The REAL truth exposed!! (Brought to you by a player in top 10)

Map drops need fixing!

2 of my friends lv 93 and 89 stop play at all cause spend most of the currency on buying maps 71-74 from other players. Its not REWARDING to run maps. Only waste of time orbs and nerves. Its good to run high-level maps, but only not as map maker. Rolling 75-120 q on maps, spedning lots of orbs on rolling mazes, packs, area size etc and getting nothing or 67lv map in return from 8 out of 10 maps is a GG.

I always run out of maps lv 70-73, and i do roll them well. Nothing helps. I runned even white maps(not rolled) in a while and get pretty much same or even better map drops. But the thing is u gonna run out of maps 70lv+ ANYWAY. Thats not what should happen over and over and over again. Having 30 high level maps and losing them all once might be ok, bad luck. But problem is you are gonna lose them all the time. U cant push players to run 66-68lv maps at 85lv+. I mean i can run them, but this is MMO, noone wanna come and do them with me!

May be i miss something but rly if u are not providing end game content(u cant call end-game plays getting 1-8% hp per map) u gonna lose more than u think getting.

Stop watching top10 streamers with 45 tabs in stash full with maps, most of ppl cant get them. I though so bad maps drops coming from thinking how to remove large count of maps away from game(i can understand that), but this is WAY too much.

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Xendran wrote:

Yeah, who would possibly want to spend thousands of dollars on a hobby?
All those snowboarders, car enthusaists, golfers, and musicians have it so lucky only spending a couple of bucks for their hobbies!

And i'm so glad that we can objectively measure that video games aren't as fun as these things for every single person alive, so we know for certain that the thousands of dollars went to waste!

No one is saying the having a hobby is free and of course people will do what they think is fun.

But what rmt are doing, if you really want to compare to lets say golfers, is paying some other dude to hit the ball from start to the green, they might do the put themselves, but thats it. And the afterwards they act like a boss. Im sure other golfers would both :rolleyes and :facepalm and whatever at the dude doing that.
And gamers have already invested in computers, monitors, etc. There's your guitar, golf club and what else.

This is about what the point of the hobby is.

Btw, I dont believe that increasing map drops will remove incentive for players to rmt. Players doing this will try to get ahead, on way or the other. If not maps, it will be something else (maybe map drops should be increased, but its should be for whole other set of reasons).

And if you remove or limit the need for rolling maps to the extend you have now, you will limit the currency sink considerably which I think would be a terrible idea.

If map drops should be increased, do it with like 10% or something, increase chisel drop rate slightly. Dont ruin the sink.

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Rugs wrote:

If map drops should be increased, do it with like 10% or something, increase chisel drop rate slightly. Dont ruin the sink.

10% more maps will do nothing, as the drop rate is next to none. 100% more probably would do the trick.

Moreover, there's a gold sink called 'crafting' (aka 'gambling').

Chisel drops need to be increased more than 'slightly.' Half the time you're supposed to be running maps in a party, you're spent begging for chisels and spamming trade chat to buy them. Chisel drops, especially within maps, need to be boosted significantly.

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entropus wrote:

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Rugs wrote:

If map drops should be increased, do it with like 10% or something, increase chisel drop rate slightly. Dont ruin the sink.

10% more maps will do nothing, as the drop rate is next to none. 100% more probably would do the trick.

Moreover, there's a gold sink called 'crafting' (aka 'gambling').

Maps are a 10x better gold sink, its (almost) impossible to fill as long as people want to lvl up. I would be nervous about touching it as a dev. In fact I prolly wouldnt.

Dont underestimate what 10% increase means in drop rate. It will further push the floor up of low level maps for sale for next to nothing. The recent buffs pushed up the floor from 66 to 67/68 for a fus/alch. Those effects will work its way up the system.

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UnderOmerta wrote:

Half the time you're supposed to be running maps in a party, you're spent begging for chisels and spamming trade chat to buy them.

Yea, that seems a tad silly. I still wouldnt want to ruin them as a trading object though by making the too common.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Given I'm fairly sure who willnotdisclose is, it's utterly hilarious this thread is still going.

If an attempt to troll results in legitimate discussion, then I'd say that's a failed troll attempt.

Carry on. :)

it doesn't matter if it was a trolling attempt or not.
certainly not at this point.

RMT is a very real problem.
sadly, it's a lot more widespread than you think, and has a crippling effect on the in-game economy.

and it will continue to be even more of a problem, until both suppliers and buyers are hit hard by GGG, AND the flawed mechanics which I dare say directly cause RMT - would no longer be flawed.

