"A build is successful if it can do 300c"

General
82

To keep ARPG players happy:

-Players want to feel like they have a wealth of choices.
-Players want to feel like their choices matter.
-Players want to feel satisfied with the choices they’ve made.

Balance plays a big role in maintaining these principles:

For example:

If someone wanted to play Sentinel, but learned that they have to play Healing Hands or else they’re going to have a much harder time.

Someone who doesn’t want to play a weak build will feel like choices were taken away from them. Either needing to get off Sentinel, or feel pigeonholed into playing it a certain way.

Or, someone working hard to optimize their damage and are really excited about their upgrades and build improvements. When they find out someone tripled their progress with half the effort, they will feel less satisfaction about the choices they made. They know they made good choices, but it doesn’t feel that way when in the shadow of something accidentally overtuned.

It is human nature that these situation will cause people to have less fun, even if it may be illogical to someone who doesn’t feel the same way.

And when players express this, it usually comes out as moaning or crying lol. But I think it’s valid to want balance, with respect to those principles and similar ones that devs try to maintain to keep their players having fun.

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83

That’s perfectly fine. I agree as well. I wouldn’t call you crying because it was measured. I’m talking about the crybabies who constantly moan and immediately go into attack mode if anyone disagrees or god forbid, are having fun with the game.

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84

300c isn’t arbitrary when it is the current end game standard, everything can be obtained/achieved at 300c essentially, so that is their current target goal, roughly.

85

Way ahead of you.

I took a wardless melee to 1500c.

And trying the same build using only gear listed for free on the MG, currently at 700c.

I get that balance is important and has some glaring issues right now, but it’s not like you need to play the most overpowered build in order to have fun and get satisfaction from making progress.

I think this is mostly a you issue.

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86

this is how i see it.

this is envy, not that choices were taken away.

if a lot of people land an impossible 4LP drop and some people dont, they feel envious and start complaining.

there is a difference between complaining due to real balance issues and complaining out of being envious.

a big problem comes from this “-Players want to feel satisfied with the choices they’ve made.” not being the case with most players.

but this almost always being the case “-Players want to feel like they have a wealth of choices.”
as well as every single one of those choices giving the same result, but also giving a better result.
its never enough because people can use and abuse items/skills faster than developers can produce them.

so many people complaining because their half-baked gear doesnt breeze to 300-500-1000 corruption, or they are struggling to get to 300 corruption and they see a video of someone else doing 2500 corruption with a different class/mastery, now they feel envious because of the choices they made.

so its more like
-Players need to feel like they have a wealth of choices.
-Players need to feel like their choices matter.
-Players need to feel satisfied with the choices they’ve made.

throw out envy and you will have this result
-Players feel like they have a wealth of choices.
-Players feel like their choices matter.
-Players feel satisfied with the choices they’ve made.

you see, all of a sudden both “want” and “need” are gone.

because everyone has access to any item/class/mastery in the game, what someone else can do, you can do too.
fundamental problems come with lack of skill/understanding.

2 Likes
87

There’s a difference between feelings and facts. They’re not mutually exclusive, but often times they don’t meet. There are people with the exact same opinion that somehow thinks sentinel is garbage, yet the other person thinks sentinel is busted. There are people with really crappy builds complaining about build diversity, but when people point it out they say that’s how they want to play. Breaking news people, any systems will always have more optimal options available and less than ideal options as well. If I go into a restaurant knowing their seafood is excellent but have terrible burgers, I’m not going to actively go in and order a burger and deem the restaurant as a shitty place. I may not like it, but sometimes people need to realize the world isn’t perfect. You’re always going to have things not work out and if you desire a different result, you have to change what you do.

88

Half of this isn’t even a logical response to my points and makes no sense lol.

Anyway,…

Balance is important for maintaining the fun factor of the game, based on principles such as but not limited to the ones in my comment. Dismissing those principles as illusions caused by human weakness doesn’t make them go away. It’s human nature for those things to affect one’s perception of fun and satisfaction.

As a player, you’re allowed to have your attitude towards them, but EHG can’t because they have to recognize the conscious and subconscious things that players deem important and navigate them.

Even if you’re right that, for some people not all, the desire for balance comes from being envious of someone stronger than them, game devs have to navigate these things that affect people’s fun. Even if theyre illogical or come from a common human weakness. They don’t necessarily have to cater to every whim, and they should certainly filter out valid points vs BS complaints, but the desire for balance is a guaranteed constant in ARPG scenes and most video games where you are given choices that profoundly affect your experience . This is a very basic point to understand, I don’t know how anyone can downplay the importance of balance in a game like this.

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89

I don’t agree. A seafood restaurant isn’t required to have good burgers if their goal is to appeal to seafood lovers.

To survive in the ARPG scene though, you need to recognize the player bases desire for balance.

“Go F off to another game if you don’t like this one” is easy for players to say to each other, but EHG would be wise to try to understand what people don’t like and find ways to turn them into things they do like.

