Talisman feedback: Hope GGG has learned a lesson here

After playing THC pretty frequently this league, it struck me just how bad the actual talisman content was.

I found 1 or 2 decent rare talismans, bought a couple more. But overall it was a really disappointing experience. The last three weeks of play I found enough rare T1 talismans to spawn maybe 1 rare T2. For the entire league of mostly daily play (I am 38, have rl job, girl, etc), I probably barely found enough rare 60+ talismans to spawn 3 T3 rares.

Since blue/white talismans are pointless, basically the league content was barely enjoyed. It was mostly "play normal path with an occasional bonespear asshole".

The league should have had everyone running around with kickass talismans. And there were some good ones I guess, but not enough to really make it "reason" to play the league.

If (and I hope it is) Talisman is rolled into the core game, the best/easiest fix is probably to make them only drop as rares since there will probably fewer spawns to begin with. The odds of finding something worthwhile are already so poor in this game I don't think it's going to flood the neck slot economy (though I do play only HC, which doesn't get multileague dumped into it like standard).

But yeah, talismans were a cool concept hamstrung by a shitastic reward structure. I played a lot of the league, but not because of the league specific content. Also, please ffs stop making uniques that only drop in SC or HC. That's awful.

Edit: The challenges sucked huge wang. Like, massive. Whose idea was that? You should probably not let that guy design MTX challenges any more. It's just an MTX, normal/consistent play for the season should be enough to get it. It's very anti-motivational to play the league for the league reward MTX when you look at the list and you KNOW ahead of time you simply can't do it.

The last leagues have given me the feeling that while GGG gets some pretty awesome ideas, they also really like to tack on unnecessary extra baggage to make the good ideas as little fun as possible.

Take Talisman:
New drop-only amulets with unique implicits that can be very powerful. Use them, or upgrade them by fighting stronger enemies, culminating in a big boss fight for the most powerful amulets. Pretty sweet, right?

Now make all the talismans corrupted to ensure that few are worth using and none are really good, and make it so you need hundreds to do the upgrade thing. Sounding a whole lot less fun now. Thus I now have a bunch of talismans sitting in a stash tab because I keep picking them up but can't be bothered to upgrade them or even check the affixes.

Maybe I'm just being overly pessimistic here, but Warbands was also a good idea gone horribly wrong. I still enjoy the core game, and there's still plenty for me to explore in terms of builds and skills, but I worry for the future content if GGG keeps this up.

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Zaanus wrote:

The league should have had everyone running around with kickass talismans. And there were some good ones I guess, but not enough to really make it "reason" to play the league.

Only assuming that they want to fully replace regular amulets with talismans, and I doubt that's the case. The scarcity of good talismans is actually their balancing factor.

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Zaanus wrote:

I found 1 or 2 decent rare talismans

same

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Zaanus wrote:

The league should have had everyone running around with kickass talismans

lol, you're sure you refer to poe?

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Zaanus wrote:

It's just an MTX, normal/consistent play for the season should be enough to get it

selling mtx is what they pay their developers with.
enabling a player to look like someone who actually supported the game with 40$ (basically paid the entrance fee) just for playing the season?

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Zaanus wrote:

It's very anti-motivational to play the league for the league reward MTX when you look at the list and you KNOW ahead of time you simply can't do it.

that's intentional.

the intention behind the challenges clearly is to let (yet unsupportive) players have some gear parts to motivate them to support the game to get a complete set.

and there is nothing wrong about it, it's called a "business model". making money to be able to continue one's business.

poe may be free to play but it's not free to make.

Feedback on warbands grind was negative. Did they learn? No.
Feedback on talisman grind is negative. Will they learn? I doubt that

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Nobake wrote:

The last leagues have given me the feeling that while GGG gets some pretty awesome ideas, they also really like to tack on unnecessary extra baggage to make the good ideas as little fun as possible.

Take Talisman:
New drop-only amulets with unique implicits that can be very powerful. Use them, or upgrade them by fighting stronger enemies, culminating in a big boss fight for the most powerful amulets. Pretty sweet, right?

