A small thought on what is wrong with the game's development vision

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HurkWurk wrote:

chris has said several times that he believes players like "chase" items, when what he means is that people like winning the lottery.

He simply doesnt understand what a chase item actually is.

Chase items require a deterministic way to aquire them... not simply a "more lucky" way to get them.

farming blood aquiduct for cards does not make a tabula a "chase item". it makes it a grind.

Oni-Goroshi is a chase item. kill hillock enough, it will drop. randomly farming its 27 cards is not "chasing" it.

Oh, Chris knows what a chase item is. He knew OG was my attempt at making one, where my other uniques had been a mix of luck and deterministic crafting.

What you see as ignorance I read as much more manipulative. GGG have a long history of twisting words to fit their agenda, not so much out of genuine desire to deceive but more because they can and it works.

In this case, "chase" is used not just with a clear target and clear path towards it (as with OG) but in fact with only one of the two in mind. Clear target but no clear path? Still a chase in terms of goal. Clear path but no real target? Still a chase in terms of action, because that path is usually a gamble. And if you're gambling, you must be chasing something, right?

So yeah, they know how the chase works. They've just figured out how to convince Exiles that merely acting like you are chasing IS chasing. As with any casino, it's obviously bad if people win too much. For everyone involved. The important thing is to ensure people are compelled to stay at the table.

But a true chase has no real place in an arpg. It's more the product of the MMO, a one and done type deal with longevity found in the steps towards the final goal. People whinge about OG in terms of farm time but they all know this is piddly shit compared to epics and legendaries in an MMO, which can take months to acquire and usually aren't even all that strong. They're for aesthetic bragging rights and badges of true grind perseverance.

No real place for that sort of chase in a game where you can hit max level in a day and everything is wiped every so often anyway.

So instead of the real chase you have, as you noted, lottery. And if we consider the two from a real life perspective, who is the more likely to get what they want: the person with a clear goal and a plan to achieve it (wants to buy a car, starts saving, doing OT, looks into loans etx), or the sap buying lottery tickets every week because just one win and he can buy twenty cars of his choice?

Of course you can be the former within PoE but you are kind of robbing yourself of what arpgs offer better than almost any other genre: harmless gambling fun. You can be the sap buying lottery tickets for no real cost and if you win, if that mirror drops, you will know that you didn't have to 'work' for it. You didn't really chase but it feels like it after the fact.

And that's how it all works: you know each click (each ticket bought) can be a winning one, but probably won't be. And once it is, you can call every single non winning click part of the chase. Zero determinism, maximum determination.

Or you can go pound sand and save up for a shitty replica, bought and paid for in zombie kills by the thousands.

I did hear of one GGG staffer who liked to farm OG to sell it early in the league and I was like...surely there are better ways to make an exalted orb or 2, but eh...that was HIS chase I guess!

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Hackusations wrote:

The sad irony is this thread is exactly why GGG is better off sticking to their vision than catering to any of the complaints and solutions you people have. Players in general are terrible game designers. We are self-serving, we don't step back and consider the nature of the problem, and we jump on bandwagons blaming things we don't like.[...]

While you are right about peoples' behavior, this is not bad in itself. Computer games are short-lived. It's all about the journey. How much fun does it give you? How much satisfaction? You realize at some point in the future you will stop playing inevitably, so all was for nothing. So it's really all about the current level of enjoyment.

If POE doesn't get it right, people will move sooner or later. D4 will be easier, but (according to the devs) hard to master. If they have overtaken a little bit of the elements of d2, it will be very hard to reach highest level and to perfect your build item-wise. Let's see.
What I really liked about d2 was that all of the classes worked to some extent. Not every one was equal, but none of them completely sucked. In POE, if you don't choose a meta build, you eventually have no chance. In red maps you will be constantly one-shot. Balance is really off.

Imho it couldn't be much worse, because of mods like "increased damage per intelligence" or because there are skills like spectral shield throw, which do high dps and implicitly grant high defenses, because you are using a shield. As long as certain builds (especially the ones with a shield, or int stacking) have these defense-wise advantages, while still granting competitive dps, it makes no sense whatsoever to play any other class. But new players don't know these things. They just choose any class, which fits their taste. Then they are punished.

People argue that GGG does not want to balance the game anymore. Because more meta shifts mean more restarts and more MTX/revenue. Honestly, after the recent announcement, I start to believe that. There is no continuity. Why don't we revamp everything from scratch every 3 months?
On top of that, leagues are too short for semi-casual or casual players, as OP said.

Plenty of issues, no easy solution. But I guarantee you, if other games make it better (the overall feeling of satisfaction), people will be gone very quickly.

