Sometimes I feel like I'm playing a VERY different game from everyone else...

"

Thesuffering wrote:

Preach gaming did just that.

Ironically enough, almost all his negatives and positives were things i highlighted in my post, and that came from someone actually going in blind and matching almost word for word. I guess there's your answer OP.

Quoting him: "There's so many thing i don't understand, not because it's hard, i think this is the interesting thing, it's not clear and they certainly don't work in a logical sense".

I would even say his journey is a must watch for devs, and how they could patch up things to make the experience better for new players and veterans alike.

Thanks for mentioning him, Suff!

But Preach Gaming immediately says at the beginning "My only experience with a game like this is D3". And not even the expansion which means he probably didn't play it for long...Much earlier in this chat I said that is an extremely rare scenario, and of COURSE someone like that is going to struggle. This particular game ASSUMES you generally know arpgs. Having that baseline knowledge alone from playing 3-4 different arpgs BEFORE PoE is enough to fix nearly every single difficulty he encountered.

I would NEVER want PoE to become the kind of game where THIS GUY is the person they appeal to. It would be the most boring game ever. If you had to teach someone literally how to play the "genre", you are better off playing a much much simpler, 90s/early 2000s rpg.

BUT BUT BUT even for someone at his level:

Watch the outro of the Day 1 video, and listen to what he says. Experiencing the game blind, look at all that happiness. That is PRECISELY what we are missing in current gamers. Day 1 for the 3rd party, streamer, book-readers is WHY ISN'T THIS WORKING? WHY IS THIS SO HARD? GAAAAAAAAAAAAH SCREW THIS". Day 1 for the actual game player "THIS IS WONDERFUL, I HAD SO MUCH FUN"

Watching a streamer, following a build, relying on all these extra tools, sucking you completely OUT of the game leads to a much faster burnout/lack of knowledge/lack of enjoyment and then they blame the GAME. The game does nothing but teach you, if you LET IT.

****I would also like to point out: from Day 1 to the Endgame video took him TWO WEEKS. That's all!!!! Imagine repeating that process and learning new characters for MONTHS without 3rd party tools. You get faster and faster, learn more and more, get better and better. All without the need for ANYTHING sucking you out of the game. Because you CAN.

Dude, can you at least be a tiny bit coherent?

"

jsuslak313 wrote:

I would NEVER want PoE to become the kind of game where THIS GUY is the person they appeal to. It would be the most boring game ever. If you had to teach someone literally how to play the "genre", you are better off playing a much much simpler, 90s/early 2000s rpg.

"

jsuslak313 wrote:

Watch the outro of the Day 1 video, and listen to what he says. Experiencing the game blind, look at all that happiness. That is PRECISELY what we are missing in current gamers.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"

jsuslak313 wrote:

This particular game ASSUMES you generally know arpgs. Having that baseline knowledge alone from playing 3-4 different arpgs BEFORE PoE is enough to fix nearly every single difficulty he encountered.

"

jsuslak313 wrote:

Watching a streamer, following a build, relying on all these extra tools, sucking you completely OUT of the game leads to a much faster burnout/lack of knowledge/lack of enjoyment and then they blame the GAME. The game does nothing but teach you, if you LET IT.

Yeah people are stupid bro.
They will always just copy whatever the youtuber tells them to do.

You can easily just pick up this game and use your brain and get to level 95 and finish ur atlas with nothing but pob.

I have also never used any 3rd party tool besides PoB, unless you count the trade macro.

The passive tree was in the old playstation 1 ff games, if people cant grasp it by now then they are lost, but most people are. The average IQ in the US is 98 lol.

Just play video games to have fun and entertain yourself. Don't be a metaslave, you wont learn anything and you will have less fun.

"

AdRonZh3Ro wrote:

Dude, can you at least be a tiny bit coherent?

Perfectly coherent from my second post. Perhaps you didn't read it carefully enough? I said earlier that the majority of "new" players aren't "new" to the genre, they pick up PoE because they like this style of game and have played many like it before. It is RARE that someone picks up PoE having literally no baseline of how an arpg works. For that RARE person, this game is really goddamn hard. But for all others, you can EASILY pick up PoE and work out what to do and how to improve without anyone else telling you that you can't.

With regards to the Preach Gaming video: he admits that he falls into that RARE category, those that I agree would have the MOST trouble with this game. That was my initial point, (and then you casually left off the "but but but" that I wrote...indicating a NEW observation...it couldn't have been clearer) And yet he loved it and said he had a great time struggling through obstacles, learning new things, improving, etc. And from literally ground zero he finished the entire game, with NO HELP, in 2 weeks. The average "new" player WITH the arpg background would have it even easier. Hence, 3rd party tools are NOT necessary and connecting back to my main argument: just PLAY THE GAME. You learn everything you need. (or I guess my concession, you learn 80%ish of what you need).

