Simply stop playing the meta...

It is the price you pay as a developer when you make a game that both offers challenges to the very best players while simultaneously making it accessible for players like me to jump in and get my feet wet. In my opinion, the real PoE meta-game is coming up with all the excuses for why some players consistently rise to the top of the competition phases of the game. Cuz dis game takes no skillz.

The only skills needed to win at PoE are being good at trading / flipping, and / or not getting caught RMTing.

THat's it. If you can flip / trade to get end game gear, or can just buy it, you are gold. But if you try and do it "self found", you are bound to just want to rip the game from your computer's memory / hard drive at some point.

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iamstryker wrote:

So you engage in the meta but you make a thread saying you don't have to?

Also this game isn't hard. Dark souls 2 is hard, PoE has a lot of time consuming tediousness. That isn't actually hard, just time consuming.

Dark Souls is only hard in the phase where you're figuring everything out. I can faceroll it blind folded by now because I practiced a lot :) Same goes for PoE. Some people like to skip this phase by copying builds from popular streamers. Their loss.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

The game CAN be hard, if you....heh, don't pay attention to the meta-game and as a result take a path of less resistance.

Play it intuitively with no external input and you're bound to think this game is hard sooner rather than later.

Especially if you race. :P

Which I see you don't.

I was referring to the type of skill based challenge that comes in games like Dark souls. PoE has very little of that.

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Xavderion wrote:

Dark Souls is only hard in the phase where you're figuring everything out. I can faceroll it blind folded by now because I practiced a lot :) Same goes for PoE. Some people like to skip this phase by copying builds from popular streamers. Their loss.

Here's the difference. I could give a decked out PoE character to my wife and she would do fine.

If I give me top Dark souls character to my wife she will still die every 2 seconds.

"the meta" in a game is kind of a broad term that describes the popular strategies that are known to work

so in a sense, you are saying to "stop playing what works"

or maybe you are saying to find new things that work. the problem is, if those things work well, they become part of the meta.

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iamstryker wrote:

"

Xavderion wrote:

Dark Souls is only hard in the phase where you're figuring everything out. I can faceroll it blind folded by now because I practiced a lot :) Same goes for PoE. Some people like to skip this phase by copying builds from popular streamers. Their loss.

Here's the difference. I could give a decked out PoE character to my wife and she would do fine.

If I give me top Dark souls character to my wife she will still die every 2 seconds.

And a Dota pro could carry your wife to 5k MMR :P

Given you start both PoE and DS completely clueless, I'd say it takes approximately the same amount of time to master each of them.

So being really new to this game and only participating in my first race this season I did find this game pretty hard. I wouldn't say it was dark souls by any means but it did give me a great experience because of how steep the learning curve was.

However I don't think that I have been playing long enough to be effected by the meta anyway but so far I have payed no attention to trade chat or streamers or even looked a build up for that matter, annd I am still enjoying the game a huge amount.

For me I think that copying someone else's build or spending ages in trade trying to get the best items possible for my money would ruin the game and make it way too tedious, but I can see how some people enjoy that sort of thing.

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iamstryker wrote:

Here's the difference. I could give a decked out PoE character to my wife and she would do fine. If I give me top Dark souls character to my wife she will still die every 2 seconds.

Your wife would not be able to kill Atziri with a decked out character. Presumably neither would you, even if you had, say, Mathil's character and gear. The same is true for me.

Dark Souls is a very twitchy game, which is half its alleged difficulty. Also, in PoE, getting a high level character with BiS gear is part of the difficulty. Trading is part of the skill set, or rather, knowledge is. And as Xav said, people copy builds and side-step one of the larger skill elements of the game and then say, "That was easy." Really? What a surprise.

But here's the thing: At races, it's consistently the same people who get to high levels. It doesn't even matter what type of race it is. Everyone starts with the same (nothing), and yet a handful of people always end up at the top.

Claiming that it's all RNG and that everyone can do it, regardless of "skill" or knowledge really doesn't cut it, because most people can't do it. The "no lifer" line doesn't apply, races are only an hour on average. Have you ever won a race? Ever been top-10? I haven't.

The theme here seems to be, "I haven't achieved much in PoE, so the game takes no skill. I'm pretty good at Dark Souls, and that shows how much skill it takes."

You can't expect players to override what they enjoy by taking on a different perspective.

I enjoy making powerful characters and feeling powerful. The time sink in this game is staggering and painfully obvious. Its frustrating to attempt to continue a course of mastery when the only thing standing [clearly] in your way is a number (droprate) dictating the entirety of your progression. Alternatively, one could spend time: studying market values, making/managing a shop thread using the forum's clumsy item linking, and taking time from enjoying the actual game to trade. However, none of that makes me feel powerful. It also isn't actually playing the game, which is kind of what I wanted to do when I downloaded it.

The game is great for more casual players who are content to just experience content (altaholics.) It is also great for zombies who don't mind spending exorbitant amounts of time farming. Ironically, the only people poe completely missed are those who seek true mastery in games. You know, the people who like to actually be challenged by in-game mechanics and can smell bullcrap/treadmills/artificiality from a mile out. They typically don't have the patience for that kind of stuff.

Telling players to play a different way isn't solving any problems. They'll still like the things they like. Furthermore, it isn't my job to manually make a game more challenging by imposing my own set of rules. If I wanted to make up rules, I'd at least throw a resume to GGG and get paid to make the game harder.