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Titoisagod wrote:

that's the thing though, even the top tier players want less grind and more deterministic crafting and loot systems. like im a 1%er in poe. i generally earn 2-5 mirrors each league and have made around 30 mirrors total since i started playing poe. im not anywhere near the average gamer in terms of knowledge and time spent playing, but im exactly where you're at. the game is wayyy too grindy.

the thing is anyone can say the game is too grindy, but most people dont actually grind for much. those of us that have done the grind know firsthand how bad it's become. i used to craft all the time but now just getting your base item setup, grinding for enough currency, getting materials, and planning your craft takes weeks. it's ridiculous

ppl play for different reasons.
I haven't even got 100 exalts in standard after 9 years of poe.
and still kill all end game stuff in leagues.

That its a huge grind for end game set up min/maxed, I understand that.
That is no fun in any game

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Xyel wrote:

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Nubatron wrote:

I take that to mean they have a hard decision to make. Water down the game to be what they don't want it to be, or lay off some people. Like I said, it's a lose/lose for them if things continue on this course.

Going back to 3.13 philosophy can hardly be called watering the game down. To undo a terribly-received design change isn't a lose scenario, it's - from a business perspective - the most common-sense solution.

It's watered down compared to what GGG wants the game to be.

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Xyel wrote:

In any other industry, if a product change led to a 30 % decrease in sales (even 5 %), that change would get undone at the first possible opportunity and no one would bat an eye. It is done all the time, and it's the most normal way products are handled. The shortest 'change - sales down - revert' cycle I have seen was a week, where a money lending company slightly altered the parameters of it's core online loan over a weekend, had a 12 % sales drop on that product in the following week, and reverted the change the next weekend.

Yes, if they were operating purely from a make money standpoint, they would go completely overboard with P2W elements and adopt a Candy Crush mentality. That was my point. More money isn't always the ultimate goal. They clearly changed their direction with 3.15 because the game was deviating from what they wanted. People that are making a money based argument need to be careful what they wish for. Next thing you know we'll be paying for energy to be able to play very long, else we'll have to wait for our energy bar to refresh (Source: Most every freaking ARPG on the mobile market). The most successful and profitable games are not games that I personally like. Candy Crush made over a billion dollars in 2020. That doesn't mean I like it.

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Xyel wrote:

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Nubatron wrote:

But they really only have one choice. If they bend to the will of a portion of the community that hates the changes, and turn back, then the portion of the community that liked the changes will have a template to force GGG's hand as well. Just boycott and throw tantrums and create toxicity at every turn to try to get them to reverse course again.

It's not about who throws a tantrum, but how many people actually consume the product - people throwing tantrums have minimal effect on that, player satisfaction does. That there's a lot of negative feedback on something is the result of decreased player satisfaction, not the other way around. And satisfaction with the product is one of the most important long-term metrics.

Out of curiosity, I took from steamdb the daily peak numbers, and averaged them out over the entire league lifetimes, and the averages are:
Heist - 37.2k
Ritual - 54.9k
Ultimatum - 43.4k
Expedition - 30.7k (using the peak from 2021-10-12 as a value for all days up to the day before the next league launch to make the comparison fair, in reality, they are likely to be lower than that)

That's a huge customer loss since Ritual and there's even a good reasoning for it:
1) Ritual added a lot of power into crafted items (maven orb), added a sort-of deterministic way to get them (harvest), and made crafting materials more accessible (fractured map farming; atlas passives)
2) Ultimatum kept the power in items; nerfed the hell out of that sort-of deterministic way to get them; and heavily nerfed the high-end ways of getting crafting currency. That made lategame items practically unobtainable for a large part of the playerbase. Did this cause the 21 % player loss over the whole league? Not all of it, but surely some of it.
3) Expedition kept the power in items, but heavily nerfed other sources of power - mainly flasks and support gems. Has this caused the another 29 % average player loss compared to Ultimatum? Yes, it clearly has.

Player numbers does not mean anything with respect to whether the game is good for a player (or the developer), particularly when a group of people are boycotting to get a change. Boycotting is done on principle to try to exact a change out of the developer. They'll try to keep the numbers low to make the point you're trying to make now, and get the change they seek. But the real thing you need to understand is the point you quote right below this.....

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Xyel wrote:

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Nubatron wrote:

Simply put, giving in is the worst option on the table, even if it includes the need to fire people. They'll end up having to fire the people anyway and have lost control of their development to the whining masses.

That's not how the creative entertainment industry works, which is where PoE belongs.

First of all, once the downsizing starts, employees start feeling insecure about the positions, which leads to some of the best people leaving (the best people always leave first). The specific problem to a creative industry is that you can't replace someone who's great at a creative job with 10 average Joes, no matter how much training the Joes get. Very few people have the creative talent to make something great, and they are extremely difficult to find.

