PSA: AHs don't ruin games, Designers ruin games

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Shagsbeard wrote:

An auction house doesn't do anything except show how trading can ruin the game for players who expect to find stuff by playing the game. That's why I don't trade... even for specific items that I know I'm never likely to find. I enjoy finding stuff, but more importantly, I enjoy wanting to find stuff. I'd ignore an AH in PoE exactly like I ignored it in D3, and currently ignore XYZ.

What bothers me is that the game is built by designers that assume we trade. That is wrong, and it's exactly why many players choose not to bother playing. They get to a "gear check" and quit, or they see "build of the week" videos that have no resemblance at all to the game they're playing and quit. That bothers me. They're told on the forums when they find a really nifty item that it's vendor trash, simply because they could trade for better.

Putting an AH in game would help some players, but it would likely lose just as many.

so much this

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terrorist wrote:

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TEBird wrote:

Auction houses/trade systems/trade automation etc. etc. don't ruin games. Bad design ruins games.

Good luck balancing a game that centers around drops with a system that can instantaneously give them every item in the game.

So just make drops less frequent right? Great. Now every single item you ever find will guaranteed to be coming from the AH just like in Diablo 3 it will feel like you're only playing to farm currency. I can tell you now I have found several valuable items, self found. It's a great feeling. AH deprives you of this feeling.

So just makes drops easier so you can still experience the joy of finding items yourself, right? Wrong. The problem with this is that increasing drop rates proportionately makes it easier to obtain the exact same item on the AH, again, making the AH vastly more desirable way to obtain the item.

There's no happy medium, either and pursuing one is a fool's errand.

Some players mistakenly believe an indexer is the same thing as an AH since it gives players wide access to all the items and in that regard and that regard alone it is true. An indexer is like an AH however it's evidently not the same or else you wouldn't be asking for an AH because an AH trivializes the entire game and you know it.

agreed, i dont understand how people dont get this.

ah=no human interaction
nuf said

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ziggro wrote:

I disagree and in my opnion AH screws the game, and d3 did die cause of the AH, if they add an AH ill unninstall insta.

I dont play POE for the same reasons that I stopped playing D3, trading is way too necessary. Whether there is an AH or not this game is the same as D3 vanilla. Sure D3 has other problems but in this regard POE and D3 vanilla is the same.

As soon as I see developers that claim ARPG's are all about trading then I uninstall insta.

So whether an AH is good or bad is more in line with personal preference than what some here claim it to be.

and again i have to explain why ah is shit


your characters now have 80/100 gear 100= mirrorworthy
so basicly you have zero char development finding rare upgrades is hard (you know probability and stuff)
what made the ah idea so shitty was ppl bought their progress ,were running around in 90/100 gear and were too fucking dumb to understand that finding upgrades now will take forever and blamed the dropsystem ( yes shit3 community is basicly full with dumb casual kids)

have you ever raced in this game ?
you find an upgrade basicly every 5 min and improve your gear it feels great
starting from 0% gear to 100% gear feels rewarding and an ah will kill this enjoymentfactor in an instant

ppl who wish for an ah have no real idea what they wish for they just see easy sells when in reality it will be itemflipping nonstop

hurray iam geared in mirrorgear ...uhm.... what now.... game is boring i play something else

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ventiman wrote:

and again i have to explain why ah is shit


your characters now have 80/100 gear 100= mirrorworthy
so basicly you have zero char development finding rare upgrade is hard (u know probability and stuff)
what made the ah idea so shitty was ppl bought their progress ,were running around in 90/100 gear and were too fucking dumb to understand that finding upgrades now will take forever and blamed the dropsystem ( yes shit3 community is baicly full with dumb casual kids)

have you ever raced in this game ?
you find an upgrade basicly every 5 min and improve you gear it feels great
starting from 0% gear to 100% gear feels rewarding and an ah will kill this enjoymentfactor in an instant

ppl who wish for an ah have no clue what it will do to their fun

hurray iam geared in mirrorgear ...uhm.... what now.... game is boring i play something else

Low level progression is fine because you're fighting far fewer layers of RNG. Upgrades slow down drastically as RNG affix and base item type layers stack up. This argument of "you're gear is so good you don't find upgrades" is just bad. Not to say it has no merit, but it's only a small part of the overall picture.

