably get bored if I would. And yes, I think there should be no way to make the game so easy that you can faceroll everything.

But that is just my opinion.

"

Bars wrote:

@CaptainWARLORD: thanks, sir.

@LSN: I think you missed my main point. My main point is not specific game balance (i.e. ranged vs. melee), it's the entire PoE design and balance philosophy and what I perceive as a serious flaw in it.

What I was saying in my post was precisely what you want: let everyone break the game. Ranged, melee, this build and that build - let them. It won't be the end of the world.

Alright, my bad. I thought you wanted the devs to leave the game at a randomly induced state of balance and let players evolve around it forever instead of change.

"

Char1983 wrote:

I like the fact that I have not been able to break the game. I would probably get bored if I would. And yes, I think there should be no way to make the game so easy that you can faceroll everything.

But that is just my opinion.

There are ways to prevent "facerolling" which are good. Example - mechanical fights and other parts of the game which require knowledge, preparation and thought to beat. Like the Labyrinth boss who is manageable if you focus him with a single target skill and don't give him any bodies to devour and one-hit you with the EK attack.

There are other ways which are bad. Like Jungle Valley which is a stat check. Got enough DPS to kill everything in a few seconds? You're good to go. Got very high physical mitigation and chaos res? Good again. Anything else and you're fucked. These are the "numbers check" parts of the game which are tricky to balance.

If the numbers are too low, that's bad for the game. If too high - again. You need to find the sweet spot where players feel challenged yet able to overcome them with various builds. This is where I think PoE is currently in a bad place: the physical damage numbers are so high that they discourage most builds and skills and make certain things mandatory.

Thanks for this read.
It sums up nicely what I had in mind when I posted about the feeling that as many defenses as possibly feel mandatory to reach anything in this game and that this limits my fun with PoE considerably.
I felt the game was in a good spot before the big expansion challange wise at least. It was possible for me to reach my goals but it wasnt too easy either.
Now I feel that too many defenses are required to have a character survive post 70 and at the same time sustain has become a total chore.

Maybe thats my semi casual point of view on this game but as it stands, I just cannot bring myself to play atm. Either dying too much because I havent invested in every defense option available, picking shadow therefor having no defenses to pick from :) or by being slowed while elveling because sustain was brought down to a flask or bust style...

I know many people break the game or at elast it seems this way but I doubt that most of the player base is the top 2% streamers and no-lifers (No offense, who can live this way, by all means he should be able to do so ;)) I'd like to be the game more accessible and less unrewarding.

But I defenitly dont want D3 or TL2 style of easiness ^^

i like that they are tring to make the game harder, problem here is that instead of making content harder but still viable for all builds they just keep pushing everyone into the few builds that work or dont need ridiculous items to pass act 3 merciless.

all in all they ned to first balance the skills and drops and then balance content.

my 2 cents for a quick fix would be to reduce both monsters and players attacks/skills damage by 20-25%.

I feel whenever new mechanics are introduced like fortify, we are expected to use those options, at elast the content seems to demand this. But shouldnt it be options instead of a mandatory investement?
A lot talk is about "investing" in stuff, but at the moment I dont feel like I'm investing in defense and offense but rather stretching to make use of every thing I can grab...
And when people are forced to use certain stuff to survive or sustain it is no longer an option.
Feels alot harder to streamline builds in this patch. At least for builds that are not "simple".

One comment though: It is rediculously hard to balance a game that is as complex as PoE, and it becomes even almost impossible to balance it for all classes / skills / builds with the extreme number scaling present in PoE.

The damage a player deals scales from about 10 DPS at the beginning to 20.000 DPS at level 80, with ranges from 2000 DPS to 200.000 DPS. If it scaled fro 10 DPS to 500 DPS instead (with lower monster life) and ranged from 250 DPS to 1000 DPS, it would be much easier to build a game that is challenging for top-tier players yet beatable for casuals. Whether it would be more fun on average, I cannot really say. People love bazillions of DPS.