You should balance SSF game mode separately from trade.
" no, the logic doesnt follow like that. trade gives you access to other peoples items yes, but also other peoples desires. if you never play melee, never have never will, but you find an amazing melee weapon that now has massive value to you because it has massive value to someone else. the entire value system of the games items is increased through trade. through trade people interact, make friendships, form communities which tie them to the game and make the more enjoyable. people group together, party up, we are social animals. guilds form. new avenues of play become open to you because you are in an environment where yes you share gear but you also share goals, if your goals are different to mine then that allows me to find value in doing something that helps you achieve your goals, that can then become rewarding to me. the problem isnt giving ssf players more gear. the problem is by giving them more gear you encourage people who start the game to play ssf which then traps them in a smaller game with potentially way less longevity and meaning. the extra gear doesnt really matter that much, yet it comes with a potentially massive downside to the game itself. trade is a positive for the game. when i first came to this game in 2013 it was a weekend break away from d3 which was just a bit shit. if there had been an option to go self found with higher loot drops i would absolutely have clicked that and stayed there because why would i nerf my loot drops by leaving? why would i leave behind all the items and characters i have found? i would have stayed there. i would not have met all the amazing people i have met in this game, ive had serious relationships with people ive met in this game, lived together, ive made friends for life, most of my time spent in this game has been doing stuff that i would only do in a trade environment. things i didnt know i wanted to do in an arpg, when i came here i came here to find items and i would have just clicked the give me more items button, been stuck there. i would not be here today writing this if there was an ssf with increased drops button. its nothing to do with more or less items being a good/bad thing, its about what you encourage players to do and what that means for the game. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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" I would argue that this is a double-edged sword. The game and community is formed from the trade ecosystem, but if players get bored of the game or quit for other reasons, it dies with them. That then leaves players who stayed with a near-nonexistent economy which the game is still balanced around to gear up, resulting in an even worse experience for them. You see this a lot in the later half of a league when the playerbase had dropped off massively as they wait for the next expansion to launch. Notably rare items are even harder to find, even more expensive, for example. And GGG, or at least Chris, has stated that they want PoE to last for a very long time. If the economy disintegrates, so will the game. By making a proper SSF league that is balanced for single-player in mind, you ensure the game will remain stable and playable in the event its popularity vanishes. You can argue that a lot of players suddenly migrating to SSF would also negatively impact the economy were such a thing be done, in which I'd agree. However, this could be avoided and people will be less inclined to play SSF if GGG made trading more approachable. Obviously the most radical way would be to implement an automated trade system, as it's been talked about to death how people despise the tedium of idling in their hideout spamming trade requests to players hoping at least one of them will answer. Nevermind the third-party trade communities which have a tendency of either scamming players or has power-tripping mods who'd love to ban you on a whim. PoE players: Our game has a wide diversity of builds. Also PoE players: The [league mechanic] doesn't need to be nerfed, you just need to play a [current meta] build! And the winds will cry / and many men will die / and all the waves will bow down / to the Loreley Last edited by Pizzarugi#6258 on Feb 9, 2024, 1:06:27 AM
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i dont really think that much of the game is balanced around trade. the game works perfectly fine in ssf right now. ssf is great, it comes with its own great things and all those things are already in the game right now.
i dont think we should even have an ssf mode. if you wanna play ssf just dont trade. the thing just exists so people can prove they didnt trade as a bragging right thing, you dont actually need the mode to exist. i think way more people stick around because of the friends they made than are forced to quit because an economy slows down. you dont need the economy, you can play the game ssf and do all the things already. people in hcssf are basically doing everything, theyre killing all the uber bosses. you dont need trade. its just asking for power creep. the power creep from trade is the downside of trade. thats not what makes trade in a game good, thats the price you pay for all the amazing things trade brings to your game. all the amaizng things playing ssf brings to your game are already there in the game now, they dont require increased drop rates, its just asking for power creep, its saying ok so ziz and alk can blast down all the ubers in ssfhc but i cant so i want more drops so i can do that too because i dont have the time investment they have. i just dont buy into that entire way of thinking, the game scales to your level of investment and skill. if you cant do something then its not there for you, its there for the people who can do it. in trade league i dont have every item perfect mirror tier stats. should drop rates be increased to let me have that? no, i dont need it, those items are not in the game for a player like me to have them. whats really balanced around trade? a progenesis drop rate? you dont need it. mirror drop rate? you dont need it. ssf isnt unplayable because that flask is too rare to reliably find. ssf lets you find value in things that would otherwise be trivialised by trade. i dont really see how then trivialising those things by increasing drop rates helps ssf? i dont even think ssf league should exist as an option. people can play ssf in a normal league so let them do it. annuhart always played ssf, made a big thing of it. when you separate people off like that then sure, the people who really do find ssf the way to play and really will never want to trade are where they want to be. but you wall people off from making friends and playing with them which is such a huge part of this game for so many people and a lot of those people didnt know thats what they wanted when they came here, but they were not walled off from it by being incentivised into a mode with more drops and eventually made friends, played together, joined guilds. all those games like grim dawn etc where theres no community, they dont last. single player seems cool and it is, but its limited, its shorter lived. wheres annhuhart now? he doesnt play any more. im still playing. as the player base falls off they can just increase whatever they need to in the base game, if they need to at all. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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I'd love to see a crafting overhaul that made trade less appealing, I'm making a ton of money this league in the context of other leagues, but still can't afford the good stuff that isn't standard corrupted uniques. I've tried crafting my own gear and the best things I ended up making weren't what I needed anyway. Things like Aisling slamming and the success rates on fossil crafts are absurd, even with a fair amount of 600+ delving and clusters.... I'm not even going to get into it about clusters. I think the experimented jewelry has become the perfect example of unobtanium. If they just dropped a few of the crap tiers on affixes for high ilevel gear it would be a world of difference and tossed "reduced attribute requirements", it's pretend stats there to decrease the odds of getting a decent roll. I'd bounce out of trade league in a heartbeat.
