Drakk the ARPG-ist's PoE Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Jgizle wrote:

I find it odd that you think the trading system is good. This is because the community dislikes the current trade system. In its current state it is not even a trade system, its a bartering system which is actually different.

You see trade is the exchange of an agreed upon currency for items. Trade is essentially what we use in reality. We use dollars, or w/e currency is used in our country to buy things from some one else. This is not what is used in POE. This is what is and was used in Diablo 3. The agreed upon currency was Gold and it could be used to buy everything.

POE uses a bartering system, and because of that "trade" in POE sucks. You see we use items with intrinsic value for exchanging of goods. The more rare the "currency" the more value we place on it. The higher the quantity of said currency in the community the lower the value of said item.

This becomes problematic because bartering requires both people be present at the same time to make an exchange. Most items people barter for have little to no value (most trash uniques only sell for a few chaos orbs). At end game you do not want to stop farming to trade for a lowsy chaos or two. As such it is very common to whisper some one to buy something and never get a reply. For the few you do whisper who reply they are often doing something and tell you to wait, such as Lab. The buyer is impatient though and often never waits.

This makes bartering difficult unless you set time aside to make no progression on your character specifically to barter with others. Its a bad system that segregates the community based on where they live and when they are able to play. Some one in a different time zone might want my item when I am offline but they will never see it.



We want a real trade system. One where people can buy or sell items to people without being present. Unfortunately that is hard to do in a bartering system unless the items we use as currency are givin a set value or these items can be converted into a primary currency we can use for trade and then convert back down into the items we currently use as currency. You could say chaos orbs are the primary currency since most items are sold in chaos, but people will still try to buy in alternative forms of currency. Some items are so valuable you cant even trade for them in chaos orbs as you would require more than 1 trade to make the exchange, therefore you risk getting scammed. Some items are worth so little that even 1 chaos orb is over priced.

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Jgizle wrote:

The lag desync issue is usually an issue on the players side. GGG has stated several times that people have spammed support on this issue. They usually say to try moving your router closer to your pc or using a wired connection and almost all people have their issue fixed after this. Next is hardware. If both of these are not the issue then it is your location in relation to the server you play on. If you are in california playing on texas server it is going to take a while to send your data and receive data back. Thus high latency and you get lag or desync. They can fix that by adding more servers, provided they had the money to do so.

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Ðrakken wrote:

-Flasks
This is a matter of my personal taste and hence not in Ugly. I think flasks are silly. "Excuse me monsters, I am parched! Please pause hitting me for one moment while I sort through my portable refrigerator for the flavor of magic mountain dew that will allow me to get unfrozen! How am I moving my arms when I'm frozen you ask? Who cares!" I guess this contributes to gameplay with more buttons to mash, but I don't like being beholden to my jamba juice selection/charges just to play a build which would work without them if they didn't have to exist in the game. Other games have them or a variation of them, and my opinion of them in PoE is no different than in those cases: They're restrictive and silly.

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heedkid wrote:

@OP
Literally half of your uglys were killer-features which brought PoE player base when beta started. Flasks with unique mechanics: you can't just mash 1-5 all the time how it was in d2 era, all your flasks have meaning. After PoE i played many arpgs and your usual "fill inventory with bottles and drink" felt bland and hollow. So flasks PoE-style was one of reasons i started to play. (Of cource i'm not talking about current pathfinder issues)
Second, uniques. Oh boy. That truly what bought my attention back in the past: uniques are not your best in every slot. All you wear atm in d3 - uniques. Even in d2 and Median, Sacred, GD. Sets and uniques were killing itemization. In PoE instead of best choices you have to think why you need specific unique, which drawbacks it brings, how to build around it. Situation got worse with jewels system though, now you can see folks running around in just two rares, but that is unusual. Anyway, getting unique in your item build sometimes is a puzzle on its own and that's great, kept me interested in itemization for 4 years.

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SunL4D2 wrote:

Except ALL other ARPGs threat their Melee much better.

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Ðrakken wrote:

-One-shot mechanics + EXP Loss on Death.

I don't have a problem with either of these mechanics in isolation: players should be rewarded for learning and mitigating the mechanics of dangerous monsters, and punished when they do not; HOWEVER, in PoE's current state with both of these elements being so unforgiving, they need to be mutually exclusive. Right now this system cuts good builds off from content and progression entirely with exactly zero recourse for player correction. How my berserker, with 6.8k HP, 160+ res and 5k armor unbuffed/unflasked can waltz through T14 maps for hours and then in a T11 map in one hit from a monster offscreen while fully buffed with zero room for player correction destroy me and lose all of that progress, is utterly ridiculous. Whats worse is how painfully COMMON this sort of scenario is lvl 85+.