@GGG Game Balance For Casual Vs. Hardcore Players

This is my 2nd post in a series based on the current state of the game. To see my previous post click the link in the spoiler below.



This post is focusing on the overall balance of the game for either casual game play or hardcore game play. As such I would like to start this off with 2 questions.

1. Does POE have more "Hardcore Players" (players who invest a lot of time into the game on a consistent basis) or casual players (Players who invest short amounts of time of at most a few hours a day periodicallly throughout a given week) ?

2. Is the game balanced around the Hardcore playerbase or the Casual player base.

For my assumptions, I believe the game has more casual players and hardcore players are a niche of the community. I also believe the game is balanced how ever for the hardcore player base (not the difficulty).

Here is my reasoning and some possible solutions.

1. Character progression requires substantial time investment or overall knowledge of the games mechanics, in depth. Information not presented well or in depth in game. Skill gem interactions could be more indepth. Maybe add an in game menu that shows a base skill and how beneficial supports effect the skill with a gif.

2. Loot is based on RNG with low drop rates. This is in my opinion because Magic Finding gear exists, and drop rates are based on the assumption players will use this gear to farm for loot, and switch gear when grinding for experience. The game has already removed the Item Quantity support gem, and reduced the amount of item quantity and rarity that can be obtained (completely removed IQ as a roll on rares), and then increased drop rates. Unfortunately this is a problem because MF still exists. Reducing IQ and IR but increasing drop rates resulted in no change. To fix this issue IQ and IR need to be removed from the game entirely, retroactively. Meaning no legacy items. Current Item Rarity rolls can get re rolled to a new affix randomly. Item rarity support gem can become legacy like Item Quantity. Then increase drop rates to make up for what was lost potentially Magic Finding. This puts all players on the same playing field.

3. Trading is based on 3rd party websites and applications as well as overall knowledge of the value of currency and items based on what builds are most effective or popular due to issues presented in my first post in the spoiler above. This is knowledge a casual player may never learn, especially when a majority of the player base does not actually know about 3rd party websites or applications for trading. As such hardcore players always have an advantage over the casual players. At level 25 a notification ( ! On left side of screen) should appear telling players they now have access to trade and Poe.Trade can be used to improve their trading experience, with a URL they can click.

4. New game mechanics that are introduced in cruel and merciless are never explained. Just the simple knowledge of resistance penalties is never explained and can lead to players prematurely quiting the game, or even being cursed and not knowing what the curse does. A simple notification in the twilight strand in cruel and merciless should let the player know their resistances are reduced and they should watch out for being cursed. Then a window can present curse icons that the player hovers over to see what they do. It gets them acquainted with the icons they will see often in the top left.

5. The passive true is unfriendly to new players or casual players. Especially when it keeps changing. A player has no knowledge of where they should be pathing, or why they should be pathing that way for the build they want. Having a better way of conveying this information would be nice. Maybe add preset pathing for different builds into the passive tree, and have a drop down menu where we can select a build. Then if there are multiple pathings for that skill add a left and right arrow on the sides of the passive tree so we can switch through them. Then have the path highlighted to give the player a pathing guide.

6. Labyrinth is casual unfriendly. I personally enjoy it exactly the way it is. But what is more important, pleasing the hardcore player base, or the casual player base who makes up the majority of your players. My biggest issue with changing lab is making AC points easier to obtain. This is for power creep issues which the game has not be balanced for. That being said, some things could be improved upon to please the casual players. My simplest solution is reducing trap quantity. This should increase player speed through lab, and increase overall enjoyment of the lab experience. The main complaint i see is people hate traps in an ARPG (even though traps have always been an RPG mechanic). I like the traps, i dont find them difficult to bypass, but i can see the frustration they cause. The most important thing I want to stress about lab is that AC points should never be obtainable outside of it. This is due to power creep, and at the very least I believe players should be forced to do something challenging for their character, no matter the build, to Ascend. AC is not balanced and as such power creep was expected, but players should not get that power as easily as they desire it to be.

7. Games balanced for casual players end up being more successful... Destiny has made getting Legendary and Exotic gear substantially easier by increasing the drop rates and methods of obtaining Legendary and Exotic Engrams. The Divisions next update makes the best gear obtainable anywhere, makes enemies much easier to kill, and as such makes the gameplay experience better for casuals and hardcore players. Diablo 3 removed trading entirely and substantially increased drop rates. This improved player satisfaction even if they had very little time to play. Getting a very good item is only the start, getting good rolls on stats is where the end game should be.

