To GGG About Delve Mechanics: Your Playerbase Loves Math Not Critical Thinking

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Fruz wrote:

There are parts of the shaper fight that you need to know in advance and to be prepare, exactly like for Atziri or the elder, period.
That's a fact.

If you are not aware that the ground dot of the shapers are permanent, you can easily get the arena pretty much covered with those, and there is not more space to move around "properly".

I don't think anyone here was claiming GGG isn't one of the greatest advocated of 'learn by failing' design in contemporary gaming next to dark souls.

There's a clear difference in approach between, say, Vorici's missions where he says in advance you will fail if you kill a guard and the Shaper fight where you have to learn from doing that you can fail by poorly positioning the ball DoTs or not running away after the bullet hell phase. Both are tried and tested takes on game design, however, an encounter that doesn't tell you why you failed isn't an approach, it's a design error. And by making the EMP charge more prominent, GGG pretty much admits it was an error, and it's easy to tell if it was fixed or not, if I'm still unable to tell which critter did it despite actively looking out for it, then it most certainly isn't fixed.

On hive mind design, I think it's becoming a thing, and I'm not talking just about Charan's sword recipes which were designed to be a community effort. Randomness in boss behavior and properties is one of those things, a fight with Izzy in normal lab didn't teach you much about his cruel encounter unless he happens to have the same loadout. If a boss uses one out of X options it is assumed a player looked up what each of those x options does in advance to count himself fully prepared because he might not have encountered all of them until that point.

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raics wrote:

however, an encounter that doesn't tell you why you failed isn't an approach, it's a design error. And by making the EMP charge more prominent, GGG pretty much admits it was an error, and it's easy to tell if it was fixed or not, if I'm still unable to tell which critter did it despite actively looking out for it, then it most certainly isn't fixed.

Yes. +1 a million times. Thank you Raics for putting what I am desperately trying to explain to Fruz, in a couple sentences.

Also, they are going to actually fix it and not just admit to it - which to me shows the strength of GGG.
Just imagine what they can do with this strength, plus the creativity and ambition Charan mentioned, minus shooting themselves in the foot by telling some IGN guy they will release exactly at 9/1 9:00:59.

And no - Fruz - this is not a childish "I win" moment for me. It's a "heck yes the game I love so much is getting even better" moment, and I can say it without.... You know... that thing Pewzor said a lot better than I could. Read signature.
Yes, you certainly are.
To that end, I will provide feedback of things I encounter. Maybe even "tantrum" when you're getting on my nerves. But we both want the same.

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MrFancyPantsu wrote:

This post, especially the title, is ridiculous. Denying the whole playerbase the fabled "critical thinking" trait because OP doesn't fully understand what most of the complaints are about is just silly.

That said, some of the minor points OP made are agreeable.

Generation internet, "oh me let me wank my shitty ego in my own imaginary world to make it better. also i wrote something so it must be true". :,,,,,)

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鬼殺し wrote:

<insert overly long blablah as usual.>

It's great that the devs are responding to feedback on Delve so far and changing things.

<more long and useless blablah>

They gotta change the all fucking league though. The "concept" is good. Everything else is trash. But hey the smart ones knew it would happen, they alternate between shit leagues and good leagues.

I give that one 2 weeks at best. Major, significant, drastic, changes will be needed to avoid that.

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raics wrote:

I don't think anyone here was claiming GGG isn't one of the greatest advocated of 'learn by failing' design in contemporary gaming next to dark souls

Well, many of the complains here boil down to that at the end.

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raics wrote:

however, an encounter that doesn't tell you why you failed isn't an approach, it's a design error.

To you, the whole game must be a giant game design failure then.

For example, it's not League of Legends, you don't have a "death-recap" screen ( because it's not a pvp game, so you have all the time you need to experiment if you want or almost ), so you can never be sure of what type of damage killed you.
You can pretty much only guess from the effect, the expected dmg output of what killed you, and your character.
This applies for Atziri, Shaper, Elder or Delves.

When Atziri reflects your full spell with this once clone ( or Izzy's lieutenant, or the Trio's enraged blade guy ) to your face, where the hell does the game tell you where you failed ?

PoE NEVER tells you directly why you died.
Sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes you need to think or even investigate to find it out. Which promotes not rushing brainlessely, which promotes progressing carefully in unknown territory.

And pretending that Shaper's encounter is perfect while Elder's encounter is shit is .... stupid, I'm sorry.
It's stupid because they are similar in many ways. The patterns are just different.
Atziri has one obscure move that is interesting in itself because you can figure it out from failing it and thinking it through, but overall it's pretty much the same : dodge what you have to dodge, find openings to hit the boss when you can and some adds phases.



About the Cavestalker, doing low level delves would show you about them, they do the EMP during the delves as : before the encounter, when it's less crowded and more obvious to see.
But no, nobody gives a crap anymore about trying to pay attention to stuff nowadays, it's al "pew pew pew" and everything is dead I had my fun.
I wish the density was lower at low-depth so that people would have even more chances to pay attention and figure out what the monsters are by themselves. But even if it was the case, I expect most people to barely see a different and still keep rolling their face on their keyboards until everything on the screen is dead.

It WAS there, people just became used to play too dumb to pay attention to the environment and notice it, at least for many if not most, and it's really sad. So yeah, given he uproar, they make it easier ... but it was already there. And Ziz saying that he finds it quite sad to see it nerfed in high level HC delve speaks volumes.
It also speaks volumes about all the HC-wanabee @"delve is not HC friendly !! this is a scandal !!"

