Path of Exile, Gameplay Criticism

interesting read, thanks.

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Kulze wrote:

the forum as well as reddit are the major places for input, mostly the forums actually as those SHOULD be the main concern for GGG, after all it's their main avenue for feedback of all kind and SHOULD be used that way.

forum should be the main source of info but isn't. ggg states that on every occasion that they get their info from reddit first.

not wondering, there are more players there after they got rid of community moderators here and purged the forums with mass probations some years ago.

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Kulze wrote:

A good game-design philosophy is to provide the best rewards for those who can beat skill-based hurdles versus content which lets you progress in a sure but steady way without ever going into those areas (And therefore taking much much longer).

it's already like this with über atziri, elder and uber elder exclusive drops.
also, rare items with the highest affix value ranges can only drop in endgame areas locked for most players.

that's the reason players want to delve cause doing low level stuff enable them easy access to endgame items.

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Kulze wrote:

There isn't only a single way to do things, what I'm taking in badly is the choices GGG is taking which - if they would look at the decisions which caused the downfall of many many companies by now in the history of gaming - would've been easily avoided and instead allowing them to provide one of the 'golden games', one which will go down in history to be said 'yes, it's genuinely good'.

thing is, they look at the community on how they take things before they make decisions. this community is reddit, the poisenous group think infested sinkhole with very few reasonable longtime players left.

regarding trade (cuse that's one of your main points) improving item exchange would result in search abilities being crippled to make (keep) trading items on par with finding items in the game.

the reddit)community wouldn't take that lightly, if they had shutdown poe.trade to integrate their console trade tech into the world realm, they would have lost a huge chunk of their playerbase.

not sure what the "top player" wants.. they already get top tier gear by crafting or being lucky, killing end bosses that the majority dont even touch..

you want the game to be hard? play hardcore, you already topped off your "skill" in softcore.. make the game for yourself, not by making everyone suffer your selfish vision of the game for your own sake.

36/40 - 40/40 players on SC but it's the same number that want the game to be "hard" but they do nothing but try to force their vision of the game on others.. play hardcore, make a new account without buying stashes, play SSF.. there's plenty of ways to make yourself the game "hard".

it's laughable (and I'm putting it very nicely here) that the make the game "hard" people do nothing in order to make the game hard for themselves but they bash with some insane low level elitism in a game where such thing is laughable again at best.

have it your way.. the game has potential, but the decisions here as lately in priorities are copying exactly the way other big companies with more resources than GGG, rather than learning from failures it seems they want to learn by doing the same mistakes..

I don't care if dev's or streamers dont post here, it only shows me they only want to see one side of the coin with forced positivity and some very abusable system to hide negative opinions for the hivemind of reddit.

my $0.0000003 cents in this thread.

poe is 25% Luck, 0% Skill, 25% Concentrated power of grind, 25% Item addiction pleasure, 25% Character build pain and 100% Reason to play it once and never again.

made up my mind this days before legion, looking at all the content i missed since i played last year and decided to leave; emptied my standard stash to the first one in global who could tell me a joke, and divined live in global all of my legacy items.

game direction is towards passive numbness gameplay.
developers are doing a great job, but this is no action rpg, they are missing the whole picture with gameplay.

sadly in the long run, this game has the same numbness mind effect of mobile games (i have nothing against mobile games).

this is no game for me, bye.

pm me if you want to hear the joke.

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Xystre wrote:

not sure what the "top player" wants.. they already get top tier gear by crafting or being lucky, killing end bosses that the majority dont even touch..

you want the game to be hard? play hardcore, you already topped off your "skill" in softcore.. make the game for yourself, not by making everyone suffer your selfish vision of the game for your own sake.

36/40 - 40/40 players on SC but it's the same number that want the game to be "hard" but they do nothing but try to force their vision of the game on others.. play hardcore, make a new account without buying stashes, play SSF.. there's plenty of ways to make yourself the game "hard".

it's laughable (and I'm putting it very nicely here) that the make the game "hard" people do nothing in order to make the game hard for themselves but they bash with some insane low level elitism in a game where such thing is laughable again at best.

have it your way.. the game has potential, but the decisions here as lately in priorities are copying exactly the way other big companies with more resources than GGG, rather than learning from failures it seems they want to learn by doing the same mistakes..

