Now enter grown-ups that could do those things within 3 weeks of vacation like you do, but take 3 months of real time for that due to *** rl obligations.
I still want to do everything in a game like I used to in my early 20s. I don’t want a shitty dumbed down 2020 experience just because of entitled people that want everything handed to them asap without any effort.
It’s been nearly a year since I last posted here, thought I’d throw in some thoughts on 1.2. I was skeptical when all the hype was going on, in my head all I saw was a lot of enhancements to the endgame system and I doubted whether that would affect me or the majority of my friends much. I was both right and wrong to have doubts. One of my friends was super hyped up about the patch; he stopped playing in about a week after beating Aberroth. Another just played a couple of hours and didn’t even make it to the mastery choice. I think only myself and a couple of friends are still playing at this point.
For myself, I was pleasantly surprised and I’m still enjoying my time in game. With the new changes to flexibility, I only have 5 total seasonal characters, one of each class, and I regularly change each of them up to try out new builds. I very much appreciate the option to swap masteries and easily redo passives. With the MG and my own growing stash, I can try out something completely different in a matter of minutes.
The additions to the endgame have helped make it more fun for me overall, and all of the weaver content is a great add to mix things up. I do have to say it was a bit confusing and overwhelming at first, and often I feel like it’s simpler to just slip back into old habits and not bother with the weaver tree. From a casual player standpoint, I have mixed feelings on adding too much complexity. Sometimes I just want to jump in and kill stuff and get phat lewt without needing to think about anything. While I appreciate many of the QoL additions, things like the Glyph of Envy (which is incredibly useful once you know what it does) feel a bit byzantine and needlessly confusing. And as nice as the combined progression for alts is, I wonder if it would make more sense to take it all the way and just make all progress account wide (for the season). I still got bogged down in the 65-75 range when first hitting monos, I feel like those levels need an xp boost to smooth out the leveling experience. With some strong builds, I was doing lvl 90 content but the xp progression didn’t seem to reward me for it. Basically it seems like you need to do whatever it takes to get to empowered to get the flow of xp feeling smooth again. Which generally means using a meta/OP build instead of an experimental one. In that respect, it feels like the devs are pushing a PoE style of game wherein you have to play an optimized build and push further into the endgame to make the pacing feel right - but I think many casual gamers would say the most fun in this game is when you get to play around with all the variety of toys, which more often than not means using a non-optimal build. I realize adjusting the balance is very difficult which is why I’m only suggesting a change/boost in the span between finishing the campaign and getting to empowered.
All things considered, a great patch but clearly focused on enhancing the endgame and delivering various QoL improvements. For the truly casual audience, though, I don’t think it changes much to hold their interest, and in that sense does not help to draw in new customers either.
I thought I’d also take a look at my suggestions a year ago and see if anything had changed.
1 and 2. I stand by these comments. The campaign is still an oddity to me and this patch didn’t change much for that. So many players want to be able to skip it. I also hear feedback that the story doesn’t draw people in and the time travel elements seem confusing, gimmicky and/or unfinished. If the devs don’t seem to care about the campaign, why would they expect players to? I say either show it some love or just make it skippable.
The pacing on MG has improved, but the rank limiting/gating still perplexes me. I have 5 characters in the 70s/80s, almost all are in empowered, and yet somehow I still don’t have full access. I’ve also been buying and selling more regularly than I ever have before. It’s not a big deal, but I just don’t see how drawing this out helps anyone or anything. I guess it gives me something to work toward?
Multiplayer in this game still feels like an afterthought. The arcane resonance and trading system just doesn’t feel fun. I want to be able to EASILY give something cool to my friends, whether or not I’ve grouped with them or not. This is one thing that PoE really excels at. Just having the simple guild system with stash is a fantastic add. For casual players who aren’t on at the same time, it’s such a nice thing to be able to drop nice items in a place they can grab them at their own convenience, and vice versa.
Not really sure about this one. I think addressing the previous items are much more important.
Yeah, that’s fair, but if you got full access at the beginning (ie, no ranks), you’d be pissed off that CoF gets stuff to unlock as you go. It’s a difficult thing to balance since trading is just that, trading, buywhat you want from the market when you want it.
Yeah, I know I really enjoy it when my “friend” just happens to give me some super awesome item after I’ve very friendly-ly given him some GBP outside of the game. I know he/she/it is my friend because he/she/it was able to deliver as promised in minutes.
The restrictions on trading/gifting do suck, but until someone can come up with a better way to minimise (or heaven forbid prevent) RMT, this is what we’ve got that allows online play.