Idea to help with retaining casual players

over time will see

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Orthusaku wrote:

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Guys we need our marathon to cater to and retain couch potatoes, I've got some great ideas!

I mean it would help get those people off the couch and into a more healthy lifestyle and getting some exercise.

Not really - it would be hazardous to their health to try to jump immediately into a marathon. They should do something more their speed for a long time until they can work their way up to a full marathon, not ask that the marathon be cut short by 98% so they can 'have a chance to do all the content'. This is all ignoring the fact that they play in temp leagues and could do 'all content' on any schedule if they would just play standard.

I would guess that the vast majority of us, no matter how good/bad we are now, no matter how hardcore/casual we are now, started with a bad character. Doing a little bit better every time you re-roll is a good long-term experience in this game. It's fun and rewarding. Some of it is player driven by acquiring knowledge and mechanical skill. The other part is GGG's scheduled power creep. But people see streamers and want a shortcut straight to what they see. The fucking annoying part is they HAVE the shortcuts at their fingertips. Guides are widespread and trade exists. But they don't just want a shortcut, they want it to be easy on top of that. 9 wives, 17 kids, 3 jobs etc can only play 15 minutes per week - we've heard it all at this point.

Retain Casual Players:

1. Dead. Know why. That is a core. Dead in this game gives you frustration, and never know why you dead. Decent pdef, high elem resistances, and a decent pool of life, and never, ever, you feel safe.

2. "Mirror Tier Items". As a casual, you see builds, that have items that "holy shit". That kind of items, you know you'll never have. And play a game, that you cant have all the shit, its not funny.
If you put, to compare the father of ARPG,s Diablo 2 with Poe... In diablo 2 you have in your hand make a strong build being a casual. Here is near impossible make a really strong build.

3. Client improvements. Find a legion encounter (for example), and when the mobs unfreeze, get lag/freeze, and got killed, seems not to be funny.

4. Game mechanics. The game is getting heavy, league by league. Its not really beginner friendly.

Ook, i'd like to ask everybody interested to do a simple experiment.

1.) Pick up a build that can reliably, both in raw stats and in comfortable gameplay (as in how tedious, painful and tiring it is to play), do endgame farming. As in t15+ moderately juiced league mechanics not rolled with easy mods or layouts.

2.) Get familiar with the gear it needs and price check it yourself on the trade site, as to be really convinced.

3.) Now, faced with a number of exalts well into the three digits, time yourself as to how long it would actually take you to farm it solo. With league start gear.

4.) Now, having realized that you are not balor mage, ask yourselves is that future easy and profitable farming that you're planning to do when your build is finally finished, worth all the pain? Will you actually not be burned out and wanting to puke at the mere mention of poe by that time? And if not this league, what about a few leagues after?

Because there is a limit to how much you can pretend that doing the same thing every day, over and over, for bloody hours with robot efficiency is fun. Cause this is your leisure time and not your job, ya know. That same job will still be there to drain your soul, regardless. Of course, farming is not the only way. Come, tell me how fun crafting is, how much you enjoy clicking 5000 alts to gear your rogues yet again. Tell me how your always sure that you'll make more than your investment in materials and you will always manage no sell your products. Tell me how you love tracking 100 live searches and competing with bots and real life ocd comrades for snipes. Tell me how you just looove doing market research so you can know the value of the items the 99 builds you are totally uninterested in are using.

N O P E

I at least support the op in making the game a slightly more pleasant experience. I also support all of us in getting some more goddamn sleep.

As for standard, let me spare you the hypocrisy and spell it directly - playing league is vastly more lucrative, more stuff drops from the omnipresent mechanic and more people participate in the economy. It takes 10 times less to farm the currency needed to buy items that are often 10 times cheaper than in standard. Plus you actually get to play the new thing before it is neutered - both the op items and the league mechanic. Yes there are exceptions, usually with valuable uniques which cost peanuts in standard but those exceptions are few.

