Path of Exile, Gameplay Criticism

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robmafia wrote:

also, i don't think the dev's try to make meta shifts, it seems more plausible that they're just bad at balance.

That's the kinder interpretation, but Chris and others have gone on record more than once talking about "shifting the meta."

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Khalixxa wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

What would make a piece of content challenging without the xp penalty on death ? where would be the risk ?
And if there is no risk, could you call it 'challenging' ? I don't think so ( not saying that any different kind of penalty would not work of course ).

This is a supplemental video linked in the description of the original one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3XIzHGUnVE

It's my take on the purpose of penalties, and it's relevant to your question.

I think "challenge" (in a video game) can be thought of as a "novel decision count". The more novel decisions someone has to make, the more challenge they experience. Play around with this definition and see if it jives with your own.

Challenge does increase as penalties for failure increase, but it has diminishing returns, as I reason in the video.

Good video! There must have been quite a bit of thinking behind it.

I don't fully agree with that notion of "setback" though, I guess it's partly because you're not considering consistency in the equation at all, which matters to me in any environment supposed to be immersive.
(Not that Deaths in SC are consistent in the case of PoE.)
Some dev might also have designed the penalties so that it does not 'break' the action, I can definitely see that being a thing too.


The penalty in PoE also serves the purpose of being a soft cap imho, could that be done with something else ? Maybe, I can't think of anything else that would work, but I definitely can't say that it's impossible.
And if it indeed serves such purpose, whatever you will implement, people complaining because they cannot progress anymore will still complain, if that is by design ( I'm really not speaking about you here ).

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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robmafia wrote:

also, i don't think the dev's try to make meta shifts, it seems more plausible that they're just bad at balance.

That's the kinder interpretation, but Chris and others have gone on record more than once talking about "shifting the meta."

I think that it's a bit of both honestly, they do want to shake the meta somewhat, but some balancing decisions' results are .... not (full) intended imho.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

It's all about affordances. And this game's affordances are utterly fucked.

Although you rightly have ascertained that the game has issues, you don't know why.

But I'm here to educate you and Charan, again.

The game is a direct result of Chris' saying to Blizzard that he can build a better Diablo 3 than Blizz can. If it isn't a direct progeny of the Diablo Experience, Chris feels D3 doesn't need it either, and so he didn't code it into Path of Exile.

The so-called design paradigms you think are part n' parcel of GGG's design philosophy simply do not exist.

Chris is an impediment to growth, an impediment to players' having fun, an impediment to daily impressions, QoQ growth and infiltration into the market - not an accidental or for reasons of happenstance, but because of active willful disregard for what PoE needs.

The game is perpetually stuck in 2006, and it will be stuck there as long as people with no consumer market-driven enterprise experience are making day-to-day decisions about resource allocation.

PoE makes it's money off of selling MTX and stash tabs (and maybe some other "investment" oppotunities, but those are impossible to prove), and so the resources allocated to the enterprise and not captured as personal gains are almost all allocated to MTX first, until fruition of a project, and the game and "playability" are dealt with with a limited budget, which means game and "playability" issues are dealt with an on ad hoc basis, which at the end of the day, leaves no resource allocation for many of those issues and they persist through many dev cycles.

From a consortium of persons engaged in design and the philosophy of design -

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Some affordances are less obvious, and many yet to be realized, but with objects in the real, physical world, there is a natural and direct relationship between the perceptible qualities of tangible things and what we can do with them.

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[However]... in human-computer interaction, we cannot rely on this natural relationship... the affordances found in screen-based interfaces [are] 'perceived', on the grounds that users form and develop notions of what they can do according to conventions, constraints, and visual, auditory, and sometimes haptic feedback.

It's obvious you don't know how to use the word, and moreover the game and it's issues I first mentioned a few pages pack, a deliberately obsequious Development team and persons divorced from an understanding of how games are played being decision-makers, are the issue here.

