They habe said so right on stream they have said it in discord stating THE BOX PRICE gives u all content for free
Verbally is also legally binding. Heres some info from USA consumer rights law.
Express contracts: These are formed by the terms and conditions that are explicitly stated, either in writing (like on a product’s packaging) or verbally. For example, if a car’s sticker explicitly lists specific features, the company must provide them
They said it one stream. Now please stop making excuses as to what they said. Judd even said this as well.
Enough fighting this theres plenty of times theh specifically said u get all future content with ur purchase of LE.
I know my rights in my country as well as whag they specifically said
They used the word ‘expansion’ right from when I started playing PoE shortly after launch.
Two quotes from official PoE content update announcements:
“Path of Exile’s first mini-expansion, Sacrifice of the Vaal, launches at 1pm PST on March 5. It expands the core game and sets the pace for our ongoing four-monthly updates.”
“For more information about this expansion, check out…” ← Settlers of Kalguur
No, it does not. It’s just what you want to read into it in this specific part.
Every time someone brings up that there were clear promises and I research sources, I always found language used by EHG staff that is not a clear promise. Every time, I found caveats like ‘intend/hope’, ‘we cannot completely rule out’, ‘we never want to say never’ and the like.
Just deliver verbatim language with the full context if you are so sure.
Given the current situation of the company and the lack of communication related to their situation leading to it?
Yes.
Otherwise it wouldn’t be, but circumstances make things more or less important then they would otherwise be.
That’s not how you increase performance, that has the adverse effect.
Long-term performance increase comes from workers which are invested into a company, have a respective amount of freedom of action and get remuneration high enough to sustain themselves and their family.
That’s it, it’s that easy, always was.
Total worked time doesn’t directly causate stress. You can work 60 hours doing something you love and hence be utterly fine… or you can do something for 5 hours with a shitty environment, shitty return and high limitations and you’ll be miserable.
Physical exhaustion put to the side there for the moment.
Now the question is, which ‘difficulty situation’ is the ‘actual expected one’?
Act 1-2?
Act 3-7?
Act 8-10?
Normal Monolith?
Empowered Monolith?
Which is it? Which is a mess? Which is fine?
I would argue ‘any of them’ as long as it’s applied to all of em. It doesn’t matter if it caters to you, or me, or anyone else specifically… it just needs to be cohesive, fitting.
No matter if they do in the end attract the lowest skill levels possible or the absolute top-end. Sure, they promised to address the middle one… and I wanna see exactly that happening… but as long as it starts to become at least a coherent experience that’s already a massive upgrade. You can far easier enjoy a game which is coherently made but not for your skill level compared to one which is just a jangled messy pile.
The gear wall nowadays in PoE is actually far lower then it was back then, and still what we saw back then in terms of retention isn’t upheld either today.
So that also can’t be fully it.
One thing though which did specifically change from Delve forward was the crafting becoming more complex but the UI not catching up.
I personally think this is a much much bigger aspect then what you wanna describe there, albeit it’s connected to a degree still.
After all… if the UI is fragmented and you need to get information from several different places at once then that creates a barrier of entry and execution, and that causes mental exhaustion. Which is why I mentioned that GGG’s problems with retention would simply ‘vanish’ in a quite large degree already if they would implement a unified universal crafting UI which does function as a singular easy to understand place for crafting. Kinda like the forge UI in LE but better designed without all the clunky mess EHG implemented there making it nigh useless again.
Tourists are in every game, be they casual, mid-tier or top-tier games. It’s people checking out if it fits them and then leaving again. The more mainstream and well-known a game is the higher the percentile of ‘tourists’. Even friggin candy crush has ‘tourists’.
The notion behind your argument is nonsensical and reductionist.
‘Coherent experience’, exactly what I’m talking about. They had a time where they screwed up majorly and it’ll hurt them for years still.
LE has the same issue, but far far far worse.
Side content is supposed to just be ‘different’. No need to reduce it to such specific aspects as you say. Side-content causes vanity which reduces mental fatigue since you can still engage with the product while actually doing something else then the core loop commonly is. The higher variety is and the better it is designed the more likely to cause high retention even if the core loop isn’t top-tier.
If you break it down to basic game-dev aspects you absolutely can compare even a FPS game with a RTS game if you want… or a Metroidvania with a racing game that has simulation aspects of some form.
‘Fun’ while created in many different specific aspects nonetheless is at the basis universal for why it exists. It’s always ‘overcoming an obstacle’ of some kind or ‘experiencing something new’. Our brain is quite simple in those regards. If you showcase something and it’s not fully explained it created intrigue, and intrigue makes people engage until they find out unless getting to that point needs to much energy to accomplish. That’s the ‘experience’ aspect. And difficulty is the ‘overcoming’ aspect.
It’s really easy when you start to understand it, just realizing it is hard as the devil’s always in the details. And details matter a lot.
Umh… yes? That’s 90% of the game? Mapping specifically can also be filled with side-content, like Alva, or expedition, or Blight… which takes you out of the core gameplay loop of maping which is ‘running and bursting stuff down until map is empty and boss is killed’. I’m specifically not mentioning things like beyond, breach or legion there because while potentially be a form of ‘side content’ they are so close to the core gameplay loop that I really have a hard time differentiating between ‘raw’ mapping and using those on top, outside of mob density.
You start mapping → you pick Incursion Atlas passives → you make several divines an hour.
You start mapping → you use ambush atlas passives → you use ambush scarabs → you make several divines an hour.
You literally need nothing more then white maps, well… and a few completed maps to at least get to the nodes, but those farming strats make no difference between Tier 1 and Tier 16 maps for the core output, which is double-corruption (gems and items) for temples results and raw currency and divination cards for strongboxes.
That’s literally it. It’s purely knowledge based.
And if you don’t want to do anything of that you just get a few mappers in Kingsmarch and send them off with rare maps, optimally 8-mod ones, you’ll get 3-4 divines per day and low-tier maps are piss-easy to get.
I agree with the minions. Crafting is pure determinism though and straightforward, you got 40 hours content in the game and then you’re ‘done’ forever.
While it feels enjoyable it has no longevity. Which is fine for a SP game, not for a live-service one sadly… which I still hold against EHG to have made the decision to become one… not one focusing on MP experience but actually being a live-service.
No… it’s not ‘up there’ because it offers roughly 5% of the content Grim Dawn has, simple as that. You can use hundreds of hours in GD to farm perfect stuff because there is a layer of RNG available but it’s not stifling… in Chronicon there is no RNG, you get your stuff and as soon as you have 1 of any item you can re-craft it until it becomes perfect simply.
Art-style definitely has an impact, but it’s ridiculously low. Otherwise we wouldn’t see games like ‘Schedule 1’ being at the top-tier of played games. It has shit graphics but it’s simply a fun well designed game.
As if PoE’s effect vomit would be better… or any Hack’N’Slash game’s mass effect galore after a specific point
You map, sure… but do you map with legion?
Do you map with betrayal?
Do you map with Incursion?
Do you map with Ritual?
Do map with Ambush?
Do you map with…
You get the gist, while it’s the same core loop you can choose different variety of the loop, and even those varieties have at times different possible focus-strats which allows even more variety.
Yeah, the percentile likely is higher at Act 3 already, not counter of what you think.
LE has no Steam achievements… but other games of the genre absolutely do!
PoE 1? 49% killed Brutus… that’s Act 1! So 50% quite before the end of Act 1.
14,5% make it to maps at all.
