Key Issues in the Game so Far 1.1 (Competent feedback after 100s hours in the cycle)

Feedback and Suggestions
65

You still miss the point:
For any subgroup you care to define in the playerbase, the hardest part of the content will be done by a minority. That’s what all statistics show.

If you pick every player that has finished empowered monos, only a small portion will have reached 300c.
If you pick every player that has reached 300c, only a small portion will have reached 1k.
If you pick every player that has reached 1k, only a small portion will have reached 2k.

This is not an opinion. It’s just what the numbers show us happens in every single game. Why should LE be an exception?

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66

Why has it even become a topic is my first question rather :stuck_out_tongue:

67

Because for some reason he objects to the word viable being used according to its definition.

68

To be fair we could go a step further for describing ‘viable’ and go along with the notion that ‘possible’ itself can’t be taken as a term either, so it has to be a variance by design.

As by science the possibility of anything happening at any moment can’t ever be disproven and henceforth is true until then if one goes for example with the chaos-theory, the chance is just abysmally small.

So we could go with sigma-declaration to make it chance-related and hence declare ‘viable’ possible if for example a sigma-5 is achieved :stuck_out_tongue:

Which would automatically remove world records and similar out of the equation already because that’s below sigma 5 actually.

69

Dude, I only called you out for you try to correct everyone talking about “viable” and even gave you that you’re right by a specific definition. It’s just annoying to read that all the time when people clearly use it in a different way.

And today was for Heavy for he thought I was being unfair, which I obviously wasn’t.

70

You both lost me like 10 posts ago, I wanted to come into this discussion one more time, but I just don’t feel like it leads anywhere.

My initial 2 painpoint with your statement were

Both of the bolded parts.

First one, these ad nauseam arguments are only ad nauseam for the people that also actively use the forum a lot, they are not ad nauseam for new posters. But a lot of them, while I no longer use them in discussiosn with other people that I know are part of the forum for logner already, are still important, because very often they are perspectives that these new posters don’t even think about.

Second one, regarding “winning”. While I understand that there are a lot of people disliking me for my very strong opinions about certain subjects, I never do these kind of discussions to “win”. That is not the point of a forum to begin with.

I honestly don’t even know why people come to these conclusion. Neither me nor a lot of these other active users are condecending or state things in a way that makes it seem like they want to win or devalue the other peoples opinions.

I completely understand and know what an echo chamber is and that it can happen for positive and negative statements and opinions.

But I really do not think this is what is happening here in the LE forum. The LE forum is very divisive in terms of opinions that are represented. This is very commonly shown by a few key users either constantly engaging witheach other and arguing.
And there are also a lot of other users that I personally already have ignored since a long time because they never created healthy discussions.

EDIT:

You were, as I pointed out above, but this is not related to the whole “viable” discussion though.

For the record I am with DJSamhein on this part of the discussion. Especially with how the OP @GodSanchez uses the term.
But in general the term viable is used in a waaaay to strict manner for the majority of cases.
And while I fully reckon its a subjective terms, I will active combat people making absolutely wild claims about what is viable and what not.

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71

Yes, but this is the issue all along. People don’t clearly use it in a different way. A small minority of competitive players do. And I’ve seen that minority address new players saying that most builds are worthless in LE, which will then drive them away.

You think it’s annoying because you belong to that small minority.
I think it’s annoying because I see them driving away new players.

So yes, and back to Heavy’s original point, we don’t speak for the majority.
-We don’t say that most people would like autopickup shards (although most likely they do). We say that the devs have a reason for it and some people don’t mind.
-We don’t say that most people like the RNG grind in LE. Just that many do and that’s clearly the design EHG is aiming for.

But when someone does make categorical statements as if they’re objectively speaking for everyone, then we’ll call you out on that and say that’s not true.

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72

I don’t but I am annoyed by a French telling a German the sun is male, while it’s a female word in German.

This is an international forum. For many people, English isn’t their native language, try to react to what they mean instead of nitpicking on every occasion. Every day.

Do you think people are scared away from the game because someone that writes in his first words that he played hundreds of hours in two weeks has a very narrow definition of that term?

73

No, I think people are scared away because when someone asks for advice on what to play, those people respond that it’s not worth playing anything other than the 2-3 builds they consider OP. And when the person asking for advice doesn’t like those particular builds, they will leave when they could be just having fun with a different build, only because a 1 percenter though it “wasn’t worth it/viable”.

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74

Related ot this discussion DJ didn’t nitpick.

OP made a very clear and concise definition of what viable is for him and DJ strongly disagreed with it.

