Feature creep and new player confusion

I'm making this thread to bring an issue to light, not sure if this has been talked about or if this is even an issue in GGG's or the forums player base radar or not but i digress.



PoE has become extremely complicated over the years, with expansion packed on top of expansion without much care about the complexity or barrier of entry for new and returning players.
I've been playing the game since closed beta and the game has become very different from what it initially was in terms of complexity to the point that it becomes daunting to understand all its systems and nuances to make a competent build.
I imagine this to be even more extreme for new players or returning players, heck you miss a league or 2 and you get completely lost with items and mechanics.

My suggestion is a simple one, lets simplify the game a bit, we dont need new currency every league (i know it sells stash tabs but come on...), we need less currency, we dont need 3 or 4 different way to craft we already have the crafting bench and we dont need a million mechanics stacked on top of each other.

-Instead of having harvest crafting let us unlock bench recipes with the harvest encounter, this also goes for heinar.
-Instead of having 50 support gems for each color fuse a few so that we have less gems but more meaningful ones
-Not all leagues need to be into the game you could turn some league mechanics into unique maps, the lake of calandra or expeditions are good candidates for example
-Simplify some previous league mechanics like heist, it could work like corrupted vaal zones.
-Instead of tainted currency we could have corrupted currency by using vaal orbs on currency
-Too many NPC's, srsly we dont need that many...


I think you guys get the idea, simplify things a bit, the game doesn't have to be for the people that play every league or streamers that play 12 hours a day every league. Move some stuff around to the mines or end game, keep the options but in a more intuitive manner.

At this point of PoE's life cycle i thing that old designer saying fits very well.

MORE IS LESS.




Just a small suggestion for the next league

I could not agree more...

I consider myself a seasoned player with eight years of PoE under my belt and I seriously pity new exiles. The complexity of the game has reached a point that borders on the ridiculous. I understand, it was never meant to be an "easy" game but this doesn't make much sense anymore.

i used to love introducing poe to friends.

i have stopped for quite a long time now.

there's a buttload of content/league mechanics for new players to enjoy but they also need to learn the mechanics

on top of that we're playing a game that has huge power scaling with a very stingy item droprate.

i also have the mindset that following a build is the game playing you instead of you playing the game.

so yeah. i havent been introducing this game to anyone for a very long time. even with diablo immortal being shit. at the very most i would give poe a mention for them to try but not really push on to it as how i used to.

The complexity is the draw though, isn't it? Learn a few basics, damage scaling and defense, and you know enough to start exploring. get better at your micro and you can get further on less.

The discovery phase is always the most fun. Nothing pops the ol gamer bubblewrap like discovering something new on your own, even if it's old hat to everyone else. I don't think I would want to take that away from new people. Learning the ins and outs of this game is such a huge part of the whole experience.

Well i think theres a difference between good complexity and bad complexity.

An example of good complexity would be the tech tree which at first glance is a bit daunting but once you played for a few hours it becomes easy to understand, uniques are also a good example, you drop one you get curious to see what else is there and the effects are written there for you to see what they do and then your head starts spinning with ideas

A good example of BAD complexity would be the betrayal league, which to this day i still dont understand and i am pretty sure many dont. Visually it makes no sense, its just a bunch of lines, nothing is explained properly and you cant deduce intuitively how it works.




The complexity needs to stay, it just needs to stay in a way that doesn't overwhelm players i think.

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sonicphi wrote:

Well i think theres a difference between good complexity and bad complexity.

An example of good complexity would be the tech tree which at first glance is a bit daunting but once you played for a few hours it becomes easy to understand, uniques are also a good example, you drop one you get curious to see what else is there and the effects are written there for you to see what they do and then your head starts spinning with ideas

A good example of BAD complexity would be the betrayal league, which to this day i still dont understand and i am pretty sure many dont. Visually it makes no sense, its just a bunch of lines, nothing is explained properly and you cant deduce intuitively how it works.




The complexity needs to stay, it just needs to stay in a way that doesn't overwhelm players i think.

Bad complexity are for me not "hard to understand" complexity but if you have to understand everything just to play the game. What is for me the case of the actual version.

When I started playing poe (betrayal) you could just play the game and explore the compelxity. Understanding the mechanics was just to tune up your efficiency. Now (i am a returning player (last league legion)) you are screwed if you don't know what harvest is, blight, delirium etc., because you have to fit ten thousand things in a build that it works or you will be too weak even for basic content (like simply running maps).

This is bad in my eyes

This is largely a result of a more basic failing GGG has long had: failure to explain. There's a lack of tooltips and in-game sources that really properly explain how to do things, how things work, and what they do; at least past the tutorial stuff which mostly just covers the basics iirc (I've been turning it off for some time now, so I don't quite remember how well it covers things).

Feature creep is a common problem/issue in games in general; it's especially prone to happen in DLC or expansion based games, which are more prevalent these days. It's easy to sell a product that adds stuff to the game, it's much harder to sell a product that streamlines things by removing redundant or similar content. In the old days that streamlining tended to happen with the next version of the game itself; that still happens now, but new versions tend to come out slower, with long periods of much dlc in between.

Another thing I find in poe that makes it harder to plan is build-enabling uniques. In the late mapping stage there's a lot more build-enabling uniques (as well as rare jewels with special keystone abilities), but if you're trying the game for the first time, or even just without the benefit of guides, you can't plan for build-enabling uniques, because you haven't seen them.

Here is an example of bad complexity.
Enemy resistance penetration and its flavours.
Turns out not everything behaves in the same way.

Let's assume we have an archnemesis monster with 75% (140%) resistance. 75% is effective value (the cap) while 140% is total (overcapped by archnemesis modifiers)

"Damage penetrates X% enemy resistance" ignores overcapped resist. If you have a 40% pen awakened gem, this puts the effective resist at 35% but doesn't affect the overcapped resist.

Exposure is something entirely different, if it has unspecified value, it lowers the resistance by 10 percent. It doesn't bypass overcapped resist. So in this case it has no use at all.

Same with Curse effects such as Conductivity. The curse applies -44% to lightning resistance. Doesn't do a damn thing against grossly overcapped resist.

So there is no benefit in stacking exposure, pen and conductivity against a mob with 140 percent total resistance. Penetration alone will suffice. Also, penetration only applies to hits. Not to DOT.

THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS. WHY A SIMPLE EFFECT OF REDUCING THE ENEMY'S RESISTANCE NEEDS TO BE THIS COMPLICATED?!

Most players will treat lowering resist and penetrating resist as the same thing. But it's not. They spend their valuable currency crafting a build to gain access to those tools, only to realize that their idea doesn't work like they thought it will. Many things in POE work in manner that is against common logic.

The post above is a very good example, i feel like PoE has many more redundant cases like this.

I think we need a "Clean up" league, where the devs adds some very basic mechanic and just use the rest of the time cleaning up the game systems for ease of understanding.

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sonicphi wrote:

The post above is a very good example, i feel like PoE has many more redundant cases like this.

I think we need a "Clean up" league, where the devs adds some very basic mechanic and just use the rest of the time cleaning up the game systems for ease of understanding.

This league they made the entire crafting chain more intuitive and made the game much easier for new players by not requiring them to start the game with anything but the default loot filter, and we got a very simple league mechanic that lets you potentially make one of a kind jewelry.

It went over like a house on fire.