Yes, but the problem with that is skipping or playing legacy. Some players aren’t interested in legacy, like me, and if you don’t particularly enjoy the mechanics being cycled you just stop playing for a few months.
That’s not good for the game. Ideally you want players to keep playing all the time. If a player stops playing for 4 months it’s quite likely they will play another ARPG and they might not return anytime soon.
So getting rid of old mechanics so you only have 5 or 6 (or 8 or however many is deemed an ok number in the game) at any time is better than having 10 mechanics but you can only have 2 or 3 (or however many) per cycle. The first keeps players in, the other leads to players leaving every once in a while.
Also, how would that mechanics rotation affect legacy? Would you keep all mechanics out of it? All of the in? Do the same rotation as the current cycle (in that case, what would be the difference between legacy and cycle?)?
The difference would be exactly the same as it is in poe.
U haave the new cycle mechanic only accessible on cycle play as well as 3 other older cycle mechanics. Legacy would only have the old cycles that are being rotated in and out.
Of course it wouldnt be just 3 + the cycle mechanics. This is just a idea for how to go about it.
I quit playing poe after 1k hrs due to way to many seasnal mechanics in the game. Which makes its bloated as well as ver overwhelming and confusing as heck for new players.
There needs to be some sort of rotation to cycle mechanics as well as a hard cap on how many cycle mechanics get to go core before older ones are rotated out and back in.
Poe became a bloated mess. Because GGG wasnt dropping or rotating seasonal content. Its seems this is what they are working on doing now. And they should have been doing that to begin with imo
Imo heavy has a good idea of how to go about doing cycles. Lets say they hard cap it at 8. The oldest one would drop out later to be rotated back in in another cycle. Rinse and repeat.
This also would help. Keep the game fresh to a point. For those that have already played these older cycle mechanics not so much
I dont want to see last epoch become content bloated. Which is why i brought up the MTG model mix in with a bit of poe as well as d4 seasonal model.
By mixing in d4 model. EHG can make some crazy op cycle mechanics that are fun but have no intent to become core. And thats the good thing about D4 seasonal model.
To be fair, there will never be a consensus regarding this. Many players will like one model and others will prefer another.
I personally dislike D4 model and it’s one of the main reasons I’ve yet to play a single season there (along with the lack of endgame and a few other things). I’m not going to be wasting 3-4 months playing a mechanic and (potentially) loving it and then those characters become useless and I never get to play it again.
Likewise, PoE has too many and it can lead to burnout trying to do them all. Or, like almost everyone does, you play just a few and ignore the rest and end up with FOMO.
So far, the suggestion I liked the most was the MtG standard rotation. Seems like the most balanced solution that should please the most players. Although it will be inevitable that some players like mechanic X and will all cry out when that gets cycled out anyway.
It would probably help the conversation if everybody were aware of what EHG have said on the matter (that they want season content to be available to non-season characters as well), as it appears that several aren’t aware of that.
Are you sure Blizz are going to delete any season-specific uniques from your character when transferring them to standard?
EHG have said that the new content for a league will be added to standard, so the main differences will be the economic reset and the leaderboards. What’s not to like? Also, any uniques/items from the season have to be “transferred” to standard because they’re already dropping in standard.
No, EHG have said that non-season characters get to experience the same content as season, just without the economic wipe or leaderboard wipe.
I believe that is called a long term economy & not having to start from scratch, some people like that and would consider it a perk.
Pretty sure mtx/cosmetics don’t provide any advantage, other than bling & the feels of the player.
Do you know what EHG have said on the matter & how they would like season content to work? 'Cause they don’t want to leave non-season players out in the cold from experiencing the new shiny stuffs.
I was only referring to the suggestion that we just cycle a few random mechanics per cycle. I don’t mind non-cycle players having access to cycle mechanics.
In a Mike stream, he said that in the first few cycles they plan on making everything core, because these are things that they wanted in the game anyway. After that, if they feel like a mechanic is good for it they will make it core, but they won’t have to always do so.
I don’t think Blizz have released a seasonal unique? I could be wrong, I stopped giving a damn about D4 months ago. However they definitely remove all seasonal mechanics (such as there are) when a season ends. Take the hearts for example in season 1. Items with the seasonal sockets that hold hearts were transmuted to have standard sockets when the items moved to Eternal.
Absolutely. I agree and applaud their foresight if this turns out to be the case. (I was unaware they had said that). This is the best seasonal model imaginable.
What would be HORRIBLE though is if they try some kind of rotation where seasonal mechanics come and go to Eternal. That would be the worse model imaginable. The whole point of playing Eternal is for stability. The last thing an Eternal player wants is for a mechanic to be added to Eternal, used in their build, then be removed at some point.
