Path of Exile, Gameplay Criticism

Hey Perq,

Thats my thinking exactly. I think GGG knows exactly what it has and how much more untapped potential there is. Even before they sold off to their new masters at 10c they must have discussed major changes. I'm thinking they just decided against it because so many in the community are resistant to changes. I'm not saying they are wrong, everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I think this game could have been so much more.

This is a followup video responding to many of the counterarguments from this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0ZGXR7qV7o

(I'll update the OP also)

People play solo, because they want to. Playing in groups gives advantages. For example sharing the cost of a map at the start of a league.

Penalty for deaths is fine, because you have to avoid dying anyways. It is a priority to stay alive. This would also be the case for other penalties for death. But it makes the penalty not important.

Killing everything on the screen in 1 attack and moving fast is what many players want. Because it allows to pick up the few valuable drops after the fight while spending a low amount of time.
It is also fun to some people, i guess.
Players would prefer fighting lower level enemies, if higher level enemies took too much time.

I mean. We have challenges. Like killing bosses. Not buying the kills. Some players have fun doing that.

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Khalixxa wrote:

This is my best shot at summarizing the gameplay problems of POE

Excellent video. :D

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canbacn wrote:

I think GGG knows exactly what it has and how much more untapped potential there is. Even before they sold off to their new masters at 10c they must have discussed major changes. I'm thinking they just decided against it because so many in the community are resistant to changes. I'm not saying they are wrong, everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I think this game could have been so much more.

I wish we could find out how the community would really feel about changes the that we are suggesting, and whether it would react significantly different to them compared to say, a typical league.

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Eyrtha wrote:

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Khalixxa wrote:

This is my best shot at summarizing the gameplay problems of POE

Excellent video. :D

Thank you very much. :D

"

FriendlyPikachu wrote:

People play solo, because they want to. Playing in groups gives advantages. For example sharing the cost of a map at the start of a league.

I think most players would appreciate more incentive to play in groups. There are reasons to do so currently, but they are typically very weak considering a single character can be built to solo all the content the game offers. Delve was a step in the right direction, and I hope to see more steps like it.

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FriendlyPikachu wrote:

Penalty for deaths is fine, because you have to avoid dying anyways. It is a priority to stay alive. This would also be the case for other penalties for death. But it makes the penalty not important.

Just to be clear, I never suggested removing penalties.

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FriendlyPikachu wrote:

Killing everything on the screen in 1 attack and moving fast is what many players want. Because it allows to pick up the few valuable drops after the fight while spending a low amount of time.
It is also fun to some people, i guess.
Players would prefer fighting lower level enemies, if higher level enemies took too much time.

When killing everything really quick is the norm, it leaves players very little to work for other than maintaining that norm. Lots of players drop out after finishing the main story each league, and I suspect this has a lot to do with it.

It's true that without the proper incentives, players would prefer to just grind easy content... but that is what we have currently. The incentive structure is already goofy.

I watched through the the videos and I have to agree with you, even if I don't think you're tackling some of the core issues which I've found over the years.

Yes, absolutely on your side with the part where you're talking about healing versus damage spikes, this one is utterly ridiculous, as well as the non-scaling death-penalty, you suggestions there are very solid and thought-out.

What I'm curious about though is the parts of game-play which you think led to the current situation, where did GGG 'mess up' badly and didn't know how to fix it?

From the parts I've seen by now it's... a very dread situation actually, their development cycle seems to be a major problem, trying to deal with 3 month cycles while also fixing the game and providing new content? That seems not optimal for me, especially given the issues we see each league arriving with it, some of them never taken care of afterwards.

I'll provide a few points which I've discerned by now:





Those 2 are the major points where I'm basing my argument from. Seeing as you're mostly talking about the healing-mechanics versus the damage spike... I think those are the reason why it existed.
We got massive healing... so the mobs had to go higher as you've already said. Then we needed to clear faster so they wouldn't always kill us, so conversion was simply ignored. The melee versus spells issue crept up, defenses suddenly got invalidated as some content can 1-shot even 30k ES by now, depending on how unlucky you are with combinations. Then it ramped each other up beyond reason.
Es nerf, ES buff, extra chaos nerf, extra chaos buff... all things which went contradictory to what was done before.

Also, one thing I don't agree is the large amount of content we have. Yes... we do, theoretically, though if we want to be true it's 'only' mapping. The others can outsides of a league only be accessed in small trickles... at best. GGG wastes a lot of potential with those in my eyes, it's content in the size of a whole expansion usually, though we as players get it in a heavily butchered way after the league ends, discarding vast amounts of it sadly.
Bestiary is probably the best example, being unable to farm specific maps for the right beasts, or rather.. a chance to get them there. Many crafts removed, even some which had not much meaning at all, the strongest crafts like eternal orbs dumbed down to nearly being worthless... rather then being made as rare as a HH-drop and leaving it in, creating new chase-items this way.

All in all I can't agree anymore that GGG knows what they're doing, yes... they have a literal gold-mine of content, the absolutely best crafting system of all ARPGs as well as the best build-diversity. At least in theory.
In praxis we by now are playing a bullet-hell, shoot stuff which immediately dies, no matter if common/magic/rare, and don't get hit a single time or you might die immediately. Which is a real shame.

I'm looking forward to seeing more videos regarding this topic, especially other issues in existance, how guilds are handled (or not rather for that matter) and if you think their development cycle should maybe change to something else, a way without deadlines and instead proper reveals a month before anything new starts. Maybe leagues just repeating old leagues for 3 month cycles in general while an actual new release can happen at any of those if it is properly polished.