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johnKeys wrote:

and it will continue to be even more of a problem, until both suppliers and buyers are hit hard by GGG, AND the flawed mechanics which I dare say directly cause RMT - would no longer be flawed.

you can't -- or at least shouldn't -- fix in-game mechanics to stop rmt. having desirable items causes rmt -- the only way to make an item have a low cash value using in-game mechanics is to make the item undesired. so you can either completely neuter the item system to make items unappealing, or you will have to deal with people trying to sell items for real money. if you go ahead and do that, just permanently power down the poe servers -- that will stop rmt for sure.

or instead you could target rmt directly through multiaccount policies, detection, and bans... while leaving the core of the game targeted directly at the intended gaming audience, with no concessions to the parasites

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PlaceholderText wrote:

or instead you could target rmt directly through multiaccount policies, detection, and bans... while leaving the core of the game targeted directly at the intended gaming audience, with no concessions to the parasites

You haven't been paying attention to the developers at all then. They've stated numerous times that they won't take too many measures to prevent multiboxing because they have no real way to tell if it's one person or multiple people sharing a network connection.

They obviously have taken the stance that it's better to let cheaters roam free than it is to ban an innocent, and it's frankly the right policy. There's nothing that kills a game faster than when innocent parties get flagged/banned.

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UnderOmerta wrote:

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PlaceholderText wrote:

or instead you could target rmt directly through multiaccount policies, detection, and bans... while leaving the core of the game targeted directly at the intended gaming audience, with no concessions to the parasites

You haven't been paying attention to the developers at all then. They've stated numerous times that they won't take too many measures to prevent multiboxing because they have no real way to tell if it's one person or multiple people sharing a network connection.

only noob programmers would stumble into such a trap. you'd want to base detection off of machine-based properties, not network-based ones, for exactly this reason... although of course you could make an exception for ip ranges that are known to originate from regions where such connections are not prevalent (for example, american isp ip ranges).

not to mention that looking for multiboxing activity shouldn't be a high priority anyway. like i said earlier, it's mostly about going after the rmt transactions themselves, since botting and multiboxing activity from dedicated rmt sellers is going to be an arms race in detection and avoidance, while rmt buyers are a much softer target. so the multiboxing detector would likely be very primitive, aimed only at the amateur cheater, while the suspicious trade detection mechanisms would be far more sophisticated...

and automatic detection should never mean automatic bans anyway... merely automatic investigations...

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UnderOmerta wrote:

They obviously have taken the stance that it's better to let cheaters roam free than it is to ban an innocent, and it's frankly the right policy. There's nothing that kills a game faster than when innocent parties get flagged/banned.

both the "never ban the innocent" and "ban first, ask questions later" policies are stupid exaggerations that try to take a complicated issue and boil it down to an automatic reaction

the proper approach is actual investigations, conducted by a living breathing human, and made to the best of his or her judgment -- a preponderance of evidence, not an instant trigger or ironclad proof. which is why flagging is so important -- as an automated tool to assist investigators in finding cases to judge

will this sometimes lead to false positives and/or false negatives? of course. there are methods for preventing such occurrences, such as using tribunals instead of independent judges (for example, three moderator-level investigators per case, unanimous decisions are immediate, non-unanimous decisions are escalated to three dev-level investigators, with non-unabimous dev votes sent to Chris himself) and/or an appeals process. however, my answer to the question of "what is worse, to judge the guilty innocent or to judge the innocent guilty?" is that a bias towards avoiding one will cause mass avoidance of the other, and thus both must be treated as equally erroneous

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PlaceholderText wrote:

the proper approach is actual investigations, conducted by a living breathing human, and made to the best of his or her judgment -- a preponderance of evidence, not an instant trigger or ironclad proof. which is why flagging is so important -- as an automated tool to assist investigators in finding cases to judge

will this sometimes lead to false positives and/or false negatives? of course. there are methods for preventing such occurrences, such as using tribunals instead of independent judges (for example, three investigators per case, unanimous decisions are immediate, non-unanimous decisions are escalated to best three out of five by adding two more investigators) and/or an appeals process. however, my answer to the question of "what is worse, to judge the guilty innocent or to judge the innocent guilty?" is that a bias towards avoiding one will cause mass avoidance of the other, and thus both must be treated as equally erroneous

You're right, GGG should totally devote their resources towards hiring a panel of law experts that truly understand preponderance of evidence and evidence beyond a reasonable doubt (which is a lot more complex than you probably understand) instead of actually making their game better and less incentivized towards RMT.