Is PoE the only game where people flock to it then try to change it at its core?

Hello GGG I am yamface and I have arrived. This game is too hard for someone like me who has a life. Why isn't your game catering to casuals like me just like the other 3000000 games out there hello? Oh you even have the fucking audacity to nerf harvest too? Let me tell you that I, a customer that paid a couple dollars total, am a valuable customer to your company. I will boycott your game and bitch as loud as I can on reddit on and these forums until you finally listen to my demands. Because the customer is always right [Removed by Support].

Well, I don't see many people who want to change it at its core but moreso people that respond to very rigorous power fluctuations that go back and forth.

Plus, if there is a lot of time investment involved the reactions get stronger.

Diablo 2 was never great... SMH... Out of the mouth of babes...

As for the OP assertion, not sure it's accurate.

But I do think part of the dynamic is PoE being the only game that scratches a particular itch.

I think PoE community would be healthier if there was a Diablo IV, Grim Dawn Online or whatever providing options.

Right now, for this particular kind of Diablo-like, you have Diablo III at end of life, Last Epoch still in beta/early access and Wolcen/Umbra stumbling into obscurity.

But, beginning of a league, far more people will be complaining about performance, visual clutter and balance than they will "fundamental changes."

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Phrazz wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Or you're just being facetious to make a point...

Really? In here? That would be a first.

<3

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innervation wrote:

There is something about PoE that makes it's players refuse to accept design 'bugs' as actually being features in a way that I haven't seen in any other game forums I've been a part of.

Oh. You were being serious. I'm genuinely sorry.

Okay, well, I sort of dodged your request for expansion last time (mainly because I felt the article said it better than I ever could), so I'll take a crack at this.

I will agree that the intensity of the online player backlash towards developer decisions has increased over the decades (yeah, it's been decades now). But it's always been there, for as long as online gamers have had a forum (figuratively speaking -- platform also works) in which to voice their dissent. The games you mention have and had very...lively communities, some of which are famous for their criticism of the game they love. And that's another factor: it almost always comes from love, not hate. Hate moves on, finds something else to feverishly love. These fervent 'attacks' overwhelmingly stem from a sentiment of 'I love this game but it's doing [x] wrong'. Responses then range from '[x] is literally cancer!1!!!' to...well, the sort of thing I used to do. Eventually the players realise it's futile either way. Eventually. Individually. Or they don't. Hence that which spawned this thread, I suspect. GGG's response: announce next expansion. 100% predictable.

And if you'd 'like to read some of it yourself', I'm sure you're more than capable of finding it. I typically loathe it when folks respond with 'do your own research' when pressed for proof or evidence but I've neither the time nor the energy to google for you. Let alone trawl through the cesspits of online gaming feedback fora.

Specific to PoE, you've struck on something important without realising it, which is good -- I used to do it all the time here when I cut loose with a rant. This isn't about player feedback or players wanting to change the game -- it's about the game itself presenting itself deceitfully and players struggling to reconcile that. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's about the sinuous nature of the dragon so many of you seem unable to stop chasing. This is no epiphany: PoE presents as a 'hardcore, gritty ARPG' and it delivers on that promise just long enough to sink its tenterhooks into the newcomer. So far, so gory. But then the true nature of the game starts to reveal itself: its 3 month character building loop, the storage 'cost', the volatile as fuck metagame, the trading clusterfuck, and so on. Again, nothing new. But all of these rub against that initial feeling that PoE was The One, With Nothing held back in terms of satisfying ARPG goodness. And so we're back at where we started: the love for that game clashes with the reality that it doesn't really exist beyond the surface level.

(Ironically, there's another [somewhat puerile] thread current in here that suggests sticking to that surface level by not watching streamers -- head in the sand much, kids? This only works if the people making the game aren't paying close attention to and haven't had a long working relationship with said top-tier streamers. And I remember the significance of Twitch integration being added to PoE's *closed beta*, so don't kid yourselves into thinking that streamer prominence and exposure thereof to the average player wasn't part of the plan from the start.)

