In 2019, Diablo 3 and Path of Exile are more alike than you realize.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

In SSF the meta does not even exist.

I'm happy to agree to disagree. But in case you'd like to try again, that's where you messed up. Many (most?) flaws in your reasoning likely cascade from there.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

The only people who's build choices are even affected by GGGs bad balance are the ones that are obsessed with being competitive, economic and efficent in a singleplayer farming game. Which is precisely why i think all your problems are simply a result of your own mentality and not inherent to the game.

That comes down to the question of do you buy a good car because you want to compete with your neighbor or because wanting to have a good car instead of a bad one is perfectly natural.

For sure, some do it mostly to impress but I'd say the majority just want to have a good car, and you're assuming that factor doesn't even exist.

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In SSF the meta does not even exist.

The only way I can see this statement being true is if your view of meta is focusing on trading to make currency.

There's a lot of overlap in league start builds and SSF builds for a reason.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Only even apply if your focused on efficiency. To players like me it doesn't even matter how much damage the best build does in relation to my own it's of absolutely zero concern. No matter how much GGG buffs or nerfs a given build, it has close to zero effect on how i play the game.

Or have any type of interaction with the community.

We automatically discern between 'good' and 'bad' builds, obviously as the human is a pack-animal and competition decides our place.
Since PoE is an MMO (And not a single-player-game) we inherently have that competition present.

Stating you're playing the game like a single-player one is fine. That just doesn't go for the MAJORITY of (actively placing) people (in end-game).
Not even for SSF as even there is a sub-category doing it for the sake of the ladder.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Same for the economy. It doesn't matter how expensive a given build is or isn't, because i am using the stuff i find anyway for the most part. If i can't afford something, who cares, i either find it or play something else.

Little Jimmy starts playing a Cyclone build. His Cyclone progresses through the game in... let's say 100 hours of total play-time until uber-elder. He managed to beat uber-elder and only use his 5 exa which dropped along the way to buy equipment. It was Jimmy's first character, it just looked similar to whirlwind in D2... hence he took it.

Now little Jimmy goes along and tries out another skill, Fireball. Little Jimmy is not happy, in those 100 hours he barely reached yellow maps. His character dies all the time, he already used 5 ex to even get there... and he'll use 95 more to even be able to kill uber-elder. Jimmy think 'Wow... this skill is absolutely shit!'

Jimmy tries around and tests out 5 other skills, all worse then Cyclone by a LOT! Jimmy decides 'well, that's it for the game, I'm done, they all feel shit in comparison'.


That's the thing which happens if power-discrepancy is too high. There is a reason as to why people in THIS game go for the FotM-builds. They are often one of the only viable choices for combining QoL-gameplay with power-level together. Not picking the meta in PoE is often a fairly dumb choice.
To get a feeling of challenge you as a dev don't want to fuck up the discrepancy between builds... you offer discrepancy between content for people to challenge themself there.
That should be an obvious thing, not something I actually have to explain.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

And no, your argument does not apply to SSF. In SSF the meta does not even exist. You have to do with what you have anyway. A build costing 2 ex or 20 doesn't matter for an SSF player. It's complete nonsense to say that every economic game is inherently competitive and then claim that a mode without any economy is just as competitive. Your contradicting yourself here.

That's so wrong I don't even know where to start...

The Meta DOES exist in SSF even MORE. Why? Because the meta means that you need LESS investment (with personal crafting) to get the expected end-result. At least usually. This held true for Winter Orb. This held true for Cyclone and before them this held true for a looong time for Molten Strike.

At their meta-times they ALWAYS were cheap and easy to build, especially in SSF. That's why they are meta and not the other way around.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

The only people who's build choices are even affected by GGGs bad balance are the ones that are obsessed with being competitive, economic and efficent in a singleplayer farming game. Which is precisely why i think all your problems are simply a result of your own mentality and not inherent to the game.

Once again, a game builds up a specific expectation by itself.
The easiest example to bring up there is even Super Mario. Old but gold game after all. Everything could be expected to a degree, to say it fairly simple it was just following a fixed progression of inputs to get to the goal, all you did was getting more precise in those, the game pushed you to get ever more efficient with it.
Dark Souls... same thing, you remember where enemies are, how to handle their behavior and you go through sections with ever less amount of life and therefore flasks lost. This especially held true for bosses.

Any game which simply offers difficulty levels (which we can put PoE into the category... reverse difficulty levels by choosing a specific skill because of massive disparity) without changing the amount of mobs, the type of mobs or the behavior of mobs along it... just the damage and life... is a friggin lazy game-design. They are not offering challenge, they are offering chore.
That's why the best games usually provide unique challenges with different difficulty-settings, or don't have them at all from the get-go.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

I fully understand that the current state of the game causes issues for your kind of play, but doing the changes you're asking for here, would cause even bigger problems for people who don't play the way you do, up to the point of excluding them from the game. As long as you can't see or accept the fact that there are players who don't think and play the way you do there is no point arguing. Hence let's agree to disagree.

Sure, but those are INHERENTLY less people. PoE is marketed as a deep and complex ARPG. It's not D3 with the casual approach. Both games have their place in the market for different kinds of players. GGG is taking away the 'depth' from the game by removing viable choices and pushing it more into the direction of it being casual.

