Endgame - Time expendature vs. Punishment
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Dear GGG,
I know this might be a long shot, but please take some time to consider your punishment philosophy. I have been playing these kinds of games since the 90's and I love your games, I really do, but as an adult with limited time for gaming, I am getting massively discouraged by the punishing nature of PoE2, especially in the endgame. I like a good challenge, so the difficulty of the game is great, but I don't understand the need for respawning every single mob when the player dies, neither do I understand the limited portals you're so fond of. If you really want to promote build diversity and innovative thinking, we need the ability to learn and manage our own time. I am absolutely sure that I would spend thousands of hours playing and learning and trying fun stuff if I didn't feel that I wasted mountains of my time every time a death occurred. Take a page of inspiration from Blizzard North. Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction may have been the greatest game of all time in this genre, and one of the things they got right was that a player could keep trying until he figured out how to beat the content. Sure we lost exp and had to run back for our corpse when we died, but we could keep trying for as long as we wanted to, which allowed us to learn and try new things. The current approach you're exercising makes playing anything other than the very best meta builds feel like torture, because if you die you potentially lose several days or even weeks worth of work. In short, your endgame feels more like a job than a game in the current state, because you're forcing excessive grinds for a limited chance to try the next step, and as a direct result you're forcing players to only play the very best meta builds to attempt to keep the dying to a minimum in the endgame and thus, you're pushing casual gamers away. - My suggestion is that you allow the players to manage their own time, fx by letting us run our heads into a boss 7000 times if that's what it takes for us to either learn the fight or give up on it with the realisation that we don't yet have the power to beat it. Last bumped on Jan 23, 2025, 4:13:29 AM
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I'm doing T10s now, level 80, SSF, and honestly I don't find much reason to continue.
I'm playing so defensively due to the death penalty that I don't find it fun anymore. It's almost amusing how so many people confuse difficulty with tedium. POE2 death penalty doesn't make it more difficult. The mobs still hit the same, the maps are still the same, it just removes progress when you make a mistake. It doesn't make the game more difficult. All it does, is incentivize and reward defensive gameplay, which, when combined with some extremely low time-to-death designs, makes the endgame unenjoyable for people who are looking for a chill farming experience. Instead of playing maybe a highly mobile and satisfying Lightning Warp Sorc, it's just better to play a carpet-bombing Spark Sorc because one bad warp could get me stuck and stunned and have an hour of progression erased. Now all that would have been better if the endgame itself was engaing, but instead we get tedious and unrewarding tower set-up chores to go through half the time, micro-managing waystones and tablets before we can get into the game, and crafting that is just 100% slot-machine gambling. Atlas passives do nothing except nudge the RNG a tiny little bit in some direction. And we end up with maybe 20-30% of the time in the endgame being enjoyable, the rest is chores, boring slot machine "crafting", and being forced to go through content we don't like in the form of bad nodes that we have to path through in order to find good regions. This endgame is really a huge step backwards from all the praise I have heard about POE1 (I didn't play POE1 but heard a world of praise for its endgame). The more I play this endgame, the more I feel disappointed. |
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" So this is just long post about "plz remove one portal". |
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" No, this is a post urging GGG to rethink death punishments, because as they are now, they're way too harsh. |
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Well, I thought the same at the beginning. I wrote several posts about "losing exp and map is too much" but then I just improved my build and skill. Now I die so rarely that I barely notice any punishment and It's usually in maps where I said to myslef "well look at those mods, I'm screwed but let's try."
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GGG mentioned they would prefer to leave un-started mechanics on the map tile on death, but are unsure how to implement it without opening up economic exploits.
I fall into the camp of hoping they find that implementation method, and would be perfectly happy with just that. |
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Who even cares about this, when every endgame builds is just path of cookie clicker 2.0
How can you play this one button nonsense for hours? It's mind numbing. |
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TLDR: Bumpity Bump Bump.
"PoE1 Clone Has No Future!" ;) | EA 0.2 | Trade is EZ mode. ;) | Path of Trading ;) | "TLDR: -1 Devs ohhh" (Lol.) | "I've played a lot of videogames. It's my primary recreational activity. Best games ever: Elden Ring and Diablo 4." ~Elon Musk, 2023 | "Dawg", "IQ 48" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ | [Removed by Support]
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Yeah, exactly. The philosophy of "pile on punishments" just encourages doing easy maps and playing defensively. It doesn't encourage pushing around your upper limit, because you get punished for that.
So instead, you do stuff you can mindlessly farm... which is repetitive, boring, and not all the "more strategic gameplay" they claim to want. They keep saying they want to encourage certain things, and then put in systems that encourage the opposite of that. I guess it's good for people with oodles of time to play because tedium won't bother them, but as a parent? Past a certain point this game simply stops being worth playing because it's just so mindlessly repetitive for very little gain that it mostly becomes a battle against boredom. |
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You are an adult with limited amount of time to game. Stop playing if you are not having fun.
I would also suggest to stop actively trying to make the game less fun for those that do enjoy the 'difficulty' of the game. |
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