POE not new player friendly

"

Sidad wrote:

@aithosrds

I have no reson to "blindly defend" GGG. I'm active on this forum for quite some time and if you search my comments you'll see for yourself how I "blindly defend" GGG. Especially when it comes to QoL changes. We used to have topic on forum where pretty much ALL QoL changes request to GGG where made. A lot of these requests were fulfilled by GGG. Go search forum if you don't believe me.

Other than that I think that you are partially right. I say partially because they want changes but changes done in a right way. Listen to Cris last pre-Christmas interview when he answers to some streamers questions and in one instance talks about trade for example. From what I understand new QoL implementations must not hurt game play GGG envisioned for PoE or create new problems like trade or AH. On other hand PoE will never tell you what crafting recipes are since discovering recipes is part of game play. Or possible chance orb outcomes. Just that idea itself sounds silly to me.
I agree with you about skill tree planer but I know as well that free skill build planer available on forum Is semi-supported by ggg so its not big issue for me but it would definitely be nice to have that future in game.

And the problem GGG has that you mentioned is simply ridiculous, imo. GGG follow's their game philosophy from beginning and that's what makes this game popular and somewhat hated at same time.

I don't disagree with your message, I just disagree about GGG's intent. Take the vendor recipes as an example: there is no "discovery" involved there. What you do is hear about it and go to the wiki where there is a detailed explanation/formula for every single vendor recipe. That isn't adding anything meaningful to the gameplay experience, it's just adding additional (unnecessary) barriers to what experienced players consider common knowledge.

If I were going to implement it (and I am a software developer) I would do what I said, put in a system where you could view what possible recipes an item works with. In addition, if I wanted to add new recipes and keep them a secret you would still be able to do that, you just don't add them to the system until they are "discovered" and become common knowledge.

See, I'm not saying to remove the element of discovery or the fun part of the experience... I'm saying that there shouldn't be additional steps for things that are obvious to anyone who's been playing a while because 99.9% of players aren't going to "discover" vendor recipes.

I also think you misunderstand what I mean when I say "possible chance outcomes", I don't mean probability numbers... I just mean that if I hover over a 2H Shadow Axe and press a hotkey (or whatever) it would show me "Unique versions: Reaper's Pursuit" and let me see a tooltip for the unique. Or if there aren't any unique versions it would say "Unique versions: none" so I would know without opening the wiki and going through 5 screens whether or not I should chance or alc something while I'm leveling.

It's something that in no way influences the gameplay experience, it just gives me a piece of common information that would otherwise take me a couple minutes on an external site to track down and that's the sort of thing that for a new player is really annoying. I'm a pretty hardcore (and experienced) gamer so it's not the end of the world and it won't keep me from playing a game, but there are plenty of people out there that those little things would put them off a game for good.

I'm not going to get too deep into the whole trade/ah thing because it's a can of worms and it's not really what I'm talking about, but I'll say this: GGG could have easily implemented an in game trade interface that operates exactly like poetrade when they added the premium tabs. It would have been virtually no work at all because it's already built into the API, so it would have literally just been a UI and extremely basic code. They didn't do it because ultimately they are going to put in a marketplace or an AH and they just haven't decided the best way to go about doing it without pissing off half the player-base who for some reason thinks it would be a negative thing (which I don't get because poetrade is literally a buy-it-now style third party AH/marketplace and the only difference is that you have to actually invite and manually trade).

Oh, and the problem I mentioned isn't ridiculous. Have you read what they have said about their growing pains? They have readily acknowledged that they have had problems because they didn't have the expertise on their team to do things properly and so they have had to fight their own code base. I'm guessing you're not a software developer yourself, because you'd understand that once you have what we call "legacy" code: you're fucked if it's not optimally designed. Why do you think it's taken them so long to update the engine to support newer versions of directx?

This stuff isn't easy, and again: I don't blame GGG because every new game studio has growing pains. You don't get to be a popular game without doing it wrong about a hundred times first. Their talent pool is a problem though (one they have also acknowledged), because they can't hire people outside NZ very easily. I'm not saying they don't have any talent, obviously they do, it's just that they need MORE and hiring is already extremely difficult even without adding in severe restrictions on the candidate pool.

If you want an example: move to the middle of nowhere North Dakota and open a game studio where you only hire people in state. Let me know how that works out for you... (spoiler: it won't).

Well long post that I'm not going to answer since we pretty much agree on most things. Other than that I found something interesting:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/460845
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/661493/page/1
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/765473/page/1

There is a lot of QoL recommendations listed there. Some are implemented. Maybe give GGG topic refresh? New ideas? etc.

Isn't that better than arguing here? Maybe GGG takes note this time. You never know.

"

aithosrds wrote:

For example, vendor recipes. Why on earth aren't those in the game? There is no good excuse, it would be absolutely trivial to include them in any number of ways such as: by hitting a box/button and putting an item in the trade window and displaying any possible recipes. Or as a straight menu in the UI, or even as a hot key when hovering an item that would display a tooltip.

Vendor recipes are hardly critical to know for a new player. The most important ones don't even become relevant until around merciless. I don't think a list of recipes is necessary, but perhaps they could be made more discoverable by adding some kind of visual announcement when a vendor recipe is completed in the trade window. Players could then experiment with adding or removing items if they want to know what exactly is involved in the recipe.

"

aithosrds wrote:

Another example, why can't we hover items and see what possible outcomes there are for chance orbs? I shouldn't have to go to the wiki, go to the armor page, select the slot, click on the type then click on the item after locating it to see if there is a unique version. We are talking extremely simple stuff here that would tremendously increase QoL for very little time/effort.

