The most visible one.
Only a miniscule fraction of players reaching a breaking point will ever ask for help and even less will do so publicly.
This is one of the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ scenarios where adjusting the difficulty itself will lead to complaints about it turning ‘too easy’ or ‘too hard’ suddenly, you can’t get everyone on board with such a simple measure after all.
Which is why I’m rather opting for ‘environmental learning’, hence the game teaching you the processes naturally along the line, pushing your thoughts into a specific way. Some boss which has dangerous attacks to be avoided coming first, but those attacks are easy to avoid, then one which has more, then one with a limited area and those… and then Lagon as an example. That’s proper progression in increments, a player will expect it to happen and will adapt to it.
The same goes for the other progression, like through monoliths. Base game difficulty should gradually ramp up without much variation, only how fast it does can piece by piece increase… which the exponential itemization topic already does by design, so the content itself doesn’t need many ‘hitches’ in it, and if it has them then also… incremental introduction. No issue first time, second time it gets harder, third it becomes a severe thing which will enforce thinking about how to continue.
No, the difference is how you mentally prepare players for it. You have a ton of people complaining about Lagon, day in and out… and if we take the size of the community into consideration the amount of people complaining about Kitava is less… and I think we can both agree that Kitava is a harder boss then Lagon, simply from the sheer amount of mechanics interacting with each other, and still, the number of complaints is less.
That comes from the preparatory phase of having Kitava the first time. First Kitava is not hard at all, but it showcases ‘this fight is special, you need to treat it special’ in several ways. Such measures simply aren’t taken in LE currently… yet. That’s polishing the experience after all and easy to not get right in a good chunk of time.
I’ll argue that PoE does the opposite of what LE does actually, they ‘overprepare’ you in Act 1 with what you can expect from the game difficulty wise, which makes Act 1 frustrating… easing up after. Inverse problem then LE has which is ‘piss easy’ for most of the time before throwing sudden random obstacles in your way without preparation mentally for it. Both are bad.
Share the corruption between monos and give more player agency on how to adjust it.
The whole corruption system in general is not very good, it’s a dynamic system and not a static content system, this means it allows less changes and enforces them to directly align with the itemization speed at any time, which is hard to do.
You get a lot more leeway when making a static system instead that tiers up in some way, bigger steps which are more meaningful and are distinct obstacles to overcome rather then silently slipping into a direction which either bores you out or overwhelms you.
Which would also be an option, and fairly spoken a better one then my above suggestion. But since EHG hasn’t provided ‘visible’ content in enough ways yet it ‘makes it seem’ as if the game has more despite not being the case. This is a perception thing which EHG needs to solve over time, 1.3 might be a big part of that.
