Zoom is not fun. It's loot FOMO

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WhisperSlade#0532 wrote:

Also I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but being seasonal is exactly why PoE has inflated numbers right after a new league launch. Compare the end of league numbers.

yeah, standart leagues in both poe1 and poe2 thrive and are full of players and local market is booming, you can buy anything you want, especially 1c worth uniques. the majority of playerbase play on perma leagues!

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SoColdO_O#1989 wrote:

its mandatory because there is no proper endgame juicing. and if you simply delete rarity, there won't be any loot at all.

Obviously item rarity doesn't exist in a vacuum, and if +rarity from gear was removed, of course it would be accompanied by considerations like increasing the base-line of loot drops. But you don't even bother to consider that might be part of the picture. That's what makes this feel completely disingenuous.

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WhisperSlade#0532 wrote:

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SoColdO_O#1989 wrote:

its mandatory because there is no proper endgame juicing. and if you simply delete rarity, there won't be any loot at all.

Obviously item rarity doesn't exist in a vacuum, and if +rarity from gear was removed, of course it would be accompanied by considerations like increasing the base-line of loot drops. But you don't even bother to consider that might be part of the picture. That's what makes this feel completely disingenuous.

I'm not "against" deleting rarity from gear. I want adequate endgame like the one we had in poe1 (before this league nerf fiesta).
Affliction was great and not about zooming actually. Solo MF content in Affliction were abysses and legion, maps were long and you had to have giga strong build. Again, not copied it from fubgun (whom TFT gave mirrored bow and quiver for free), but progressed with Scourge Arrow of Menace starter (new ability introduced in 3.23) -> mirror tier TS. And it was fun and amusing journey and gaming experience. And overall, the community loved affliction. That's what I want.
For people who do not love zoomzoom there's a ton of cool endgame in poe1, for instance valdo maps. Again, meaningful combat is required when you deal with ghosted Feared even if you're cap block es stack glad

It's easy to satisfy both people who love zoom zoom and people who love more slow gameplay by a large choice of endgame options. without nerfing and deleting endgame

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SoColdO_O#1989 wrote:

I'm not "against" deleting rarity from gear. I want adequate endgame like the one we had in poe1 (before this league nerf fiesta).
Affliction was great and not about zooming actually. Solo MF content in Affliction were abysses and legion, maps were long and you had to have giga strong build. Again, not copied it from fubgun (whom TFT gave mirrored bow and quiver for free), but progressed with Scourge -> mirror tier TS. And it was fun and amusing journey and gaming experience. And overall, the community loved affliction. That's what I want.
For people who do not love zoomzoom there's a ton of cool endgame in poe1, for instance valdo maps. Again, meaningful combat is required when you deal with ghosted Feared even if you're cap block es stack glad

Alright that's all fine. So what do you say we have a good conversation where we are all considering the pros and cons of everyone's points, trying to understand them, and not trying to "beat them" because we have strong prepositional feelings about something.

We were having a pretty fair and congenial conversation about the topic before this rapid fire succession of strange comparisons of "player count" and "you're just jealous". Obviously, everyone is here because we care about the game, and we have opinions about it. Nobody is trying to "ruin fun", and we're not acting with malice. Try to understand the points being made, and addressing them directly with convincing counter-arguments. I'm tired of measuring egos with people.

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WhisperSlade#0532 wrote:

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SoColdO_O#1989 wrote:

I'm not "against" deleting rarity from gear. I want adequate endgame like the one we had in poe1 (before this league nerf fiesta).
Affliction was great and not about zooming actually. Solo MF content in Affliction were abysses and legion, maps were long and you had to have giga strong build. Again, not copied it from fubgun (whom TFT gave mirrored bow and quiver for free), but progressed with Scourge -> mirror tier TS. And it was fun and amusing journey and gaming experience. And overall, the community loved affliction. That's what I want.
For people who do not love zoomzoom there's a ton of cool endgame in poe1, for instance valdo maps. Again, meaningful combat is required when you deal with ghosted Feared even if you're cap block es stack glad

Alright that's all fine. So what do you say we have a good conversation where we are all considering the pros and cons of everyone's points, trying to understand them, and not trying to "beat them" because we have strong prepositional feelings about something.

We were having a pretty fair and congenial conversation about the topic before this rapid fire succession of strange comparisons of "player count" and "you're just jealous". Obviously, everyone is here because we care about the game, and we have opinions about it. Nobody is trying to "ruin fun", and we're not acting with malice. Try to understand the points being made, and addressing them directly with convincing counter-arguments. I'm tired of measuring egos with people.