And that’s for all time… not even league specific.
Grim Dawn? 65% of players reached level 10. Means 35% quit before level 10.
27,5% complete the game.
We’re not even talking about end-game stuff here… so obviously the majority quits before empowered, that’s a natural given. It’s universal for nearly every game.
If someone is statistically average then they’re inherently ‘not good’, that’s a given. Good is above ‘average’ after all
That’s the point? ‘Make a game for everyone and you make a game not fit for anyone’. Which means not even those which would be catered to normally as the watering down causes people to be turned away from it.
Starfield is a great example of ‘Catering to everyone while not catering to anyone’. And I’m not speaking about the loading screen mess it is or the bugs. It’s… shallow. You get ship-building but cannot do it unless you specifically focus on leveling that, which makes it impossible to upgrade, forcing you out of that. You get base building but all the stuff on bases take tens of hours of set up while you can buy the same amount easily in shops.
You get gear through enemies with different rarity… but you can access the top-end leveled content right away and simply kill a few enemies there to have the top-tier stuff immediately, which removes all incentive for a natural itemization progression.
The game world wants to tell you ‘you have freedom of choice for outcomes’ but ultimately you’re really really shoehorned into solving problems in pre-determined ways that often lead to ‘all are shit solutions’ directions. CEO wants to enslave a group? No way to kill that CEO since it’s a story-relevant character and hence you cannot ‘free’ those people, you can only decide how bad their situation will be. Dead? Slaves? Have a pick! Hurray, right?
That’s what I’m talking about here, shallowing down things which are specifically designed for a specific audience to make it stomachable for those which aren’t the audience usually… it nigh always comes at the cost of enjoyment for the actual audience.
Same thing in LE. Who is EHG catering to? Mechanical bosses and hence high difficulty and precision-play? Or the power-fantasy rush-players? Or the more tactical people which try to overcome adversity at any moment? Who is it? You get all of em willy-nilly randomly thrown at you, so if one of those 3 isn’t your style you get repeatedly forced into engaging with it which ruins your fun long-term.
Yes, and I agree with you it’s a part of it. The whole discussion went off with ‘It’s not the main point, but still a point’
And the argument was for a ‘mid-tier player’. Which means above D3/D4 skill-levels commonly. Good enough to do the top-end content in D3 without issue. That should allow anyone to handle after a single time to deal with empowered at a follow-up playthrough.
They used a whole cycle for the following content when broken down:
4 versions of Nemesis (4 mobs)
2 versions of Harbingers (2 mobs hence)
1 Boss (Aberroth)
That’s it. Besides that they had to do do 1 UI, adjust a pre-existing UI and make a single mini-area.
That’s all they did… the NPCs there are as forgetable as it comes since they have no function and no proper storyline, and the items should anyway be created, hence uniques.
The only nice thing were the different base-types added, but no build runs em since you can’t reliably get any results on em in the first place sadly.
But I fully agree with the state of the fights being really really bad… LE went from ‘mid-tier content’ to ‘top-end content’ really fast while not positioning themselves to cater to those people. It’s a bad experience hence.
I think it is a big issue as it showcases their ineptness for releasing content, their content pieline is awful. Instead of focusing on mechanical aspects and not needing to create a bazillion animations between those cycles they did tons of work which while deepening the immersion is not important… it only adds to things when the basis - the mechanical gameplay itself - is already properly handled and polished.
Yes, I agree, 100% there!
There’s been experienced knowledgeable people speaking about issues with balance since… I think 0.5? 0.4? The same things still existing today, the exact… same… things…
Never addressed.
Not quite. Yes, there’s a lot of damage in the prefixes, but for Attributes are also there, as well as auxiliary mods which are defensive, like leech. Also Mana, which can be used defensively. Minion health too, potion to ward conversion, Experimental mods.
If it would be cleanly split I would agree, but it isn’t, which makes it more of an issue as it convolutes the system.
Modes were never promised. Core PvP was.
Important difference.
Under ‘Featuring’: Massive end-game content and replayability, trading, PvP, Cycles(seasons), Ladders, and Achievements
This is the ‘core’ thing promised, not stretch-goals. Stretch-goal was ‘PVP modes’.
Yes, I wouldn’t buy it.
Why?
Because they said they wouldn’t do it. And my bar for entering a game when I know that paid expansions come is vastly higher then otherwise, which means I wouldn’t have paid into it as early as I did. Instead I would’ve played something else and still not be playing the game at all since I’m simply waiting.
A single game on the quality level and polish of ‘Silksong’ is worth more then 100 games on the polish level of ‘Last Epoch’ plainly spoken.
While I wait I can play Terraria, Minecraft, Vintage Story, Abiotic Factor, Dwarf Fortress, Rain World, Avorion and whatever else is out there until the game reaches a stage where it’s good enough to buy in… given that the price-tag upholds what I’ll be able to get from it in return then accordingly to the competition on the market overall.
We’re not talking about white lies or miniscule things nobody cares about.
You damn well paid for something. You made a contract.
If you order food and it comes stone cold you don’t pay.
If you order a car and it comes without a wheel you don’t pay.
If you order a house and it misses a friggin wall you don’t pay.
Size doesn’t matter. A contract is a contract. Not upholding promises breaks trust, and breaking trust comes with repercussions. Towards strangers (which we are towards the devs, we’re in a business relationship only, they’re not friends, they’re not family) it has to have them.
Don’t be a friggin doormat.
The 30 Dollar supporter pack does fully support you playing.
Especially since every second weekend there is a stash tab sale whcih causes prices to lower by 50%… since years, without fail.
300 points is what we would have.
What we need is:
75 currency tab
50 divination tab
150 map tab
40 essence tab
75 fragment tab
Makes a total of 390 without reduction. 195 with reduction.
Base tabs are not off 50%, I think it’s 30 or 40%.
Still, you can upgrade your base 4 tabs to premium for 10 per (reduced price), a total of 225 spend, 75 left.
2 extra premium tabs.
That’s it, you won’t need anything else, that’s all you ever need unless you’re hoarding.
And you got 24 base character slots.
Then you’re equivalent with LE anyway already, so screw your ‘but you spend more’.
Yes, it is.
The kickstarter is a perpetually legal contract without stated end-time, hence lifelong. They are not allowed to change anything stated there by EU law, outside of things which don’t directly include the kickstarter itself, like pricing of the product if it’s included in the kickstarter already (as you have it already and hence it doesn’t affect you anymore).
Which would cause them being up to be sued in the EU since that would be a breach of contract as well, making everyone backing the kickstarter eligible for a refund. Unless the product provides what was promised in the kickstarter in full actually.
In some cases… absolutely! Like Stardew Valley. It was a single person doing everything.
But… will they?
We got some issues I know of that exist since 4 years now. We got issues from 1.0 which are still not tackled even. How long to you expect a customer to wait on their product to ‘work as intended’? What’s acceptable exactly, where’s the line?
Battlestate Games did exactly that with ‘Escape from Tarkov’ for their ‘Edge of Darkness Edition’ which was available early on before they tried to backpedal with their PvE mode, nearly killing their game completely.
They changed over to call every league a expansion since they started to update core content as well with every league.
Formerly core content wasn’t always updated but only extra stuff related to the league added, some going core after. By now major changes - hence expansions - are done every league.
If we compare ti to LE then EHG does do a expansion every Cycle… but we cannot actively call it that since their promised core state wasn’t reached, hence nothing to ‘expand’ upon.
