Make the game hard, not tedious

While I appreciate that one of the 'challenges' of the ARPG genre is to just sink a truckload of time into your character, I do feel that there is a significant gap between genuine challenging gameplay and simple added tediousness. Often suggestions to alleviate the tediousness are dismissed by other players as making things too easy, while a good game should try not to waste the players time and instead provide real challenges.

Therefore, I propose a number of suggestions, some to reduce tediousness, some to increase the challenge. Some of these suggestions go hand-in-hand (that is, they make more sense together than in isolation).

The Death Penalty
A subject that has been debated to death and then resurrected (with 15% XP penalty) many times over. The death penalty in its current incarnation does nothing more than make things more tedious. Died at high level? Plenty of XP grinding in the future for you to catch up. Deaths should be meaningful, yes, but not in a way that makes you feel that you just lost hours of progress.

There are various ways to fix this without outright removing the death penalty. You can give players that died an "XP debt", where half of the XP they earn is used to pay off the debt. Same net result as the current penalty, but psychologically a lot less demotivating. Alternatively, grant players a stacking buff that increases XP gains as they continue to kill stuff without dieing. Death resets the buff. Base XP gains lowered to make it so that the average player still has the same XP gains in the long run. This turns the death penalty into a reward for surviving, which is more motivating. Yet another way is to start with no penalty and increase it with every death in a short(ish) timeframe (say, 15 minutes). The incidental death isn't punished, but careless play or resurrection-zerging is.

Portal refills flasks, restores health
I'm not sure why it's thought to be a good idea for a game that is supposedly catered at more hardcore players to have such a straightforward get-out-of-jail-free card. As long as I have enough portal scrolls (or a portal gem and a hiding place to cast the spell without interruption), flask-resource-management is effectively negated. When I first started playing, I found this flask-resource-management to potentially be one of the more interesting parts of the actual combat. But with the portal-mechanic, I might as well just spam my flasks at the earliest opportunity and portal out when they're empty. Additionally, this mechanic greatly diminishes the value of flask-mods that increase number of charges or reduce number of charges spent per use.

A simple fix is to simply not restore flasks to full charges or regenerate HP/mana when you portal out. Of course, HP (with some regen gear) and mana will continue to replenish while in town, so you can just wait that out. Another fix is to disallow portals during boss-fights. As soon as you engage, only one of the two of you will leave the room alive. I like it that way, it makes the fights more meaningful.

Monsters don't reset
If I die or portal out, the monsters I was fighting don't heal back to full (unless they have a regeneration mod). So as long as I can make it back to the instance before it resets completely (which is easy to do by just keeping a portal open), I can restart the fight with my opponents already weakened. Especially on boss-fights, this seems a bit silly. If you die, you failed to beat the encounter and you should start over.

So my suggestion is that the health of monsters in an instance resets back to full as soon as there are no players alive inside the instance. This solution also fixes my previous point of using portals for free flasks-refills / heals. Coupled with a reduced or removed death penalty, this allows for bosses that can provide a challenge for the player, where they can try to beat the boss by good execution and dodging of attacks rather than by outgearing/outlevelling the enemy or cheesing it with portals and/or resurrections. With no death penalty, a boss fight turns into a proper gatekeeper to the next area. Failed the fight? Okay, try again from scratch. And you keep trying until you get it right, but without having to regrind your XP.

Lack of Waypoints, Instance resets & more portal cheesing
Instances reset after not having anyone in them for 8-15 minutes. Waypoints don't exist in every zone. Especially the "dungeon"-zones with several levels typically have they waypoint on one of the later levels. So if I die or if I have to log out before reaching the waypoint at level 2, I have to port to the previous waypoint in the zone outside, clear my way back to the entrance to level 1, then reclear level 1 to reach level 2, which at that point has reset itself.

This can be circumvented by keeping a portal open when you enter a new level, which allows you to take this portal back when you die. But if this mechanic is already in place, why not go the extra mile and make returning to your zone more easy. Add a special waypoint at every zone-entrance, but fully reset that zone when this special waypoint is used. This allows players to hop back to the zone they were in without having to reclear previous zones because they didn't quite make it to the next waypoint. This reset would serve as a detriment to dieing, but for players that have to log out it shouldn't matter, because the zone would've reset anyway upon their return. Such a mechanic makes the game feel less like a "race to the next waypoint or lose all progress" for players without a lot of time to play per session.