Some reasons:
- GGG doesn't want to reveal new uniques before players find them
- They don't want to reveal which uniques are chanceable (since not all of them are)
- "The game said I could chance this but it doesn't work" whines from players who don't understand probabilities

"

aithosrds wrote:

Another thing, why don't we have an in-game skill tree planner? It's on their damn website, why can't I plot out my levels and save it so that when I level it highlights my path?

This would actually be nice. As a first step maybe the web-based planner could get a button by which you can export the plan to the game so it's shown as an overlay on a specific character's skill tree.

"

aithosrds wrote:

For that matter why don't we have a build planner that lets us select what skills, supports, gear types and so forth to prioritize? Even better would be an adaptable loot filter based on a planned build instead of having to spend an absurd amount of time customizing them for each one. (I know that's a much more complex feature, just tossing it out there).

There are plenty of other things I could mention, simple stuff shown on the travel/world map like "hey, this zone is focused on X element".

Now this is getting to the handholding territory. You're asking for the game to tell you what you should do. The game is very much designed to not tell you what you should do, to promote discovery and to avoid steering players a certain way.

"

aithosrds wrote:

Speaking of maps, how about a map that isn't pseudo-3D and instead make a nice clean and easy to read 2D one?

Not sure what you're talking about here. Are you asking them to change the main game view from perspective 3D, to what exactly? Isometric 3D (like Diablo 1 and 2)? Top-down 2D (like a lot of console RPGs from the 8- and 16-bit eras)?

"

aithosrds wrote:

It just makes it more accessible and therefore less frustrating to new players. I shouldn't have to go to my second monitor several dozen times per session to trade, to look up recipes, to look up affixes, to check gear bases, etc. All those things should be part of the core game and having a "viable" 3rd party option isn't an excuse

Vendor recipes you learn fairly quickly if you're serious about the game. If you're not serious you probably won't care anyway.

Regarding affixes and base items, I have two suggestions for item tooltips that would go a long way:

- Display the required level of the base item even for unidentified items. This would serve as a reminder of whether it's a top tier item or not. I know the types I use but sometimes I don't remember if the top chainmail was saintly or holy or which type of scale was best.

- Display the ranges for each property (including the implicit) when holding alt. Perhaps even highlight mods that are of the best possible tier for the item level. A small uncertainty here is how to handle stacked mods like %ES and hybrid ES on the same item.

"

databeaver wrote:

"

aithosrds wrote:

Speaking of maps, how about a map that isn't pseudo-3D and instead make a nice clean and easy to read 2D one?

Not sure what you're talking about here. Are you asking them to change the main game view from perspective 3D, to what exactly? Isometric 3D (like Diablo 1 and 2)? Top-down 2D (like a lot of console RPGs from the 8- and 16-bit eras)?

It's the minimap he's talking about. I agree it's kinda bad and I think devs said long ago it's just a placeholder in which case it long overstayed its welcome, but you get used to it after a while so no biggie.

"

raics wrote:

It's the minimap he's talking about. I agree it's kinda bad and I think devs said long ago it's just a placeholder in which case it long overstayed its welcome, but you get used to it after a while so no biggie.

Oh that. Yeah it's pretty crude. Could certainly be improved a lot.

"

databeaver wrote:

- Display the ranges for each property (including the implicit) when holding alt. Perhaps even highlight mods that are of the best possible tier for the item level. A small uncertainty here is how to handle stacked mods like %ES and hybrid ES on the same item.

I think it should be possible to unstack the mods when you press alt, that might solve the range display problem and it would be a very nice QoL feature regardless.

"

raics wrote:

I think it should be possible to unstack the mods when you press alt, that might solve the range display problem and it would be a very nice QoL feature regardless.

From a technical perspective it's not a problem. The game must know which affixes the item has so it can reroll them with a divine orb or block the appropriate affixes from master crafting. I was mostly thinking from a design perspective - is it intentional that players can't see the separate affixes? Or is that just a byproduct of avoiding the confusion from having two lines with the same mod?

If the information hiding is not intentional, it would actually be quite cool to display each affix separately and in the case of multi-mod affixes join them with a bracket on the left to show that they belong to the same affix. This would also help in gauging whether a corrupted map has eight affixes or not. Quite a few map affixes add multiple mods, some up to three, so it can be difficult to see the number of affixes at a glance.

"

databeaver wrote:

I was mostly thinking from a design perspective - is it intentional that players can't see the separate affixes? Or is that just a byproduct of avoiding the confusion from having two lines with the same mod?

Dunno, I assume it's the latter, there are scripts that can tell you which mods the item has, if there's a way for a determined player to see the information it's nothing more than an inconvenience.

"

raics wrote:

Dunno, I assume it's the latter, there are scripts that can tell you which mods the item has, if there's a way for a determined player to see the information it's nothing more than an inconvenience.

Aren't there cases that are ambiguous though? With some values it's impossible to tell between two adjacent tiers. And it's possible to have a 4-affix item with separate %ES and stun recovery and a 5-affix item with those two plus hybrid so that the numbers end up the same. The other two affixes would both need to be suffixes to mask the difference in master crafting.

It seems though that if masking affixes was intentional they'd have added more multi-mod affixes and not limited it to a few corner cases (albeit important corner cases, given how the hybrid mods are needed for the best possible items).

"

databeaver wrote:

Aren't there cases that are ambiguous though? With some values it's impossible to tell between two adjacent tiers.

Yes, that's why I don't think it's intentional and they want us to be able to deduce the mod composition on some items but not on others.