Makes the naming of the new update actually kinda problematic as well If they got time to ‘expand’ on their initial promises I would argue they should get their asses to finally fulfill their initial promises first.
Legally not binding in the EU.
Simple as that.
There is specific text in the law related to ‘reward-based crowdfunding’ which a product like LE entails. They are mandated to shut the studio and declare bancrupty should it come to that, or pay in full.
And plainly spoken the owners should be legally forced to pay for the failure in private should it happen… but that’s not in law sadly.
It’s a loophole in most countries in several business models.
Long-term, you burn your employee out, short to mid-term, it works quite well.
Companies know this, and yet, they still do it.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as you make it out to be.
No, not necessarily. But most people are rather shit in feeling (or acknowledging) the toll it takes on them before they crash one day. I’ve been there. I’ve spent enough time in therapy to hear this story over and over again. Many people who claim they are fine with working 50+ hours per week have substance abuse problems as a coping mechanism - aside from the fact that this ain’t exactly legal for employees in Germany. 48 hours as an average over 6 months is the highest legal workload for a normal employee in Germany.
The main point is that performance-pay correlates with higher work hours and higher health risk, and higher work hours also correlate with higher health risks on their own.
Your statement that performance-pay is better for companies and employees is simply an untrue generalization.
Maybe under ideal circumstances the ideal worker with the ideal education at the ideal workplace in the ideal project has all the benefits (higher pay, feeling directly rewarded) without the negatives (envious competition with co-workers, more pressure to deliver, worse health) - but reality looks different more often than not.
This one is not really something easy to say and that is because as you go up it is expected to keep rising but then again so is player gear with the caveat that player gear can only go so far and corruption scales infinitely. With that being said, assuming we smooth out the overtunned mobs which are for the most part the majelsa ones I’d said the point where difficulty feels about right is normal monolith in the monoliths prior to getting to the last 3 ones that give access to empowered. Usually by this point in the game it feels like they have enough power to kill the player if he isn’t careful or has a decent build but they also aren’t just completely destroying him instantly.
For me this seems like the obvious middle ground in difficulty between PoE and D4.
You have no idea how wrong you are. Do you know how well geared you had to be pre delve?
You needed elemental resistance cap (not even put anything into chaos res), around 3K life which was archieved with 50 to 60 life rolls and not even half the current life nodes on the tree, a 6L which normally was a tabula and a wand that would cost, 1 to 3c which often you could find something that good during the end stages of the campaign. All in all you could do this less than 20c (bear in mind, tabula was 10c around the second day of the league).
If you had that and a good build you’d demolish tier 15 maps and almost never feel threatened.
Comparing to now where you need to think of at least 5K life, capped resistance and at least decent chaos resistance as well as secondary layers of defense and much higher damage gear and that is just to do yellow maps, if you want to do tier 15 maps you need several divines worth of gear.
If it wasn’t for settlers bringing in a way to sell bubble gum currency easily the situation would be far worse than it is.
Those tourists only do that once and you don’t have hundreds of thousands of new tourists every season, that is just unreasonable. What you do have however is people checking if the game problems have been fixed and it’s now fun to play. Once they made their opinion, usually within the first week they stop playing but if the game was in a good state, they would stay and play for a lot longer.
This is why the idea of tourists isn’t very realistic with well known games past the first year or two. At this point you have almost no tourists, just people coming back and hoping the game is fixed.
Not necessarily. While you can argue you can chose to go that way it very much depends on the game and in ARPG cases, core content is meant to be the easier content that everyone can do without a problem where side content is where the challenge and better rewards normally are. The idea is that the average player whose time to play varies wildly will engage with this and have enough fun to play for a few weeks and if they manage to get strong enough to move to a bigger challenge, they will otherwise they won’t.
You can think of this as a sort of progression. There is no barrier of entry for core content and core content must be incredibly solid to keep the player entertained for week. Once you have progressed enough you move on to the next challenge and thing with side content is, you can have 3 or 4 different types of side challenge that are just a bit hard and then 3 or 4 that are even harder and so on and so forth. By doing so you present the alternatives of doing what you like while you progress to harder and harder content until the player finally gets bored of the game and shelves it till the next season.
PoE is a weird case where they do put a lot of side content in the map but then again what does the average player do? If the side content isn’t hard or really makes a difference from the mapping experience like let’s say, abyss. They will do it but understand, all they are doing is just killing more mobs as they go along. in cases of real side content like alva, most players ignore it and move on.
Let me give you my example, in map I do abyss (I do not invest into it) because it’s the same as just walking around and killing, nothing changes it’s just more enemies to mulch through and same for breach. I do harvest which is not exactly fun but it’s easy money and I do ritual despite being a little bit harder because it’s not massively so and has decent rewards. Also less annoying than harvest. But if you ask me what is the main focus of PoE atlas tree for me. It’s scarabs and I use exactly 0 scarabs. It’s the way I make money because I don’t have to do anything extra, nothing will be harder, I’m just getting more currency and if I could remove all side content and boost drops of valuable more entirely, that’s what I and most average players would do.
This right here shows so much how you are so much better than the average player that is insane. Average players get completely destroyed in incursion. Incursion is not fun nor is it very straight forward to understand how to shape the pyramid.
However do you want to know what is the funny thing? There is a grand total of 0 average players that will ever do X divines an hour. Average players do not run maps in 3 minutes. They do not treat the floor like lava and that is just 2 examples. Whatever example you use here, even if we are removing the skill barrier and the gear barrier they would be doing maybe 1/10 of that. This is why a lot of players have realized that meta farming strats don’t work. The only thing that will ever work for the average player is something that is slow and steady like for example scarabs now that we have indirect trading.
Also let me tell you how kingsmarch go. You set up then mappers, you give them the maps to go do. They die 1 minute in and brought nothing. Ok thanks bye. The investment required into kingsmarch to make this viable is huge.
40 hours of content in Chronicron? I have 193 hours and I never got my gear fully upgraded or did the highest difficulty content because my gear was not up to par yet. To be fiar, around 50 or 60 hours of those were on other characters but still. To reduce it to 40 hours of content just goes to show how different your skill and speed at which you run through a game is compared to the average player.
I disagree. Chronicon is better because it actually has a decent endgame system. You want to know why I and many people don’t ever finish characters or play higher difficulties of Grim Dawn? Campaign is just not what ARPGs are about. We want the end game systems and Grim Dawn end game systems are barely existent.
It is better because you don’t have particle vomit on top of pixel art. I’m not saying the result is overall too dissimilar as you end up not seeing much, but it is better.
I was talking about Chronicon in this specific section. What you do at endgame in Chronicon is just mapping. No more and no less and it’s enough.
C’mon, you are not this dense. You are a very intelligent person and we’ve been able to have a good discussion so far. You know WAY better than to try and use this kind of argument. 49% killed brutus. How many people actually played PoE 1 more than once in their life? Because achievements count overall player even the ones that played for 5 minutes, didn’t like the game and quit forever. This is not about what you early called tourists because yes they exists but as I said, they disappear overtime. What you care is active population at the start of any given season and achievements will skew the number beyond belief.
You understood what I meant but fine, you got me. It still doesn’t means he’s bad.
Yes but that is what I’m telling you. There is no game catered to everyone. All games are catered to a specific audience. Where some are catered to a specific audience and a specific skill level requirements, others try not to be and both are equally achievable and can be equally good. But we can’t take Triple A industry as an example of anything other than an example not to follow. They only care about money, not about even making a product worth the money which is why this whole point here is moot and we should just move on from it.