I bring these games up because they all have RPG aspects in the them. They are all successful due to catering for the casual player base. Hardcore players will always be better because they have invested more time in the game, but the casual players is where most of your player base lies. If you make them happy, they tell their friends, you get more new players, and the community grows substantially by word of mouth. This is something that can be used to promote the game to bring back players who quit, and new players alike.

So either no one agrees, or no one cares to read this.

Would balancing this game for more casual players be so bad when its been proven successful with other games in the rpg genre?

I may not be a hardcore (difficulty) player, but i consider my self hardcore (invest lots of time in game) and still think this game is very casual unfriendly.

I think it is unfair that players can be significantly better than others simply because their knowledge of the game is superior. Especially when the game makes no attempts to educate new players.

I'm a casual myself and I do not agree with spoonfeeding in games, it seems that casual now means entitled whiny baby. I don't want handholding and welfare.

This game does have some big issues though, from obtuse mechanics to unrewarding and many times even punishing gameplay.

Oh and by the way, labyrinth (even uber) is very casual friendly, mechanics are easy to grasp and Izaro fights aren't pure gear and build checks like it's the case for high tier maps, Atziri, new content, etc. Most average builds with average gear can clear it (except for Argus).

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Raudram wrote:

I'm a casual myself and I do not agree with spoonfeeding in games, it seems that casual now means entitled whiny baby. I don't want handholding and welfare.

This game does have some big issues though, from obtuse mechanics to unrewarding and many times even punishing gameplay.

I was going to post a pretty big rant but yeah, that sums it up.

This generation of gamers are far too whiny and entitled, they have zero concept of earning something and triumphing over something. The great thing about Path of Exile is it teaches you to acknowledge your failures, whether it be game knowledge or builds, if you dont or cant acknowledge youre wrong you will fail at this game, plain and simple.

The game ive most enjoyed is still Vanilla/BC Warcraft, nothings ever filled that void in me. Such a shame Blizzard had to ruin their gem with the casualization and dumbing down of the game. Didnt down much in Vanilla but downed everything in BC, CASUALLY. Said it many times before but i was in school, had work, social life, homework, club, sports, still managed to down everything, i always found it amusing how "adults" with far more free time than me had the nerve to try and complain about the game being too hardcore.

The game certainly has balancing issues but it isnt Casual vs Hardcore, its game mechanics. The current balancing being done is catering to people who play broken as shit builds, thus everything else, like melee for example, suffers and feels like utter trash. It doesnt take a genius to sit around holding one key instant leeching and killing the toughest content while face tanking it.

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Jgizle wrote:

2. Loot is based on RNG with low drop rates. This is in my opinion because Magic Finding gear exists, and drop rates are based on the assumption players will use this gear to farm for loot, and switch gear when grinding for experience. The game has already removed the Item Quantity support gem, and reduced the amount of item quantity and rarity that can be obtained (completely removed IQ as a roll on rares), and then increased drop rates. Unfortunately this is a problem because MF still exists. Reducing IQ and IR but increasing drop rates resulted in no change.

IIQ was removed cause of bots.

Buff to droprates resulted in a H U G E change. What was once a multiple ex item, now is a 5c item. Why? Increased droprates.

Loot in this game is just... tiresome. You get heaps and heaps of complete garbage.

There are at least two different scales of commitment, and at least three different sub-games in Path of Exile.

The scales of commitment are: time and skill. Good game design allows a baseline rate of progression per unit time with little or "no" skill, while allowing increased rates as skill increases.

It's a mistake to think that allowing fast rewards for minimal time investment AND minimal skill, simultaneously, is "casual friendly." If by "casual friendly" one means "the game is all played out in a matter of hours and not with picking up again until the next content dump," then maybe. But assuming one wants people to play one's game, and play it a lot, getting all the rewards fast should require massive skill, and getting them without skill should take a massive amount of time.

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A tutorial is taking up a player's time in order to train a particular skill, if the player doesn't have it already. Researching stuff (looking it up on wiki) also uses player time to train a skill, but doesn't consume the time of players who already have it. So forcing tutorials is only good if the player experience at a certain later point can be very bad if a particular skill is but mastered.

What's more important than tutorials is affordances. In game design, an affordance is an object which implies an expected behavior; for example, a doorknob or handle on a door says "go through me," and the design of it may even imply "push" or "pull." If you've ever noticed a door with a "pull" affordance but it's actually a "push" door, you've experienced the frustration of poor affordance design.

If the game is light on tutorials, that's fine, but the affordances for research need to be in the game to lead players to the appropriate resources. There's already a button in the game, green like US dollars, clearly marked with a $, and it takes you to the MTX shop in your web browser. That's good affordance design. It's just a shame that GGG hasn't put in a similar effort for trade indexers or the community wiki.