I don't care if dev's or streamers dont post here, it only shows me they only want to see one side of the coin with forced positivity and some very abusable system to hide negative opinions for the hivemind of reddit.

my $0.0000003 cents in this thread.

You don't understand how PoE or aRPGs in general work. What the majority does in a f2p game is not something that should be taken too seriously, unless you aim for a mediocre game that it's only purpose is to make more money. A percentage of the people that don't reach endgame, don't even try to do so.
The difficulty most new players face in PoE has nothing to do with actual gameplay difficulty, but with information, complex mechanics and the learning curve.
A more simplified crafting system, a smaller in size class/skill/gear system, could work better for new players while at the same time add real depth in theorycrafting.
Harder end game content and powerful builds that can only be achieved after much more effort and not by spending just a couple of exalts, could keep people engaged for a longer period of time in each league.

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Jdahl22 wrote:

You don't understand how PoE or aRPGs in general work.

stopped right here, I don't care what you think if you gonna act like one of the "1k hours team".

Good luck there zoomer.

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Jdahl22 wrote:

people engaged for a longer period of time in each league.

people engaged =/= people having fun.

people engaged === money

people having fun <=/=> money (saw it in many games)

devs aim priority:
1) money to sustain the game and their life
2) people having fun
in that order.
ggg has money now but money isn't an one time objective, so as long as people can't fight engagement, game won't change.
devs are not willing to do some hard unpopular choice for the second objective.

we still have no sign of pvp after 6 years, and yet there are still people in standard global requesting to duel to this day.

i tried incursion, betrayal, beast capturing, for the first time this year, all game core content.

-incursion: when i enter a zone i literally don't understand what is happening, what i'm killing, what i should do. is a mess.

-betrayal: i like it. fighting other npc exiles is one of the most pleasuring experience of this game BECAUSE IT IS NOT A SCREEN MESS and they have some basic AI. i love fighting warbands for the same motive.

-beast capture: wtf i don't even understand what i'm doing, the screen is a complete mess, i'm just killing something that the games is telling me to kill but i can't see it. from my research during the league, capturing a beast required some active elements, sacrificied later for the sake of speed meta.
what is the difference now from killing to capture?

i know i talk from an egoistic point of view of a demanding customer, but because i want this game to be good, and not fake good.
but i also understand now that the devs have lost control over their game.

engagement =/= fun

this is why i will be probably checking poe development in the future without playing it.

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Sol_Starving wrote:

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Jdahl22 wrote:

people engaged for a longer period of time in each league.

people engaged =/= people having fun.

people engaged === money

Can you explain the first part? What's the point of playing if you are not having fun? I can't think of any other useful statistic, apart from player retention within a league, to be honest.

As for the second part, I also disagree. CW himself said that they make the most during the first days of a new league from microtransactions. And maybe that's why they are interested more about the spike than about retention.

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Sol_Starving wrote:

people engaged =/= people having fun.

people engaged === money

people having fun <=/=> money (saw it in many games)

devs aim priority:
1) money to sustain the game and their life
2) people having fun
in that order.
ggg has money now but money isn't an one time objective, so as long as people can't fight engagement, game won't change.
devs are not willing to do some hard unpopular choice for the second objective.

Yes, true to a large degree... though not entirely, you're leaving out a few very important points.

One of those is short-term versus long-term viability. Providing a fun and engaging game-play provides long-term viability... versus a simply engaging game-play providing only short-term viability.

