Lack of choice is what's wrong with this game right now

When you strip players of choice and force things they don't like on them, that's when people get frustrated and leave the game. I think we can all agree that, based on a very high number of posts (both here and reddit), the game is not in a very good state.

This league is not very successful (visible also in the numbers I think) and a lot of the playerbase does not enjoy it.

The reason for this "evolution" is very simple - lack of choices. 3.17 was a very popular league and people liked it a lot, but ever since then you've gone a long way to limiting player choices.

Let's take a look at the most brought up issues with the game:

Archnemesis - a lot of people (me included) hate that it's gone core. Why? Plenty of reasons, but there is a main and very important one - you have NO CHOICE whether you want to interact with it or not. In Archnemesis league, it was a player choice, and that's why people either enjoyed it or simply weren't bothered by it. I liked AN in the league, but that's because I could choose if and when to interact with these overtuned bosses. Now it's polluting every other league mechanic, making a lot of them difficult or just downright impossible in early-mid game (Blight, Heist, Betrayal, Incursion, Delirium, etc)

Nerfs - there were a lot of nerfs since 3.17, just more subtle than before. Some might argue that this makes the game more challenging - I don't think it does, I think it just makes it more tiresome and unfun. Either way, by nerfing so many things, you are forcing players into a few (mostly un-enjoyable) meta builds and skills. I don't know how many skill gems are in this game exactly, but I'm sure there's a ton. You built a complex skill tree and skill gem system interaction, but you killed most build paths - WHY?

Divine Orb changes - again something that severely limits player choice. Before you could maybe go about a few ways to crafting your gear, or you could at least afford to craft some of your gear even as a casual player. The Divine changes absolutely wreck the economy, so players can no longer use Divines for rerolls, they can no longer afford to craft gear because it's more expensive than buying it, and to top it all you've killed the joy of finding an Exalt Orb too, since they are now useless.

Harvest - I don't think I need to explain the way that this limits player choice and playstyle.

What is (or was) so great and amazing about this game is the endless possibilities, the huge number of choices and freedom it gives you. So many ways to build your character, so many skills to choose from, so many league mechanics to play around, so many ways to progress into endgame and so many ways to enjoy the endgame.

But all this is actually just a front because in reality your build choices are severely limited, you can only use a handful of skills, you must play the profitable league mechanics or you won't be able to afford the trip to endgame. Even those said mechanics must be played a certain way or it's not profitable - and POE is a game that severely punishes everything that isn't profitable. You can't progress without investment that's somewhat strict - a decent build that can do all content is between 20 and 50 ex (old ex currency) which is not something that a player that plays completely casually and just does stuff that are fun for them will ever achieve.

GGG, you built such a complex web of mechanics and interactions, only to kill off most of them and force players into little box builds, skills and playstyles, and this is everything that's wrong with the game.

The most successful leagues in the past few years, Ritual and Archnemesis, were successful BECAUSE they promoted choice and diversity.

Ritual had harvestcrafts, which gave players a ton more options on crafting gear. Despite what people were saying, you weren't FORCED to do Harvest if you didn't want to. Sure it was stupid powerful, but as a result of that, a lot of the good gear was far more accessible, giving you the option to buy it. It was an "easier" league, some might call it, but because it was easy and stuff was accessible, a majority of the players could, for the first time, afford to try stuff they'd never tried, play mechanics they'd never played, try risky builds and just explore the game in general.

Archnemesis brought a lot of diversity in the mechanics, and made it so that most league mechs would be closer in profitability. It opened up new choices in crafting thanks to the new implicits without making them so ridiculously expensive that no one could afford it.

And here we are, in 3.19, where the economy is so harsh and punishing that you must choose a meta build, you must finish the campaign on day 1, you must progress your atlas the "correct" way, you must do only the most profitable mechs, because otherwise you get left behind, the economy overwhelms you, you cannot afford decent gear and that means you cannot explore what the league has to offer. Oh and yeah, you should also avoid the league mechanic because it's so ridiculously unrewarding (barring any lottery luck, 99% of the loot is shit). Kalandra deserves better than this crap, GGG.

