Inconvenience and Extreme Rarity is bad design for most players

Honestly, I just wanted to say the title and that I am in the group of players who was disturbed by lines such as

"Players should no longer be burdened with predictable unique Jewel quest rewards"

whoever thought that predictable rewards are bad scares me almost as much as whoever approved that line and thought that was good design direction.

"Jewels should be more exciting than before"

GGG has taught us this phrase means they are nerfing them out of the game through rarity. I really dislike that they think that gambling is where they want to take their game. I would like to point at a lot of WOW's recent failures of examples of what happens when you use rarity and inconvenience as a way to create "difficulty" and slow down top players.

Also, balancing AGAINST top players is always a bad experience for the rest of the playerbase. Again, look at WOW. Instead, you need to find ways to add content that is appealing and challenging for top players without destroying the base game for everyone else. Generally trying to reward players intrinsically instead extrinsically is key for such efforts.

I don't know how to put it. This is just really disappointing.

GGG thinks that making easier things a slog is the key to longer retention on leagues. I'm not sure why they can't ever understand that the key to longer lasting leagues is not to make the journey of 1 character take longer but rather to make the journey of many characters more enjoyable. If they took this approach instead they would get much better retention on leagues AND greatly increase their revenue (as people tend to spend money when they are having a good time).

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thunderingice wrote:

Honestly, I just wanted to say the title and that I am in the group of players who was disturbed by lines such as

"Players should no longer be burdened with predictable unique Jewel quest rewards"

whoever thought that predictable rewards are bad scares me almost as much as whoever approved that line and thought that was good design direction.

"Jewels should be more exciting than before"

GGG has taught us this phrase means they are nerfing them out of the game through rarity. I really dislike that they think that gambling is where they want to take their game. I would like to point at a lot of WOW's recent failures of examples of what happens when you use rarity and inconvenience as a way to create "difficulty" and slow down top players.

Also, balancing AGAINST top players is always a bad experience for the rest of the playerbase. Again, look at WOW. Instead, you need to find ways to add content that is appealing and challenging for top players without destroying the base game for everyone else. Generally trying to reward players intrinsically instead extrinsically is key for such efforts.

I don't know how to put it. This is just really disappointing.

Oh no, they going to remove jewel that give us -1 to maximum charges or we can't get something like Assasins Haste (10% mana reg, 4% MS, 4% AS and CS). Wow, uplayable Kappa

GGG literally told in manifest that you will get good jewels without losing anything and even non unique jewels will be buffed. Some players like cry so much.

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Alendert wrote:

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thunderingice wrote:

Honestly, I just wanted to say the title and that I am in the group of players who was disturbed by lines such as

"Players should no longer be burdened with predictable unique Jewel quest rewards"

whoever thought that predictable rewards are bad scares me almost as much as whoever approved that line and thought that was good design direction.

"Jewels should be more exciting than before"

GGG has taught us this phrase means they are nerfing them out of the game through rarity. I really dislike that they think that gambling is where they want to take their game. I would like to point at a lot of WOW's recent failures of examples of what happens when you use rarity and inconvenience as a way to create "difficulty" and slow down top players.

Also, balancing AGAINST top players is always a bad experience for the rest of the playerbase. Again, look at WOW. Instead, you need to find ways to add content that is appealing and challenging for top players without destroying the base game for everyone else. Generally trying to reward players intrinsically instead extrinsically is key for such efforts.

I don't know how to put it. This is just really disappointing.

Oh no, they going to remove jewel that give us -1 to maximum charges or we can't get something like Assasins Haste (10% mana reg, 4% MS, 4% AS and CS). Wow, uplayable Kappa

GGG literally told in manifest that you will get good jewels without losing anything and even non unique jewels will be buffed. Some players like cry so much.

yep good jewel that is so rare you will never get to see them :D

and this buff/nerf just makes first weak more annoying than anything ells thats all to it

"

Alendert wrote:

GGG literally told in manifest that you will get good jewels without losing anything and even non unique jewels will be buffed. Some players like cry so much.

This is false. The new corrupt-only jewels will be unable to have a corrupted implicit, just like the current ones. This is a nerf.

They explicitly stated that they were "making it so that every unique jewel that drops is very rare". This means less available, and is a nerf. The severity of the nerf is vague, but it is a nerf nonetheless.

They are culling specific unique jewels, such as Fireborn that they somehow couldn't buff (Just add more damage in the conversion? Add another explicit? Add a threshold that does something neat if it converts X% damage or more?). Depending on what's culled, this could fundamentally kill some builds. Another nerf.

They are adding more ailment avoidance, reduced ailment duration, and reduced ailment effectiveness to jewel mod pools. In some cases, this can be a buff but in most it just makes an already strained mod pool even more strained. There's also the opportunity cost of sacrificing slots to obtain the mitigation which previously didn't exist. This could also be stacked with unannounced nerfs if they intend to gut things like Purity of Elements to brute force players into these choices. One more nerf, and potentially more given GGG's recent track record enforcing terrible solutions to problems they create.

The only things that can be considered "buffs" here are availability of ailment mitigation (that's harder to obtain thanks to mod pool and costs an existing mod slot), potential improvements to unique jewel drop pools due to the reduction of available jewels, (which are going to be made "very rare"), and whatever they do to buff the jewels that aren't culled (which wasn't stated).

If they wanted to make Fireborn useful while not losing its identity, all they had to do was change the radius from Medium to Large. Because doing just that, it is now suddenly really strong for RF builds in the socket above the witch starting area (because all of both the Cold and Lightning wheels at the top would 100% convert to Fire). RF has a real hard time getting enough %increased damage, so this would be a massive buff. Would be great for Ignite builds in general too.

What? You will not enjoy Watchers Eyes and Timeless Jewels being as rare as Ashes/Omni drops?

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TemjinGold wrote:

I'm not sure why they can't ever understand that the key to longer lasting leagues is not to make the journey of 1 character take longer but rather to make the journey of many characters more enjoyable.

This.

There are tons of skills I'd love to take a swing at, but as they continue to become more and more expensive to build, I instead focus more on just one or otherwise will not have enough time or resources to complete any of them.

I'd love to make a skelly mage build that can comfortably take on aspirational content then later put it down and try running a Flicker Strike, Reap, or Arc build instead in the span of one league. As it stands, I'm currently struggling just to get the skelly mage build to even manage T14 maps.

For a game the community praises about having great build diversity, GGG seems to be making damn sure that only the meta is the only thing worth doing.

"

anti4z500 wrote:

yep good jewel that is so rare you will never get to see them :D

and this buff/nerf just makes first weak more annoying than anything ells thats all to it

Probably some of current unique jewels work in trade leagues where you can make a specific build, but who care? - I'm not. Lower drop rate? I going to play RuthlessHCSSF (1 alch per 10 acts as GGG said), cause I think there too much loot in PoE, players get top gear in few days and hide 99% items with loot filters.

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Alendert wrote:

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anti4z500 wrote:

yep good jewel that is so rare you will never get to see them :D

and this buff/nerf just makes first weak more annoying than anything ells thats all to it

Probably some of current unique jewels work in trade leagues where you can make a specific build, but who care? - I'm not. Lower drop rate? I going to play RuthlessHCSSF (1 alch per 10 acts as GGG said), cause I think there too much loot in PoE, players get top gear in few days and hide 99% items with loot filters.

well gl on that , i dont find any fun in playing act 1 for a weak just to get to act 2 :D