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

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sidtherat wrote:

'worth'? 'benefit'? are you here for gaming or for something else?

the only time others 'gaining' more affect me is when these others corner a market on an unique i wanted to use and i have to pay more for it. everything else is just 'obtainable' from trade for very little (i mean 'mid-tier stuff', i do not care about top-end, why would i?). people having it easier wont break that. thousands of bots havent managed, so im pretty relaxed about that.


like seriously. this game has an economy (to create a social aspect AND to make it more attractive to players who want to be superior to others) but thats it. you can ignore it, self-ignore it, fool around with it. if you care so much for it.. then maybe this is no longer just a game for you and maybe take a step back?

these are just pixel money, cool to have but like all money - it is just a way to do things. it seems that for many these 'things' are no longer important, it is all about gains, benefits, worth and all that..

(i know ill be able to do more builds because i do that all the time without really bothering with that crap POE's economy is. try it, you dont have to be SSF and artificially gimp yourself to dont give a quack about economy and race to the 'king of pile of pixel cash')

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sidtherat wrote:

if it wont help.. then adding it wont worsen their situation as well? am i right?

i firmly believe than removing faux content is going to benefit everyone. it wont turn noobs into pros. the gap between them is going to remain - thats rather obvious (and im not in any way advocating for closing this gap - but stop pretending doing chores is some kind of skill you have to acquire to be good at this game)

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Spoiler

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

(I'm putting a spoiler tag for concision's sake, but there are enough good points in here for this post to warrant its own forum thread so it's definitely worth checking out for people new to this thread)

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

Spoiler

Fun fact: McDonald's can be quite the luxury experience in China.. List of 20, and 3 of them are in China/Hong Kong. Not quite as upmarket as KFC (when I went there back in 2008, there were people paid simply to open the door for guests!), but still -- a slightly relevant bitter edge to your analogy. At this point I think it's really stretching it to call PoE devs 'chefs' given the breakneck schedule, repetitive gimmicky output and prioritisation of exporting their hard work to another country to be polished and rebranded as a premium game with relatively low-impact pay-to-win features. At this point, a more assembly-line approach would be preferable; at least that way there'd be adequate QA. Not exactly what I'd expect of fine dining degustation, but maybe decent enough for oh, I dunno, Red Lobster.

Restaurants change their menus all the time based on consumer feedback and reception. Even the really snobbish ones, if the feedback and reception comes from the right people no-names-mentioned-KAREN. Unfortunately for your analogy, GGG do not produce food of any nature -- they sell a highly compelling experience governed almost entirely by a house-always-win RNG and the acceptance therefore that winning is a state of simply not-losing-catastrophically. And yes, it's free to play, but that doesn't mean they're not selling all the creature comforts a regular user soon learns they can't live without. Not even an argument at this point.

Lastly, the distinct lack of competition and options really rips the wind from this analogy's sails. If you don't like what a chef is serving, it's true: telling them so probably won't make much difference (depending on the nature of your feedback perhaps) -- but you can usually go somewhere else that will offer up a similar experience. Or, at least, a different but equally good one. No game out there is quite like PoE, for better or worse. Certain upstarts are aiming to be as good but in their own way. Relevant to something else you said, one of them has a brilliant deterministic crafting system baked into its every layer, accessible at any time. It's an excellent 'option' if that's what you want from an ARPG. But if you want the multiplayer, the vast if volatile flexibility of support gems, totally-not-unbalanced Ascendancy classes, the fallacy of diversity that is the skill tree, the abhorrent but somehow addictive trading scene, and the supermarket freshness of competitive game-changing leagues every 3 months, PoE is pretty much it for now and the foreseeable future.

Forget restaurants and chefs, this is about a whole other sort of service.

And you don't need to be Walter White when you're the only lab in town.

But I suppose if calling the devs 'chefs' helps retain one's view of the game as something not insidiously predatory on the addictive personality and GGG being 100% aware of this, meaning no real need to suffer the players' uninvited grievances, that's fair enough. Maybe they'd be chefs in China, where McDonald's is indeed a little bit fancy, while excellent local cuisine is ridiculously cheap and taken for granted. Funny saying that in regards to a 'home grown' game studio from New Zealand but I guess you lose that cred when you sell out as magnificently, as spectacularly, as GGG did.

