What is wrong with you GGG, seriously!

I also disagree so strongly with the idea that nerfs are NECESSARY in a game.

Nerfs are only necessary in a poorly managed, poorly planned, overly patched game. There are TONS of games across the rpg genre that have constantly introduced new content, without needing to nerf every little thing every 3 months. That is a phenomenon unique only to GGG and "developing" games that might be in their beta phase still. The need for constant nerfs points to a shoddy product, not a normal situation.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

@vio: usually I agree with many of your posts, and you have even more time in the game than I do.

But

How can you say all that with a straight face? GGG is healing the game? A successful game is determined by the number of players, and especially the number of sustained players. This is not a subjective comment or opinion, it is a fact of the industry. It is a business and the number of consumers is king. A game's popularity is all that matters. At the moment, the game has comparable players to 2015....I'll say that again, 2015. There was a reason player counts rose above 10k, above 20k, above 50k. "Healing" doesn't even make sense if it means backtracking 8 years in player numbers. In fact, those numbers suggest the exact reverse of your analogy: the cancer went into remission and the game exploded in popularity, but now we see a resurgence of the cancer that is (not so) slowly killing the game.

I don't think in the history of poe steamcharts have I ever seen a 24 hour peak and current amount of players this low. That certainly doesn't scream of a healthy game to me...

And yea yea I get the old saying, it has to get worse before it gets better...but thats where the analogy stops. If too many players leave, and too many players stop recommending the game, then the game will dry up and die off on its own. It will be impossible to recover, especially with a game that is now considered "old". No way they are going to start the entire 2015-2022 growth cycle again with a 10 year old game...

You are making many, many unwarranted and entirely incorrect assumptions here.

They don't WANT a game "for everyone" and Krillson himself has said that many, many times. I'm fond of the restaurant metaphor for games so I've said it before and I'll say it again: GGG does not want to be McDonald's. They want to be a cool low-key noodle bistro with regular customers who come in every week.

GGG would rather have a niche game that a small number of hardcore players absolutely love than a generic game than a huge number of people play. And you can think this is a bad business model all you want - considering how much money mobile games bring in you'd even be correct - but it doesn't change that this IS the business model. If you suspect that you are not the target audience for this game, you should stop playing it because you're probably right.

^That might have been true a long time ago, and that might be what they continue to say in public....but thats not how they market. Constantly pushing mtx, focusing on the start of league peaks, partnering with tencent, all points to the desire to make money and NOT the desire to remain a niche game. Hell, the original developers of PoE with their initial (and public current) vision are meaningless because they no longer own the game. Tencent owns the rights to the game, and the company. Unless they get carte blanche from tencent (which they clearly do NOT have), they answer to shareholders and business partners first, and their "plan" second.

I do not believe I am making any wild or incorrect assumptions. We know how the game developed over the last 5 years, we know how the game changed when tencent took the helm, we know how hard microtransactions are being pushed now on a daily and sometimes multi-daily basis, we know how patches are designed in such a way to encourage more microtransactions. It doesn't matter what people who really aren't in charge anymore "say" they want out of the game. It's not their game anymore. If CW or any of the OG team decided tomorrow they wanted to shut down the servers and start from scratch, they would be unable to do so.

The powercreep and changes from 2.1 through 3.13 didn't come from nowhere....it came from the same developers spouting their vacuous vision and plan nonsense. The hammer WILL come down, and soon. And we will be right back to 3.13 levels of power, with half or less of the players.

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vio wrote:

what the userbase usually understands as "fun", is to have the illusion to get better at the game and get more rewards and faster progression and so on.

the analogy of "cancer" is a really fitting one for "power creep" cause it starts slow and accelerates until the patient (or game) is dead.

ggg isn't destroying, it is healing from the wrong user base that doesn't understand game cycles and have no clue that there is no unlimited growth.

Yup.

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what the userbase usually understands as "fun", is to have the illusion to get better at the game and get more rewards and faster progression and so on.

RPGs by design are illusions, vague translations of actions into numerical comparisons and dice rolls. I remember when throwing around the term 'artificial difficulty' was such a popular phrase, when it was such an odd one to apply to RPGs that, by design and at their core, are completely artificial gameplay.

The point I'm making is that people don't really play PoE to get better at it in a skill sense, they play it because they want their characters to get better, it's more like a project to work on rather than a mechanical skill check (outside of bosses that have more constrained, predictable design that allows some skill requirement but outside of that it is an RPG first and an action game second). And there is nothing wrong with that, having good builds is its own flex and obviously requires knowledge and making correct decisions with both ideas and time management to accomplish.