Here's the TLDR:
1) Just play the game, no need for outside help
2) new players are generally not totally "new" or brainless slugs. Don't belittle them by constantly assuming they can't function on their own.
3) At it's core, the game is NOT complex: its generic arpg for the most part. Players have fooled themelves into thinking the game is a lot more complicated than it is, simply because there is a lot of choice presented to a player. Choice alone does not make a game complicated. Only the endgame, late game crafting, and certain league mechanics are complicated.
4) You can get so much more enjoyment out of the game if you actually just play the game and NOT rely on build guides, streamers, vids, wikis, tools, etc. JUST PLAY THE GAME.

I just tried "Unguided watch Unguided PoE".

Rule
1. Ignore the context of "streamer contents".
2. Turn off the sound.
3. Only see what's going in the combat. (skip everything else)

~~~~~~~~

He was learning from the game. For instance in the Lab, he had already started to manage his game play for a set purpose

"do not die"
- It's obviously from the game design because he had to start all over again.

using the basic skill functions
- Leap Slam to disengage, Flicker Strike to engage.

And he finally managed to beat Izaro followed with a shot of adrenaline.

I have no doubt he knew he was going to do melee stuff from the very beginning.
And maybe he changed the rule at some point ? (I saw a PoB screen and PoB has built-in "not really optimized" optimization in skill tab that lists recommended gems by DPS/skill category.)

But anyway, what else could he expect more as melee in PoE ?

People that talk about "game is impossible with outside help" tend to be the same people that consider everything below red maps "tutorial"

Pretty damn long this tutorial that is worth a solid week of playtime for those who dont speedrun

Considering how close red maps are to the point of no more content to be found in the game, any reasonable person would think its DEEP into bonus content. "But serious players have most of the playtime there!", yeah, in most rpgs i also tend to spend most of my playtime tapping sidequests and preparing to tap top optional bosses. Even on the remake of resident evil 2, most of my playtime was perfecting my runs until i got a S rank. The brunt of my time on starcraft was also spend trying to climb the ladder above plat

"The game expands after red maps". So do most games. Almost every game with post-story content offer stuff that feels broader and all around more enjoyable than what you get for just finishing the story. In a sense, maven is very much in the place of ultima weapon and ubers are poe's omega weapon. Yeah, ubers surely feel a whole diferent experience from kitava, but so does playing starcraft on plat vs playing on mid-silver, or trying to speedrun RE2 with mister X on your heels vs taking your time to walk around him, or comparing the mentioned weapon monsters with regular story mode bosses

By the logic of a bunch of this forum, the whole run tro the story on resident evil is also "tutorial", the first 20 hours of most final fantasy games? "tutorial", everything you play on starcraft until around plat/diamond? "tutorial"

Poe DOES have a casual portion that can be perfectly played with no outside help. Its kitava and maybe white maps. Pretty much every skill gem works on that point, sure you might have to respawn a bunch and brute force your way out some encounters, but that also happens on every non-braindead game: Duriel on D2 was far more brutal than anything story poe have to offer, the original starcraft had some quite arduous missions on campaign and hardly anyone complains about how many times they had to respawn on sen fortress on dark souls community

Red maps and beyond demand outside help? Yeah, and i completely agree the game makes a piss-poor job at telling critical info and some subpar gems and mechanics are in bad need of buffs, but one would think the game being challenging so far into top content rather than cakewalk all the way tro would be a good thing

"

feike wrote:

People that talk about "game is impossible with outside help" tend to be the same people that consider everything below red maps "tutorial"

Pretty damn long this tutorial that is worth a solid week of playtime for those who dont speedrun

I mean... OG content additions were the races. Sign up and compete to see who could get the furthest the quickest.

I don't even know how many people I've convinced to start playing that quit because they tried to play it without any outside information. They'd make a build that would struggle to get past many parts of the story content.

Even if you're using build guides, how often do you think a brand new player lands on a non-viable build simply because they weren't paying attention to the version number?

Can you play without any outside info or tools? Sure. Some people might even enjoy that. There are also plenty that say screw this as soon as they realize how much there is that they don't know and they realize they have to start over from scratch every time they screw up their build. Most of which really don't come online until you're out of the story content.

"

chipninja wrote:

I mean... OG content additions were the races. Sign up and compete to see who could get the furthest the quickest.

I don't even know how many people I've convinced to start playing that quit because they tried to play it without any outside information. They'd make a build that would struggle to get past many parts of the story content.

Even if you're using build guides, how often do you think a brand new player lands on a non-viable build simply because they weren't paying attention to the version number?

Can you play without any outside info or tools? Sure. Some people might even enjoy that. There are also plenty that say screw this as soon as they realize how much there is that they don't know and they realize they have to start over from scratch every time they screw up their build. Most of which really don't come online until you're out of the story content.

The story recieved significantly more updates over the last years than just races...

Also, i dont know how you are so certain these people you convinced to play would stay if the game was any clearer, you dont need to know the finer points of the game to beat kitava, someone who quits before even finishing the story had other problems with the game than "not clear enough", maybe they felt it was too slow, maybe too repetitive, maybe they disliked the sockets system, or the outdated graphics, or the story, i know a lot of people that dont like to play past maps because lack of story to push forward and they dislike the feeling they are just running random places for the sake of number-raising, but i legit never saw someone seriously complain story mode was too complicated