Second of all, downsizing of the workforce means downsizing of the product scope - PoE2 gets canceled (or postponed indefinitely), the product (future leagues) start being worse than the old ones, new skills are even more extreme on the OP/garbage scale...etc

And most important, third of all, gaming communities move in trends - as of 3.15, PoE is on a strong negative trend, which is accompanied by heavy losses to the company goodwill. If the product gets downsized, this trend will continue, because people always notice the product becoming worse, and some more will quit, and the trend continues. In the worst-case scenario, it continues until the game stops being profitable to maintain. And downward trends are extremely difficult to get out of in gaming, because unlike physical products, games cannot rebrand to reset the goodwill.

Like I said: If GGG gives in, the 3.13 crowd will have only proven one major point, that if you boycott and cause major financial harm to the game, GGG will change their direction. The people that thought the 3.15 change was a positive change in the right direction can also deploy the same methods to try to get them to change again -- causing further and similar harm to their bottom line. They'll end in the same place they are now with one major exception: they've lost control of their development to the whining hordes that have learned that all they have to do is boycott the game to get GGG to change their mind.

I did not personally like the direction of 3.13. It basically made the game into a harvest crafting game with ARPG as a side show. But if they came out and said this is our vision and we are sticking with it, I would have respected that. I still enjoy the core game and can avoid Harvest, at least until the game is balanced around every player having GG broken items.

But if they give in, I can't respect that. They will have ceded control to an angry mob and the development of this game will never be in their control again. That's an eject moment. The angry mob will never make the game better, and I wouldn't stick around to watch them ruin the game.

This is a serious crossroad for them, but it's not a hard choice. I think either path leads to layoffs since both sides of this argument can boycott causing serious revenue issues. But one of those paths includes maintaining control of the development of the game while the other cedes control of development to the mob.

They made a mistake putting 3.13 in the game, but they can't unring the bell. It's time for some hard decisions as a result of that mistake.

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Nubatron wrote:

It's watered down compared to what GGG wants the game to be.

What does GGG want the game to be?

Might sound like a venomous question, but I mean it - I would really like to know what GGG wants the game to be. I haven't seen or heard that anywhere, the only thing I see is a ton of mixed signals.

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Nubatron wrote:

Yes, if they were operating purely from a make money standpoint, they would go completely overboard with P2W elements and adopt a Candy Crush mentality. That was my point. More money isn't always the ultimate goal. They clearly changed their direction with 3.15 because the game was deviating from what they wanted. People that are making a money based argument need to be careful what they wish for. Next thing you know we'll be paying for energy to be able to play very long, else we'll have to wait for our energy bar to refresh (Source: Most every freaking ARPG on the mobile market). The most successful and profitable games are not games that I personally like. Candy Crush made over a billion dollars in 2020. That doesn't mean I like it.

And would p2w elements make the game more money? I mean, one of the core monetization methods PoE is using are lootboxes, which is among the most pretadory monetization method there are, so I wouldn't say GGG is above using predatory monetization methods, but rather that they know (imo rightfully) that p2w elements simply aren't compatible with their user base.

Even Blizzard, one of the most aggressively predatory companies when it comes to game monetization in the world, has cleared D3 off p2w stuff, which is a strong indicator that it simply wouldn't work for the games genre.

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Nubatron wrote:

Player numbers does not mean anything with respect to whether the game is good for a player (or the developer), particularly when a group of people are boycotting to get a change. Boycotting is done on principle to try to exact a change out of the developer. They'll try to keep the numbers low to make the point you're trying to make now, and get the change they seek. But the real thing you need to understand is the point you quote right below this...

Player numbers decide whether a game will be developed, expanded, maintained, or if it will be left to die.

Also, what makes you think people were, en-masse, boycotting anything? I didn't see anything of that sort, but I saw a whole lot of people simply not enjoying the 3.15 version, and thus not playing.

Boycotts suggest something artificial was going on, which I have seen no hint of (a few madmen calling for boycotts at the forums with zero positive response is not a boycott).

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Nubatron wrote:

Like I said: If GGG gives in, the 3.13 crowd will have only proven one major point, that if you boycott and cause major financial harm to the game, GGG will change their direction. The people that thought the 3.15 change was a positive change in the right direction can also deploy the same methods to try to get them to change again -- causing further and similar harm to their bottom line. They'll end in the same place they are now with one major exception: they've lost control of their development to the whining hordes that have learned that all they have to do is boycott the game to get GGG to change their mind.

