Player Manifesto

Let me start with possibly untrue statement.
Seasonal leagues were meant to be a fun twist of the standard league.
Having this in mind, seasonal leagues could be void. Why? I think that more than 90% of people who play seasonal leagues don't play standard seriously. Easiest example would be streamers: 1/2 months top of current league streams, next month other games. Time between leagues? Theory crafting/other games/vacation no standard in sight. In my opinion you are either a standard player, for set in stone content tested and perfected, or you are a seasonal league player, for 'it's practically a brand new game!' content.

I would love to know your opinion
I have spent some time on this post, and i hope that anyone who would want to leave a comment would do that after spending some time thinking about an answer :)


Disclaimer:
I came up with following changes having seasonal leagues in mind, standard league could stay the same.

Acts:
Acts are fun for first created character only, doing it on every next character feels like a chore. I know that easing players in is important, letting them know new mechanics, reminding/teaching them why and what happened before they start mapping. But
Imagine doing 4 characters a league when Acts take you 5-10 hours, its like waiting in line to rollercoaster, in summer, no shade in sight, 40 degrees Celsius, your water bottle is empty, you are alone, you cant leave the line or you will lose your place, ambulance came because someone near entrance collapsed...

Every character after first one could start in Oriath or Karui Shores at lvl 68 with lvl ~10 gems selected from prompts - it's basically shared progression same as trials, crafting modifiers, atlas progression.
Not everyone can finish acts in 1 sitting (or even 2).
For people who like playing acts on every character you could give a prompt if they want to skip them or don't want.

Atlas:
Filling atlas is fun once (leave unchanged only in standard league?), doing it every league is a chore.
Not everyone can fill atlas in first month after which some end playing due to Grinding(GG) frustration, never experiencing league fully.
Remember that one time I went to a rollercoaster?

Atlas could be fully unlocked after acts, you still wouldn’t be able to play high tier maps anyway (probably).
More GGG way of doing it could be: only 4 first regions are unlocked then, after Sirus, next 4, then, after Sirus, next 4...
Chance league mechanics feel like they were meant for people who can play every day for countless hours (some don’t even know there was a Trial Master fight. Maven? Что?).
Mechanics like that could be condition based - finish 10/20/50/(how many you want) trials and you get map like item to boss fight arena.
Stupid? Maybe. More accessible? Definitely.

Gold:
Please, rethink introducing gold. Currency items you already have are it's equivalent anyway.
I know you didn’t want to implement gold as in Diablo it's meaningless. Your solution to this problem may worked in PoE 1.0 and beta but, right now, this current system went to extreme on the opposite side of spectrum.
There are so many kinds of currency items at this point, so many possible drops, its sickening.

At this moment pinnacle of mapping looks something like this: play map without paying much attention for 5 min, spend 20+ min looting, do it again.
The idea of gold as it is in Diablo is fundamentally wrong, but can be improved. Imagine having 1 currency drop that gives you many possibilities instead of many currency items that each have only one.
Current currency drop rates are calculated for normal player (someone who plays, 1-2 hours a day) throughout 3 months but player base drops significantly after 1 month (around 50%, sometimes more, sometimes less), which leaves this 'normal' players, if they still want to play, playing ghost league.

CONTROVERSY INTENSIFIES:

Gold would be untradable but you could pay with it at merchants.
You could introduce new NPC and/or free or paid stash tab for currency exchange.

Example exchange table:
        Buying currency:
        100 - Scrolls
        .
        .
        .
        10,000 - Chaos Orb
        .
        .
        .
        1,000,000 - Exalted Orb
        .
        .
        .
        1,000,000,000 - Mirror of Kalandra

        Selling currency (for example for 50% it's gold value):
        Scrolls - 50
        .
        .
        .
        Chaos Orb - 5,000
        .
        .
        .
        Exalted Orb - 500,000
        .
        .
        .
        Mirror of Kalandra - 500,000,000

Gold should be easy to implement, just count how much currency usual player got before and check how much it would be in gold based on exchange table.

