Only 3% killed shaper on steam?

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MaxEXA wrote:

This cannot be real?

Most players have never killed Diablo in any Diablo game. For PoE, why would it surprise you that most players haven't slogged through PoE's purposefully grindy end-game to even get to see The Shaper, much less kill him?

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Morkonan wrote:

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MaxEXA wrote:

This cannot be real?

Most players have never killed Diablo in any Diablo game. For PoE, why would it surprise you that most players haven't slogged through PoE's purposefully grindy end-game to even get to see The Shaper, much less kill him?

To be fair, the game isn't called 'The Shaper', so I feel there's less impetus to face him than Diablo in...well, Diablo. This game is called 'Path of Exile', and technically that path ends at act 5 when we return to Oriath. Or 10 when we make it 'home' again by incidentally saving it, depending on what you consider 'exile'. Unless we want to get aaaaall sorts of retconnery and consider the Atlas of Worlds/Maps an 'exile' from whatever the hell the corporeal world of 'Path of Exile' is called.

So...while I agree that most players wouldn't slog through PoE's purposefully grindy end-game, I disagree as to why. He's an afterthought with little to no representation in the game's marketing material (conversely, they changed their logo to contain Kitava's blind X), as is most of the grind leading up to him. Difficulty aside, I think that '3%' would be at least a little higher were The Shaper to be billed, throughout the main campaign, as the game's actual boss, rather than some 'there just for the no-lifers who don't know or care when the story is over' add-on. Some ARPG equivalent of a raid boss.

But were that the case, he'd probably have to be much easier because his defeat would actually matter and thus be, design-wise, ordained, which would defeat the point of him being so abhorrently difficult...so then we'd have some other abhorrently difficult add-on boss after some other abhorrently irrelevant 'story' worthy of a free to play game that knows full-well its most dedicated grinders ain't got no time for reading...so it might as well be The Shaper that fills that role.

I think 3% is, in light of all that, quite high.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

...

To be fair, the game isn't called 'The Shaper', so I feel there's less impetus to face him than Diablo in...well, Diablo. ...

I agree with that.

PoE has a very compartmentalized, modular, sort of "storyline." But, since the Atlas is PoE's answer to "Grand Central" allowing for all sorts of other worlds to be accessed, the Shaper is a major part of that story.

Or was.

Now, he's just another RNG-hobo.

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I think 3% is, in light of all that, quite high.

Probably so. Selling "carries," maybe?

PoE takes a bunch of effort to even be able to "play" in the late game. That's part of the problem with PoE.

For myself, in PoE, the walls and blocks put up and the intentional hurdles to increase the value of the work put into the product in terms of "hours online and exposed to the RMT" usually ends up causing me to stop playing somewhere in the Early/Mid Atlas progression. That's because my "work" is no longer meaningfully contributing towards my "goal" of advancing my character. I can't. So, I don't.

For Diablo, though, there's much less of a focus on "grinding" to get to "Diablo." A blind monkey with a speech impediment armed with Chronic Depression could take out Diablo by the time they got there...

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Morkonan wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

...

To be fair, the game isn't called 'The Shaper', so I feel there's less impetus to face him than Diablo in...well, Diablo. ...

I agree with that.

PoE has a very compartmentalized, modular, sort of "storyline." But, since the Atlas is PoE's answer to "Grand Central" allowing for all sorts of other worlds to be accessed, the Shaper is a major part of that story.

Or was.

Now, he's just another RNG-hobo.

"

I think 3% is, in light of all that, quite high.

Probably so. Selling "carries," maybe?

PoE takes a bunch of effort to even be able to "play" in the late game. That's part of the problem with PoE.

For myself, in PoE, the walls and blocks put up and the intentional hurdles to increase the value of the work put into the product in terms of "hours online and exposed to the RMT" usually ends up causing me to stop playing somewhere in the Early/Mid Atlas progression. That's because my "work" is no longer meaningfully contributing towards my "goal" of advancing my character. I can't. So, I don't.

For Diablo, though, there's much less of a focus on "grinding" to get to "Diablo." A blind monkey with a speech impediment armed with Chronic Depression could take out Diablo by the time they got there...

Agreed. Although again, we must ask: which Diablo? Normal? Pffft. Nightmare? Getting there. Hell? Nasty stuff. Is the replay baked into the experience? I think so, having spent my time under Tristram back in the day. The intense but narratively underwhelming 'ending' made clear that you weren't doing it for the story by then, but for the dings and the frustrating mouse-over search for their location. I can't remember if Diablo 1 was my first experience of such an explicit 'your Diablo is another castle' set-up (I didn't play Mario 2, I just like the trope) but it's definitely my most memorable. So when Diablo 2 did it, it just made sense. When Diablo 3 tried it I laughed all the way to the PS button to turn the game off for a long, long time.

So what happens when an ARPG dares to move past it? To remove its own explicit replay factor in favour of a theoretically endless scape (made less endless by the mapping of it, oh-so-ironically)? We lose THAT impetus, and must be given another. But that other should, I think, be hardwired into the game from the 'start'. This is, for PoE, major too-hard-basket territory: they had enough trouble getting Dominus in there earlier, never mind something so messy as The Shaper's story. So instead you really have two games rather than one: you have the ten act campaign (which is actually difficult compared to every other ARPG's campaign, since it's serving as a proxy normal-->nightmare-->hell progression), which we can and should call the 'core game', and then you have post-core game Mapping, the 'Grand Central' of not the game's world but certainly the game world. And they genuinely feel nothing alike, in terms of motivation, structure and progress. Core game is a linear plot; Mapping is hub-based. It's little wonder so many long-time players see Mapping as the real game, and core game as 'tutorial' -- they seem to have no real grasp on the implications of that, which is why 3% of players killing The Shaper is considered 'only'.

To get back to that question as to what happens when you merge the replay difficulty into a single campaign, almost paradoxically the core game and the post-game become more detached. They tried to smoothen the transition from core game to post-game with what has to be the easiest quest in ARPG history, but it still feels like it comes out of the blue. I was actually happier Mapping when it was just something we did because it was something Malachai and Maligaro did, exploring dreamworlds and enjoying the endless possibilities. It was elegant and flexible. I could do it at my own pace, or not at all. I'd played the core game three times and was ready for something new, something 'else'. In contrast, 3.0 ends its campaign and then...just begins another one. It's...frankly, it's kind of fucking exhausting. If their aim was to reduce burnout by removing the same 4 acts played 3 times over, they certainly didn't give due consideration to the potential burnout of going straight from 10 acts played once into a huge, complicated tangle of mechanics and teased 'lore'.

There's a reason gap years are so popular, after all.

So, again, for 3% of all players to overcome that, get through the ridiculous mire that is the Atlas and face The Shaper...that's kind of nuts imo. That's like 3% of all high school students going on to get a PhD, when barely ~1% of all university graduates do so.

3% of all players taking down an optional uberboss in a game that feels like a grind the most its core game is done is ridiculously high.

And that's just for steam, which is constantly trying to get us to buy/play other games via seemingly endless sales. I imagine stand-alone client users, whom I perceive to be a little more dedicated to Path of Exile as 'their game' (such 'gamers' exist; you might even call it 'their thing'), are even more likely to do it.

As for carries? Maybe, maybe not. I can't speak to that. I am unfortunately rooted in a SSF mindset, so perhaps my PhD analogy was off. You typically have to earn one of those for yourself. I would...deeply like to believe that the majority of players who are in that 3% did the same. Let me have that one possible illusion; I've lost so many others regarding PoE.