PoE Issues That Need Solutions Now Not Later
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PoE has had many issues over the years since I first started playing this game post Beta. From day one what inspired me to keep playing was the potential and possibilities in builds I can play. My goal ever since has always been to play as many different builds as possible, especially since they started League content. However with the constant nerfs and buffs I always go back to my love Cyclone. I'll never get over the - 30% movement speed on it. The game has changed a lot and I am glad to see GGG making the game a little harder early game, and adding harder aspirational content. However there are issues that need a solution, and have needed one since the game was released. Trading
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Trading has always sucked. No one wants to trade. People trade cause they feel they have to in order to progress. According to Chris Wilson himself in a interview or podcast, most players do not trade.
Chris is entirely against making trade easier. From his perspective I understand easier trade means faster upgrades, huge skips in progression, and the potential possibility that players will finish a build and then quit, thus having poor player retention. It is my firm belief that no one in the community wants to play only 1 character or build for 3 months. In fact I am more likely to believe that most players want to make their own builds, play other builds, and learn more about the game so that they can make their own builds. Easier trade means more potential to experiment. I love that on console they have an auction house, allowing potential to trade with others without leaving your map, or being in content you cant leave in order to initiate a trade. I don't like that searching for items is made intentionally trash to make finding good items difficult. So many issues exist due to current trade. - Players scam the community through in game trade chat with exchange rates that net them huge profit when they resell in bulk on the trade website. - Trade requires leaving the game to find an item, then requires the seller to be online and not afk, and trade requires the player with an item listed to care about taking their time to initiate a trade. Most players who have 1-10c items listed after week 1 will never sell those items despite leaving them listed cause that amount of currency is no longer worth your time. - Knowing what an items value is, is difficult. As such people sell at or below what ever they see the current value is on the website. They often don't realize when people are selling items cheap, but plan to never sell the item, and instead buy any selling lower than theirs. They also don't realize when a small sub 1% group has been buying, crafting, and owning an entire market of a particular item. They don't realize on average how much is costs to make an item, how much the craft bench modifiers cost, and how much of a net profit the seller is trying to make on their listed item vs its actual value. IMO players should be able to send a trade request to a player for any item or amount of a stackable currency listed on the trade website, with players having a pending trade sent to them in game. A player in game should be able to accept or decline the trade request which they can pull up at any time to view the item being traded for, and the item or items being exchanged for said item. If a player agrees with the trade they should be able to accept the trade, and the item sold is automatically taken from the sellers stash and sent to the buyer. This could all be done without actually sending a specific item to the other player directly. - When a trade is accepted, the item data for the sold item is copied, and the item data for the items traded for said item are copied. Those items are then deleted from each players stash when a trade is accepted. The items are then generated in a new tab or a new hideout decoration where a player must go to retrieve their goods. This means no players need to be online. The buyer can be online, send a trade to an offline player, and the offline player can accept when they log on. When the trade is accepted, all items involved in the trade are deleted and a copy of those items are generated somewhere else for a player to pick up. It is already possible to tell what items are where in every players stash. Acquisition or other old trade programs were able to obtain this data for listing items on the forums for trade. There are also websites which obtain this data such as PoE Price which can auto generate rough market values for items in all stash tabs. GGG already has the ability to do this. The only thing they would need to implement is a way to delete or purge the item data, or modify the data when a trade is accepted to "delete" it from our stash, and then implement an alternative location where those "deleted" items are generated again. Loot & Crafting
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Crafting has always been the method to obtaining the best gear. Over time however the power and potential of crafted gear to surpass literally anything that touches the ground has essentially made 99% of all loot that you ever see useless. If you do not use a strict or extremely strict loot filter, even after filtering, most of the stuff you see is still trash. GGG has tried to make picking up things, specifically gear better. They did this by making flask modifiers tiered, by adding influenced drops, and designing leagues around dropped items. Scourge for example is essentially about taking loot off the ground and potentially getting something better, having the ability to maybe add a craft from crafting bench, quality it up, modify a stat here and there with harvest, corrupt it for a potential good corrupt modifier, and then scourging it for another potential good modifier, or bricking your entire item or even entire build by completely turning entire play styles off. At the end of the day however loot on the ground will never be good unless it can compete with crafted items, ie they are