Zoom is not fun. It's loot FOMO

Zoom-zoomers are definitely having fun. But that isn't what is really at stake. The question is: why do they seem to be ruining other players fun?

1. They flood the trade economy with currency, and little else, causing inflation.

2. People abandon playing at a more sane pace so that they can gear up for pinnacle content or find super rare/BIS loot quickly, lest they miss out on it entirely when that gear becomes orders of magnitude more expensive.

3. It is frustrating to play as a group when clear times are drastically different between characters. The difficulty scaling of group play only makes these differences more stark.

All three of these factors lead to an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude, and the problems snowball. That is what drives the proliferation of zoom-zoom.

So what would solve this? (a) homogenizing clear times, (b) decoupling currency drop rates from rarity, and (c) incentivizing build diversity and increasing diversity of chase items.

1. Decoupling rarity modifiers from currency drop rates would make farming currency directly by stacking rarity modifiers impossible. Stacking rarity would still mean more uniques and rares, and better rolls on those drops, but it would incentivize farming things other than raw currency. Mechanics like ritual or abyss could be scaled for more omens or essences with the atlas passives, but not with rarity modifiers. This would increase the diversity of items being farmed, thus reducing the inflation that comes from currency farming, and it would encourage farmers to specialize with the atlas tree and engage with those mechanics instead of ignoring them to clear the map a few seconds faster. This could also democratize farming, in the form of just playing one's favorite type of endgame content more, since the bar to entry for efficient farming would be fairly low.

2. Link movement speed to damage output, negatively in most cases, to homogenize clear times. This means slowing down to clear the screen before moving on, but it doesn't mean making characters literally move slower.
Here are some examples:
-Ranged attacks could have increased accuracy or luck when stationary
-Ranger's Rhoa mount or Tailwind stacks could decrease accuracy or make damage unlucky at range while moving, incentivizing using the speed to kite mobs and run down uniques, not just delete the edge of the screen faster.
-Chronomancer ascendancy notable where cast speed goes up and area of effect goes down when affected by a slow, (like bullet time, possibly choosing to be slowed for a single target damage increase)
-Channelling skills channel better/faster when stationary
-Crossbow reload speed buff while stationary

These changes would make skills that slow enemies, do damage over time, require channeling/charging/combos, or rely on getting in close become more competitive with ranged lightning damage for clear time, without taking Lightning Arrow/Herald of Thunder from casual players who just want to play it like a twin-stick shooter.

I've been working my way through this thread, but there's a lot here, so sorry if I am repeating what others have said, but I think this is the biggest issue facing POE2 going forward, so it's worth thinking about.

P.S. I go more into detail about some of these proposed fixes and balance changes in this thread: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3883230

P.P.S. I know saying zoom twice is like a Mazda commercial, but I think it is more fun :)

Your post is necessary. We need to discuss these issues and i agree 100% with you. Zooming is poor game design. People got addicted to it because they see streamers doing it.

Zooming turns people objectives into really strange things

Zoomers hate any kind of campaign, any kind of difficulty, anything that increases map completion time. Its almost like they dont want to play the game, they just want to see explosions and tinks.

Everything becomes how many maps per hour or divs per hour they can do. Their mob density is so high high, and their flashy explosions are o huge yhat they dont even see The monsters while they Rush The map dashing, Jumping and teleporting. Their screen is almost frozen and their mini map covers all The screen. Its a disease. Its a degenerated concept of gameplay.

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zepberonha#9748 wrote:

Your post is necessary. We need to discuss these issues and i agree 100% with you. Zooming is poor game design. People got addicted to it because they see streamers doing it.

Zooming turns people objectives into really strange things

Zoomers hate any kind of campaign, any kind of difficulty, anything that increases map completion time. Its almost like they dont want to play the game, they just want to see explosions and tinks.

Everything becomes how many maps per hour or divs per hour they can do. Their mob density is so high high, and their flashy explosions are o huge yhat they dont even see The monsters while they Rush The map dashing, Jumping and teleporting. Their screen is almost frozen and their mini map covers all The screen. Its a disease. Its a degenerated concept of gameplay.

There's the journey (moment-to-moment gameplay and discovery) and the destination (loot and rewards). They feed back into each other, which is the core gameplay loop. If you make the game frictionless, then you flatten the game out and make it one-sided. Then you're just on a treadmill of constant loot acquisition without ever taking time to enjoy the things you just acquired.

Sid Meier said, "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game. One of the responsibilities of the designer is to protect players from themselves."
I would say in the case of multiplayer games, it should read from each other.

I hadn't really given much credence to the influence of streamers prior to reading this thread, but I do think that this playstyle spreads like a virus, so they would be like super-spreaders in this analogy. They are not the root of the problem, but they accelerate it.

This game is very heavy on gameplay and light on story. I can think of games that are the opposite, where people barely play the game, but spend lots of time watching youtubers dissect the lore, but never actually play the game and get good enough to experience the 'good ending' for themselves.

