Pushing towards the extreme - Loot in POE and impact on casual gamers

Hi together,

I assume most of the people here have already read Chris' post with regard to the "new" development principles for POE. And there are some sentences in that post which I find very deceitful. They are not outright lies, but very deceiving. And they regard statements like "on average, the loot remains the same".

I want to illustrate what I mean with a small example:

Let's look at 100 players, each playing one hour.

Scenario A) Each player gets 1 Divine in that hour.

Scenario B) 99 players get nothing. 1 Player gets 100 Divines.

On average, both situations amount the same average loot per player: 1 Divine. But with regard to the player happiness, they are completely different.

Now Scenario B seems exactly what GGG is pushing towards. Less loot from "regular" mobs, more high value loot from buffed and extremely tanky mobs. And this leads to the situation we are having today: while "some" players drop 50 Divines from one mob, a lot of other players do not have enough alchs for an Alch & Go strategy. And it seems very irritating for me that GGG/Chris consider that situation Ok.

Especially if we try to extrapolate the future development: casual players who are not able to beat the statistics (aka rushing so many maps that they will encounter one of this "special" mobs) will get even less loot than in the previous leagues, whil specialised groups will get waay more.

Am I missing something here? Or is it simply a further push towards the lottery/gatcha-world, without regard for the regular players?

I hope this is the case. I like this change.

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If that's the goal for loot drops then Chris Wilson has totally lost his mind. No-one is going to play a game that's drops 99 divines to 1 player and and 99 people get nothing.

I definitely think they're going more down the route of gacha and the occasional loot explosion over grinding for somewhat prediacble rewards and deterministic crafting - and that's the Chinese influence.

If they think I and many many others are going to play Genshin Path of Exile then they are hugely mistaken.

As a casual player I enjoy almost every change they made this league. The only think I dont like is the unbalance of difficulty/reward on some archnemesis monsters and the fact they are stronger then map bosses. I am playing a pretty powerful build right now so I dont have problems with them, but thinking back to some of my builds that have struggled with map bosses, I cant imagine how shitty they would be now against rares.

I do notice less loot but it isnt enough to impact my gameplay, I am not running out of alchs or maps. If you are I suggest selling stuff for alchs instead of chaos. I do that every league when everyone complains they are running out of alchs. If you are playing SSF, the game isnt balanced about SSF and with SSF you should be taking in account how to solve these issues for yourself.

I didnt get any big drops but I farmed like 200chaos in my 18hours played this league thus far. You can do alot with 200chaos specially on league start character.

If you believe that having 1000chaos 2days into the league should be the norm. Then I am sorry but I dont agree and I think the sped up progression of the game over the last few years has been only negative for the game.

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avodat wrote:

If you believe that having 1000chaos 2days into the league should be the norm. Then I am sorry but I dont agree and I think the sped up progression of the game over the last few years has been only negative for the game.

Not at all.

And I do get along myself, that's not the problem.

My point was that the situation is going to worsen for us casuals over time. Overall we are getting significantly less loot/currency (I do see that when I compare the current situation to the previous 4-5 leagues) while the people at the upper end will get way way richer.

So this changes will simply accentuate the divide between casual players and pros way more than it was previously. It's simply the consequence of increasing the tails of the loot distribution while keeping the average.

And unhappy people leave - especially when we consider that there are a lot of alternatives. Which will impact POE in the long run in my opinion. And since I like the game, I am a little concerned...