Being a mediocre player gets you nowhere in POE

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

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ChefoSLR wrote:

10% xp is not a big deal... till the later levels. Of course it's not the same punishment as hardcore. But claiming its meaningless is just hardcore player elitism.

You know what used to be a good punishment? Armor repairs in Diablo 3 on release. If you die, you lose durability on your gear. Die enough times and you need to dump serious cash to use your items again. If you were particularly bad at the game you could end up broke and without functioning gear. Now D3 was and still is a shallow turd of an ARPG, but the one thing that game nailed was the unforgiving difficulty that ARPGs were known for. You're building a super powerful hero to slay equally powerful monsters; that's what made gearing up feel rewarding. You were expected to play well and build well, otherwise you died and there were real consequences for your fuck up (of course, all the difficulty was later removed to the applause of casuals).

To that end, a 10% XP loss is nothing, and no amount of calling me an elitist will change that fact. It's only a penalty if you're gunning for 100; a pointless endeavor since you can beat all the content at level 90 and probably lower. Old-school gamers would look at the PoE softcore death penalty and think "wait that's it? What's the point then?" And softcore players would, reasonably, look at lag/freeze/crash deaths in HC and think "wait that's it? That's bullshit". And both sides would be right. Ideally there would be a middle difficulty where death is permissible, but still heavily punished - maybe gear breaking or losing an entire level? And if that's still not to your liking, you can continue playing softcore. I don't mind softcore players and I'm not trashing their choice of game mode, but to claim that a 10% XP loss is in any way a serious punishment is some 1984 "facts aren't facts" delusion. It's basically there because the devs can't have zero penalties for dying.

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ChefoSLR wrote:

To that end, a 10% XP loss is nothing, and no amount of calling me an elitist will change that fact. It's only a penalty if you're gunning for 100; a pointless endeavor since you can beat all the content at level 90 and probably lower.

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

But really, it's nice to be reminded that there are gamers still around that were born before the original starcraft release.

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鬼殺し wrote:

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

In all other ARPGs, killing bosses is the most encouraged "job". In PoE, oneshotting trash mobs is encouraged, and bosses are often skipped (not worth farming), if you dont kill them in few seconds.

You've hit onto a serious insight here.

A game that encourages oneshotting 'trash' mobs (I fucking hate that term so much!) as the best way to progress rather than focussing down bosses for the loot will almost inevitably make players ask why bosses aren't dying as quickly as trash mobs if the reward for killing them is the same or less than mowing down hordes of mooks.

This all goes back to GGG's very early insistence that boss runs not be a thing. It's almost as if they wanted to make normal mobs the focus, the challenge, but then failed to follow through on that by making every encounter engaging (which is ironic because other, far more successful games like the Souls series did just that!). Of all the things for GGG to carry forward from the heyday of D2, you'd think that boss runs would be very high on the list, and shit like wisdom/portal scrolls and a fucking terrible trade system would be discarded in the light of how far games in general have come since then.

So we have this interesting situation where a decision made early on (no boss runs) and a failure to follow through with it (make engaging normal mobs as interesting/rewarding as bosses) has left the game in a worse state than the much older, much less evolved game that inspired it.

I can't for the life of me think why GGG wanted to nix boss runs. There are smart ways to overturn the apple cart, and then there's the old 'if it aint broke, don't fix it' adage. They seriously overestimated their ability to make clearing areas and normal mobs interesting and rewarding...and underestimated players' tendency towards the path of least resistance. It's not that GGG didn't make interesting or challenging bosses...they just failed to make them proportionately rewarding. And it's too late now because PoE players have been conditioned, for years, to expect fast-as-fuck gameplay. They won't be satisfied with bosses that don't, in some way, just feel like beefed up trash.

Compound this with the fact that what boss runs do exist in PoE (for example, Titziri) are long slogs through wave after wave of extraneous crap, and whatever exclusive shit she drops can be more easily traded for anyway.

...And there's another thing that GGG decided early on that has, I think, probably hurt the game in the long run. No bound items at all. This accords with their 'economy uber alles' philosophy but it takes any motivation out of killing difficult things for yourself. I get that bound items are not common to ARPGs but they are the easiest way to make boss encounters alluring and rewarding in a personal sense. Far more so, I'd say, than 'kill this boss 500 times for a challenge achievement', which only affects league players and turns what should be a rewarding experience into a soul-numbing, will-crushing grind.

...Then again, that's probably most of PoE in a nutshell.

It didn't have to be.