I did not personally like the direction of 3.13. It basically made the game into a harvest crafting game with ARPG as a side show. But if they came out and said this is our vision and we are sticking with it, I would have respected that. I still enjoy the core game and can avoid Harvest, at least until the game is balanced around every player having GG broken items.

But if they give in, I can't respect that. They will have ceded control to an angry mob and the development of this game will never be in their control again. That's an eject moment. The angry mob will never make the game better, and I wouldn't stick around to watch them ruin the game.

This is a serious crossroad for them, but it's not a hard choice. I think either path leads to layoffs since both sides of this argument can boycott causing serious revenue issues. But one of those paths includes maintaining control of the development of the game while the other cedes control of development to the mob.

How do you tell a boycott was happening at all? I was following the community part for pretty much the whole league and saw no sign of that, but saw a ton of 'I don't enjoy this, so I quit' -- how do you tell who are whining hordes and who are genuinely unhappy players?

At the end of the day, no players = no game, so throwing everyone unhappy with the game under 'angry mob' or 'whining hordes' is an effective way to justify ignoring all negative feedback, but wouldn't be terribly useful.

Also, how would they have lost control of their development?

On the example of Harvest, the problem was that harvest heavily outshined other crafting methods. One solution to that was to gut harvest, another was to buff the other crafting methods, the third one was to nuke influence modifiers to bring down the overall power of rares, and I'm sure there were more and I just can't think of them - the choice was and always would be GGGs, that they chose something the players haven't been terribly happy with is on them alone.

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Nubatron wrote:

They made a mistake putting 3.13 in the game, but they can't unring the bell. It's time for some hard decisions as a result of that mistake.

This is where I would strongly disagree - putting 3.13 in the game was the natural evolution of the game, the mistake was GGG's kneejerk reaction of 'oh shit, we're not a D2 clone anymore, time to hit reverse' that put them on the 3.15 path

GGG made mistake when they put 3,13 harvest in core game. they needed to scrap that and move on. harvest was mistake and wilson knows that as he talked about that in podcast. problems is when company starts loose control and starts cater game around crying players that dont know shit. thats a point game rolls dawnhill and dies when top 10% of players starts leaving game

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anti4z500 wrote:

GGG made mistake when they put 3,13 harvest in core game. they needed to scrap that and move on. harvest was mistake and wilson knows that as he talked about that in podcast. problems is when company starts loose control and starts cater game around crying players that dont know shit. thats a point game rolls dawnhill and dies when top 10% of players starts leaving game

Idk man.

So if the 10% (hell even 20%) remain and the other 80-90% leave what has really been accomplished?

Some sort of elite head nod from pro-gamers that your game is good? Even as it passes into total irrelevance or goes out of business? What is the point?

Now not every game has to be played by the masses but you cant be shifting back and forth in development kneejerks. Which GGG has been doing and pitting players against each other (in terms of what they want from the game)

Pick a fucking lane GGG and roll with it is my suggestion.

My personal opinion is that they have already gone too far. I find it hard to believe they are going to operate targeting a much smaller community and dramatically scale back their revenue and staff levels. I mean maybe, but GGG doesnt own PoE anymore and has to answer to Tencent. Developmental freedom is one thing, intentionally shooting a torpedo into the hull of the cash ship is quite another.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

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anti4z500 wrote:

GGG made mistake when they put 3,13 harvest in core game. they needed to scrap that and move on. harvest was mistake and wilson knows that as he talked about that in podcast. problems is when company starts loose control and starts cater game around crying players that dont know shit. thats a point game rolls dawnhill and dies when top 10% of players starts leaving game

Idk man.

So if the 10% (hell even 20%) remain and the other 80-90% leave what has really been accomplished?

Some sort of elite head nod from pro-gamers that your game is good? Even as it passes into total irrelevance or goes out of business? What is the point?

Now not every game has to be played by the masses but you cant be shifting back and forth in development kneejerks. Which GGG has been doing and pitting players against each other (in terms of what they want from the game)

Pick a fucking lane GGG and roll with it is my suggestion.

My personal opinion is that they have already gone too far. I find it hard to believe they are going to operate targeting a much smaller community and dramatically scale back their revenue and staff levels. I mean maybe, but GGG doesnt own PoE anymore and has to answer to Tencent. Developmental freedom is one thing, intentionally shooting a torpedo into the hull of the cash ship is quite another.

ahh not like that, i mean its like top end stops that means that this your 80% stops geting end game items,builds,streams,information on game and so on ....

what gets me the most about the whole harvest arguments is that they said it was too easy to make end game items, so they scrapped it. why didnt they instead cap what could be made that way to only be "7/10" quality stuff? why couldnt harvest be a way to get good early end game items, but not the best stuff?