So I would argue that people haven't 'flocked to PoE and then try to change it at its core' so much as 'people flocked to PoE and tried to understand why its core had little to do with its body'. Look: I don't know jack about the Harvest crafting situation, so if this is somehow different, do let me know. But every other incident I've seen of prolonged, sustained attempts by players to 'change the game at its core' has been a result of them thinking they were getting one sort of game, but instead being force-fed another. Actually, there's one exception here, and it' a doozie: the very first sustained attack on a core PoE feature, free for all loot. GGG were adamant about this feature for ages, because they knew that allocated loot was the domain of 'softer' arpgs that lacked the cut-throat edge they were going for. FFA loot was an excellent way of balancing risk vs reward: if you wanted that loot, you had to get in there; if you got in there, you were prime target. Now what made that debacle all the more amusing was that it was players trying to change PoE not into what they thought PoE was going to be, but a certain other ARPG they almost unanimously swore they hated and was infinitely inferior to PoE. When PoE got allocated loot, when the devs caved on that one, PoE became a LOT more like Diablo 3 than anyone cared to admit.

But that's the exception in my opinion. If we consider another sustained hotbed issue, the Labyrinth, we can see that the 'why are you doing to this my idea of PoE?' philosophy is on display writ large. The Labyrinth isn't bad game design, and I think it'd be a great fit for most other ARPGs, but it does too many things that run contrary to what players are told to do by all other aspects of PoE. So here we see, yet again, the base problem of expectation vs reality, or perhaps normal vs abnormal. Addicts do not deal well with change, which with PoE is doubly amusing because the game's cheese is built on a lasagne of flux. I suppose there are acceptable types of change, and then there are the real game-changers.

I've seen these kill other games before, and sometimes even partly resulting from player feedback. It's not entirely an illusion that players have sway over the game by way of feedback, but in terms of PoE it's pretty damn close. I think it's overwhelmingly obvious that GGG are way past the phase of giving much of a shit regarding player feedback on what to them is a past-tense issue. Will they lose much money making a change to a league mechanic after its gone core? Not really. Not nearly as much as they'd lose by not having the next league ready to go or the much-vaunted PoE '2' still hot on the oven. And while we might see some reactionary force in the timing of the Pi announcement and a PoE '2' teaser, my guess would be it was scheduled and any appearance of cause and effect is coincidental.

Because you asked the question in your topic title, you're at least curious about 'why' players do this. More importantly, I think it's good to consider 'why' it rarely matters. Think of players like units in a Tactics game. Their concern would be stuff like 'will my sword attack land?', 'how much damage will it do?' and 'what damage will I take in return if this attack doesn't kill my target?'. Significant issues for the poor little soldier mook. But the devs are the actual players of this game: they're concerned with what's going to happen if the scenario is lost, how this might affect the flow of the story, their ability to level up their army, and whether or not they'll even keep playing the game. Or, sans metaphor, micro vs macro. I have learned just enough about GGG's approach to micro vs macro to have driven me off almost completely, because as a player I found it infuriating and understandable and oh lord is it ever depressing. As a high-end supporter with the company's best interests at heart I found it fascinating and ingenious. And it's not as though any of this is secret or devious: Chris gave a nice long talk about it a few years ago and a bunch of you watched it. I think that's also part of the issue here too: you know the game GGG are playing and how unrelated it is to the daily vicissitudes of game balance. You've been shown, mercilessly, how your chosen passion is by design an addiction, something 'to be played forever'. (unspoken: supported forever too.)

Or maybe it's even simpler than that: status quo is the only seemingly solid ground upon which Exiles can stand. Upset that too much and they cry out like passengers on the Titanic who've only just realised the deck has turned into a slide. What they don't realise is it's not the Titanic -- it's just a ride designed to feel like it. Over. And. Over.

Or maybe they do realise it and get some perverse joy out of that vertiginous sensation. Fucked if I know; I jumped ship for a much more stable stable of games years ago. I'm too old for this shit. And I'm not even that old.

Foreverhappychan's post is one of the best I've ever read.

At the same time, I wonder we don't judge GGG too harshly.

Do they truly pretend that this game is something other than what it is, or do people simply hope it is and fool themselves?

Is it really that hard to copy builds and do 10M dps with a few layered defenses and "conquerer" endgame?
(Personally, I often fail because I individualize and do 20% of the dps I should with 50% of the defenses.)



PoE, at its core, is a game where 99% of players copy proven effective builds and succeed or build their own and generally 'fail' (meaning, the build wont conquer endgame, but they may still have fun and 'win').

The other 1% (not me) spend the time to develop actual builds using off-game tools and a few years / 1000s of hours of knowledge.

Often the top players by first kills or money have zero interest in understanding why their own builds work, they just know they work.


Thats not great, its like a meta-game, but its not really that bad either. The build-of-the-week even kinda showed that GGG was not hiding this. They literally recommend you just copy paste successful players.