Respecs & the Passive Tree
The passive tree is huge. And that's good. There are many interesting keystones and paths to connect them, allowing for a wide variety of builds. The problem is that such a huge tree can be rather intimidating to a new player. In addition, when you start the game, you have no idea what is viable and what is not. HP stacking is the primary path to success at the moment, but who knew this from the start?

In the discussion on respecs, you primarily hear people representing the extremes of the spectrum: no respecs at all or easy access to respecs at will. Personally, I do like that your spec defines your character and is not something you can change to whatever is the flavour of the month. However, what you learn in the early game does not at all prepare you for how things are further down the road. Your awesome melee-glasscannon-build that allows you to cruise through normal will run into a wall soon enough.

An often heard reponse to this issue is "just reroll a new character", but this, to me, seems like a tedious and outdated mechanic. Similarly, the use of Orbs of Regret and the bunch of respec points earned along the way does not really provide a viable alternative, since Regrets are rare enough that it is often faster to just relevel a new character than to farm for a full respec. Offering players somewhat easier access to fix their early mistakes, seems like a good idea.

For example, after completing Normal, you could offer the player a single full respec, but if it hasn't been used before completing Cruel, it is lost (You can shift the gain and loss moments to tweak things, but you get the general idea). This allows players to fix their mistakes, but still ties a character to a single spec when it matters, in the mid- to lategame.

Alternatively, buffings Orbs of Regret to provide 3 (or 5) respec points per Orb makes grinding out a full respec a more viable alternative. It's still not going to be something that you can do every week, but it does allow people with significant time invested into their character to keep it viable in the lategame.

Conclusion
I hope that with these examples I have made the difference between challenging gameplay and tedious gameplay clear. In many discussions on the forums, especially the hardcore players (as in the mindset/attitude, not the league) tend to consider the two to be equal and any suggestion to reduce tediousness is dismissed as an attempt to make the game easier.

In the end, a f2p game like PoE depends on players sticking around for it to be profitable. Simply saying "if you don't like tedious feature X, go play alternative game Y" is a quick way to chase away a lot of players and potential supporters. And a lower number of players is not only bad for GGG, it also means a less interesting and less active economy ingame.

f2p games like League of Legends aren't the successes that they are because of a small, hardcore group of players, but because of a large, casual fanbase that drops a few coins for a cosmetic MT every now and then. The trick is to keep the difficulty of the game without chasing away the majority of the players. You do that by removing tedious mechanics that have little to no place in a modern game.



edit: Added section on waypoints

I couldn't of summed up my small complaints with this game better than you did here. Great job pointing out some of the annoyances that really do affect game play -- such as irritating way points and finding out in the 2nd difficulty that your character is useless. Well said for sure :D

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You can give players that died an "XP debt", where half of the XP they earn is used to pay off the debt. Same net result as the current penalty, but psychologically a lot less demotivating.

I disagree, that sounds more demotivating to me. Rack up 10 deaths and now the next level and a half goes at half speed? Lots of deaths would make people give up their character...

Or maybe you mean it can't stack? Well that's bad too, deaths would barely matter since you can progress through once you stop dying. The system is fine really, anyone having a problem with it should try to not die.

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Alternatively, grant players a stacking buff that increases XP gains as they continue to kill stuff without dieing. Death resets the buff. Base XP gains lowered to make it so that the average player still has the same XP gains in the long run.

So basically the exact same as your other idea, just phrased a different way. Half exp on death is the same as half all exp but doubled if you don't die.

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I'm not sure why it's thought to be a good idea for a game that is supposedly catered at more hardcore players to have such a straightforward get-out-of-jail-free card.

This is a gripe I have with the game too. The best solution I think should be whenever you enter an area from town, you can't use any portals for 60 seconds. You can escape once, but when you come back you have to "commit" and rely on your own skill to survive, which sounds much better. Portals shouldn't be disallowed completely, D3 did that and it made hardcore very boring since you had to overlevel a ton for every boss just in case you couldn't handle it.

In any case, fixing this means most bosses would have to be nerfed; right now they have extremely high damage to account for the fact that player constantly go back to town to get flasks and hp refilled.

