farming sulphate is aids

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adghar wrote:

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grepman wrote:

again, because people will just do whats more efficient, if you make delving strictly less efficient, then people wont do it when its not new. if you make it more efficient and remove gating, no one will play maps. the only way it works if neither have gating or both have it. you cant XOR it. and 'challenge reasons' isnt really good enough for the game nowadays.

lol. This is not correct. You might argue for it being correct for streamers/racers, but that's always been true of every game. The core of doing whatever is more efficient is economics & opportunity cost, which depends on people's marginal benefit function for every single choice. Sure, if you're offerred $10 vs. $12, everyone will take the $12 and almost nobody will take the $10. The problem with that is that Delve and Maps are not 1-dimensional figures. They are radically different forms of content with radically different forms of combat, pace, rewards, graphics, challenge, progression, mechanical minigames, etc.

And that allows each mode to provide its own value to people, variable over time, with one taking precedence over the other for different people at different times. Some people will only play Maps, some people will only play Delve, most would play a mix of both, because variety provides its own value. Value for the average player is not only measured in exalts & chaos. whether or not they admit to it. The mode of action is integrally important to a player's decision to play content, because otherwise, it's not play, it's work, and work is precisely what many people try to avoid in games.

I REALLY hope GGG hasn't forgotten the intrinsic value of experiencing content vs. the extrinsic value of currency, as you seem to have.

I havent forgotten intrinsic value of experiencing content. since experiencing content is the only reason I still play this game, I cannot forget it.

I too, play content. the difference is I dont think gating is bad per se, I would say I somewhat LIKE the gating part- I havent bought a single map since 2013 and completed all maps all the way to the top just like it was intended to and I like the experience. and I definitely can make a few arguments why it content in poe SHOULD be gated.


one cant justify something with 'fun', which is what snorkle is doing. his whole argument is 'I dont like gating because its not fun; therefore things shouldnt be gated'. this is a pointless argument because fun is subjective

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

its not even true for most streamers. Most of the big hc streamers now play solo self found, how is that the most xp or wealth per hour? Its not, ssfhc is the least efficient way to play this game, it offers the least potential loot and xp of any mode, and yet the most challenge and, potentially, fun for them. Thats why they play it, challenge and fun.

wow, you're actually moving the goal posts

people play ssfhc because its the way to compete solo and dont have bitchbois who feed you materials you need to progress further. they want to level the playing field against groups who do the gating part separately for the person who actually accesses the content.

I dont get why I have to spell it out to you.

gating isnt as effective when people can trade, party and delegate routines;

what you want, on other hand, is abolishment of routines.

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how? by tuning the gating system to allow people to spend enough time in the delves to facilitate those criteria....?

what you're asking is to balance a gated system (maps) vs a non-gated system (delve) in terms of progression. I dont think you realize how difficult it is, because in mapping system the highest content you need to grind and depend on RNG, where you certainly dont need to do that for delve and given right build and NO gating, you can GUARANTEE progression.

again, I offered a gated compromise about grinding sulphite in delves- why dont you like it ? you dont have to leave delve, but youre still gated by sulphite in your ability to go deep

is it because you simply think gating is bad for gaming, but you cant say why ?
I dont think so, and you've yet to present any coherent argument as to why its bad besides it not being fun for you.

well, fuck it, its fun for me. then what ?
my fun is not the right type of fun ?

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then take it from people who do know this subject that it proves your previous point incorrect.

again, we're talking about PoE, where the mapping system has been here since 2012, always gated behind RNG map drops. what works in other games, doesnt necessarily work in poe. what is gated in D3 nowadays ? enlighten me.

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non one asked for bestiary.

I did.

you can qualify with something as fun and not fun, and yet you will most likely dismiss my version of fun as masochistic or some other nonsense.

why ?

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Theres absolutely no meaning or point in what youve just said here.

you said theyre afraid to put out content that is just 'fun'.
this content was fun for me and some other people. it was a change of gameplay and one of the most interesting leagues Ive played in recently

and I dont say its shit- you got it wrong. it was FANTASTIC content, to me. the point it wasn't received well. so your point about 'fun' is ambiguous.

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I just dont think you get it, thats fine, but Im not gonna spend forever trying to explain things to you.

I dont get what ? that you consider gating bad in games in general, and I dont ?
I get that.
You also struggle to explain why its bad and 'waste of time' besides the whole 'its not fun', when fun is purely subjective - so you arent making an argument at all.

grinding in poe to get resources on low level to gain access to higher level, is a routine. so many games have so many routines that either stretch out content or the effort needs to conquer the content, either via rng or routines that could easily be automated but are left to player to do. RTS games are notorious for latter and arpg/rougelikes are famous for former.

simple question, snorkle

endgame alternative to maps, that is still gated by rng and grind.

yes/no ?

if yes, then delve exists and with something like sulfite available as rng drop/reward in delves (non-deterministically) you get what you want

if no, then its not maps youre tired of, its gating... so you want strictly an alternative system without gating.
and this is the issue, because you hold gating as some evil axiom of what should not be done in games.