Now make all the talismans corrupted to ensure that few are worth using and none are really good, and make it so you need hundreds to do the upgrade thing. Sounding a whole lot less fun now. Thus I now have a bunch of talismans sitting in a stash tab because I keep picking them up but can't be bothered to upgrade them or even check the affixes.

Maybe I'm just being overly pessimistic here, but Warbands was also a good idea gone horribly wrong. I still enjoy the core game, and there's still plenty for me to explore in terms of builds and skills, but I worry for the future content if GGG keeps this up.

+1 good points.
I also disliked warbands at first, but once I learnt how to 'hunt' 5 dot maps I enjoyed it and got quite a lot of the uniques as well as enjoying the fights. The need to use external sites without at least GGG supporting/telling the players of their existence was imo their main failure in this league, if they had done this I'm sure many players would have enjoyed it (not only did you have hard fights and new uniques but it gave you a reason to store/grind maps you'd never go back to reducing grind. Similar to tempest, which I only stopped because I wanted to do the challenges/practice atziri).

Talisman on the other hand was from the get go obviously excessive grind and the fact that we only encountered weak t1 enemies also lessened the impact of the league on the players. I did enjoy griswold and the uniques tho, +1 for that - pity again so little contact, compared to for example atziri when SOTV was released (admittedly it was an expansion and not a league, but still). This is further excaserbated by the 3 month league duration, which should lead to content rich time.

Anyway, both were leagues with great ideas, and I do believe they are learning from their experience. Its just a pity that they don't adapt the leagues themselves faster as feedback comes in.

Every league I have played that I have enjoyed has made content more challenging. The reward was through overcoming challenges.

The following leagues have not been good (in order from worst to least bad)

1) Talisman
2) Warbands
3) Whatever that shrine one was (Domination?)
4) Whatever that ghost one was (Torment?)
5) Ambush

Notice that most of these were softcore leagues. Lately the hardcore leagues have been less fun as well (nemesis, invasion and beyond were peak hardcore IMO).

If GGG cant sell a challenging league that makes the grind to maps worth anything other than leap slamming over >50% of the content, whilst also allowing the people who want an easier experience to have their fun.... then GGG should just split the leagues again and hire more people to get it done.

Talisman and warbands were literal trash. Seriously boring

Players want to feel like they played for 500 hours after only playing 50. You know what? That's not going to happen no matter what GGG does. You'll still be comparing your 50 hour result to what you see people who have played 500 hours have and still feel that you were left out.

How do you suggest GGG fix this other than stamping your feet and saying "fix it!". There isn't a solution. You will always feel that way.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Players want to feel like they played for 500 hours after only playing 50. You know what? That's not going to happen no matter what GGG does. You'll still be comparing your 50 hour result to what you see people who have played 500 hours have and still feel that you were left out.

How do you suggest GGG fix this other than stamping your feet and saying "fix it!". There isn't a solution. You will always feel that way.

I've played for 500 hours and feel the same... and now? :>
Oh, probably I want to feel like I've played 5000 hours after only playing 500, right? :D

... problem of this league is: everybody is disappointed about something, the number of players that really felt in love with this league you can count with one finger.

I've seen it multiple times now, very good concept in general (that's something GGG is able to) but fuck the numbers (that's something GGG isn't able to handle) and in the end... not added to the core game, again.

Peace,

-kcstar-

I'm seriously interested to know how Talisman had the highest player retention.

I played it longer than I should have, and more often than I should have. But I stopped. Because it was boring.

There was nothing interesting or fresh about it - there wasn't anything that made it interesting in cruel/merc.

There were entire chunks of content in the league I never even accessed because it was never actually encountered more than a few times - i.e. it was wasted. For example, I never bothered to look at what T2 and T3 talismans did when enemies picked them up.

In nemesis and invasion there were level gates - but when you reached that gate you were actually encountering Storm Herald and Cintiq (as opposed to pewterfang) regularly.

This was the first league where I actually spent some reasonable amount of time in maps. Because the levelling process was that boring this time around. Every other league I've been super satisfied just getting to A3M - because the actual game was fun.