I was referring to ubber aberroth bit I’ll give you that point. That was a garbage season in terms of what content was added.
That being said the bigger problem is still less what was being added and more what wasn’t being fixed which I think we can both agree on.
As for who they shifted their focus from to cater. The problem is as usual the top 1% which tend to be the more vocal part of the community as well as the streamers who by the nature of their job want to present the next big challenge to their audience and they push forward for these and unfortunately, the Devs always listen to the wrong crowd… I mean if your game is dark souls by all means listen to this crowd, they are going to be right almost all the time but if you are making a game for the average player why are you even listening to these people? You are only ruining your game for everyone including these 1% which are still never going to be satisfied with your game anyway.
I’m not sure when I started but it was a few months before they did the resistance changes where they lowered elemental values across the board and removed all double resistances and yeah, they do not listen. They used to respond back then but their response was always that they believe that things were in a good spot. Well EHG, are they still in a good spot? Number seem to say otherwise.
It also doesn’t helps that the 1% all join up to come with BS reasons as to why the person giving the feedback is wrong and essentially drowning the feedback posts in garbage that even the Devs don’t want to look at anymore.
There are certainly a couple but the defensive layers you normally get from grand blessings are resistances, crit chance reduction, endurance, etc… They are the suffix ones and it really is a case of a player having to lose a defensive layer to add a defensive layer which brings us to the same problem.
This does happen to some people, but another big thing is your character other then “minmaxing” is done at empowered.
When you are hitting empowered, your character has 20 skill points and for casuals is about level 75-80 meaning you have the majority of your passive points as well.
So two things happen with your build, either its a “Good” build that will win in 100c with 0 problems, or its a “Bad” build that struggles at 100c, in either case you quit. if its a good build you are board until you push corruption, potentially taking hours upon hours to get some challenge.
And on a bad build you will struggle potentially again for hours, and it wont get any better cause so much power is in your passives/skill trees. if your build needs legendaries to do 100c, its a meme build.
They need to better refine the content curve. going to 100c is a huge jump in damage taken and mob hp, when many builds are already at like 80% power so if they cant handle the bump, they can barely do anything about it. And other builds are so strong they can do 300c+abby basically in yellow gear with very little effort.
Allow me to debunk this instantly. In 1.2 I made a “righteous fire” paladin and it was one of the most broken OP with ridiculous high damage and one of the most if not the most tanky builds and it got demolished the moment it got to empowered.
Now to be fair, it was not normal content that was demolishing it, it was the cemeteries / tombs. That being said it was dying every 2 to 3 maps.
Every single build without exception will build some defensive layers on grand blessings. You need to have those when you are doing empowered content, you can only gain those in empowered content. We have a problem here because you need them before the content you are getting them on.
Add to this needing good gear and not just good gear but good gear on specific bases and you are starting to exacerbate the issue even further because once again, some defensive layers end up being in specific gear bases.
Read it again dude. The last part of that section.
All they did was mobe the paying to b2p. Thats it nothing else changed
This part notice the complet last epoch experience
This one-time payment will be all that a player will have to spend to have the complete Last Epoch experience and be on the same footing as other players.
That includes all content even expansions. So that all playera are on the same playing field. Cant habe that with paid content
This is a link to your Paladin Build, and debunks your point immediately. Sure the damage may have been OP but this character is not even remotely tanky and that is why you’ve had problems when the difficulty spike kicks in at the start of empowered monoliths.
Just moving a few passive skills around to be more defensively focused would nearly double your maximum effective health pool allowing for smoother progression into empowerted monoliths.
I do agree that there is a big jump in difficulty beteeen normal and empowered monoliths bit I also agree with DiceDragons statement that a “good” build doesn’t really feel the jump in difficulty that much whilst a “bad” build will.
Grand blessings are great for adding defensive layers, but until you get them, use passive skill points to build more defensively and respec the points once the grand blessing has been aquired into a more offensive focus.
It is tanky by comparison to many other builds at this stage of the game and while points could be moved around, I was following guides from the build that was essentially the second most powerful build in 1.2. The only thing even more powerful being a warpath void knight but they are less tanky and not as good a start, they can just push a bit more corruption when we’re talking both builds having BiS gear.
Now you can say I can move around passives but did you even looked at what I picked. Every node is primarily defensive and even the few nodes I picked for offensive reasons which again are few, still double as defensive nodes too.
Could I have picked more straight up HP in the tree? Sure, but what would be the cost for just a little bit more HP? Losing some block? Losing some resistances? Losing some straight up damage reductions?
There really isn’t a much better nodes to pick over what I did and while I could have removed some healing effectiveness which is doubling as damage, at some point I need some investment into damage or I won’t do enough damage when it comes to kill bosses.
You cannot do anything to replace grand blessings, there just isn’t any leeway. There isn’t leeway on gear as you are trading one defensive layer for another, there isn’t leeway in the tree as you aren’t magically gaining more skill points out of nowhere and I already explained how the tree could not be improved much and any actual changes to it would simply move the problem from one place to another and potentially be even bigger.
The only point you could say that the build was not op was the gear I had at the time but again, this is just straight out of monoliths and into empowered, there isn’t much I can do at this point to improve the gear because gearing is already a massive issue.
LE requires very high skill to overcome the issues it currently faces until gearing catches up and grand blessings with good rolls are in place but the problem is that the majority of the players aren’t going to be that good at the game. They will be average and considering LE is meant to sit in between PoE and D4, meaning a game that is not being made for people who are good at it nor for people who are bad, a game designed specifically around the average player then the game difficulty should reflect this.
Yes, and burned out employees lead to your company failing.
It’s the core reason as to why companies which work for investors - hence quarterly reports - tend to fail after some years commonly, with very very few being any exception.
Longevity is and always has been the king for businesses since… well… ever in history actually. Happy workers + happy customers means you can make mistakes without worries as you have so much goodwill that people will just wave it off.
If you don’t have goodwill and don’t produce and qualitative long-term results because something is badly managed then that goodwill is not there and any mistake causes the same customers to rip apart your company front to back.
Quarterly reports, which are the bane of any company. Has always been the case.
Nothing kills quality as much as being reliant on investors.
Look around and you see it easily. Publishers are nothing else then investors into a studio basically, publishers cause studios to create a decent product beyond their means… and then a while later to fail. Very few exceptions are out there.
Same the moment you go to the stock market, investors cause your company to have the ability to expand but also causes inherently that your company will long-term fail.
It’s a classic cycle which is well researched by now. Applies to governments as well as capitalism as well as people in general. Exceptions obviously always apply.
You get a young government/company/person and that means they are prone to take risks, are open for new ideas and hence adapt swiftly to changing environments. When doing it a while they settle in and become more risk averse, hence the focus shifts to stability. Stability causes inherently stagnation as it is risk-averse, also it means changes in the situation can’t be handled as fast. And then any combination of issues arising which are individually accounted for but not accounted to happen at the same time - as that’s nigh impossible to include realistically - makes a stagnated system crumble.
The stock market as a whole is a prime example of this actually to showcase it quite visually. It’s one of the unsolved issues with capitalism as a whole still. Same for governments with the increasing overhead as regulations cause overreach inherently after a while. Iitially good but rampant it causes the downfall.
Because it’s not taught to people. ‘Work hard’ is taught. Obviously people crash. ‘The more you do the better your life will be’ is one of the biggest societal lies which have never upheld.