Example
Each fully finished act could give ~1000 gold * act number throughout act playthrough:
        1’st act ~1,000 gold in total
        5’th act ~5,000 gold in total
Finishing all acts would accumulate ~55,000 gold in total + maybe some gold bonuses from missions so you get around 100,000 = 10c, which should get you prepared for low tier maps.
Low tier maps would give ~10,000 gold (1c worth), mid tier ~100k (10c) and high tier, or at least t16 maps, would give ~1 mil (1 ex).

With this calculations Mirror could be obtained in ~11 days (8 hours per day) which is huge investment of time (just calculate this time * avrg per hour salary in your country).
For "normal" player (2h per day playtime) this would be around 41 days.

Proposed system could give more flexibility for item crafting - you've got 1 mil gold from red/t16 map and now you can decide on what you want to spend it.
You need 10k portal scrolls? Go for it.
You need (some amount) Orbs of Fusing? There you go.
This could increase good items count on market at the same time decreasing their price, ergo more fun for little people.

Small change:
Make that support gems that are incompatible either with spell gem or item spell can't be put on (ex. Archmage doesn’t work with Manabond).
Does any build need support gem that doesn’t work?

Other ideas:
Support gem for auras that overrides mana reservation cost to for example 500 mana (maybe + some penalty like 10% less aura effect).

Show map preview on hover.

Source:
https://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All + my experience.
Kinda source but mostly interesting https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/8fu2sd/what_percent_of_players_in_bestiary_league_did/
Different game but the same problems (on a larger scale but still)
https://youtu.be/Xtdaby3q6NI

Leagues were meant for us the gamers to be beta testers for standard.

Make a damn TP already. Your manifesto is vastly obsolete. I shouldn't spend so much time tabbing in and out, stopping my game, using portals, just to trade something for a few chaos, or if you want to craft something, spending hours trying to get the currency form afk players.

Currency: yes, get rid of everything, use one currency, gold. But don't exchange it for the existing currency, have vendors or crafting benches do it. Want to reroll all mods on a rare (chaos)? have the crafting bench do it for 100 gold (completely arbitrary). Add a mod? 1000 gold. Open a portal to breach realm? Talk to the creepy, weird expert on the breach lords and pay 10,000 gold. Etc.

Could say more, but I'm cooking.

"

Leagues were meant for us the gamers to be beta testers for standard.

Make a damn TP already. Your manifesto is vastly obsolete. I shouldn't spend so much time tabbing in and out, stopping my game, using portals, just to trade something for a few chaos, or if you want to craft something, spending hours trying to get the currency form afk players.

Currency: yes, get rid of everything, use one currency, gold. But don't exchange it for the existing currency, have vendors or crafting benches do it. Want to reroll all mods on a rare (chaos)? have the crafting bench do it for 100 gold (completely arbitrary). Add a mod? 1000 gold. Open a portal to breach realm? Talk to the creepy, weird expert on the breach lords and pay 10,000 gold. Etc.

Could say more, but I'm cooking.

I can see your point, thank you

So, to summarise. You want to remove the progression path entirely, and destroy any semblance of the player-driven economy.

Again reminds me o the old 'private servers people used to make of a certain game I used to play. Inevitably there were always a few where you started at max level in full gear and just teleported from boss to boss from an NPC in town.... it was laughable, pointless, and never lasted more than 2 or 3 days.

I don't think you grasp the incredibly important part progression plays.

I don't play PoE in it's current state, but I actually like the idea of making temporal leagues void. They should be, as well as HC leagues should outright delete characters upon death.

That way we'd first of all get rid of hypocritical whining, since the claim 'nobody doesn't care about standard' would actually be backed up by seeing who does and who doesn't, and 'git gut' about punitive XP penalty would be backed up by a real HC mode and its proponents. Also, there'd be no leaking of league items to standard mode, polluting the base with too much stuff.

Furthermore, it would finally put an end to excuse of fiddling farmed gear retrospectively, in effect devs destroying player accumulated stuff in their attempt of making players keep running in their mouse wheel. By the way, this was one of the bigger reasons for me to quit PoE. Somebody falsely blamed Blizzard here at PoE forums how 'the flying mount stuff is BS and GGG shouldn't go that route' but I've played WoW classic a lot and flying mount is by no means BS, why? Because you actually get to keep what you've worked for. In comparison, I don't have time for the sh*t GGG throws at their playerbase. If GGG had flying mounts, we'd first accumulate the 1000 gold for it, and then they'd nerf it's movement speed to 25%. Again and again. If you don't have means to keep your itemized progress, I'll rather go play WoW -as I did.

