[burnout] just a little rant about how the game (d)evolved for me

to make a summary, i believe GGG simply lost its hand on the power creep and how it manages difficulty to increase the so called "player retention" on the realms
i apologize in advance for bad grammar

1- How it was - pre-3.0

i started playing in 2013, when piety in lunaris was the last boss and people farmed vaal pyramid on a2 lol
everything then felt like damage sponges because the engine, gems and items were way too few, and the sorting things out without a filter was the real challenge, but it was fun we had crazy and fun stuff like "Descent + Cutthroat PVP"

2- The boom - 3.0 to 3.5

The game sudddenly becomes completely another, we now can do whatever shit we want but only a few meta builds really thrives on maps, this was the "mjolner era" and the famous double-dip for ignite builds
it was fun...a lot of d/c and game crashes because of extreme visuals but i never complained even with 10 fps, to compensate for over-screen-cleaning, the power creep started around this time.

3- The Apex - from 3.6 to 3.9

personally, the game peaked in this interval...sure we had the immortal builds and necrobots dominated, but for someone like me looking for a chill gameplay while doing hipster builds, this was nirvana...the difficulty level was on OUR hands
we didn't have had access to uber shit like meta harvest, but the game felt right with no excessive nerfs, but seeing certain mechanics like impale "gating" endgame capabilities and certain nerfs being applied i suddenly started feeling that the game was turning over a certain direction
There were a ton of nerfs, but most of them to stop certain unintended abuses

4- Double down on dumbing down - 3.10 to 3.14

to make myself clear: i am not raging over ritual or ultimatum, i started having mixed feelings about the game since 3.10

i don't know exactly when things clicked in my mind in the last year, i always joked how talisman and synthesis were the worst leagues, but suddenly i felt they were not so bad (minus the bugs) compared to the ritual and now ultimatum mechanics
if i want to deviate a little on a certain meta mechanic it takes so much item building nowadays to get a decent in-slot and the game doesn't feel that rewarding as i feel GGG is "dumbing down" challenges as they get less and less creative with leagues
on a side note, Chris was right, they should never have put harvest in the game, they increased the difficulty of the mobs even more (and more bugs to thee engine) and now they remove the good part of the crafting but still preserve the counterpart, thus "unbalancing" the entire game
Finally i feel that to keep the players on realms, they push the difficulty on the mechanics to make them super deadly to simply hinder their progress towards the challenges and guess what? they still fail to retain people as there will always be some "carry" and "aurabot support" to brute force everything, but what about those who feel more accomplished to solo everything?
i feel like a orphan now, because every step feels like a hurdle to go over a nerf threshold
the most contradictory part is that doing endgame bosses feels easier than a juiced map where i could get one-shotted from some unloaded texture or skill on the ground
to make it on another perspective, everyone on my guild that used to play on HC gave up to play SC, this or just skip the mechanic for the entire league

i also like to make a special mention to PvP that became utterly dead as to guarantee damage levels to counter the power creep on mobs, it makes nearly impossible to balance them against other players, which is also sad

In the end, i feel manipulated by how GGG puts new mechanics and gems to make build viability even more convoluted than before, but this convolution contradicts itself with the dumbed-down and/or lazy mechanics that doesn't feel rewarding while making the other league's mechanics like delve, blight and betrayal even less viable to farm some good items (i am talking about good items, not currency), the grinding has come to a halt for me
and btw GGG? these challenge's MTX feel stale, you can do better than this

Conclusion

so...yeah, i most certainly won't touch the game until next league or PoE 2 and i pray for their success, certainly isn't easy to reach this game height of popularity, but this "milking" mentality should stop while there is still time
as it is now, this is not the game i fell in love for all these years...


Update
If you are reading this for whatever reasons, now 1 year after my original post we reached the status of "scorched earth" in 3.19, GGG made an extra effort to nerf even loot and horticrafting and now even streamers are quitting and bawling their eyes out.
honestly, i am having more fun on 3.19 than the disaster that it was 3.18, we just have to learn to "let it go", GGG objective is clear: they are gearing the game towards MOBILE, streamlining everything as it is only a matter of time for the hardware in smartphones to catch up, maybe in 5 years or so.

All gen 3 is terrible save OG Delve. Bunch of try hard leagues full of tedium and repeats of Breach. I'll take 1.5 stand alone for $500 or 2.4 if you like ascending and OG breach you can keep Gen 3.

Mjolnir was a joke all gen 3 too you shoulda tried it with no cool downs. Or when Jugg gave 11 endurance charge per hit for discharging sickness. Thats probably why it costed 60ex back then and peanuts in gen 3.

