To hard for beginners and you need a PHD in POE to play.

"

sonicphi wrote:

I have been saying this for a while, not only is the game a bit more dificult than it should be, the dificulty is also not linear, for example act 2 is easier than act 1.

Dificulty aside POE also has a MASSIVE feature creep issue, 10 years of new system without the devs taking a look at complexity and ease of acess to said systems makes the game extremely daunting and dificult to aproach.

Not only does the game have the issues mentioned abouve it also has balance and design issues , its kinda hard right now for any one that has not been playing the game for a while to get into the game for the first time or come back.

IMHO the game needs a "clean up" league, where the devs dont introduce any new mechanics and simply simplify the existing ones as well as taking a very long and methodical pass on balance and design.

Hard disagree. The game doesn't need to be simplified or made easier, it just needs to explain itself better to players who have not been playing for the last 10 years. You can have an incredibly deep and complex game without the obfuscation which makes path of exile nearly impossible to break into.

I realized as soon as I made my last post that the perfect example of this is already in the game, in the form of heist. The way in which heist is introduced and explained is the gold standard for in game tutorial systems: players find their first markers, and as soon as they pick them up into their inventory they get an optional quest which tells them to talk to an NPC in town. Speaking to this NPC starts a guided tutorial where the player is introduced to the rogue harbor, who the various NPCs are and what functions they serve, and finally given a first contract where Karst coaches the player through every single step of the heist proper. Every single aspect of the system is introduced in an organic way without the players having to sit there and read a tutorial off of their screens.

I like that it's not as simple as Diablo and enjoy the complexity.

What I dislike is:

- Massive lack of QoL features
- Lots of poorly done UIs
- Tedious aspects forced upon the player (especially in trade)

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

"

sonicphi wrote:

I have been saying this for a while, not only is the game a bit more dificult than it should be, the dificulty is also not linear, for example act 2 is easier than act 1.

Dificulty aside POE also has a MASSIVE feature creep issue, 10 years of new system without the devs taking a look at complexity and ease of acess to said systems makes the game extremely daunting and dificult to aproach.

Not only does the game have the issues mentioned abouve it also has balance and design issues , its kinda hard right now for any one that has not been playing the game for a while to get into the game for the first time or come back.

IMHO the game needs a "clean up" league, where the devs dont introduce any new mechanics and simply simplify the existing ones as well as taking a very long and methodical pass on balance and design.

Hard disagree. The game doesn't need to be simplified or made easier, it just needs to explain itself better to players who have not been playing for the last 10 years. You can have an incredibly deep and complex game without the obfuscation which makes path of exile nearly impossible to break into.

I realized as soon as I made my last post that the perfect example of this is already in the game, in the form of heist. The way in which heist is introduced and explained is the gold standard for in game tutorial systems: players find their first markers, and as soon as they pick them up into their inventory they get an optional quest which tells them to talk to an NPC in town. Speaking to this NPC starts a guided tutorial where the player is introduced to the rogue harbor, who the various NPCs are and what functions they serve, and finally given a first contract where Karst coaches the player through every single step of the heist proper. Every single aspect of the system is introduced in an organic way without the players having to sit there and read a tutorial off of their screens.

Heist at the moment is nothing but glorified mapping, its a system that exists just for the sake of existing, it adds nothing to the game besides another layer of complexity.

You might like complexity to each their own, but when the game has 10+ systems like this that add complexity just for complexity sake the game becomes confusing.

You can have heist or you could pop the heist maps in ur maps thingy and do the interactions of the NPC's yourself, it would achieve EXACTLY the same thing and it wouldnt have another useless layer of complexity...

I think GGG does this on purpose to scare away any players that do not like difficulty in what they think will stop people from complaining maybe. They do not need new players they just need to hype (con) enough new players into pre-buying supporter packs before the league starts hoping most of them will just leave the game without asking for a refund. This is why they have been sponsoring streamers that are completely unrelated to ARPG's the last few leagues. It get new players to see the game and then hype's them up to buy supporter packs.

CW literally said the last time they did massive nerfs they would never announce them again as they lost something like 36% of sales. So now when they forgo the development manifesto to "not bore the players with a bunch of numbers" you know mega nerfs are coming. Their shady sales game has gotten better in the last few leagues. Maybe they hired new marketing people to show them how to basically lie and steal to keep sales up.

POE2 is going to be so much worse than what we are seeing now. They are going to double down on the difficulty and unfairness of the game. They have alluded to this many times. The people that think POE2 will fix everything are in for a rude awakening.

"

sonicphi wrote:

Heist at the moment is nothing but glorified mapping, its a system that exists just for the sake of existing, it adds nothing to the game besides another layer of complexity.

You might like complexity to each their own, but when the game has 10+ systems like this that add complexity just for complexity sake the game becomes confusing.

You can have heist or you could pop the heist maps in ur maps thingy and do the interactions of the NPC's yourself, it would achieve EXACTLY the same thing and it wouldnt have another useless layer of complexity...

You completely missed my point. I'm not saying anything about the value of heist, the fun level of hiest, anything at all measuring whether or not it should be in the game by anyone's metric. I'm simply pointing out that it is a very complicated system which any player will 100% understand without reading a single tutorial, just by interacting with it organically, because the system is taught with gameplay instead of a giant wall of text hidden in a sub menu that nobody ever looks at.