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Noble_Seiken wrote:

"

vio wrote:

what the userbase usually understands as "fun", is to have the illusion to get better at the game and get more rewards and faster progression and so on.

the analogy of "cancer" is a really fitting one for "power creep" cause it starts slow and accelerates until the patient (or game) is dead.

ggg isn't destroying, it is healing from the wrong user base that doesn't understand game cycles and have no clue that there is no unlimited growth.

Yup.

There is also no unlimited retention. GGG could have chosen to give more people strictly positive experience, without imposing hardcore elements into every gameplay aspect. Let people level almost any noob build to 100 visiting all content and bosses with it, and leaving till next major update.

But they are so afraid that "there will be nothing left in game to do", that we get half the skills not working in endgame without exorbitant cost, sadistic lootrates, slot machine crafting, oneshot bosses gated behind long grind loops (so even learning their moves takes a lot of time), keeping busted AN mechanics in game at all costs and adding uber bosses on top of that ("would be nothing to do without AN", right?), and other frustration-based "we dare you" designs.

Trying to artificially extend player retention is not a business model, because development costs of modern games rise exponentially with new graphic technologies, which cannot be sustained by cosmetic MTX revenue from a small dedicated hardcore playerbase willing to take all that abuse from a game, and even be proud of themselves for it.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

I also disagree so strongly with the idea that nerfs are NECESSARY in a game.

Nerfs are only necessary in a poorly managed, poorly planned, overly patched game. There are TONS of games across the rpg genre that have constantly introduced new content, without needing to nerf every little thing every 3 months. That is a phenomenon unique only to GGG and "developing" games that might be in their beta phase still. The need for constant nerfs points to a shoddy product, not a normal situation.

Nerfs are never, ever, ever warranted, especially in THIS game above all others. There is no need to ever nerf anything except to make people envious of certain builds (EG, Necro's Tears).

Nerfing makes bad people feel good. I mean shit humans, not bad players. A Lot of this community seems to get off on cutting out others from enjoying the game. Half my friends are 1%'ers and if the pleb community gets REAL gear, they get offended and quit.


Why do other people need to get trampled to make a very small fraction of the 1% feel good about themselves?

"

Half my friends are 1%'ers and if the pleb community gets REAL gear, they get offended and quit.

This was the attitude I saw on a lot of this forum during Harvest. A lot of people (traders particularly) didn't like that the game became an actual grinding game with character building goals that could be worked for.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

"

Half my friends are 1%'ers and if the pleb community gets REAL gear, they get offended and quit.

This was the attitude I saw on a lot of this forum during Harvest. A lot of people (traders particularly) didn't like that the game became an actual grinding game with character building goals that could be worked for.

Yep, current crafting/lootrate barrier only serves to attract people viewing this game as self-actualization by looking down at others (even though they themselves hardly perform heroic feats, they just abuse oversights like running 6-man MF cull parties to get ahead of majority). Saw a comment here a week ago:

"

Shouldn't call yourself a casual if you have a mageblood. Unless it is a gift, casuals will never have one.

and to further augment this sick attitude, people like those price-fix the market so "casuals" are cut off unless they nolife the game and suffer through clusterfuck oneshot balance to farm respectable amount of currency for the first time.

If GGG actually likes this situation, idk what more to say :shrug:

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jsuslak313 wrote:

I also disagree so strongly with the idea that nerfs are NECESSARY in a game.

Nerfs are only necessary in a poorly managed, poorly planned, overly patched game. There are TONS of games across the rpg genre that have constantly introduced new content, without needing to nerf every little thing every 3 months. That is a phenomenon unique only to GGG and "developing" games that might be in their beta phase still. The need for constant nerfs points to a shoddy product, not a normal situation.

Right to a point but not right by comparison.

Tons of games do introduce new content, but that content is almost always a nerf to players by proxy. Very very few games do flat balancing because you run out of space very quickly to make meaningful additions.

The primary issue with the nerfs aren't needed crowd is they don't appreciate that nerfs to players directly and nerf by proxy are the same thing even if one feels worse than the other.

Totally agree that GGG are responsible for the number and size of the nerfs they introduce though, just the idea that you never nerf anything in an arpg is patently false its the most common strategy to get players to try new approaches, items, stats and characters.

Also casuals can have a mageblood guys its like saying casuals can't be lucky, I know plenty of people with a fraction of my playtime that have dropped mirrors. You get more chances if you play more but luck is luck.