The Psychology of the Path of the Exile

Hi guys,

today I feel like I want to go into some details of how this game manipulates it's players, and why some of the game mechanics are as they are, and why they are intentionally frustrating for the players as they are.

Like every day as a PoE player I was trying to trade and got frustrated, because people would either not answer or be busy with farming and bossing, and so could not trade without interrupting the things they do like to do in the game, because busy people do not like to trade, otherwise they would not farm or boss.

This is the core idea of this game, you are forced to leave what is fun, and continue later, if you do have portals left, which is on top frustrating to lose a portal just for a trade. And who feelsl ike trading if the result of this trade is not rewarding enough, so people do not like to trade low value - which leads to frustrated poor people, who do not trade high value items but require low value items very much to progress, which is ofc hidnered by those, that have them plenty but do not want to trade them. It leads to frustration on both sides of the trading idea.

The core propblem, for why trade is necessary is that you cannot find every item yourself, either you craft yourself a character or you depend on items which you will not find yourself when you need them.

The idea behind all those mechanics, that basicall lead to frustration and interrput the flow of gaming, interrupt the fun part for both parties that want to trade is to keep you away from enjoying the game, it is a time sink mechanic that is supposed to achieve 2 things :

1) You spend more time in the game, get addicted and spend money on stuff.
2) You get frustrated and pay to get currency, which is the core solution in outr societies, whenever we get frustrated we just pay someone else to do it.

It is very probably, that GGG does get a cut in the currency tade of the "illegal" trading sites, by just not banning their bots and only shutting those down, that do not pay for safety. We as players cannot look into the business details, but it would not be the first game, where the profit comes from both : ingame shop and currency trade.

THe argument here is, this game would not focuss so heavily on frustrating the player, if it was not the intention of the developers. If something is done in a certain way in game development, then it is always an intention behind it. It is no accident, that most people are frustrated which leads to toxicity - it is the way how modern games make their cut.

This does have heavy influence on the personality of the players, in a long term it will lead to deep character changes, that transfer the toxicity into real life, just like sociial media does too. From a political point of view it is just a question of time until measures will be decided to crack down on gaming like it tends to happen bit by bit on social media already.

This game creates toxic people, but at the same time punishes them if they let the pressure out and act toxic, the devs expect from their guinea pigs to be calm and accept any frustration and just pay to get rid of it.

Thos that get toxic do not spend money on currency, those are not the players that support this game. So they need to be punished because they do not get rid of their frustration by buying currency, instead they act against other players and the regulations in a natural way by expressing their frustration.

If i feel like it, and the mods did not delete this yet because it is too revealing, I will go into the other time sink mechanics that force people into buying currency - but not today - I have to suck up more of this sweet frustration.

Didnt spend any money on currency or Gear.
Very happy with the Game.

Excited for the Gauntlet and next league.
Thanks GGG for a great Game and the big Updates in short timeframes.

"

Tamo_Tua wrote:

If i feel like it, and the mods did not delete this yet because it is too revealing, I will go into the other time sink mechanics that force people into buying currency - but not today - I have to suck up more of this sweet frustration.

They aren't going to delete anything that isnt violating the forum rules, while some of this talks about some toxic things you're not really violating those rules, I wouldn't say this is too revealing but a lot of casuals probably aren't aware of it.(good for them)

"

SilentSymphony wrote:

They aren't going to delete anything that isnt violating the forum rules, while some of this talks about some toxic things you're not really violating those rules, I wouldn't say this is too revealing but a lot of casuals probably aren't aware of it.(good for them)

Well in another thread of mine they hacked my posting into pieces because calling developers incompetent is "insulting" according to the mod. So I am unsure if they tolerate any criticism at all anymore.

"

Vepa wrote:

Didnt spend any money on currency or Gear.

Well m8, we are not identically and industrially generated machines, we are individuals, and as such we all behave different, but there is always a majority that follows certain patterns. So it is no surprise, that people just like this game without any investment.

Look some people are even masochists and love to fail in games, I do not know you personally, so I do not know what actually makes you like this game, since you did not even care to go into details and explain what you like about it. It seems, it is not worth your time to let us know what makes this a great game in your opinion. Maybe you like frustration ? Idk - but if you like you can let us know here. I am not saying that everyone is the same.

Notice : This Topic does neither contain any Feedback, nor does it make any suggestions. The Mods moved the Topic out of the General Discussion to hide it in a section that has less readers.

I mostly agree with how you see it.

"

Tamo_Tua wrote:

2) You get frustrated and pay to get currency, which is the core solution in outr societies, whenever we get frustrated we just pay someone else to do it.

It is very probably, that GGG does get a cut in the currency tade of the "illegal" trading sites, by just not banning their bots and only shutting those down, that do not pay for safety. We as players cannot look into the business details, but it would not be the first game, where the profit comes from both : ingame shop and currency trade.

This is where you lost me. They make plenty of money flogging mtxes to then risk actively touching that which they most ardently condemn. Were they to get caught, the consequences would far outweigh whatever they might have gained. Keep in mind Tencent outright BOUGHT GGG for roughly $100m USD. I doubt they did that because the former owners were, as you are not so subtly implying, crooked as all fuck at what is essentially the street level. The devs getting a cut from RMT might make sense to someone who thinks and exists at the street level, but from a big business perspective it's like slinging baggies when you own your own pharmaceutical company and can make more the legal way.

