POE is ACTUALLY dying not the drama queen kind, but the actual kind... From Developer Hubris

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

theres little build enabling things in poe or stuff that changes how you play?

Correct. I was referring to gear. And yes PoE has very little.

it has at least 10x more than any other arpg ever made. this statement is just incorrect mate.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

I'm sorry if PoE is all you have. Lot's of great games out there. If anything my criticism of PoE is a direct result of having perspective from alternative gaming options, which is entirely the point.

ive played them all. ive played 1000s of hours of d2, d3, grim dawn, ive extensively played torchlight/2, titan quest, ive played wolcen, last epoch... all the diablo clone arpgs of note that have ever existed and everything adjacent like neverwinter nights, DAO, BG etc etc. im 40, ive been playing games in this space since the late 80s, master system, nintendo, amiga, 286 pcs, 386, 486, i remember when the first pentium came out. i had diablo 1 within months of its release, you dont need to tell me about other games.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

GGG developmental direction, and overall PoE experience won't improve if all you do is praise and defend them. You are actually doing the game a disservice by providing blind loyalty. Your unwavering support is admirable, truly, but misguided.

im one of the most crticial, consistent feedback givers in these forums since 2013. i post extensive negative feedback on the games failings all the time. but its realistic, its not claiming the arpg with the most builds, the most build enabling items and the most endgame content doesnt have enough build enabling items or things to do, i dont just post half baked, half aimed negativity for its own sake.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

the majority of players are playing self found

Nope, and it's not even close. Softcore trade league is by far the most played.

most people who play softcore trade league dont trade. most players are playing self found, this is a fact. ive never played actual self found league, but ive played a lot of self found.

"

Tsokushin wrote:

And here's another quote from the trade manifesto. It's in big, bolded letters in its very own line close to the top.

"Items Matter. Trade is Important."

yes, trade is important, but you said the game is balanced around trade. its not, they clearly show you its not, in that post they talk about how trade is cumbersome because they dont want to balance around trade. so if you are gonna quote elements of that post at me fine, but the full post literally says you are wrong, so feel free to quote as much of it as you want.

the reason most of those really experienced players from hardcore now play ssf is because the game is stupidly easy when you trade and only really provides the sort of resistance they are looking for in ssf. if thats not you then fine, i dont play ssfhc either, but dont pretend the game forces you to trade and its balanced around you having traded for op gear. ive plyed self found enough to know i could clear the full atlas and beat all the uber bosses self found if i wanted to. if you sit in trade league and play the market what you end up with is a serious lack of balance as you just faceroll almost everything in the game.

a balanced game actually fights back, it takes some kind of effort to beat, maybe thats the bit you are struggling to realise. clearing out the entire endgame and being level 96+ with fairly bis gear within a week of a new league is not the intended balance of the game, thats not the bit where its working and everyone else is being shit on, thats the bit where the balance has fallen apart and the game has become a joke. thats what high trade softcore is, its a joke. i play that joke too quite a lot, its not a dig at you, its just a reality.

"

rekikyo wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

"

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great

Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league.

The major problems with this assumption:

GGG has also stated that 92% of all players quit before finishing the Acts.

The reason people don't trade is because they opt of of the game before it's even lucrative do so.

They maybe buy a Tabula Rasa, and a couple other 1c uniques, and then quit.

the people who trade extensively dont really trade during the acts either. ggg are talking about trade in terms of game balance between traders and non traders, so obviously they are talking about game balance in endgame where you have people effected by gear they have traded for vs people who are dont trade or trade very little.

theyre not balancing trade vs non trade in act4 on day 1 of the league where no one has traded for anything. the asserting made is that the game is balanced vs trading and hence you have to trade, and from gggs own assertions that the reason the trade system sucks is because they dont want to balance around trade because most people dont trade, through to the fact that the good players can all play ssf and beat serious endgame bosses just fine, shows that this assertion is simply not true, it doesnt hold up.


im not saying you made that assertion, but that is the conversation my post was responding to.

It's a good thing they avoided having to balance around trade. Could you imagine how the balance would look if they added another layer of complexity to it? 😉

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

"

Phrazz wrote:

"

roachmanley wrote:

Spoiler

I am going to toss in my 2c here, I have played since open beta. And honestly....I play an arpg to FIND cool items. NOT to craft them using some deterministic formula that I need to spend 100 hours learning the ins and outs of how to make my items stronger. I just don't find "crafting" fun. I don't like having to use craft of exile to try to make items ( and lets face it that's only a stopgap ). I go to look for an item in trade and there are literally hundreds HUNDREDS of mods for every single item, probably thousands overall.