People whose _only_ experience with consumer-based market-driven enterprise is Poe/GGG is a bad, and by that I mean f'n atrocious, idea.

You both can hem and haw all you like, but unique impressions are down, and potential consumers are a dwindling resource.

Chris can (and will) run his company the only way he knows (see above), but don't piss on my lawn then tell me it's raining.

These issues are result of deliberate decision-making, and not the result of happenstance - if they were, they'd've been corrected years ago.

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鬼殺し wrote:

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Orca_Orcinus wrote:

But I'm here to educate you and Charan, again.

Aw, you shouldn't have. Really.

No really. You shouldn't have.

You're basing everything on a number of really bad assumptions and flat-out ignorance, but just as I really couldn't care less what you think, I'm sure the feeling's mutual.

Carry on though. I'm still happy you caused me to learn a new word. That doesn't happen very often. Americentrism. It's a doozie. ^_^

So I guess you did kind of educate me after all!

BTW it's raining.

Charan, buddy, you don't understand the first thing about your argument - I'm tired of having to waste time figuring out which one of your mutually-exclusive nonsensical arguments you actually believe

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bad assumptions

but also (and I had to down a few aspirin after this doozie)

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So if a fuckin' juggernaut like Actiblizz dumped it because it was clearly too hard to balance, you can only imagine how it must have been for an indie dev from the antipodes

BUT ALSO

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now it's more likely the same fucking reason we have (or don't have) everything else -- players get by just fine with/without it.

The argument/goal post changes literally every post with you. You contradict yourself, then find a new way to invalidate what your reply to a reply to you was...

Unreal.

If you think shit at GGG is being coded by 150 design teams with complete autonomy (actually I'm not sure why I asked this question, you'll have three differing answers in three replies...) then there is very literally no hope for you. Chris is in charge and shit is or is not in the game due to his hubris and/or lack or experience with an enterprise that requires knowledge outside of the cloistered yes-men milieu he's fomented around him.

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Orca_Orcinus wrote:

But I'm here to educate you and Charan, again.

Just so that you know, you haven't been 'educating' (/rofl) anybody, really.


GGG started as an indie studio competing against a freaking giant in the field.
Where are they now ? That's right, we all know.
Now, let's compare that to ... you :
Who are you by the way ?
Are you rich and powerful ?
or is that thin air on the internet ?

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Orca_Orcinus wrote:

I'm tired of having to waste time [...]

Oh don't, you really don't have to !
Ignore us all, please ignore all the peasants that we are, and feel free to go play a better game with other elites.

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鬼殺し wrote:

So if a fuckin' juggernaut like Actiblizz dumped it because it was clearly too hard to balance, you can only imagine how it must have been for an indie dev from the antipodes.

Blizz dumped up pretty much on every aspect of character customisation, to be honest. Stats? Why bother, let 'em use main stat and vitality, everything else is useless. Every skill uses the same scaling, Itemization for every build is the same, etc. There is no glory in reaching balance with that much simplicity and homogenization... Any person with basic math education can perform it.

I thought they did it because their devs were MMO devs, not ARPG devs. They made the game more comfortable for them to design and balance. It has to do more with recruiting the wrong people for the job rather than being inept at the job.

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Orca_Orcinus wrote:

But I'm here to educate you and Charan, again.

The game is a direct result of Chris' saying to Blizzard that he can build a better Diablo 3 than Blizz can. If it isn't a direct progeny of the Diablo Experience, Chris feels D3 doesn't need it either, and so he didn't code it into Path of Exile.

The so-called design paradigms you think are part n' parcel of GGG's design philosophy simply do not exist.

I don't understand your point. Can you please elaborate?

Exactly what design paradigms do you think I am attributing to GGG which don't exist?

You didn't say, and so I don't know. Please educate me.

you keep asking the same question.

i keep telling you it was answered on page 20.

you keep asking the same question.


edit: numerous people are blatantly namecalling and etc. these posts... are still up. know why? they're not being reported.

only one side here is clicking the report button like it releases dopamine.