PoE leaving its hardcore niche and turning generic

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Char1983 написал:

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mynameisonlyforthegods написал:

I don't understand why people are so hung up on the fact that spending more time on a game should be giving advantage over others is a bad thing. It's not.

They still have an advantage. For example, I don't have a 6l yet (other than Tabula), you probably do. While I could have a 6l if I wanted to, I could not afford one of the best 6l on the server, while you probably can.

Well, to be honest only one of my 6l's is due to that "advantage". Rest are thanks to rng being nice to me (6l's with 3rd and 11th fuse, chancing mjolner when it was worth 100+ ex etc.)

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Char1983 написал:

If your main worry is that you want to feel better than the casual player for investing more time, then yeah, you should not be advocating easier gear acquisition. And I have the lingering feeling that that is the main issue here.

maybe? see, i come form rts/moba scenes. poe is the first mmor-, sorry, arpg, that i've played. and i've gotten used to the fact that a player who has played 100 competitive matches isn't a match for a person who has played 2000 competitive matches, unless they're a gaming genius.

that difference used to exist in poe as well. at least i felt like it did back when i started. awesome uniques were expensive as fuck, 6l's cost 30+ ex. you had to spend time to reach those.

and now we're at perandus. what's worth anything anymore? vagan daggers? mirrors, headhunters, skyforths (which are sinking in price constantly)? everything is far too accessible, and thanks to power creep the game is far too easy. you don't need to look for that ll st build to clear maps in <5 mins anymore, it's more like if your build can't clear maps in <5 mins it's a shitty build nowadays.

thanks to just about any build having extreme amounts of damage, the only 'learning curve' left in the game is to avoid things that can possibly 1shot you. it's akin to killing a bunch of practice targets and then rushing into a bunker to avoid a direct hit from a nuclear missile.

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in short. there's no longer much difference between poe and fnaf or whatever else the casual mainstream favors nowadays. i wouldn't know.

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Casual_Ascent написал:

It would appear that the game is still a bit difficult for you.

At least kill merciless Malachai in that league before claiming that the game is too easy. Then your statements would have some credibility. Reload and try again.

I agree that it's a shame GGG doesn't offer an official real hardcore option.

Says the guy who sets his character profile to private...

HMMMMMMMM.....

Yes, the game is easier than when I first started to play it (I also played melee back then...), and yes, power creep and item availability has something to do with this. But power creep and item availability are vastly different - one affects everyone and makes everyone stronger, while item availability mostly makes the "weak", or "casual" players stronger. The first one (power creep) can be balanced by making mobs harder, the second one allows to make mobs harder and make it more difficult for the top dogs. The problem is that GGG did not buff the monsters, so now we are all insanely powerful compared to the mobs.

The real problem with power creep is the power differential you introduce. Think about this: You have 5 support gems, and for sake of simplicity, all of them give you 100% more effective DPS (through direct damage buffs, through AOE coverage, attack/cast speed, whatever). Now, you got 32 times your base damage (2^5=32). Have one of the support gems badly balanced (does not work that well with a specific gem, works specifically well because of double-dipping, ...) and have it give 50% or 200% instead. Result: You got either only 24 times your base damage or you all of a sudden have 48 times your base damage, a difference of a factor of 2. Combine that with the fact that twice the damage does not only make you clear stuff faster, but it also makes it safer (cause mobs don't hit you as often, and you gain flask charges / on-kill effects, Vaal souls faster) and you have a character that is easily three or four times "better" than the other one.

Even worse, compare the guy with the 6l to the guy with the 5l, and you have a huge power differential.

Compare that with the situation where an average support gem gives only 20% more damage. You have a total of 2.49 times your base damage (1.2^5), 2.28 times in case of one "bad" support gem giving only 10% more damage, 2.9 times base damage in case of one giving 40% more. The difference is much smaller. "More" modifiers in general are pretty tricky, "increased" scales differently and much less easily becomes OP. Also if the individual support gem mainly changes behavior, but doesn't massively increase damage (why again was "more" damage added to pierce?), the difference between a 5l and a 6l will be less prominent.

One solution is, as pointed out in this thread before, is to make every build oneshot everything. Makes for boring gameplay. Also doesn't work for bosses, where in the end some builds can oneshot the boss, and others can not.

On the other hand, ease of access to build-enabling uniques, but also ease of "access", i.e. understanding of the skill tree, will make those players that invest less into the game comparatively stronger. Now, that is bad for players who like to feel superior, but good for balancing. It is not the same situation as power creep, which makes everything easier for everyone, and makes balancing harder. If you have to design the monster damage output for players that have 3k HP and players that have 13k ES at the same time, what do you do? Unless you do some fairly weirdo scaling, you either oneshot the 3k HP player all the time or you create an environment in which the 13k ES player almost literally cannot die. You can find yourself in a situation where you frustrate some players because the game constantly oneshots them and frustrate others because the game is too easy/boring.

For those who want to feel superior, it would be good if the gameplay was more skill-based, like in the RTS games mentioned. Then again, the Lab is a lot more skill-based than the rest of the game, and lots of people hate it, so.... I don't know? Maybe people just want to grind? I personally don't like mindless grind, I like to be challenged (almost) constantly, but there seem to be people who do.

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derivi8 написал:

There's plenty of hard content out there, but there is not a lot of reason to step in to maps that are over t12 anymore. Last year when the higher map tiers were introduced, there were reasons to do the highest maps you had. They gave more experience and most people who were trying to hit high level quickly had the incentive to do so.

Which honestly makes it even more sad and pointless that they are so scarce (it doesn't hurt players that want to level to 100, but it does hurt players that seek challenge). Personally, I would reduce the amount of levels around your character level where you still gain reasonable XP, so that you don't level to 80 in Dried Lake any longer and pretty much have to run T14+ if you want to push beyond lvl 95.


EDIT:

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derivi8 написал:

Not sure what you mean with easier access to gear, that to me is already too abundant at the moment. I'd like uniques to become rarer so that we'd see more focus on normal yellow items again.

One reason for this is that some uniques are pretty broken (hello, Voltaxic), and another reason is that T1 mods were made freaking rare (and crap mods were introduced to dilute the pool) because of Eternals, and after Eternals were removed they were never put back to their appropriate rarity. This is mostly true for weapons and ES gear, which needs T1 mods (another case of "make acquiring gear a bit more easy please").


Sorry for the long post.

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Char1983 написал:

For those who want to feel superior, it would be good if the gameplay was more skill-based, like in the RTS games mentioned. Then again, the Lab is a lot more skill-based than the rest of the game, and lots of people hate it, so.... I don't know? Maybe people just want to grind? I personally don't like mindless grind, I like to be challenged (almost) constantly, but there seem to be people who do.

Labyrinth isn't the game. It's not even 1% of the game. Not even 0.1%. If Labyrinth was, say, 50% of PoE I wouldn't complain about nearly as much since it wouldn't be breaking the flow of the core game so horribly.

As for the rest, I'm not a fan of the "bring all players in line with each other" mentality that you seem to support. Power creep and easier item accessibility are different things that affect different parts of the game in different ways, but at the end of the day they're there to make the game easier for all. I'm not a fan of that happening.

As for PoE being skill-based at all... It's not. And I don't really care about that. Of course it depends on what you consider as "skill", but I wouldn't say that PoE needs skill in more than 10%, maybe 15% if we stretch it properly, content of the entire game. You'd need to trash a LOT of current gameplay if you wanted to make PoE skill-based.