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ventiman wrote:

and again i have to explain why ah is shit


your characters now have 80/100 gear 100= mirrorworthy
so basicly you have zero char development finding rare upgrades is hard (you know probability and stuff)
what made the ah idea so shitty was ppl bought their progress ,were running around in 90/100 gear and were too fucking dumb to understand that finding upgrades now will take forever and blamed the dropsystem ( yes shit3 community is basicly full with dumb casual kids)

have you ever raced in this game ?
you find an upgrade basicly every 5 min and improve your gear it feels great
starting from 0% gear to 100% gear feels rewarding and an ah will kill this enjoymentfactor in an instant

ppl who wish for an ah have no real idea what they wish for they just see easy sells when in reality it will be itemflipping nonstop

hurray iam geared in mirrorgear ...uhm.... what now.... game is boring i play something else

IMO he hits the nail on the head here. Players see a "Build of the Week" video, or a build guide and expect to be able to copy that themselves. Hell, they see 120 points on the website's Passive Tree calculator, and assume that's easy to get. Many of them don't realize that, while 100% build is possible, the storyline is not difficult to beat with 65-70% build. They see someone shotgunning 2 million DPS with a Cast on Crit build, and want that on their first playthrough.

But as we all know, our first characters sucked. I've got several friends that quit the game when they realized the character they wanted to play and the character they were building were two drastically different beings. I recognize and respect that this game is supposed to be difficult, but I think that it's also driving away new players. I feel like a low-level passive skill respec option should be in place; maybe you get a full passive tree reset after you kill Dominus on Normal and Cruel, but you lose the respec the next time you level up. That way it's a bit more forgiving to newbies without breaking the game's difficulty.

This game is never going to bring in as many players as we all wish it would. It probably won't even bring in as many as D2 had, at its 10 year mark. It's not a "cater to everyone" game, it's a niche game.

Also, I don't see how an AH would help this game. I think too many of us are jaded to the ease of obtaining loot that an AH brings to MMO's, and can't bear to imagine loot-based gaming without one. But for how easily bots can dominate automated AH's nowadays, I'm glad there isn't one. D2 did just fine without one, but D2 was fueled by bots and a few guaranteed drops that PoE doesn't have.

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ventiman wrote:

and again i have to explain why ah is shit


your characters now have 80/100 gear 100= mirrorworthy
so basicly you have zero char development finding rare upgrades is hard (you know probability and stuff)
what made the ah idea so shitty was ppl bought their progress ,were running around in 90/100 gear and were too fucking dumb to understand that finding upgrades now will take forever and blamed the dropsystem ( yes shit3 community is basicly full with dumb casual kids)

have you ever raced in this game ?
you find an upgrade basicly every 5 min and improve your gear it feels great
starting from 0% gear to 100% gear feels rewarding and an ah will kill this enjoymentfactor in an instant

ppl who wish for an ah have no real idea what they wish for they just see easy sells when in reality it will be itemflipping nonstop

hurray iam geared in mirrorgear ...uhm.... what now.... game is boring i play something else

Don't enforce your own limitation of having fun within the sand-box i call PoE on all players.

I have around 98 build theory's lined up, completing one would simply mean i get to move on to the next one.

Unlike the "oh character is finished game is over" sentiment you are promoting.

peace,

-Boem-

What frustrates me about this game is that we're constantly being told 'POE is designed around trade' and 'one of the most important aspects of POE is the economy'. The item drop rate is designed specifically to drive players to trade, since that's likely the only route to getting the items one would want/need for a non-trivial build. (Crafting is ... well that's a whole separate rant.)

Yet, the trade mechanism is so awful, cumbersome, inefficient ... it would be laughable if it weren't so painful. As I wrote previously:

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Who wants to sit on the trade chat all day, or pop out to random 3rd-party sites that awkwardly crawl out-of-date forum posts that have to be tagged *just so* in order to be indexed, and then hope you're online at exactly the same time as the other party in the transaction? I mean, for a game that's supposedly designed around a bartering system and a trade economy, I don't think I could come up with a more inconvenient, cumbersome trading mechanism if I tried. How hard can it be to design an in-game method to put your items up for sale and conduct an asynchronous transaction?

It's about time you guys realised that GGG do not give two flying fucks about anybody who doesn't want to trade.. I thought it was quite evident after years of countless people raising the issue only for GGG to brush it off. It's a bad mechanics that will ultimately lead to the games demise, I mean look at the people that are still playing the game. How many are left from OB? Perhaps like 5%..