Necropolis = Lessons Not Learned

I'm just not sure where the design philosophy is at anymore or what GGG is doing.

POE players are nothing if not dedicated. They will tell you directly, clearly, sometimes angrily, exactly what they like and don't like.

This league is a combo of some of the worst aspects of leagues we've had in the past. Flaws and oversights and quality checks that should have came up when this was being put together. These are things that they have changed after rollout of those leagues. This makes some of the dumb, goofy, and frustrating parts of necropolis frustrating for me where as much as I complain about the game, say this game sucks etc. At the end of the day I think POE is awesome and I want to see it succeed. But right now I think they're just so unbelievably lucky that blizzard can't get it together either. They are tripping over themselves right now because they've become arrogant about their game.


On initial rollout I saw right away that the league mechanic is overtuned and unrewarding in acts. And its forced on everyone so you can't just ignore it until your character has power and resources to tackle it. You're gonna take those 400% crit multi and 200% life mob packs to the head at level 27 and you're gonna like it. And your smile is gonna deepen when you see these mobs drop whites and whetstones. Now back on earth, in reality far from the delusion that this company is experiencing, you're gonna wonder why monsters you have to work harder to kill are less rewarding than monsters who just happened to be described with yellow. And these benefits are stupid. 400% quant is usually pretty worthless in acts. What are these mobs gonna be dropping? Just throw us some flat bubble gum currency until quant starts to matter more, like in maps for example. Make overcoming the challenging part of the mechanic tied reward where if you kill a juiced up pack up mobs, loot flies out of it.

Now whenever I'm clicking in a map and I don't see any yellow I'm thinking alright cool, I'm playing standard for the next couple minutes. The divine slot machines are cool. I got one in fact. Was pretty silly pulling five div out in act 9. That positive outcome didn't make up for how annoying it was to play through the rest of acts. This mechanic isn't good just because I got lucky once.

Now we talk about the crafting part. Its a mess. It feels like I'm wasting my time. I've never had it spit out something I'm happy with. It is less determanistic than just sitting there in your hideout and slamming essence on base items. The crafting part of the league is basically just alch orbs with some special combinations that are supposed to give you uniques or something. The modifiers have quality control issues. What the heck does 50 fire modifier strength mean? Write a better tooltip. Explain what that does better.

Harvest had people complaining about the garden management and it was changed and had parts removed for being unreasonable. This league we instead get to be excited about GRAVEYARD management. The UI is bad, wastes your time, and misclicks are very easy to do. The limited storage on corpses is also really dumb because I'm just holding onto corpses until I know more about what they do. But oops, I'm full. Just bury some random ones and throw away whatever garbage it prints out.

These are lessons they're supposed to have learned before. We told them what was bad and we saw them fix it. Then they made the same silly mistakes over again. Very disappointing to see.

Leaguemechanic is complete ASS. I don't won't to play it, but the game forces me to do because you can't disable it when you join a area/map.

I give it a try a few more hours but at the moment i think i won't play this league...

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frky wrote:

Leaguemechanic is complete ASS. I don't won't to play it, but the game forces me to do because you can't disable it when you join a area/map.

I give it a try a few more hours but at the moment i think i won't play this league...

You could just come to std and have fun with all your old legacy shit from past few leagues like i am.

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frky wrote:

Leaguemechanic is complete ASS. I don't won't to play it, but the game forces me to do because you can't disable it when you join a area/map.

That’s what happens when GGG tries ti create something new and not copying something from somewhere else.

This is going to be one of the worst leagues in retention numbers and they lost 1/4 of the players on Steam over the weekend already.

GGG needs to get into their thick skull that people stay when they are having fun and not because they need to go through lengthy and painful mechanics to progress.

It's a temp league bro, they try things out, some things work, some things don't and some need a lttle bit extra polish.

Necropolis for me is one that needs polish, most of the problems should be a fairly easy fix.

Sort the crafting (personally i would prefer that crafting leagues would just stop but there is a market for it sadly)

Tune the area modifiers
Allow full player control of the league mechanic
Add more incentive to interact with it.

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TIGRElaranja wrote:

This is going to be one of the worst leagues in retention numbers and they lost 1/4 of the players on Steam over the weekend already.

This isn't an indicator of anything. I don't remember who said it, but back in an interview during Expedition league (which a LOT of people also hated purely because of the massive nerf hammer), they said a lot of players quit the game after beating act 10. And I mean historically, apparently most players don't care enough about mapping. People like us, who tend to stick around all the way to T16+ maps and beyond? We're the niche.

And it plays out in statistics. Remember the days when GGG would publicly announce statistics mid-league? The higher the number of challenges completed, the drastically smaller the player count who reached it. The player counts fall HARD past a certain single-digit challenge completion.

We're 3 days into a league, it wouldn't surprise me if most of these people have just reached and beat Kitava.

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Pizzarugi wrote:

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TIGRElaranja wrote:

This is going to be one of the worst leagues in retention numbers and they lost 1/4 of the players on Steam over the weekend already.

This isn't an indicator of anything. I don't remember who said it, but back in an interview during Expedition league (which a LOT of people also hated purely because of the massive nerf hammer), they said a lot of players quit the game after beating act 10. And I mean historically, apparently most players don't care enough about mapping.

We're 3 days into a league, it wouldn't surprise me if most of these people have just reached and beat Kitava.

its just a bad league, ppl just jumped ship to play more fun games..
then torture them selfs in poe.

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anti4z500 wrote:

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Pizzarugi wrote:

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TIGRElaranja wrote:

This is going to be one of the worst leagues in retention numbers and they lost 1/4 of the players on Steam over the weekend already.

This isn't an indicator of anything. I don't remember who said it, but back in an interview during Expedition league (which a LOT of people also hated purely because of the massive nerf hammer), they said a lot of players quit the game after beating act 10. And I mean historically, apparently most players don't care enough about mapping.

We're 3 days into a league, it wouldn't surprise me if most of these people have just reached and beat Kitava.

its just a bad league, ppl just jumped ship to play more fun games..
then torture them selfs in poe.

Keep telling yourself that. What I said also plays out in statistics. Remember the days when GGG would publicly announce statistics mid-league? The higher the number of challenges completed, the drastically smaller the player count who reached it. The player counts fall HARD past a certain single-digit challenge completion which is roughly the same amount of challenges you complete by the time you beat a10.

Can second the initial critics.
The mechanics are annoying and since you cannot turn them off during campaign they make playing pain in the a**.

It would be SO EASY!
Click on the bubble: Area WITH mechanics.
Click on normal portal: Area WITHOUT mechanics.

If you have a medium-strong or self-invented build, you won't have any fun by hitting rare monsters for 2 minutes until they are down.

Hey GGG, do you want to open the game to newbies? This way it's the safest to keep new players away and scare them forever.

I'm highly annoyed right now and rage-quit the game some minutes ago. (lvl 56, Act 8-10)
Never had so little fun while playing.

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BaerndME wrote:

Can second the initial critics.
The mechanics are annoying and since you cannot turn them off during campaign they make playing pain in the a**.

It would be SO EASY!
Click on the bubble: Area WITH mechanics.
Click on normal portal: Area WITHOUT mechanics.

If you have a medium-strong or self-invented build, you won't have any fun by hitting rare monsters for 2 minutes until they are down.

Hey GGG, do you want to open the game to newbies? This way it's the safest to keep new players away and scare them forever.

I'm highly annoyed right now and rage-quit the game some minutes ago. (lvl 56, Act 8-10)
Never had so little fun while playing.

That won't work in maps, but it's a good idea for acts 1-10.