Yeah, I actually came to forum only because of GGG's amusing experiments (0.2) of deleting player power and endgame. Just to give some feedback. For me such experiments and overall GGG's initial "vision" are completely wrong.
I already made a topic explaining that zoom zoom meta is based on weak endgame juicing in current poe2 state. You don't need to stack defenses or stack excessive damage if mobs are not juiced by Affliction/deli orbs etc. If you create hard, challenging dps- and ehp- checking content you gonna make build diversity more vast and make people happy. Most meta builds from Affliction league who MFed juiced maps: poison caustic, CWS chieftain, TS deadeye, Scourge Arrow deadeye, BV assassin/occultist, various molten strike iterations, and its only the top meta. In 3.26 build diversity in juiced map farm was lower because of atrocious t17 mods (a lot of people complain about their design), but still there were KB, BV, strength stack, etc.

I just wanted to say that "hard" content in ARPG is not pvping with white mobs wearing white armour and blue weapon because of lack of drops and currency. Its pinnacle juicing which require stong build, both geared and planned well, and nice variety of endgame strats including both juiced maps and tile loot strategies, which are especially great for new players.

I don't want GGG to destroy game by terrible nerf fiestas like 0.2 and 3.27.

btw, why are comparsions of player retention rate "strange"? Retention rate shows whether people want to continue playing current league. And based on player retention rate "Giga endgame and vast endgame expansions mean that more people are happy, whereas nerf fiestas and bringing loot and player power down means extremely low retention rate. If you turn poe2 into pvping with white mobs and 0 loot, no one gonna play it". Isn't this statement true?

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SoColdO_O#1989 wrote:

I don't want GGG to destroy game by terrible nerf fiestas like 0.2 and 3.27.

Alright but let's look at this critically.
First of all, 0.1 & 0.2 were the very first iterations of the game, which absolutely did have super broken 'zoom' builds that had intense clear. You have to expect that no matter what GGG did with the very first versions of the game, things were going to be unbalanced, need changes, need additions, and so on.

You have to parse what went wrong in those iterations, from the idea you might hold in your mind about what 'engaging combat' could mean.

For example, see what you think of this statement:
"There are better ways to make the game 'zoom', and there are worse ways to make the game 'zoom".

If you think that statement is factual, consider the next statement:
"There are better ways to make the game more methodical, and there are worse ways to make the game more methodical.

This idea of "meaningful combat can't work, they tried it" makes absolutely no sense to me. If it were true, then we wouldn't have examples like Diablo 2, or from games of any other genre for that matter. All this demonstrates, is that there are right and wrong ways to do something.

So I'm sorry, but I do not find it very convincing to hear "this instance went wrong", especially when that instance had elements of the 'zoom' style you advocate for. There is more that goes into the experience of a patch than whether you can melt screens with your AoE.

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SoColdO_O#1989 wrote:

btw, why are comparsions of player retention rate "strange"?

The short answer is that it's a bandwagon fallacy.
But a better answer is that correlation doesn't indicate causation.

If a league is more or less popular, that doesn't tell us "why", and it's subject to confirmation bias. And that's without even taking into account the psychological effects of players transitioning from one game to another, and comparing relative performance between the two, stuck to a mindset of the rapid loot farming they may be accustomed to from PoE1.

If you really cared about player counts, do you consider that PoE1, which is much more 'zoom-oriented" having a lower count than PoE2 to be very convincing? I think you don't. And I don't either. That's why it's fallacious.

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WhisperSlade#0532 wrote:

You have to parse what went wrong in those iterations, from the idea you might hold in your mind about what 'engaging combat'

people were unhappy that they had to pvp with white mobs using autoattack, or in other words participate in "engaging combat".
examples of engaging combat from poe1: valdo map with 100% delirious, ghosted feared and 10% less damage per piece of gear. if you win you get a mageblood.
examples of how according to THE VISION engaging combat should have worked in poe2: you pvp with white zombies to get 2 white jackets to throw transmute->augment into them and vendor in case you did not hit great mods. its not fun and engaging in any way. and nerf fiestas tried to make the game feel this way (or very similar)

now GGG clearly stated that the pace of endgame gonna be like poe1, and with lightning spear, twister, sparks and 0.3 LA its completely clear that the game is more poe1 now. And pvping with white mobs failed

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WhisperSlade#0532 wrote:

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SoColdO_O#1989 wrote:

btw, why are comparsions of player retention rate "strange"?

If you really cared about player counts, do you consider that PoE1, which is much more 'zoom-oriented" having a lower count than PoE2 to be very convincing? I think you don't. And I don't either. That's why it's fallacious.

That's why I presented % of player retention, not numbers.
Poe settlers had peak online because of new audience hyped for incoming poe2. And making poe2 pvp game against white mobs is wrong. I sincerely doubt it gonna attract vast new audience