Ultimately, its a good game masquerading as a great game, but the developers dont try to hide this, the complexity of the game itself does.

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trixxar wrote:

Foreverhappychan's post is one of the best I've ever read.

At the same time, I wonder we don't judge GGG too harshly.

Do they truly pretend that this game is something other than what it is, or do people simply hope it is and fool themselves?

Is it really that hard to copy builds and do 10M dps with a few layered defenses and "conquerer" endgame?
(Personally, I often fail because I individualize and do 20% of the dps I should with 50% of the defenses.)

-cut-

The build-of-the-week even kinda showed that GGG was not hiding this. They literally recommend you just copy paste successful players.

If there is a gulf between what players expect and what GGG delivers who is at fault then?

My biblical knowledge has dulled over the years so forgive me if I'm embellishing, but I'm reminded of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and covering up their genitals, to which God replied, "who told you that you were naked?".

That would be the question I'd ask in pursuit of the first question: who told you (casual player complaining about X core design decision) that you were supposed to play the way that you're trying to play?

And what I'm getting at is some of these complaints come from people comparing themselves to streamers. GGG doesn't showcase jacked-to-the-tits characters doing T19 fractured delirious maps in their promo vids, trailers, or back in their build-of-the-week series. In fact they are/were often panned for showing leveling characters at low power levels with mana flasks equipped.

GGG doesn't tell you to pursue playing the game that the 1% of power gamers play. I don't think the streamers do either. In fact I'm consistently shocked (especially since Path of Matth and Grimro started tailoring their videos to a more casual audience after the original Harvest league) at just how far these content creators go to be inclusive to the casuals. They really break it down step-by-step what any player can do if they want to emulate X activity.

And like you're saying trixxar, there is nothing, nothing at all preventing players from cookie cutter copying any of a number of successful and affordable builds out there.

It's not an accident that one of the most common refrains you hear from Harvest Manifesto critics is "we casuals were finally closing the gap between the rich and poor, the casual and elite, and if you're for Harvest nerfs then you just don't want me to have fun! Elitist jerk!"

Here's how pervasive that attitude is, FHC, in case you don't believe me. Not only will you see it throughout the forums and on YT videos about Harvest, but Sirgog posted a video today about next league - the video said nothing about Harvest, he said nothing about Harvest. Here is the most upvoted comment on the video:

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You'll see real quick for yourselves how good their retention is going to be after they remove Harvest. And my favorite coping mechanisms, "you can still craft with Harvest after the nerf guys!" or "They nerfed or changed things in the past! It'll be fine and we'll just adjust!" The things these people tell themselves just to try to feel better about the situation. So glad I moved on to different games that don't have devs like this. They made the game bearable for once with Harvest and made Harvest even more RNG dependant than before but they couldn't stand people having a reasonable way to actually progress their gear so they just went back to the horrible state the game was at before Harvest.

Figures they can't figure out a reasonable compromise so they just ruin the whole mechanic as usual. Can't expect much from the people who did the same thing in the past with other mechanics. Enough is enough though, and finally, people are realizing this toxic repeating behavior, moving on to other games that don't do stuff like this to the player base. The people left I think just don't mind being stepped all over and being used as beta testers and so they're left with mostly shills or those who don't know any better. I hope the people left enjoy continuing to eat this cactus. Take care.

"They made the game bearable for once" Think about that. For as long as you have to. Imagine playing this game repeatedly and resolutely, a game that is 'unbearable'. It brings me back to the Mathil quote that I should have put in my opening post instead of leaving it open to the facetious interpretation:

Why the hell are you here? Why in the hell did you start playing PoE? Who gave you the impression that it was anything but what it is? Wanting the game to stay true to its original principles isn't about being an elitist jerk, it's about valuing something original and unique in the gaming landscape and not wanting to see casuals take a flamethrower to it and thereby melt into the generic and trite.

Who told them PoE was anything other than what it is?

To quote trixxar again, "Do they truly pretend that this game is something other than what it is, or do people simply hope it is and fool themselves?"

Who is fooling whom here, really?

-

a final thought

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Look: I don't know jack about the Harvest crafting situation, so if this is somehow different, do let me know.

Well the complainers say this one hits different. Vets like myself have been extremely skeptical - we've seen it a million times. One thing that makes this different is that this truly is a mess (if it is in fact a mess, hard to tell if vocal minority or real situation) of GGG's own making. They ran Harvest league from June to September of last year. Papa Chris himself went on the Baeclast pre-launch podcast and paused in answer to a question early on in the interview. "We think this is going to break the game" he said, or something like that. The hosts snickered and there was a rare moment of silence. They didn't really know if he had on his hype-man hat or if he was being serious.

