Crucible is Fundamentally Flawed - Especially at endgame
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OP makes a really interesting and valid point.
I don't see a way out of this either. BIG OUCH coming soon I guess for all of us... "Wealth in a game is measured by the amount of fun, joy and entertainment you can get out of it".
-Mythabril |
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What about this as a potential fix to the problem;
You no longer identify a weapons skill tree with the first use of an alter. Instead, a new currency orb drops that puts a random skill tree on to a rare weapon, with a rare currency for uniques. This way you don't spam alters identifying every rare weapon you find. You instead just use the currency on your weapon of choice. Thoughts? |
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I don't understand the "spam altars" part. There's only one altar per zone, and I assume one use per altar. If so, you're going to be picky about which items you bring to the altar. Where does the "spamming" come in?
edit: Never mind, I think I get it. I suppose I shouldn't be, but I'm continuously surprised by how much effort people will go to to turn a perfectly fun game into the crappiest job ever. - here's my sig Last edited by AcrylicHercules#1220 on Apr 1, 2023, 9:44:11 PM
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" That's a great idea, and these orbs could also have tiers so you could use them only to items that match that tier level; ie, an orb that has an item level 86 and so on. Man, I wish they had designed it like this from the beginning! "Wealth in a game is measured by the amount of fun, joy and entertainment you can get out of it".
-Mythabril |
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Dear Diary...
" Nice April Fool's joke, DS44. I care about low level. I CARE A LOT.
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In other games.
...Seriously though, good post. The game that seems to have crawled so far up its own complexity so its nose is rubbing up against its planet-sized brainstem may finally have released a league gimmick so clever it defies most if not all of its existing game conventions -- and not necessarily in a good way. You know me: I think in metaphor and analogy. A terribly useless approach to a game like PoE (whose players need no such tools to consider it) but great for slackademic exercises like pondering its trajectory. Slap a simple IMO on the front and it's unassailable, IMO. Okay, sometimes on the back. So keeping in character, I have always thought of PoE as the gaming equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses. An infamously difficult book to read but with the right guides, and the right attitude, Ulysses an almost endless reservoir of cleverness and wit...and a surprisingly simple heart, once you get through the entertaining literary onanism. But right now it is dangerously close to becoming the gaming equivalent of another Joyce work, Finnegans Wake. Unlike Ulysses, FW was written deliberately to confound the literati, a brilliant but smarmy, self-conscious labyrinth of words with many, many dead ends and only one exit: that last page, to which any reader could (and probably should) skip rather than getting lost on page 10. There are no guides for Finnegans Wake, no primers or translators. It isn't based on an existing story. You can find wonder on a random page and madness on either page before or after it. But Joyce was a genius at his craft -- it took him 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and it's a relatively lean 650 or so pages. Of the few brave souls who have made it all the way (def. not me), none tmk accuse it of bloat or filler. So clearly that isn't what I'm talking about. The main point of comparison between the two is that clever, self-conscious angle. Passive trees on weapons? Wow, mind-blowing. Brilliant. That'll keep the so-called experts of the game busy for days. Maybe even weeks. Will it in any way make PoE a better ARPG? Of course not. If anything, it's precisely the sort of needless exercise that serves to further separate PoE from pretty much every other ARPG ever made. So be it...and that's fine as long as it actually improves the experience rather than simply make it more complicated. Most league gimmicks do. I am not convinced this one does. Which is fine -- I'm not the audience. But if it both manages to be needlessly excessive *and* corrosive to the existing work, then y'all have a problem. A big one. And I am willing to bet this is a major concern internally not just for this league gimmick, but all of them...which is why they started so delightfully simple (20% increased movement and attack speed! Shrines! Strongboxes!) but then, as GGG realised just how voracious Exiles are for new ways to do the Same Old Shit, leagues officially became 'expansions' (and expansions, sequels, but like Camelot, let's not go there), Standard became a dumping ground and Exiles were simply expected to play the league, sorry, expansion. And from my perspective, that's like an annoying literature fan saying to me, here's Ulysses, it's great, it'll keep you busy for years, BUT REALLY YOU SHOULD READ FINNEGANS WAKE IT IS SO MUCH BETTER...yeah, maybe if you've read Ulysses a few dozen times first and even then I have my doubts. But look on the bright side: at least PoE is not the gaming equivalent of Gravity's Rainbow, the book with a wonderful title that, according to famous Among Us streamer Benoit Blanc, no one's actually read. Well, not yet anyway. 4.0 will really be the decider there, with its seemingly more accessible gem system and marginally less stodgy action.
Spoiler
Meanwhile we have Elden "20 million copies of a premium priced single player game sold motherfuckers LOOK AT ME GAAS AND WEEP" Ring over there just happily being the Lord of the Rings of gaming, at least LOTR according to Tolkien's wishes, who never wanted any of the vast supplementary material published (but his son lovingly did so anyway, for $ome odd rea$on). As a single book/trilogy, LOTR is pretty damn perfect. People reread it en masse. It continues to defy market trends. It has been superseded on every front but never by one single work.
IMO PoE wants to be that, but it can't stop breaking what isn't fixed. 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. |
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^
For what little it is worth, for context, I was talking about low level in terms of the league mechanic as it relates to farming these fucking trees.
Spoiler
For the actual character leveling process I could make an entire other thread on how absolutely stupid it is to alter an already terrible leveling process, by balancing it towards racers, and punishing the 99.8% of other players. Not to mention the unshakable stubbornness to not allow for alternative options once you complete the campaign. Jesus what a slog it is, it's just painfully old, cumbersome, and flat out unfun.
Or I could make another thread on how deeply misleading the "not a nerf fest" comment is and "we kept the six best masteries" statements are. The fact they didn't do a manifesto...well that reason is also pretty clear, because they would have to explain all that mess without being a laughing stock. Or fucking Ruthless, our favorite passion project, that will have no effect on the main game ... lol sure. So I decided instead of making 3 or 4 threads ripping them, I decided on one that called out the lack of foresight on the entire league. The downward trajectory on display the last 18 or so months is striking. Fml looking forward to June. Edit: well i guess I did make a snarky Ruthless thread too. I regret nothing "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln Last edited by DarthSki44#6905 on Apr 2, 2023, 12:52:07 AM
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" This is an important and really interesting part of game design, because players who play video games (particularly ones like PoE) tend to be math minded, they also tend towards efficency in mind. They will plan the fun out of a game for efficency, so game designers need to make effiencant ways the 'fun' ways otherwise players will often walk right past the interesting ways. You see this in Dark Souls discource around DS1 vs Bloodborn and how shields let players play with extreme caution and never try what many consider the 'fun' part of the actiony / dodgy way to play the game (While that speific example is a little fraught, but it's good enough for a quick idea). Path is rife with this problem (and due to the type of game it is, some of that is unavoidable, and instead just trusts players to find fun on their own). |
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" This. |
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" This more or less was my line of thinking. Ideally anytime you finish altar you get the progress and you get the currency to reveal more weapons. Or if you do without a weapon then you get a token to reveal, which you can stockpile for later use. Maybe amount of tokens depends on how high you channeled and map tier, so quarry would only be 1 and t16 full channel 3-4. |
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To quote a man about to be turned into a work of art, "I know".
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. |
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