__

As for Mathil: he's one side of the Australian PoE Advocate coin, the sceptical, no-bullshit side that can come across as abrasive. ZiggyD was/is the other side, the happy-go-lucky, give-it-a-go-mate angle that is easily misconstrued as overeager or even obsequious. Between the two of them, there's a fairly complete, balanced picture of Australian gaming attitude. I'm biased though; my one experience of watching Mathil's stream was him saying Chris should be working on Christmas Eve instead of playing PoE, which I found unnecessarily harsh and sufficient a taste of his 'style' for my likes. If indeed he is representative of this player base, I'm happy to no longer count myself a member of such.

And Ziggy, well, it only cost me $12,500US to put a huge smile on his face, and I do not regret it one bit.

__

...I wonder which part of this harmless rant will somehow trip Support's trigger. I honestly can't even tell anymore. Maybe this part. If you can read this, I consider myself lucky, but you likely don't.

I had no idea about the "McDonald's in China" thing, and it certainly does put a bit of dark irony into my metaphor. Not that I think it makes the analogy any less accurate... quite the opposite, really. Regardless, you made a fair point about me oversimplifying the nature of the beast, but I'm not sure of any restaurant chains famous enough worldwide to really capture the spirit of how I see GGG these days in a relatively short metaphor.

Maybe I should stop bothering to even try keeping my posts short? But I've had my share of post edits/deletions/forum probation for things I couldn't wrap my brain around (albeit not quite to the infamous extent you have) so I guess I've been conditioned into avoiding giant walls of text, when the alternative seems to be having the meat stripped off the bones of a post and removing important context for the scraps left behind.

But hey, they left your post intact for once, so maybe I'll get grandfathered in?

Anyway...

To attempt to return to the actual topic of the thread, I was simply saying that since the "average" player doesn't even reach maps, balancing the game around them makes about as much sense as a chef picking core menu items based on the opinions of people who come in for a happy hour cocktail and then leave.

Or, if you prefer (since there's certainly some truth to the comparison), a drug dealer setting their prices according to the opinions of teetotalers.

In both of these cases, as in Path of Exile, the product should be designed with the clientele in mind. And I don't even know who that is anymore, which is how I've felt since Synthesis League. It's definitely not me, and that's fine. But the shriek-filled echo chamber that is the subreddit right now really needs to have more people considering that maybe it isn't them, either, and that this doesn't mean the end of the world. Play the game until it stops being fun, and then do something else with your time. Like Factorio!

Maybe the only thing that games, food, beer, and books have in common is that they are all at their best when they're made according to the vision of the creator-artists, instead of watered down into something boring for the sake of wider mainstream appeal. The consumer's goal should be to find a creator-artist whose vision aligns with theirs, not to try and radically change something that exists against the vision of (in this case) the lead game developers.

I was dreading a combative reply given my unprovoked aggression towards your analogy, so thank you for not turning this into a...situation where either of us could appear less than civil and thus potentially worth of the red-badge-of-dishonour. It is most appreciated.

Factorio has been on my radar for a while, but I'll be honest: Satisfactory looks more my speed, although even that I prefer to watch others creatively break the game than immersing in it myself. And by others, I mean This Motherfucking Beast Right Here. Easily the most enjoyable streamer I've ever seen, and pure gold for both viewers and devs who don't mind someone beta testing the shit out of their works-in-progress for free.

Regarding the average player never reaching Maps thing: I used to fly that flag pretty high, given there was some weird reputation out there that I'd never played a Map in my life (when I probably played one before most of the people believing that), but I think it's misleading now. Chris was almost certainly talking the totality of created characters rather than accounts, and that unfortunately includes bots. And we know the game has a bit of a bot problem. So...while it might be statistically true that most characters never enter a Map portal, I'm willing to bet the vast majority of regular players do.