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""Potentially" is doing an awful lot of work here, and between that and "trapped" (which is just false) this is very paternalistic. I mean nobody's trapped, right? It's just an option in a videogame. The idea that easier-than-SSF item acquisition would "trap" people in SSF also implies that people in trade leagues are trapped, because trade leagues also have easier-than-SSF item acquisition. And yet I think it would come across as incredibly rude if I were to tell people in trade league they're trapped there. They're not. They have minds of their own, with the same dignity as me. Don't you? And once we get past this "it would trap people in it!" silliness, what else is there in this concern? It's all a bit like saying people shouldn't make action movies because I'm a fan of dour period dramas, I've made a lot of friends discussing those, and I don't want people to become seduced by the base appeal of explosions and punching. There's some irony in deploying this kind of patronising "I know what's really good for people" argument when the subject is a mass-market videogame designed about blowing up millions of monsters and designed with tools of addiction. |
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" they are trapped because they are now in a league where they cant make friends, party, decide to trade etc. someone who trades can decide to stop trading any time they want. currently in the game someone in ssf can decide to start trading whenever they want and migrate their stuff to trade league. if you make ssf league a separate balance stat then you have to remove the ability to migrate from ssf to trade. and that is why it then traps people there, because all their characters are in that league, all their items, they played the game for 1500 hours and all that investment is in that league and they cannot just decide to make friends and play with them without leaving all that investment into the game behind. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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" Good luck getting the Forbidden Flesh/Flame jewels in SSF without spending the entire league grinding the bosses hoping they not only drop those jewels, but roll them with the ascendancy you wanted. And that's just one of many examples. Right now, SSF is oppressively limiting in what you can and can't play due to the sheer rarity of some items. Want to play a Zoomancer build? Good luck getting a +2 all minion gem, elder, and shaper modded helmet which is a core item, for example. Flicker strike? I hope you're happy being content just using Terminus Est or Oro's Sacrifice, because you won't find anything better. You shouldn't be forced into perpetuating an economy and its terrible trade system to have the freedom to play the game how you like. Grim Dawn didn't just die from a lack of community. Its endgame is absolutely basic level compared to the amount of effort GGG put into PoE. Surely you can agree that there's a big difference between grinding the same dungeons after finishing the campaign, and running 130+ different maps that are randomly peppered with various leagues of times past? And speaking of leagues, that's another failing of Grim Dawn which I think contributes more to its lack of players: No seasons. I strongly doubt Path of Exile would keep the community it has if we only had standard league since launch. PoE players: Our game has a wide diversity of builds.
Also PoE players: The [league mechanic] doesn't need to be nerfed, you just need to play a [current meta] build! And the winds will cry / and many men will die / and all the waves will bow down / to the Loreley |
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"”I can’t trade with anyone while I’m reading a book, therefore books trap people” would be an absurd thing to say, wouldn’t it? "People who move from SSF to trade league, and people who move from trade league to SSF league, can both do that at any time, with or without any migration options. I have no qualms about deleting that option though, sure, that’s fine. "Who is this imaginary person who can’t change modes in a videogame? “They cannot decide to make friends” yes, they can. People do things on their own all the time and then at other times go and do things that are social. You don’t have to live in one mode at all times to be capable of it. |
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I'd personally like some sort of a deterministic "tree" of sorts like they have with atlas and passives where you can slowly grind your way towards crafting results, like a "defensive stats", "caster stats", whatever system. They could make it hard to respec or extra grindy? I don't care, where I could start picking up half the junk that falls on the ground and absorb it or something to work towards actual crafter skills, instead of just pissing away currency and time for some generally disappointing outcome. At the pinnacle of it, you'd have maybe specialization in synth, fracturing, influenced crafting or whatever. Just something besides sitting around in my hideout wasting currency on something with nothing to show for it half the time.
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+1
But with Last Epochs CoF on the horizon this is only a matter of time anyway. My best guess: majority of players would prefer SSF anyway if it was viable for endgame without feeling like a second full time job. At least I personally would. But with drop rates balanced around trading, SSF is a total no-go. |
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