Either way it is lop-sided game design. To pour over let's plays and wikis is free, but to zoom, you need to buy the game, so that addictiveness applies to the people making the game as well. And there's the rub.

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zepberonha#9748 wrote:

Your post is necessary. We need to discuss these issues and i agree 100% with you. Zooming is poor game design. People got addicted to it because they see streamers doing it.

And this is why it will never be fixed. Streamers will cry if they go 5% slower next league, they will doom about poe2 being dead, their followers will download the message and flood the internet discourse with it. Devs will be bombarded with the same inane questions in every interview until they have no choice but to change things for the worse.

People with very surface-level emotional reasoning and histrionic reactions (streamers) end up dictating the direction of the game. They invited this problem when they courted community figures so hard, and now it's impossible to fix without stepping away from community engagement which would look absolutely horrible for them at this point.

I love the godlike power fantasy of zoom, I equip my stupidest half screen glowing star god and blast everything, nowhere else I can own that much looking that good with so many options. Which is why I love PoE 1.

What I also love though, is a good, grounded isometric action game. I'm not saying PoE 2 is that, but it sure makes more sense power curve wise, and lets me fight like something resembling a normal fantasy person, at least until I get powerful enough. It also lets me dodge and and actualy fight the enemy, which I felt was always a bit lacking in Arpg, also present some mild but actual difficulty here or there. which is why I love PoE 2.

So, hope the devs think like me, and keep the games separate and different.

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TwelveOhSix#3995 wrote:

There's the journey (moment-to-moment gameplay and discovery) and the destination (loot and rewards). They feed back into each other, which is the core gameplay loop. If you make the game frictionless, then you flatten the game out and make it one-sided. Then you're just on a treadmill of constant loot acquisition without ever taking time to enjoy the things you just acquired.

I get the “journey vs destination” framing, but that loop doesn’t really hold in a seasonal game. Leveling pace is so fast that any good leveling drop is obsolete within minutes, not hours. Even a great rare gets replaced the moment you move an act or two ahead.

Once you hit maps, world drops aren’t actual gear in practice. They’re crafting bases. Nobody equips random world rares in endgame.

So when people argue that reducing campaign friction “flattens the game,” it makes me think they don’t engage with endgame much and mostly want to drag out the on-ramp grind. For players who actually push maps and bosses, the real game doesn’t start until after that point anyway.

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Leveling pace is so fast that any good leveling drop is obsolete within minutes, not hours. Even a great rare gets replaced the moment you move an act or two ahead.

When you are zooming through maps in a couple of minutes at a time, mostly only grabbing currency, minutes matter. The difference between completing a map in <5 minutes, vs 5-15 minutes is huge. I'm not asking for a stop-and-smell-the-roses experience whenever we've all seen these maps and enemies dozens of times. I just wish we'd all stop and actually look at that pile of loot we just dropped, for a few more seconds, instead of just skimming divine orbs off the top because you know it's worthless and you've filtered for good crafting bases.

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Nobody equips random world rares in endgame.

Yes, but this is a consequence of design choices the developers made. If you could not acquire as much currency directly from mapping at super speed, because you needed to sell or craft on more of that stuff, instead of just a small handful of chase items, then people would be stopping to look at the giant piles of loot they are dropping. The piles are garbage to even a casual endgame player, not just zoomers, and that's a choice.

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people argue that reducing campaign friction “flattens the game,” it makes me think they don’t engage with endgame much and mostly want to drag out the on-ramp grind. For players who actually push maps and bosses, the real game doesn’t start until after that point anyway.

I am not one of these people at all. In fact, I wish, after completing the campaign once an update, I would have the option to start new characters at lvl 65 in maps. (Recently, Borderlands 4 had an option like this; it isn't unheard of). This would let us experience many more characters, without retreading content that isn't really made to be retread, unlike maps.
For perspective, I leveled 3 characters over 90 in the last update. I dropped a headhunter with my first character, looked up gameplay of it, saw it was a glitchy-looking mess, and promptly sold it. I like slamming through a map in 10 minutes, or trivializing bosses with my OP builds, but I don't like zooming, or instantaneously killing pinnacle bosses. It feels cheap.

When I say frictionless, I mean directly throwing currency at zoomers, to the point that not only do they never have to slow down to human speeds, they never even have to stop look at what they dropped for more than a few milliseconds. I am okay with farming gear at high speed and high efficiency, that's part and parcel of ARPGs' endgame, but zooming is minting currency, while disengaging with most of the game's core systems.

I think with the mob density changes that the devs are making in 0.4 they seem to largely agree with your reasoning. They want more builds to be viable than just stacking aoe and movespeed and painting the map in your preferred colors. The big problem with maces, for example, is that while their attacks do a ton of damage they often just overkilled their target and "wasted" all that dps - dps that faster classes could use on other mobs to more efficiently clear the map. Now the mace should feel a lot better as it's high damage can be put to more efficient use. I do agree with the sentiment that some playstyles feel more sluggish than others (and that passive tree reductions to attack speed are just mean), but I think that that's largely fine as it *changes the way that different weapons feel*.