At my most sceptical, my most jaded, I admit that I don't think anyone reading or using this forum is part of the target audience. Nor, as you noted, the howling void that is the PoE subreddit. In those fits of pique, I believe that the Chinese players are the target audience and it is they who receive the polished product; compared to what they're paying for (and pay they do), the international PoE is a slouching mess of obfuscated subsystems, glutted with poorly implemented leftovers from each league and bereft of much in the way of user-friendly streamlining (because as we all know, streamlining means simplifying and OMG GO PLAY DIABLOW 3 IF THAT'S WHAT U WANT LOLZ). I would publicly fellate a cucumber to know what sort of cash Tencent are pulling in per month from their version of PoE. Even now I look at their site and marvel over the slickness of it all. You don't go to that effort if you don't expect to make it all back and then some, and a company the size of Tencent isn't going to settle for a low ROI. So yeah, gun to the head and all that, I reckon that's your real player base. You and anyone else playing the International PoE? Dregs.

But that's just me at my gloomiest. Because I also know and acknowledge that even if what TencentGGG deploy every so often is rough around the edges, it's still a lot of work and perfectly playable. It is, if you're into it, worth supporting. I just think it's hard to do that knowing that (uh-oh food analogy incoming) you're eating adequately-prepared sushi from the same haul that is shipped off to China where it's turned into an entire seafood gourmet. Sure, their PoE is pay-to-win by the International PoE standard but nothing overtly insidious by any other f2p standard. It might even be worth it...

But that's creating a false dichotomy I think. There is no rule that states a f2p, non-p2w POE has to be as crude and user-unfriendly as the current one is. It seems a strange attitude adopted by gamers that because a game is free, it is given a pass on certain shortcomings. Never mind how much that game pulls in (in some cases, much more than a triple A title over the long term). We're back at the dealer analogy -- no point in wasting time and money on gussying up a product people are going to consume regardless. OTOH all legal products of addiction spend oodlefucktonnes of cash on advertising and product image, but that's because there's competition.

PoE desperately needs real competition to get out of this rut of creative dehydration, of quality being a lower priority. And I'm sure the devs are aware of that, even if it's in their owner's best interest, in their very instincts, to maintain a monopoly. I hope it's a matter of time before Tencent make Eleventh Hour Games an offer they hopefully can refuse. And that's the best-case scenario.

Finally, the issue of creator-artist vision vs adapting to the clientele: it's a balance, of course, and no one would accuse GGG of doing well in that regard. They'll compromise as a business because there's money in that -- don't pretend for a second that PoE being a Chinese product hasn't and won't influence the game's design. Much easier to make Chinese-friendly content than have to change it at a later date. But compromise with their players? That's pretty rare, and most times they do, there's some lingering regret and long-term problems. Most obvious example: allocated loot. That was a huge issue back when. Massive thread. Multiple threads. GGG knew that allocated loot was against their vision of the game, but eventually they had to admit that their vision wasn't what people wanted. The knock-on effect was drastic but slow to manifest, and by the time anyone noticed it it was too late: PoE was balanced (heh) around FFA loot, thereby ensuring melee/close ranged styles were adequately rewarded for their risk-taking. Safer ranged play missed out on the choicest loot, but died a lot less and so retained more experience. This was fundamental to the notion of a truly 'hardcore ARPG' where risk matches reward. But GGG caved, implemented allocated loot, and suddenly ranged play had no real drawbacks. Melee play had no real advantage. This was, whether anyone wants to admit it or not, the very decision that led to the speed meta. And yet GGG probably had no choice. Players really were quitting because of the unfairness of FFA loot. They got what they asked for, but didn't really stop to wonder why GGG didn't implement it in the first place. As it turns out, there was a very good reason. Oh shit, the devs actually knew what they were doing, even if players couldn't grasp it? Oh. Well.

But then there are examples of compromise like nets in Bestiary. Their removal was another caving, but a good one. The last thing a speed-based PoE needs is a slowing mechanism like throwing a net manually amid frantic, frenetic combat. By the time I played the Bestiary mechanic, Einhar was handling all of that and I was thankful for it. I had enough to manage, thank you very much.

