Supporting GGG and PoE, but not necessarily Bestiary Leaguespansion

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Seymowr wrote:

Give me some shit that when i step in will pop some crazy shit that will get me swarmed by mobs, than i can kill them pretty fast and move to next pack, not a fucking pokemon/monster hunter minigame with crafting ********, sight
Next

That this ISN'T just a case of killing huge crowds with one click is probably why some people thought I'd appreciate this. As a concept, I do. The execution, no puns intended, is reprehensible.

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BossOfThisGym wrote:

Standard has been dead for years mate, the coffin isn't even there to put nails in.

Even without league stuff, if everyone from the leagues went into void league... standard will still be dead. It's economy is busted, everyone there is either a complete noob or has done everything and has GG endgame gear. What's the point?


I don't even understand people who don't eventually make the transition to HC after enough hours, I can't even fathom people who main standard league.


The type of casual player who would be fine in standard isn't going to bother even coming to the forums, let alone post anything. Don't call yourself casual when you got 1k+ hours and hundreds of forums post ppl. there is a different word for that.

True, that's 'filthy casual'. :P

Dead or not, this comes down to GGG's official stance. Which I'm fairly sure they will never publicly take.

Without being dismissive or berating anyone the TL;DR of this thread is that some people actually care about the lore.

Not something I'd every really gave thought to. Personally I play games for mechanics, not story.

All this hate for Standard, I sympathize with Shags. I'm over 70 y.o. and I like to take my time and play the way I enjoy instead of the zoom-zoom that's considerably easier for younger people. I have never sold items, don't give a damn, although I've bought several. Fun iisn't an exclusive for younger, faster people only, everyone will find their reflexes decaying given enough time.

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Without being dismissive or berating anyone the TL;DR of this thread is that some people actually care about the lore.

Not something I'd every really gave thought to. Personally I play games for mechanics, not story.

It's not exactly the lore. It's more about characterisation. I am sure GGG could tap the lore to justify all of this, as frostbite tried to do, but there's little evidence to me that going from Fall of Oriath, in which we faced down nascent gods and stole some of their power, or Harbinger, in which we faced terrifying enigmas from the future using overpowered versions of our own skills...or even Abyss, where we faced horrors from below and finally explored their (theoretically) lightless warrens to take out their big bads....to a glorified mixture of pokemon, monster hunter and low level cultist behaviour is a step forward. This is punching down, plain and simple.

Of course, there's no real 'up' from facing gods and strange beings from the future (which I'm fairly convinced were super-evolved Exile descendants), but that doesn't mean we have to resort to...this. Sure, leagues are just excuse after excuse to kill lots of shit and get lots of shit, but I'd like to believe GGG could come up with better than capture-study-then-kill.

So no, not really about the lore. More about feeling slightly insulted by GGG that they'd think this was a good way to do things. On the other hand, they did make a virtually Auschwitzian set of decorations, made their most interesting villain a literal Femmenazi and modelled the insignia of their totally-not-theofascist slave-operated empire around a familiar red, white and black motif -- all just used as semiotic shortcuts to 'REALLY BAD GUYS HERE'...so I doubt anyone's going to accuse GGG of being subtle or creative when it comes to getting their point across.

It's just a little different when that's then imposed on the player character. All of my characters have their own paths to power, and so far none of them included genuine and prolonged cruelty to animals, corrupted or otherwise.

As the girlfriend said when I tried to explain the Bestiary mechanic to her, 'this sounds a little psycho.'

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raincoast wrote:

All this hate for Standard, I sympathize with Shags. I'm over 70 y.o. and I like to take my time and play the way I enjoy instead of the zoom-zoom that's considerably easier for younger people. I have never sold items, don't give a damn, although I've bought several. Fun iisn't an exclusive for younger, faster people only, everyone will find their reflexes decaying given enough time.

That's awesome. I don't hate standard, if you're referring to anything I said. I genuinely feel sorry for it. GGG had the perfect opportunity to keep it relevant with the leaguestones and they let that one slide.

And I don't see Standard vs League as the same argument as you're making here at all. Standard at the high end, if anything, is more zoom-zoom than any league, by virtue of how many power items end up there. You can do everything you've described on Standard on league, and probably easier since league tends to give solo players and SSFers more power early on.

So with all due respect to your argument and your venerable nature, you're talking about something different to what I'm trying to express with this thread.

Yes of course, I didn't mean it to reflect on you or derail the conversation, it just piled up on me seeing endless posts about "noobs" or "dumpster" league. Good items are hard-won for me and I'm having a great time. Apologies to you if I said anything hurtful.

I think it's cool to cage and slaughter stuff. So I'm feeling the exact opposite towards the bestiary expansion. It's probably gonna be the first league I've played since Perandus.

I used to work in a butcher plant, and my job was to grab baby goats, slit their throat and put them on a meat hook conveyor. If someone actually made this into a game, awesome! That's the kinda league I was hoping for to get me back into the game! I'm stoked for this new league, can't wait!

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Without being dismissive or berating anyone the TL;DR of this thread is that some people actually care about the lore.

Not something I'd every really gave thought to. Personally I play games for mechanics, not story.

It's not exactly the lore. It's more about characterisation.

Yeah definitely, more character and theme than lore and story. It's "who am I to this world, what am I actually doing?"

I mean Super Mario Bros could have been a game with the exact same mechanics, but making the player a white supremacist stomping on minorities because he thinks the world is run by lizard-people, and it would have had a very different reception and legacy. By which I don't mean to insult Knowledged3 there or anyone else who is here for mechanics: POE is an exceptionally systems-focused game so I'm sure most of us are here mainly for that side of things. Just, you know, the mere fact that devs spend all the resources they do creating art and designing worlds for their games at all, rather than having us play as textureless collision boxes interacting with different-coloured textureless collision boxes, should remind that the "dressing" does affect people's experience.

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raincoast wrote:

Yes of course, I didn't mean it to reflect on you or derail the conversation, it just piled up on me seeing endless posts about "noobs" or "dumpster" league. Good items are hard-won for me and I'm having a great time. Apologies to you if I said anything hurtful.

Nah mate, not hurtful. Just wanted to make sure we're on the same page here.

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Okay so I get the feeling (read: I sort of know) that the sacrifice bit is optional. That's lovely, but I think anything that brings you power in PoE isn't really considered optional. At the risk of my own derail, this recalls the argument regarding whether or not the Labyrinth is optional. Technically, yes. In practice? I very rarely see base class characters running around after level 40 these days. The power gain is just too good, even if people hate the means of gaining it. So while you can opt not to sacrifice your captured animals, if there's a power gain in it, people are going to do it. And I am obviously not saying they'd do that in real life -- come on, I'm 40 years old and I've seen *that* argument come and go for decades now. If this were the sort of game where something like animal sacrifice was a thing from the start (in terms of character behaviour), well and good. Then it's following its own internal rules. I apologise for using so many words to arrive at my point; I'm not even sure I ever will. I'm circling some very key, very core idea as to why this particular league's reasoning is grinding my gears, but I'm not quit at the point of crystallising my apprehension.

Or maybe I did and I didn't catch it. That happens too.

Maybe it's because this behaviour is regressive. It reminds me of what the Karui did in response to the Nightmare. Sacrificing their own. It's not savage so much as primitive. And the Exile to me always represented a wild sort of evolution of what happens when a truly autonomous power-hungry being meets an untamed land like Wraeclast.