Can't progress anymore

What is a good amount of time for someone to farm easy maps before they move up? I think according to ggg its about 10, which is what their quest has you complete before moving up with low tier maps. If you have to do 50-60 maps with no challenge to move up with your quest then there is another issue.

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LordSett#6649 wrote:

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

No, the game is just badly designed and people are quitting because of this. This is an undeniable fact, that's not me talking. That's just numbers and statistics. Clearly the game needs to be re-balanced and endgame is in a terrible state atm.

I don't know where you're getting these numbers from, because on Steam alone the game has been maintaining a very stable ~300k players 24 hours peaks since its EA launch, which is utterly remarkable to be so stable for any game at all, let alone an Early Access launch.

Steam numbers dropped 200k players since start, this is a third in just three weeks. Last week was sustaining, cause people have free time at christmas. I really don't know where your 'stable' can be found.

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LordSett#6649 wrote:

IMO hilarious is to have laymen like you judge this game as "badly designed" when you clearly don't know shit about game design

It's up to every player to decide what's good game desgin or not - and everyone can do this wheighting the fun against the punishment. It's not up to you to decide who's qualified to do this, especially not ending up in personal insults without contributing anything useful to the discussion.

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leoviale#3633 wrote:

I’ve been running maps and mostly getting waystones of the same level, occasionally one level higher, but 95% of the time, they’re lower-level ones. My progression was steady until I hit level 11 maps, where the drops almost stopped. Then I died to random, unexpected causes (something this game seems to love doing) and now I’ve run out of waystones entirely.

I’m stuck and can’t progress anymore. This feels like horrible game design, and I don’t understand the logic behind it.

I even tried combining waystones in the map slots (there are four, so I thought maybe mixing levels would work), but no luck. Of course, GGG had to make it cryptic and frustrating instead of offering clear mechanics.

Can someone explain how we’re supposed to progress with maps?

Every tried throwing exalts/vaals/regals at your maps? There is a % waystone drop stat on your maps.

Bosses on maps are guaranteed to drop several high-tier maps as well.

You can reforge lower tier maps into higher tier.

That doesnt help that the death caused the loss of the map he was running causing him to lose map sustain and regress.

If you run a map with full mods with a boss you have more of a chance to die and lose your map as well.

Consider the fact that not everyone here is playing a meta build and the struggles of each person can be different. If you dont read build guides or watch youtube videos this can be an extremely frustrating system.

When you're playing a game and you have a goal, and you're trying to work towards it lets say for instance, if you were playing ocarina of time if you died to the boss in the desert temple, what if the game made you go back and redo the water temple. Thats the parallel frustration. You didn't even have the opportunity to learn. While this mostly applies to pinnacle encounters its still the same concept. Your punishment for the mistake is to regress. Also just because you die doesnt mean your build isnt ready, there are a lot of on death effects and other things like volatile plants that can destroy you and make early progression frustrating.

And keep in mind, a lot of things in poe2 were sold to make the game better for the casual player, and melee was supposed to be fixed. Go start over on ssf with mace warrior and check the game out through that lens.

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AngryGekko#0233 wrote:

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LordSett#6649 wrote:

I don't know where you're getting these numbers from, because on Steam alone the game has been maintaining a very stable ~300k players 24 hours peaks since its EA launch, which is utterly remarkable to be so stable for any game at all, let alone an Early Access launch.

Steam numbers dropped 200k players since start, this is a third in just three weeks. Last week was sustaining, cause people have free time at christmas. I really don't know where your 'stable' can be found.

They dropped from launch day only, which is expected. After the initial peak, the 24 hours peaks are stable.

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AngryGekko#0233 wrote:

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LordSett#6649 wrote:

IMO hilarious is to have laymen like you judge this game as "badly designed" when you clearly don't know shit about game design

It's up to every player to decide what's good game desgin or not - and everyone can do this wheighting the fun against the punishment. It's not up to you to decide who's qualified to do this, especially not ending up in personal insults without contributing anything useful to the discussion.

Fair enough, ad hominem wasn't necessary.

But no, really no, it's not up to each player to decide what's good game design or not. I do actually think it's funny (and revolting in some ways) that people think they know about certain topics, like politics or game design, without having ever actually studied them in depth or practiced them to some degree. You don't see people making the same amount of assumptions about things like aircraft piloting, for example.

Imagine you're a chef in a world-class restaurant. Someone saying "This is a bit too raw for me" to you is 100% fine; someone saying "this food is shit; you should've used pan X and let it cook for Y minutes" (when you know what they're saying is absolute bonkers and makes 0 sense)

It's revolting not only for the chef, but also for anyone who actually understands cooking and is sitting nearby listening

Interesting example, are humans not allowed to have agency over their particular tastes?

