This is a death spiral. Here's how to stop it.

I wrote a much longer post. This is the condensed version of it (no, I'm not kidding, I've been writing for hours).

Last time I saw Chris talking about the direction the game was going in, the discussion veered really hard to the economics of keeping development afloat.

Chris has been saying some things. Paraphrasing:

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They aren't trying to bring in new players; they're trying to maintain existing players. Essentially all "new" players are returning players, and 86% of the revenue comes from the top players, so that's who they cater to.

This is an incredibly damning admission.

That means you've made the game so hostile to new players that you can't even count on referrals from existing players. Your own players can't even go through the levelling experience with friends and have them enjoy it, despite providing expert assistance.

POE used to respect and promote players engaging content on their own terms. That was what made it great, and that supported emergent gameplay.

Now?

You want to play melee? Fuck you.

You want to play with (any number of undercooked skills) fuck you.

Explosive concoction? Cool idea. You wanna play it? Fuck you.

That needs to stop, yesterday. Not balancing the game and pushing out untested content is not emergent gameplay. We're not finding new ways to explore and engage the game, we're finding solutions to your shitty mistakes. And right now, the biggest enabler of emergent gameplay is wealth - most skills are so broken that you need to be rich to make them work.

You can routinely find Chris saying:

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Players flock to the optimal builds

We're not flocking to optimal builds, we're going to builds that make the game the most accessible - in terms of exploring content - and the least frustrating.

There are like 5 builds, in the game, right now. Skeleton Mages, Righteous Fire, Seismic and Exsanguinate traps, Poisonous Concoction, and a couple others.

Why? Those are among very few skills that are accessible, minimally frustrating, and workable without an existing stockpile of wealth. That's not a player problem, that's a design problem. Every single skill in the game should be capable of that, no exceptions.

This brings us to the second sentiment, one that Chris has stated consistently:

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We really want to slow the game down; retention is healthy for the game

... but you've already admitted that the people who have the longest retention are the people who get to engage in the endgame and they spend the most time and money on the product. That you consistently fail to get people to that point (80% of people weren't reaching red maps before 3.15 and I'm sure those numbers are lower, now) is incredible.

But you also don't want to do anything to bring people into the endgame, because you're afraid that the more accessible you make content, the less frustration and tedium you introduce, the faster people will get tired of the game.

They're not getting tired of the game, they're getting tired of the fact you've gated your own profitable content behind a relatively few builds.

This is putting fertilizer on the flower bulbs while drying out the roots. And I don't know if anyone here likes plants, but both of these are generally ill-advised, no matter how much you want to grow flowers.

The fixes:

Establish a proper auction house. I know, I know, Chris says having one is bad for the game, because then people finish their builds and move on. Chris is wrong. The people who use TFT are the most established player base, have the most access to the trade economy and the endgame, and therefore, spend several times more money on the game - that establishment is where 84% of their revenue comes from. You know why they aren't leaving? Because wealth makes the game accessible again.

Make the game accessible again. Give players their agency back - get rid of ailment, element, and status immunities. Get rid of reflect. Stop making gameplay a choice of trivializing encounters or avoiding them. Stop randomly punishing players for playing the skill they chose to play, because, remember, the game might be more than that, but it's never less than that. Skills need to start on a level playing field for engaging the entire atlas (and have options to meaningfully engage boss content without ever trivializing it). And that means...

Make "starter" builds a thing of the past = if the majority of your skills aren't viable for regular endgame play without large investment - we're talking shaper and guardians for less than most players league earnings - or if they're a pain in the ass to level, fix them. Undercooked skills cost you money. They are making the game boring for existing players and hostile to new players, and with that active disengagement, nobody's going to spend.

Support more differences in kind. We don't get bored of rolling new characters if the builds offer meaningful gameplay differences. Right now, the main enabler of that is wealth. We're not just talking about numerical buffs (which many skills need); we're talking optional ways of changing how skills behave, and changing how players play. Diablo 3 leaned into this with unique item interactions. They fucked it up, then kinda fixed it with Kanai's Cube.

What helps new players helps existing players, too. Just, as an operating principle, because you've definitely forgotten that.

What helps solo self-found helps trade-league too. Anytime you see an area where you think that's not true, you have a balance issue. That SSF is viewed as a special challenge mode says a lot about skill balance and build-enablement.

Actually support emergent gameplay, don't just brag about it at conferences. The more skills are viable for regular play, the more time we're going to spend exploring them. The Blight notable skill that returns projectiles to you after they reach the end of their travel? VERY COOL IDEA. You seeing it getting used anywhere? No? Why do you suppose that is?

Fine, slow the game down, but make combat more interesting. Archnemesis is a perfect example of this. In the league it was introduced, when there were extra rewards, I still found some of the mobs quite unkillable. When done well, rare Archnemesis mobs are boss fights. At least, for the effort, you got much greater rewards if you succeeded. When an archnemesis mob hits the field, I expect a quick 1-second intro, showing me very clearly what its mods are and what makes it dangerous. I expect everything around that Archnemesis to die, and the total loot drop to be absorbed into the Archnemesis, and modified according to the mods on the monster.

