Chris Wilson: "I want to make sure that melee classes are as good as they can be"

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鬼殺し написал:

Did you just TL;DR me after I actually gave a perfectly decent one-word answer for once?!

Ah, no, not really, just expanded a bit on 'So?' :)

You're touching on some other points too in that other post, it's going both longer and wider. That's why AoE scaling as we knew it had to go.

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raics написал:

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Ceryneian написал:

So - GGG can do it. Why are you doubting their capability? This is a professional gaming company, whose design, balance and QA team are experts at the game - Chris would not accept anything less!

Gameplay expertise of their QA team can at best guarantee that they know what currently works well and what doesn't, not that they're also willing to fix it or can realistically do it within their constraints.

Don't kill the messenger guys. Besides they already fixed melee - like I said many times that melee 5% buff patch was the big melee rebalance patch. 5% and 7% "this is a buff" patch addressed the issues, stop asking for more guys!

Ignoring how the lion's share of all incoming damage can be ignored just by being ranged.

Melee won't work. If it could be fixed it would have been fixed already. I've pretty much lost hope. No amount of stat buff is going to change melee. You notice how new "melee" skills have some sort of aoe or ranged baked into the skill? (frost blades, earthquake, sunder, wild strike etc...). There is a reason for that.

Melee is shit. Because the game itself makes it shit. Desync still happens if you're melee. Its virtually gone for ranged/summoners but if you :

a. can be stunned
b. are close enough to be body blocked by mobs

Congratulations! you have the joy of occasionally getting fucked by the game and having the mob you clicked on not be the first in the pack even though it looks that way on your screen. So now your character brilliantly runs around doing zero damage trying to find the mob only to get body blocked and desync even more. Then you die lose 10% exp and wonder "why in the fuck did I roll melee?" and switch to ranged.

This is going to continue to happen until melee skills have some sort of forced attack feature where if you click attack on a mob pack and the mob you picked because you thought it was closest is last because lol desync then your character just loses his shit and starts to fucking smash whatever is closest to him.

I don't know if they are working on something like that so until then just go ranged.

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suszterpatt написал:

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鬼殺し написал:

And that's where this ends. Player demand will keep ranged over melee because the steps necessary to rectify that would *shred* player retention.

What retention?

See that huge bump in august when a new league starts that retention, try setting the range to be longer than almost exactly one league. PoE has people coming back league after league and then leaving after a month or two, and a game that's fun for melee is basically not a game that the people playing want to play. See how people love mob density? That's one of the first things that need to go for melee to feel good.

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j33bus написал:

See that huge bump in august when a new league starts that retention, try setting the range to be longer than almost exactly one league. PoE has people coming back league after league and then leaving after a month or two, and a game that's fun for melee is basically not a game that the people playing want to play. See how people love mob density? That's one of the first things that need to go for melee to feel good.

Why dont just delete all melee skills then, or turn them into ranged? Why all those "obvious noobtraps" should exist?

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j33bus написал:

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suszterpatt написал:

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鬼殺し написал:

And that's where this ends. Player demand will keep ranged over melee because the steps necessary to rectify that would *shred* player retention.

What retention?

See that huge bump in august when a new league starts that retention, try setting the range to be longer than almost exactly one league. PoE has people coming back league after league and then leaving after a month or two, and a game that's fun for melee is basically not a game that the people playing want to play. See how people love mob density? That's one of the first things that need to go for melee to feel good.

People coming back for the start of a league is not retention. Retention would be people not leaving inbetween leagues. Which is the exact opposite of what that graph shows. In less than 3 months, the playerbase shrunk by 85%.

Hop on Steam and look up the chart for any other semi-successful F2P game to see what retention looks like. tl;dr: it's flat.

I find it hard to believe that if GGG were to take a serious shot at closing the melee-range gap, the result would be so abysmal that it could make player retention any worse.

So basically the only options for that on the steam charts are DotA 2, Warframe and Path of exile, DotA is a fundamentally different beast than Warframe and PoE as it's a competitive ESport which is driving most of it's player base, Warframe is riding the high of it's recent expansion, but before that was basically doing the same thing, maybe less but they also have much worse increases than PoE every time. Part of the huge losses PoE takes is because they get people coming back for every new thing, so all those losses are temporary, and that's basically their business model if they thought it was a bad thing they'd try to release content more frequently in smaller doses probably.

Any way yes, fixing melee would probably hurt overall. Just look at the shitstorm that happened when they nerfed the strand mob density, because the first thing you'd need to do to fix melee is do that to everything even harder. Then you'd probably need to reduce interesting monster mechanics and gamespeed because there's no good way to really do melee targeting, because the only thing worse than namelocking and not doing it in a game this fast because then you'd never be able to target. Making melee good means making the game slow and spread out and most people just don't seem to want that.

Or maybe player retention is so bad because the game is already so fast that you can completely burn yourself out within a few weeks. The first people hit level 100 in HC within days. Hell, I work a full-time job, and even I can get a char to level 80 in less than 2 weeks. What is there that's supposed to hold pro streamers' attention for 3 months, other than self-imposed shit like making "loot from 100 X maps" videos?

If you ask me, the game could very well stand to slow the fuck down.

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鬼殺し написал:

I appreciate you answering them for me. I figure responding to one troll in this thread was enough for me. Explaining that player retention for PoE is measured in the spikes and dips of expansions and leagues to someone who's been around long enough to get that just seemed a waste to me.

Why does PoE get to use its own definition of player retention?