If you don’t follow this common teaching then you don’t overreach beyond your long-term means easily. And it’s a rather solid fact by now that a large portion of people are not able to work a ‘classic’ job setup for one reason or another, especially not in modern times with the remuneration for it being substantially lower comparatively to generations ago. Nothing alleviates the stress created as the reward isn’t clearly visible.
That’s why those have to be created. They don’t fall from the sky to randomly pick up, you gotta do it yourself and create this environment or it won’t happen.
It’s obviously not simple but saying ‘but that’s just not normal’ is something nonsensical. It can be normal, but if the opposite is normalized then obviously you gotta do things different then ‘the normal’.
Well, but that’s not the question there.
The question was ‘which difficulty level is the expected one?’
We got several stages of the game which are grossly different. Each of them has a different aspect of effort needed to handle it versus rewards provided for doing so.
Commonly you slightly raise the effort needed while providing the same level of result as that creates engagement, rising skill level up to a stage where your skill can’t keep up potentially, which means a natural cut-off line for more and more people as it progresses.
But the big question is… where is the starting line and how swiftly is it supposed to ‘ramp up’?
We can see situations in LE where it ‘ramps down’, and that is simply a failure of design.
If we know the suggested rate of ramping up as well as the suggested ‘common player’ skill-level for this specific game then we can say though ‘this are needs a buff’ or ‘this area needs a nerf’ specifically.
Since we don’t have the baseline though we cannot argue about it, we can only say the preample to it, which is ‘it’s all over the place and needs to be straightened out’ simply… we cannot even say ‘this is the scale we need to achieve’ because there is none available currently which goes for the majority of the game to adapt towards that.
Yes, and it would be a good one absolutely. Which means Lagon needs to be substantially nerfed and Act 9 and 10 as well, same as empowered.
As well as a smooth progression towards it by enforcing normal monoliths to gradually ramp up corruption from 0 to 100 over the 5 ‘stages’ to the top, in steps of 20. This removes the ‘spike’ entirely and causes the game to feel ‘smooth’ again. You don’t get suddenly stomped into the ground without expecting it, you adapt naturally as it proceeds.
Yes. I do.
And I also know that back then 1 div per hour was the top-end farming result with absolute top-end equipment while nowdays we’re talking about 25-30 div per hour. Starting at 1 div/hour in white maps and ramping up gradually as you progress.
Take the different situation into consideration.
You can still easily handle all necessary content up to Maven with a friggin multi-modded set of gear.
All of my main characters have between 4,5k and 8k life, negative chaos res and simply capped res. They do between ‘I can run simply T16’ up to uber-bosses. My uber-boss character currently is actually a speed-clear char with awful single-target having 4,5k life.
It can kill the stuff, it’s not fun, but it can. Mind you, I’m not a good player, just got some experience with the mechanics by now. There’s a myriad of people which do the same content with far less equipment then I have.
My bossing character I’m working up currently has 7 div value in equipment, which is… 7 hours in white maps farming, or 2 in red maps with a middling strat on a pre-existing character. It’s slapped together roughly and not quite done yet as I try to self-craft everything that time while seeing how to handle that well, but that’s the ‘market value’ of the items. It can do T17 maps while being a bit careful.
What you describe is not the case… you actually needed quite a lot more skill with some of the older bosses. Elder was chaotic but well designed. Shaper is a long-ass fight with surprisingly tight attacks at the later phases. Comparatively Eater of World is a laughable boss, you can no-hit kill him without much skill. Exarch is problemativ because of the ball-phase only, which has a trick to it as well. The hitbox is smaller then the visuals, which means there is actually a gap between them, which you can get basically every time handled if you click on the exact same spot on the arena in the middle to simply stand there and wait it out.
Maven is just shit because of the memory game which can screw you over, but at least that one also has a guaranteed few tricks like the inability to go clockwise when reaching the bottom field, it can not move from the bottom right to the bottom left, hence it can only go counter-clockwise from there and only move over from left to right there either, removing a substantial amount of possibilities to remember as well, especially since it’s always advacent fields to trigger unlike a normal ‘simon says’ game.
The only difficulties are the T17 bosses as they’re more chaotic compared to newer pinnacle bosses even.
First of all: No, they do it repeatedly at times.
Secondly: Yes, you get thousands, which is the inherent aspect behind a long reach, percentile wise you get enough people together to create social groups where those tourists hence either come on their own or try to play it since it’s a peer related thing to have similar topics to talk about.
Thirdly: Those people ‘checking’ are to a high percentile also ‘tourists’ by the way. The game being unfitting for their personal experience but adjacent enough to warrant the look, regularly. But never getting into the zone where they wouldn’t be.
Fourth: The vast majority of people playing games are tourists in every game. ARPGs actually have less since it’s a more niche genre for more niche mindsets.
Delve doesn’t uphold that. Heist doesn’t uphold that. Incursion doesn’t uphold that. Harvest doesn’t uphold that. Kingsmarch doesn’t uphold that.
Those are the PoE examples.
In Torchlight Infinite basically nothing upholds that notion either.
Grim Dawn does uphold it, since their side content is solely challenge content in the first place.
For other games? Isn’t upheld in Stardew Valley, isn’t upheld in Avorion, isn’t upheld in Hollow Knight and Silksong, isn’t upheld in No Man’s Sky, isn’t upheld in FF14, isn’t upheld in GW 2…
You got it the wrong way around. What you name is the possibility to do, but it’s not the basis for it.
Depends on the difficulty related to their current equipment, but usually they do.
Side content like heist, delve or incursion for example are skipped often because they absolutely suck without investment into it. Has nothing to do with ability. Some people do whatever comes along before learning to focus on one thing simply, that’s commonly the newer players.
Also as you progress you skip all content which you’ve not invested into as it’s not worth it, the contrary, it reduces your outcomes. Incursion has mostly white mobs and reduced return from loot, hence not worth it. Abyss takes a minute for a map you clear in 5 otherwise, for commonly 2-3 rare mobs, also not worth it. Legion you open because loads of rares, breach you open as it might simply give a few extra kills… but you don’t wait it out. Heist is left behind as few people like running heist, delve is often capped and is only a click anyway so why not when you see it. And harvest provides jack-all in return without investment too, for loads of time and substantial risk compared to other stuff, the enemies there are dangerous at T4 crops.
That’s your mistake, all content in PoE nowadays is based around scaling with scarabs. You don’t use scarabs… you get jack-all. Simple as that.
Obviously your experience is different because you get 1/10th of the return of anyone even using basic scarab setups.
Really? ‘Shaping the pyramid’ is hard to understand? You open the layout, you see which room it is… and all you care about is ‘is it a corruption room on any side? Yes? Grab it.’ If not then enter, kill some mobs and open the next best door which isn’t connected with anything optimally and leave for the next.
If that’s a problem then sorry… I’m baffled. It’s not the convoluted mess of the Betrayal board and setting that up or how to handle crop rotations, which is a massive chore. It’s also not handling Sanctum planning or anything of that sort which is also not straightforward… but temple? That’s really easy, you gotta remember the text of exactly 2 rooms and that’s it, and you enter it in T1 when your build still is not res capped, which it is commonly around T2 or T3 maps.
To go below 1 div/hour you would need 50 minutes per map with most strats nowadays.
If you’re that slow I recommend seeing a doctor.
Especially since several of those strats are simple and can be done in T1, essences I think in T6 it was? Dunno, anymore.
But if you do 1/10th div/hour then you’re playing at the pace of 1/50th of a experienced player with a mediocre strat… not top-end… just mediocre strat.