Kulze, thanks for the feedback.

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Kulze wrote:

I watched through the the videos and I have to agree with you, even if I don't think you're tackling some of the core issues which I've found over the years.

Yes, absolutely on your side with the part where you're talking about healing versus damage spikes, this one is utterly ridiculous, as well as the non-scaling death-penalty, you suggestions there are very solid and thought-out.

What I'm curious about though is the parts of game-play which you think led to the current situation, where did GGG 'mess up' badly and didn't know how to fix it?

I didn't go into specific detail because ultimately we can't go back in time, but it's a good question.

I think each of the three problems discussed are intimately related, and we can't talk about them individually without talking about the others too (thus the purpose of the main video). Each of them coincidentally are inherited from Diablo 2, probably without much forethought.

Life drain and "spammable healing" in general, will always lead to rate wars in eny game they are allowed to exist in, dissolving away the time that players have to react to mechanics until it is faster than human reflex time, which necessitates face-rolling in order to be able to play the game, which leaves an overtuned and inconsistent death penalty as the only thing seeming to shape player behavior.

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Kulze wrote:

From the parts I've seen by now it's... a very dread situation actually, their development cycle seems to be a major problem, trying to deal with 3 month cycles while also fixing the game and providing new content? That seems not optimal for me, especially given the issues we see each league arriving with it, some of them never taken care of afterwards.

The 3 month cycle presents some real challenges. It means that the developers are pressured into allowing player progression to accelerate as new content is added. However, we have to weigh this against the huge advantage of being able to test new ideas with an "escape plan" of the next league.

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Kulze wrote:

We have several possible multipliers working in conjunction. Crit multi, extra damage effects, conversion and increased damage on and entity as well as attack/cast speed.
If we have 1 or 2 of those, they won't scale into 'oblivion', though generally I think 2 are the limit where we can make it have any resemblance of a 'decent' balance at all.

As an example we have our main meta-skill right now, Winter Orb. With a Trickster we get the most bonuses for it, allowing to get both crit as well as extra damage and conversion stacked all into one neat skill at the same time... without any downsides.
This makes our additive damage modifiers like 'inc elemental' or 'inc damage' suddenly become multiplications. We use cold, add the inc damage, convert to fire, add the inc damage again, convert to chaos and get the inc damage once more suddenly.

I think the "damage scaling" is part of the "facerolling" category. Hypothetically, we can still have good gameplay with high scaling, but not when damage outscales life totals to this extent, and not in the absence downsides to go with it.

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Kulze wrote:

The disparity between spells and attacks is massive. To get attacks to be a good thing we either need to invest into any form of crit chance or flat accuracy to even allow for a half-decent output of damage, and contrary with spells we.. always hit.
If we want to do the same with attacks we could also go very specific uniques or craft it on a rare weapon, though this will take away a mod used otherwise normally. If we don't, we'll be heavily punished. Only 80% hit chance? Well, say goodbye to 20% of your total damage, no questions asked!

This one comes from the tradition that spells be different from attacks in this way. It's difficult to convert the advantage that spells get into an equivalent advantage that melee gets, other than to create a variety of situations in the gameplay that favor one or the other. The current state of facerolling makes this nearly impossible though.

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Kulze wrote:

We got massive healing... so the mobs had to go higher as you've already said. Then we needed to clear faster so they wouldn't always kill us, so conversion was simply ignored. The melee versus spells issue crept up, defenses suddenly got invalidated as some content can 1-shot even 30k ES by now, depending on how unlucky you are with combinations. Then it ramped each other up beyond reason.
Es nerf, ES buff, extra chaos nerf, extra chaos buff... all things which went contradictory to what was done before.

I go into a more depth on the "rate war" in one of the videos linked in the description of the Gameplay Criticism video.

"

Kulze wrote:

Also, one thing I don't agree is the large amount of content we have. Yes... we do, theoretically, though if we want to be true it's 'only' mapping. The others can outsides of a league only be accessed in small trickles... at best. GGG wastes a lot of potential with those in my eyes, it's content in the size of a whole expansion usually, though we as players get it in a heavily butchered way after the league ends, discarding vast amounts of it sadly.
Bestiary is probably the best example, being unable to farm specific maps for the right beasts, or rather.. a chance to get them there. Many crafts removed, even some which had not much meaning at all, the strongest crafts like eternal orbs dumbed down to nearly being worthless... rather then being made as rare as a HH-drop and leaving it in, creating new chase-items this way.

All in all I can't agree anymore that GGG knows what they're doing, yes... they have a literal gold-mine of content, the absolutely best crafting system of all ARPGs as well as the best build-diversity. At least in theory.
In praxis we by now are playing a bullet-hell, shoot stuff which immediately dies, no matter if common/magic/rare, and don't get hit a single time or you might die immediately. Which is a real shame.

I'm looking forward to seeing more videos regarding this topic, especially other issues in existance, how guilds are handled (or not rather for that matter) and if you think their development cycle should maybe change to something else, a way without deadlines and instead proper reveals a month before anything new starts. Maybe leagues just repeating old leagues for 3 month cycles in general while an actual new release can happen at any of those if it is properly polished.

Those are some issues I didn't hit on at all: content availability, item crafting, guilds and trading. I hope to eventually.

i suggest a melee skill gem that allow players to backstab bosses.

Players may have incentives to play in groups not because it's fun to do so (for the most part), but because of the increased loot. While this may be arguably "better than nothing", it just leads to all those pseudo "team play" options talked about in the video: "Looking for AFKers", "Boss kill service", etc.

Path of Exile doesn't make very good use of its multiplayer potential.