I think this is where reasonable expectations come in to play. I don’t expect a relatively small company (EHG) making their first aRPG to be able that still doesn’t have all of the core stuff in it to be putting out complex & innovative league mechanics like I would expect from GGG (since they’ve been doing this for well over a decade) or that we should be expecting from Blizz (since they damn near invented the genre & have massive amounts of both cash & people). Given that they said that 1.0 was going to bring Factions & the 2 remaining masteries, I don’t think it was ever going to have much content & thus be a bit on the boring side. If they’d switched the deliverables around & released the Mono expansion from 1.3 instead then I think that would have been different & people would have stayed longer 'cause there would have been more and new stuff to do rather than the same old stuff that we’ve been doing for several years (since they introduced the current version of the Monos).
For clearity: I don’t want this at all. I just want it to be (throwing numbers arround) 1 in 10k instead in 1 in 1kk. Still rare but realisticly obtainable in a 3-4 month time period while playing 10-15h a week.
Yeah but making an example for every item would take far to much time so i threw them all in one basket ^^.
That’s the first problem. They released a game without all the core stuff in it… we could call this an unfinished product if we want to.
I talk about content not making complex stuff or cycle mechanics. I can’t recall the name of the game but there is a mini hack an slash game made by one person that started out with 8 different endgame modes from mapping to bossing to arena and whatnot. There is just different stuff to do but you have something to do or opt in to do one thing today and the other tomorrow.
I don’t even expect Blizz to make good games anymore so they fullfilled my expectations from the getgo ^^.
I don’t know I haven’t played 1.3. This is a thing we can talk about once we get it but right now there is to little stuff to do that get’s old rather fast. That sums things up pretty much ^^.
Well, in LE, if you get a 4LP drop, you then have to make a good exalt. And you do have quite some control over it since the crafting is very deterministic. So as long as you find you best affix as a T7, you have a lot of control over what you get. And once you do have the exalted item, you know it’s a slam dunk. You run the dungeon, slam the item and you’re guaranteed to get the BiS item.
Sure, you have to grind a lot for each, but it’s 2 parts of an equation and you have quite a lot of control over one.
In PoE, however:
-you have to get the unique you want to drop
-6-link it with proper colors
-max enhance its quality
-enchant it over and over again until you get the enchantment you need
-once that’s done, you apply the double corruption and hope you don’t get a yellow out of it. Or 2 useless affixes. Or even worse, an affix that is actually bad for your build
If you don’t get it, start all over again.
So LE is actually better than PoE in this regard. It’s easier to get a BiS item in LE. And you have a lot more control over it.
As opposed to D3 (I won’t comment on D4 because I haven’t played the new loot system so I can’t comment on it, but before this season, D4 was the same) where you get your BiS gear really easy and then you’re only left with hunting down some number (max GR, max nightmare dungeon, etc). Which is fine for some people, but boring for others.
This is not to say that LE is right and the others are wrong. Or that PoE is right. Or D3/D4. They’re all right. They just target different people.
Basically, the loot grind/drop rate is like Goldilocks: one game is too easy for you, the other is too hard, the other is just right. And this will depend on the player.
Some players like PoE’s, some like D3’s and some like LE’s. Neither are right or wrong in liking it. Fun is a subjective thing.
They are wrong, however, when they try to change the game to fit their preferences, rather than find a game that already fits them. Especially because everyone’s goldilocks zone is different.
Seasonal games are always unfinished. That’s their whole business model.
In LE pinnacle bosses are part of the core system because the devs say it’s what they want in the game. If they had never said that, you wouldn’t have missed it. Likewise with skill sigils.
If you look at PoE, when did they stop adding core stuff? What even is core stuff?
Today we consider ascendancies a core mechanic for PoE. But that was 3 years after launch. Same for the map revamp they did 2 leagues after that, where they introduced a pinnacle boss.
The reason why people keep expecting LE to have more stuff in the game is because they go “Oh, GGG already did that 10 years ago, they should know better and have it in the game already”, but they seem to forget that for years EHG was just a handful of devs. Much like GGG was at the time. And making games that are this complex is a slow process.
Other than the campaign, which is unfinished (which I know irks some people), everything else is in a good completed state. It needs some rework on some things, some balancing on others. It needs to be expanded upon.
But overall LE is a pretty finished product. It’s just that the devs want to add more stuff to it.
Yeah, I’d agree with that. Though I’d also question what “released” actually means for an online game with seasons, early access & the like. It’s not like it was back in the day where we bought boxes from shops & couldn’t patch games.
Ok, so what was the content that you could do in PoE back in the day? And when did it increase from just maps? Abyss wasn’t until 3.1 in December 17, Delve was August 18. Breach was Feb 17 & that introduced the Breachlords. And yet 1.0 “release” was October 13.
Exactly, hence my comment that if they’d switched things around to include some new endgame stuff to do that would probably have improved player retention.
Yup, that’s why I don’t think it’s reasonable to compare a game “released” now to a game “released” over a decade ago. Understandable, but not reasonable.
That feels a bit of a stretch given how much “core” stuff they want to add & how many bugs & the like need to be fixed, plus the amount of polish that needs to be added to the UI & other stuff.