You get mappers until it shows ‘1% chance to die’ and then you let em run rather then throwing them to the wolves… kinda on you if you don’t do that.
I’ve held back and fished for T5 mappers and now they run T16 8-mod maps for me with 1% death-chance, all the stuff I cannot run since my build would die, they do it.
How?
You pick an item, you watch what you want, you roll for it and lock it, done. And legendaries you upgrade into true legendaries simply with crowns, which you get easily by just running end-game maps repeatedly anyway, which are all the same.
You mean 3 or 4 different map layouts which are all the same with I think 3 or 4 bosses that are all one-shots? As the game is set up to reward you for one-shotting stuff and punishes you if you don’t improve your char until it can? With endless scaling of ‘the same’ via the mastery levels which you get 1-2 per map-run at least?
You sweet summer child.
It’s solely about the mechanical gameplay from moment to moment, it makes no difference if it’s in a campaign or a end-game system. As long as the mechanics work it’s good. Any genre has that, there is no difference there.
That’s why Minecraft works despite having no guidance, and that’s why Starfield doesn’t work despite basically being only story as it has nothing else (and the story also is kinda crap… but that’s another problem on top )
That’s clearly better, right?
You gotta see it in 2 ways here though.
The first is the amount leaving early. Like with Brutus. 50% leave, means we got 50% left, right?
Then we have achievements like ‘reaching maps’, which is a 10 hour campaign at least for a newer player, likely more, commonly around 20 first-time, some 30 even. Given that the average play-time of any game is around 20 hours for players (studies have been done around that some years ago, probably changed a bit) we can say it’s the ‘common players play-time’.
So if we remove the 50% which drop out early then that means any successive higher-reaching achievement becomes all the more important… as those include ever more and more repeated players. So those 14,5% are actually 29% of players keeping at least more then 2 hours of gameplay in, which is also a big turning point (which is why steam put the 2 hour refund policy up).
Hence we can say only 61% of players actually do maps in some form.
Now we can move further ahead, Exarch and Eater, which is T14… and also a boss, so likely around T16 handled, so people actually playing end-game.
We established we need to double the percentile since the ‘testers’ are the players commonly playing at best towards Brutus, seeing the game isn’t for them.
Then we can establish the actual playercount which are at least ‘tourists’ as you describe em, checking out the game but playing it for a while. How about the turning point being ‘Part 1’, and hence Act 5? That’s around 6-10 hours for a new player, so you gotta at least think the game is ‘ok-ish’ to do that.
20%
So that means from now on we’ll simply say any percentile beyond is compared to the 20% we have as a baseline. If it looses 1%? It’s actually loosing 5%, our 20% are the new 100% of playercount, to weed out the low-end.
What does that tell us? Let’s check the actual numbers hence!
‘Actual players’… 14,5%? That means we 72% of players finish the campaign. Decent, acceptable rate, right? Actually relatively clear.
So from then on we can look further, if 72% beat the campaign… how many actually make it reasonably far into the end-game? How much is the falloff after investing at least the same amount of time again into the game?
Luckily we got a decent one, which are Eater and Exarch, T14 unlock and commonly killed with a character around T16.
4%.
That means 20% of players generally kill it. Absolutely decent!
Especially since you also named it yourself! The higher up a content is the more likely a returning player has done it repeatedly after all, since more and more people fall away having never done it and simply left before ever achieving it, being gone. The leftover are always the dedicated core audience which makes those percentiles in reality higher then depicted for the total playerbase.
20% total for T16… which likely means 30-40% of players make it that far per league in reality.
Maven killed? 2,6%… or 12,3% in actual percentile, so likely rather 15-20%.
So basically in a active league every 6th player managed to beat the core content, that means they are in a position to tackle the pinnacle content of the game.
That’s acceptable as a rate, absolutely.
If we compare it to a newly released game like Silksong (hence less skewed metrics) we can go with the same metrics of decision here, like ‘defeating Lace’ as a entry barrier, 80%, meaning 20% are lost, meaning every 1% is actually 1,25% in actual value, tourists removed.
So there the base game was beat (roughly 25 hours play-time for a first-timer) by 27,5%, which is 34% in reality.
Would say it aligns quite well play-time wise! Despite being a different genre.
You need to realize I’m in this 1% actually… and I’m definitely not catered towards.
I can handle top-end content, not because of skill but because I’m a so called ‘forever player’ in games. I throw myself at the wall until the wall crumbles, I don’t need a door. I’m not the norm there, quite far from it.
And still, I’m not catered to despite the relative ease to cater to me normally.
I mean, look at the state of the game. Competition? How? End-game is such a RNG crap-festival where you cannot sidestep it through knowledge that you can take 1 hour or 10 hours for achieving the same upgrade on the same build. Unlike in PoE where always the same people win races you won’t see that in LE happening at a similar scale. LE is a knowledge based game, you can circumvent nigh all downfalls it has progression wise to ensure you get your stuff in a relatively fixed rate.
In LE you can’t.
So that is already not a thing catered too, the most sweaty players are left on the side completely.
Then we got the people which are min-maxers, and I mean my type of player. The ones which play to achieve the absolute top, no matter the time, no matter if they manage. I cannot reach the top in LE since EHG doesn’t provide a ‘top’. 4 T7 items with a T8 sealed is the current top-end… that’s simply non-existent.
4T7 is also non-existent, we can at best realistically reach 3T7 with a group effort on playing CoF and pooling resources. Millions of kills for a single LP4 boss unique? Won’t happen during a single league either.
In PoE every league there’s a dozen ‘god-tier’ items created over the whole player-pool. Then those dozen items get further towards players because of mirrors.
In LE? You don’t even see those things, they are non-existent, there is no ability to achieve them, which makes working towards one not an option. Hence I’m not catered towards either.
As for content-based sweaters? Who is catered towards? You cannot kill uberroth with many ‘scuffed’ builds to prove your skill as some hits there are non-avoidable simply. And those builds cannot build up the defensive measures to not be one-shots at times. So skill-based players are simply not catered to either.
That leaves very… very… very few people at the top-end which enjoy the game on a high level. You seem to miss out that while you wanna voice that it caters to ‘the 1%’ it in reality absolutely doesn’t.
LE caters to basically nobody currently.
If they would actually cater to the 1% it would be in a far far better state then currently… and the game is not meant to cater to the 1%.
Exactly, that’s a major part, the itemization route is unfinished simply it feels.
It has 3k EHP, no… it is not. Especially since some ‘odd’ things are there… like necrotic taken as phys, when having less phys then necrotic res, which makes it a detrimental Affix even. Rather then using a health + hybrid health helmet while ignoring the healing effectiveness… which is sustain solely.
Your build has no initial defenses but good sustain, it also has high dps which leans into the sustain. You need to pass the threshold of initial defenses to tank the alpha-hit though, otherwise it doesn’t work. Sustain is recovery from a hit, but if that hit is a one-shot then you cannot recover.
Secondly, the body armor is atrocious and just a empty slot, a single T5 Affix is better then the whole thing at total.
Relic is also wasted completely.
Your build can have substantially more life or implement endurance easily and hence survive. It’s just badly built, that’s all.
I dont know why you think this especially with paladin. Paladin can have almost capped res just with passives in its tree + holy aura etc.
Paladin is THE noobie friendly class, cause you can just do whatever, you get tons of defense/res from passives so you can just bumble around in barely any items and survive.