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90

you are not the first person to have difficulty understanding me.
try reading it slowly without a defensive attitude and thinking about it.

some people read what i say as aggressive, as if im attacking them or something.

i agree.

which is why i dont agree with balance changes being only after 3-4-5 what ever months it takes for a cycle/season.
but competitive people do want that, because they want their overpowered build to last the whole cycle/season.

im am not competitive which is why i dont care if someone else even gets to even 20k corruption, i know for a fact they are abusing something and it will be nerfed.
the only thing they would have achieved means nothing, but everything i have achieved means i am already above them, because i am not abusing something.

me on 700 corruption means more than someone on 7,000 corruption, their level is invalid, mine is not.

91

This game has the worst balance of any game I’ve ever played including pay to win games that sell intentionally overpowered characters.
It’s actually amazing how bad they are at balancing.

They need to rethink their idea of balance because what they are doing is not working.

92

The problem with your take is that it has a very divisive and dismissive attitude.

“I don’t see it as a problem so neither should you.”

See, as a player, I’m probably more similar to you. I don’t care about being the strongest. I like taking underpowered things and trying to make them work. My main is a melee build without ward. I brought a knife to a gunfight willingly because I get satisfaction from trying to be as good with at killing with a knife as other people are with a gun.

But at the same time, I can think it’s completely valid that someone feels like they’re having less fun when someone else can get 3x the progress with half of the work, by virtue of dev miscalculations and imbalances.

I don’t dismiss their desires for balance as “you should be as virtuous as me and not be so envious”. I can at least understand why someone else would have less fun if the game is poorly balanced. I’m not so shortsighted that I can only see things from my own perspective.

If you could attempt to see things from the perspective of a different mindset, you might not be so dismissive towards people who want a more balanced game.

Maybe instead of the attitude of “I’m not a competitive person so I don’t acknowledge the things competitive people value”.

Try “I’m not a competitive person but I know competitive people also play this game and they value…”

This is what I mean about your attitude. I think you’re both valid. You are reluctant to see someone who plays the game differently than you as valid.

93

It’s not a literal example. Hopefully you get the gist. I’m not going to have a tizzy over balance in this game as opposed to league, where I am actually affected by the imbalance when playing the game. If a build is fun and works well then I’m fine with what I’m playing.

94

thats because the whole design started from a group of people having fun playing together.

it wasnt about balance or anything, it was just something fun for a group of people to do.

that is why i have the feeling that the entire game is like an experiment, like the way people experiment with different builds, but its with the entire game.

some uniques have the most random stats that you end up questioning why they are even there, making a build around them actually takes away more than you get.

i acknowledge all of it, even more than people see them selves.
i just indicate the things some people dont seem to see.

if thats what floats your boat then good for you.
im not reluctant, im fair.

abusing a specific thing that you know for a fact is either a bug or overpowered is almost cheating.
to some degree even things that seem overpowered are more because of a bug than just being overpowered.

in this case
ward is overpowered because of how it works, not because of how much you can get.
if defensive stats did not apply to it, then 30-50K ward would be almost useless, but they missed this with balancing.

when a skill gives you 40% of something instead of the listed 4%, thats a bug.

if someone only managed to get to 7,000 corruption because they were getting 10x more benefit due to a bug, then their 7,000 becomes invalid and they should be forced to start again with the bug being fixed.

but you feel they should still be rewarded when abusing a bug, which is basically cheating.
thats your choice and you are entitled to it.

anyway… we can agree to disagree.

2 Likes
95

They balanced stuff in the past a lot. I guess they simply ran out of time and rushed 1.0 and now they have a queue of neverending problems. If they handle those like they handled other time consuming stuff in the past then nothing will change and only new “content” will be added.

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96

the cycle system prevents any real balancing.

so we will see what balances come with 1.1

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97

I recognize that there is a significant subset of players who are always going to gravitate towards the strongest, most overpowered, most degenerate thing in the game. Bugs included. I personally think they are entitled to seeking that way of having fun, but EHG should be reigning in extreme outliers to power level (aka balance) for reasons I’ve mentioned earlier in this conversation.

Just stay within the ToS, no duping/hacking obviously. And no crying when the bugs are taken away. You knew the risk you took.

If they got to 7000 legit, fine. It there was a bug involved, fine. I would rather it not be possible because I value balance, but it’s not on the players to not play the way they like to play. It’s on EHG to balance their game and fix their bugs. And especially to punish people who cross the line into hacking/duping.

Your points tend to revolve around devaluing somebody else’s game experience as less important than yours.

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98

Calling someone who is using an op build cheating is a bit of a stretch. Someone who is hacking and duping is cheating.

Using busted mechanics is on EHG which they have shown intiative to correcting.

Can we laugh at people bragging about using “meta” busted builds? Absolutely!

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99

that was/is not my intention.

leaving it at that. its off topic.

neither were definitive

Blockquote
almost cheating
basically cheating

100

He literally said ‘it could be any number’. It’s completely arbitrary. Also, since just about every build is all over the place, corruption-wise, it better be arbitrary, or they missed the mark worse than a Stormtrooper.

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101

300 is about where I get bored of any single timeline, so yeah, true story.