Your 2021 PoE end game ladies and gentlemen.

"

porous2 wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

you have a pretty interesting image of a 'casual'.

here is a casual for you:
- casual does not trade
- casual barely know how to link items
- casual surely has no idea about reddit and might be intimidated from entering this forum
- casual is lvl60 and soon to enter act8
- casual uses unique weapon because he thinks 'unique==best'

Hmmm, the definition I heard of 'casual' was that it's someone who plays for less than three hours a day. That category includes a lot of players who are quite a bit more advanced than the above description. It would help if we had consensus on what a casual is, rather than applying our own subjective and individual criteria.

Agreed.

I think the most important asset for any PoE player is knowledge, which is then multiplied by time and efficiency.

So there will be a stark difference between an informed casual (spends little time on playing the game but is knowledgeable) and an uninformed casual (also spends little time playing the game and doesnt have time/willingess to do research).

The latter one will have a hard time in PoE whereas the former one wont have any trouble beating the entirety of the game regardless of the time spent playing on a daily basis - as proven by BalorMages WorkingClass Exile series on YT.

Casual refers to everybody who doesn't play the game professionally, so everybody who is not a streamer and his money flow doesn't depend on playing.

"

Orbaal wrote:

"

porous2 wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

you have a pretty interesting image of a 'casual'.

here is a casual for you:
- casual does not trade
- casual barely know how to link items
- casual surely has no idea about reddit and might be intimidated from entering this forum
- casual is lvl60 and soon to enter act8
- casual uses unique weapon because he thinks 'unique==best'

Hmmm, the definition I heard of 'casual' was that it's someone who plays for less than three hours a day. That category includes a lot of players who are quite a bit more advanced than the above description. It would help if we had consensus on what a casual is, rather than applying our own subjective and individual criteria.

Agreed.

I think the most important asset for any PoE player is knowledge, which is then multiplied by time and efficiency.

So there will be a stark difference between an informed casual (spends little time on playing the game but is knowledgeable) and an uninformed casual (also spends little time playing the game and doesnt have time/willingess to do research).

The latter one will have a hard time in PoE whereas the former one wont have any trouble beating the entirety of the game regardless of the time spent playing on a daily basis - as proven by BalorMages WorkingClass Exile series on YT.

How do you define casual? Well I have a suggestion: casual is someone who enjoys a singleplayer game for what it is and doesn't give a damn about being 'efficient' or 'competitive'. In fact, this is why casuals mostly should have little reasons to concern themselves how 'the market' is or if some mirror-tier build might be broken. These are, however, concerns which have been brought up at forums many times.

Let me elaborate: if you want to be 'efficient' or 'competitive', in PoE terms it means you discard the fun and go play with discord these days. If you want to play a video game for fun, you pretty much try your best forgetting these 'efficient and competitive' methods.

With PoE, if you are efficient, in my books you pretty sure are not a casual player. If the game offers loopholes to be efficient by actually not playing the game, then it should not be a casual player which must be punished for it by taking away his fun. And all the discussion on Harvest has been about taking away means to have fun in a single-player game.

But defined this way I'm sure people can argue with it, saying fun is subjective thus people are having fun chatting in discord and 'being efficient' and studying databases.

It was being efficient which killed WoW Classic for me, as I've mentioned before. That and having a goddamn collection of databases, meaning if you wanted to just have fun there were gank squads guarding any valuable areas. These were people which were farming same place over and over, going through databases for valuable items and being 'efficient' with a guild to back it up. F*ck them I said and that was the end of WoW Classic for me: no more joy of finding things yourself, or exploring yourself what should've been an exciting, vaste gameworld full of secrets. The 'metagame' had been already decided via discord channels and it effectively blocked casuals since power difference was terrible between haves and have-nots in a multiplayer environment.

So there is my definition of what goes for casual. In WoW I did do some trading though, since it wasn't absolute BS as it is in PoE.

That's why I've suggested a "casual league" before, for people who don't care about efficiency or the market or whether some item or means of item acquisition is "broken". Remove the ladder and prices and everything from it to make extra clear that it isn't competitive. Doesn't need MTX rewards either.

Standard could be that league, or it could be a new league run in parallel. Doesn't really matter. Just a place to have lots of fun. The player base is large enough for such a split, if you ask me. I would even pay for it as a (longer term) private league, if I could then tweak the values to my liking.

The current system must almost necessarily displease a significant fraction of PoE's players, which isn't good.

All these complaints are pretty pointless by now. They made it clear with their actions that they simple dont give a fuck about the playerbase anymore. Performance is terrible as always, trading is fucked and the game keeps etting overloaded with currency and power creep to the point of absolute boredom. Just keep praying that one of the other ARPGs in development will get you interested and wait for POE2. THis version of PoE is just getting worse pretty much league by league.