If you said like a mage yeah, they have pretty rough early gearing, A paladin? I play almost exclusively paladin specific because I can ignore any early issue instantly just by being a paladin lol
So when is advertising not a legally binding promise? If only there were a contract lawyer here…
Oh no, am I not showing enough edgy teen angst? Teh horrorz!! Please don’t get me kicked out of the edgy gamer club!!
You’ve been here long enough to know that I don’t agree with everything the devs do & if I see something I disagree with I disagree with it.
So, just like mastery choice is permanent then. But thanks for ignoring the rest of what Horus said.
So you’re going to just “put to the side” sources of stress? How about we “put to the side” things like a hostile/toxic work environment or pressure to get stuff done? Honestly, I don’t know why employees complain!!! If you ignore all the bad things about a job it’s perfect & they should be grateful!!!
And if you don’t? I’d be surprised if doing a job you love was a common thing.
How about others? I don’t think it’s particularly common for a single person to be sufficiently skilled at all parts of creating a game that the game wouldn’t benefit from specialists doing their particular thing. It might even be more efficient.
I’m pretty sure they only call the larger ones where they “progress the story” expansions which is roughly once a year, everything else is a league.
Oh, so that part of the legally binding kickstarter promise isn’t legally binding? Because they were talking about what you pay for? I’m confused! It’s almost like you’re cherry picking stuff to argue about despite them being the same thing.
And we all know that’s my bag!!
Like, from physical exhaustion of being required to work long hours?
The advertisment only counts for the duration it’s ‘relevant’, that’s why ‘20% off’ ones don’t last forever.
They are binding in the EU as well though.
But in the case of the kickstarter the mention of it being free to play until level 20 would include solely a short portion of the total product (hence shareware) and the price changes according to the kickstarter pricing are also only relevant related to the timeframe.
Since both don’t affect the backers directly but only - at best - people personally known to the backers it isn’t a permanently binding aspect.
It’s all a bit complex when you go into those things at first but makes surprising amounts of sense, some gray areas there though.
Yes, because I wanna specifically focus on the mental aspect, which is more complex then physical exhaustion. Your physical ability won’t suddenly recover to full because good stuff happens. Your mind absolutely does that though to a surprising degree.
Which makes your follow-up arguments quite unfitting
Then don’t do it 60 hours.
If you have to work 60 hours a week to sustain yourself then the complete system in your area has failed and I recommend moving as swiftly as possible, to another country.
Small scale teams then rather then large scale ones.
The moment you need to implement middle management it starts to create overhead and tends to go to shit. Your manager won’t be on the same page as you, you’ll have limitations which are far more stringent. The bigger the organizational setup the less gets actually conveyed between the layers.
They switched that over, nowadays they simply say ‘major expansion’ when something like that happens.
Happened over time, but nobody took offense at that either since their usage of terminology always was fairly clear-cut in meaning, unlike what we currently have here with EHG, which is a bit ambiguous.
Actually… yes Because that doesn’t entail to the backer but to other customers, hence it’s not a obligation created through the backing process but only created the moment someone buys the product later on, hence it’s not established by that point.
Well, for starters you aren’t resist capped and have not allocated the threshold bonus from sanctuary guardian giving 15 to all resists, a huge defensive boost for just 4 more skill points. We also get more armour for these points too. As you’re not block capped removing some of the points that add block effectiveness in favour of this node overall yields better results for your effective health points.
I don’t think it unreasonable to remove a 2 points from alignment or righteous firebrand and 2 points in steel aegis in the force guard tree to slightly lower your dps to nearly double your EHP.
I’ve not mentioned the gear as I get that you’ve got what you’ve got and there are elements of RNG that are out of a players control, but it looks as though you could craft on your current gear to make further improvements.
By crafting in the empty affixes on your gear you can intact use these extra stats to cover what the grand blessings provide.
I think in order to smooth out the difficulty, the normal monolith should get a baseline amount of corruption, starting at 0 on the first timeline and going upto maybe 80 or 90 for the level 90 timelines, that way the difficulty curve is a lot smoother, rather than jumping up 10 levels and 100 corruption, it’s just 10 levels and 10 to 20 corruption.
It’s actually really easy related to the corruption increase.
The monolith system is set up in 5 ‘layers’ which you need to go through, the side doesn’t matter.
So you start with ‘0’ and turn it up by 20 each layer, which means you end at 80 corruption naturally at the top 3 timelines.
That’s as smooth as it can be… dunno why EHG never did that, it’s a piss-easy change which has massive impact, which has been mentioned since several Major updates now and simply was never even acknowledged.
Says someone who’s clearly never experienced depression or anything like that. Stress, anxiety & mental exhaustion absolutely do not “suddenly recover” just be ause someone is nice to you.
Ah, the “if you don’t like it don’t do it” argument. How did you react to that every time it was used in the past? I’m pretty sure your reaction involved cleaning up the hot beverage you’d just spat out over your screen…
" Which makes your follow-up arguments quite unfitting "
Now now, be careful, we don’t want you to put your back out while moving those goalposts.
The moment you get a second person involved in anything they won’t be on the same page as you, does that mean that people should never attempt projects bigger than themselves.
Overhead isn’t always bad.
Yeah, and those “major expansions” are the roughly annual ones I was talking about.
I did gave you answer though. Normal monolith difficulty with the ideal place being the monoliths just prior to the last 3 that give access to empowered.
I think you are misremembering things. I remember them very vividly because it was the only time I was truly able to enjoy PoE.
Recommended farming methods for “casuals” were meant to be worth 2 to 3 ex (it was ex, not divs back then but I get what you mean) per hour and people who were good and were using actual good farming methods were getting easily 5 times that an hour.
The average player in reality did a few chaos per hour because bubblegum currency was not tradable by the average player back then and they do not really blast maps fast nor they treat the hideout floor like lava.
So no, back then you needed virtually no gear with a good build. The gear needed to start mapping, for tier 1 maps was more than enough for tier 15 maps which I’m not going to say it is necessarily good but at the same time it’s better than being gear blocked from progressing.
Again, I will call you out on this. You are a good player, you are well above the 10% even if you fail to recognize it. I will guarantee that no average player does 1 div an hour on white maps. Heck, I do better than most average players and I still don’t do 1 div a day unless I get super lucky with a very valuable scarab drop. It’s fairer to say that I get anywhere between 1/3 and 1/2 a div a day until I’m firmly in red maps, then profits certainly start leaning to 1 o 2 divs a day. Now if you ask me how long it takes me to get there… At least 3 weeks. Heck, the campaign takes anywhere between 3 and 4 days (granted the first day I don’t play much as the update is already late into the night).
We are not going to agree on the definition of Tourist then. To me and to most people tourists are the people who try and give up. Whether they randomly stumbled upon the game on steam, saw a youtube vid on it or saw one of their favorite streamers play it. They are the kind of people who try and are like. No thank you.
The people who consistently come back and then quit again are not tourists, they are people like me who once enjoyed the game but right now can’t play it anymore because the game is ruined by poor decisions made by the developers and are coming back to check if the problems were fixed and the game is playable again.
All the PoE examples. Delve is much harder than mapping, heist is much harder than mapping, incursion is also much harder than mapping, harvest is a little harder mostly due to a couple overtunned mobs, Kingsmarch doesn’t even has a place in an ARPG in my opinion but requires so much investment and can be significantly harder to get the harder ores if you want full rewards.