similar in power, and crafting better gear requires more risk and luck. This could easily be fixed substantially with smart loot, by making entire modifiers and weapon types not drop by designating what kind of build you are when you create your character, with an option to turn it off if you are not sure, or off by default for new players. It could be fixed by introducing veiled items into the core drop pool, and making them much more common. It could be fixed by allowing us to swap modifiers on gear to equivalent types in the same tier for free on unmodified gear (non crafted gear) - Physical Damage to any other damage type - HP to ES - Evasion to Armor - etc Personally I loved harvest crafting, excluding the planting and such. Since then however crafting has been made exponentially harder. Harvest has been nerfed into the ground, Veiled Aisling 4 nerfed, No buffs to any other crafting methods to spread harvest power around to different mechanics, and as such Items that might take a few hundred at most attempts in Harvest are now back to thousands upon thousands in potential to actually get what is needed for a single item of a single build, often being mandatory for a build to even function. Killing splitting and fractured items is the icing on the cake, despite the issues those made by allowing a small group to have an infinite monopoly on a specific item. I don't really know how they could make crafting easier. It is already so complicated as is that most people do not even interact with it at all beyond what is in the crafting bench, and maybe what is still left in Harvest. Rog is probably significantly easier to understand. I would prefer to craft my own gear and not have to interact with the current trade system ever again. I don't want to spend an entire league trying to craft a single foil or 2h weapon, or a single chest piece just to play the build I want to play. It would be great if it was possible to simply delete a specific modifier on gear, and to add a 4th modifier on gear without having to spend an exalted orb to do it. Exalts are so rare until you are geared enough to run content with huge investments for large potential returns. Until that changes players will always resort to trading for the items they want rather than trying to make it themselves. If I could add 4th modifiers with a currency equivalent to a regal orb, and remove any modifiers I don't want, that still makes it possible to craft a 1/100000 item even if it takes a while. I don't however want to craft 100000 items and still not get even close to what I wanted. Builds
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I don't like seeing build diversity killed. I don't like seeing players forced into "meta" builds which are usually not the best build there is that league, but people flock to because it is proven to work. I don't like seeing players not want to make their own builds. Many game designs force players into playing "meta" builds, not testing "nerfed" builds, and not trying out new builds or new skills because most of the time playing any new skill is a risk, usually resulting in finding out the skill is mediocre, or under powered. Very rarely is a new skill actually good, or over tuned. A lot of the above issues are the reason for this. A lot of league design decisions are also a reason for this.
I am not a fan of timed content. I don't like Alva in maps timing you on how fast you can kill the enemies, get keys, and open doors. I don't like scourge forcing you to have high mobility due to high blood consumption. I don't like Delirium fog forcing you to speed run through a map. As such by default a ton of builds are instantly made unviable before the league even starts. Just looking at Scourge current played builds its obvious that this is the case, and its one of the top design decisions players hate. Any league where you are forced to be fast, kill fast, or kill screen wide amounts of enemies quickly you are funneled automatically into a handful of skills or playstyles. In particular this league, ranged skills and cyclone related builds. When players talk about lack of build diversity this is exactly what we mean. The skills being played right now would be entirely different if blood was consumed 90% slower like it is with the scourged map modifier. Going forward I truly believe timed content needs to be much more forgiving in how fast you are required to be. Playing a fast build in itself is already a reward. You clear content faster, meaning you can do more content in a shorter period of time, meaning more chances to get loot and make money to improve your character. No one needs a league mechanic to force them to play that way. The nerfs are often overboard, and this has been the case throughout history for PoE. GGG always over nerfs things, often completely killing an entire build, or playstyle, and occasionally playstyles in the process. In Legion league they buffed cyclone and for once it was finally in an amazing state. As such, much like right now, a large amount of players played cyclone and they nerfed it immediately after. It is already bad enough playing a slow skill, requiring huge investments in mobility, aoe, and single target damage, with a low percentage of added damage effectiveness, and a huge dependence on mobility and attack speed, but as soon as Cyclone aoe gets half a screen or larger with heavy investments into area of effect, bam kill it. Minions all of a sudden do great damage, zombies too OP, Syndicate Operatives too strong cause their better than literally any other spectre option, just die. Carrion golems too strong omg nerf nerf nerf. The panic over nerfs are getting quite old, and you never know if a playstyle is going to exist the next league. I would not be surprised to see the new unique shield this league get substantially nerfed when this league ends because that is how GGG does things. When in history has GGG not taken the easy way out, and instead made other skills more viable. It is literally undeniable that no matter how much currency you invest in many skills, they will literally been incapable of doing many or most high end content, or even just up to T16 maps due to how low their damage numbers or damage effectiveness is, or how few targets that skill can actually hit. Build diversity needs some love, and I hope with the removal of links or sockets in POE2 (i forgot the specifics) that this opens things up. But I already know that change is going to be so broken, that there will be substantial nerfs the league after. Leagues
