Theorycrafters don't want to revel in victory: why 1.1 was the best time in PoE

This is one of those long posts (there is no TLDR) where a veteran player explains why he is taking a break. Many of the points I'm making are at least partially opinion based, but they are opinions I've arrived at after putting in a lot of time into PoE.



The first opinion I hold is that people play PoE instead of D3 or Torchlight or Skyrim because they a) want a game that isn't easy to min-max, and to a lesser extent they want to b) compete economically. Of course one or both of these doesn't apply to all players, but I believe these are two desires that GGG wants PoE to fulfill. This post is about the min-maxability of PoE, or how easy it so to determine what the best build in PoE is. For instance Skyrim is easily min-maxable, and if you play it as a min-maxer you will quickly get bored. PoE is more difficult to min-max, so even if you play as a min-maxer, it will take you longer to reach game-breaking builds. In my opinion the development focus GGG has had since 1.2 has not helped make the game harder to min-max. That said I think the new poison announcement is exactly what GGG needs to keep doing.

To understand the importance of min-maxability we need to start with the distinction between content producers, and content consumers. There are far fewer developers than content consumers. Furthermore it is much harder to develop content than it is to consume it. For example, Act 4 took GGG 1.5 years to make, and at least 4-5 months of 'all hands on deck' development time. Meanwhile it's possible to consume all the content of Act 4 in 4 hours. So roughly we can say it takes 1 month of full development time per 1 hour of new content. This is crazy expensive, and as a result content needs to be reused in clever ways. I believe there are three ways of getting content to be reused that were employed in 1.1:

1) RNG-gating. High tier maps were still reasonably rare, sacrifice parts were rare, and mortal fragments were rare as well. To do the new content you had to repeat content. As a result each Atziri run would take 2-3 hours if you grinded the sacrifice fragments yourself. Similarly, powerful uniques like Crown of Eyes, Shavronne's Wrappings and Mjolner had small drop rates but enabled powerful builds. By setting the drop rates low enough, yet rewards high enough, GGG is able to make players redo the same content multiple times without them feeling like they're completely wasting their time. Of course this is the cheapest method for content reusability, and one players see through the easiest.

2) Difficulty-gating. At the same time that Sacrifice and Mortal Fragments were rare, the Atziri fights themselves were challenging on build design and fight mechanics levels. If a player had a 25% success rate to kill Atziri, the 2-3 hours of initial sacrifice fragment grinding would get multiplied by 4x to stretch out the initial content to 8-12 hours. Adding the uber atziri layer meant that everything would be multiplied by the mortal hope drop rate and the probability of success to kill uber atziri. As a result by clever design decisions for the atziri fights and number tweaking GGG was able to generate 200-300 hours of content out of something that would have been only 3 hours of content if it was implemented like Core Malachai. (That's how long I would estimate it took me to figure out how to beat him).

3) Combinatorial optimization-gating. Combinatorics is the study of the number of ways to choose different objects to go together. Each time GGG releases a item or gem, we the players have to consider the other possible skills, passives, supports, and items it will go with. Two good examples of this from the 1.1 era are Mjolner (released in 1.1.2) and Summon Raging Spirit (released in 1.0.6, 1 month before 1.1). When these were first released, people didn't quite know how to use them. Tom94's Rainbownuke build (published 1 month after Mjolner was released) was a revelation, as well as PepprmintButler's HeadBangGang (only published in 1.1.5, 5 months after the gem was released!). Gems and items take a certain amount of work to develop, but it takes us longer to figure out how to make use of them than it does GGG to develop if it isn't obvious how to use them. I believe here the development time to content time ratio is much better than in other cases. Meaning, if it took GGG a week to develop Mjolner, it took the playerbase as a whole about a month to figure out how to use it. This is much better than the 1month:1hour ratio we got from Act 4. RNG-gating makes this combinatorial optimization problem more difficult and as a result makes it take longer until the community can solve how to use new items and gems. The caution is that if theorycrafting takes effort (regrets, leveling time, purchasing items), it should be rewarding if you do it properly. If new items are released that are mediocre, people are discouraged from trying them, and their development time is wasted.

Thus, I believe GGG needs to create combinatorially-challenging uniques at the level of Mjolner or Whispering Ice or gems as tricky as Summon Raging Spirit at roughly one per two week. I wouldn't worry too much about balance when they come out at first. Rather don't allow future items to have legacy versions, i.e. treat them like gems where each item gets rerolled in a smart way once the item gets nerfed. For instance if this were applied to windrippers a 100/12 WR would be rerolled to a 80/12 WR. I believe this is the only way to create enough content to keep PoE alive, and by hammering items/gems that were initially overpowered, GGG can more easily keep power creep at bay.

