It's time for GGG to take back reigns of trade for the sake of the game

I've obtained a headhunter five times in my PoE career. Zero were from drops. I've bought a headhunter once and chanced the rest (either chance orb or ancient orbs prior to HH being added to the core pool).

With harvest crafting now, it's not unreasonable for a player to farm a card and then double or nothing craft it up to a full stack.

What I will say regarding Headhunter specifically: The build and gear required to leverage the ability on the belt will cost you more than the belt itself. If there's a player out there who wants one but could never afford it, that is my warning to them. It costs more than you think. And the same goes for a lot of 'op uniques' like the original sin ring.

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muzein wrote:

I don't want to invalidate your opinion.

I am always up for some quality rhetoric, and by responding, you have validated my point enough that you decided to give your time to it. So please don't think you will offend me with your opinion. Your response is enough to appreciate the respect intended.

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muzein wrote:

I can see where you're coming from but you're asking for a 'Diablo 3 mode'. That is such a shallow gameplay experience that it has diminishing returns at a rapid pace.

PoE has nearly 1,500 unique items. The idea that '100 hours is enough time to have earned a HH or MB' is crazy. Every mob would have to explode unique items or get rid of the weighting.

I would argue that PoE suffers from the same fate. The game is just as repetitious but with completely RNG based progression. The difference between the too is the amount of gear in the game. When 90% of the gear that drops is useless, what is the difference between that 10% of PoE gear vs 90% of D3 gear.

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muzein wrote:

I've never subscribed to the idea that just because a game has an attainable goal, that all players who want to achieve it can do so. Part of a new league and a fresh start is to do more or go further than you could in the previous league. PoE especially, has multiple vectors to achieve this via game knowledge; you build better characters and have a better understanding of the value of items on the market (if SC Trade is your jam).

This is where I make most of my money. I snipe items during the day at work, and resell. I average 7div an hour while I am working and watching trade. I have a list going of 50-100 items every league that I watch via a piece of software I wrote. I am way ahead of most people when it comes to income generation, please feel free to look at my characters to verify.

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muzein wrote:

Essence League was my first real commitment to this game and all these years later, this is the first time I bothered to get 40/40 challenges. It would be nice to do every league but it didn't upset me that I never had. The same can be said for killing every uber boss, reaching level 100 or obtaining the most valuable uniques. I didn't get it done this league but maybe next league I will. Every new league has a goal for me to set based on my shortcomings of prior leagues; and that doesn't even account for any new stuff that a new league brings. It's great.

Delirium was my first and only level 100, it takes too much time otherwise. I made it to 97 and was one of the top 5 RF juggs when I quit this league. I was halfway to an MB before I gave up due to Sanctum sucking for zDPS classes. My goal is to try out new builds, supposedly this game has depth, but I would never know it because I can only do 1 to 2 builds per league. I would love to try crazy off skill builds, but it is too expensive and time consuming to pull off. So I play one build, and then usually quit. Ritual and Harvest were the only ones where I kept playing, and that as because I could incrementally build my toon due to deterministic crafting. I even made a stupid build to just try, I really enjoyed my fireball build.

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muzein wrote:

PoE is a long, complicated, deep game--just as a foundational principle to the core identity of what this game is.

This is the only point I will disagree with you on. I feel that PoE is a massive lake that is about 3 inches deep. There is an illusion of depth created by bloat. Take the skill tree for instance, there are only a handful of nodes everyone shoots for depending on their starting position, the rest is fluff. There are 100+ skills, but only a very select few are viable for end game. 99.99999999% of the loot is worthless. To the point where you need a loot filter to get rid of it all. If you peel back the fat, there isn't all that much meat, and the meat that is actually there is just coated in RNG gravy making it hard to grab.

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muzein wrote:

This one serves this particular niche, however.

This game suffers from an identity crisis. It was a niche game, and then Diablo 3 imploded. It was a victim of its own massive success, as strange as that sounds. The problem this game is facing is what it wants to become. With Diablo4 coming out, this next year+ is going to be horrible revenue wise for this game. PoE 2.0 isn't going to be able to keep up with the juggernaut that the Diablo Franchise is if Diablo 4 is any good. With Tencent owning this game, and them wanting profits from their investment, what do you think they will do? Keep the same formula of the niche game, or try to cater to all the casuals in order to keep them. Diablo 4 is going to be a stark reminder of how small indie this game was before the D3 implosion if D4 is any good at all.

Headhunter and Mageblood are actually fine balance wise imo. They are unneccessary luxury items, yes they are powerful but they aren't mandatory on any build. It's fine for them to take thousands of hours to find.