At some point throwing leagues each one with different concept is cool on paper but at the end makes everything more convoluted than it has to be.

I myself enjoy bigger leagues so Synthesis was cool, the problem with that was it was riddled with bugs... like any big expansion, Delve was full of bugs as well.

After few leagues it is clear that it is hard for GGG to develop a bigger league without bugs that is somewhat enjoyable. I don't blame them, sometimes it just is not feasible to build something big in 3 months time. Even Heist was 6 months in production if I understood GGG correctly and look how it ended up when it comes to bugs and crashes.

The game just devolved from making cool builds into grind simulator where you need 30 ex minimum to get to the endgame ( Maven, Feared etc. ).

In Legion you could pretty well farm 5Way or Uber with a Starforge, and it's not like Starforge was super expensive, I dunno like 10ex maybe. Did the game suffer? Were there posts of unhappy players who said "naah game to easy with Starforge buff mobs" nah there weren't...

I don't like how everything devolved into:
- everything drops from everywhere
- but the droprate is atrocious so that's that
- and you don't really can do the content you like cause then you're not doing the optimal grind for your 30 ex to get to endgame
- and for the love of god someone should already understand that if people like me played since 2.0.0, I have seen the content countless times. Doing more and more tedious stuff which piles on top of each other for 5% increment in content is just not worth it. Unless you are a completionist with too much time on your hands, than that's a different matter...

It should be apparent that returning players are not the targeted audience.
I don't think anyone who plays this game more then 2 hours can be also called a casual.

And as the last point. If GGG really cared about retention and returning players the changes to past leagues should be taken further:
- Go the route that things can be dropped in the leagues they are from but make them well rolled (Incursion for example)
- You already have nodes in Delve with special Items - make them well rolled as well
- Let the bosses drop well rolled items of the connected type ( Minotaur - Physical, Phoenix - fire, UE - chaos, etc. )
- Make more Fated Uniques but more interesting so Prophecy is worth doing again a little more

And for the love of god if there is a league then let us encounter the league content more often then less with 8% chances the content will take 10 times as long after merging it with core.
And please don't put everything core cause in 3 leagues we will drop to 4% chance and before we get to POE2 it will be 1% chance so yeah that's that.

Times when games were made for players are gone a long time ago man. Now games are made to make money. It’s sad but it’s true..

"

KOrchann wrote:

Times when games were made for players are gone a long time ago man. Now games are made to make money. It’s sad but it’s true..

Tencent says hello

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Exsmigol wrote:

"

KOrchann wrote:

Times when games were made for players are gone a long time ago man. Now games are made to make money. It’s sad but it’s true..

Tencent says hello

Yes, actually taking a step back and looking how Warframe evolved in last years(especially since Tencent) and how PoE evolved is pretty shamefull. Yes we all have high hopes for PoE 2 but let's be fair there, the game will run on its own engine wich is very similar to PoE one and the direction of what I'm seeing in PoE and what is showcased in PoE2(wich definitely more polished) doesn't look good at all. 3.14 is imho the worst league ever released. Yes it is not that hard getting currency and getting to whatever build you'd want but overall GGG fucked up everything that was imho balanced just to shuffle things around in order to justify future content, and on top of that the engine never looked as awfull. It's pure debacle.

You're an exploiter... and there's nothing wrong with that. You seem to enjoy finding ways to "beat" the game. This patch was a smack-down on that style of play. They focused on closing down some of the more popular exploits.

Don't worry... they'll be back. The game goes in cycles.

Imho they should just void every league and go more crazy, with balancing, drops etc.
And dont bloat up every league with all the previous stuff.

Harbinger to Betrayal was honestly where I felt the game peaked, as far as feeling like I could do most any build. Though even that was questionable, when GGG killed Elementalist proliferate it killed the class for me. It was a time when I could make stupid hipster builds that actually worked, but because people were abusing the same mechanics at higher levels everything started getting nerfed. Then they decided to just fucking triple monster HP across the board, and that pretty much killed any hope of playing hipster builds ever again.

It's ironic...I know Chris Wilson is an MTG player, so he should understand the idea of looking at a box of cards (or in this case, gems, passives, and gear) and coming up with a unique way to use them. But it feels like now we're pretty much locked into doing the equivalent of net-decking, instead of being creative you have to look up whatever everyone else is doing and copy it. Once upon a time I could play ridiculous things like Molten Strike Elementalist and have fun, nowadays builds like that are objectively the wrong choice.

Sounds to me like you gave up playing for fun and are now simply playing for "profit"... what ever that is.