I will not talk about torchlight, I don’t like it. they did minions wrong, the way characters control feel weird, I just cannot like that game so I can’t speak to anything in it. You can say I was a tourist in torchlight.
Grim Dawn upholds this yes but Grim Dawn is also an anomaly in the sense that it doesn’t has a true end game and even the end game is the challenge stuff which is odd because the campaign is not really re-playable in the way maps are.
For non ARPGs I will not talk, different genres have different expectations of how sided content differentiates from core gameplay so it’s pointless to use them as examples.
No, people don’t simply skip based on investment or gearing. People skip if they don’t like it and as it is to be expected, there is far more content people don’t like than content people like. People may put up with disliked content if it’s profitable but even then not many average players do. For the average player there is often limited time to play and wasting that time doing content that is not fun is not going to be the choice.
Again, I personally do Scarab because is money with no extra side content needed nor extra difficulty. Then it’s harvest which isn’t that hard other than some mobs that are overtunned and those mobs aren’t the T4. It’s the mobs with barrage abilities or which explode and I do ritual because while it is harder it isn’t something I hate and has ok returns. Still scarabs and harvest are better money makers for the average player as ritual is all about lucky drops.
This comes again from someone who is very good at the game and can make juicing work. Simply put, juicing is the absolute worst idea for the average player. The content quickly becomes too hard to handle and the investment only pays off at high levels of investment. If all you are doing is buying a couple scarabs just to add a little bit, you are going to be spending more currency than you are getting in returns. I have tested it and made a list with gains vs losses and there was only loss. It only matters when you juice things to the point where you need the kind of builds that costs hundreds of divs and guess what, most average players won’t even see 10 divs in their life.
Unless this has changed, simply having double corruption doesn’t sells well, you kinda need good layouts with multiple decent rooms, double corruption and there was another things or the value price for that is only a few chaos… Again it may have changed recently but it used to be like that not so long ago.
That being said you need multiple maps and very often you don’t even get a pyramid worth selling, When i tried doing this strategy I can tell you that 1 out of 4 incursions would get a corruption chamber and it take multiple maps to get one pyramid complete.
Then you have another problem. Most builds can’t handle doing the pyramid. The mobs in there are pretty strong and you don’t just have to survive, you have to delete them extremely fast so you can actually shape it right.
With all of that said, the average player ain’t getting currency out of that. I’ve tried, most people have and they don’t do that because it just doesn’t works, not for the average player.
A single map isn’t going to drop you a divine or the equivalent of it. This is a fact and even more so white ones.
To even go 1 div an hour you are going to be needing to clear maps at 5 minutes top and even then I’m doubtful that’s fast enough. The average player will take anywhere between 8 and 10 minutes per map assuming nothing happens that makes him slow down significantly and bring a map to 15 minutes.
Lets compare this to you alva idea previously. Let’s say a player does 6 maps per hour, that means in 2 hours he gets 2 pyramids done and that is assuming his build is at a point where he can handle deleting the pyramid fast and have the time kill the boss, pick the key and open the correct door. Now you need 1 corruption chamber which when I tried was averaging at about 1 in 4 completed pyramids. That means that’s 4 hours per sellable outcome and how much is one corruption chamber with nothing else of interest going for? Because I doubt it’s 4 divs. I doubt it’s even 1.
And how long does this takes to set up? How much gold do you need to be spending per hour to keep this running? Again it’s not so simple, it never is. In fact by the time you can have a reasonable setup running you’re probably at a point where you have other options available that are just better.
How? Because you need crystals to roll, you need souls to roll, you need the right items to drop and so on and so forth. Again, you are completely ignoring that you are not an average player, you are a good player that blasts through everything so fast that you cannot even comprehend how others are not just slower but look like they are going at a snails pace by comparison to you. This is what I mean when I said that when you are good you cannot understand what being average means, the skill difference is astronomical and because of that the average looks like bad but it isn’t, it’s merely you being unable to understand what average really is.
Compared to not having an end game system or maybe compared to the end game system being an even worse time attack end game map system. Yeah, it’s better. I didn’t say it good, I said it’s better.
Yes and no. Gameplay is different between campaign and maps because campaign is a craft big thing with a storyline no one cares about. A proper made end game has a decent mapping system where you blast through maps and get your loot.
One is you running after certain goals you don’t care about and maybe something drops. The other is a crafted experience where you are dropped in a limited space with just tons of enemies to mulch through and loot to filter through after the fact and for ARPGs, that is the draw.
GD is good on mechanical terms but the act of mulching through enemies and getting gear is generally subpar in campaign and the only parts where it tends to feel somewhat good is when you open shrines but playing a map should just feel like you are opening a gigantic shrine.
Imagine that but now everything is pixel art. Now it’s gotten much worse.
You really don’t. When you are counting your player bleed, that only matter over the active population, not the people who played the game once or twice but don’t anymore, regardless of them having playing 10 minutes or 10 hours. You only want to know what is your player loss over the active one.
Also, while not relevant to this specific point. at least 10 hours for a newer player, 20 to maybe 30 for first time. I have over 4K hours in PoE, this doesn’t includes time prior to it being on steam but that wasn’t a lot as the game wasn’t enjoyable for me before ascencion.
It takes me about 3 days (if we discount release day where I generally only put a couple hours before I go to sleep) and I put on average some 8 hours a day. This is your average player. Your first time/newer players are at least going to double this if they are average players too. Again, you are overestimating average players based on what is your skill level.
I didn’t say you were or that anyone was. EHG has consistently failed to deliver no matter if it is to the 1% or the average. The problem here is that what the average players ask for are the things that will fix the game where the things the 1% ask for are the things that no only won’t fix the game, they are not what the game even needs to move forwards. There is no forwards if the problems we already discussed aren’t fixed in the first place.
And while you may be the rare case of 1% who still wants the game to actually cater to the average player, you are still the minory of the vocal payerbase, much as I am.
The planned HP by the end is much higher than that, that is just what was possible with the gear that I have as I am moving from normal monoliths to empowered. If I don’t have better is because better was not possible to find thus far.
If layers of defense are missing they are missing because either I can’t get better gear nor get my blessings.
This is part of the issue I’ve been discussing. We need difficulty curves to be a lot smoother because empowered content should be significantly easier as it is the starting point of farming for stuff and getting the blessings and we need the ability to more easily acquiring the gear we need to progress.
Yes and this is literally what the build is doing and is supposed to do. Again, if you look at the gear and think it’s bad then perhaps that is not the player fault that better gear isn’t dropping and that grand blessings are virtually mandatory to get defensive layers done.
I understand YOU can ignore almost any issue with a paladin. I’m also sure you probably can do it with any other class as long as you have a good build. Skill will compensate for what the gear lacks but for the average player, that isn’t true.
If something isn’t there yet, it was meant to be. I went after what was being more necessary at that specific point in time. Even with what i have there I am massively lacking damage to kill bosses and I certainly am not tanky enough for cemeteries / tombs. Gear cannot really be upgraded significantly, either the gear I had no longer had crafting potential or I needed more levels to keep upgrading it. My hands really were tied.
As for your idea of smoothing, that isn’t smoothing, that is exacerbating the problem. The problem isn’t simply that you got into a much higher difficulty. The problem is that the difficulty is too high to handle with this level of gear and no grand blessings coming from normal monolith.
It is the empowered that needs to be significantly lowered in difficulty through many other means I’ve discussed already and certain enemies need to be brought in line with the rest of the campaign so that once they scale up to monoliths they aren’t again, a huge spike when they are present too.
