The Vision - Ziz interview

"If the tools you have are too powerful, then the people that know to use them are benefitted to a larger degree compared to the people that don't..."
-Jonathan

Yes, Jonathan. This is the entire structure behind game mastery and what leads to longevity. Treating this formula as problematic hinders the actual players from feeling a sense of personal growth after spending time and labor to learn and play the game. Even Dark Souls possesses the capacity to be trivialized, as seen by the guy that beat the game with a banana. Attempting to curate the entire game in a way to prevent all trivialization makes the game repetitive and slow. While the anti-trivialization approach will in fact net new players in the short term that enjoy the prolonged engagement, it will not retain players, as those players will never see a personal pay off for their time invested.

When looking back at PoE 1's decade long growth, there's definitely elements that are worth improving on and learning from. There certainly can be a problem with excessive trivialization but in ARPG's trivialization ONLY makes sense to primarily occur at the level of game knowledge, otherwise we'd all be playing FPS games instead. There's nothing wrong with incorporating more skill into trivialization versus game knowledge, this can be good. But to be anti-trivialization for the sake of persistent challenge is a death sentence for a game, as players will not continue to feel good about playing a game they cannot actually master via skill or game knowledge.

The concerning part about this then becomes that the vision for PoE 2 is a philosophical problem. It's not simply monster life or speed or anything like that, future content will continue to have the exact same problems repeated because the vision for the game is shortsighted. Not that PoE 2 won't be great but the process to make the game great will be the continuation of the same clashes 0.2 caused between many players and developers, instead of understanding the core of the issue and adjusting the vision accordingly.

What players and devs need to really understand about Path of Exile is that there's some very special formula to PoE 1. Special enough in fact that it led to the game's growth over a 12 year period. An achievement so wildly uncommon it's hard to think of almost any other game that's managed to do the same. This is not to say PoE 2 ought to be PoE 1, I can understand a very large part of the current PoE 2 community doesn't want that. I can respect that many players want something different from what PoE 1 offered. But in the interest of PoE 2 lasting 12 years like it's predecessor, it's worth understanding all the reasons why PoE 1 was able to have such a exceptional history of player retention and growth and taking caution with tinkering with these things at the foundational level, such as game philosophy.

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"If the tools you have are too powerful, then the people that know to use them are benefitted to a larger degree compared to the people that don't..."
-Jonathan

This is how ALL things work in LIFE. Not just games . Thats how it works everywhere.

Those who have the knowledge how to farm good will have good yields! And you say that its bad??! Its bad because there are still people who are picking berries in the woods? ... and because of that we all should go pick berries. What in the actual F ?

The farmers make videos and teach others. Others get hyped to try it and LOG IN! Is this really that hard to see?

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CheshuR#1175 wrote:

"If the tools you have are too powerful, then the people that know to use them are benefitted to a larger degree compared to the people that don't..."
-Jonathan

so everything in the game has to be shit in order for the worst player to not feel alone. great

Yeah, that reasoning also didn't make any sense to me.

The only kind of games where knowledge and/or experience don't give you any advantage are pure games of chance.

Like, you can't "get better at buying lottery tickets." There is nothing for you to "know" that would increase the chances of winning one lottery ticket gives you.

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"If the tools you have are too powerful, then the people that know to use them are benefitted to a larger degree compared to the people that don't..."
-Jonathan

It makes sense to balance a game around players who know how to play it correctly. Instead, balancing the game to reward ignorance means both that players who know what to do can exploit it, but it also kills any enthusiasm by this kind of player who actually likes the challenge.

Imagine making the same complaint about any other game, or even real life game. Imagine complaining to the NBA that the teams who know the rules have an advantage over those who don't. They'd laugh at you. Which is why this mentality is also laughable applied to videogames.

Now the issue is that PoE in general is a massive RPG with dozens of systems that aren't tutorialized step by step in the game. So players who aren't putting the effort to learn will omit all the ways to gain the advantages. The game could be made so that these systems are more explicitly taught to the player.

I think a lot of what you hear from JR can be skewed out of context, especially with the way he speaks sometimes can seem like he is not being polite or genuine. He admitted to being a bit upset at the start of the interview so we should give him some slack. It's rough when you work hard on something and you recieve a lot of negativity you feel like you're put in a defensive position.

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"If the tools you have are too powerful, then the people that know to use them are benefitted to a larger degree compared to the people that don't..."

You can interpret this in two ways but ill look at this from a designer perspective. First inherently smarter / stronger players will always have (some) advantage over weaker ones, even in games like Rock/Paper/Scissors where the rules are very basic. So players like this will know how to optimize or how to choose better items like using a mace that has +1 to skills instead of one that has a damage roll or something.

The point is not to remove all the knowledgeable areas of the game but the team as Designers have to be careful how much of these types of pre-requisite knowledge they add to the game, especially if it hinders the on-boarding process for new players and makes them quit or feel unsatisfied from the game.

Especially when its a binary solution to a problem early on in the game. And then that binary solution is tested for in the balance of the game.

Because now you must balance around players not doing X weaker character solution, or whatever the case may be.

I like to simplify things since usually thats how I take in information so heres a hypothetical scenario :

Red is very good and very strong always pick Red. 70% of players Picked Blue and say that Yellow is too overwhelming. They're unaware of how ( yet obvious to strong players) Strong Red and its influence on the game, they blame Yellow for killing them in the game, thinking that Blue was the obvious choice.


This is why you should look at these interviews from the perspective of the designers who are making a difficult game but want players to acclimate to the difficulty or learn the game in a way that is not unintuitive.
And not focus too heavily on what your issues are in a vacuum or a group vacuum.

I also couldnt understand his attitude to player power and his obsession with trivilizing content. its like he has a time limit in his head that he feels it should take "x" amount of time to kill a white mob and anything that breaks that is too OP and will get nerfed

also the whole monster speed, his take is we will avoid combat...wtf!
that one made me really laugh, dont we want and need to kill mobs to get things
you know xp, currency, loot, gold etc. in short to progress...

that was a real headscracher answer to come from a game dev. mark got it and soom we wll see what the changes do.

My hope is someone is taking abit more control over the gameplay thats why the fast changes but time will tell

Agreed. If you've been using a rock to hit nails, it's not the worlds fault you didn't know a hammer existed. But when you discover the hammer it's that much more satisfying the first time you hit the nail.

I think this take is entirely taken out of context. That's not exactly all that he said on the subject either.

His whole point was that it shouldn't be SO rewarding that it scares away a new player like it does in PoE1, so having a bunch of XYZ that answers problems a large pool of players and onboarding newcomers aren't aware of isn't a good solution. So he was and still is proposing an alternate solution that already exists, like making the Runes stronger.

He also opted for testing himself a disenchantless run with more gambling in order to experience Zizaran's point of view.

As for the movement speed thing, I do actually agree with John on that one myself. Imagining a world where people hyper-run to rares on maps while avoiding all combat with the rest of the mobs isn't exactly farfetched, since they'll be repeating "DIVS PER HOUR" in their heads on repeat like some cursed mantra. Rare currencies don't really drop from white mobs and I think that that's more or less universally understood.

John's nervous about the game's depth and I think that that's a valid concern that I'd want a developer to have. The fact that he spoke more like a frustrated player than just a developer, for me, is a really good sign.

the current game is clunky as hell, will see how long those people that scream "keep the game as slow as it is now" will stick to the game. Maybe they just all trolls hired by competitors.