The majority of players dont like hard content

Again, PoE isn't hard. Or challenging. For the most part, at least. PoE is time-consuming, and not in a good way.

If you want a challenging game, play Starcraft. Or Trackmania. Or maybe Dark Souls (never tried, was told it is challenging), or Chess. PoE was never a game about challenge. It was a game about grind. Now, even more so.

People like you really love to confuse difficulty with time consumption. PoE isn't hard, it's time consuming, for as soon as you understand it's mechanics you can beat the game (kill uber bosses) within less than 24 hours.

Trick is, not everyone has the amount of time required to learn everything PoE has to offer into minute detail, even less so to play consistently. Couple that with ever dwindling resource acquisition and you get current displeasure with the game you have now.

That's why Ruthless is beyond absurdly nonsensical. Progression difficulty is the same, the only thing that will change is that you will waste more time in each act trying to acquire the same base line power you need to progress.

Majority don't like hard content, sure, but everyone, universally, despise having their time be wasted.

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AdRonZh3Ro wrote:

Majority don't like hard content, sure, but everyone, universally, despise having their time be wasted.

And for me, every update that's happened post-3.13 just feels like an ever-increasing waste of time.

I don't want to ask how GGG could make it worse at this point since they literally shoehorned in Archnemesis mechanics from a perfectly viable build-a-boss league, so I'm not going to tempt fate.

I would say OP is correct: the majority of all potential players do not like hard content.

My counterargument, though: "So what?"

The majority of PoE players don't reach maps. The majority of the people who do reach maps don't reach T16. The majority of people who reach T16 don't kill pinnacle bosses. The majority of players killing pinnacle bosses aren't doing it in HCSSF. And so on. There's ALWAYS another difficulty level to push yourself against in this game.

If you think GGG is interested in balancing the game around what the lowest common denominator wants, you clearly haven't been paying very close attention.

While I don't know PoE's exact model; games that run on models like this tend to have a small portion of users make up the bulk of the profit. So it's quite possible that 1% of the playerbase is responsible for 25% or more of their revenue. Now I don't know how that percent mixes with content difficulty preferences.

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Chadwixx wrote:

Title of the thread

You’re free to your own opinion but don’t present it as fact when you have nothing to back it up. Hard is arbitrary and broad as well which won’t be easy to argue against and for.

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Chadwixx wrote:

After playing poe and lost ark i see people only sign up for groups that get the kill.

So you confirm this is an opinion piece.
Your sample size of your personal experiences is what you base this off of.

People have been getting carries in games before PoE even existed. Just because someone wants a boss kill/ level skip, or help doesn’t mean they don’t “like hard content”.

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Chadwixx wrote:

I dont understand the business model with these games. Who are they trying to appeal to? Seems minority based, which doesnt make sense as a business model.

We are here to play the game or not. We don’t worry about companies business models. And if you actually cared about this you wouldn’t use a Blizzard product as an example. I don’t think I need to elaborate on that one 😂.

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Chadwixx wrote:

People lose things everyday, when they log in they dont wanna lose more. I think you have forgotten what video games are supposed to do.

This in terms of like level progress? If so then don’t die. do easier content

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Chadwixx wrote:

Bottom line, harder game play creates less players in the end. Match making is amazing in lost ark, but when you hit a threshold, people no longer que.

I wonder if GGG could retain more players if they made the game fun, instead of punishing. The core of the game is extremely fun, but the end game is super linear (builds for bosses and xp'rs).

You have to remember the majority of people who play video games have other stuff going on in life, you are catering to the 1% instead of 99 and expecting a positive result like its a lotto.

Unless you have a massive whale promoting this demonic influence, you should check yourself before you wreck yourself.

As for the rest of this. It just seems like a huge rant of talking points that don’t really expand your main point. You don’t say anything specific you just want “fun” and “not hard” “not punishing”

A game developer, if they decided to read this, wouldn’t know where to start. You’ve said nothing specific.

This whole thread is like saying “it’s dumb because it’s stupid”

I've stayed away from PoE for the past couple of leagues. I tried this league briefly, but with the increased difficulty scale and item drop nerf, I stopped shortly after getting to maps.

Overall, my enjoyment of the game has been on the decline since 3.15.
The constant barrage of nerfs to my favourite builds, item drop rates, OP mob mechanics (Archnemesis - current iteration), and Harvest recipe removals are a few examples of GGG's extreme decision making that simply do not seem to line up with what the majority of PoE players want.

Now that Ruthless is a game mode, I would like to see them make the core game more accessible to casual gamers by undoing the most controversial nerfs, and use Ruthless as the platform to cater to the top 5% that better enjoy a harder ARPG.

Negativity aside, PoE is unique and awesome in a lot of ways. I love the complexity of it that no other ARPG on the market has through it's massive build diversity, smooth gameplay, and the way that the devs have meshed so many different game mechanics together through the mapping system.

People don't do matchmaking for recent content in Lost Ark so that's probably your mistake.

The game is also entirely centered around killing big bosses once a week so if you don't show up 1-3 days after reset, good luck. If anything it's a good example of why big bosses don't work as end-game content. After a few kills I was generally sleeping through Valtan and Vykas. Then quit.

WoW got popular because it was a perfect storm condition. They copied everything from other MMOs before and EQ2 dropped the ball at release. Nothing more, nothing less.

People like hard content as an option. Maybe they don't like it every day just like some days people don't feel like PvP but GGG has a very distorted concept of what difficulty is at this point. Ruthless is a perfect example where the biggest difference is just depriving players of stats.

PoE has become an 80% gear based stat smasher. Difficulty will never exist until that changes.
Neat as they are big bosses have no sustaining difficulty quality which is why they get put behind grind walls. Once you've fought them enough. You will always win.

Real Difficulty and skill are forced out of players with unforeseen conditions. Which sadly could be the rest of this game with it's dynamic generation. It just doesn't work anymore.

When an opinion create's other opinions we are having a conversation.

Thanks

according to chris no one is complaining about any penalties :D