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Lately I have found league mechanics quite boring, some to a point where I have skipped the entire league. Expedition is quite boring, and the only value was occasionally haggling for an exalt, or messing around with Rog for some mediocre gear. Scourge is cool, at least concept wise, and the demons are dope. However the mechanic of throwing gear in the blood crucible is just boring. It is delayed reward for often trash gear. You will never find a scourged item drop that is good, hence why no one even cares to run scourged maps that drop more scourged items, and why most people don't even scourge actual gear. Most scourged modifiers on most gear types are trash. Chest pieces have some of the best options IMO, but who is going to go through the hassle of crafting a chest piece, in a game where most people don't craft to begin with, and then throw it in the blood crucible. Who is going to go the whole 9 yards, craft an amazing chest piece, go to Alva's Temple and Double Corrupt it for the exact 2 mods they wanted, then throw it in the blood crucible and pray for the exact mod they wanted. No one.
Ritual and Ultimatum are both ultimately trash leagues IMO. Ultimatum was just spam hundreds of rares, run in a circle, and pray for as much currency as possible, and dip when you see exalts. Likewise Ritual was just painful, and the amount of people who actual used ritual vessels must have been under 1%. Another league where you mostly bought currency, essences, and maybe occasionally a synthesized item. Boring. Even Heist is absolute garbage despite the fact that there is huge "potential" profit from it. No one wants to stand behind doors. We hate doors, literally despise them. In fact everyone wants doors that open automatically like in Alva map missions. So why design an entire league mechanic around something we hate and on top of that design the enemies to take formation and all shoot pinpoint projectiles through a doorway that can easily kill you. Might as well be the same as allowing a single enemy to hit you with multiple projectiles at once, it is literally effectively the same in that situation. It has been a while, and the back to back to back poor league mechanics are taking a toll on the player base. I am glad to see mediocre or useless league content getting removed from the game such as perandus, and potential past league mechanics in POE2 like Beyond. That being said the new leagues need to be good and interesting as well at all levels. I am tired of seeing league mechanics just drop currency, or things from other leagues. It is nice for some stuff like scarabs, or blight maps / oils if its not all the trash lower ones, but leagues that just focus on currency are the most boring, and often kill the economy making it difficult to actually sell things. I hope in the future leagues start introducing entirely new mechanics or systems, alongside a set of league specific uniques that are actually good and desirable when that league is relevant. At least I can say scourge released with some great uniques. The best league mechanics are those that offer potential solutions to our current problems. Harvest was successful because players want to make their own gear. Prophecy was great because it introduced a ton of "upgradable" uniques, a great concept that was never follow up on. It also introduced nice prophecies for solving some other issues in crafting, like the 5 link and 6 link prophecies, the quality prophecies for weapons, armor, and maps, twice enchanted for higher odds in lab enchants, along with the tempests which give a free 30% IQ and IR where ever they proc. Metamorph was amazing cause of Catalysts. Legion was amazing because of Timeless Jewels Delirium was amazing for Cluster Jewels Essence was amazing for early game crafting Heist was potentially amazing for alternate quality gems and replica uniques. However most of all the things added were horrible, and the good ones were instantly nerfed after. We have not seen anything amazing like these recently, Heist probably being the last league to do anything interesting, even though most of the stuff offered, the entire point of doing heist, is just straight up horrible. The only reason heist is even played today is due to the loot rooms and chests before you reach the end. Very few people care about any of the alt quality gems or uniques. lets get back to the interesting leagues. I understand that GGG is working from home (unless they no longer need too), but these recent leagues have been pretty horrible and the 3.15 changes did not help. We have been talking about the same issues for nearly a decade. Most companies would just give people what they want, or introduce something that indirectly solves the problem. GGG has an issue with introducing temporary solutions as well, and instead wants to create long term solutions that take years to introduce. I understand that PoE is a game with several types of players in it. I also understand that a large portion of the community may never experience these issues due to how little they play. A game designed around trading needs to have good trading. That is my opinion, and the fact that trading is trash in PoE IMO makes PoE a worse product. Leagues, the entire point of keeping players coming back need to introduce entirely new things that have the potential to change the game forever, even if its in a small way like prophecy, or a big way like Delirium. Crafting needs to be made more simple to do, and understand, or needs to be made easier like Harvest league but through a different mechanic (new currencies, spreading the crafting options to other sources, like beast crafting, veiled mods, corruption