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Mischief67 wrote:

I give that one 2 weeks at best. Major, significant, drastic, changes will be needed to avoid that.

rofl, another "the game is dead at this rate !!" post ...
It's fine, if you find is so trash, no one forces you.
Let's see how the game dies .... or more like, let's see how QQing people leave while the drastic majority of the playerbase keep playing the game ( not saying that giving feedback is a bad thing obviously, just in case ).

PS : @JohnKeys : I really could not give a shit about what that Mr "Pewzor" said, your signature is already more than enough to dismiss that completely.
People just throwing "you're a whiteknight duh!" to anything that they can't provide actual arguments about are .... a bit pathetic, and I have no interest.

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Fruz wrote:

PoE NEVER tells you directly why you died.

Of course it does, the game gets a little coy with mechanics that help you kill yourself but it's a case of 'if it isn't one it's the other', if nothing hit you and you died, then it was probably one of the many forms of reflect.

Which could get a bit awkward with effects such as the original lightning thorns, which is why GGG was phasing out less transparent crap like that, it just isn't good design. I suppose normal reflect mobs now also do flat damage with their orb counters like thorns did, but you get a visual cue of 'hit an enemy - get balled' and it has a cooldown so it won't just suddenly barrage you, there's time to see what's happening. The new volatiles also behave in a way that's obvious enough after you see it in action a few times and the audio/visual cues pretty much scream 'danger' so you're unlikely to eat it even the first time you see the effect.

Now, to be fair here, I said that EMP was a design fail when it's in fact an execution fail, we have a cue but it isn't nearly visible enough. The unclear radius of flares is also an execution fail but their wonky throwing mechanic is a design fail, because they intended them to work that way.

I like that they aren't going back on their design this time, though, what they did back in the bestiary wold be the same as lining the main crawler path with rewards and hidden doors so you don't even have to go into the darkness.

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raics wrote:

if nothing hit you and you died, then it was probably one of the many forms of reflect.

Come on lol, you are saying that a hard to read animation is absolutely terrible in our case, but "then it was probably reflect" on the other hand is a good design and <=> telling you what killed you ?

You can't always see, especially during the split phase : if you throw projectiles and the mirror clone is on the other side of the room, you won't see it.
And you will instandly die.
Same for unid reflect map. Either you tried with a low level skill ... or might be the moment your launch your optimized high level move, your character is already dead. You can guess it's reflect in this case ... well, too late ! :/

Here, we know that darkness is something that kills you, and it's easy enough to see that it's a damage over time that gets more intense the longer you stay in it. We know what it is from the start, and it's anything but instant, which makes it much, much more easy to deal with than reflect.

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raics wrote:

Now, to be fair here, I said that EMP was a design fail when it's in fact an execution fail, we have a cue but it isn't nearly visible enough. The unclear radius of flares is also an execution fail but their wonky throwing mechanic is a design fail, because they intended them to work that way.

The ton of effects really does not help about the EMP wind up animation.
I could agree with the fact that there is ( was ) an execution problem with it, but I think that the problem itself isn't the animation, it's the whole crapton of effect + the density of monsters too high, at least at low depths.

Flares .... idk, I guess design flaw/defect could fit there, yeah.

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raics wrote:

The new volatiles also behave in a way that's obvious enough after you see it in action a few times and the audio/visual cues pretty much scream 'danger' so you're unlikely to eat it even the first time you see the effect.

It has clues tho, very clear ones :
- unusual sound
- a big thing flying at your face at increased speed ( you need to experience "dodging" it once to understand how to deal with it though )

Yeah, it was a huge improvment compared to the previous iteration of volatiles.
But now ... we also have lightning mirages .... I guess not as bad as old volatiles but ffs ...

Right, mirages can be pretty awkward for anything that has to stand in close range, you know when to expect a volatile but mirages just keep spawning. I was having a bit of a hard time seeing them too when I played a ball lightning build last flashback.

They're obviously trying to get more transparent, give us something to analyze and adapt instead of relying on gut punches and it feels better, when I get hit by a volatile orb it's usually because I mistimed the dodge or positioned myself where I can't avoid it and in both cases it's on me. I suppose that tendency is also the reason why each step back resonates this hard in the community, we don't want to go back there.

There are elements and clues already in delves, as I said before, they are making some more obvious, that does not sound bad on its own, but it's sad in a way that so many people could not be bothered to even try looking for what was happening and raising the "this is BS !" flag before any thinking.

The duration nerf ... I'm not sure, that feels a bit unnecessary, now I don't light a flare at all anymore because I don't really need at all.
Well, when flares will be instant, maybe I will just in case though.

But as Charan pointed out, the time when players were trying to find out what was going on and what they did wrong is mostly gone, now's the time of blaming game Design completely instead ....
Quite typical of our time I think, and quite sad too, at least to me.

Well, the reason is twofold, you can't blame the players for not looking if the game doesn't condition them to because most things can be trivialized with bullshit dps/coverage, I'm examining things because it's a good habit to have. The other reason is that audio/visual cues are way too often drowned in the chaff flying left and right, so even when you look it's hard to see anything unless you isolate the monster and do some testing which might or might not be feasible. Delve is a good example of the latter, even if you're in the right mindset isolating a test case is fairly tricky because the player is under pressure.

Yea, I don't think there's anything in PoE I appreciate more at the moment than visually unobtrusive effects.