People like to experiment and try different things, and if you give them this option, they will enjoy playing POE, they will continue to play and invest money in the game they love. Diversity and freedom of choice are the key to this game being successful, and the more you limit that and force players into stuff they don't enjoy, the more alienated they will become, until the game will die a slow death.

Following on from your post GGG could easily solve this by adding one node to the atlas tree which gives monsters in your maps archnemesis mods (adding difficult and more "REWARDS" supposedly). Then removing archenemesis mods from all monsters otherwise.

This would have some distinctive benefits.
1. Early game experience will be improved as less new players or experienced players will die to BS rippy archnemesis mods in acts 1/2.
2. Those who hate archenemesis mods can completely avoid it and accept that they might not get the supposed "rewards" which never drop anyway.
3. Heist/Delve and other UNRELATED content goes back to it's original difficulty levels.
4. The 1% of players that do enjoy archenemesis mods can enjoy it in their juiced maps.

monsters are fighting back? that's bad.

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vio wrote:

monsters are fighting back? that's bad.

Yes, that's exactly what I said. You, sir, and exceptionally perceptive.

Chris wants the entire game to be "hardmode" go back and listen to his interviews very carefully and you'll see. He makes it quite clear that his vision for the game is highly over-tuned monsters, with little to no defensive strategies other than run away until your gear is better.

He wants extremely slow progression, and overly taxing punishments for trying to progress early on.

At least in games like D2 when you had build breaking affixes they were generally locked into predetermined areas. You knew that going into an area or boss fight was unbeatable for certain builds. With Arch Nemesis it's just randomly build breaking mobs at every turn. There's no strategy to that. You just have to realize the fight is unwinnable, and either logout or run away and reload the zone.

They wonder why everyone had 100% spell suppression... well it's because you made it mandatory when you beefed up spell damage on everything. Armor is mandatory as well now. Evasion? Almost useless because it has a mandatory fail mechanic. It's alright as your last layer of defense, because why not. But compared to everything else it's pretty sad. Taking 0 damage is great, until suddenly you take all of the damage ever. At which point you need all the other defense layers to save you... so you might as well focus on them first since they're mandatory anyways.

Players are using all the defensive auras? What a shock! Guess you should just make it so they can't do that anymore by nerfing reservation efficiency. Just keep taking stuff away, without giving additional options. Like the game doesn't already have a steep enough learning curve.

The game just feels like a chore now. I just go play something fun instead until they decide to change things. If they don't, then oh well, it was a fun 7k+ hours before they ruined the game.

There is a lot that I agree with in the OP, and a lot that I disagree with.

I'm not overly fond of Archnemesis going core, but not because of the bother and difficulty, but by the nature of certain mods invalidating entire builds. It's reflect rares all over again, 10 years later.

Divine Orb changes: strongly disagree with the conclusion, although I agree that GGG went about the change very heavy handed and dealt a lasting and painful blow to a huge portion of the playerbase. Divine Orbs themselves did not limit or promote build choice. Re-rolling uniques and rares IN GENERAL was not a significant power boost. You did NOT need the best rolls on every single piece of gear, the ranges of stats are generally very small. Sure, certain items (timeless jewels, uniques with wide ranges, etc.) required far more divine investment, but the vast majority of items did not NEED to be tweaked with divines to feel good. Did they need to be changed so significantly all at once? No. I think it would have been perfectly fine to just remove the 6L recipe and keep everything else the same, keeping exalt value and inflating the divine value. This whole idea of "flipping" their values was just dumb and poorly thought out, because now exalts have NO value and divines have TOO MUCH value. And this was easily foreseeable.

Nerfs: very much agree, GGG's pattern of blanket nerfs rather than well thought-out and planned rebalancing is lazy, cruel, and detrimental to the game. We can see this in the fact that nearly every change GGG makes has to be re-changed 3-4x almost immediately. Every. single. one. They don't learn and they don't care.