EDIT: after sleeping on this I have taken a complete 180 on my stance. Portal mechanics are fine as they are. Restricting their use just makes the game more tedious without increasing the difficulty. For example, disallowing use of portals for 60 seconds means standing on the waypoint for 60 seconds in case the first monster you see is an extra fast substantially increased damage bonus crit snake. It would also mean running away from Merveil for 60 seconds because you are out of flask charges.

Speaking of flask charges, you say being able to constantly refill them is a problem. But IMO not being able to is even more of a problem because then everyone would be forced to get life leech on their skills or have high life regeneration in order to complete the game. Being able to refill flasks actually helps build diversity. What is important is that the game is still difficult in between portal trips, and GGG has definitely succeeded there. See this video by Kripparian; constant portal trips still could not stop two out of four people from dying to merciless vaal.

Then again, all of this applies to the main game. Once you start running maps then you get your wish. Players can't portal out willy-nilly since you can only enter a map six times. So if you want the game to be more unforgiving in that regard, just get your character to end game maps and enjoy I guess.

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health of monsters in an instance resets back to full as soon as there are no players alive inside the instance.

Bad idea, since it hurts solo players but not groups. Solo play is already harder, don't need to screw them over even more.

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This can be circumvented by keeping a portal open when you enter a new level, which allows you to take this portal back when you die. But if this mechanic is already in place, why not go the extra mile and make returning to your zone more easy.

You said it yourself: there's already a mechanic in place to prevent resets. Why should GGG spend time adding something unnecessary? Are you not aware that their programmer is heavily overloaded with work already?

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For example, after completing Normal, you could offer the player a single full respec

Bad because it can be abused. You can make a fast, safe leveling build, and then respec into the unique build you want, rather than having to stick to your unique build from the start. Also, if rolling a new character is "tedious and outdated" then this is not the game for you.

I agree with just about everything you bring up. I have about 7 lvl 40 characters that just aren't capable of doing really well. I try to avoid guides and figure it out for myself, but at this point I have almost stopped playing. It's just annoying how some of the game mechanics work now. I have a pure defensive marauder sword n board with all defensive passives and he still gets destroyed by physical damage. I will admit I don't have what many would consider standard characters but whats the point of the passive skill trees current setup if you can't do wildly varying builds. It should be more effective in many directions and less like a puzzle with few solutions.

I applaud the thoughtful post. While i do not agree with all the suggestions I would like to underline the death penalty issue.
An rpg game, all of which are built on the concept of character leveling, that functionally caps character leveling at artificially low levels through high death taxes (or any means) will destroy the enjoyability and longevity of that game.
Please fix this issue.
thanks

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I agree with just about everything you bring up. I have about 7 lvl 40 characters that just aren't capable of doing really well. I try to avoid guides and figure it out for myself, but at this point I have almost stopped playing. It's just annoying how some of the game mechanics work now. I have a pure defensive marauder sword n board with all defensive passives and he still gets destroyed by physical damage. I will admit I don't have what many would consider standard characters but whats the point of the passive skill trees current setup if you can't do wildly varying builds. It should be more effective in many directions and less like a puzzle with few solutions.

This game is hardly a puzzle it has more build diversity than almost every other MMO I know of. Also if your defensive mara was getting destroyed in close range you either had low armour/low life/ or weren't using endurance charges.

In diablo 2 you could tp, go to akara/ormus whatever, get full hp/mana/pots and go back to battle ( all this in a few seconds ), yet the game was a HUGE succes.

Just to point this out: Flask management is still mandatory in maps as you can only ever zone in 6 times.

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Rannasha wrote:

While I appreciate that one of the 'challenges' of the ARPG genre is to just sink a truckload of time into your character, I do feel that there is a significant gap between genuine challenging gameplay and simple added tediousness. Often suggestions to alleviate the tediousness are dismissed by other players as making things too easy, while a good game should try not to waste the players time and instead provide real challenges.

Therefore, I propose a number of suggestions, some to reduce tediousness, some to increase the challenge. Some of these suggestions go hand-in-hand (that is, they make more sense together than in isolation).

I will show you that you don't get the point of this game at all... At last about some points:

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Rannasha wrote:

The Death Penalty
A subject that has been debated to death and then resurrected (with 15% XP penalty) many times over. The death penalty in its current incarnation does nothing more than make things more tedious. Died at high level? Plenty of XP grinding in the future for you to catch up. Deaths should be meaningful, yes, but not in a way that makes you feel that you just lost hours of progress.

