Do you wish to grind a hundred hours for another kick in the nuts?

Long post ahead - constructive feedback in the last half of the post.

I feel somewhat passionate about Path of Exile. The original idea of no pay to win components was hugely appealing to me when I first learned about the game - and I really enjoyed the Diablo games that PoE wanted to succeed. However, the game is being taken in a direction that is thoroughly unenjoyable to me and I wish that I would have realised this long before I developed a passion for PoE.

I am by no means a skilled player and I hate when I'm forced to rush in the game. Despite having played for thousands of hours, I have never touched true endgame content. I've made it to red maps up to tier 15 and delved to a depth of 107. My highest character is level 92 in standard - and I had a level 84 character die in hardcore. I embraced SSF because I always hated the trading in the game. I just want to slay monsters and improve my gear - and sometimes I just want to feel OP.

My biggest enjoyment in PoE have come when I've been able to make steady progression to my gear, thus unlocking the opportunity to continually advance to slightly more challenging content. I've enjoyed the leagues that received the most criticism because they offered deterministic crafting options. Those mechanics allowed me to make steady progress - set a goal and work towards it, even if always with a modicum of RNG involved.

It's now clear to me that GGG intends to remove every ounce of determinism in PoE and that introduction of deterministic crafting mechanics must have been by mistake or simply to give players like me false hope. Despite playing for hundreds of hours in a league, "progress" is reduced to a matter of gambling because I simply can't amass enough chances to have a decent chance of success.

The result is the question in the title. After each unsuccessful attempt to progress my gear, I have to ask myself "do you wish to grind a hundred hours for another kick in the nuts?" Well, the answer is "probably not anymore". Even though Lake of Kalandra promises exciting content, it is all based on the same premise of eventually having to gamble all my efforts on a single RNG event.

The promised feedback:
Imagine if every rare item had a chance to matter because it offered an opportunity to improve your gear (every rare unidentified rare item would thus be a small mystery box). The recombinators offers an iota of this idea, but they're still burying progress behind layers of RNG and even that was too deterministic and so they were removed. Imagine a common currency that lets a player combine items in order to gradually improve an item towards perfection. A steady stream of tiny rewards for grinding. It could work in the way that say a ring has +43 strength and you find another rare ring with more than +43 strength then combining the latter onto the former would result in the former being upgraded to +44. The hunt for rares with higher and higher and ultimately perfect rolls would be on. We could all eventually end up with god tier items - and the game's endgame would be naturally balanced around that.

And by all means, let the best players have a hard mode available that players with less ambition can pass up while still being able to enjoy the endgame content on a less punishing level.

Imagine also that you could target farm items and modifiers by killing certain monsters - and that said monsters would indeed use the sought after items against you during the fight. You want that +2 minion gem levels helmet on the necromancer? Well, then you better be ready to take out the swarm of +2 gem level skeletons that are being summoned. Imagine if things made a kind of sense in Wraeclast.

I know that I'll never have the above. I know that now...
But I certainly wish that was the direction GGG was taking the game - instead of making it an unrewarding slot machine simulator.

GG everyone.

Agree with perspective.

agreed. And the biggest shame of it all is that devs have said for years that they want item drops to MATTER, literally years...and yet they have done absolutely nothing to make that happen. In fact, every new iteration has made drop itemization WORSE rather than better.

Solutions already exist in the form of other successful game crafting systems, loot systems, etc. Veteran and dedicated players have offered seemingly plausible solutions endlessly. But it has all been ignored.

I don't play nearly as much as I used to anymore, and quite frankly I'm not too sure why I continue to play this game at all. But I do because I love the "premise" of the game: i love the skill gems and support gems, I love the skill tree, I love the addition of the atlas tree. But the devs come up with failure after failure, bad idea after bad idea, and I have lost all faith in their actual ability to FIX the game they essentially destroyed.

In this latest patch release (and previous releases), CW reiterated that PoE is an "Itemization" game, they want to return power to the items, etc. But that's slightly inaccurate: PoE is a "loot" game first and foremost and when the loot itself is all trash, then the game is all trash.

It's just a very disappointing situation.

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In fact, every new iteration has made drop itemization WORSE rather than better.

Because players want trade-core / buy all gear mode. This is the main reason nothing good drops and you must farm currency orbs.

It would be interesting to see this game with self-found as the primary mode. Party-play could still be possible, but carried items would be permanently allocated upon zone change.

^one of the single biggest flaws of Diablo 3 are the bound items...no thank you EVER in PoE

Agreed. I can't imagine why someone would continue to play this game. They'll break your builds twice a year and destroy your currency and then expect you to do it all again. It's a crazy concept, but a large amount of players like to keep what they earn or spend time on, who knew?

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jsuslak313 wrote:

^one of the single biggest flaws of Diablo 3 are the bound items...no thank you EVER in PoE

You could still have a trade league, but the game development and balancing would consider self-found first and trade league second - instead of the other way around. It feels like drop rates and RNG are based on the assumption that you can buy what you need, while you'll rarely be able to drop what you need (except for a few very skilled players).

Trading would be something extra that you could choose to add to your experience. An easier, less time-consuming league. If necessary for balance, they could make it so that only improved items were bound to the account and that traded items couldn't be used/consumed for improvement. Then you could have gear progression through trading as well as crafting, but not combined (assuming that would make progression too easy).

Or they could omit the deterministic improvement orbs from trade leagues and keep them exclusively in self-found for simplicity.

And hard mode? Solo, self-found without the deterministic improvement orbs (or with lower drop rates) with some added monster scaling on top.

The above are just ideas. To be honest, I'd poll the players interested in trade leagues and hard mode about how they should be. My interest is a fun self-found league that's viable for less skilled players like myself. Each player segment should be offered a league with the advantages or disadvantages that make the game fun to them while experiencing that all content is accessible.

What deterministic crafting part did you lose from the core mechanics? ,
It seems to me that the more we move forward, the more you get deterministic crafting as next league we'll have Harvest crafts available on the trade site.

"Deterministic" "crafting" (as both terms only loosely apply) in PoE is at best super RNG influenced still and every mechanic that has been introduced with a degree of determinism has been nerfed shortly after or outright removed. In addition, the mechanics have been kept away from casuals because efficient use required extreme grinding, trading sim, or RMT.

I'm not holding my breath for the harvest improvements because I'm convinced that all deterministic crafting options in Harvest have been removed or will be shortly. GGG doesn't want players to have a guaranteed outcome when applying currency or crafting. There must always be a significant risk of failure, which can only be overcome through massive grinding.