World class according to who?

I like well done steak with ranch. Am I wrong?

You are right though it doesn't make me a chef, and GGG is still the best.

The best part about all of the outrage, the reason it exists is because people care. They love poe1 and they want poe2 to be a game they love. Whenever they realize they don't its pretty disappointing. Which causes all of whats going on right now.

If you don't frequent the feedback forums for poe1 then you may not know that this is always going on and isn't local to only poe2.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

Interesting example, are humans not allowed to have agency over their particular tastes?

World class according to who?

I like well done steak with ranch. Am I wrong?

You are right though it doesn't make me a chef, and GGG is still the best.

The best part about all of the outrage, the reason it exists is because people care. They love poe1 and they want poe2 to be a game they love. Whenever they realize they don't its pretty disappointing. Which causes all of whats going on right now.

If you don't frequent the feedback forums for poe1 then you may not know that this is always going on and isn't local to only poe2.

Sure, people are entitled to their opinion on stuff. And I understand getting passionate about things you enjoy, as can be seen by my overly aggressive reply earlier.

But it's not bad design. It's design that doesn't fall within your preferences.

The truth is: it's hard to judge objectively something so subjective like art (and games are a form of art) or cooking (which is also an art)

Although if most people that study something can agree that X is bad, then well, it can be said that it's bad, through consensus; like, a burnt steak (not well done, but burnt, literally black and crusty, tasting like charcoal) we can agree is bad.

Well done vs medium rare? Not really.
Most replies here are like "This steak is medium rare, it's bad cooking and no one likes it" and I'm sitting across enjoying my medium rare steak, thinking "bruh?"

fml analogies stretched too far.. anyways, I guess that's the gist of what I was trying to say, in a way

Fwiw I don't think the game design is bad, I just think the 1 portal system is dumb. It does not fulfill the same "vision" of bringing in new players and dumbing the socket/crafting systems down.

I play hcssf(at least until t17s made me play sc more again) so most of these don't effect me in the long run. I started in sc in poe2 though, and i play this game a lot and do hard content and as annoyed as i was i cant imagine how most new players must feel.

Me and Tofort (i think is his name) are usually fighting in the poe1 feedback forums, and since were agreeing on something im more inclined to feel like were probably leaning into being more the majority than not.

I can imagine all of the mlgpro or whatever kids call it, sc players that are licking their lips and rubbing their hands together imagining being a few people able to farm the pinnacles and monopolize that kind of content so that new playrs cant farm their own gear and they get to get rich off of it. Its just not fun that way.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

I just think the 1 portal system is dumb.

It makes sense to me. The mechanics and bosses can be more rewarding if they're rarer.

At the moment what makes it bad is not the 1 portal system, but rather the fact that one-shots are still abundant in the game, and often with very poor visibility. White bomb guys can "one"-shot you in high level maps.

IMO what could happen is having the extra rewards disappear when you die (not the loot on the ground, of course, ffs GGG how did that came through), but the portals stay. That's as simple a solution I can think, but it's hard to apply that to map bosses - if you die, essentially your waystone turns white and the map loses the extra mechanics from towers/node. But then again, I'm a layman too, so I'm not sure of all the implications of this.

However, that could only happen if they actually remove the random bs one-shots from the game. Probably rares and bosses should be much tankier than they are now, and the damage the mobs deal should be toned down across the board, especially burst damage from on-death, effects that persist after death should simply not persist, and degen grounds. Atm everyone is too squishy, me and all the mobs.

For Pinnacle, you should have the six portals. Simply makes no sense to force people to grind for dozens of hours for each attempt at learning mechanics.

Then were in agreement, because since archnem the 1 shots are here to stay. The only time they nerfed it was in kalandra. Outside of the purple crystals going from ripping me for 80% of my deaths to me standing in it always in poe1 ofc.

They have been knowing for a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time that dd and on death effects suck. That isnt changing. At the very least portals need to scale 6 in white maps 3 yellow 1 red and 3-6 for pinnacles. To help people in their struggles of early progression. The xp loss is enough to get people to stay away from glass cannon builds. The other solution would be to remove xp on death and I don't think thats better than getting more portals.

Dozens of hours is an understatement, i have a 90 titan, 92 stormweaver, and a 90 monk on sc and i havent fought arbitor yet. I quit trying, i have killed all the breach bosses 3 expedition and 1 ritual only about 220 simulacrum splinters. 1 citadel fragment. I think i probably have enough time in to have found at least 3 citadels but i havent. If their intention is for the average player to take and entire 3 month league to fight arbitor once then i dont think the majority of casuals will stick around if completing pinnacle content is a goal they have. unless they have 6 month leagues for poe1 and poe2 and have a launch every 3 months. Because that is how the pacing of poe2 is atm.