"Unsuccessful league": this is a VERY problematic statement that I see floating around in many complaining threads. The league is 3 days in...and the player numbers are just as high and just as consistent as any other league, at least according to the one source of numerical data we have: steamcharts. There is literally no proof of the league being less successful (yet). These forums and reddit are an echo chamber, and the players that post represent an incredibly SMALL percentage of the playerbase. They are not a true indicator of success or failure. And these kinds of commnets and threads occur in EVERY league including ritual/archnemesis which are considered by OP as successful leagues.

Whenever I see a post that includes things like that, I become extremely wary of ANY point being made because its coming from a misguided, elitist, "false" start.

I agree with many of the points, don't get me wrong. But PoE really isn't losing any players. So GGG will continue to make changes they deem correct. And this is a real shame because the game could be so much better. We need to have an ACTUAL catastrophic event and mass exodus before GGG learns anything. Frankly, that needs to come from mainline streamers which have developers ear all the time. But so many of them have lost all touch with "new" players that they can't even see the game for what it has become anymore and will remain successful no matter what GGG throws at them.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

There is a lot that I agree with in the OP, and a lot that I disagree with.

I'm not overly fond of Archnemesis going core, but not because of the bother and difficulty, but by the nature of certain mods invalidating entire builds. It's reflect rares all over again, 10 years later.

Divine Orb changes: strongly disagree with the conclusion, although I agree that GGG went about the change very heavy handed and dealt a lasting and painful blow to a huge portion of the playerbase. Divine Orbs themselves did not limit or promote build choice. Re-rolling uniques and rares IN GENERAL was not a significant power boost. You did NOT need the best rolls on every single piece of gear, the ranges of stats are generally very small. Sure, certain items (timeless jewels, uniques with wide ranges, etc.) required far more divine investment, but the vast majority of items did not NEED to be tweaked with divines to feel good. Did they need to be changed so significantly all at once? No. I think it would have been perfectly fine to just remove the 6L recipe and keep everything else the same, keeping exalt value and inflating the divine value. This whole idea of "flipping" their values was just dumb and poorly thought out, because now exalts have NO value and divines have TOO MUCH value. And this was easily foreseeable.

Nerfs: very much agree, GGG's pattern of blanket nerfs rather than well thought-out and planned rebalancing is lazy, cruel, and detrimental to the game. We can see this in the fact that nearly every change GGG makes has to be re-changed 3-4x almost immediately. Every. single. one. They don't learn and they don't care.

"Unsuccessful league": this is a VERY problematic statement that I see floating around in many complaining threads. The league is 3 days in...and the player numbers are just as high and just as consistent as any other league, at least according to the one source of numerical data we have: steamcharts. There is literally no proof of the league being less successful (yet). These forums and reddit are an echo chamber, and the players that post represent an incredibly SMALL percentage of the playerbase. They are not a true indicator of success or failure. And these kinds of commnets and threads occur in EVERY league including ritual/archnemesis which are considered by OP as successful leagues.

Whenever I see a post that includes things like that, I become extremely wary of ANY point being made because its coming from a misguided, elitist, "false" start.

I agree with many of the points, don't get me wrong. But PoE really isn't losing any players. So GGG will continue to make changes they deem correct. And this is a real shame because the game could be so much better. We need to have an ACTUAL catastrophic event and mass exodus before GGG learns anything. Frankly, that needs to come from mainline streamers which have developers ear all the time. But so many of them have lost all touch with "new" players that they can't even see the game for what it has become anymore and will remain successful no matter what GGG throws at them.

Thanks for your insight, it's very interesting to see, particularly the bit about Divine orbs since I used to spam them like crazy on anything, and it wasn't important enough that it ever occurred to me to check if other people did it. I'm surprised to find out they didn't.

But to be fair, I was referring to the fact that the impact of this change on the economy will severely limit player's choices of build, gear, and will deter people from crafting in general, which in my opinion is a terrible thing.