Define "viable build", if its "can get to white maps and maybe tap some yellows", i can garantee its not that hard, i could get there on my first try back when i wasnt even aware you could alch maps and i still can make toons that get there just picking a skill gem i think its cool and making some shallow theorycraft around it. If your definition is "can reach and clear red maps", well... that kinda makes my point that if you need to go THAT deep into the game to require a guide, how it is a bad thing?

Much dont come online until after story? True, but again... wich game trully comes online by end of story mode? The point you are complaining is hard is a place that is SUPPOSED to be hard, only very dedicated players ever even try to go for red maps, and yeah, for those players it does makes sense to impose some skill and knowledge checks

"

feike wrote:

"

chipninja wrote:

I mean... OG content additions were the races. Sign up and compete to see who could get the furthest the quickest.

The story recieved significantly more updates over the last years than just races...

You missed the point. You were making a comparison to "speed runners" and yet that was literally a feature in the game when we got our hands on it. The fact races aren't a big feature now doesn't mean that the OG players weren't encouraged to speed run content from the beginning. That's without even talking about mechanics that have been added since that are built around the concept of clearing things as quickly as possible.

"

feike wrote:

maybe they felt it was too slow, maybe too repetitive, maybe they disliked the sockets system, or the outdated graphics, or the story, i know a lot of people that dont like to play past maps because lack of story to push forward and they dislike the feeling they are just running random places for the sake of number-raising, but i legit never saw someone seriously complain story mode was too complicated

I didn't say the story is complicated. And it is slow... when you don't know what's going on and how things work. I mean, one of the things new players isn't thinking is "this is a game about killing monsters, so I should skip these ones" but that's exactly one of the major things that slows it down. A lot of things are just plain counterintuitive.

You keep coming back to the story, but the story is just world building and justification for the underlying mechanics in a game.

"

feike wrote:

Much dont come online until after story? True, but again... wich game trully comes online by end of story mode? The point you are complaining is hard is a place that is SUPPOSED to be hard, only very dedicated players ever even try to go for red maps, and yeah, for those players it does makes sense to impose some skill and knowledge checks

Ok, so let's put the information into perspective. Tooltip DPS isn't accurate. Is it smarter to take a + or % gain? Does the order of things matter? When a new player looks at a skill tree, they see all the nodes that do cool things. More often than not, they take what looks cool... and they're missing the life and ES they really need to progress. And they get one-shot.

Can you brute force bosses? Sure. The new players I know didn't have fun doing it. I'm not talking about new to ARPG players either.

One of em, build guides gave him some direction. Only he realized the gear he was finding was trash. So he looked into how you trade. Oh, a third party site (at the time). He tried trading. Most of the people were AFK or didn't have the item any more. He ended up spending days looking for gear... on a web browser. When that failed, he moved on to searching for RMT instead and got items in minutes instead of days.

Sure, trade is built into THIS site now, but players are still expected to use a webpage to make solid currency. Funny enough, that's not the case on the console side. Sure, you still have to deal with sifting through trash and people being AFK, but it's built in. It's just a prime example. PC is EXPECTED to use tools outside of the game.

"

feike wrote:

The point you are complaining is hard is a place that is SUPPOSED to be hard, only very dedicated players ever even try to go for red maps, and yeah, for those players it does makes sense to impose some skill and knowledge checks

That's where you misunderstand the point. Red maps aren't hard unless you've got garbage luck, don't trade, or put together a bad build. Depending on how bad that luck or build is, that extends all the way to gear/skill/build checks in the story. Having taken the time to use third-party resources though, I can't even remember when I haven't gotten to red maps. Even when I made builds for the luls.

None of the things above have anything to do with "hard."

It's a lack of information conveyed in an effective way to the player. That works for games like the Dark Souls series - but mostly because the mechanics in the background are more limited. For a game like PoE with year after year of new additions and interactions, that's not going to happen.

New players are going to pick items and skill gems based off wrong stats because the interactions aren't always clear, and the tooltips aren't conveying it properly. They're going to interact with league mechanics and get nuked.

All of the knowledge that helps you become a better player is found elsewhere. In build guides, hours of videos detailing league mechanics, tools that more accurately represent DPS or EHP, pages and pages of content explaining crafting, or even just basic trade features. And we haven't even talked about shaping your mapping experience.

The game is VERY different when you use those resources and actually learn what's going on under the hood. It's the difference between people taking a week or two to complete the story mode with a build that feels slow and ineffective and then quitting because they don't feel like they've progressed, versus completing the story in a day or two and having a build that feels good to play.

If you're measuring your level of success as how many times you kill Kitava without looking at anything outside the game, more power to you.

But when you find someone else that's doing the same thing, show them a video of the ubers being one-shot. Then come back here and tell us what that player does next. If they don't quit out of frustration, it's going to be them hitting third party websites and tools.

Don't get me wrong, I like having the complexity. It's just not explained well in-game. You absolutely do not have the same experience playing solely in-game versus leveraging other tools and resources.