This is a general thing, that both DJ and me feel like needs to be contested.

I don’t think that this single instance will drive away players.

But when this kind of behaviour and otherworldy statements stay uncontested, this will either drive away players, because they will think that there are only a handful of builds that can be played.

Or a lot of unexperienced players will simply not try and give LE a chance in terms of build diversity and how much you can do in the game and will stick to some of these “meta builds”, because they think anything else is useless.

75

That’s fine, but in this thread there was no newbie player asking for advice, it was a diehard player’s feedback. I would take that with a grain (or two) of salt if my intention was to play much less than him.

Also, I wouldn’t harass you if your definition of viable wasn’t that low. The new player isn’t helped any more by a statement that 500 builds are viable if that is only by your but not his standards.

There is no scientific truth for what “viable” is, only subjective definitions. And a newbie who isn’t a newbie in another game might have a much higher expectation than you of what a build should be able to do, maybe even in relation to others.

76

Sorry, for clarity, you think a large minority of players reach 1k corruption? Is that before or after they don’t finish the campaign?

77

Yes, but that diehard has a habit of doing that, like creating threads like this.
So I will continue to argue about this with him because he’s too liberal with the term.

How is it a low standard? If I said that viable builds are the ones that finished the campaign, then yes, it would be a low standard. If I said that viable builds were the ones that reached empowered monos, yes, that would be a low standard.

But from the start I’ve maintained that a viable build is the one that can do ALL content in the game. What more do you want?

If someone asks “What’s a viable build to play the game?”, the answer is “Almost all of them”.
If someone asks “What’s a viable build to be able to do everything in the game?”, the answer is “Almost all of them”.
If someone asks “What’s a viable build to reach the top of the arena?”, then they have restricted the term already and only the competitive ones should be considered.

78

Hasn’t stopped me from understanding what the word means as a non-english native speaker.

Shouldn’t stop anyone.

If you talk in a language you take on the specific ‘quirks’ related around said language, first, second or tenth doesn’t matter.
If I talk in german I’ll take things said literally, because that’s how german cultures are. If someone offers you a piece of cake and you say anything else but ‘yes’ then it’s for example bad manners to keep offering, you just take it away and it’s fine.
In english I’ll instead directly look out for the meanings behind words which aren’t literal… why? Because it’s often not meant literal.
And in japanese or korean for example? I’ll try to infer the meaning through the sayings, because a lot is talked through that there often in comparison to german or english.

So yes… if I talk to someone in english I’ll generally adjust to that and adhere to the terminology in that language… otherwise everyone will simply be confused, and why wouldn’t they? You can’t infer through their wording what they actually meant, you go by social norms.

Yes, obviously so!

100% sure even!

How to make it better then?
You stay with what actually happens as closely as possible. If someone says ‘there’s barely any viable builds around’ then me reading it as a new player would immediately think 'oh… so probably 9 out of the 15 classes don’t get to enjoy the game ‘properly’? Man… I don’t know about it, maybe I’ll wait it out and come back someday later.

That’s a common thing actually and should be avoided. It’s for example well known that in Path of Exile people always talk about ‘you need to follow a build guide to make it through the game!’ and yes… they mean towards red maps and Maven with that… which probably though won’t hold true anymore this league actually, but that’s beside the point.
But what’s often forgotten to mention is that people can absolutely muddle through the campaign and experience the game quite well - and likely even better then normally - if they just do ‘whatever they feel like’ and see where it brings them. And then start over with a second character when they come to a standstill or the next league.
It’s a fault of how perception is aligned often.

And those things shouldn’t happen, if one comes along that notion then I personally think it’s to be called out since it’s detrimental for the long-term health of the game and enjoyment of the individuals. We get notions like ‘anything else but Hardcore isn’t a thing which should be taken into consideration’ before long or the alternative ‘every build can always get you to your goal!’ which both will be wrong.

You hence speak in broad terms when the topic is about broad situations. You can’t say ‘it should be changed’ without taking into perspective both short-term players and long-term players.

For example… ‘should corruption be gained through all timelines at the same time?’ has a very clear answer when thinking about this way (it’s an example, don’t dismantle it, it’s just there to showcase a point).
Currently no, since it would lead people which aren’t heavily dedicated to gearing sooner into the position where they don’t have a goal directly in reach and hence stop since their next step would take far longer.
Soon enough hopefully yes when more content takes care of the need to keep people invested through such means and it’s a bothersome thing to do which downgrades you basically to re-run ‘already passed’ difficulty again.