I wonder if the endgame changes promised by the devs will involve reworking the whole lategame to fit into the pace they seem to be wanting the game to be. I imagine that initially, this "endgame rework" of theirs mainly just involved implementing many of the PoE1 mechanics into the endgame to give it some variety, but as the developers came to understand their project more and came to understand how they could distinguish it from it's predecessor they had to rework more features. 0.5 I think will be where we really see what their "vision" (I know, scary word) truly is for PoE2. Hopefully we can, in a game which emphasizes customizing one's own experience so much, find some means of making playing at whatever pace one chooses equally rewarding.

Sorry I haven't been able to respond to everyone.

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LiterallyTheWizard#6109 wrote:

I think with the mob density changes that the devs are making in 0.4 they seem to largely agree with your reasoning. They want more builds to be viable than just stacking aoe and movespeed and painting the map in your preferred colors.

Yeah I was obviously happy about that and a bit surprised how 'on the money' they were when discussing it. That really gave me some hope about the direction they're taking the game, and their willingness to consider the points made in the feedback. They didn't merely agree with the community, but described it in a way that showed they understood. So that was really cool.

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LiterallyTheWizard#6109 wrote:

The big problem with maces, for example, is that while their attacks do a ton of damage they often just overkilled their target and "wasted" all that dps - dps that faster classes could use on other mobs to more efficiently clear the map. Now the mace should feel a lot better as it's high damage can be put to more efficient use.

Right. once other classes with projectiles and AoE cross the threshold of being able to clear everything on the screen, then the 'niche' of the warrior doing larger damage to a smaller or specific area, becomes 'redundant damage' and they're made obsolete. I completely agree with that, and it's just one of a plethora of downsides that come with the AoE clear meta. It leaves very little room for diversity of archetypes once the 'ultimate archetype' has been established as one that can effortlessly clear screens.

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LiterallyTheWizard#6109 wrote:

I do agree with the sentiment that some playstyles feel more sluggish than others (and that passive tree reductions to attack speed are just mean), but I think that that's largely fine as it *changes the way that different weapons feel*.

Agreed. Not much more I can add to that. Some people pick this out as a downside, if their concern with how a build plays starts and ends with "how does it clear". Which is understandable if the environment cultivates that mentality. I'd love to see a diverse range of viable play-style archetypes, that exceed our expectations about what PoE could be.

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LiterallyTheWizard#6109 wrote:

I wonder if the endgame changes promised by the devs will involve reworking the whole lategame to fit into the pace they seem to be wanting the game to be. I imagine that initially, this "endgame rework" of theirs mainly just involved implementing many of the PoE1 mechanics into the endgame to give it some variety, but as the developers came to understand their project more and came to understand how they could distinguish it from it's predecessor they had to rework more features. 0.5 I think will be where we really see what their "vision" (I know, scary word) truly is for PoE2. Hopefully we can, in a game which emphasizes customizing one's own experience so much, find some means of making playing at whatever pace one chooses equally rewarding.

That could be. They've had to deal with the challenge of maintaining some semblance of balance while continually working on new content and systems, and introducing them into the game one piece at a time, without all the pieces necessarily available to complete the full picture. So of course there are going to be bugs and issues with the balance right? Utterly expected.

Now that they've decided to make this very important change, I'm going to start a new thread, with the reduced monster density as a 'jumping off point' for the discussion of what could come next. Because there is a concern, that even though this was a very important change, it is a change that is intended to exist in a broader coherent 'whole'. The big picture will be hard for the player base to see, if it is only being implemented one piece at a time.

Thanks for your great comment. Keep having conversations about it because they do seem to matter. Cheers friend =)

Hard agree with Zoom not being fun. Zero skill brain off games are such a turnoff. It's 2025. Can we get with it? Gamers are more skilled now than ever...make it harder to match. We've seen all the systems already. You're not surprising us. At least give us a challenge.

Neither is the crafting system. Having the best loot always be crap you craft and having none of the stuff that drops LITERALLY ***EVER*** be the best thing you can get completely ruins the loot fantasy of ARPG's. They're doing things weird. They need to not only dial back the speed IMMENSELY, but also completely gut the crafting to a bare minimum, and make drops exciting. There's already just way too many systems in this game that don't need to exist. POE1 and POE2 are both prime examples of why just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should. I can take like 30 crafting items and throw them away and nobody would care. Replace them with more simple systems and RNG instead of allowing a separate item in your inventory to independently force roll prefixes or suffixes of certain items. It's gross negligence and over convolution of a system that doesn't need to be that complex. You should not need to read a novel to master a crafting system of an ARPG. Nor should crafting be the dominant and soul path to the most powerful gear.