You break the game, or the game breaks you

Perhaps the path to a super-powered character is the most popular format of RPG. However, I contest the argument that POE must follow the most popular format. The argument that a game has to follow a more popular format leads to everything following a single formula. Any niche is less popular than the mainstream, and since a game should follow what's popular it must be made in the mainstream fashion... it's like arguing that niches shouldn't exist. The world is a big place, but it can't all fit in the mainstream. At some point, something grows to dominate the mainstream (in this case, it's Diablo), and there are more opportunities in the niches than there are to continue fighting for the mainstream market.

By way of analogy, suppose I told you that every hero story needed to follow the most popular format, which is a good guy beats a villain. Stories about tragic-heroes or anti-heroes don't have the outcome that most people like, so they would have been better if they followed the standard format. How would you feel if all authors writing in a niche realized their works weren't mainstream enough and chose to do something more typical instead? A more video game related example would be Dark Souls, whose main selling point is that it's a difficult game. Not everything does- or can- fit in the mainstream. Maybe POE is one of those things.

GGG has demonstrated they are successful in the niche they have chosen- having to rely on distribution partners in areas where they can't grow fast enough. They aren't lacking for insufficient fans. The call that it isn't mainstream enough, or it doesn't follow the standard tropes of super-powered character closely enough, would be pertinent if GGG was failing in their niche. However, they are succeeding in their niche. Diablo 3 already covers the mainstream RPG of super-powered heroes. Unless GGG can follow that formula better than Blizzard, where's the profit in leaving the niche they have created for themselves, and which they dominate? It would be like Game of Thrones/Sword of Fire and Ice trying to be a better hero story than Harry Potter. The strength of POE is not in how well it executes on things that are important to the mainstream audience (great production values, smooth gameplay, accessibility, and the like). Their strengths are in all the things that keep the player's power contained, and finding something interesting for the player to do that is different from getting overpowered.

Yes, POE is the one where either you break the game or the game breaks you. That's the niche that has made it successful.

"

PolarisOrbit wrote:

The strength of POE is not in how well it executes on things that are important to the mainstream audience (great production values, smooth gameplay, accessibility, and the like).

At the risk of sounding like a douche, seriously.. the things on your list are not for "mainstream" audiences, those things should be for everyone.

Who would want to play a game that looks and feels like a potato, and proudly says "hey guys we're unique in such a way that the quality of our game is sooo bad, herpderp"?

"

PolarisOrbit wrote:

Yes, POE is the one where either you break the game or the game breaks you. That's the niche that has made it successful.

Anything can be a niche, but not all niches are good. If you are supporting PoE with the direction it is going (or the so called niche), then PoE's hipster approach will soon definitely kill itself.

"

Bars wrote:

@Tiandal: how exactly is making your game less interesting is going to help stash tab sales? I don't follow.

As you mention in your post: creating an illusive competition enviroment, periodically adding new stuff (without fixing broken or unused things) and with various other methods to bind players and lure more ...
GGG gives 0 ... for fun or better gameplay imo but care about circulation of players and keeping up the companies revenue via keeping da ECONOMAHH healty,

in a proposal; why poe is almost awesome at start and soars when we go higher in difficulty (game losses smooth proggression via gated content, build diversity fades to air etc...) and losses smooth progression curve requires explanation for sure but i dont expect any answers from GGG after that time i have spent with the game, they prefer to not care much about forums opinions.

Some of us like me came here for the probability of a D2 successor, i still have a slim hope ... :D

To be honest, the recent changes since 2.0 just made the game worse, not better. At the risk of sounding like a casual,personally I am just getting more frustrated daily from the amount of farming done versus the rewards gained from it. On top of that, the insane damage from monsters and the amount of defenses required to even be decent is absolutely stupid. I used to play a messed up shockwave bm scion which worked decently but very squishy, switched to a templar with 60+ block rate, maxed defenses and over 15k armor that was getting destroyed (that was a tank) and went to a spectre summoner . Now my minions rarely die, yet somehow since i started doing warband chaos bosses(redblade ones) I understood how bs the system really is. circles covering half of your screen and doing insane damage on maxed res. anything below 5k hp/es combined and you will last 2 hits, if you got hit by burn it was insta GG even with flasks. Those bosses literally 1 shot my minions with a spell. I have to cheese my way to barely beat the boss and wasting all the portals

Meanwhile one of my guildies plays standard, srs with 13k hp and 1800+ hp regen (uses kaom's heart legacy and other crazy stuff). He has np with new difficulty because he's all geared up in item worth hundreds of ex if not thousands. I feel like GGG has the illusion that every player is using this type of gear and that we all breeze through content as if it was nothing while finding tons of shavronnes and mirrors on the ground. It got to the point where playing POE is actually frustrating rather than a pleasing experience. look at 2.0. Ci nerfed, evasion nerfed,tanks nerfed, shotgun nerfed, maps nerfed. Everything is getting nerfed while monsters are getting buffed and more immunity maps are appearing. What is next?elemental immunity?physical damage immunity?Call me casual if you want, but all those nerfs on players and buffs on players just make it worse. Not everyone is a tryhard willing to take hits over and over. Many people will get tired and frustrated from their builds getting broken over and over. That is just my two cents, take it as you like

I use fortify... it seems to not do anything far as i can tell

Just read the wiki on it and it lowers damage by ALOT... or should yet i feel it doesn't work and my gems lvl is like 18 or something (that's -42% dmg and there is 0 way this is working)

"

pneuma wrote:

The game is a competitive one, and builds can be judged objectively. It may be a mistake or a confusion, but it's what GGG desires and it's the road they're going to continue to go down.