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Fhark wrote:

It the content is to rewarding (which it is) then half the rewards and cap them at a certain delve level. Also why does delve need all rewards, lab enchants, shaper/elder items,essences,reliquary keys etc.
Then make it more dangerous then maps and cut ivl 83 mobs experience by a 1/3rd and remove the sulphite limit.
The price for that lvl of experience is an alc in mapping and we can run t15 maps infinitly now for 6c a pop at zana lvl 7.
Its easy to make delve not the place for high exp gains and loot drops ggg just had to make it grindy and oh wowow lootsplosion filled.

this is a problem though- look, me you and snorkle actually agree that its cool to have an alternative endgame just for challenge- I have no issues with no rewards- if anything, todays poe wants to give too much rewards. fuck all that. I have so much chaos in drops I dont know what to do with em.

the issue is GGG put themselves in a corner where they have to satisfy most fanbases of the game. so they HAVE to make it grindy and they have to make it worthwile to run it. sure, there will be people running it for challenge. just like people competed for lab leaderboards - but that number was so small GGG didnt want a repeat of that.

they dont want one or the other alternatives to be better than other (and in their balancing, they will inevitably do so) so that streamer x tells people 'yeah just run this all day' because it gives wrong impression

Im not defending them, and Im not saying its the right thing, its awful to me that the game is in the state it is now and I play it mostly on autopilot just to experience new content. with that said, either they have to do precise balancing (something they are not known for) or gate and intertwine both endgames to force people to play both.

think about it- there are people pushing for 100 in new league, and ladder pushers have no one playing delve (or maps) on twitch. GGG does not want that. they want to showcase the 'either or' and not one that is strictly better.

I wish these things didnt matter, but they do. I wish GGG balanced better, but they don't. Gating puts all people on level playing field because RNG aint got no face or bias. Non gating opens a pandoras box, a can of worms or a can of expired mountain dew from a rpgcodex poster.

Moreover, it stretches the content so after a month you still have some carrots on a stick on the horizon, and not devour those carrots in the first week without looking.

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grepman wrote:

sure, there will be people running it for challenge. just like people competed for lab leaderboards - but that number was so small GGG didnt want a repeat of that.

Then have they perhaps considered the possibility that Labs are not fun? I mean even out of non-"competitive" content that exists in the game now, the trials and labs are the only bit of content in PoE so far that I actively disenjoy and therefore never do more than once. The thought of doing them without a reward would never even cross my mind. This doesn't mean I wouldn't do challenging content without any rewards, it just means that labs are bad gameplay design.

The same simply can't be said for the mines. Sure, the darkness mechanic is a bit obnoxious and annoying/unnecessary, but as long as I stick to the path I can mostly ignore it. But to use a quick example, imagine what the mines would be like if the crawler didn't auto-speed up to your movement speed. That one simple difference would turn it from content I would happily do all long (if I didn't have to grind for sulphite) to content I would never enter unless I had to, like the labyrinth.

My point is, it's all a question of making the gameplay itself fun, over everything else. Fun and challenging gameplay provides its own reward. Frustrating and challenging gameplay does not, except for the minority of people that also competed in lab leaderboards. Making delve challenging can work, it would just take minimally more effort than the minimal amount of "slap together a bunch of grind and sprinkle in rewards to keep the hamsters fed" that modern gameplay design consists of.

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Gating puts all people on level playing field because RNG aint got no face or bias.

Except when the gating mechanism is "amount of time played", which IMHO is significantly worse than gating behind RNG in a game with trading. (Gating behind RNG in a game without trading is basically the same thing as gating behind time played)

Gating behind time played puts everybody with a semblance of sanity at a disadvantage compared to botters and people who play the game from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep for a living.

If you want to gate something to make it feel elusive/special, gate behind player ability. (Then again, that requires actually being able to design difficult content, which requires being able to balance)

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grepman wrote:

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I just dont think you get it, thats fine, but Im not gonna spend forever trying to explain things to you.

I dont get what ? that you consider gating bad in games in general, and I dont ?
I get that.

no no, I dont consider gating in games bad, at all.

Ok grepman, Ill take the time to try and get you up to speed on what it is Im actually saying here because I do like you and I value what you think, and you seem intent on going there so ok, lets go there.

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grepman wrote:

I offered a gated compromise about grinding sulphite in delves- why dont you like it ? you dont have to leave delve, but youre still gated by sulphite in your ability to go deep

Ok, I didnt say I didnt like this, it wouldnt be how I went about it, but its an idea.