So that’s how my ages long posts generally come into existence… you can’t do it right after all. You’re damned if you do you’re damned if you don’t. ‘Too long didn’t read’ is my issue. Not being specific enough when needed others. Only tackling a single aspect and misrepresenting the overarching situation a third.

So the ultimate outcome is ‘yes, everyone is actually right with the position but only from a different perspective in a different time at a different position’ and the hard part is to find the right combination of that crap coming together into the holy trinity of communication.

Yes :stuck_out_tongue:

A minority likely doesn’t finish the campaign. A minority of those reaches 300 corruption and a minority of those reaches 1000 corruption. So it stays true in both answers I would say? Likely at least?

79

No, that’s not how maths works (& I can’t be arsed, sorry, it’s not you).

80

While this is cool for LE, we still have various degrees of character power. Think of a tier list.

I wouldn’t say only S-tier is viable, but by your definition even D-tier is. And while it is true that even those builds can clear all content, I as a player unfamiliar with LE would consider that definition just as bad as the other.

@Kulze pretty German to demand such language standards from foreigners :sweat_smile:
For the record, I too am German.

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81

That would depend on the balance of the game.
If you make a tier list of build in PoE, D-tier builds usually can’t do all content. They have a hard time with bosses. Or they have a hard time not dying in red maps.

However, LE’s bottom balance is actually very very good. At least for now with the endgame mechanics we have. It’s only the top tier balance that is all over the place. You don’t actually have many builds at all that struggle to do any part of the game.
In LE there isn’t much difference between a D-tier build and a B-tier build. It might be a bit faster or tankier, but overall the impact they have on your ability to play the game is actually rather small.
But A-tier and especially S-tier builds are way way better than the rest right now.

Now, you wouldn’t say that only S-tier is viable, but that is what the OP does. In fact, he doesn’t even consider S-tier viable, just S±tier. Which is what I object to, especially when making grand sweeping statements about the overall quality of LE.

To finish off, because this has been a really long sidetracking, I will end with this:
There is objectively no difference in LE between the viable builds and the competitive ones other than higher numbers. Unlike some games where you have plenty of builds that actually can’t do parts of the game, in LE the S-tier builds don’t do anything that the D-tier don’t.

So the only objective difference in LE between those 2 types of builds are that one is a “numbers-go-up-higher”, rather than “I can’t play this part of the game without them”.

82

Huh? What do you mean?

It’s the basic probability curve.
The proclivity of people to engage with something takes effort, it takes more effort to stay engaged. The longer the engagement lasts the higher the chance for something else to interrupt it.
I could go further into the psychology of it and how attention and hobbies and so on interact with each other but that’s a bit too much for that.

Suffices to say that it’s obvious that less people finish something then start something first and foremost, a logical conclusion.
Also the chance for more and more people to not engage with something the longer it lasts is progressively higher over time until you only have ‘mental outliers’ (we all are in some aspects, that’s normal) leftover.
So the logical conclusion - and a proven one via statistics and aligning with psychological findings actually - is that less people then buy the game start it. Less then start it actually do more then trying it out, less then those trying it out finish the campaign, less then finishing campaign will finish base monolith, less then reaching empowered monolith will reach corruption 300 and less then reaching corruption 300 will reach corruption 1000.
This is a nigh infallible thing - and worth a case-study if broken - since each of those steps takes progressively more effort to achieve, hence leaving people reaching their ‘limit’ in terms of engagement behind.

Same as with any hobby, any goal, any career. It’s why only very specific people take up high management positions of big companies and they generally all - with very very few exceptions - have the same basic emotional indicators in the extreme. Little compassion, highly internal thought processes, highly goal-driven. Why? Since it’s a competitive environment at the highest level and otherwise you’ll fail to be in it, having to sacrifice a otherwise ‘normal’ social situation by default.

See? Then you understand what I’m talking about! :stuck_out_tongue:

Yes, and that’s why in comparison to PoE we can’t go with the same notions inside which is ‘viable’ or not. A PoE player can easily enjoy the game without being able to complete all the content. In Last Epoch? We don’t have as much content, not finishing some parts of it is a much bigger issue still. We have too little to do for too much time while PoE is too little time for too much to do.

84

And what is your opinion on the matter you quoted?

Looks to me like you tried real hard to find something to get at me and well, you got me once, should’ve been “many” instead of “most”, the other you just misunderstood. However I don’t do this habitually and you would find dozens of these false claims on your side of the fence, so what’s the point?

85

It’s interesting for you to ask, and then immediately,

…Assume you know the answer to the question you have just asked.

Although the attempt to classify people in “sides” of a “fence” feels strongly like something from kindergarten.

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