---

I, for one, don't want to play the game like a single player romp where I end up becoming a deity in the final act. There are great single players games to scratch that itch. I enjoy the struggle and having to find the shallow route to victory while at the same time trying to flex whatever creativity I can within that framework.

Grinding my face off and/or farming ignorable mobs until my eyeballs pop out isn't desirable gameplay to me. That's a solved problem and a bot can do it. I want the unsolved problems of trying to select elements from a bag that total a certain weight, or trying to design a build that is best at some aspect of the game instead of a generalist.

---

Anyway, great thread and well-written OP. I disagree with you, but I love it when we can all sit down and talk civilly about the game. :)

The game could be played as a competitive one but its core is PvE - that's how it was built from the ground up. PvP was added just recently in view of the game's entire lifetime. There has always been competitive content, but it's just been the periphery.

This is a game where players run around killing non-player characters and time investment, RNG and gears/builds are the single most important factor. It is like the definition of "not competitive".

A competitive game is one where everyone starts at a more or less equal footing and the randomness is nonexistent or at least minimized. I'm not bashing Etup, Havoc, Thorz and others' achievements, they have amazing qualities, it's just that what they are doing is the only way to be really competitive in PoE and almost no one has the time, inclination or capability to do it. They are referred to as the 1 or 2 percent, but in reality it's more like 0,1 or even 0,01 percent. From GGG's perspective, they are (or at least should be) excellent marketing tools, not representatives of the wider player base. They are a demonstration of what the huge majority of players is not.

Also, no one wants a boring grind - that's not what my post is about. On the contrary, I specifically mentioned this a few times as a bad symptom of the game's current state. It's all in the player/game power balance: if it's skewed too far in either direction, the game is boring. And I think currently the game is a bit too powerful and the player is a bit weak.

All I'm suggesting is a slight nudge of the power balance in the players' direction.

I'm also saying GGG shouldn't be so scared of players breaking the game, they should view this as a positive thing and encourage and promote build diversity, not try to kill anything perceived as "too strong" and letting everyone wallow in mediocrity and only a few decent builds being available at any given moment.

Again: if the players are not breaking the game, the game is breaking the players.

"

pneuma wrote:

The game is a competitive one, and builds can be judged objectively. It may be a mistake or a confusion, but it's what GGG desires and it's the road they're going to continue to go down.

No, it is not... I bet by far most players have never even looked at the leader board, and that less than 5% play PvP regularly.
Even most players who play the races only play against the game to gain the alt art pieces. They don't actually 'race'.

I'd totally love the core game beeing more seperated from racing/compettetiveness at least from a ballancing design point of view.
Have races with pre defined builds and deterministic (read: same loot for every participant) and let the core game be just that little broken in enough aspects that people can get their touch of "godliness" in many different ways while still posing threats at all levels of play, but cutting down on one shot deaths.

regards

Both Grepman and Pneuma are "on point" though, irrelevant of your own perception of the mater or the thought that it isn't all that important because you don't care for that fragment of the design/core game experience.

PoE is a multiplayer competitive ARPG and it is in fact designed around that thought. Since it facilitates a long life-duration of the core experience.

Apart from the notions both grepman and Pneuma presented in this thread, which are both correct as basic principles. There is another notion that is blatantly forgotten in the OP.

Not on purpose i assume, i fully agree with what is presented in the OP, but it is only half of a full story.

This notion that is forgotten, is the fact the game is not a "finished product", while the examples used to reflect against are in fact "completed endeavors"

This is important to note, since the OP is targeting "endurance balance" as one of his main points.

Or put alternatively, balance over a prolonged extension of time which results in player experienced stability.

It is a fallacy to expect such a result from a game that prides itself as being "under construction" for a very long time to come.

In essence it is impossible to balance the game in such a way as presented in the OP, since it is nowhere near completion. As such, not all relevant factors can be accounted for when pushing for a "final balance" state.

Patch 2.0 "The awakening" should have made this perfectly clear and understandable to the player-base as a whole.
The sheer number of balance and mechanical alterations/changes should hint at the fact this game is very much still under construction both balance and content wise and will most likely remain in such a state for a long time to come.

Is this pleasant for the player-base? I have no clue, i assume there are two sides to this, people that enjoy this fact and thrive on it and people that do not and feel insulted by the changes frequently put forth by GGG.

Is there a lack of long therm stability? Absolutely, the notion that the league's are the "core experience" of PoE sort of hint at this fact. The "long therm stability" in this scenario points at a three to four month duration of stability and nothing more/less.

Where perma league's are simply there because they are desired by a big portion of the community, but have inherent flaws baked into it's existence. The absence of long therm stability in an "endless" character progression perma league, being one of those flaws.

Good read though Bars and an issue i brought up a year if not longer ago, the illusion of long therm progression in an ever evolving game state.

Peace,

-Boem-

I don't "expect" anything. Unfinished as the game might be, I'm talking about the situation there and now and how I think it can be improved. I don't care about a hypothetical future moment where the game may or may not be complete.

About the "competitive" part - I won't waste my breath arguing about something which should be obvious to anyone with experience in true competitive pvp games. Not to mention it's besides the point. This thread is about the player vs. game power balance which has nothing to do with player vs. player balance.