So, I just uninstalled PoE today.

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鬼殺し wrote:

*hug* I honestly have no idea what you're on about, but you seem to need one of these right now.

Enlightenment through spiritual vibration...expand your conscience, not contract...forgetfulness, is intelligence...

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DreadLordAvatar wrote:

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鬼殺し wrote:

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DreadLordAvatar wrote:

D3 aka Mario Kart ...a race against time!

PoE is far from that.

He says, when several leagues have *literally* been races against time.

Also, Mario Kart has been almost universally loved by gamers around the world ever since the early 90s and its glorious Mode-7 debut on the SNES. You sully its grand legacy with that pisspoor comparison. :P

Lmao. A comparison of extremes...not the quality of the games themselves, although both are AAA titles. Silly Exile.

As for PoE, I just play slow as a turtle...oh there's a white item, better pick it up...loot filter what's that? GGG wouldn't know.

By the time I hit end-game in a league it has likely migrated to standard...so seamless...therefore, time is....irrelevant.

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DreadLordAvatar wrote:

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鬼殺し wrote:

*hug* I honestly have no idea what you're on about, but you seem to need one of these right now.

Enlightenment through spiritual vibration...expand your conscience, not contract...forgetfulness, is intelligence...

What the...?

You better take Charan's hug.

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鬼殺し wrote:

The irony is I used to say the same thing about Diablo 3, except at least there you can change your load-out dramatically between stages for some variety. With PoE, you are largely committed to one configuration. You are also encouraged to solo. AND since we have a full-bore speed clear meta, you are best off choosing an efficient, quick configuration that keeps you as far away from mobs as possible while outputting sustained mass destruction.

This para basically summarized my developing disappointment with POE. Godmode is fun to strive towards in arpg but you’re practically led towards that point very quickly almost right from the get go that the entire grind just feels very meaningless. Particularly when you’re heavily disincentivised to group with other players (outside of very specialized group setup) and player interactions boils down to trades (which frustrates). In the last year or two, the only player interaction I got outside of trades was from masters rotation and now even that shallow form of group play is taken from me.

This post is EXACTLY how I feel!

Faster, faster, faster! That's all it is now. No strategy...it's just speed and 1-shotting...that's all there is to it.

Syndicate just lags my computer like crazy, even after the patches that were supposed to fix it. When I enter a map and start lagging, I know that Syndicate is going to appear somewhere in that map. So far, that has been 100% accurate.

That map stash tab...just horrible! GGG, be ashamed!

I have been wondering how PoE got to the zoom-zoom-state it is now. Was it an intentional design direction by GGG? Is it an unavoidale consequence of having to put out new content every few months?

Atziri forced you to have a quick movement skill or you would get blasted by those flameblasts. But that was just one special boss.

Rebalanced all monsters to move and attack faster. Was something lost already then?

Tormented spirits came with a timer and a fleeing mechanic. Sucked for slow melee builds, but they were just loot pinatas. And they aren't even that anymore.

Breaches were fun, but also messy and the rewards were very clear-speed reliant. You can't get to the good breachlords if you can't clear quickly. Still, you only need one build for that.

Abysses had timers, but they seemed to be long enough to mostly not matter. Still, you kind of have to rush into them and not get surrounded. A nod to the speed clear direction.

Bestiary initially tried to force players to stop and slow-dps monsters, but it also had inifinitelly spawning monsters and a lot of spammy effects. Nets went away, but the spawns stayed.

Incursions were fun too, but frustratingly useless for slower builds. Still are. The temple does not force such speeds, but you can't share your incursions so a slow build will never get a proper temple. The temples also introduced regen-mechanics for some reason. Since map drops are in part balanced around temples, you can't really ignore them either.

Betrayal had, and still has, infinite spawns, messy effects, regen mechanics and timers. Built around high sustain, area clear and very high dps numbers. Still, a slower and tankier build can at least run the fortifications and interventions. Safehouses also do not come with stupid timers.

Synthesis is an another timed event, which gives rewards closely related to your clear speed. At this point, few even bother to complain about that. And, the league has so many other problems that no-one woud listen anyways.

I don't see this trend changing. GGG is not going to re-work old content. They are not going to change their approach to content gating, since they propably truly believe that they know better how we should play the game. Because, as we all know, eating too much candy can be bad for you and level-appropriate and challenging content is like candy... right?

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鬼殺し wrote:

I am not sure any one person has a comprehensive answer as to how we got here

They implemented hard-counter on bosses.(stun immunity, poison immunity was a thing back then, freeze immunity etc)

Which is code from a designer saying "we lost the rails".

So bassicaly, atziri implementation was the design turning point when they realized "we done goofed".

