Counterintuitive to the current clear speed meta: Slow the Game Back Down

I probably emphasize balancing skills a bit too much but I agree with the whole godly tier to garbage tier distribution.

As I see it right now, new items and skills are released and instead of the distribution in that picture that we would hope, new op skills leave other builds that aren't in that godly tier group with ellipses between the position of the top tier and the rest of the curve, skewing it worse than we would want it to be. At the same time, garbage skills like elemental hit sit for patches without change equal or greater than other nearby tiers of builds putting them further away from all other tiers and making more skewing on the other end.

I don't mind GGG hyping up new skills and synergies making build the new op setup, but these new setups should not be entire standard deviations away from the rest of the pack in opness and left alone.

Have whatever opinion you want about d3, the continuous balancing of the skill runes to me is a great thing. I don't know how good of a job they did at trying to make build variety but it made it feel like I wasn't stuck in situations of "why would you even play crusader right now when barb got a huuuuge buff this patch that makes it flat out better than anything a crusader can do. Even worse, I decided to go with set xyz, no other set and skill combo comes close to hoe terrible this combo is."

Right now we have new skills overhyped and usually overtuned to make them the meta of new leagues, old meta or average strength builds are forced into new positions with too much or too little needing and then generally left alone for too long, and then you have things like elemental hit which have literally been a laughing stock since they last got touched 2+ years ago or skills that get a slight buff that makes the community say "well, we tried it and it is still trash, not even within a standard deviation of average build strength.

I know build diversity and balance with this many options is atrocious with these amounts of options but there just are not any attempts to rectify big gaps for long periods of time that in turn make it look like GGG is saying "no! You are going to play this type of build this league or have a bad time. Maybe we will make viper strike more viable next time... Or we will just leave it alone entirely and introduce a new skill that has an even bigger power gap from viper strike than this current one."

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Fruz wrote:

I think that even though the balance is a little bit less important than in PvP game, GGG needs to aim for it.

Well, the thing I implied there is that balance is far more important for us to have than it is for the devs to provide it. We will play the game regardless, the effect they get from "this brand new OP skill look interesting, I'll play that and be competitive" is very similar to "I think I'll pick the skill X this time, new skills look fine but I haven't played skill X yet and it seems to be on par with the new ones".

Of course, they will lose players that think "crap, I wanted to play skill X but it looks trash compared to new ones, I'll pass" but I don't think their number is higher than those that go "woot! new OP stuff - gimmegimmegimme!", and new skill are indeed easier to put in spotlight, even though something like new Shield Charge ultimately garnered a lot more attention than Lacerate.

That pic I posted is how the things should look like for any game with a large amount of options, that's why it is called natural distribution. The difference between good and bad balance is only in the gap between garbage and god tiers. I personally don't think god tier should be more than twice as strong overall as garbage tier even in ARPGs and in PoE we're dealing with a whole order of magnitude, and that's being conservative.

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raics wrote:

That pic I posted is how the things should look like for any game with a large amount of options, that's why it is called natural distribution. The difference between good and bad balance is only in the gap between garbage and god tiers. I personally don't think god tier should be more than twice as strong overall as garbage tier even in ARPGs and in PoE we're dealing with a whole order of magnitude, and that's being conservative.

I need to learn to not ramble on in forums. You just said my entire last post in 3 sentences.

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raics wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

I think that even though the balance is a little bit less important than in PvP game, GGG needs to aim for it.

Well, the thing I implied there is that balance is far more important for us to have than it is for the devs to provide it. We will play the game regardless, the effect they get from "this brand new OP skill look interesting, I'll play that and be competitive" is very similar to "I think I'll pick the skill X this time, new skills look fine but I haven't played skill X yet and it seems to be on par with the new ones".

Of course, they will lose players that think "crap, I wanted to play skill X but it looks trash compared to new ones, I'll pass" but I don't think their number is higher than those that go "woot! new OP stuff - gimmegimmegimme!", and new skill are indeed easier to put in spotlight, even though something like new Shield Charge ultimately garnered a lot more attention than Lacerate.

That pic I posted is how the things should look like for any game with a large amount of options, that's why it is called natural distribution. The difference between good and bad balance is only in the gap between garbage and god tiers. I personally don't think god tier should be more than twice as strong overall as garbage tier even in ARPGs and in PoE we're dealing with a whole order of magnitude, and that's being conservative.

At the start, GGG was not the kind of companies that would just go for attracting as many players as possible.
I do believe that it's still valid, even though they are making compromises to attract a larger crowd imho.
Still, I have a hard time thinking that GGG would go full "Let's just aim for player retention through new shit and screw the others" ....
They are not exactly showing me that they don't tho =S

Of course there will always be tiers, but the gap can be greatly reduced.

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Fruz wrote:

Of course there will always be tiers, but the gap can be greatly reduced.

Yeah, I also believe it can, said so a few posts back myself. But I can also understand why they aren't really trying, they're running a business there and I'm fairly sure somebody thinks about stuff like 'what would make the best effect on playerbase for least amount of development time'. There isn't really anything reproachable about it, that's sound business thinking as long as you don't start selling smoke mines and mirror arrows.

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Fruz wrote:

Of course there will always be tiers, but the gap can be greatly reduced.

This. It's the difference between nicely-balanced games and badly-balanced ones.

Perfect balance will never be achieved, but most developers look now as they are not even trying to balance anything. Just put some "new thing" here and "here you go". Humans as a spiece take great meaning in fairness. If person A with his/her build spend x hours on gameplay and get wastly less benefit than person B with other build and same time spent, there is high chance that person A will simply quit the activity, so in this case the game.

Balance is wery important for games, since games are made at their base as a competition type etertaiment. If there is weak balance then you cant really create healthy competition between players.

GGG care to much of what people that are left on servers want, they sem to forget how many players they could have on servers that arent playing the game due to its problems. PoE could have much larger playerbase if we would get rid of the things that really annoye most people. More people playing the game, more income for GGG, so more money to develop the game to even better game.

New league concept - turn off trading or limit it to let say 3 trading in month per account.

And here you go - POE is challenging game once again!

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filtre wrote:

New league concept - turn off trading or limit it to let say 3 trading in month per account.

And here you go - POE is challenging game once again!

It would, of course. But trading is crucial part of the game. You might as well say "league with no flasks" (I saw that as an argument just now so that's what I'm going with here)

(I'm well aware that people play ssf, but it's just an arbitrary challange they assume for themselves, either because game is too easy for them or because they hate the fact that trading system is a third-party joke after all those years. Or both.)

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filtre wrote:

New league concept - turn off trading or limit it to let say 3 trading in month per account.

And here you go - POE is challenging game once again!

Not a new concept and not really challenging. All it would encourage is people to play spell builds that scale well without point or gear investment. Get to low tier maps with capped resists is easy solo self found. I do it pretty much every league minus buying a leveling item here and there that could be skipped. Hell you can cap resists in yellow ele weakness maps now solo self found.

Like we have been saying, what is wrong with keeping builds generally balanced against each other other than developer time? You can still have low life hitting that dps harder than a life or CI version or what not just not have it leagues above average builds in general.