The above assumes that end-game farming for loot is the only reason people play the game. I don't think that is necessarily true. It's not, for example, why Tytykiller does Act 5 and Act 10 Kitava races. He is certainly not spending hundreds of Exalts in his runs, nor is he expecting to find or craft mirror-tier gear. He is instead trying to shave seconds off his fastest time. It's obviously an addictive and enjoyable way of playing the game for him, even if it doesn't work for everyone.

For me, trying out different spells as traps, mines, ballistas or totems and seeing how they compare to the self-cast version of the spell is a lot of fun. I don't need to farm end-game content in order to derive enjoyment from it. Ditto with trying out different combinations of summons/minions.

Let's use music as an analogy. A teenager aspiring rock star takes up guitar. Fifteen years later, this is his summary: 'Music sucks. They dangle the idea of stardom and wealth to entice you. So you take up an instrument, practise until your fingers bleed, and form a garage band. But the studios aren't interested in talent, only in image and sales. So creative musicians don't get the contract, it goes instead to some talentless person who is lip-syncing but has the right image to sell albums. The industry stinks and people are best advised to stay away from it. There is no reward in it if you're a genuine artist.'

Doubtless that is valid from his perspective. But it's not the reason why everybody takes up music. There are other reasons too. People find enjoyment and fulfillment from music without needing to become a rock star.

Honestly i always thought that tyty is a professional and his clients are precisely those who want to make currency the most and will not sleep in the first few days. As per path of math profit decline explanation.

But i also like your teenage music enthusiast story. It puts sugar in my coffee.

^^

Then again i play one toon per league, start in the middle of it and do the acts mostly ssf (i buy an unique weapon if i struggle). I do enjoy doing all quests and exploring to read various lore pieces i might have missed or to see a new uniue mob. But i thought how i would feel if i were one of the people who did level several characters in one league, and my teeth hurt at the thought of going through the acts several times one after another. So i liked the op's suggestion very much.

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Orbaal wrote:

On that note:
If your question was (Im exaggerating here big time) "how can a player with little to zero knowledge, slow and inefficient playstyle plus a bad build progress in a single short session towards the topend endgame?" my answer is: That player shouldnt advance at all and rather stall out in white/yellow maps.

Previous to your post, I don't believe anyone was talking about that sort of character.

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DimlyLit wrote:

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Orbaal wrote:

On that note:
If your question was (Im exaggerating here big time) "how can a player with little to zero knowledge, slow and inefficient playstyle plus a bad build progress in a single short session towards the topend endgame?" my answer is: That player shouldnt advance at all and rather stall out in white/yellow maps.

Previous to your post, I don't believe anyone was talking about that sort of character.

Point in case was to define what the term "casual" means.
I exaggerated on purpose quite a bit because the "casual" term is often times used in the same sentence and context as "new player / beginner".

What I described was a "new player" and I stand by what I said: This type of player shouldnt make it far into endgame.
I also linked a YT playlist created by a very experienced veteran player playing "casually" and making it to the very end of the endgame, which was dismissed as unrepresentative of "casual" players.

This caused and in my mind still does cause some degree of consusion as to where exactly the line is drawn to seperate terms like "beginner", "casual" and "casually" which often are used almost interchangeably.

I feel detaching a lot of self sustaining side content from mapping would go a long way.

Content like Heist, Delve, Incursion and similar have no reason to be connected to the Atlas.

I am not a casual and even I have to scalp what I focus on each league because mapping is put at the front of end-game taking up the most time when it really doesn't need to be with Influenced items being so powerful that all other items have become irrelevant. It's just a bad loop currently.

Regardless of the original intent for this post I think GGG has made it clear they are moving in a different direction. Opposed to making the campaign more streamlined/skippable they are doubling down on making it a core player experience. I personally think this is a bit incorrect since I have never cared about the campaign of an ARPG, especially D2 which is my favorite game of all time. Cow runs, meph runs, and baal runs represented most of the leveling/farming experience. It will be very interesting to revisit that premise under D2R. Does it feel as fun to play such repetitive encounters as I remember?

At least based on the feedback of this thread I'm both not the only one that dreads the campaign, but there are also plenty of other people that love the campaign. So while I see the predicament GGG is in it sure would be nice if there were more options for the leveling experience.