There are various ways to fix this without outright removing the death penalty. You can give players that died an "XP debt", where half of the XP they earn is used to pay off the debt. Same net result as the current penalty, but psychologically a lot less demotivating. Alternatively, grant players a stacking buff that increases XP gains as they continue to kill stuff without dieing. Death resets the buff. Base XP gains lowered to make it so that the average player still has the same XP gains in the long run. This turns the death penalty into a reward for surviving, which is more motivating. Yet another way is to start with no penalty and increase it with every death in a short(ish) timeframe (say, 15 minutes). The incidental death isn't punished, but careless play or resurrection-zerging is.

It's just important that their is a penality like losing exp. Old school gamers love those kind of penalities. Why? Because you have to be damn careful if you don't want to lose EXP! If you wouldn't lose EXP, you would go to lvl 70 areas with lvl 65 and if you die like 1000 times, you wouldn't care at all, because you don't lose something. It prevents that lvl 30 noobs join parties with lvl 40+.

I'm happy that their are penalities, this way people have to think about their equipment, they have to think about their build and they need to think about wether they can beat a dungeon or not with their current strength/skills. Without the penality they would just use the "error and try" method and that is lame...

And a game shouldn't waste the time of players? Don't make me laugh, it is a game with all it's challanges and GGG made it for oldschool gamers who love to grind and use their heads. You can save ALOT of time in this game, if you use your head once in a while. The problem is not the game and it's mechanics, it's the gamers who don't understand this game. If you think long enough about your build and equipment and skills, it's quite easy to figure out what you can handle ingame and what not. Bost most people think they are lvl 30 and can easily fight in lvl 31 and lvl 32 area. But in fact, they should have 3-4 more levels then the area they try to beat. Most gamers here are just ignorant about those facts and are crying in this forum "plx make it easier, make this and that stronger, make enemies weaker, no penality please, give me free locked items only for me please please please"...

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Rannasha wrote:

Respecs & the Passive Tree
The passive tree is huge. And that's good. There are many interesting keystones and paths to connect them, allowing for a wide variety of builds. The problem is that such a huge tree can be rather intimidating to a new player. In addition, when you start the game, you have no idea what is viable and what is not. HP stacking is the primary path to success at the moment, but who knew this from the start?

In the discussion on respecs, you primarily hear people representing the extremes of the spectrum: no respecs at all or easy access to respecs at will. Personally, I do like that your spec defines your character and is not something you can change to whatever is the flavour of the month. However, what you learn in the early game does not at all prepare you for how things are further down the road. Your awesome melee-glasscannon-build that allows you to cruise through normal will run into a wall soon enough.

An often heard reponse to this issue is "just reroll a new character", but this, to me, seems like a tedious and outdated mechanic. Similarly, the use of Orbs of Regret and the bunch of respec points earned along the way does not really provide a viable alternative, since Regrets are rare enough that it is often faster to just relevel a new character than to farm for a full respec. Offering players somewhat easier access to fix their early mistakes, seems like a good idea.

For example, after completing Normal, you could offer the player a single full respec, but if it hasn't been used before completing Cruel, it is lost (You can shift the gain and loss moments to tweak things, but you get the general idea). This allows players to fix their mistakes, but still ties a character to a single spec when it matters, in the mid- to lategame.

Alternatively, buffings Orbs of Regret to provide 3 (or 5) respec points per Orb makes grinding out a full respec a more viable alternative. It's still not going to be something that you can do every week, but it does allow people with significant time invested into their character to keep it viable in the lategame.

I just can't agree with this. I already saw so many builds that say "You can't do the first 40 levels by yourself, so have some people who level you". With your suggestion, those people could make a killing machine until lvl 40, get a free full respec and then can switch to the build that wouldn't be so easy to level to lvl 40 normally... Especially summoner builds are often based on "weak early game, strong end game" and with this method, summoners would have an easy early and end game... And summoners wouldn't be the only one.

Cruel difficulty will really show you right at the first missions that your build is viable or not. You will be likle lvl 35 when reaching that difficulty. That means, you have like 40 skillpoints used to that point. If you haven't respeced, you already have some point to respec and maybe get some resistance/life. That at least gives you some survivability. If those points are not enough, get 4-5 orbs of regret. Then you can respec 1/4 of all your skillpoints. If even this does not help, then you really should start a new character, because you totally messed up.