Regarding the success of the league - yes, there are always people who are unhappy with the current league, and there are always complain posts. But there are also always people playing in weekend 1, because they're waiting and hoping, really, for balance changes. Once it becomes clear they will not happen, people stop playing the league. You can always more or less gouge the success of the league by the number of "bad" posts vs the number of "good" posts, and mostly the content of said "bad" posts. I agree that it's too early to determine, but my approximation of the "success" or "unsuccess" of a league has mostly been pretty accurate. I can bet you there will be a big drop in numbers for next weekend if GGG doesn't make significant changes (I'd say maybe 60-70k next weekend, followed by continuous drops in the following weekends).

Since we can only use Steamcharts as a metric, take a look at this and you will understand that it's not just me saying Ritual and Archnemesis were successful leagues:

https://imgur.com/a/0hOgvnO

The reason why the catastrophic event you are talking about hasn't happened (and the reason why the game is maintaining a somewhat stable playerbase) is fairly simple - the game isn't going in one direction, but rather going forward, then back, then forward again and so on. You get a league once every 2-3 that pleases the majority and people love it, but then it's followed by a league that the majority dislikes, nerfs, etc. And when a league like Ritual happens, a lot of players start regaining hope that maybe the game is finally going in a direction they like. This works for a while, except one day a player will get sick of being jerked around and decide it's not worth the trouble, so they will quit. POE is losing players, and this is also visible in Steamcharts.

^I believe that the divine change will have a negligible effect on overall crafting (on its own). Simply chamging the currency required for metacrafts will only increase the price of crafting slightly, but it won't deter or change it. The more pressing issue is the gutting of harvest/bestiary/etc. as forms of crafting, but not the divine change. Perfectly rolled rares with divines were only the ultra peak of crafting, not the crafting itself. But crafting is definitely in a bad state, just not at all because of that particular change.

Regarding the steam data: its very easy to draw conclusions looking at one small set of data myopically, but its equally easy to misconstrue that data and reach bad conclusions. Those numbers do not tell the whole story, and they are incredibly narrow.

If you look at All Time for PoE, the bottoms remain relatively static over the last 3 years and the top continues to rise. There is effectively no loss of players happening OVERALL and the game continues to attract more players in the beginning. The data only shows us that GGG has a problem retaining NEW players, not a loss of players.

Additionally, what this data fails to account for, especially looking only at a 1 year snapshot, are the averages across all similar league releases in terms of TIME. Ex: December/January/February releases generally have higher players and slower rolloff in general, regardless of whether the league was good or not. Spring releases are similar, but generally lower than those winter releases. Summer league releases basically ALWAYS suffer in terms of rolloff, possibly due to other games coming out in summer or vacations or whatever, but likely not totally related to success or failure of the league mechanic.

These trends are important to look at, because they give the overall picture of how another variable (time) effects a league success. You MUST factor that in when determining if the steam charts are showing whether a league is successful or whether it is simply being effected by timing.

But this also highlights how little we can even rely on the data...there are sooooo many unknown variables that effect steamchart numbers that are completely unrelated to the successes or failures of PoE. Other major game releases, total world collapse due to COVID, etc. Outside influences HEAVILY effect the peaks and valleys of the game, as well as retention across months. I would argue, they effect those numbers far more than the game itself.

Your final paragraph is well intentioned, but there is simply NO visible data accessible to us to know whether this is happening. In fact, the data we are provided actively refute all those conclusions. Sure, there are less successful leagues but that's only natural and has been the shape of PoE since the very beginning. But the game continues to rebound league after league after league, regardless of how loud the complaints are, with similar or higher numbers overall. Hell, the highest peak EVER was this year in PoE, AFTER all the chaos that was 3.15 and 3.16 nerfing EVERYTHING into the ground and the playerbase screaming bloody murder and doomsday. And our peak this league is right on up there with the very best of the them. I hate peaks, but it at least gives us an indication of the still-growing, or retainable interest people have in PoE no matter what people complain about.

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Felix44 wrote:

This league is not very successful (visible also in the numbers I think) and a lot of the playerbase does not enjoy it.

Well the 150k player spike is there (all the studio cares about), but it went down pretty fast compared to the previous spikes. On the steam charts anyway.

the peak is all they want - people (for whatever reason) buy stuff BEFORE league launches

thats the reason why they hide nerfs from patch notes now - if you check previous 3 releases, it is not an accident