I dont want an abolishment of routines, I dont want an abolishment of gating. I want endgame content I can play, a lot, not a little, a lot. I can map a lot, if I want to map I dont need to go spend an hour grinding some other content to get access to maps, I just go and map. I want more content like that, but that isnt maps. Thats the whole point of alternate endgame activities to maps.

Theres a lot of high reward gated content in this game that should be high reward, should be gated, should be this special thing you sometimes get to do but most of the time you dont. Most of the time you play the run of the mill long term big hour endgame grinding content, currently maps, and then you sometimes get the special stuff.

Great.

What we need in this game is more run of the mill long term big hour endgame grinding content. We dont need more gated special content, we have tons of that, we dont need big rewards, theres too many rewards already Rewards are killing this games longevity, they are killing player retention. Not enough forms of run of the mill long term big hour endgame grinding content is killing this games longevity. We need stuff that boosts this longevity.



Heres what I put in my suggestions thread:

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The problem in a nutshell, this should be content we can play, an alternative to mapping when, for whatever reason, people dont want to map... but its not, the amount of time you get from the sulphate you mine and the way you can see that scaling down with levels, its gonna kill this entire concept of an alternate endgame activity. Its relegating it to another atziri style gated thing.

I think its important that people have to come out of the mine and farm some sulphate, it adds something to the experience, gives it a sense of value. but its way too much, if people want to delve, at any level, then when they sit down to a day or a week of delving MOST if their time should be delving, not mining sulphate in maps. The whole point of alternate endgame activities is that people dont want to play maps, they want to play an alternative. If maps becomes more than 20% of the time spent trying to delve, at any level of depth, then this entire idea has failed and delve is garbage.



a guy in that thread hit on, imo, an inspired idea. I wont post his full ideas but this part in particular is genius imo as a way in to finding a really good solution here...

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NovaHeartss wrote:

Instead of giving a ''fixed ammount'' of sulphite every vain you find.

Give it percentage based.

Okn so how does this work, whats the effect?

Well, lets say it takes somewhere between 4 and 8 sulphate patches to completely fill your capacity, depending on how lucky you get. Delve can now start off in an early league as a very restricted activity, your capacity for holding sulphate is low, takes a while to fill it up and then it doesnt stretch very far down there before you run dry. So say an average of 6 piles of sulph needed, roughly 1 in every 4 maps, you get to have a small delve for every 24 maps you run on avergae.

But, as the league goes on, the more you delve the more azur you farm, the more you build your capacity. So if you put time into the delves by say week 2 you start to be able to do some good delving and it really opens up as a mechanic, you can probably spend as long delving as you do mapping, regardless of delve level.

Then by 6-8 weeks into the league you have potentially built up your capacity to the point where you run your 24 maps and can then delve for 15+ hours.

This means long term players on standard, where rationing the rewards of delve are not important, can work it up over 6 months, a year, to have a huge capacity, and they can spend 30+ hours delving off the back of this 24 map sulphate farming session.



Son this adds something to the leagues. Theres a big problem with the leagues starting to feel a bit corpselike after only a few weeks, its been a big issue for years now. It would be really cool to have a mechanic like this that takes a few weeks to even get fully going right? Its impact on the economy is shifted away from the first 2 weeks where it matters too. And then for the standard players who love long term goals, this is something they can build over 6 months, a year, 2 years, REALLY long term goals, investments.

This is what the game needs. Not another once in a while shot at content variety before we are thrown back into yet another 1000 hours of maps.

Im not against sulphate, I think we need sulphate and I think we should be leaving the mine to get it. Im not against gating. Im against the current sulphate gating mechanism for this particular content. So most of what you are saying is aimed at a presumption about my stance which is incorrect.


Routines are great. This contents place in these routines should be similar to maps. It can be be gated by maps, but shouldnt require constantly spending more time mapping than delving, and it shouldnt provide gratuitous rewards that are bigger than maps. It should be an alternative to maps, another thing we can do that fills that sort of day to day this is what we play, stock endgame grind time slot.

It shouldnt be 20 currency boxes omg look at all this loot look at all this xp this is so op omg omg bullshit that then gets gated to a point where its not acceptable for this to be a big time burner the way maps are. We have those, and they have failed to add life to the game.


The game dies quicker every league, GGG keeps giving us more op rewards and its meaning players cap out their gear earlier and earlier. Its cancerous, the rewards are way too much already. The content is way too little, maps are just not holding people. Look at the leagues, GGG admit theres a problem with player retention, we can all see it, when the whole game comes down to "well, its just maps again for 3 months" people leave in a matter of weeks because its boring, its so boring.


