Blight, forever in the shadow of Legion

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Cyzax wrote:

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CarNiVooRa wrote:

Especially if its so much worse than Legion.

But it isn't...

Legion was not really accessible to the vast majority of the player base. It was way too narrow in which builds could really do the encounters well, and casual players would never get to the timeless domain (or at least only once or twice)

Blight is accessible!

I rate leagues by 'fun', not by worthless ingame currency... It doesn't matter... If GGG doubled currency drops, all that would happen was that buying items would cost twice as much. Basic economics.

Blight is accessible, if you just want to fail 90% of the blights, sure. I for one have no clue what's going on. Click the towers, select something for each one of them, then you can click some more of them, then monsters come to the middle and it's over. No loot.

edit: yes, it's my fault for not trying to learn to play tower defense games in monster slashing grinding arpg. It's also my fault for having no tutorial on how the damn thing works in the first place. Sure I figured it out. I'd just rather do anything else in the game.
Legion on the other hand was pretty cool, nothing much to understand, break some ice, kill what you free up, collect loot.

Blight in the shadow of Legion?!?!

To be in the shadow it must be close enough for that... But Blight is miles away from Legion.

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Cyzax wrote:

Seeing people showcase awesome synthesised items which you know you'll never get near, and having that be true for the large majority of the playerbase is not good PR...

The same could be said about double-corruptions of expensive items, that's not an issue there though.

If you look closely as to why despite both being fairly similar in time-investment to achieve it's actually easy to see.

Synthesis was bad in regards to information towards players while also being overly complex. Hence why I'm saying... only dropping the mod-range regarding the level of content run. This alleviates the whole 'no value' issue of the mechanic.
Secondly showing all possible outcomes from the Synthesizer when inputting the items and you're done, it becomes a decent mechanic with those few changes already... and if you go further it becomes a fantastic one.

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Cyzax wrote:

Convoluted mechanics, mod-tiers, numbers had nothing to do with whether it was good or bad, nor could it be fixed... The problem was the entire item synthesis system was way too biased towards the trading and/or high-end players, making the majority feel left out. Thus it had to go...

But... exactly that was the issue. Nearly everyone had several 'worthwhile' items sitting around after playing a few days in T15 or T16 content. And that's not hard to do.
The big issue was that nearly nobody had the nerve to look up the shit-festival that the mechanic was.
It was exactly because:
A.) It was convoluted and nigh impossible to use without looking outside the game.
B.) Sorting through the items dropped was utter nightmare (solved by mod-range and adjustment of actual drops)
C.) It took up literal endless space.

The last can be solved by 'extracting' fractured mods from items and allowing them to be put on another base of similar ilvl with a hefty cost attached.
That's not hard to program either to simply show a non-fixed list of available single- dual- and tripple-fractures you've extracted as well as the max ilvl the base could be.

But eh... people have little imagination to see how much actual potential a system has or doesn't have.
That's the issue with Legion... it has not a lot of potential versus Blight which had a ton of it in comparison. Or Synthesis which even had more.

Heck... the 'best' side-content (Delve) for the majority is also barely tapping the available potential of it. It's an utter waste of concepts.

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Cyzax wrote:

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Kulze wrote:

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Olympiacoz wrote:

Synth was way better than both. From a gameplay and depth point of view, not loot. It was the best league since delve. But unfortunately for some reason devs worship those dumbass casuals at reddit so we can't have it added to the game.

Sadly true, Synthesis was a far superior league compared to those we have at the moment.
The only thing which broke their neck was the convoluted mechanic to synthesize items as well as how the drops of fractured items were handled.

Adjusting mod-tiers regarding the content you're running while also limiting the total number of drops regarding that would've solve the whole situation... but no, instead we got the bosses as Zana-maps now while ignoring the important part of the league completely.

A disgrace to see that.

Speaking as one of those 'dumbass casuals', synthesis held about zero worthwhile content for us.

Seeing people showcase awesome synthesised items which you know you'll never get near, and having that be true for the large majority of the playerbase is not good PR...

Convoluted mechanics, mod-tiers, numbers had nothing to do with whether it was good or bad, nor could it be fixed... The problem was the entire item synthesis system was way too biased towards the trading and/or high-end players, making the majority feel left out. Thus it had to go...

LOL What? If you don't like convoluted you shouldn't be playing this game at all, look at the passive tree/item interactions and try to tell me otherwise. POE is a game where you need to use thinking and solving ability, you also need to be able to make the right decisions and read, coupled with mechanical skill, and frankly having people like you who demand everything to be easier (for you) would just ruin it and make it something it's not and has never been. And the fact that synth was removed already gives you people the literal and already well known status of game ruiners.

Why GGG even takes their time to backpedal to you people baffles me when you're just a little upboted vocal minority and in no way reflect the huge playerbase.

Let me remind you that most people who play this game, like it because it's depth, and because it's challenging. Not because it's loot and not because easy.

Loot isn't what makes this game good. Loot isn't a correct measure of what defines a league. Depth is. The fact that this game is HARD, convoluted already is what adds all the depth, all the fun and playability as an ARPG.

Casuals with lame demands have always been the problem with gaming since 2011, and companies appealing to that crowd is the sole reason it's so generic, brainless unoriginal and destroyed these days. I'm sure you can agree seeing 99.9% of all titles being boring, stale, simple, unoriginal, generic, where everything is bite size and dumbed down enough for them to immidiately process without any effort.

With some exceptions of convoluted games like Dota 2 which kept true to the core game design of DoTA, and guess what? It turned mainstream and massively ultra popular because of it's recipe of UNFORGIVING DIFFICULTY and DEPTH which i mentioned and marketing of tournaments. Valve is the last to care about causals petty demands, they know how to make a fine games and do their own thing, and to no surprise millions still play because they have the recipe down and keep doing it right.

all the 2019 leagues were bad IMO

Non stop performance issues

1-month beta testing leagues

In the case of some we are still beta testing leagues that are years old

Hopefully 3.9 is something decent, my expectations are incredibly low

They've already killed melee and self casting spells

What next?

