Ending the Speed Meta, or Redefining Chris Wilson's "better builds are faster"

One thing about Chris's beliefs, and those of many of us on here, is that they leave no room for variance. You're mandated to be going at least a certain speed. If you're not, you're going against the grain.

It's worth noting that more effort seems to be made to constantly make the slow player feel bad, then make the fast player feel good. I made a point already earlier in the thread that fast players are already rewarded for being fast: they power-through content and reach the higher-level more rewarding content earlier, and their pure speed allows them to repeat that content more often. Throwing in massive rewards in every area, via content that takes very little time to do, hardly any skill, and mostly just fuctions as a "speed-check" seems frivolous.

I mean, from a certain point of view it's almost like players recieve an infinite-use VIP pass when they buy any pair of 35%-movement-speed boots that they can hand-in at the start of every area to claim their free Exalt.

Chris is so confident about the superiority of speed, and is so hell-bent in trying to drive slower players to use faster builds to the point where we have a mechanic literally designed as a "let's have a look at what you could have won..." placed prominantly in ever area so the slower player gets to feel bad about himself over, and over, and over, and over again. The form changes each league, but the same basic concept applies.

That tells us one thing at least: that it doesn't work. If there's still enough players using slow builds for GGG to consider it worthwhile adding new ways each league to punish specifically those players, then perhaps that will never work?

So why doesn't Chris just grab the bull by the horns, and raise the BASE movement speed of players up to whatever their minimum acceptable speed happens to be? That would eliminate the "we don't want people playing slow builds" problem right there. Movement speed could still exist on items, but it would be a smaller bonus with the same top-speed that can be reached currently.

Speed isn't just about movement speed. It's about kill speed. AoE kill speed in particular.

It's not good enough any more to kill every monster you encounter, and deal with the tough rares in a few seconds. If you don't literally one-shot every monster on an entire screen at a time, you're not fast enough for Legion league or Incursion mechanics. Look at how many people are still playing RF or Zealot's Oath. Oh, none? Because they only kill half a screen at a time, have to be reasonably close to the thing they're killing, and may take 2-3 seconds to do do so. There aren't any dot builds at all any more. There can't be, because by their very nature "over time" effects need time to function and that's simply not allowed by modern league mechanics.

Take the timers away. The fast players will still be rewarded by letting them do 3x, 5x, 12x as much content as slow players can clear, but at least let the slow players clear it at their own pace without racing a clock.

Kill everything before it can hurt you is not a bad stratagem.

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Kurgosh wrote:

Speed isn't just about movement speed. It's about kill speed. AoE kill speed in particular.

It's not good enough any more to kill every monster you encounter, and deal with the tough rares in a few seconds. If you don't literally one-shot every monster on an entire screen at a time, you're not fast enough for Legion league or Incursion mechanics. Look at how many people are still playing RF or Zealot's Oath. Oh, none? Because they only kill half a screen at a time, have to be reasonably close to the thing they're killing, and may take 2-3 seconds to do do so. There aren't any dot builds at all any more. There can't be, because by their very nature "over time" effects need time to function and that's simply not allowed by modern league mechanics.

Take the timers away. The fast players will still be rewarded by letting them do 3x, 5x, 12x as much content as slow players can clear, but at least let the slow players clear it at their own pace without racing a clock.

RF once had screen-wide AoE and they took away while RF got Elemental Equilibrium, Scorching Ray, Vaal RF, tools for burst damage, matter of timings and speed.

Top end durability has been always there.

Edit:I forgot to mention about Shield Charge. :P

Edit2: Timer is to drag players into the mess. It's intentional. Many of Legion mob's biggest attacks are directional. It's much easier to avoid when you stand closer.

Edit3: Alternative strategy is to move "crazy fast" so that mob's directional, relatively slow launching skills are likely miss. I don't think it's good to remove "crazy" "game breaking" "bugged" "ez" stuff from PoE to entertain gamers.

I'm pretty sure there's already hidden mechanics to reward slow players. Like how chests usually just drop scrolls of wisdom, you open enough of them though and you'll end up getting an assload of six sockets and alts. I'm also 99% sure slow characters have higher item rarity, my first four characters in synthesis were extremely slow, they all got an ex before hitting act 9. Those were also the only ones I got the whole league, I sped it up and my drops ended up massively worse.

