dear GGG a message of love that many others seem to support (Mathil Video link below)

Sofocle: all emperors are rulers; not all rulers are emperors. I am, I believe, afforded new clothes. And as you're about to see, these aren't new clothes at all. ;)

Moon: that's not my name! (and you, of all people right now, know it)

__

I had a strange thought after that huge infodump and rambly rant. And since I do not wish to create any more threads, I'll just tag it into here because I think it does sort of related to what sid and Moon are on about re: game actions that are fun vs game actions that are work.

So I'll start with the bombshell and then we can deal with the fall-out:

I think Diablo 3 won; Path of Exile lost.

Okay, still here? Still breathing? In, out. Slowly. You'll live.

Alright.

So I had to look it up because I quit Diablo 2 not long after Synergies became a thing, but to this day, Diablo 2 does not have allocated loot. It has what is known as Global Loot, aka FFA loot. As does Diablo 1, of course, and the majority of ARPGs not made by a company that also revolutionised (read: dumbed-down) MMORPGs, where allocated loot is much more the norm. Suffice to say, most ARPGs didn't do allocated loot, and Diablo 3 likely did it because so much of that game was influenced by WoW (the Demon Hunter's pointless presence was just the tip of that iceberg).

My very first real post about Path of Exile (which has not been deleted, because this, Sofocles, *is my original account* -- the bling account was made for moderating, and later Ruling) was all about how I as a 15 year veteran of Diablo chose PoE over Diablo 3. Believe it or not, back in early 2012, this was a scorching hot topic. The meat of my comparison is about skill runes and support gems; I don't mention loot at all because, idiot that I am, I never figured PoE would change from its cut-throat FFA system, because it seemed GGG was that dedicated to replicating and improving upon the Diablo 2 experience -- again, feel free to peruse my link for details (first spoiler tag is the original March 2012 post). FFA loot was baked into the PoE experience back then, because unless you'd played Diablo 3 (and it was always in a strict Closed Beta at the time), you hadn't really experienced a Diablo-like ARPG with allocated loot. (Edit: Titan Quest might have but who the hell played that multiplayer seriously?)

Well and good. PoE circa early 2012, a few months before D3 dropped, was a savage thing hellbent on killing you from Hailrake onwards. And if you partied up, you dealt with FFA loot, because it just made sense. Everything about PoE was self-centred -- you were an Exile, struggling to survive not only against Wraeclast but, obliquely, other Exiles. You could form alliances, even friendships, but if the right loot dropped, that could be broken in an instant. It worked really well (plus or minus the drop trade system -- thankfully they solved that one...eventually), mainly because it was a fairly small community, a lot of us spoke English, the game wasn't free at the time, and people generally understood it was just a game, one we'd been waiting a very long time for.

Then Diablo 3 releases and it's kind of a bummer. Sales are just fine, but obviously it's not the ARPG you'd expect from the people who brought you Diablo 1 and 2 (because as we all know, it's NOT). More people flock to PoE, specifically more Diablo 3 refugees. We welcome them as fellow Exiles, more the merrier, glad you're here, now come play Cut-Throat so we can kill you and take your shit, it's fun, promise! (It really was.) But with them come certain...expectations born of Diablo 3. Rumbles and grumbles of PoE not having an auction house, for example -- mere mention of an auction house in Global Chat at that time was begging to be dog-piled. If anything set PoE apart from Diablo 3, it was that. That...and allocated loot.

This is a very complicated argument. There are dozens of threads from 2012 on the matter, and I can't even find the one that GGG eventually caved to when they introduced loot options. I do know that the volume and intensity of threads arguing for allocated loot/against FFA loot jumped significantly after Kripparrian brought the first wave of Diablo 3 malcontents in around July 2012 or so. Suddenly it was an argument, a topic that dominated this very board for months. I think we all weighed in, with the locals arguing the pros and cons very thoroughly. And I won't pretend that we were all FFA stalwarts -- I can see plenty of alphas and old guild members of mine arguing for allocated loot, usually along the lines of 'so this exalted dropped, I was playing a ranger, and----'. Youch, I felt for them. I did. I think even I argued for the system that GGG eventually implemented: options. Because options are good, right?