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Olympiacoz wrote:

LOL What? If you don't like convoluted you shouldn't be playing this game at all, look at the passive tree/item interactions and try to tell me otherwise. POE is a game where you need to use thinking and solving ability, you also need to be able to make the right decisions and read, coupled with mechanical skill, and frankly having people like you who demand everything to be easier (for you) would just ruin it and make it something it's not and has never been. And the fact that synth was removed already gives you people the literal and already well known status of game ruiners.

Another one with the same argument and inability to properly discern.

Convoluted designs =//= depth.

Depth = good
Needlessly complicated designs = bad

What makes a good game great is to provide deep systems with the easiest solutions possible, not vice versa. Synthesis was a fantastic base system... but it failed to engage people because it was needlessly complex.
Who wants to look up over 1000 possible rolls outside of the game each time they try to see if their item could possibly be worthwhile? That's simply bad-design. To make a good system you make it complex but understandable. Synthesis was complex... but understandable? Not in the least without intensive building of knowledge, all your results will be utterly worthless though.

In comparison Betrayal was a fairly decent mechanic (outside of the Mastermind). While you had no idea how exactly it worked at the beginning people could personally deduct the results just by watching how the relations changed the rewards. Once again... with Synthesis you had NO CLUE AT ALL. That's convoluted and unnecessary.

Also I'm someone who always opted for Synthesis to go into the core-system, hence... you're barking towards the wrong direction here in the first place. Pick your 'fights' properly next time.

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Olympiacoz wrote:

Why GGG even takes their time to backpedal to you people baffles me when you're just a little upboted vocal minority and in no way reflect the huge playerbase.

A good game has to take into consideration the 3 main types of players. Casuals, invested players and the core player-base (which are the 0,1%).
If you ignore even a single one of those your game will fare far worse then it could be.
Casuals need the simplistic designs and easy ability to understand the core-mechanics.
Invested players mostly want proper progression and the feeling of always be able to do so fluently with regard to their invested time.
The 0,1% are those which need top-tier content which is heavily skill-based.

Or to give it with the WoW classic example:
Casuals are on the road from 1-60 while the game is explained to them PROPERLY along the line (good tutorials and easy to understand mechanics)
Invested players are those who play on after lvl 60, hence those farming up decent gear and reputation with factions.
The 0,1% were the raid-guilds there, highest-tier content and the hardest one to achieve, as well as loooong grinds for the highest standing with factions to get expensive and 'rare' rewards.

Take away the fairly decent tutorials for the time and it would've failed. Take away the ability to simply play on after reaching max level and it would've failed. Take away raiding and massive grinds... and also it would've failed.

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Olympiacoz wrote:

Let me remind you that most people who play this game, like it because it's depth, and because it's challenging. Not because it's loot and not because easy.

The depth? Yeah... that's what GGG tries to sell it for.
Maybe they should stop with the meta-rotations then? They are detrimental to 'depth' by streamlining it completely.
Maybe they should also properly invest their efforts into at least basic levels of balancing then? Because in the current situation it feels more like a bullet-hell then an ARPG.

Depth.... what a joke. That time sadly is over, PoE has become a mediocre game with regards to its age and potential. It's a sad state and one which GGG has to solve, so they need to finally get their asses in motion and do it properly.

Also about your 'easy' part:
Convoluted mechanics are a menace, skill-based content is proper difficulty. Discern between them please.

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Olympiacoz wrote:

Loot isn't what makes this game good. Loot isn't a correct measure of what defines a league. Depth is. The fact that this game is HARD, convoluted already is what adds all the depth, all the fun and playability as an ARPG.

Dark-Souls is also an ARPG. PoE on the other hand a looter-ARPG, which is a sub-genre of a sub-genre from RPGs.
Hence yes... loot is a MAJOR part of the game... not the only one on the other hand.
To have it be good you need the loot, the crafting AND the actual game-play. The last is in such a sorry state that we can only fall back to loot and crafting most of the times though. Which needs it to be changed direly.

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Olympiacoz wrote:

With some exceptions of convoluted games like Dota 2 which kept true to the core game design of DoTA, and guess what?

Dota 2 is a simple game. A masterpiece example (formerly) of what makes a game good.
Simple mechanics... hard to master.
Every dimwit can play the game after a day or 2... but getting good needs thousands of hours of experience.
In PoE? It's ridiculously hard to play the game on a base-level, and after you're through that you usually can easily get uber-elder done in 2 weeks after a league starts. It's the exact opposite of Dota. Convoluted mechanics... easy to master.

Sure, you can go beyond that, but why? What sort of goal is there? There is no functioning competition in the game as crashes and game-breaking bugs are rampant at the start of each league, causing ladders to be an utter joke, as well as every other time-based competition as players have to have luck for their systems to still be compatible while the game not simply breaking anyways if it is.
Simply said... it's a disgrace on the side of GGG to even have this happening.

One thing that some of you got wrong is the fact that everyone could play the 4way or 5way with the amount of ppl doing literally free carry to hit lvl 100.

You just needed to farm or buy the splinters go to global 820 and you got a mountain of loot and shit and a shit ton of xp on top!

So saying it wasnt accessible to many players is untrue.

I did carrys myself, around 100 carrys and most of them were first timers doing the 5way.

If blight came before Legion it wouldve defenitely had a bigger playerbase enjoying it more, then this way around.

I wonder why Essence League is never mentioned as the worst league. Cause it was the most boring imo