The big problem is "regular" stuff that's needed for endgame characters. Ashes, Omni, Voidforge, Paradoxica, Savior, Disfavour, Starforge you name it. All of those take >100 hours to find as well. Going with ashes we have a 2% chance from a boss that needs 30 maps to be done per cycle. Assuming average joe does a map in 5 minutes that's 2,5 hours per cycle. Just going with the average of 50 cycles required we are already at 125 hours just for that. And this is just the average here, you can hit it way worse than that. It took me 2,5 leagues in standard to farm my omni with 2-3 cycles per week. Those numbers are absolutely ridiculous for what has to be considered regular lategame equipment.

People always talk about super ez mode, and best items for everyone as soon as someone dares to critizise loot in this game but let's be real here, between the status quo of current POE where actually finding just "good" items outside of endgame bosses is essentially impossible and "best items for everyone" is a large amount of space to settle in that could be called good design. "Best items for everyone" would be a shitty game but current POE is just as bad just in the opposite way.

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AdRonZh3Ro wrote:

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awesome999 wrote:

The "super ez mode" is where everybody get the same item, Power disparity is minimum and people rely their skills rather than their tools. You seems to have it backwards, a lot of games get harder when the player is doing badly and have nothing like BEST items to fall back on. BEST items are like crutches.

The best items are a crutch when the game is badly balanced. Other games require you to get the best gear AND skill to beat the hardest bosses, which is opposed to what PoE does, in which the best gear demolishes the hardest bosses.

Ruthless is further proof of their lack on understanding of balancing. Instead of making the game harder by having monsters do double damage and have double the health, making good defenses and better damage a requirement, they just made loot scarcer. It would be a lot different if ruthless REQUIRED 10mill dps, along with 6k hp, 80% elemental resistances and capped chaos res, opposed to just getting one exalt raw drop the entire league.

There is a serious problem with people thinking that if items are handed to you on a silver platter this make such games easy. Yet it say nothing about the difficulty.

"Hell" mode in skill base game is another universe, as intentionally balanced, mind numbing punishment. Intentionly balanced to be a living hell.

Items and grinding does nothing to help you find the necessity to throw your mouse/controller out the window if you find such games mechanically impossible to beat.

@awesome999
Could you elaborate it better?

You know how to get to 40 the fastest tho? By RMTing, which is the whole point of this thread. And that GGGs current trade system/philosophy is even facilitating and encouraging it.

@la_blue_girl
Exactly the point i've been making the entire time. The community is alredy heavily divided.

Making an easier difficulty to flee from the bullshit bar set by the "elites" and RMTrs would not only improve community perception, it would improve their sales. It has alredy been done with Ruthless. Being opposed to the contrary while praising how Ruthless was a good move is simply pure hypocrisy.

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AdRonZh3Ro wrote:

@awesome999
Could you elaborate it better?

Grinding, sometimes also called farming, means doing a set of repetitious, normally boring tasks for the sake of some benefits. Grinding for items is just that. And how powerful your character is depend on your grinding.

Such games just remove the grind. If you already have the best items, why do you need to grind? If you can't beat something already at your most powerful state, how would you beat it?

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awesome999 wrote:

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AdRonZh3Ro wrote:

@awesome999
Could you elaborate it better?

Grinding, sometimes also called farming, means doing a set of repetitious, normally boring tasks for the sake of some benefits. Grinding for items is just that. And how powerful your character is depend on your grinding.

Such games just remove the grind. If you already have the best items, why do you need to grind? If you can't beat something already at your most powerful state, how would you beat it?

That's not what's happening though, at least at the high levels it seems.

Folks are RMT'ing for great items, and people with decked out gear are providing services.

So to answer your question, what does it appear people are doing after they get the "best" items? Sell for RMT or in game services & carries for even more currency. It's one of the reasons TFT is so big, and why RMT is ever more prevalent. The more they extend the grind and reduce availability of desired items, the more RMT becomes both appealing for the buyer as well as the seller.

@awesome999
I still don't understand what is the point you are trying to make. You want the game to be grindier or more skilled oriented?

I want the game to be more difficult and to have less need for grind. To be able to try out more builds and be adequately challenged at the same time.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

So to answer your question, what does it appear people are doing after they get the "best" items? Sell for RMT or in game services & carries for even more currency. It's one of the reasons TFT is so big, and why RMT is ever more prevalent. The more they extend the grind and reduce availability of desired items, the more RMT becomes both appealing for the buyer as well as the seller.

Yes, again, exactly that. The point of this thread.

Plus, League is only 3 months, no harm in trying a SSF version with more loot that can't be merged into std or parent league. Unless "elite" players get offended, which is the only presentable proof that it would be the worst of things to do, which i can give the same answer when they talk about Ruthless: "it's not for everyone and it doesn't affect you".