Rushing to endgame isn't fun, theorycrafting is the fun.

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AkuTenshiiZero wrote:

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Phrazz wrote:

Congratulations, you've just realized that "fun" is subjective, and that it's up to each player to find their own "fun".

If "fun" involves more time spent outside the game than actually playing it, there is a demonstrable problem. The job of a game designer is to find the fun thing, and focus on it. If the fun thing is creating unique builds, then the focus should be on finding ways to reward that creativity.

GGG lost sight of that a long time ago, instead focusing on hostile game design that punishes creativity. Some might say that build diversity exists, if they consider builds that sputter out in yellow maps to be "viable" and seeing your build slowly grind to a halt as "fun," but that's just a world-class cope. I've been here long enough to know what build diversity used to look like, and it was sure as hell better than what we have now.

No. The problem that is actually being demonstrated here is one person acting like their definition of fun is more important than someone elses.

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arumat89 wrote:

for me its fun killing a9 sirus in the first week and then go for the challenges in the second

See that sounds a little too much like work to me. Maybe you shoulda enetered that $40,000 deal ziz put on and gotten paid for it.

Then you're living the dream - Fun and money.

Well, I agree with the title and that the recent trend has been

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hostile game design that punishes creativity

. I therefore also choose to theory craft on PoB far more than grind out oneshots in game.

As usual, there are those who play the forum game rather than actually playing POE, though what joy they can get out of posting the same opinion/snide remark for the 40th time is beyond me.

Phrazz makes the valid point that the number of skills you can beat the game with is wide. However, the variety of mechanics and creative interactions one might use still seems limited to me. If 90% of skills can be used, but all rely on raw stats and are simply a different coloured way of making the whole screen go pop - is this really diversity?

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grimlock9999 wrote:

Well, I agree with the title and that the recent trend has been

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hostile game design that punishes creativity

. I therefore also choose to theory craft on PoB far more than grind out oneshots in game.

As usual, there are those who play the forum game rather than actually playing POE, though what joy they can get out of posting the same opinion/snide remark for the 40th time is beyond me.

Phrazz makes the valid point that the number of skills you can beat the game with is wide. However, the variety of mechanics and creative interactions one might use still seems limited to me. If 90% of skills can be used, but all rely on raw stats and are simply a different coloured way of making the whole screen go pop - is this really diversity?

What do you propose? Stats are what define power. Whether they be 2000 str in str stacking build or 100% crit in a crit build or your life/ES/res etc.

My feeling is there are too many stats in this game with 855 uniques and hundreds of affix's on rares it just confuses the hell outta most players and they say fuck it and follow a meta/publicised guide so you get that collective of builds every league most play. But yes everything is viable. Mathil proves it all the time. Dudes brain is amazing actually how much diversity he's able to throw out there time after time.

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grimlock9999 wrote:

If 90% of skills can be used, but all rely on raw stats and are simply a different coloured way of making the whole screen go pop - is this really diversity?

By this line of thinking, what game has any diversity? Everything can be reduced to same-y-ness by zooming out.

All pokemon are the same, most use damage abilities and a few buff/debuffs.

All D2 characters are the same, one uses hammers, one javalins, one bone spells, is there really a difference?

All MOBA champs are the same, bunch of characters using their 1 gap closer / evasive spell and 2 damage abilities to position for the best 'ultimate' ability they can.

Rushing to end game in a matter of a few hours on league launch is the most fun for me, while theorycrafting starts out as fun but quickly stops being fun and becomes tedious.

When all I've been doing for hours is looking at PoB and alt tabbing to wiki, I might as well do something else with my time lol.

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kole wrote:

Rushing to end game in a matter of a few hours on league launch is the most fun for me, while theorycrafting starts out as fun but quickly stops being fun and becomes tedious.

When all I've been doing for hours is looking at PoB and alt tabbing to wiki, I might as well do something else with my time lol.

I dont even play the first week until bugs are ironed out. Oh and no ques I dont like lines anywhere actually. Wife and kids got turned around after a 4 hour drive to yosemite once cuz line too long. City boys waited 4 hours to get in like its nothing.

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What do you propose? Stats are what define power. Whether they be 2000 str in str stacking build or 100% crit in a crit build or your life/ES/res etc.

Creative interactions or playstyles could define power, or at least provide an alternate pursuit, and I would argue previous versions of the game allowed this.

For eg:
- Freeze used to be an option as opposed to raw damage. Who is using thousand ribbons unique now?

- Curses used to be a viable defensive option. Now there are a thousand terrain effects which have no interaction with curses. Who is running a curse now when they could stack another X amount of life/ES?

- AOE vs single target used to be a decision. Mob density has since changed and now if you have no AOE you have no game.

- Utility from items such as Kitavas thirst used to require creative planning to use. Now it just requires currency or grinding to get the stats on a rare. IMO, interactions with almost any of the cool unique items this game has are far harder to make viable now. This, I call a loss of diversity.

- Positioning used to matter, so giving up some life for movespeed, or damage for minion movespeed was a legitimate choice. Now, with screenwide explosions, teleporting monsters, unkilable boss spawns, etc. who is choosing a kiting build over what I call 'raw stats'? (meaning life, and damage, stacked endlessly on top of each other).

- Crafting used to be optional....

- farming to min/max used to be one option, finding your gear used to be another. Now that they dilute drops to account for the variety of content, it is painful to rely on drops to make a build.

- Before they stretched everything out so much, clearspeed used to be a more relevant decision. People could give up clearspeed and not sacrifice as much. Now, show me the slow moving tanky build that can compete with a zoomer at the start of league, and hence be in the running to actually afford anything mid league.

- The range of viable damage used to be anything from say 100K shaper dps to the rich people who grind for days and can min/max to millions of DPS. Now, try using a tank to face all the rares, beasts, bosses etc that spawn endless high HP minions - it is painful in the extreme. Better go back to a stacking damage into the tens of millions build!

- People used to post on the forums a whole array of meme builds, or tests of underpowered skills, or ways of playing the game that were not just stacking power. While these things still exist, you'd find it hard to argue that they haven't dried up dramatically. Someone once killed shaper using spectral tactician spectres. Now, try getting fully life buffed tacticians to survive a white map, let alone do any damage. Too painful, so next off you go to stack millions of damage.

Building on what grimlock said,

The more you push the zoom-zoom meta, the more the game is about raw stats. Skills are interchangeable because the whole screen blows up. You insta-phase bosses.

The less you push zoom-zoom, the more there are options for different playstyles. A damage over time character can feel different than a melee, feels different than a squishy caster. But only if there is time to interact with the enemies instead of either dying instantly if you dont kill the screen instantly.


I think there is still some build variety, but there would be more with less zoom, less one shots, more focus on tactics not screen explody.

Theorycrafting for a game being more fun than actually playing it is a common occurence i'd say, at least it is for me. In my Pokemon Showdown days i spend way more time in the Teambuilder than on the ladder, in my MTG times i spend more time making/optimizing my decks than playing, same in all the other card games i played.

In POE this is actually less the case then elsewhere, i don't find POB all that engaging and usually rather play than just fiddling around with numbers there. Maybe it's because there is no real need for it, you need so little to just blow up everything that i see it as a waste of time to minmax everything after a certain point to save a second per map.