By now we can easily say that Grim Dawn is balance-wise a better game then PoE by far. That's why so many people enjoyed it. The issue with it is the long-term viability. Since it's pay2play upfront and has an inferior itemization-system long-term it's not viable to pick up as quickly again after beating it, though it generally is enjoyable to play over and over again just for the sake of the infinite mechanics like Crucible and Shattered Realms, challenging yourself with different builds. Sadly those builds are fairly quickly 'maxed' unlike in PoE where this NEVER happens.

Bring a SINGLE game with as deep of an item customization-system as PoE on the market and people will flock to it immediately. Nobody has dared to go that route yet though. The competition is young and not at the point of procedural endless progression-systems. A small try was made with 'Chronicon' but that game is very casual and repetitive... also can be beat through time-investment alone rather then actual itemization.

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raics wrote:

That comes down to the question of do you buy a good car because you want to compete with your neighbor or because wanting to have a good car instead of a bad one is perfectly natural.

For sure, some do it mostly to impress but I'd say the majority just want to have a good car, and you're assuming that factor doesn't even exist.

And that's exactly the point, nice example there!

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

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In SSF the meta does not even exist.

The only way I can see this statement being true is if your view of meta is focusing on trading to make currency.

Even that's too generous. All video games have a (theoretical, at least) meta. Multiplayer is circumstantial.

The original Super Mario Bros had one, even. Schoolboys sharing tips on how to find the Warp Zones--guess what? That's meta gameplay, right there.

Meta gameplay is any exploitation or development of extra-game knowledge, period.

People figuring out which overpowered mechanical interaction GGG overlooked? Yep, meta gameplay.

Looking at Youtube guides to choose your next build? Meta.

Following Labyrinth layouts online and choosing a good layout day to do a bunch of Lab runs? Meta.

Going on reddit to figure out which 90% of builds are trash-tier this League? Meta.

Looking at a Betrayal excel document to guide your decisions? Meta.

Noobtraps, and knowing how to avoid them, are also a form of meta-knowledge, since the game itself doesn't teach you in any reasonable fashion.

Many of the above are (arguably) necessary evils, but I wouldn't say a single one is evidence of strong game design. Quite the opposite in fact.

I am aware. I was pointing out that is probably the only real meta thing that gets removed in SSF, but both leagues still value skills that need less gear to work.

The game certainly has lost a lot of the "oh shit" factor over the last few years. Used to be a lot more trial and error and areas that are difficult. Very little in the way of running through the map so fast, you could easily forget what map you are in.

I mean, I get it, it is what brings a lot of the people in. I have no problem, playing a speed build and do for currency and equipment. However it has changed the game, and while that is great for a lot of people, it has taken a way a lot for people like me. The game is so easy now, that you really don't have to work to hard to beat everything. There is really no challenge to it anymore.

In the end, GGG is a business and they have to cater to what is hot.

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DS_Deadman wrote:

In the end, GGG is a business and they have to cater to what is hot.

While I agree with some of your statements, especially the one I just quoted, I think they are mostly not connected to this particular thread.

I'm not asking GGG to make the game harder (or easier, for that matter). Rather, I'm asking GGG to do a (MUCH) better job at respecting the choices that players make, that the game itself offers as legitimate choices, and if I thought that was any sort of threat to their bottom line I wouldn't even bother, because I'm not that naive.

Deliberate metas stifle choice. This should be obvious to anyone with a pulse who has been playing this game for more than a year.

Yet meaningful choices are one of the key draws of the genre. In a game with as much (potential) depth as PoE, they are even more important to maximizing the game's profitability. (Not to mention its overall quality, for anyone who happens to care about that.)

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raics wrote:

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Baharoth15 wrote:

I am not really sure what that critic is aiming at in D3 but i guess it's about how skills and character building work there and in this regard POE IS in a whole other league. The complexity and all the possibilities you have in POE aren't even comparable to D3 and the limited options you have there. Not to mention that you can literally switch up your char entirely whenever you want in D3 making the choice irrelevant in the first place as it can be changed and reverted at any time for zero cost.

Be as it may, the stats show that the majority of players tend to play what the devs want us to play that league, even if we don't technically have to we still do, they make it way too tempting.

I'd imagine it's more than just a simple factor of attracting people to "Flavor of the Month" builds. Another problem this game has is that it makes it difficult for you to get anything done, because of how bad the game's RNG is.

Need an important item for your build? Better hope you find it or shell out currency to someone else. Need a 6l? Better you hope you find or craft it or shell out currency to someone else. Need more high yellow or red maps? Better hope you find it, understand how to maximize their chance of dropping, or shell out currency to someone else.

The game has reached a point that unless you blaze through the game at lightning speeds, you're not going to get much done. People are shocked to learn I still use the chaos vendor recipe for money, but whenever I ask them for tips on how to get currency faster, it almost always invariably boils down to "MAP FASTARRRR!". This is because the RNG is so bad that the only way to circumvent it is to optimize yourself until you turn an ARPG into a sprinting simulator.

And then we had Betrayal league, where the game gave you just about everything you could ask for. You don't need to run maps stupid fast for more currency, there's plenty of syndicate members who drop them hand over fist. You don't need to blaze through meticulously sextant'd maps to find more maps, Rin's got you covered and so does Cameria with his Harbinger Orbs. It was the closest thing we ever had to the game letting you play whatever and however you want without punishing for not choosing the meta.