An Open Letter to GGG RE: One Portal

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soulravin#7258 wrote:

I play the game the developer puts in front of me.And without complaint i either like the game and continue or i dont and move on. Players who want to change the games they play should build one themselves.

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Gwonam#5505 wrote:

Something else others in this thread have brought up that I wanted to elaborate on is that there are currently two games in PoE2: the campaign and mapping. Both games have completely different pacing and expectations.

The campaign is meant to be slow, brutal, and rewarding. Your average player will die over and over to bosses and certain maps, but they’ll learn something every time that will eventually push them to victory. It’s like learning a boss in a Souls or Ys game. This is the part of the game that’s getting praise from critics, as well as both new players and old players. This is also the mode that was clearly made for couch co-op. Jonathan and other GGG devs have hammered home that PoE2 is supposed to be a good co-op game. This is very important. Keep it in mind.

Maps, meanwhile, are cookie clicker loot farms like they were in PoE1 - except with the pacing and lethality of PoE2. The goal is not to learn how to run a specific map, but how to optimize your clear speed to gain currency. You’re asked not to overcome a specific challenge by running it over and over - which is essentially what the old portal system did, with limitations on how many times you could run a specific map. Instead, you’re asked to optimize your mapping. You’re asked to hedge your bets on difficult maps, because running easy maps likely won’t get you any waystones at your level. Hell, even running juiced red maps hardly drops any t13-15. Your best bet to start a chain of maps is to trade for a few at your build’s level. This is fine for players who enjoy Ruthless. But like I said yesterday, this isn’t intuitive for new players. New players are asked to completely rethink how they approach the game once they hit maps, with few guidelines to help them other than "run this tier map x times."

Now recall what I said earlier about GGG pushing PoE2 as a fun couch co-op game. The campaign caters to co-op very well. Maps, however, do not suit co-op at all. The main culprit? The one-death limit. It’s pretty deflating having to abandon a map because one person got nuked by screen junk, or a Volatile Plants hiding under a pile of corpses. You can’t run the map again like you would in Campaign, using the knowledge you learned from your death to finish the map. Your chance at redemption is gone. That's the exact opposite of what the Campaign teaches you. We can sit here on the forums, smugly telling the plebs to git gud from our high horses. But PoE2 can’t be a good couch co-op game in its current state, at least past the campaign.

How do we fix this? I’m still in favor of my three-strikes system, where the map will close after dying but will let you re-attempt the same seed (maybe with fewer rewards each attempt). Making that work for multiplayer is trickier, though. Maybe players who die will be unable to re-enter the map until every other player has died, at which point the map owner can queue up the same map again? This poses the problem of players killing all but one mob pack, then suiciding so they can run the map again. That's the next wrinkle I have to work out with my suggestion.

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CharAznable#7844 wrote:

One portal best portal.
If you don't like it, build more tanky.