He wasn't just right, he was damn right. It's not just that they made the league, they make everything core now (RIP synthesis), so they brought it back 6 months later (you are <here> in the timeline, this is the present) with not nearly enough nerfs. You know perfect items are supposed to be rare. And near perfect items only slightly less rare than that. There's a reason mirrors don't drop as often as exalts.

GGG has a plan for how long it should take people to get top-shelf gear in their temp leagues. They released Harvest in a state that blew up that plan. Players who can't help themselves attached themselves to it like the child who wraps their father's leg in a full-body hug when they don't want him to leave. GGG is now going about their life like there isn't a lifeform clinging to that appendage.

So the short answer is 'I don't know'. The likely answer is, no, this is no different, because people (especially those prone to complaint) routinely underestimate the amount of power and reward creep GGG is about to deliver. So GGG is nerfing Harvest by 15%. Whatever new thing we're getting next league is almost certainly going to make up for that and more.

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trixxar wrote:

Foreverhappychan's post is one of the best I've ever read.

I second this.

I find it ironic, given that shitting on Diablo 3 has become a rite of passage for most PoE players (at least on PC), that the game finds itself in the very same situation as what drove players away from Diablo 3 in the first place. Poor performance, terrible itemization, useless uniques, always online, screen clutter, useless skills. Then you add in the auction house controversy and PoE does THE EXACT SAME THING, save for the RMT’s, but only on the console version. But time and time again the fanbase (fanboys?) give GGG a free pass on all of these things. Why? You didn’t put up with it from Blizzard.

The answer is part delusion and part addiction. As has already been said, the addictive nature of PoE (and all F2P games in general, let’s be honest) is by design. They want you to keep playing so they can clutter your inventory with more sort-of-but-not-really useful trinkets so you’ll chomp at the bit on those stash tab sales. The addicts need their fix, and no addict wants to acknowledge their addiction let alone have their “lifestyle” delegitimized by others whom they deem to “not understand”.

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trixxar wrote:

Do they truly pretend that this game is something other than what it is, or do people simply hope it is and fool themselves?

Is it really that hard to copy builds and do 10M dps with a few layered defenses and "conquerer" endgame?
(Personally, I often fail because I individualize and do 20% of the dps I should with 50% of the defenses.)

Had I suspected that copying builds to get through the content was GGG's intended way of playing a game that in all other respects so loudly proclaimed itself as one with 'many paths to power', I wouldn't have given them a single cent.

And let me be clear here: I'm not talking about the top 10% of the game; I felt this way just getting through the ten acts. When people say 'it's a tutorial', what they're really saying is, 'it's teaching you the meta expectations of what comes after'. Play the ten acts SSF and without copying a build and tell me it's a tutorial. Even better, get a friend who's never played PoE to try that. Arguably that is where the 'hardcore, gritty ARPG' exists -- except that because GGG fully expect people to trade and to look up builds; even the core campaign (and especially the league gimmicks) is balanced around those two assumptions.

And then there's the extremely strong trend of adding 'meaningful' content to Map-level play. It's sort of hard for me to give a shit about Shaper, Elder, Zana, Sirus and Maven when I need to 'copy a build and/or trade' just to get within spitting distance of any of them.

Remember this: trade during closed beta was Diablo 1 level shit. You dropped an item, the other person dropped an item, and you did a sort of hostage exchange dance past each other. There were promises of a trade window (which GGG delivered) and comprehensive offline forum-based trading (which GGG did NOT deliver). Again, had I known that GGG would not deliver a safe, fair, efficient means of trading in a game that was entirely balanced around the assumption that people will trade, I WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN THEM A SINGLE CENT. You don't just make your entire game based around a process that you completely fail to make user-friendly in the slightest. That, friends and Exiles, would be unforgivable anywhere else. GGG only got away with it because by the time it was clear they were going to abandon a core angle of the PoE vision, folks were already addicted and playing what is, otherwise, the best ARPG since Diablo 2. Bar none. Not even I would deny that.

But the cost is simply too high.

You know that saying about how the Devil's greatest trick was to convince people he didn't exist? GGG's greatest trick was to convince people that poor UX is challenging and hardcore and mastering it makes them Super Elite Gamers.