It's no secret that whatever PoE is now, it's definitely not the ARPG the devs wanted to make so that they could play it themselves. I don't know if that was just a cheap tagline they threw around in the early days to sucker in fat wallets like mine, but if so, they did a damn good job feigning sincerity. And of course buyer's remorse and personal experience doesn't permit me to really believe it, to think Chris could be that duplicitous. I think he's very shrewd, but not outright conniving or treacherous. I think what we played in Closed Beta was definitely the ARPG GGG themselves wanted to play. Maybe even some of Open Beta. But not long after that the game became a product first, artistic creation very much second. Which is fine: sooner or later, a product has to transition from the niche to the mainstream if it has the chops to do so. And PoE most certainly did. Another doubt I'll never not have: was PoE's evolution from hardcore niche ARPG to trade-driven, mtx-blinded spam-fest Chris' plan all along?

Chris liked to say, 'the players are the boss', but I think this was him being his usual mix of sly, glib, poignant and earnest. It was true -- without our support, the game was nothing. But it was also untrue -- increasingly, player feedback was being disregarded as GGG started to formulate long-term plans for league ideas, and for international expansion. The players aren't the boss; they're the small-fish investors being told what they want to hear, appeased not through obvious kowtowing but a carefully calibrated mix of reassurance, defiance and resilience. League to league, it's business as usual. Support packs. Meta builds. OP items. Frustrating mechanics. Most importantly, PoE promises its devotees a simulacrum of genuine mastery over a game 'too difficult' for the vast majority of gamers. I am sure no one needs to look too hard to find examples of what happens when that delusion of superiority goes to a person's head.

But -- to bring this back around -- in every field, even mostly unproductive ones such as a computer game, there are genuine experts, and they will stand out one way or another. The population will choose its representative not as the 'everyday' type but as its paragon, its ideal, and PoE's current population has done that with Mathil. Superiority doesn't go to his head; he is just outright superior. Any arrogance or abrasion you might detect in his bearing is more than outweighed by the fact that he can back it all up if called on it. For Exiles, he's basically the ubermensch. There's something curiously democratic about it: if he weren't worthy, people wouldn't watch him. They might gripe about streamer luck or how the game they play is balanced around the top 1%, but maybe they'd be bored if their favourite streamer wasn't appropriately challenged. Then again, what do we even mean by 'population'? Surely there are plenty of players who don't even know who Mathil is. So technically they're not involved in this process...so, silent, insular, seemingly unaffected by any of this and uninterested in being part of the vox populi -- are they even part of the population? Again: statistically, of course; effectively? Maybe not.

It's just really sad when and if they realise that 'seemingly unaffected' is only that -- seemingly -- and soon learn how pointless it is for an individual to try to be heard now, now that player feedback is less about simply giving it yourself and more about somehow trying to make it come out of a mouth to which TencentGGG have decided it's profitable to listen...and even maybe unprofitable to ignore.


OH FUCK THAT ENDED UP REALLY LONG. SORRY. Okay back to shooting shit in Elite.

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I don't see people praising Blight and Harvest mechanics. The Oils? sure. The targeted crafts? sure. Not the bulding of the garden. Not the building of towers.

I find it odd that there's so many who play challenge leagues and don't want a challenge.

How about starting next league, we can bring our standard characters straight into the challenge league and all our currency. I bet that will be fun! /s

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TheFazzo wrote:

Honestly I will move away from the game for a while. An ARPG is for me the realization of a power fantasy. If I can’t get where I want, no matter the time that I spend in the game, I just don’t want to play. Mathil does that for a job, good for him but he can’t play anything else. I have other choices luckily.

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sidtherat wrote:

you are still soooo focused on prices and economy. just get over it, it is not the game, it is the means to do fun stuff - testing things out, blowing shit up, enjoying the storyline (well, no), seeing the character grow and your idea bearing fruit.

lots of ex help with that but the game is so easy (once you get the initial time investment and understand the broken parts) that you can do A8 sirus with total crap gear

gear crap enough to be 'worthless' and not affected by economeh at all - all that 'inflation' (because thats the word you are looking for) doesnt affect players as much as you think. it is already in full swing (bots, THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of very efficient bots pumping piles of orbs every day) and affects only the top 1% (other players do not care about top-end stuff) and 'normal gear' is just as affordable and obtainable as before.

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SaiyanZ wrote:

If the game is already so easy, why do you want it even easier? Seems like you're being dishonest (and it's not really that easy).