Theres content you gate and content you just let people play. We need more content that we let people play, the game is dying for that content, literally.





Theres so many ideas you can add. You can have upgrades to your delving tied to specific maps the way shapers orbs are, so a player has to reach a certain tier of map and obtain this reward in order to realistically be able to spend a lot of time in a corresponding xp level of delve.

You could make it so that they have to get a quest item from every map of a given tier in order to upgrade their sulphate capacity to be able to accomidate delving at that level.

We could go on all day, but have it be that, have it be that you unlock it and then you can play it with fairly minimal sulphate grinding. I grind sulphate for an hour in maps and bang, I go delving for 10 hours, limited to a monster level that I have justified by reaching already in maps so that it is tied to this existing gate progression system.

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"

non one asked for bestiary.

I did.

you can qualify with something as fun and not fun, and yet you will most likely dismiss my version of fun as masochistic or some other nonsense.

why ?

you asked for a zoo and the ability to catch monsters in nets to unlock a whole new form of item crafting?

I never saw anyone ask for that.

Ive seen an awful lot of people asking for an endless dungeon to give them something to do instead of mapping, Ive seen that asked for dozens of times, Ive seen people asking for that for 5 years straight.

Ive never seen calls for a zoo, Ive never seen serious calls for content that gives us 20 boxes full of currency endlessly all day.

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grepman wrote:

they dont want one or the other alternatives to be better than other (and in their balancing, they will inevitably do so) so that streamer x tells people 'yeah just run this all day' because it gives wrong impression

we both acknowledge that one has to be better than the other, they cannot strike a perfect balance here.

Heres my take, delve has challenge that mapping doesnt (at least it should due to supposedly infinite scaling), it offers leaderboards, it offers a sense of exploration and interest, it offers a completely different feel of play the way breachstones do, and it offers something new after 5 years of endless mapping, its a breath of fresh air.

So let mapping win the xp per hour and currency per hour efficiency war. One will always end up more rewarding than the other, perfect balance is impossible, let mapping win that balance and let delve justify its existence on its own merits listed above.


The streamers Im watching do these crazy high tier delves, they love it, they say its the best content in the game. Theyre not talking about the xp/currency rewards, theyre talking about the challenge, the goals, the playstyle, the team effort when theyre playing in their groups in there, the competition.

Iy doesnt all come down to xp and currency, there can still be a game here, played because its fun. An arcade blaster, not a slot machine we just feed with coins till it pays out. I dont feel like the resigned, defeatist view that everyone is a speed junkie efficiency whore so we cant have a good fun game holds up, I think those people are actually the minority.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

So let mapping win the xp per hour and currency per hour efficiency war. One will always end up more rewarding than the other, perfect balance is impossible, let mapping win that balance and let delve justify its existence on its own merits listed above.

Seems good enough to me.

Delves have fossil crafting, leave them that.
I find stupid that elder/shaper items can drop in delves, leave that in maps.
It's all tradable so it does not push anybody to do anything if they don't want to either.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

I dont feel like the resigned, defeatist view that everyone is a speed junkie efficiency whore so we cant have a good fun game holds up, I think those people are actually the minority.

I think it holds to some extent, and I think that the majority of people is going for the path of least resistance ( at least in PoE ).
Still, I agree that it can't keep GGG from doing fun content ( I find Delves fun, but I haven't pushed deep yet and I can understand where you're coming from with your complaint ).

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

Iy doesnt all come down to xp and currency, there can still be a game here, played because its fun. An arcade blaster, not a slot machine we just feed with coins till it pays out. I dont feel like the resigned, defeatist view that everyone is a speed junkie efficiency whore so we cant have a good fun game holds up, I think those people are actually the minority.

The concept of fun in PoE is very simple - loot. Do you think that 30%, 1/3rd of the playerbase, finds Arc and Blade Vortex fun? What if other skills were meta, do you think those 30% would go towards them? Why? Because they like loot and these 2 skills offer the best path to this loot. The game was made like this, where speed running is king when it comes to gathering loot, period. So those "speed junkie efficiency whores" are the norm, not the minority.

Meaning that if the price for entering delve was removed 2 things would happen
1. If the rewards are still great a big chunk of people will go and farm there leaving the maps, the thing GGG spent so much trying to balance, a wasteland or
2. The delve's reward is so miniscule a big chunk of the people doing it now will stop delving and instead go back to mapping for the better loot.

Both of these alternatives are not good because they alienate one half of the content. Meanwhile the thing we have now, where you need to play maps to go to delve OR go to delve as a bonus and a change of pace from mapping strictly involves both.

I think removing the cost from delving will reduce the end game possibilities instead of enriching them.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

I think removing the cost from delving will reduce the end game possibilities instead of enriching them.

Which is not what he proposed.