Peace,

-Boem-

edit : i do like the FFA loot argument which is also a direction turning point.
It certainly set off the melee vs ranged issue.
I remember people in fellshrine going for that loot at the risk of a character :p
To be fair, melee wasn't really any safer back then to get it though, 2 skellie hits would off a full geared melee char either way.

The moment they fixed lock-step and we didn't see a shift to balance as a course correction of the game being unable to achieve it without lock-step is the point that horse threw itself of a cliff.

Before that point they had every reason to make the balance a function of the planning game and not the actual in-game.

And if they really wanted they could have fixed melee/ranged/caster/hybrid with the ascendancy introduction.

Make the specializations one of those 3 options with the hybrid allowing 2 instead of 1 at efficiency cost.
Restrict weapons/gems based on specialization etc

The game would lose a bit of it's "anybody can be anything" but to a far lesser extent then is the case now.
And you would suddenly have the design tools to directly pull on those distinctions.

I could go on but you get the point i figure. You probably have had a lot of these thoughts as-well over the years so yeah :p.
Can't really blame them, in our visions we might only be at act 7 at this point.

As for social media and co, let's be honest here not a single sector anticipated the impact this would have.
Admitedly gamers had "one-up" on most working sectors because of how relevant it already was prior to going mainstream, but still, that's a pretty visionary mind that had seen this amount of impact.

I credit Chriss for what he did, but i think thats overselling the guy and he seems as capable as they come.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Cipp wrote:

I have been wondering how PoE got to the zoom-zoom-state it is now. Was it an intentional design direction by GGG? Is it an unavoidale consequence of having to put out new content every few months?

As boem stated lockstep changed a lot, before that you could have run a qotf ranged character and played very fast but desync would have crippled you.
After that 2.1 introduced jewels and the vaal jewels which bought in the whole vaal spark meta.
Then 2.2 introduced ascendency's so a pretty mega level increase in clear speed from 2.0 -2.2.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Meanwhile every other significant up-and-coming ARPG (all two of them) has clearly defined class skills and passive skill progression logical to the character's development because, surprise surprise, those devs play PoE too.

Maybe that's PoE's grand legacy: as with D2, it's inspiring the next generation of ARPGs through its earnest missteps as much as its calculated triumphs.

In a sense, this is a positive note. I'm not sure they can undo all the damage introduced over the years, so maybe the best prospect is that the next game(s) will do things right. Or do them right for longer (sigh).

Coming back to the 3-month gap between leagues-expansions, which many say are too brief. Could well be right, but I'm thinking the main issue is in how they devote development time during those 3 months. Obviously some speculation here, but when they feel the need to push new bling-bling every single day, they have spent quite some hours developing all that crap. But if this happens to be the main income these days, then I understand why they do it, even if it's to the detriment of the game quality.

It actually feels good to have uninstalled the game and just observing from the sidelines now. I do wonder, though, given the general feedback in the forum (people seem more upset than normal), what is the thinking inside GGG? Are they still pleased or ecstatic about the state of the game and its income, or would they be holding meetings about how the hell they managed to cock up so badly, and bringing forth ideas for how to bring the game back to its original path.

Whatever the thinking is, I find it ludicrous that the game is so unbalanced if they actually genuinely tried to balance it. They've been pretty straight forward in admitting they want to shift the "meta" around each league, or in other words, "we don't care about balance, but we do want to change what was OP last league to something else that will be OP next league".

That's a pretty terrible stance. Not everything needs to be 100% balanced, it's one of the things I disliked somewhat about Pillars of Eternity, but it should be more balanced than the current mess that is POE. Everything is about speed-speed- speed now, and killing everything in sight (and off-screen) with the click of a button. Until you face syndicates or suchlike and get one-shot yourself.

The whole thing is just sad now. There are so many serious issues to solve that I don't envy GGG's task. Perhaps it's understandable they just keep piling on more speed and power until the whole thing comes apart in the seams. Easier than trying to fix it.

well, my player retention increased from 4 days in betrayal to a week in synthesis (after i played to 40/40 in harbinger, abyss, incursion and delve)!

since betrayal, i just can't see a design direction anymore. it's quantity over quality and i agree with what OP said about the bugs and design problems as well as the layers of rng and deliberate design of league mechanics to sell stash tabs.

also, it's funny how chris thinks what they do is some 200iq league mechanic according to baeclast (quoted as "Chris worried about synthesis being too complicated for the community" in a reddit post about that baeclast). he should play the game for a few hours before launch even if his schedule is really tight and see if this really fits his vision of poe.

personally, i give poe another chance next league to see if ggg woke up by then and addressed the biggest issues and comes up with an interesting and well tested league mechanic. i used to be excited about new leagues and was fairly attached to the game, but can't say i care at this point. maybe i'm just a "bittervet" as they were called in eve online.