Well, they are when people use them. There was a belief that with FFA/allocation as an option, people would keep using FFA to preserve the experience of loot tension and intensity...yeah, that didn't happen. Of course people chose the path of least resistance and least stress. No one wants to see that exalted orb their arrow dropped 'taken' by someone who's closer to it. That shit just sucks, right? So naturally FFA was dead in the water, which then leads to everyone playing ranged, which leads to monsters being easier and safer to kill, which leads to devs having to beef up the monsters against ranged (proximity shields came way too late and were implemented way too clumsily), which leads, of course, to the current arms race that has done a real number on PoE today.

Here's the crux: would allocated loot, the probable trigger for what would eventually become the speed/projectile spam meta of PoE, have been considered so fiercely had Diablo 3 not had it? Did Diablo 3 condition ARPG players to expect it, and did those players then bring that expectation to PoE? We know that the GGG devs did not want allocated loot. When they said 'gritty, hardcore ARPG', they did not mean having the time and leisure to pick up what the monsters dropped. They meant genuine pressure in the moment to balance killing, surviving and looting -- FFA loot is the racing heart of that system. Like or not. FFA loot was central to GGG's vision of Path of Exile, and caving on it was the single biggest step they ever took away from that vision.

Naturally, GGG might have been wrong. Maybe FFA loot was a relic and the majority of modern ARPG players, Diablo 3 refugees or otherwise, no longer wanted to deal with it. Certainly few of us at the time had the foresight to see that it was a necessary evil if the game were to remain truly hardcore.

Here's the kicker: being a SSFer from the start (give or take a few partnerships built up over a lot of time), I felt that the FFA/Allocated loot argument didn't really affect me or how I play. At that point, I was still so naive to how larger forces would affect not just how others played but, obviously, how GGG then changed the game based on how they played. Over the course of several years, I was forcibly and repeatedly reminded that no, PoE wasn't a single player game just because I played it that way. And yes, the game was getting a LOT harder for me because it was being tuned against players who had reacted to the Allocated Loot change.

I'll be honest: I felt like it was a bit unfair, like I was being pressured to either play 'their' way or quit, because my more close quarters way of playing, unchanged from the start, was fast becoming impossible beyond bottom feeding. Fun, but each update, the ceiling of non-meta viability dropped another notch. And as far as I'm concerned, an ARPG that has a clearly defined meta, one even occasionally overtly defined by the devs themselves, is not worth playing. I couldn't quite put my finger on any of it, on why things had gotten this way, until I traced it back to any possible turning point.

I genuinely think that turning point was allocated loot replacing FFA loot. And that this replacement was the result of pressure from people sick of FFA loot because they'd experienced allocated loot in an ARPG elsewhere, and that elsewhere was for most Diablo 3 -- because no other ARPG really did it before Diablo 3. And, to return to my little grenade at the start of this post, I believe that this influence from Diablo 3 was the first and most significant step in changing Path of Exile from what the devs wanted to make, wanted to play, and towards whatever shambolic mess it is today.

Here is where I'll link this to what sid and Moon were saying. FFA loot forces tension into the moments of game play, which can be 'fun' in context, especially if you build your character to be both resilient and profitable. Allocated loot removes that tension, which makes picking up loot a process bereft of any pressure. It's a chore. Work. Filtering it becomes important when you have that much at your disposal -- another chore. Like or not, allocated loot is kind of boring. But if PoE proves anything about so-called hardcore gamers, it's that they'll take boring and lucrative over exciting and unprofitable any day of the week.

PoE's entire identity was that of a merciless rebuttal of Diablo 3's hand-holding and Whimsyshire-filtered bullshit, as a return to form for the hardcore, every-bastard-for-themselves ARPG. Diablo 3 introduced the idea of allocated loot to ARPGs cribbed from MMOs; it seduced ARPG players with its convenience and fairness, and not even PoE could stand against that. Allocated loot, even as an option, stripped PoE of its identity and set it on the path towards becoming a spammy shoot-em-up so clotted with guaranteed loot players would have to aggressively filter it. What a massive failure compared to the ridiculously awesome beast PoE was in 2012.

Therefore: Diablo 3 won, Path of Exile lost.

