PoE needs time-gating to improve player retention

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Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

Nawh, GGG needs to make the game actually hard, not random.

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Garr0t wrote:

Wayyy back in closed beta, I put forward a concept that seems to embody the nature of PoE:
"Random rewards are good for gaming longevity because of the Skinner box stimulation on behaviour." In order for the rare rewards to retain that jackpot feeling of hitting 'the lucky one', the frequency of occurrence must be very, very low.

As a counterpoint, in order to provide some player agency to reduce the negative impact of a perceived loss of control due to the RNG aspects of the game, GGG has, over time, introduced various mechanics like master crafting, and now beast crafts. To mitigate any sort of repercussions on the valuable nature of getting a 'lucky' drop, anything that has a pre-determined outcome should be costly and or moderate (i.e. you shouldn't be able to roll a T1 affix at low cost).

Of course, the most pre-determined way of progression is to buy what you need on the open market. I believe this is the 'safety net' that GGG lays underneath all of its design decisions. 'If it's super rare to drop and almost impossible to craft, that's okay, because there are enough players killing enough things/doing enough crafting that statistically, there should be enough supply of 'X' to meet the demands of the economy.' Of course, 'X' should not be freely/readily available, because that would destroy the concept of scarcity and/or exclusivity, diminishing the 'jackpot' feeling that makes gaming so addictive.

Fast forward seven years to today, and PoE has Katamari'd into this massive ball of RNG mechanic on RNG mechanic. Unfortunately, in their attempts to mitigate the multiple layers of RNG, they instead decided to make power more accessible in order to give players more 'pulls on the slot machine'. This had the direct effect of dramatically accelerating player progression through the game and diminishing the value/significance of what are still extremely rare items because everyone is capable of a high level of loot efficiency.

The end effect? A drastic decrease in play longevity because everyone is achieving nominal success that much sooner, and the only goals left to shoot for turn into the T0 holy grails for whatever build they were working on or desired to play.

The only correct way of fixing this is to remove power (i.e. nerfing things to the ground). But there is no way that is ever going to happen because we know the rioting and rebellion that would be sure to follow.

So what do we end up with? GGG throwing on yet another unfleshed/buggy mechanic to flaunt as a new 'feature' to entice/lure the die-hard addicts back for another few weeks of activity, before the dopamine rush dies again.

Rinse and repeat, and you now have GGG's business model.

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Aim_Deep wrote:

What jackpot when you can trade for everything? I've never found anything I went wow over as opposed to market so never had this feeling. Dont even pick up yellows anymore and use neversinks strictest filter.

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oldmunchi wrote:

they could try to create an infinite difficulty like have map tiers go up to ~ and the monsters health/dmg scale up and the exp scales up so people are level 9999 and each map tier that you go up has more and more op gear ad infinitum.

the diminished exp returns that already exist would ensure that people couldnt buy a carry in a lvl 5847467 map while level 90 because they wouldnt get any exp from it.

they couldnt buy gear to op on the market because it would require lvl 19457859845 and theyre only 3729.