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BloodPuddles420 wrote:

I'm pretty sure there's already hidden mechanics to reward slow players. Like how chests usually just drop scrolls of wisdom, you open enough of them though and you'll end up getting an assload of six sockets and alts. I'm also 99% sure slow characters have higher item rarity, my first four characters in synthesis were extremely slow, they all got an ex before hitting act 9. Those were also the only ones I got the whole league, I sped it up and my drops ended up massively worse.

I agree with your impressions as long as we play in a limited measure, slower play style can be rewarding in some way but in this thread, some are talking about "game breaking speed" which has been relatively easier to achieve since GGG brought many tools for speed.

For example, try Alchemist's Quicksilver Flask of Adrenalin along with Flask effect passives on the skill tree. This solely gives you a crazy boost. Add Phase Run on top of it and you will see what is discussed here. It's even impossible to pick items but don't worry. You don't have to go back to the start of the map all the way to gather all items in 5 way battle. (ofc you need some levels to pick passives and meet DEX requirements for skill.)

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Kurgosh wrote:

Take the timers away. The fast players will still be rewarded by letting them do 3x, 5x, 12x as much content as slow players can clear, but at least let the slow players clear it at their own pace without racing a clock.

Chris's response to this is equally bizarre.

Apparently the timers exist to restrict the content: if everyone was able to get the rewards, the rewards would plummet in value and be worth next to nothing, and the only way to prevent that would be to nerf the rewards across the board so everyone gets less - but that would make the content unrewarding for those who choose to do this.

Ok. Now riddle me this:

We can confidently assume that given the speed-meta, there are far, far more players running speedy builds able to do the content, than there are players running slow builds that cannot. Given how unrewarding slow gameplay tends to be, many people play fast builds because they feel pressured to do so.

But for whatever reason, you have this situation where the majority of the players are both fast enough to complete the content, AND fast enough to access that content many times in a short timespan. A single fast player doesn't clear one Legion encounter an hour, he clears dozens.

So if you're a speedy player and you're breaking records on clearspeeds and number of Legion clears an hour, and rewards earned from Legion, that's fine: you earned the reward, and it's not a problem for the economy.

But if you're a slow player, not only are you currently unable to get any rewards from Legion, but you're likely only encountering 2-3 monoliths an hour at that because it takes much longer for you to clear individual areas and probably aren't super-efficient outside that.

But if timers didn't exist, and the relatively low number of slow players were suddenly able to slowly earn the rewards from maybe 2-3 monolith runs an hour, the rewards *they* earn would significantly devalue the rewards and make Legion unrewarding for everyone else... apparently.

Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment, I strongly believe this implies that this "economic disaster" wouldn't be related to the amount of items in the economy, because the slow players would still be contributing less than 1% of that. No, it's all about wealth distribution - ie. the idea that if the wealth of the average poor person increases, the less comparably wealthier than them the rich people are, even if they still control more than 90% of the wealth in-game.

In other words, poor people must exist in order for rich people to be rich, so efforts are made to ensure that poor players stay as poor as possible.

Of course, if the poor players all decided in unison that they had enough of being downtrodden and decided to quit, the game's economy would be in shambles because the removal of the poor from the equation would cause the average wealth of all players to increase substantially, and people who consider themselves very wealthy could end up having below-average wealth.

Just to chime in on this... do you guys think that a skill that charges up levels for massive aoe damage (eg. 1 tick per attack/cast speed tick) then unleashes it in one go with higher expected DPS than multiple casts will be a reasonable mechanic? Maybe make it not channeling, it just continuously builds up while youre holding down the button then unleash it when you let go.

I bring this up because that is most often the light vs heavy balance is often dealt with in games.

Many small pokes vs 1 massive smash. Think dark souls dex vs str.

If skills like that were in the game, it could help steer us to a good speed balance. These could still be zooming across the map but not blitzing things down at the speed of ping for a more weighty experience.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

What you're really asking for is that they make the game have less of a gap between meta and non-meta. To make choices the players make matter less. If I want to play Dual Strike, I should be able to do almost as well as an arc-trapper, or whatever meta you want to compare it to.

No.

Meta != speed. Even if you drink Chris's kool-aid.

Meta = efficiency. Efficiency usually = speed. But not necessarily, and this is an important distinction.

I'm probably going to get a bunch of crap for this but Diablo 3 solved this problem by having scaling difficulty and rewarding doing harder content.

PoE on the other hand usually rewards you for doing easy content you can clear extremely fast, rather than doing high level stuff you can't. Also PoE caps the level of content you can do so it doesn't scale with character power, and gives access to maps in a way where character power doesn't matter.

PoE is a speed game because it's not a game that rewards difficulty.