Btw.: Even glass cannon builds can be viable in cruel, but they need better equipments then people who went for survivability. So instead of played cruel, you could farm at pietys place and get some rares for your glass cannon build and then go back to cruel. In the mean time you may even get some more orb of regrets or other orbs you can trade for orb of regrets... Players really have enough options to make their way through cruel, but most people are just damn fucking lazy and want everything for free that doesn't consume time...

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Rannasha wrote:

Conclusion
I hope that with these examples I have made the difference between challenging gameplay and tedious gameplay clear. In many discussions on the forums, especially the hardcore players (as in the mindset/attitude, not the league) tend to consider the two to be equal and any suggestion to reduce tediousness is dismissed as an attempt to make the game easier.

In the end, a f2p game like PoE depends on players sticking around for it to be profitable. Simply saying "if you don't like tedious feature X, go play alternative game Y" is a quick way to chase away a lot of players and potential supporters. And a lower number of players is not only bad for GGG, it also means a less interesting and less active economy ingame.

f2p games like League of Legends aren't the successes that they are because of a small, hardcore group of players, but because of a large, casual fanbase that drops a few coins for a cosmetic MT every now and then. The trick is to keep the difficulty of the game without chasing away the majority of the players. You do that by removing tedious mechanics that have little to no place in a modern game.

Dude, you don't need MUCH players. You just need players who are willing to pay for a game. 70.000 active players who spend like 100$ a year is more worth then 70.000.000 players who don't pay anything. Just an example. Look at how many gold/diamond supporters are lurking around the forum. And I guess it is not the last time they paid for the game.

GGG said they wanted to create a game that they wanted to play themselves. And their name is speaking for itself: Grind Gear Games. In this game you have to do alot of grinding and that's why I said that even a glass cannon build can still go back to normal difficulty and grind some equipment. There are tons of options to make an unviable build viable, but it's time consuming sometimes (depends on what you want to do and how much you messed up).

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Rannasha wrote:

Respecs & the Passive Tree
The passive tree is huge. And that's good. There are many interesting keystones and paths to connect them, allowing for a wide variety of builds. The problem is that such a huge tree can be rather intimidating to a new player. In addition, when you start the game, you have no idea what is viable and what is not. HP stacking is the primary path to success at the moment, but who knew this from the start?

In the discussion on respecs, you primarily hear people representing the extremes of the spectrum: no respecs at all or easy access to respecs at will. Personally, I do like that your spec defines your character and is not something you can change to whatever is the flavour of the month. However, what you learn in the early game does not at all prepare you for how things are further down the road. Your awesome melee-glasscannon-build that allows you to cruise through normal will run into a wall soon enough.

An often heard reponse to this issue is "just reroll a new character", but this, to me, seems like a tedious and outdated mechanic. Similarly, the use of Orbs of Regret and the bunch of respec points earned along the way does not really provide a viable alternative, since Regrets are rare enough that it is often faster to just relevel a new character than to farm for a full respec. Offering players somewhat easier access to fix their early mistakes, seems like a good idea.

For example, after completing Normal, you could offer the player a single full respec, but if it hasn't been used before completing Cruel, it is lost (You can shift the gain and loss moments to tweak things, but you get the general idea). This allows players to fix their mistakes, but still ties a character to a single spec when it matters, in the mid- to lategame.

Hi, I'd just like to say that I almost completely cosign this. Or maybe, say, allow this for only your first 1-3 characters created, so that new players aren't discouraged by their build failing mid-way and needing to start again. Generally speaking, if your build isn't going to cut the mustard, you're going to notice this between Lunaris normal (if your build is total crap) and the start of Merciless, usually somewhere in Cruel Act 2 or Act 3, so your placement seems about right. I had to retire a level 45 Marauder because I, not having a clue what I was doing, just sort of scrolled around the tree closest to where I started and said, "hey, that looks good". If I could respec that char completely, I would. Moot point by now, seeing as I've now got a different Marauder at about the same level, but still... This would make the game starting out a lot more friendly towards newer players. I like a few of the other suggestions (changing the way XP loss on death is treated, for example), but this one really struck me as incredibly sensible.