I have spent more money on this game than any other supporter to my knowledge, and I never once considered RMT. I don't see any sort of correlation between the sort of person this game aims to hook and the sort of person who'd sink to the pathetic option of RMT.

I don't know Chris' current stance on bots but in the early days, killing them was a pastime of his. I think you're vastly underestimating his business acumen if you think he'd suddenly switch sides in that regard. My guess is he's come to terms with them being a necessary evil -- as you said, some players get frustrated and want to pay for currency, and like or not, this idea that we can exchange real money for virtual pleasure is far from new or even particularly abhorrent in and of itself. Especially when that virtual pleasure hinges on a lot of virtual displeasure first -- that is to say, grinding. Which, honestly, is work. And don't we usually get PAID to work? That, I imagine, is roughly the mentality behind those who resort to RMT.

GGG cannot outright get rid of bots, and they know it's probably more efficient to quietly neuter them rather than kill them -- it's much easier for gold farms to replace known dead bots than replace bots that they don't know aren't working. This isn't particularly secret knowledge, although of course the extent to which they do this rather than other methods, such as turning a blind eye, will remain unknown to us plebs.

Besides, bots add to overall player concurrency and we all know GGG love to look at those huge numbers and declare victory.


Also, this definitely belongs in feedback: you're giving feedback on what you perceive as GGG's financial MO, ultimately. It's not very good feedback and they can't really do much with it, especially if it's based on an erroneous premise, but you should also understand that Feedback and Suggestions is more often perused by GGG staff than General Discussion -- for fairly obvious reasons. GD might have more player/forum user engagement, but more posts that end up in F/S actually get actioned by GGG.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

This is where you lost me. They make plenty of money flogging mtxes to then risk actively touching that which they most ardently condemn.

We have different opinions, and that is okay, it is only natural to disagree.
But I have a reasoning behing my "suspicion", and that is that actually games are in general not doing well anywhere, it is already trend that games do not even leave the beta stage anymore, because it is not profitable to fix bugs.
You probably know how many bugs PoE has, and that the most annoying beta bugs still exist, that would require investment which does not pay off.

Also you do not see any changes of the interface and general usability to improve this game, because it does not pay off. I know, you can disagree on that again, and this game is highly complex, so they are nonstop busy already with fixing just the game's main mechanics to prevent that people exploit it nonstop. It is for sure time consuming and expensive, I do not deny this. Many other games are less deep into game mechanics and require a lot less investment here, that is how this game is expensive to maintain for GGG. That is probably why they sold their souls to Tencent.

In short, it is a brutal business and requires sacrifices. If you have to always look for sources of income, to prevent get bankrupt, which is always as a Damocles sword hovering above the heads of every game developer, then you have to take a hose and connect it to the sources of liquidity that are available.

Honestly it is not like RMT would not work properly - people do it because it is impossible to shut it down entirely, and the reason for that is that there are many participants that work together and develop methods to counter GGG's actions, it is like trying to counter a crowd funding project, it is like creating an Antivirus software, which always faces a superior enemy, that is the mass of people that develop virusses.

The position of GGG here is that they have to counter other interests strategical decisions, which is always a money sink, it does not pay off, because it is highly time consuming, and ignoring a certain percentage of bots will only end up in slightly higher server costs, while developing highly dedicated methods to exterminate even the last bot is nothing but timesink/moneysink.

So in the end, every game developer has to arrange himself with the botters and RMT. I do not in any way think that GGG is able to sustain the business just by their MTX. Yes they condemn RMT officially, because it is always destroying the game balance and making it an unfair game if you want to see it like that. Never selling powerups in the store sounds like someone does have character, but behind the scenes, nobody would ever know if for example Tencent does have it's own botfarm running which might be the reason why they bought GGG, to make profits with the actual game. Botfarms make a lot profits it is way better than selling cosmetical MTX.

So what I want to say with it is that they know there are many pools of liquidity they can actually use for their own advantage. It wouldn't even be some kind of bad, since you would have a way with that cooperation to crack down on the other botters, I am not going into details here, but there are ways of getting an advanntage if you are a botfarm and you have an interest in shutting down other botfarms by manipulating the cooperation for example the software they use.

If I was GGG I would probably cooperate with the biggest botfarm that there is, and make a deal with them, they give me their IPs and I would grant them immunity, but I would demand a cut of the profits and demand from them that they shutdown and manipulate other botfarms as part of the crowd project. This way everyone profits from it, regular people would have a better game experience, and the convenience to pay if they want, while I keep my good looking image of not developing a P2W game.

Also I do not think it is necessary for you to ever invest in RMT just to understand that many people do it just for the reason I named already, it is convenient, it counters frustration. There is no doubt that this game creates a lot frustration.

I can't see how you could think games aren't doing well anywhere, it isn't profitable to fix bugs because customers became normies that don't give a shit about quality and they never hold anybody accountable.

The rest just reads like naivete if you think MTX can't sustain a business but skimming off the 100 players RMT'ing apparently pays the bills, they don't do anything about RMT because it simply isn't worth the effort not because they are skimming.

Games that skim the RMT just legitimise it like lost ark, WoW, GW2 etc there is literally no reason to do it under the table.