a great league failing because of things that have already failed, ultimatum and AN.

"

alhazred70 wrote:

i want to agree with the sentiment of things sometimes going bad from predictable and often repeated mistakes. Ones that they should know by now are mistakes. But damn the OP makes it hard to want to agree with them. Drop the goofy tencent tin foil and the pretend 80% of my pretend or not (sounds pretend to me either way) friends list, ad populum argument. For starters GGG has exibited all of the traits we see, and the implied critisism from day 1; so no need for tencent to explain anything. And you don't need an anecdotal group of friends to state the basic reasons which are often repeated and have been points of critisim from literally closed beta.

Two of the worst aspects of POE an otherwise really crazilly well made game are the failed idea that "confluence of bullshit" makes good challenging content. And the exact same confluence of bullshit makes for fair, well signaled "time to live" and "time to kill" in game design terms.

Too much TTK (Hit Point sponges in gamer terminology AKA "AN mobs" or the obvious equivelent which we have right now, by any other name AN) is actually just as bad as too little TTK (cookie clicker gameplay). Its not an easy target to hit. And often they might hit the target for some 20million DPS meta build but 99% of the players feel like every rare is an Uber.

Too much TTL (never feeling threatened) is just as bad as too little (falling over quicker than reasonable human reaction times to threats that happen quicker than reasonable human visual processing times). This ones worse in my view. I can choose to limit my juicing, but no matter how tanky i build confluence of bullshit still makes every build just instantly fall over at some point.

Even the worst game designer can make a game that kills you unfairly. Its incredibly easy to kill players. You can just hit them with more damage than they can possibly have HP for and faster than they can possibly do anything about. Sadly this describes POE even though i don't think GGG are bad at this, I just think they have blinders on about this subject.

Or possibly they are unaware of the principle of TTL. They've publicly expressed the idea that its okay to randomly have a gameover screen appear. So its pretty clear they're just mistaken and stuborn or are making virtue of necessity.

TTK on the other hand they've talked about being "too short" so clearly this concept is part of their design process unlike TTL. The issue here is that they seem to not understand or are unwilling to believe that TTK that's too long is just as bad for the games (intended) design parameters as "cookie clicker" TTK is.

I say intended because we can see POE2 and have heard them speak many times about wanting to make the combat more engaging. Obviously the clear speed zoomers love POE's cookie clicker "flow state" but also obviously that was an emergent meta of play and not the design intention of POE.

The fundamental problem here is something called "bounding" which is designing your game so that "dynamics" don't get totally out of control. In this regard POE is kinda like a bad recording of a kick ass live heavy metal show... the dynamics frequently ruin the sound, there's massive peaking and muddy parts, overly quiet parts where the subtle bits are lost in the crowd noise. The dynamics destroy the intent of the bands music. Yeah we want the guitars to be distorted, but not the actual RECORDING itself. POE is a lot like that. It needs to control its dynamics better. its needs less "clipping" and distorted overdriven mics (spike damage AKA confluence of bullshit) It needs to have the gain turned down a little and a nice audio compressor to keep the dynamics in range.

I think the audio compression analogy perfectly sums up my issues with POE. I love the fucking band... but GD I would love to listen to a show without speaker blow out.