Map diversity sucks hard without trading

I wrote a thread about some serious issues with self found play a while back. One of them is what made me quit playing last league on day three. This is that issue, and it's still super awful.

Unlocking new maps to progress in the Atlas is neat. You play the map, kill the boss, and can now have the next map drop. If you played the right version of the map, you also get the Atlas bonus. I like this, but it does have the obvious problem of shutting down progression for builds that can't handle certain bosses.

The problem is getting the map to drop so you can run it in the first damn place. For example, Armoury unlocks Arena, but trades in for Atoll. This means that you have to play your Armoury maps in order to unlock Arena. I've done this countless times already, yet I have not had a single Arena map drop. Quay into Underground River is another of these, where I've probably killed dozens of that annoying boss without getting the right map to drop. I have a fat stack of tier 11s from running them, at least, for what little that's worth.

Eventually either things drop or I save up enough maps to trade in if there's a route to even do that in the first place. I just have to grind maps I don't want to run in the first place over and over and over again until it happens. It took me forever to finally get Tropical Island to drop. That's my favorite map. I've been running them every chance I get, hoping for a Reef. Of course I don't have a Reef. Now I'm saving up to trade in three of a map I want to run every time it drops just to finally unlock another map I want to play.

This sucks. Hard.

I don't like having to buy content. It feels shitty, especially since I'm a self found player. When I transition at some point out of self found late in a league, it's so I can do neat things with my builds that I couldn't with my drops. It's not so I can run a damn tier 9 map I can't get to drop on my own.

Please fix this problem.

You can make it so a boss drops the next map after you kill it a certain number of times if that map isn't unlocked yet (every 3 or so). You can allow maps adjacent to unlocked maps to drop anywhere instead of just in adjacent maps, or at least as long as you achieved the bonus. There are so many more options that don't result in self found players getting fucked, not being able to run the maps they want to run, and having to run maps they don't want to run.

I'm in red maps now. The problem is much worse here due to the lower drop rates of high tier maps. This is ruining the game for me. Zana helped a little earlier. I think she unlocked 2-3 maps. She's not doing shit anymore, though. Now the game just sucks. As a self found player, I can no longer progress through the Atlas without insane amounts of grinding.

This is the regular content of the game, GGG. You don't need to lock this away behind absurd grinding walls like Uber Atziri or unique drop impossibility like The Vinktar Square.

Let me play the damn maps. Please.

And to people out there who really want to rage against self found players, fixing this would also make mapping less annoying for all of you. Don't argue against improvement simply because it also helps people who do something you hate.

Yes, if you don't trade for maps going through Atlas is a pain. Last league I played my atlas without trading and I ended up at 86 total (full ssf this league). Unique map drops were non existent and some maps that you can not upgrade to the normal way (vendor recipe) were super painful to get (I think Primordial pool was one, not sure though) I used Zana a lot for missing maps and farmed Encroaching Darkness like a mad man. I like the idea of Atlas but the reality of it completely sucks. I dislike to be tied to certain paths now, seemed cool on paper but does not work well.

Solo Self Found is not supported by GGG , so you're complaining about the fact that you handicapped yourself on purpose which is amazing lol .

"

BestMageKR wrote:

Solo Self Found is not supported by GGG , so you're complaining about the fact that you handicapped yourself on purpose which is amazing lol .

And steamrolling content by sharing gear from a preset group of people that alienate the rest of the population isn't supported either, but I see no nerfs to it...

I understand that some people have an intense hatred for self found play and self found players. I can't fix them or even educate them on why this is an asinine thing to do, since any attempts at rational discussion with them always end in failure. Luckily, this is a feedback thread for GGG, so you crapping all over this and other self found threads only serves as a bump.

Thanks for the continued bumps on all self found threads, guys!

"

Jennik wrote:

I understand that some people have an intense hatred for self found play and self found players. I can't fix them or even educate them on why this is an asinine thing to do, since any attempts at rational discussion with them always end in failure. Luckily, this is a feedback thread for GGG, so you crapping all over this and other self found threads only serves as a bump.

Thanks for the continued bumps on all self found threads, guys!

Well Trading with Zana and other players are two options that are present in the game. I don't see a need for another one. Zana essentially provides every map up to red ones (I think her pool ends at 11). So even without a lvl8 Zana you get access to all yellow and white maps from her.

I'm not really sure why they should waste time fixing problems they already fixed just because some players don't want to use the fix they implemented.

Your Zana argument is laughably off base. If Zana always had all of those maps in stock, you'd have a point. She doesn't. You could do dailies for a month without a specific map being available from her.

It was a shitty band-aid that I complained about the day they made the change. It is no different now than then, and is still extremely shitty as a "fix" for the problem.

Also, dude, self found players use vendors. What the hell are you even thinking with that?

"Oh, they don't trade. They must not "trade" with vendors."

Jesus.

I didn't say that, but this fix does it for me, considering how many maps she offers I was able to fill all gaps short of a single T10 (Arsenal) which I still had open and had to buy from another player. But exspecially the middle from T5 to T9 she essentailly offers all the maps, because of how many of those maps she sells. I even was able to complete most of them by just buying the unidentified maps she offered.

I finally got my third Tropical Island, which I hoped would trade in for a Reef. Of fucking course it trades for Coves.

This is some truly annoying shit, GGG. I know there are apologists for literally any shitty aspect of the game, but I'm sure you understand that some guy like him would come along and defend a knife in the eye as long as you were the ones thrusting it. He's also apparently talking about standard over the course of a significant amount of time, not a week or two into a league, at which point my map diversity, the very point of this thread, has already been ruined.

I don't want to grind a map I hate dozens of times just to get a lucky drop or have Zana unlock a tier 8 map ages after I'll ever want to run it. That's the problem I'm talking about. There is no benefit in having these maps locked away from players for excessive amounts of time. It's pure downside. Why can't I play maps I want to play when it's appropriate to play them like I used to be able to? That was fucking great, and you ruined it.

This sucks. Please fix it.

Edit: And Reef finally dropped on my first Trop run of the three. It's ridiculous that I should be well into running red maps on this character (which I've still done quite a bit of), and instead I'm happy about finally being able to run one of favorite yellow maps. What an astoundingly shitty system.

The atlas system is one of the "problems" which killed a lot of my motivation to play at all.

Last League i had 2-3 chars over 80, and after countless of low-mid lvl maps done, i had to buy 8 maps ranging from tier 3-7, because i COULD NOT get needed maps to drop, even though i had done every map that dropped which lead to the ones i needed.

It is not about the price of the maps, but the freedom of the game, which ggg strips away with a system like this. Same goes for unique maps. Entire atlas was a massive letdown for me. They even rekt Zana.

This is the only way ggg found that makes players actually run the shit maps, bravo!