End the speed meta, already. Provide more mechanics that normalize loot drops for people who choose to play longer encounters rather than running at high speed and trivializing weak encounters. We're not just talking bossing, here, we're talking mapping. Archnemesis is a great way to do that. You wanna speed map for mechanic farming, fine. You want to go slow and kill big monsters, also fine, and just as rewarding.

Treat controller support like it always belonged - not because controllers necessarily matter, but because it means getting rid of tediousness in gameplay and UI while promoting more accessible and dynamic play. Inventory management hard on a controller? That means your inventory UI sucks. Organizing your inventory can be solved algorithmically, and serves no meaningful purpose in gameplay. On that note:

Stop worshipping Diablo II. There was a remaster and it died a quick and painful death. That should be proof enough that it's dated. There is nothing of value in its itemization, loot, encounters, skill structures or UI that POE needs to inherit. Everything that made the game great 20 years ago can be improved upon dramatically.

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Patness wrote:

You want to play melee? Fuck you.

You want to play with (any number of undercooked skills) fuck you.

Explosive concoction? Cool idea. You wanna play it? Fuck you.

You have some really good ideas brother and this made me chuckle XD. +1

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Patness wrote:

I wrote a much longer post. This is the condensed version of it (no, I'm not kidding, I've been writing for hours).

In place of GGG, I would have at least directed my support/moderator team to post some short encouragement answers to those willing to really invest their time and effort into making constructive feedback. People attempting to think through the fundamentals are no less valuable audience than those zoom-zoom streamers, and here they got no recognition from the staff (what is that "valued poster program" even for?).

Even if the ideas posted here happen to be not new and were posted across this community many times in the past year (I wonder why:)), it does not diminish the value of each effort to voice them again.

If you are a lead of the renown project and your project managed to generate acceptable revenue so far, it doesn't make you immune to mistakes, and often people you look down upon the most turn out to be seeing something you don't at the moment (or year).

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Patness wrote:

Every single skill in the game should be capable of that, no exceptions.

Unfortunately, this is the core of the problem, which makes all other balance problems unsolvable.

The skills and their builds differ in performance so vast, that achieving balance between them is impossible without culling many specific gem links themselves. For some reason, GGG seems to be adamant on never doing that, and their (futile) efforts to work around the core are creating one mess after another.

If one skill can produce a build thousand times stronger than the other, how can mobs ever be "balanced"? Simply culling the skill won't do, because same skill can produce both OP builds and "normal" and "interesting" builds, why kill the latter?

Maybe they have found some grand solution and are preparing it in PoE 2 right now, I would be very happy in this case. But the very fact that they are still actively engaged in current pointless struggle with monster modifiers does not bode well for the future of the project.

It was a decent read until I got to the auction house stuff. Just no. That would be the end of PoE. You might see hype for one league and then game dies to auction house buyout bots. Game already has bots everywhere? Sure, but they are nowhere near as intrusive as they would be in an auction house system.

"

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It was a decent read until I got to the auction house stuff. Just no. That would be the end of PoE. You might see hype for one league and then game dies to auction house buyout bots. Game already has bots everywhere? Sure, but they are nowhere near as intrusive as they would be in an auction house system.

You suggesting that goods being tradeable through a gated community like The Forbidden Trove is better?

That's the argument behind itemized trade. "But if we make the game more accessible people will get fed up and leave"

You're already at a point where the game is contracting and there are no new players. People leaving is now inevitable.

Making trade more difficult hasn't done anything to mitigate bots. Botting is a whole other problem.

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Patness wrote:

You suggesting that goods being tradeable through a gated community like The Forbidden Trove is better?

Example: Sentinel HC league, present day.
1) HC character 1 farms new juicy recombinators.
2) HC character 1 transfers recombinators to HC character 2 of level 1
3) HC character 2 suicides himself at the first mob he meets, and goes to Standard.
4) recombinators are sold in Standard for many ex, likely before GGG even considered if they want them in Standard or not.

You think adding Auction house (AH) into this would benefit trade? It would only serve to fully automate schemes like above. In pure theory, AH would be better than current trade website, but at this point too many parts of the economy are plain lawless and out of GGG control.

^I've never played HC so I don't know the answer to this...I thought if a HC character died it becomes void? It simply drops to standard?! That is busted af. What's the actual point of HC then? It's not exactly perma-death, is it?

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86% of the revenue comes from the top players

I'm fairly sure it's more that 86% of the revenue comes from the revenue brought in by the top players. Subtle distinction but in terms of remembering who is ACTUALLY supporting the game and the importance of not alienating them, probably an important one.

Streamers and top players are not whales; they are commercial fishermen with dragnet trawlers. They don't 'support' PoE; they exploit the system by providing it with supporters, thus making themselves MUCH more important to the industry than any of the fish themselves -- even we really big ones.

Damn good business.

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arknath wrote:

It was a decent read until I got to the auction house stuff. Just no. That would be the end of PoE. You might see hype for one league and then game dies to auction house buyout bots. Game already has bots everywhere? Sure, but they are nowhere near as intrusive as they would be in an auction house system.

Bots are already everywhere. At least learn about basic economics like supply and demand. If the demand remains the same, the bots will make the market fair by ajusting the supply to the optimum cost of the supply. That's not a problem, that's a solution. They are right now the reason why you don't have to whisper 50 people to get 50 scarabs and other currency.