I am also curious how the trading faction rep stuff will work. That mechanic sounds like a long-term character investment that would not be suitable nor meaningful for transient seasonal characters. I won’t play seasons so it won’t affect me, but it does make me curious.
I’ve googled it & there were some uniques that were added in S2 but they were added to both season and non-season. Blizz have, however, added some season-specific aspects in the codex but I think they’re only removing them from the codex after the season, not deleting any items they were on & I’m not sure if you would be able to get them as drops (I assume so).
The alternative is bloat like PoE has. If all season content is added to non-season at the same time then it’d just keep building up as it has/did in PoE. You can’t have it both ways, you either have season content added to both modes and accept that some point some of that will need to be pruned, or you accept content bloat after a few years, or you accept the PoE model where seasonal content isn’t added to non-season during the season but afterwards likely in a reduced/watered down form (then some of it still likely gets shuffled around every few months after a few years because bloat will still be a thing just a bit slower in developing).
I disagree, like any currency, it just builds up in non-season, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful in season.
Actually, there IS another alternative. Add a mechanic for the season, available both in cycle and legacy, then after the season is over you scrap it. Kinda like D4 but available to everyone (maybe even to offline).
Won’t happen at first, since the first cycles content are things EHG already wanted planned to put in the game, but eventually you can do that. As long as it’s fun to play during the cycle you still incentivize people to play and it’s better to drop a mechanic after a single cycle rather than keeping it for a couple of years before dropping it. My 2c anyway.
So, as a game dev (which I’m actually not, but like to try my hand at game design anyway), it seems redundant to me to have an Eternal and a cycle have pretty much the same thing. In my mind, cycles are where you start fresh and try new things and eternal is where you grow stupidly powerful and break the game (and that’s ok).
So my question was to Mike et. al.; did ya ever think about this?
Background/rambling:
So the thought process was this; The eternal realm is, for those of us that love cycles, mostly a waste of code. Additionally, hard core is really exciting, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Rogue-likes are exciting for similar reasons, but I’d like to gain something for my effort, have a record of those who have gone before, and maybe even be able to play them again in an “afterworld” type of setting (note: i want each of those three things. Also note: like Hades).
So, let’s combine both, cycle play is a rogue-like, when your character dies their resources go to the eternal realm and can be used there to build stuff (and the char is available to play). You’d need a gap between cycles, so that folks could play in the Eternal realm and do some different things during that time (you’d still be, mostly, playing an ARPG). And those other things would be taking resources accumulated during the cycle, and using them to build things in eternal to make all your eternal characters more powerful.
So what would be the difference between HC & the cycles? If there’s nothing then why bother having “cycles” since they’d be introducing the new content every 3 months for everyone? That said, if you wanted to have an economic reset & a fresh leaderboard you’d be required/“forced” to play HC, which as you say, isn’t to everybody’s taste.
I mean, D2 pretty much did this. You would play seasons just to get resets and start fresh. For a chance to race the leaderboards and get a fresh economy. People kept playing seasons in LoD even though new content was non-existent for many many years. So many people like this format.
By the way, I find it funny that many people complaint about PoE being bloated and yet GGG announced that Ancestors isn’t going core and there are a lot of people complaining about that
I play casual mtg. I play with cards from the urza set, and cards from the newest set, I play EDH, its not like having access to some rare card as a one off is gonna impact the play that crazy(I dont even know anyone with power cards lol)
At the end of the day, I think this does touch on core mtg themes though. Some of us are deck builders, and anything that hard limits the choices we can make can be seen as a misstep in design.
I currently hate the current poe trend of “this is the new toy, use it and then lose it” I am the type to play say build C, in leagues A,B,C and D. And while in not a legacy player, I enjoy watching the builds progression change as tools are added. if my build is fluctuating in power all the time because of strange temp power, it feels like nothing actually matters. Im not improving on my formula, because each new cycle is just “what shit stuck to the wall this time”
There is so many fun builds that existed in poe, that instead of being balanced if too strong or weak, simply get shitcanned because they came from a temp league mechanic that no longer is there because the devs dont actually care about cultivating the interesting mechanics. which is exactly why that games build scene has been stale for years now. Nothing new gets to stick to the game because its immediately deleted lol.
I am a firm a believer in that there is no such thing as bloat, PoE gives the players amazing tools to focus farm whatever content they want to see. They should simply keep that system evolving as more things get added. I am never upset at more choices in a game.
That’s exactly my point. No matter what they choose to go with, there will always be complaints. So, to me, I feel like EHG should just do whatever they were planning to do and pretty much ignore this whole thread