If casuals don't care about competitiveness then not being able to do end-game content shouldn't bother them. That is a concern for competitive players only.

"

frostzor27 wrote:

"

theD4nk0wl wrote:

Seems like you're unfamiliar with this games origins in daiblo 2 and its expansion.

What trade Diablo had? What trade Diablo 2 had? Oh yeah I remember, NONE. If you use D2 as an example to how economy is good for ARPG genre it's just wrong.

The thing that made D2 the game it was was not having trade at all. You need to grind a lot, kill stuff, loot stuff, etc. And it worked perfectly.

Oh yeah you had those 3rd party sites just like PoE has, don't tell me you guys ever used them...

Not arguing about the PoE stuff, but with D2 u're very wrong. Maybe u never traded in D2, but there was an established market.

I played D2 from 1.02 onwards until 1.11 I think and I traded ALOT. There were many forums at least in my language with market places to trade in. (not talking about d2jsp, which is basically rmt)
In 1.09 where I did alot of ruleset PvP there was no way to be competitive without trading for example.

There were established prices in LoD with Runes, such as IST for currency ect. and that's where PoE got the inspiration from. Spamming in Trade channels was also a thing back then.
On US I think they traded more in trade games aka "Bring X Offer Y", but still there were tons of trades.

"

Johny_Snow wrote:

Casual refers to everybody who doesn't play the game professionally, so everybody who is not a streamer and his money flow doesn't depend on playing.

In that case, I'd suggest that it's a meaningless term that is only fractionally less generic than 'gamer'. Lumping in someone who started PoE today with a 7-year vet who has taken multiple characters to lvl 100 - but who doesn't depend on PoE for their income - means that you cannot apply any sort of skill, knowledge, experience or time investment criterion to the term 'casual'.

"

Sadaukar wrote:

Not arguing about the PoE stuff, but with D2 u're very wrong. Maybe u never traded in D2, but there was an established market.

I played D2 from 1.02 onwards until 1.11 I think and I traded ALOT. There were many forums at least in my language with market places to trade in. (not talking about d2jsp, which is basically rmt)
In 1.09 where I did alot of ruleset PvP there was no way to be competitive without trading for example.

There were established prices in LoD with Runes, such as IST for currency ect. and that's where PoE got the inspiration from. Spamming in Trade channels was also a thing back then.
On US I think they traded more in trade games aka "Bring X Offer Y", but still there were tons of trades.

I know there was a market. But the game was not intended to have a market. Nor have any tools. You literally had to drop things on the floor!

And the game was not developed/balanced around the market. And here's why it was successful. PoE on the other hand...

You are right. I NEVER traded in all my years of D2. I progressed all by myself. No item editors, no trade. Did a lot of uber runs, and even some PvP. Hell I still miss my old Bonemancer... Magefist + Bone Spirit <3

And wanna know? It was AWESOME. That's how an ARPG must be. Trade is something that works well on MMOs, but any ARPG that has trading as it major feature is faded to fail.

And I will not even start talking the RMT part of D2 or PoE...

"

frostzor27 wrote:

"

Sadaukar wrote:

Not arguing about the PoE stuff, but with D2 u're very wrong. Maybe u never traded in D2, but there was an established market.

I played D2 from 1.02 onwards until 1.11 I think and I traded ALOT. There were many forums at least in my language with market places to trade in. (not talking about d2jsp, which is basically rmt)
In 1.09 where I did alot of ruleset PvP there was no way to be competitive without trading for example.

There were established prices in LoD with Runes, such as IST for currency ect. and that's where PoE got the inspiration from. Spamming in Trade channels was also a thing back then.
On US I think they traded more in trade games aka "Bring X Offer Y", but still there were tons of trades.

I know there was a market. But the game was not intended to have a market. Nor have any tools. You literally had to drop things on the floor!

And the game was not developed/balanced around the market. And here's why it was successful. PoE on the other hand...

You are right. I NEVER traded in all my years of D2. I progressed all by myself. No item editors, no trade. Did a lot of uber runs, and even some PvP. Hell I still miss my old Bonemancer... Frostburn + Bone Spirit <3

And wanna know? It was AWESOME. That's how an ARPG must be. Trade is something that works well on MMOs, but any ARPG that has trading as it major feature is faded to fail.

And I will not even start talking the RMT part of D2 or PoE...

No you didnt there also was a trade window?

There were also many trade sites which actually monitored your trading to remove people that would just dump runes on the sites (at least before they made high runes drop like flies)