I just cant keep up. And so PoE has to go. I enjoy the hell out of the game, I just am so lost trying to play it. Its become an overbloated mess. And because of the convoluted crafting, that's why so many feel weak, die to one shots etc. GGG balances around a player who crafts his items and has the stats to match, and simply put the vast majority of players don't even UNDERSTAND the crafting systems, let alone USE it.

This game is a crafting simulator, not an arpg.

Spoiler

I do actually agree with you when it comes to dropped items versus crafting in PoE. However... That is purely subjective of us, and I struggle to see how it makes PoE any less of an "ARPG", just because it focuses a lot on crafting. Your last sentence is like saying "Diablo 2 is an item dropping simulator, not an ARPG", which makes very little sense in my head.

ANYHOW, if it was up to me, the power of crafting would be reduced and the quality of dropped items would be increased. But luckily for the PoE player base, I'm not in charge, because A LOT of players are playing PoE because of the in-depth crafting system.

Spoiler

Diablo 2 isn't an 'item dropping simulation' because that is sort of the core of the genre. It is the real and original purpose of the thing. Might as well say that a bicycle is a two wheeled mobility device emulator. No. It's just what it is.

And item dropping is what the Diablo type of game has always been about.

Item crafting came later, and until PoE was used fairly sparingly because ARPG devs typically know what I just said: people expect one thing from an ARPG over all else, and that is the basic idea of killing lots of shit and taking their stuff, hoping to find top tier gear upgrades. Sure, d2 had a few crafted items but PoE is on a whole other level when it comes to crafted power.

And you'd think I'd be down with that, considering probably my biggest contribution to the game for years was a crafted item. But it was always a gimmick item. There if you want to stuff about with it.

Crafting in an ARPG should be ancillary. Always.

Spoiler

Because once it's not you're in a different genre. Different motivations. Different enemy design. Most importantly different itemisation.

And there is nothing wrong with that. My very first post as a PoE supporter praised the currency system as a set of crafting/item rerolling tools. But the game never fully embraced that either, not outside of truly revolutionary experiments like Descent which removed trade and very briefly allowed us to use currency guilt free for its actual purpose. So even in this simple case PoE wavered and hesitated.

At the same time, it has gone full ham on the *complexity* of item modification and creation, which pulls it even further away from the basic ARPG experience. GGG needed the game design equivalent of an editor long ago and now you have the game equivalent of a sprawling series that is magnificent if you've been into it for a while but is utterly impenetrable otherwise. Those who are into it cannot understand why those who aren't also into it...aren't. And those who aren't think those who are are rabid fans beyond all reason.

Simplified but I'd say the divide isn't far off that.

And the irony is PoE is a f2p which typically go way the fuck out of their way to lure new players. Can you imagine the quiet pride swelling in GGG's collective heart that they have defied probably the strongest f2p cliche ever? And they started to do it before anyone else, before f2p was even on the table as a respectable business model.

With an ARPG.

So in a way it shouldn't be surprising that PoE has gone way beyond what we expect an ARPG to be. They're all bicycles and PoE is some weird juggernaut with dozens of axles, a Rube Goldberg cutaway profile and a treadmill rather than pedals. Awesome...but kinda pointless when all most people want is to jump on the bike and go for a ride.

To bring it full circle, a thing doing what it's built to do, delivering an authentic experience, is not a simulator. It is the actual thing. And a thing doing stuff outside its traditional purpose in an abstract way that evokes a feeling of doing the original but never quite in a fully believable way...thats a simulator.

So you can call PoE a trading simulator or a crafting simulator because neither are core to the basic feeling of playing an ARPG, and it more than dabbles with both fairly clumsily. But you can't call Diablo an item dropping simulator since that is what it actually is. There is no simulated experience there.

The core argument is really whether or not what PoE simulates so intensely overshadows what it was meant to be...with the follow up being...does that matter?

I saw a stream on Twitch where David Brevik (one of original D2 devs) exactly mentioned this.
Crafting is fine if it's a minor side thing to give your items the last fine touch.
But it should IMO never have so much weight that it completly replaces the item drops as this would mean anything that drops afterwards is mostly trash, like now in PoE or in Last Epoch with its Harvest crafting.
Smart loot cant come fast enough if you ask me.

"

gandhar0 wrote:

I saw a stream on Twitch where David Brevik (one of original D2 devs) exactly mentioned this.
Crafting is fine if it's a minor side thing to give your items the last fine touch.
But it should IMO never have so much weight that it completly replaces the item drops as this would mean anything that drops afterwards is mostly trash, like now in PoE or in Last Epoch with its Harvest crafting.
Smart loot cant come fast enough if you ask me.