This has been observed many many times by now. Just take into perspective how online-games have changed over the course of the years. Probably the best example there is Ultima Online even.
The game started out with a very intriguing game-mechanic for the time, major functions (like an actual option to chat to other people) implemented over time. It grew steadily, nothing else even remotely close to it existed. Several expansions came and made the game better, removed tedious mechanics, introduced new content which was very very challenging even for groups and allowed for long-term enjoyment. It was one of those 'golden games' I've talked about. It was the best of the genre, it probably is still one of the best in the genre today despite its age and it'll be one of the best MMOs of all time for a long time to come most likely at the point to which I described it yet.
What changed and why it died was only a single reason alone... the head behind the game (called via nickname 'Lord British') got disgruntled at the decisions the publisher tried to push through, he left the company, the game got more expansions which had issues with the lore, mechanics which were... not very fun anymore (engaging though!) and players kept playing the game... a least a few years.
By the time other games came out though it immediately lost the people who got disgruntled at the very awkward changes there, they left, never to return... the game died.

The same can be seen with WoW (that's why classic is so sought-after) and OldSchool Runescape (which despite clunky graphics has as many players as Warframe), those games tried to change what made them good, players got pissed off and they then re-made the initial experience. Those examples alone should be more then enough reason for GGG to get a grip on their philosophy.

A game won't survive with being engaging alone, at least not indefinitely, a game has to be fun and enthralling, something a player will enjoy looking back to having done at any time... otherwise more and more people sooner or later will say 'You know what? Fuck it... it's actually not worth it despite investing 5000 dollar and 20000 hours into the game, I guess I'll invest the next 5000 somewhere else'. And then the problems start.
Also if enough players leave those who are investing a lot into the game suddenly have nobody else to show it off to... leaving sooner or later as well, the game becomes a literal graveyard.

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Sol_Starving wrote:

this is why i will be probably checking poe development in the future without playing it.

And this sentence alone, repeated by a rather large amount of people is enough to look at to see GGG should change something, direly.
The master-rework and Blizzard's fuck-up gave them a large influx of players, though with how they're working at the moment we'll most likely be back where we were before, I don't think Legion will show a hefty increase in players, PoE is at a decline right now and a decent mechanic + melee re-work (partly at least) won't save it, a LOT more has to be done by now.

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Jdahl22 wrote:

As for the second part, I also disagree. CW himself said that they make the most during the first days of a new league from microtransactions. And maybe that's why they are interested more about the spike than about retention.

Sure they do, after all people come back and say 'Oh hey, why not buy the supporter-pack? Looks nice! I need stash-tabs anyway!' and they do it. Though to have that happen the spike needs to be a s big as possible, and with the negative attitude all-around at the moment regarding GGG the spike will decrease each league until changes are made.

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Sol_Starving wrote:

we still have no sign of pvp after 6 years, and yet there are still people in standard global requesting to duel to this day.

they fuck it up themselves and then kind of blame the player base. First by listening to Greendude guy promoting LLD instead of HLD, then by waiting about 3 years to start to nerf broken shit.

Then once recently they started to take care of the old pvp broken skills they introduce crafting power creep mods insta killing the last hope for pvp.

Then they come on some podcast and laugh at players enjoying more pvp with earning exalt than pvp in the arena.

They just don t understand what is pvp and blame it on the player base.

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Jdahl22 wrote:

Can you explain the first part? What's the point of playing if you are not having fun?

same biological brain mechanics as smokers, social media addicts, ecc.
there are tons of neuroscientists that do ted talks about it.

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Kulze wrote:

Ultima Online

don't even make me start to talk about ultima online.
which game today can force a mass log in of half the server at 3 am in the morning (so at that time, you received phonecalls from guild members to log in) only because some minor guild without protection tried to do some Lord Oaks or even Harrower to avoid raid. A true example of how pvp and pve could live togheter in balance in the same zone, with a true living economy.
i'm sad because i felt true gaming fun, true game engagment in that game, and there is no game today that can do that
it is still the best mmorpg out there but people are satisfied with shiny sensless pew pew without a care of what they are pew pewing, as long as it rewards them because they never experienced something else.

new party game
look at this video and down a shot every time CW say the words "rewards"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBp6yeVSiDU