Chris: You are Wrong about Red Maps.

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Currently, they are the best place to find items and gain experience if you have the currency to support it. Many players are doing this, especially in Standard leagues where there's less risk of character loss. They also represent a difficult challenge, and we're totally fine with the average player deciding not to play the most challenging content. It's better that it's available as harder content for them if they do want to push themselves.

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buhdunkadunk wrote:

oh no you didn't !

I hear the charge of the white knight brigade coming ........ run

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HikaruYami wrote:

I am leaving this feedback because Chris's most recent dev Q&A has unveiled that he still doesn't play his own game. Namely, this section:

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Currently, they are the best place to find items and gain experience if you have the currency to support it. Many players are doing this, especially in Standard leagues where there's less risk of character loss. They also represent a difficult challenge, and we're totally fine with the average player deciding not to play the most challenging content. It's better that it's available as harder content for them if they do want to push themselves.

Thanks to its perfect linearity and wide-but-not-too-wide roads, Plateau has the maximum possible exp efficiency with the new monster level penalty to high-level content. If you make a T15 with the layout of gorge or plateau (or strand, or hell, even tropical island), that will be the new most efficient map for characters with insane clear potential, but no matter how much DPS you have, no current map (not even Colosseum) has a layout that can give you more exp per hour than plateau. Too much side-winding or backtracking is necessary for all of them. (most red maps were better than plateau _before_ the nerf, btw, as long as you could survive & DPS through them as fast as possible)

The only solutions here that I can see are either to make it so that you can kill monsters from more screens away (say, the max width of a colosseum map) so at least ranged builds can clear faster on red maps, or to make a new map as stated earlier that is red and has an excellently linear layout (so that _anyone_ with enough DPS can farm most efficiently there).

Now, Chris, you may want to say "oh, but what about move speed? If you have enough move speed AND dps then you can totally clear colosseum fast enough for it to be more efficient!".... Dude, that doesn't work because more movespeed means _also_ more plateau clear speed. It's exactly proportional! If you 1 shot all mobs in both maps then you still have to move around the entire map to finish everything off.

The only remaining argument here is that you have to be rich enough to take a linear path through Colosseum and just leave about a quarter of the monsters , total in the map, unkilled. I admit that then, Colosseum becomes more exp per hour than plateau if you 1-shot everything. But is that really what you want, Chris? You want people to just be leaving an entire quarter of a fucking t15 map unkilled?? (edit to clarify why this doesn't translate to colosseum being only 4/3 as slow as plateau: you have to both backtrack to kill the extra 1/4 of monsters _and_ you have to backtrack _back_ to continue progressing through the map. So it's nearly twice as slow, only the first section is arguably linear and that even has a section that literally gates you while slowly releasing monsters _from gates_, thus preventing truly blazing progression like plateau allows)

Some math: a player at level NINETY-NINE will get 3.7% of zone exp from plateau. From T15s, they'll get 6.0% now (the effective level difference is only 2! Already this should ring an "obviously crazy" bell). This would be a semi-acceptable efficiency boost _if_ T15s were linear (or if we could use tool assistance to map out a path through a nonlinear zone to perfectly optimize our coverage of "active zones"). But they aren't (and we can't)! Even though the PoE Wiki gives colosseum a map type of "A", there is no truly linear map above T10! For contrast, before the nerf, plateau gave 5.5% of base exp, and t15s gave 22%. That's a 4x difference, which actually _did_ outweigh the downsides of nonlinearity (the only reason people were doing mostly gorge and plateau rotations back then was for safety and currency efficiency, not pure exp per hour efficiency!)

Jesus christ, Chris, before you unveiled the dev manifesto about the nerf, I think practically everyone assumed you were just slightly increasing the exp penalty exponent at higher levels (or hell, at all levels--most people do within-penalty content up until the early-80s, anyway, so now you'd be encouraging them to be within the penalty boundary at _all_ levels!). This way, it would still be much harder to reach 100 (hell, you could tune it so at level 99, T15s still only gave 6% exp. If you did, then plateau maps at the same level would have a ridiculously harsh penalty, in fact they would hit the min exp return of 1%. Math: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%2899%2B5%29%2F%2899%2B5%2B%2899-82-9%29^x%29%29^1.5%3D.06 returns 3.055 for x, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%2899%2B5%29%2F%2899%2B5%2B%2899-77-9%29^3.055%29%29^1.5%3D returns under 1%. And most people would've been _much happier_ for that than they are for this new system, which gives stupidly huge relative bonuses to parties that never go beyond plateau (or even gorge!), and slows down max exp for everyone (everyone!!) above level 85, whereas previously, a fast-clearing level 91 would _barely_ start feeling the pain as T15s started to give slightly less exp. Increasing the penalty rather than decreasing zone levels just would've made infinitely more sense on every level. All you are doing is discouraging high-level content. There's no reward for it, because even skyforth is way more easily chanced than found.

The only thing that has me excited is that in the same breath you announced some massive endgame overhaul for 2.4.... I am looking forward to that, certainly. But you need to understand when you are _wrong_ about how this game works.

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HikaruYami wrote:

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Currently, they are the best place to find items and gain experience if you have the currency to support it.

The only remaining argument here is that you have to be rich enough to take a linear path through Colosseum and just leave about a quarter of the monsters , total in the map, unkilled. I admit that then, Colosseum becomes more exp per hour than plateau if you 1-shot everything.

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almostdead wrote:

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HikaruYami wrote:

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Currently, they are the best place to find items and gain experience if you have the currency to support it.

The only remaining argument here is that you have to be rich enough to take a linear path through Colosseum and just leave about a quarter of the monsters , total in the map, unkilled. I admit that then, Colosseum becomes more exp per hour than plateau if you 1-shot everything.

So I see that you do agree with his statement?

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OneAngryDonkey wrote:

I pity any whiteknights who show up to argue, you come across as someone who would probably relish the chance to bust out some spreadsheets and graphs to prove a point that any normal person wouldn't give a shit about.