I feel Ruthless is better for new players than regular game and here is why
" A player reading every virtue gem is not the same as a player having an actual understanding of them. Most players will absolutely not read every virtue gem, and if you sat them down and said "Hey in order to enjoy this game, first read 40 item discriptions", you will see an instant log off for anyone who doesn't list Dwarf Fortress as a favorate game. The benifit of Ruthless for a new player is you get your skill and the game sends you on your way. Normal throws thirty things at you every zone and expects you to have a fundamental undrstanding of it, because it's also going to be shoving pretty big piles of pretty zoomie enemies at you, and you're still learning how to walk and what your one skill does. For example, you roll a Marauder, STR builds are typically an accessable RPG starting point. You get a club and Heavy Strike. Simple enough, club hits things, heavy strike lets you spend mana to hit harder with a push. half way through the strand, you get Ruthless, which interacts with item links, stuns, bleeds, and meta concepts like attack tempo and timings. So that's two moderately complex mechanics (Stuns and Bleeds) the game is asking you to know about (which ultimately you don't need to know, but the player will feel like they need to know because the game is telling them that by throwing out these loaded keywords). They won't have any way to know what bleeding is or that it's actually not important in this case (since Heavy Strike won't cause a bleed for Ruthless to boost), without turning to an external resource. And again, if you're asking the AVERAGE player to read a wiki or dive thorugh dull fuck all menus for tutorials, thats where you get that 95% loss rate of new players you're claiming. In ruthless, you get heavy strike and a club. YOu get to club guy and not read a thing. You'll have no further considerations till Lionseyes eye where you'll compare a half dozen skills to pick from, then you'll go back to hitting things (maybe figure out your skill tree a bit). The only thing the player HAS to learn, is footwork and flasks, and they'll have 1-2 hours of just learning that and a single skill or two for a few hours to get their value, some edge cases and the like. When you let players actually stick with an idea for a while, that is how they learn. People do not learn by throwing thirty different things at them at once. It's why schools tend to teach simple concepts like addition over a 4 week period to children, not have them learn Addition, Subtraction, division, muliplication and then randomly talk about negatives, rounding, square roots and imaginatry numbers intermittetly. Focus provides learning. Things like blight are not 'the game' they are an objective. The moving and the fighting is 'the game' and that's the part people bounce off of when they start the game, they need to be onboarded to the very core concept of the game, and ruthless does that better than standard by not mistaking the forest for the trees. |
|
|
Fun fact. Some new players even rage quit, because they can’t beat Hillock.
And to be fair, if you don’t know Jack about the game, that fight can be challenging. Flask empty and so on… PoE devs are kind of proud of this state of the game. In their mindset PoE is for the elite of gamers. 🤓 | |
|
Not so fun fact:
You cant beat hillock? You don't want to invest time to try a few times? You ragequit because of this? This game is not for you. Simple as that. More than enough games for you out there. At topic: After having reached lvl 80 ssfhc this league i went ssfhcr. And man.. Feels like early Poe for me. Easier than early Poe but nevertheless.. A step in the right direction. Playing feels rewarding. In ssfhc i zoomed through campaign and the first maps, always fully capped resists with no effort, top gear/uniques dropped like candies. I did not pay attention to anything and there was not one dangerous Situation. In ruthless its not more difficult i feel (resists are a Bit Harder to cap, but i am lvl 32 and 25,so not that far), but much slower. I needed to farm a bit for gear and for a bit overleveling. Bossfights do last longer. You cannot facetank every shit they throw at you. You have to take care and take your time. You habe to take care and don't get surrounded. I really really like it so far and wont go back to retail. |
|
|
No
(سಥ益ಥ)س (سಥ益ಥ)س (سಥ益ಥ)س (سಥ益ಥ)س (سಥ益ಥ)س (سಥ益ಥ)س (سಥ益ಥ)س
|
|
" haha, "elite". I laugh at the very notion; if I wanted snobbishness I'd choose something like ADOM or any number of other pickier things. All too easy to confuse bad design for 'requiring skill'. It's a pity PoE fails at so many basics of game design near the start of the game, especially since they tweaked act 1. Last edited by zlefin_actual#4855 on Dec 26, 2022, 8:33:51 PM
|
|
" This is just a poor excuse for them to not fix their in game tools. Poe isn't hard, it is the fact that there are many things not intuitive and many people don't want to use 9001 3rd party sites and tools to just play a damn game. |
|
" Nope. Ruthless has little to no value to someone who can't appreciate what it leaves out. If I like a game, it'll either be amazing later or awful forever. There's no in-between. I am Path of Exile's biggest whale. Period. Last edited by Foreverhappychan#4626 on Dec 27, 2022, 1:43:51 AM
|
|
|
Couldn't disagree more.
One of the biggest reasons for people to quit early is the lack of potential of feeling powerful anytime soon. If they would start Ruthless, this is amplified tenfold because of the lack of support gems and lack of anything really. In general people play hack&slash games to feel powerful, literally chop through hordes of monsters, ruthless is basically the opposite. Sure there is a market or it, but it sure isn't average Joe loving the lack of everything, basically playing a 2012 beta version of an ARPG. Last edited by leto2626#2588 on Dec 27, 2022, 7:34:29 AM
|
|
" This makes an erronius assumption that players are playing an ARPG for the same reasons, and forces PoE to compete directly with D3, TL, Lost Arc and other games that cater to that desire. It's a FAR better market plan to find an unfilled niche and fill it, and PoE's harsh realities do that far better than the high scope compared to those games. Much as PoEs game play, it is best to focus on strengths, than invite a weakness in conformity. |
|
|
Just tried ruthless up to lvl 75.
1: its not hard 2: Its slow paced to progress. Ruthless some will will spend 2-3 weeks farming your Support gems. Its not really exciting. 3: Any difficulty is inflated by the people playing it. Many in chat talk about how its great and they are free to do builds they were never able to try before.. Why ? because they can't follow a cookie cutter guide with specific uniques ? There is still a meta of what works and doesn't. 4: No movement skill gems - eh its w/e not a big deal. 5: Delve/Heist etc. You will spend a majority of time in maps and map sustain. You will not get to do many of the other mechanics. Overall.. its nothing special, or anything great. your Better off playing SSF on standard league if you want something different. |
|
