Someone please ask Chris Wilson this on his next community interview:

Why is the game balanced around the ability to logout instantly, and will you pretty please change that between now and PoE2?

From my understanding, the reason why monster damage is so spiky and time-to-death from full life is half a second or less, is because without that, players would never die as they can just instantly log out.

The health globe is either full, or empty, almost never somewhere in between. Monster damage should be reduced, and player recovery should also be reduced to compensate, and instant logging out should not be a thing.

+1

Got to personally agree, but am fully aware that the change won't come with a simply "make it so". They would likely have to throw a small bone to the "reduce/elliminate the death penalty" crowd.

They would also have to deal with the travel/movement skills as they would become the alternative method of escaping danger.

Travel/movement skills to escape danger is 1000x better than using a logout macro.

Movement skills feel good, logout macro feels bad.

They should also make guard skills better for this same reason.

Melee should dig their heels in and fight, ranged should dodge and flee, and casters should crowd control to deal with these situations. Then in true PoE fasion let everyone choose which approach they want even if it's not from their core archetype and maybe even mix and match.

Or ya know... put the logout button in the game for the same reason Chris doesn't want players to have to spend time setting up the UI to be able to play the game.

Think it's more or less impossible to disagree with this as a whole. Monster pike damage IS too high, so is our recovery tools.

My question to Chris:

Does GGG want PoE to be a BIG game to compete with D4 or does it want to be small only for regular 100k players?

He's been asked about it many times before, and the answer is always the same. There are technical necessities why logging out works the way it does, and those lead to balancing the game with the realization that players will do so. The game design itself is so dependent on it that Chris believes that changing this one thing would require huge amounts of work rebalancing things, and the entire flavor of the game would change, and it's just not worth it. Whether you or I believe that's true is irrelevant; Chris believes it's true.

Zizaran posted a video a few weeks ago where he replayed audio from a few years ago of Chris explaining this in detail. This link skips a to few minutes into the video where Chris begins his explanation:

https://youtu.be/xNPH29DUPRY?t=188

"

Zizaran - Say your character is about to die but you can save it by logging out?

Chris - So the answer is yes, but this league I haven't needed to yet, and that's partly because I'm playing an insanely tanky character where if I'm finding these spikes of damage then I can politely walk away and open a portal. But I absolutely will log out if I see my life drop to 30%, it's just that that hasn't happened so far this league.

And this is an intentional thing where there are two ways you can balance the game.

The first way is where you actually get damage swings that are meaningful, and in that case you could be killed in a couple of seconds, and so logging out is a way of avoiding that.

Or you can say "look guys, logging out is cheesy so we're adding a five second period where if you try to log out you're still in the game while still taking damage for five seconds". And the game would be 100% different end-to-end if that was the case. Like, that will never happen to Path of Exile because the amount of work required. It would mean so much of a rebalance we'd be sent back to the dark ages. And, you know, the hardcore community who may be complaining about logouts would still quit when that change is made.

I actually remember that, I still think the in game survival options need to be at least viable compared to logout macro. Not necessarily even equal, but just better than they are. I personally have never and will not start using logout macro, so I just play until that becomes unbearable and then quit for a while. I think I cannot be alone there, though I'll make no claims to know what portion of the players feel the same other than not zero.

Edit: Basically what I'm saying is that I don't feel they should remove logout macros from the people who want to use them, but I don't want to feel coerced into using them myself.

Double Edit: I think it might be helpful for us to illustrate what we mean when we say the game is balanced around the logout macro. Personally I think that if the current rippy/ 1shot/ instadeath state of the game is due to logout macro existing then that sucks because it feels bad and pushes me away from a game that's otherwise good enough to keep me coming back for more abuse. Hell I'd settle for an "enter on use" support to go with the portal gem and sacrifice two skill slots for it if that's all I can get. I just don't want to use logout macros, I don't like it.

+1



i dont care if they add a logout timer to hardcore or not, i dont care if ahrdcore becomes a joke because logout makes you immortal. better than hardcore is a joke rather than the entire game being a really bad 1 shot joke at everyones expense.

we shouldnt all have to play a bad game to accommodate this.

make the rebalances and just leave logout in there, maybe u can then put a 5 second timer in the hard mode. theyre rebalancing everything for poe2, just take that opportunity to do it properly.