MTX are important, and great that you have people dedicated to working on them, but if you didn't have as much effort on MTX you could hire more game design developers. I'm not going to buy a demon king frog shield pet, but I might have bought a summon raging spirit MTX if I just figured out how to use it back in 1.1.5 and felt awesome about this new skill. Although the SRS MTX came out in September, a staggering 8 months after the skill was released, most of us weren't thrilled about it by then.

Personally I'm taking a break or quitting because a) I've done everything there is to do (including L100) and b) PoE makes me feel bad about myself. What's the point of pouring in hours of my life I'll never get back to get 1 more skill point? What's the point of doing 50 atziri runs if it means I only get to run uber atziri once. What's the point of MFing if getting extremely lucky means I will earn 4exalts, which is absolutely meaningless in standard. What's the point of doing any maps if I'm already L100 and all the maps/bosses are easy for my build. Also there's no point for me to try other builds, because I'm almost certain I have the best possible build for anywhere near my wealth level. If there were new powerful uniques and gems released every two weeks, I would have a reason to try new builds, and hopefully feel awesome about them.

Cheers, cool feedback enjoy whatever you do next sir.

Peace,

-Boem-

I wondered where this was going for a while, but it's good feedback. I think when something's new and a bit shiny it's reasonable to expect 2-300 hours into it (atziri) but suspect the numbers of people willing to put that kind of effort in are thinning out.

It's a reasonable suggestion to keep introducing chase content but I still have a fundamental concern, based on my own experience. When you keep adding content such as new chase uniques on a very regular basis you end up with ever-increasing levels of vendor trash, driving dissatisfaction with drops, and huge code-bloat. The second is the bigger concern. Imagine a balance pass at some point in future taking a whole year to complete; not to mention the ever-increasing numbers of possible code interactions leading to bizarre and untraceable bugs. Which definitely happens already.

I'd reiterate my view from a game I played and worked on for longer than PoE has existed (and perhaps will exist) - the only way you can keep players coming back for a bite is to have no stopping point. Uncapped levels and diminishing returns would achieve this. Yes, some would leave anyway, but hopefully fewer, because no one would ever be able to say 'ok I got level 102, I've done everything'; the response would be 'yeah but I've got a level 105, sure it took me 19,000 hours of xping, but cmon ya scrub'.

"

davidnn5 wrote:

It's a reasonable suggestion to keep introducing chase content but I still have a fundamental concern, based on my own experience. When you keep adding content such as new chase uniques on a very regular basis you end up with ever-increasing levels of vendor trash, driving dissatisfaction with drops, and huge code-bloat. The second is the bigger concern. Imagine a balance pass at some point in future taking a whole year to complete; not to mention the ever-increasing numbers of possible code interactions leading to bizarre and untraceable bugs. Which definitely happens already.

I'd reiterate my view from a game I played and worked on for longer than PoE has existed (and perhaps will exist) - the only way you can keep players coming back for a bite is to have no stopping point. Uncapped levels and diminishing returns would achieve this. Yes, some would leave anyway, but hopefully fewer, because no one would ever be able to say 'ok I got level 102, I've done everything'; the response would be 'yeah but I've got a level 105, sure it took me 19,000 hours of xping, but cmon ya scrub'.

I don't necessarily advocate for chase-content. Active skill gems or support gems are easy to acquire. The chase on uniques extends their lifetime in a multiplicative fashion with how hard they are to fully utilize. Meaning common uniques will be solved faster because more people can afford to buy them immediately, whereas rarer uniques will require people to farm up to them as well as figure out how to use them.

Code-bloat isn't enough of a reason to not take game design choices IMO.

Your suggestion for uncapped levels is something I don't like. It doesn't solve the problem of not wasting the player's time (increasing diminish returns). Leveling to 101 would be boring, and GGG suggesting that it's something worth their players' time would be insulting to the player (IMO).

The best content that would yield the most return is PVP content. Because it has endless potential to entertain.(since no player vs player action will ever be reliably the same given a solid framework)

The problem for this to succeed is that to much power is focused in the gear acquisition, creating huge discrepancy's between competing players.

Simply put, if PoE was a theory-crafters heaven with reliably comfortable time-frames to fully develop a character to roughly 95% potential we would see a lot of PVP activity.

This actually moves the end-game past PvE content, which ultimately always has an "end" and moves it to PVP content.
So the core content aims to provide the player with a character to ultimately PVP with and simply enjoy PvE with.

The current framework doomed PvP before it was even implemented.

Peace,

-Boem-

Sounds very familiar what you are saying, only I never leveled a character over 85 because that's the point where enjoyment turns to grind for me.