modifiers, crafting bench options, and so on), and harvest as a mechanic needs to be removed from the game entirely, with its passives on the atlas removed and replaced with something else. GGG needs to be enforcing build diversity, and 3.15 changes did not do anything to improve that. The past year of league designs have done nothing to improve that. Just because a league is over doesn't mean you never need to revisit them. More prophecies should have been made by now. More beasts or beast crafting options should exist by now. More rooms, or improvements to rooms should exist in Incursion. Never iterating or improving past leagues is the status quo and that's not good. Just giving numerical boosts to old league mechanics is not enough, and making minor changes is not enough. At the end of the day it is still essentially the exact same. Sure players could be summed up as wanting to just kill everything instantly screen wide or further through all the content in the game. However I say players just want to play the game the way they want to play the game, support the company by spending money by allowing them to play the way they want, and congratulate GGG any time they give the players more options on how they can play. I dream of a day when all the hassle and struggle to play poe is gone. Where I don't ever need to leave the game to find a trade, or where I am never inconvenienced or forced to stop playing in order to trade. I dream of a day where I can find a new build to play, follow a guide, and have my loot filter modified specifically to my build without having to leave the game. I dream of a day where I can play my own build on league start, craft my own gear for that build as I go, and actually complete the build before the league ends. Finally I dream of a day where I can play more than 2 builds a league, my starter for making currency, and the build I actually wanted to play, but requires crafted gear. GGG I hope you can take a few steps forward each league from now on, and never take a step back. Lately it has been more like 2 steps forward and 3 steps back. Chroniccomplainerreviews.wordpress.com Your source for quality honest reviews to save you time and money! Last edited by Jgizle#5723 on Nov 26, 2021, 2:46:00 AM Last bumped on Feb 28, 2022, 5:45:14 PM
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I disagree with pretty much your whole post and personally I feel POE is in the best state it has ever been since I've been playing (since 2014).
The variety in game play now is just insane... You can do so many things in the game it's almost a second Life. The quality of life the game offers now is amazing. The Atlas, smooth progression, and streamlined updates with boss lists etc is amazing. Nearly all bosses now have their unique purpose in the game Anyway, to your points. 1) Trading. I have no issues with trade whatsoever. Using tools like Awakened POE Trade are smooth AF and searching on the official trade website is a good experience bfor me... Much easier to do a detailed search there compared to trying to do it in game... Can you imagine trying to do that detailed searching in game? Fuck that. It's easy. It works. And it is ENGAGING which is what GGG want too... I actually see and speak with other people, albeit for 10seconds. BUT this does have a huge psychological effect that you are not gaming alone. This is key for making the player base sticky. 2) Crafting It sounds like you want Crafting to be given to you on a plate. If that was to happen, everyone would be walking around with mirror tier gear and destroying all content. Sure, you WANT that, and everyone does... But as soon as you have it, and so does everyone else, the desire is gone. Again, this is key for GGG making the player base sticky and I have no qualms about it. 3) Builds Every league there are at least 20+ builds that can destroy all content.. and more if you want to invest more. There is build diversity if you open your eyes and actually look for it rather than go by what Redditors and streamers are saying.. because obviously, they push a meta, but that doesn't mean it's the only viable skill. And every league brings about build changes so you naturally get build diversity throughout your Poe experience. 4) Leagues Agree. Leagues are shit. Playing Standard fixes most of your issues. In summary, you need to put yourself in GGGs shoes and you won't have any qualms about anything you mentioned. They know a shitload more about gaming addiction, retention, and behaviour then you can imagine... And that is exactly why you are still playing this game today. Making some of those changes you mentioned have downsides... Even though you may not see them, overall, it will have a negative impact on the game. |
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" This is something that anoys me every league when people pretend their are only 5 to 10 builds out their that can tackle all content. Its not even that streamers push that meta its just people are so narrow minded that they refuse to look around what is also available or try to figure it out themself. Even popular streamer play stuff like CoC DD/VD or even mathil played a absolution build recently. Here are some of the really good builds that arent really meta but are crazy good: Juggernaut Wander Wave of conviction ignite Chaos animate weapon Guardian reap Carrion golems (people forgot about it but its still super strong) Earth/Bone shatter berserker CoC DD/VD That are just the first builds that come to my mind. Last edited by Zerber#2188 on Nov 26, 2021, 6:32:23 AM
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" You literally have no right to talk, you haven't touched the game since Blight buddy. You have no clue what you are talking about 100%. |
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As people told me: no better game atm and so we close eyes to poe cons or take a break to refresh. :/
PS: do not even dream that ggg will tryhard on something "right now", their strategy is minimum work for OK profit >repeat every 13 weeks /no matter the subject/. Slow down for a minute to enjoy the beauty around us.