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The three sub-games are: build design / theorycrafting, piloting / farming, and trade / flipping. It's important to realize that any one of these three could be the key point of focus to a particular player, to the point of almost total exclusion of the others. Each of these three sub-games has their own time/skill reward structure.

I feel the biggest weak points with PoE are overly low skill intensity with the farming and trading minigames, and overly high skill intensity with theorycrafting.

Although GGG intends farming to be grindy (meaning: serious time commitment), and that's fine, that's not mutually exclusive with a skill element. I think there isn't enough emphasis on positioning and telegraphed enemy attacks, and instead too much low-skill shooting-gallery style play.

PoE's trade system does have one obscure skill: realize poe.trade exists. Once that barrier is cleared (affordances!), there isn't much skill involved. The always-online trade culture generally favors those who are always available for buyers to contact, and pricing is usually just a matter of searching for similar items. It would be nice if pricing was more of a personal skill challenge and being online wasn't necessary to sell an item.

Lastly, PoE's theorycrafting is actually too deep. The raw amount of content released in this department is staggering, and there's a lot of it which is more or less junk - junk skills, junk items, junk affixes, junk passives. The game would really benefit from, instead of yet another update adding even more content, an update which refined and, even more importantly, outright deleted some of the dead weight.

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Regarding droprates: increasing them doesn't mean you find any more upgrades. More drops mean better items, but better items also mean higher standards for what's good and what's junk; these cancel each other out when droprates increase, solving nothing.

Feeling like drops are shit is instead indicative of another problem: boring itemization. Deep itemization will have you consider two items with different mods and make you wonder: which is better for your build? Shallow itemization doesn't do this, so as soon as you see an item you immediately know whether it's trade/vendor fodder or a new equip.

Not all melee is bad, just most melee. I find cyclone to be the most rewarding melee skill. Maybe I like it because Whirlwind Barbarian was my favorite in Diablo 3. Not sure. But with Slayer and Juggernaut the movement speed penalty doesn't feel like such a huge downside any more, especially with double movement speed quicksilver flasks.

This being said the game is very conflicting in what it wants to be. This game is supposed to be "hardcore" and punishing. That being said they dont reward players for actually playing Hardcore mode any more, the way I believe the game is intended. Maybe it is because the hardcore playerbase is too small. Maybe its because the league players in general are to small compared to the standard mode players. The most hardcore aspect of the game is lack of information that may make the game appear to be difficult at first. But in reality this game is not hardcore at all.

Power creep is a major cause. The lack of build diversity due to continuous releases of stronger and stronger skills and uniques along with jewels and ascendency is heavily dividing the player base. I am well aware that Ascendancy was released unbalanced intentionally. Rory at GGG madebit clear that Ascendancy was intended to increase build diversity. All it did was make meta builds even stronger and perpetuate the issue it was intended to fix.

Sometimes I wish a larger company bought Path of Exile. GGG's small staff makes any real improvement in the game a huge problem when their number one primary focus is to grow the player base. They focus entirely on creating expansions that can be used as advertisement for the game when no expansion is needed. Their primary focus should be fixing the game they already have, and then improving it once the game is in a polished state.

A company with more money, and larger staffing could do this easily. The fact that this game is free to play is a crutch and it is hindering the potential this game has. Free to play games are successful not because the game can reach a wider audience, but because they have some form of monthly program players can purchase, like a membership, that benefits them and the company. Some other games offer purely cosmetics, but that is because they have a large enough player base and good game that people are willing to spend money on cosmetics to support the game they love.

League of Legends has cosmetics. Smite has cosmetics and the option to buy a pack for only 25$ that gives access to every character in game and any coming in the future. Team Fortress 2 has boxes that you need to buy keys for to open and get rare cosmetic hats or special named weaponry (that is the same as their non special counterparts). Warframe has new characters, skins, weapons, and decorative items you can buy with real money that can mostly all be obtained in game for free. You are paying to save time. Trove has new classes you can buy with in game daily currency rewards, or you can buy class tokens to unlock any class of your choosing, or save them for new future characters. Class tokens can be obtained for free by increasing mastery rank. Heartstone and Paragon sell card packs or skins.

My point is these games are all polished and have a large playerbase from the beggining. They can afford to go free to play because they already have the player base to support them. They all sell items for convienience or for style.

Path of exile sells MTX cosmetics and stash tabs. But the game has a niche player base. They need to get a larger player base first if the ever want to grow. This game has less than 150k active players minus all the banned bot accounts and players who downloaded the game and quit before completing act 1.

Heres an idea of how much of the player base makes it through each difficulty in the game on steam.



Tldr, since games release on steam

3.6m people actually played Path of Exile on Steam after downloading it (over 2m downloaded it and never played it)

576k players completed normal difficulty.