Btw, if you are looking for a challenging game that requires careful planning, precise execution and doesn't make you feel as if you are just wasting time of your life I'd recommend Kerbal Space Program. You can pretty much make it as easy or hard as you like and: No gated content, good balance, no server lag, all the mods and as much grind as you want.

"

MatrixFactor wrote:

Your suggestion for uncapped levels is something I don't like. It doesn't solve the problem of not wasting the player's time (increasing diminish returns). Leveling to 101 would be boring, and GGG suggesting that it's something worth their players' time would be insulting to the player (IMO).

I agree and disagree.

The reality - as you note in the OP - is that a game like this will always need replayability more than newplayability. There will always be boring things to do, depending on what you think is boring. Don't get me wrong, the game should absolutely scale sideways as well as up - by adding more meta games as well as an uncapped stretch of levels - but I'm sure the devs would admit they are starting to see some natural limitations to what they can add, skill-gem-wise, for example, due to the basic design of the game.

An obvious example would be comparing ice crash to glacial hammer, or wild strike to elemental hit. Not really new skills, just reskins. How many different ways can I realistically hit someone with an element?

I'd also say that code bloat is easy to discount - until your job is untangling the billions of possibilities (for bugs and game-breaking states) your content creates.

Trading is realistically a metagame and can continue to be so (for those that enjoy it). PvP could be strengthened by a more horizontal approach - i.e. item-limited leagues, gem-limited leagues etc. As Boem says, while it remains a gear check there's little incentive for many of us to get into it.

There are other ways to innovate. We have divination cards - why not a divination card game? Merchant abilities? (i.e. generation of useful materials for crafting)... MMOs do these things because they realise levels can't be everything, even if they can be more than what we have.

Not saying there isn't a rare good point in there, but what I'm reading here is someone extremely wealthy in-game complaining about boredom because his super-high tier build can faceroll all the content in game.

A PvE-focused game gets boring after you master it to a point where everything feels easy. Congrats on figuring that out. Good luck mastering whatever game you pick up next.

MatrixFactor, I am curious about your opinion on the behind the scene for the skill gem development. My biggest take away from they is they are terrified of creating another
Flameblast or mjolnir. That's only reinforced with the 2.0 gems, they had uses, but were carefully trimmed down.

"

davidnn5 wrote:

The reality - as you note in the OP - is that a game like this will always need replayability more than newplayability. There will always be boring things to do, depending on what you think is boring. Don't get me wrong, the game should absolutely scale sideways as well as up - by adding more meta games as well as an uncapped stretch of levels - but I'm sure the devs would admit they are starting to see some natural limitations to what they can add, skill-gem-wise, for example, due to the basic design of the game.

An obvious example would be comparing ice crash to glacial hammer, or wild strike to elemental hit. Not really new skills, just reskins. How many different ways can I realistically hit someone with an element?

Trading is realistically a metagame and can continue to be so (for those that enjoy it). PvP could be strengthened by a more horizontal approach - i.e. item-limited leagues, gem-limited leagues etc. As Boem says, while it remains a gear check there's little incentive for many of us to get into it.

It isn't obvious to me how GGG can develop new interesting skill/item mechanisms, but I'm sure there are many people with interesting suggestions, the issues is finding those people and getting them to share. My only opinion is that GGG should go for new stuff, that isn't obvious (i.e. not reskins), and it shouldn't be afraid of releasing slightly OP stuff and rescaling it later.

If you think about trading, I think most people will agree that trading is more fun in new leagues compared to standard. Scrotie's excellent post on PoE's economy explains the reason behind this. It's because in new leagues players are diversified into different tiers of gear, and there is much more flow of gear between the tiers. In standard everyone is in pretty much the same very high tier of gear, and significant trades don't happen. Sure I sell tons of 1c-10c items, but these sales aren't nearly as meaningful in standard as they are in temp leagues. Also I believe that GGG needs to make standard work. Shortening temp leagues and reseting more and more frequently can only work for so long.

I also absolutely agree about budget-limited PvP. The issue is how to limit budget without limiting build diversity too much. If it can be done, it would be amazing based on my experience with something similar in Diablo 2.

"

PrinceOfPuddles wrote:

MatrixFactor, I am curious about your opinion on the behind the scene for the skill gem development. My biggest take away from they is they are terrified of creating another
Flameblast or mjolnir. That's only reinforced with the 2.0 gems, they had uses, but were carefully trimmed down.

I think the fear of releasing stuff that's too powerful is hurting GGG's ability to develop interesting stuff. The issue is they don't want to give players power and then take it away. But they already do that in a different way with frequent temp league resets. I think these coincide well with power resets and meta shifts. If new skills or mechanics are too broken to wait for temp league resests, they can still be reigned in (like ghost busting) and people will accept it just fine.