was deliberately getting in the way of the gameplay...because the gameplay itself was nothing amazing. T
hat was before D3 cleaned up its act pretty hard, scrapped the RMAH, introduced Adventure Mode and landed
as a quite fun multiplayer lightweight brawler with RL friends who didn't have time or mental space for the likes of PoE. And fuck me dead if I didn't come to appreciate the
green arrow/red arrow system because it
meant I wasn't fucking about with gear analysis when I'd rather be out in the game proper killing shit with my friends.
Here's the thing, Varana. Here's what I learned. My entire attitude towards QoL and the simplification of ARPGs before that was based on one simple factor:
I was used to playing alone and in my own time. I could leave my Exile sitting in Sarn or my Hideout as I researched shit on the web about the game, or yes tapped poe.xyz for some 1c deals to play with. Or weigh up various options going forward.
PoE is fucking awesome if you don't want to play with friends.
And that's sad, because I played D1 with friends. I played D2 with friends. I
played Wolcen with a friend. I play Grim Dawn with a friend (and with that one, the lack of at-a-glance upgrades really fucks with our sessions because we're both Exiles and we both can't resist fairly small upgrade choices when in town. We waste a lot of time fucking about with GD's dated item system). Hell, I even played Darkstone with friends.
The ARPG is, traditionally speaking, a multiplayer game and is, I'd argue,
at its peak when you've got a good rhythm going with friends.
It is impossible to achieve that rhythm with PoE because it lacks any sort of green arrow/red arrow system. And that's fine -- as I said, it's made for people who play alone and only really interact to trade. But we've all gotten older, a bit slower, a bit more inundated with life. Mostly. And the younger generation, they never experienced the early ARPGs to begin with, so it's little wonder the ARPG genre is on life support compared to the truly popular games out there.
I suspect by invoking the almost universally hated Diablo Immortal you wanted to initiate a slippery slope style argument, but
I strongly doubt it was the red arrow/green arrow system that makes Diablo Immortal so universally hated.
And ignoring even that example, getting back to the actual topic at hand, I maintain anything that streamlines the players' experience of PoE as a game where you kill monsters, get stronger, and then kill more monsters is a good thing. Regardless of the technical shitstorm it seems to have caused.
PoE could be endowed with a LOT more such QoL and automation and still be the most complicated, convoluted ARPG to ever exist and it wouldn't even be close. Exiles fail to realise that because they just see red arrow/green arrow systems as anathema and leave it at that. They don't engage critically with anything BUT Path of Exile because frankly, Path of Exile is too consuming to allow or encourage that.
And that's why the game is where it is. Because so often
suggestions to drag PoE kicking and screaming out of 2012 are seen as personal attacks on the Exile's way of life.
Green arrow good/red arrow bad would only work for a PoE that remembered that ARPGs were about more than painstakingly building a character by yourself and then throwing it into a simulation.
See, that's where I really get confused.
Exiles get up in arms at the mention of possible automation/simplification of the trading system, as though it's not the worst trading system in 'modern' gaming,
but are content with ludicrously automated/simple gameplay. GGG keep trying to make PoE more tactical, starting with the Labyrinth, moving into more telegraphed boss move design and of course now with The Sanctum, but Exiles want none of it. Because they've spent so much time and effort strategising their character that there's really no reason why it shouldn't bulldoze through any tactical challenges.
Meanwhile
the very games Exiles mock because players can, at a glance, upgrade their gear effectively, have much more tactically involved encounters that require actual engagement in the moment regardless of gear.
And to each their own.
The more tactical ARPG/brawler that prioritises the action and encourages multiplayer involvement by minimising time-consuming gear deliberation
is great for shenanigans with friends but *typically* kind of boring alone. And strategic
games like PoE, those that prioritise the methodical construction and maintenance of the player's resources (be it a single character, a party, an army, a world, etc)
are more like puzzles to be figured out, which are not exactly much fun with others. And if that is the model PoE is following, then I'd look at its
godawful trade system like having to leave the house to get the necessary jigsaw pieces to finish a puzzle. Now and then it's fun to go on such a quest (collectors know this very well) but if you're forced to do that too much, it
gets in the way of enjoying the puzzle solving.
That's why PoE is seen as work to a lot of people who try it. I think they recognise early on that it's a puzzle-solving game at heart rather than an action game, but the combination of extremely unwieldy instructions and missing pieces in the box (well, not missing -- acquiring them is part of the game) is very off-putting.
So again, I don't see how any sort of QoL that makes it easier or more convenient to acquire the desired pieces to the puzzle should detract from the game IF it's about solving that puzzle. But if it's deliberately about making acquiring the pieces difficult and tedious, then by all means keep it that way.
This all accords with
PoE's decaying identity. It doesn't know what it wants to be: a traditional
hack and slasher;
a puzzle to be solved;
a trading simulator? PoE doesn't provide players enough built-in tools to be a great example of any of those. Combine that jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none approach with its terminal addiction to genre-sampling league gimmicks and the end result is pretty messy.
Were it to commit to the action, red arrow down/green arrow up would be welcome. If it wants to be a puzzle that reconfigures itself every so often, then it needs to make the acquisition of the many possible pieces to solve that puzzle easier. And
if it wants to be a trading simulator, then it needs Eve-like tools to encourage players to treat it that way.
Ah, but that's why we have the third party tools, right? Because
players decided for themselves what PoE was and how to approach it. How to streamline it. How to grant it the QoL GGG wouldn't.
And GGG went along with that, because of course they did: players were modding their game experience and the devs were like, wow, they REALLY love our game to do that. And
'going along with it' became 'encouraging it' and is now 'relying on it'...which is
fine until player-made tools reveal how exploitable they can be because they don't have the oversight of dev-made ones. And that's how we got to the point of GGG having to *make a news post* telling people not to use certain player-made tools.
That's really embarrassing when you think about it.
And if they'd embraced a mentality that maybe lies adjacent to 'green arrow good/red arrow bad' (i.e. built in QoL), maybe they wouldn't be in a position where they're having to tell players not to use certain player-made tools when they've been allowing, encouraging and relying on people to use them for years.
"
Bleu42 wrote:
"
Foreverhappychan wrote:
100% good. Anything that removes some of the arbitrary cumbersomeness* getting between a player and killing shit good in an ARPG is good.
*I love this word. It is cumbersomeness itself; it's almost onomatopoeic. Sort of the opposite to stuff like pulchritudinous (beautiful) and doggerel (comic verse).
edit: per DS44's take, good 'for the players, not the game' is something I left out. I don't think anyone really cares about the latter anymore. Or, maybe more precisely, sees a difference.
I'm disappointed but not surprised you're on board with something detrimental to a game you no longer play. I guess it's a version of schadenfreude.
You would guess wrong. I want the best for PoE because I think it's hit a wall as a solo player game when the true beating heart of ARPGs was always in their multiplayer potential. So...QED.
I AM experiencing some belated schadenfreude regarding GGG though. I have never hidden how I felt about some of their business decisions and how eventually, they would prove to be less than ideal.
But since I don't consider the streamlining of the trade process in PoE detrimental and never have (the game's trading system isn't that much evolved from the drop trades of beta, to be honest -- it's barely at D2 level), because I've also played games like Eve, accusations of schadenfreude in this case are null and void. :)