306k players completed cruel difficulty.

172k players completed merciless difficulty.

3,428,000 players never played through merciless difficulty.

25,133 players play Path of Exile Concurrently and the average play time is less than 1 hour.

I doubt GGG is going to get very far on such a small active player base. I highly doubt more than double the players play Path of Exile using the stand alone client.

Meaning unlikely poe has more than 75k active players.

@GGG can correct me by releasing in depth statistics about their clients downloads, active players, and avg play time.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Regarding droprates: increasing them doesn't mean you find any more upgrades. More drops mean better items, but better items also mean higher standards for what's good and what's junk; these cancel each other out when droprates increase, solving nothing.

Feeling like drops are shit is instead indicative of another problem: boring itemization. Deep itemization will have you consider two items with different mods and make you wonder: which is better for your build? Shallow itemization doesn't do this, so as soon as you see an item you immediately know whether it's trade/vendor fodder or a new equip.

Higher drop rates actually do do something: They make theorycrafting more fun / easier / more rewarding. Why? Because with higher drop rates, it is easier to equip a new character. In a new league, it might take quite a while until I can actually test whether my theorycrafted build works, especially if it requires certain build-enabling uniques that might be several exalt in price. Also, the amount of trash that drops in this game (i.e. items that do not have any use in an end-game scenario, regardless of whether you are well equipped yet or not) is pretty astonishing, and on top of that influencing game performance.

The second effect better drops have is to narrow the gap between "no-lifers" and the more average player. This results in less of a power differential and thus makes it possible to better balance a game, especially in a situation where clearspeed is very important and actively encouraged through on-kill effects.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want the game to be easy. I want it to be challenging. And what you say about farming being a skill-free, mindless activity is unfortunately very true, and better solved in other games. It is way too easy to clear the entire screen with the press of a single button. That does not mean, however, that I would mind having less, but better drops. Also I would not mind better and less RNG-gated access to end-game content (high-tier maps, Shaper, Uber Atziri).

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Char1983 wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Spoiler

Regarding droprates: increasing them doesn't mean you find any more upgrades. More drops mean better items, but better items also mean higher standards for what's good and what's junk; these cancel each other out when droprates increase, solving nothing.

Feeling like drops are shit is instead indicative of another problem: boring itemization. Deep itemization will have you consider two items with different mods and make you wonder: which is better for your build? Shallow itemization doesn't do this, so as soon as you see an item you immediately know whether it's trade/vendor fodder or a new equip.

1. Higher drop rates actually do do something: They make theorycrafting more fun / easier / more rewarding. Why? Because with higher drop rates, it is easier to equip a new character. In a new league, it might take quite a while until I can actually test whether my theorycrafted build works, especially if it requires certain build-enabling uniques that might be several exalt in price. Also, the amount of trash that drops in this game (i.e. items that do not have any use in an end-game scenario, regardless of whether you are well equipped yet or not) is pretty astonishing, and on top of that influencing game performance.

2. The second effect better drops have is to narrow the gap between "no-lifers" and the more average player. This results in less of a power differential and thus makes it possible to better balance a game, especially in a situation where clearspeed is very important and actively encouraged through on-kill effects.

Spoiler

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want the game to be easy. I want it to be challenging. And what you say about farming being a skill-free, mindless activity is unfortunately very true, and better solved in other games. It is way too easy to clear the entire screen with the press of a single button. That does not mean, however, that I would mind having less, but better drops. Also I would not mind better and less RNG-gated access to end-game content (high-tier maps, Shaper, Uber Atziri).

Numbers mine.

1. The key phrase here is "build-enabling uniques."

Imagine if Shav's didn't exist, and instead "Chaos Damage doesn't bypass Energy Shield" was a prefix which only spawned on Scholar's Robes.

If this were true, droprates wouldn't need to be very high to get a basic low-life-enabling chest; even self-found could do it reliably, before even reaching Cruel, with just a handful of Alterations. However, perfecting that chest, getting it to the same power level of Shav's, that would border on a Mirror-worthy item. (Technically, Mirror Scholar's Robes would be like Shav's with better resists.)

The way I see it, unique items are bad design. They put build-enablers into a terrible binary: not enabled, or best-in-slot. There's no room for gear progression in that gear slot under such itemization.

2. This is only true once the no-lifers hit a lack-of-new-content wall (itemization is content). Until then, the gap follows the same rule as upgrade frequency; higher standards cancels out better items. Also, hitting that content wall is kind of a nightmare scenario from a dev standpoint.

Trade does the same function better. The more players there are ahead of you, the greater the supply of hand-me-down upgrades, therefore the cheaper they are to buy.