[Ruthless] Can't wait!

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overcoming that difficulty feels highly rewarding.

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Bleu42 wrote:

I agree OP, I have a feeling I might just love this mode. If anything it's a 'standard' mode for all of us who might be done with a regular league, but don't want to actually play standard. Something I can work on over a long period of time.

Hell I might league start it, but honestly that comes down to my only real 'complaint' so far; no challenges for ruthless in 3.20. Maybe the rewards will be an easy pass like 3.19, but maybe they'll be really cool like 3.18, in which I might have to just play league.

Either way I'm pretty excited to give it a try.

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Denpakei wrote:

People with "fixed mindset" will not handle this.

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overcoming that difficulty feels highly rewarding.

- clearly ruthless is for people with "growth mindset".

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Ivanovv83 wrote:

People nowdays are completely clueless what is difficult and what is tedious and boring.

The fact that the ruthless wont have support gems and 98% of the items does NOT make it difficult. Just the grind will be 20 times more..


No wonder the entry exams of most uni-s are dropping..

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innervation wrote:

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Ivanovv83 wrote:

People nowdays are completely clueless what is difficult and what is tedious and boring.

The fact that the ruthless wont have support gems and 98% of the items does NOT make it difficult. Just the grind will be 20 times more..


No wonder the entry exams of most uni-s are dropping..

I agree with you that people no longer know what difficulty is, but I would argue it's those taking your position that have lost sight of it.

1. People, especially those taking your position on this tend to define 'skill' as mechanical skill with K&M reliant on low time-to-process mental reactions to a quickly changing landscape of incoming information. I presume you would say a video game like CS:GO takes skill to be good at, and I also assume you would say most popular real-world sports take skill (consider the science behind professional football goalies).

2. ARPGs have historically not been about quick-twitch reflex, high mechanic boss fights. So why would we apply the above standard to PoE? It's not particularly a fair or reasonable standard, but I'll fight the unfair and uphill battle anyway.

2b. Despite that tradition ^ PoE still requires plenty of quick-twitch reflex to not die, both in maps and in boss fights. It also has a quickly changing landscape of info flying at the player that they need to react to in order not to die.

In fact, when compared to its peers, you'll have no trouble finding complaints that 'one shots' aren't telegraphed enough, a.k.a. they don't have a 'fair' enough window to react and use their skill. Yet we see some people consistently not have a problem with these mechanics - thus we can conclude that some players are quite skilled at PoE while others are not. This is perfectly in line with the hypothesis that PoE is difficult not just tedious (of course PoE can be both, a thing can be two things simultaneously).

3. 2b leads nicely into point 3. We see a consistent group of high performers league after league. In the same way that you could take a top 250 chess player in the world and drop them into any tournament of 100,000 players anywhere in the world, so too can you take a top 250 PoE player, drop them into a race with a surprise rule set, and expect them to outperform a large playing field. This is evidence of skilled play - which is itself evident of a difficult game. If the game were only tedium, there would much more than 250 players with the same amount of free time who would randomly churn through the top spots of events and races.

4. Players, especially newer ones, constantly complain the game is too difficult while veterans tend to forget how much they struggled when they started. Just because you've mastered the knowledge aspects of the game, and are quite practiced at the mechanical aspects too doesn't mean that everyone has. If the game weren't hard, we'd only see complaints about the tedium (picking up breach splinters) and never about the difficulty (omg act 1 is too hard!)

5. Speaking of 'knowldge aspects' and also harkening back to point 1, PoE is difficult in ways that other games and genres are not. Beyond the quick-twitch mechanics of not dying, both in maps and against bosses, there are knowledge, planning, market, and social skills that come into play as well.

Knowledge can be seen as a bit of an umbrella over the other 3, and this post is long enough that I won't detail how each come into play in PoE, but I certainly can if required. I don't think it's so bold of a statement that we don't agree that PoE has room for those kinds of skill expressions as well.

And when there is room in any system for skill expression, with a big gap between 'skilled' and 'not skilled'. That is difficulty.

University scores have been dropping since the mid to late 80s in America, YMMV in other countries - but I'd be careful who you point the finger at for that. Personally I blame a lack of critical thinking - evidenced on forums by trite posts that make large sweeping factual claims without nearly enough evidence or thought put into them.