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

"

sonicphi wrote:

Heist at the moment is nothing but glorified mapping, its a system that exists just for the sake of existing, it adds nothing to the game besides another layer of complexity.

You might like complexity to each their own, but when the game has 10+ systems like this that add complexity just for complexity sake the game becomes confusing.

You can have heist or you could pop the heist maps in ur maps thingy and do the interactions of the NPC's yourself, it would achieve EXACTLY the same thing and it wouldnt have another useless layer of complexity...

You completely missed my point. I'm not saying anything about the value of heist, the fun level of hiest, anything at all measuring whether or not it should be in the game by anyone's metric. I'm simply pointing out that it is a very complicated system which any player will 100% understand without reading a single tutorial, just by interacting with it organically, because the system is taught with gameplay instead of a giant wall of text hidden in a sub menu that nobody ever looks at.

I understand, but thats not the point of the OP, the OP says the game is too complicated and more systems just add to that regardless if they are well implemented or not.

What i was trying to say is that, there is not point to having another system when you can just make use of the old one and achieve the same thing.

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

"

sonicphi wrote:

[...]

[...]The game doesn't need to be simplified or made easier, it just needs to explain itself better to players who have not been playing for the last 10 years. You can have an incredibly deep and complex game without the obfuscation which makes path of exile nearly impossible to break into.
[...]

I feel like agreeing to this one. I just restarted playing PoE like 1 1/2 or 2 Months ago ca. and before that I only played to act 3 like around 2013 or so and dropped it back then because I wasnt that much into ARPG Genre.

After ca. 10~ Days of raw playtime now(so 240~ hours, maybe bit more or less) I kind of understand more and more here and there, discover what league mechanics are needed or/and used for (heist for alternative gems, blight for oils for powerful amulette annoinments, legion splinters to upgrade my map device, as examples) but the way to it feels kind a tedious/harder then it needs to be.

I believe it would be helpful already, if the Game freezes/pauses itself when you encounter a league mechanic for the first time and pops up a little Box with Pictures and or Text explaining what it is and used for.

Before I learned about what oils are used for, although i could've googled it way earlier - like when I encountered it the first time, I just skipped the encounters everytime because it felt like a not-worth-it-and-slowing-me-down mechanic - but now I actually kind a enjoy because I know the reward is worth it and I actualy like a bit of Tower Defense gameplay.

I mean, it maybe also show's another aspect to it: Players(here as example me) not willing to immediately commiting to dig the knowledge about stuff they see for the first time.
One wants to play and not read 1-3 papers about mechanics - but after I got into it, I wouldn't say simplify the mechanic or game, make it better learnable/understandable. Maybe you don't need to explaing everything on the first tooltip for a mechanic if that would blow it up to much, but a little brief introduction inside the game itself with little points for what the encountered mechanic is used for or worth doing.

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

This is definitely one of the biggest issues currently facing the game, and it really is something that GGG should look into before path of exile 2. The core of the problem is that the game has an excellent tutorial which nobody reads, because people trying out a free-to-play game just want to get out there and smash skeletons, not sit in town reading page after page of information they really do need.

The solution is more interactive, organic tutorials introducing systems through gameplay. A simplified example of how this should be done is a guaranteed whispering essence just inside the entrance to the prison or something, some major quest area that players are forced to walk through, and investigating it essentially triggers a side quest where the entire essence system is introduced to new players in a way that isn't miserable and boring.

The problem is, this takes dev time and work to implement, and then has to be translated into every supported language, and then this would have to be repeated for every single system in the entire game. It's definitely not a minor undertaking by any means, but that's exactly why GGG should probably get started now and try to hit a couple of mechanics each patch.

Yep.

Brings to mind a change I think GGG should make with PoE 4.0, one that acknowledges their domestic market (China) and the game's global audience -- overhauling the entire passive system away from English to symbols. Symbols typically don't need to be translated as intensively as full sentences in any language, and English is notoriously slippery in that regard. I always found it amusing that Chris and co overtly copied so much of Magic the Gathering (one of the GGG founders was an MTG champion of some repute) and yet never embraced its early innovation of symbols/visual shorthand for common attributes and stats. Certainly the cards also use keywords but tmk they left the verbosity behind long ago. Symbols are often intuitive and even if not, very quickly integrated into one's understanding of a game's mechanics.

This would have the added side effect of providing GGG with boundaries regarding new mechanics (harder to go gonzo batshit when you're not allowed to use full sentences to introduce new game mechanics), but that's a different discussion.

"

stalkingjackal wrote:

Idk if any of you played TL Infinite, but they have an in-game system where you can hover over keywords and it explains what it is.

When crafting, there's an info icon and if you click it shows all the affix tiers & weightings.

In their trade house, if you look up an item it tells you if it's a global drop or boss/area-specific drop, and which monster/area it drops in.

To do all these things in PoE, you need to have multiple windows open in your browser. So yeah, no new player is gonna tolerate that.

It seems GGG has just accepted that PoE gets only returning players & little to no new players.

TLI is real good and its getting better.

i honestly would be playing it right now but POE's crucible tree power creep is too good to pass on.

that said, i believe GGG already accepted that they've already cornered the market.

people who like poe are already playing poe.

newer players? they dgaf. they know its very likely newer players might not like the game.

i personally am having the worst time of my poe life right now.

sanctum was my top number one league where i had tons of fun. and just 1 expansion later the experience is bad.