Here endeth (or began) the lessening.

one note about the FFA loot. i think you grossly overstate its importance

loot allocation matters only if you play with others. even back then, closed beta/early open beta playing with others was rather unattractive on its own: UX/team features sucked/werent present at all AND the speed difference between characters made any form of coordination impossible

grouping existed ONLY as a MF thing (including or maybe even revolving around buffing map drops). it wasnt fun on its own, it was profitable to group

even at the start of open beta POE was a single-player game. that never changed. GGG never tried to fix it. state of guild features today is proof enough that GGG abandoned it.

ive played solo/nonsolo back then, change allocated loot changed very little. the melee/ranged dynamics you mentioned already didnt exist. that was the time where GGG nerfed entire passive tree to 'balance' Kaoms Heart and murdered life melee builds in the process. melee kinda sucked since then. FFA loot or not

the rest of your points - true. sad but true. but the loot allocation.. who cares? team-play in POE wasnt enjoyable enough on its own (excluding generic social aspect of killing monsters with friend/spouse) to make people play it without artificial stimuli.

the balance (or rather lack of it) between different builds made synchronisation impossible because how do you imagine 3 characters with vastly different speeds (20, 30 and 55 screens/minute) to play together? it didnt work back then, it doesnt work today. coop in POE isnt inhenently FUN, it is profitable (and GGG did a lot to tackle the profitability without really addressing the fun aspect)

if you want to know what - IMO ofc - was the change, the point of no return? killing reflect damage. before that people had to build balanced builds, there was some kind of self-regulating feedback loop on damage/defence/playstyle. reflect did that.
the day they 'temporarily' removed it, replacing it with some bull.. orbs and whatnot - the floodgates opened. speed meta was born. that was the point of no return - because ofc GGG would survive (literally) backslash of reintroducing reflect (or similar, strong, balancing mechanic). the patch that killed reflect (that admittedly has its issues ofc) was the patch that closed the first chapter of POE. after that it was completely different game.

I would love to be proven right about the overstatement possibility. After all, that's how I felt for years myself, as I said in the post. It seems such a stretch, and yet you have to look at it from a personal perspective for that stretch to not give. Once you look at it from GGG's perspective, it makes a lot more sense.

Reflect damage's alteration is definitely relevant as well, but I see it as symptomatic rather than a cause. Once players were okay with only playing ranged since their loot was secure (even if quite a few people played solo, obviously enough played together to make the loot allocation vs FFA loot argument significant -- the main thread about it was legendarily long and intense), the next step of security was removing the unfairness of reflect damage at range, the dreaded 'off screen' death because now ranged players were free to build purely for damage output rather than some tankiness to survive a loot attempt. CQC characters still feared reflect but we were also built tanky because, well, CQC. But CQC was now pointless, so reflect damage's primary role as punishing CQC's heavy hitting was equally so. Now it really did seem unfair as an off-screen killer, hence the implementation of weird shit like fiery souls and last gasp and all that.

On the other hand, reflect damage itself always struck me as a last resort for balancing, a sort of 'shit, we have no idea how to make these monsters challenging' ham-fisting.

So I agree it was part of it, but not, as you feel, the start. Not that this is an argument worth pursuing -- we are not at cross-purposes, only different opinions of how we came to this point. The point is we did come to this point.

It's fun to see all this views about what caused the downfall of the game. In my personal opinion it happened when GGG allowed the "standardization of trade". GGG had created this cool idea of crafting materials as currency instead of plain "gold", just to have it completely wasted with the advance of trade.

It's even worse when they kept trying to restrain trade in the worst way possible, while at the same time balancing everything around trade.

IF they had just scrapped the whole "public" items idea in the forum that led to the 300 different third party apps feeding on the Public API we have today and the "muh economy culture the game evolved into" the game might've turned really better in my opinion. All they had to do was offer a way for players to trade the "crafting materials", that's all was needed in the game.

Trade, the way it is today, killed any possibility of "find/craft cool gear" idea, that should be core of an ARPG.

After that they started pushing more and more towards the "casual crowd", which led to the game getting faster, more mobs, faster, more mobs, oneshots, faster, loot explosion, faster. You get the point.

They murdered the "role playing" aspect for the sake of plain mindless colorful action (the same mistake d3 did), which is sad with how many core ideas they did right in PoE (crafting currency, skill gems, support gems, passive tree).
Unfortunately all those cool core ideas are wasted when they balance the game around the "efficient" and not around the "fun".