"

Chalace2 wrote:

So, to summarise. You want to remove the progression path entirely, and destroy any semblance of the player-driven economy.

Again reminds me o the old 'private servers people used to make of a certain game I used to play. Inevitably there were always a few where you started at max level in full gear and just teleported from boss to boss from an NPC in town.... it was laughable, pointless, and never lasted more than 2 or 3 days.

I don't think you grasp the incredibly important part progression plays.

Do you know what definition of insanity is?
I'm not against progression, I'm against repeated mundane tasks you have to do before you start playing for real.

"

vmt80 wrote:

I don't play PoE in it's current state, but I actually like the idea of making temporal leagues void. They should be, as well as HC leagues should outright delete characters upon death.

That way we'd first of all get rid of hypocritical whining, since the claim 'nobody doesn't care about standard' would actually be backed up by seeing who does and who doesn't, and 'git gut' about punitive XP penalty would be backed up by a real HC mode and its proponents. Also, there'd be no leaking of league items to standard mode, polluting the base with too much stuff.

Furthermore, it would finally put an end to excuse of fiddling farmed gear retrospectively, in effect devs destroying player accumulated stuff in their attempt of making players keep running in their mouse wheel.

Good points

Some things I agree with, some I don't.

I very much question your take on gold, and your assessment of its values and practicality. To preface what I'm about to say, I have played many many other games with a gold crafting system. However, there is a very obvious reason that most modern rpgs do NOT use gold systems anymore, at least not exclusively.

It doesn't work.

GGG put a ton of thought into their manifesto from 10 years ago on gold, they did a TON of research on the pros and cons and ultimately decided the cons outweigh the pros. I'm sorry but do you really think that just because you played Diablo 2 you are qualified to say that gold would work how you described, and completely ignore the sheer amount of research the developers did to disprove exactly what you described?

Re-read this thread: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/55102

I can 100% guarantee you that GGG put far more research, time, development, and practice into their decisions to not have gold than you did or ever will. It is one of the core aspects of this game that make it what it is. This decision is certainly not based on the simple fact that it "didn't work in Diablo 2"

"

jsuslak313 wrote:

Some things I agree with, some I don't.

I very much question your take on gold, and your assessment of its values and practicality. To preface what I'm about to say, I have played many many other games with a gold crafting system. However, there is a very obvious reason that most modern rpgs do NOT use gold systems anymore, at least not exclusively.

It doesn't work.

GGG put a ton of thought into their manifesto from 10 years ago on gold, they did a TON of research on the pros and cons and ultimately decided the cons outweigh the pros. I'm sorry but do you really think that just because you played Diablo 2 you are qualified to say that gold would work how you described, and completely ignore the sheer amount of research the developers did to disprove exactly what you described?

Re-read this thread: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/55102

I can 100% guarantee you that GGG put far more research, time, development, and practice into their decisions to not have gold than you did or ever will. It is one of the core aspects of this game that make it what it is. This decision is certainly not based on the simple fact that it "didn't work in Diablo 2"

Hmmm, insightful. Thank you

"

jsuslak313 wrote:

Re-read this thread: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/55102

Ok, finished reading this, i remember when i read it while playing beta :D
Right now though, this seems too outdated. There are no sinks for certain items, players leave league with thousands of one currency (which is useless after acts) and few if any of those they would need.
Post was wrote when there were less than 25 currency items (soon to be updated to 25 in 1.0 release).
I agree that gold could be less fun than dropping pure ex, but it would be more fun (in my opinion) than having nothing of value dropping for hours, and, when you reach peak delirium maps, picking valuables for 20+ minutes.
I'm not against trading with other players with currency items, I even said, that gold should be untradable.
Items would still drop, people would still use currency items on those and trade currency items for those, but they would have to pick less 'clutter' ;)