After testing part play in Monolith with friends recently, we found, specially from a perspective of many years of poe experience, that we have no motivation to play in party, with character min-maxing as our priority, because of current “reward” system.
only party leader is getting specific reward chest of echo type ran. That alone did stop us from party farming exactly after realizing that is how the system works, because for anyone else except party leader this feels like “wasted time” that could be spent much more effectively for character improvement by solo running own monolith with deterministic rewards.
that does not even feel like real “multiplayer”, where at any point you can group up, and farm together where everyone benefits equally. We felt it more like some online COOP game, where there is a host, who is progressing hist campaign\quests\whatever and there are “fillers” who just join to assist, and have a role of more like bot\minions. But the thing is that mine friends were attracted to join game after multiplayer announce with a real multiplayer game experience in minds
in current state, if you want to maximize you effort to reward ratio in minmaxing your character, it feels like you are forced to play solo your own content, because in party you have a feeling that you are loosing time so to say, getting way less reward for efforts, then when solo.
I really hope that this will change, to make party play more rewarding then solo play. or at least as rewarding as solo.
there is also a small chance that we did miss something or did something wrong, and that is why we had such experience, in that case would be great to have more in-depth description on how party system works in terms of rewards.
As of now, at least for me and mine guildies it is just solo game with online chat… very very sad.
Quite liked it myself and my group had a blast playing Monoliths. Think not everyone getting each nodes reward is to avoid making MP too much stronger then playing solo. Getting a choice between two different options is fine. If you already play in a group you can still share most loot between you which is a huge benefit.
And nothing stops you from taking turns running your nodes. We swapped quite often in our group to see if the others had interesting nodes to go for and once we had enough to run the quests we did so on one person to clear the boss.
but isn’t that the main point for most players who want to maximize reward to effort ratio?
we will do more testing I guess, but that just feels less stronger then solo as of now, at least subjectively. And it is just extremely hard to justify to self a reason to put more effort for less if that makes sense
actually, to give a bit more context on mine conclusions, two hypothetical scenarios, that imo are one of most common ones for party farming in argp multiplayer, for people who enjoy progressing their characters (main point of arpg?)
group decides to help a group member in farming specific chase item that this member need to progress, group join their efforts, but the result will be approximately the same if the person would just try to target farm the item solo, because noone else in group will have much better chance of getting it, odds barely change, while also other party members will be sort of held back in own progress for sake of barely anything.
several people need same chase item, so they would join efforts, and put a lot of work in getting better chances of farming item they need as a group (like running desired nodes of every group member, then everyone resets, and rinse-repeat, makes sense right? much much more effort from every member to have improved odds). As of now trying to do so will result in way less odds for every party member, which again brings us to eliminating motivation to group up.
I do think most players want that but think I have seen somewhere that EHG don’t want it to be to powerful and have both as solid options.
Thier stance on coop so far has been much better then PoE were it hardly ever felt worthwhile to coop for me as progression truly only happened for the host and it was cumbersome to take turns.
It does make sense and I understand how you are thinking but just don’t really feel the same way. Everyone gains progress towards the quests and beating the boss, you get some rewards (of limited choice) and depending on your group size you technically have two to four times as much loot due to the instanced loot.
I have told my friends what items I need and even added rules to my loot filter for what they are after to maximize the loot that the group finds even further.
if that makes sense