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I generally agree with you.
Trading in its current form enables price fixing and there is usually very limited interaction which is often preceded by multiple unanswered whispers. Switching between the website and the game to whisper people just ain't fun. Comments in this thread around Awakened POE trade are interesting as arguably its use is outside the Terms of Use which state you may not: Use any data gathering and extraction tools or software to extract information from the Website or utilize framing techniques to enclose any of the contents of the Website. Although I don't use it many streamers do and GGG do not seem to give a shit. Crafting is also terrible and arguably not really worthy of the name. I cannot think of many ARPGs that got crafting right, ironically for all their flaws SOE probably had the best crafting with Star Wars Galaxies and EQ2, but these were MMOs. Whilst something with this level of depth would not be practical in an ARPG I think it does show just how much room for improvement there is by introducing the outcome volatility into the crafting inputs rather than the crafting outcomes. Builds, I am less persuaded that there is a problem. There is a relationship between builds and skill, a skilled player can make an ok build look great whereas an unskilled player will be bad no matter what they play, meaning there are often only a few builds which an unskilled players can use to faceroll content. Being a crap player is why I often play totems. This league Arc totems and Ballista totems are definitely good and capable of clearing content as I have played them. I also know from friends Ancestral Warchief is strong. So there are three very different totem builds. Some builds are better but many are viable which is all we can ask for with regards to build diversity. Leagues are a problem. Anyone who has done any project work will know that that having a constantly renewing three month project cycle is an invitation for Mr Fuck up to come to dinner. |
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Loot needs fixing, the rest is pretty debatable but I think holding loot hostage for a title we don't even have a release window for is very dumb personally.
If anything I think a loot rework is already a year late its getting ridiculous, and then making mechanics like scourge just highlights it even more. Diversity is bad, the games still playable on SC and i wouldn't struggle to do all the content on most skills but that doesn't mean that diversity is good, playing well rounded characters that don't rely on fleecing the common pleb to access gear you'd never personally find is very rare right now and has gotten progressively worse. Defensively this league was a huge step in the right direction though so I'm willing to believe it might improve in the future. Offensively there is a shitload of work to do and if they relaunched this league with like toxic rain and phys traps nerfed you'd see the complaints roll in real fast. Which is probably why they didn't :p Lastly leagues aren't a problem, its literally their business model and its a very successful one, complaints about quality are obviously valid but suggesting they ditch leagues entirely is extremely naive you may as well ask them to voluntarily close the studio. Last edited by Draegnarrr#2823 on Nov 26, 2021, 8:41:18 AM
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" To do that , requires too much time and currency and the risk of finding out later that you wasted all that for a build , not viable for what you are trying to accomplish with . So it's only normal for people to chose something , they know 100% , it's working . |
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" It doesn't extract data direct from the website, it uses the GGG provided APIs to get data - the whole point of those APIs is to provide data to 3rd party websites and tools in a controlled fashion. I don't think it even uses those APIs directly, the pricing info comes from poeprices.info Last edited by Randall#0850 on Nov 26, 2021, 9:31:43 AM
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" U can just PoB a build before playing it and with enough experience in the game u can tell from those numbers and the items u generate in PoB if the build will do the content u wanna do and what gear is needed. That's definitely not for the newer players, but it's not that hard to figure a "viable" build for most endgame activities out. The problem is, that it's still much more work than just copying a working build that most likely will also be stronger than whatever u will come up with. So people go the easy street and then complain about the meta. |
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