PoE Issues That Need Solutions Now Not Later

The problem that needs to be worked on is the wide gap between what is "normal" and what is "exceptional". There's no way to design a game that allows for both groups to enjoy the content. Right now, normal play is gated out of much of what people consider end game. That leads to players thinking they NEED to follow some meta. That leads to your trading problems and everything else. It all stems from that initial problem of the disparity between playing the game with gear you find and craft and playing the game with hyper-tuned gear and exploiting weird interactions.

Hope they can do something about it, but doubt they will.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

The problem that needs to be worked on is the wide gap between what is "normal" and what is "exceptional". There's no way to design a game that allows for both groups to enjoy the content. Right now, normal play is gated out of much of what people consider end game.

That would effectively make the game "easier". When a casual can do many things that the nolife can. So... you know how GGG felt about this...

I just want to say PoB is a crutch. Most players just use it to find out what their dps is in a build, or to make a build with as much dps as possible. It is pretty common to make a buikd in POB that loiks amaziing on paper, but then is actually trash to play or trash in general when executed. You see streamers do it all the time. Have you looked at 3.16 content. How many actually new and updated builds have you seen. Most of the forums only have 1 page of builds updated to 3.16, and thats only in the title, with most not actually updated or tested. On youtube there are very few builds as well. What if you don't like any of them.

As such what do people do? They play what they know works (cyclone, minions, totems, death aura, etc) or go to poe ninja builds and copy what ever is at the top. Personally my next build is CoC Firestorm as no one ever plays it and i love it.

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Networm13 wrote:

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Shagsbeard wrote:

The problem that needs to be worked on is the wide gap between what is "normal" and what is "exceptional". There's no way to design a game that allows for both groups to enjoy the content. Right now, normal play is gated out of much of what people consider end game.

That would effectively make the game "easier". When a casual can do many things that the nolife can. So... you know how GGG felt about this...

I don't think there is an issue with heavily dedicated players having a tier that they can strive toward and beat that isn't watered down to the point that everyone can do it. It's not special or an achievement if everyone can do it. Call that elitist or whatever, but it's hard to make something for that tier of player special and also make it available to everyone.

That's the real issue with genres like this. You have pick a target balance point which will undoubtedly leave some out, whether it is casuals or non-casual players.

You can split it into different modes but this game doesn't have a big enough player base to have a mega-casual, casual, normal, hard, godly mode...and that's probably still not enough modes to cater to everyone. Someone is going to be left out of some contents.

It's not like D2 offered a lot in this realm. HC and Non-HC. Non-HC was the easy mode.

POE offers a lot of layers that I personally think caters to different tiers of players. The issue is that some players think that the existence of something in the game means they should experience it. I believe that is something they need to get over if they're not able to put in the time/effort to get to it. That's a failure to manage expectations problem.

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Nubatron wrote:

POE offers a lot of layers that I personally think caters to different tiers of players. The issue is that some players think that the existence of something in the game means they should experience it. I believe that is something they need to get over if they're not able to put in the time/effort to get to it. That's a failure to manage expectations problem.

Its what basicaly ruined WoW, turning the nice world & mmorpg into a theme park without soul and no real player interaction.

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brunowa wrote:

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.

Is that why you are playing a toxic rain champion. You talk about variety, don't mind your only high level chars are post 3.0 strength stacking zombies, CoC cospri's, elementalist burning arrow and a toxic rain champion. Your whole opinion on variety is irrelevant if you only play insanely strong meta builds. There is more than enough data to suggest variety has gone down a lot in recent patches.

You talk about playing since 2014 as if it means anything.

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dupie wrote:

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brunowa wrote:

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.

Is that why you are playing a toxic rain champion. You talk about variety, don't mind your only high level chars are post 3.0 strength stacking zombies, CoC cospri's, elementalist burning arrow and a toxic rain champion. Your whole opinion on variety is irrelevant if you only play insanely strong meta builds. There is more than enough data to suggest variety has gone down a lot in recent patches.

You talk about playing since 2014 as if it means anything.

THIS ^^^ if u see the white knights profile u will notice almost all of them are meta slaves. There is those who make a living from the game... but well this cannot be discussed. Its funny to see people talking about diversity and only play the meta builds.

As Steve Jobs said, the most important thing is user experience. Not designer intent.



Trade is not fun or immersive. It feels unpleasant and unrewarding.


Crafting feels ridiculously RNG and like playing the lotto. Also poorly explained. Blocking certain crafts to get others.. yuck. Its a mess.


Builds ... this is complicated the harder the game the narrower the builds, this one I cannot say what they could do. Making the game easier or crafting easier makes more builds viable, but makes the game easier.

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tomcruisejr wrote:

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brunowa wrote:

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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%.

What's with the aggressive attempt at shaming? Is that really necessary or grants weight to your position? Why not disagree with the points raised and put forward your counter argument rather than try and belittle someone.

For the record, you'll find that brunowa plays predominantly in standard but is the author of an outstanding summoner build from several leagues ago. He's certainly no tyro regarding PoE.

More broadly, I see a lot of these types of threads devolve into an "I'm right, therefore you're wrong" argument which is not helpful. Not many seem to ask the question about why there are such significant difference of opinion and to my mind that is the real critical issue with the game.

The gap between the haves and the have nots is just too wide now and GGG's poor attempt to rebalance the game just made things worse. Of course, those who work all the elements of the game to their advantage are likely to do better, but when the carrot is so far out of reach the system collapses because a large portion of players just gives up.

In summary, both positions are correct and GGG has a lot of work to do.

I have to say as a fairly new player here that crafting in this game is very confusing and intimidating. It is also so RNG and expensive to do that it puts me off ever trying tbh. I don't want it handed to me on a plate but I am sure they could make it easier to understand and also easier to do. Like why do we need to separate a stack of fossils to socket it into a resonator? it's Ludacris and painful to do as u need to do anything from 20-50 to get what you need. I actually agree with OP the game does need some quality of life improvements to make a more intuitive game. Op I think your constructive feedback was very well written and thought out good job!