Not IMO either. But does it make PoE or Last Epoch any less of an ARPG? No. It just mean those games cater to a semi-different crowd. Brevik has his opinions. You have yours. I have mine. Every head over at GGG have theirs. None of us own the definition of an ARPG.

Smart loot will never come to PoE, nor should it. Improved loot, on the other hand, should've been here years ago.

"

Phrazz wrote:

"

gandhar0 wrote:

I saw a stream on Twitch where David Brevik (one of original D2 devs) exactly mentioned this.
Crafting is fine if it's a minor side thing to give your items the last fine touch.
But it should IMO never have so much weight that it completly replaces the item drops as this would mean anything that drops afterwards is mostly trash, like now in PoE or in Last Epoch with its Harvest crafting.
Smart loot cant come fast enough if you ask me.

Not IMO either. But does it make PoE or Last Epoch any less of an ARPG? No. It just mean those games cater to a semi-different crowd. Brevik has his opinions. You have yours. I have mine. Every head over at GGG have theirs. None of us own the definition of an ARPG.

Smart loot will never come to PoE, nor should it. Improved loot, on the other hand, should've been here years ago.

glug glug

Ah shit, now there's two of you responding smartly demanding my near-full attention. Crrrrap.

Okay. SO: Last Epoch is to me a true evolution from PoE in that it actually delivers on PoE's original promise that any white item has the potential to be something much more in a practical sense rather than a merely possible one. If crafting with currency on PoE is a series of spins of a fucking huge wheel of fortune where most results are some variant of 'insert coin to spin again', doing it with LE is much closer to fitting pieces together to construct a desired whole. Rather than draw on PoE's slightly sick obsession on gambling with lottery-level odds, LE tapped Torchlight's enchantment system wherein the gamble per crafting step is a simple binary: break or not break?

That's awesome imo.

Don't know about you guys but when I'm crafting something IRL, be it a meal or a piece of writing or a dress (okay last one is the partner but I ran out of shit I can craft), I know the risk is a binary: either it turns out as planned or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, is what I do make somehow still okay for the planned task? Or do I scrap it and open UberEats or close Word and go cry about how utterly useless I am...then try again later?

This is the LE approach.

In contrast, the PoE approach is more like you set out to craft something but somehow have a pants on head stupid moment and end up with something quite different. Ostensibly it's the same thing as planned (a cake, for example) but how the fuck it went from chocolate mud ingredients to New York cheesecake results is downright baffling.

Can you in good conscience call it 'crafting' when the outcome is determined by rng? I know GGG did and do but I read that as them pulling their usual "English is...well, flexible, right brah?" shenanigans.

PoE does have true crafting, yes. Div cards are technically true crafting. Master crafting. To a lesser extent, essence I suppose. Anything with logical input to output determination, that is crafting. From what I've seen, Scourge is just uninspired super-corruption with silly disabilities (I swear I tapped 'possibilities' but let's leave that one for shits and giggles).

So true item moulding and straight up chaotic derolling (wow there's another one) are lumped together as "crafting" and there's no wonder people generally don't like it.

LE in my experience has mostly true item moulding with a chance of failure. This just makes more sense to me.

I only found a few legendaries in LE and none replaced what I'd made and that was fine. But at the upper level, I fully expect so-called chase items to be the prize, while crafted gear is merely good enough.

At any rate, I am glad that when I step into the kitchen and pull up my recipe bookmarks, I know chances are what I serve will be close enough to what I intended to make that I can say I 'crafted' it.

I do not play dungeons and dragons, throw a nat 20 after a bunch of middling rolls and say whoa, nice crit I just crafted.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

LE in my experience has mostly true item moulding with a chance of failure. This just makes more sense to me.

So crafting does belong in an ARPG? It even makes sense? Well, then we agree.

His point is "PoE crafting has only the name of it. It has nothing to do with crafting, it's just slot machine". His second point is "Drop has also to be relevant. It is in LE, it's absolutely not in PoE".

Not sure why it was so hard to get.

The PoE gambling systems extend all the way to their mtx's ffs.

The extent of the layered rng systems are like nothing I've ever experienced in another game before. Its actually insane have far they have gone to extend play.

"

Keyen wrote:

His point is "PoE crafting has only the name of it. It has nothing to do with crafting, it's just slot machine". His second point is "Drop has also to be relevant. It is in LE, it's absolutely not in PoE".

Not sure why it was so hard to get.

I've critiqued the PoE crafting system this whole thread, and I've also critiqued PoE's drops system. I get it, and I even agree, as I've said several times. But the point that drew me into the debate, was this claim that "crafting does not belong in an ARPG", which is nonsense.