Edit and afterthought: I've said many times that I have no regrets supporting GGG the way I did, and that remains true. I don't ever have the direct thought, 'man I really wish I hadn't done that'. It's been a helluva ride, the details of which are both too banal and personal to share here; suffice to say, once in a lifetime experience and not one you can just put on a bucket list. I saw an opportunity and I embraced it entirely. PoE's ongoing success and GGG's amazing lack of failure as a gaming development company from New Zealand are all I need to consider to dispel any sort of 'regret'. BUT the above sentiment certainly resembles a sort of regret, in that if I could go back and undo it, I probably would -- based solely around a single unfulfilled promise. I think it's less a regret from a personal perspective and more a regret for the game itself. PoE is great. It really is. But it almost doesn't bear thinking how much better it would have been had GGG focused less on the myopic league-to-league changes and more on getting that trading system in place. We're talking Diablo 2 x Eve levels of amazing here. That WAS the plan. GGG really let their own vision down when they left it too long, and players came up with their own sketchy-as-fuck trading solution and then came to rely on it, almost like how the human body comes to rely on toxic substances through overexposure and adaptation. How did we know it was too late for recovery? GGG's ultimate response was simply to clone that player-made-and-run system in case it ever went down or was compromised. They didn't try to fix the addiction to an absolutely poisonous, unhealthy trading situation; they merely helped facilitate it.

I find it astounding how people can get hyped for 'Path of Exile 2' when 'Path of Exile 1' never came close to fulfilling its potential (despite its success) and chances are this gussied-up expansion won't either.

So there you go, innervation, my more personal take on the question: it's not that players are trying to change the game at its core; it's that its core never fully matured and that's understandably very frustrating for a lot of people. PoE will very likely always be the genius savant kid with a lot to offer the world...if you can put up with its social awkwardness, emotionally baffling responses and occasional violent outbursts. The tragedy is it didn't have to be this way. GGG were exceedingly poor parents: instead of going to lengths to help their brilliant but kid function in society (ie making a user friendly trading system their top priority), they indulged its inclination towards seclusion and solitude (ie acknowledging and supporting a reliance on a quick fix that became the default).

And you might not think this relates to the actual topic at hand (Harvest crafting)...but I think you'd be wrong. A trading system that encourages usage and doesn't force the player waaaay out of the actual game to use it affects everything, from item design balance to monster balance to, yes, item modification balance. But eh, this is like speculating what the world would be like had birds become the dominant species way back when and not primates. Fun for fantasy; frustrating and pointless for anthropology.

Imho, making a thread like that is actually quite disrespectfull, borderline naughty, and imho stating things pretty far from reality.

Most constructed criticism made about harvest change has strictly nothing with what you are talking about. Most people who critizice harvest change are actually from the crowd that is eager to try new balance patches, leagues, and see their meta and routines challenged regularily. It is why they noted exactly what went wrong with GGG statement and wrote WOT or made 30mn videos about it. They are actually rooting for the game success, implying game changing at its core constantly, their approach is very positive, and this time it makes sense. When GGG nerfed aura stackers, temp chain or other very meta things, the vocal crowd hasn't gone wild at all for example. There are things that are understandable, some are that are hard to swallow, and some that do not make sense and are not even advocated correctly(for me it happened once in 10 years or so playing this game, and it was the harvest nerf)

Please try to connect the dots and reformulate :)

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

it's not that players are trying to change the game at its core; it's that its core never fully matured and that's understandably very frustrating for a lot of people.

They haven't met any of their internal benchmarks for stability or adhering to the roleplaying as the main focus of the game; let alone compete favourably in those same fundamentals with other multiplayer games, even ones that aren't ARPGs.

No wonder longtime players have gotten jaded and disgruntled about PoE. They keep waiting for memory leaks, CPU/GPU load, and visual clutter to get fixed since well before 3.0, and it's still not there - it's gotten arguably worse.

Having to use third-party tools like TFT/discord, trade macro, etc. is a symptom, not the primary cause, of what ails PoE. I'm pleasantly surprised at how collective action on the part of the TFT community has largely made it possible for anyone to accomplish some very high quality and build-specific crafting on a reasonable time scale and budget. It's not perfect, but it's at least nominally more secure than global trade chat.

For some, it's a deal breaker to use any third party tools, and GGG has the right to decide which functions it wants to waste time coding into the core of the game. That said, if other game houses can do it, GGG can at least take a look.

FWIW quality of play is not an unwelcome distraction from the hard realities of life in Wraeclast. I heard nary a complaint about tab affinities or folders. Even the diehard economic opportunists value their time and carpal tunnels.