"

Mortyx wrote:

It's fun to see all this views about what caused the downfall of the game. In my personal opinion it happened when GGG allowed the "standardization of trade". GGG had created this cool idea of crafting materials as currency instead of plain "gold", just to have it completely wasted with the advance of trade.

It's even worse when they kept trying to restrain trade in the worst way possible, while at the same time balancing everything around trade.

IF they had just scrapped the whole "public" items idea in the forum that led to the 300 different third party apps feeding on the Public API we have today and the "muh economy culture the game evolved into" the game might've turned really better in my opinion. All they had to do was offer a way for players to trade the "crafting materials", that's all was needed in the game.

Trade, the way it is today, killed any possibility of "find/craft cool gear" idea, that should be core of an ARPG.

After that they started pushing more and more towards the "casual crowd", which led to the game getting faster, more mobs, faster, more mobs, oneshots, faster, loot explosion, faster. You get the point.

They murdered the "role playing" aspect for the sake of plain mindless colorful action (the same mistake d3 did), which is sad with how many core ideas they did right in PoE (crafting currency, skill gems, support gems, passive tree).
Unfortunately all those cool core ideas are wasted when they balance the game around the "efficient" and not around the "fun".

This is astute. The closest we ever had to what you're describing was with Descent and Descent:Champions. You couldn't trade currency items, and in fact were encouraged to use them to craft. Amusingly, in Descent, an exalted orb was pretty worthless compared to an alchemy orb, which is why that mode happily threw them at you from a scripted reward chest. That always tickled me pink. Without trading and long-term storage, currency item value is wildly different based on functionality alone. Even the mighty mirror is of little real use to a SSFer.

Regarding the trading system of PoE: the failure to realise their original plan to turn forum-based item listing into asynchronous escrow (the very reason why this forum, this site, is hand-made, was to allow for out-of-game trading) was a huge, huge hit to the Path of Exile they'd been planning to make. And by the time they could get around to it, players had already created what was essentially the one thing GGG never wanted in their game: a somewhat automated indexing system best used as a sort of click-to-buy Amazon or Ebay, which is why plenty of people *prefer* to trade with bots. Bots at least aren't under the impression that this was supposed to be a barter-based trade system. They do precisely what you want them to do when you want it. Easy.

And as I said in my old, old post, one of the coolest things about PoE was the goldless approach, turning upgrade items into currency. It's such a shame that these upgrade materials later became gold-by-proxy, again thanks to the convenience of the third party indexing system. And instead of somehow working against this ad hoc system, GGG waved a white flag and embraced it, even creating their own as a backup.

But this was always going to be a trade-driven game. That was the original plan, and it is based on the game's deeply-seated Magic the Gathering DNA. Chris is a huge MTG fan and player, and no doubt has the fondest memories of trading cards at swap meets, of bartering and dickering. Of course he'd want to see that in his own game -- but it was a pipe dream, for so many reasons.

The fact that both the domestic and console versions of PoE do have in-game marketplaces seems to indicate to me that this fight is long-lost. The only reason they don't implement it in the international version is they don't have to. International players have been accustomed to their own inferior, jury-rigged system for years. It's all part of that fallacy of hardcoreness. Can't make it too convenient or streamlined, guys. That's not HARDCVRE.

now people are asking that ggg removes the death penalty of 10% experience...
in another thread

"

BlackPulsar wrote:

now people are asking that ggg removes the death penalty of 10% experience...

People have been asking for this for years.

"

VolcanoElixir wrote:

"

BlackPulsar wrote:

now people are asking that ggg removes the death penalty of 10% experience...

People have been asking for this for years.

and than what? we all play full damage builds with no life and a cast on death+portal setup?
i hope they make it 20% :) i have 3 lvl 100 chars and i play since 2014
these guys want what i did in 6 YEARS done in 2 weeks :))))))))))) i'm so sad :))) unbelievable...

I wasn't implying they'll get it, just that people have been asking for its removal for years.

"

VolcanoElixir wrote:

I wasn't implying they'll get it, just that people have been asking for its removal for years.

i got it,just made an example of wtf logic :)