I don’t disagree with the bugs and UI polish required. I was talking about the mechanics.
Yes, they want to add a lot more “core” stuff. But it’s a seasonal game, that will keep happening, like it did in PoE. There will never come a point where the devs (both from EHG and GGG) will say: “Okay, we’re happy with how the game is and we don’t want to add any more stuff to it.”
But I can farm a truck load of mats and I can start over again as many times as I want. I’m faster in PoE to get the mats I need for a craft then dropping an equivelent item in LE.
Control yes but to me it isn’t that much better but that is mostly connected to the unlucky star I life under ^^.
I’m not happy wiht any loot system out there BUT I liked D3 for the ease of approach that brought you online realy fast while it leaves a lot of room for improvements to minmax.
I like PoE because I can farm mats to craft as many times as I want and it’s something that comes natural over time anyway.
D4 is okayish maybe the system I have the least issus with but the least fun as well.
LE always felt like a needlessly big slot machine to me even given the fact that PoE has moore hoops to jump through. Maybe this will change with more time but so far I have certain expectations when i use mats and they are mostly not met ^^.
Why? I could find D3 is fugly and LE suits my taste in every regard outside of drop rates. So it’s fair to say “me want more drops!”. It just stops to be feedback depending on the constuctiveness of the approach. I can only speak for myself when I say “I want a slight improvement in droprates.” and I don’t thing this is something inheritly bad.
I talk about the stuff that didn’t make it into the game for whatever reason. I talk about masteries so old their social security number is one. I talk about masteries not having 5 skills to begin with. i talk about the unfinished storyline and so on and so forth.
I don’t talk about the addition of content to a once finished product. I don’t talk about evolving over time. I simply say the game wasn’t finished on the release day and work from back then is still piling on making it even harder to evolve the game.
Let’s take D4 for example. It started with a pinacle boss, nightmare dungeons, the tree and helltides. Those are still baseline mechanics today but they added the gauntlet and the pit on top of it and made helltides fun. Still they started out from a place where the game looked finished.
I hope this explains my point a bit better.
And where is the problem with that? Adding content to a game that is so good it becomes a core mechanic is an awesome feat in my eyes.
So I’m one of htose people and again: they took my money they better deliver. LE has OBVIOUS holes in their 1.0 release and I don’t give them slack for whatever reason because they took my money. If this was a f2p game i won’t even talk about it and say “Give it time!” like i did in the PoE Beta ^^.
1.0 feature finished complete product where things are added for a game as a service model. As I said above there are obvious things like outdated masteries or masteries that don’t even have 5 skills to begin with.
I don’t compare back in the day. People might think this is unfair for whatever reason but EHG released at this year knowing well what other games offer and they wanted money for it. So I want a finished product that is working. Right now I aided a kickstarter, EA game that released as a construction side. I don’t give a rats ass about how small a team is or whatever they took my money they better deliver or I move on and never touch anything they offer again. On top of it I don’t care how games started out whenever because I think that’s the wrong way of thinking because all modern day hack and slash games of the last 30 years are awesome compared to Golden Axe that trash game that offered nothing.
Not really. Most of the stuff that makes a BiS item in PoE is tied to specific mechanics. Max quality requires betrayal, enchantments require Labyrinth or Heist, depending on the gear, double corrupt requires Incursion.
You can get the mats to craft something (unless it’s a unique), but you still need to run those mechanics over and over again until you get the perfect result.
And failing to double corrupt (which is the most likely scenario, since it can roll any implicit in the game) means you have to start all over from the start.
I mean, it’s all subjective, but I didn’t feel like D3 loot had a LOT of room for improvements. It was basically getting ancient gear, changing one of the affixes and getting a single piece of primal gear in your setup. It was actually pretty limited.
Which is why I got BiS gear for a build in a week.
I think the main thing for your view on this is that in PoE buying the stuff you want to craft with is a natural thing, whereas in LE it still isn’t.
You say that because you make currency, then you buy the gear you want to craft, including the proper base. In LE you don’t feel it like a valid option yet because the market isn’t yet in a good state. It’s not stable and not yet widespread enough like PoE’s is.
Once you have the market working properly, it won’t be hard to get BiS gear. I mean, you’ll have to grind for a lot of gold, but that’s no different from grinding for mirror-tier gear.
Yes. I didn’t express myself properly. I meant that saying “I’d like to have better drops” is fine, especially if followed by a constructive remark about why you want to.
Demanding that they change because the devs are stupid and/or the people that like it are stupid (or other useless remarks like that) isn’t fine.
BTW, that wasn’t targetted at you, it was just a generalization.
This isn’t incomplete, though. It’s just unbalanced. The masteries are all there, even if some are more shiny than others. Balance isn’t the same as completeness.
Yes, those 2 are good examples. I had forgotten that there are still a few missing skills. However, what else is incomplete about LE? Like I said, if the bosses had never said anything about a pinnacle boss and wanting it to be core, would you have missed it? Would it have been incomplete without it? Or the skill sigils, whatever they will be.
They started with monos, dungeons and arena. All of those are finished as is, even if they’ll be expanded upon/revamped later (much like Helltide was repeatedly revamped). The only thing that isn’t finished, from the consumer point of view, is missing skills and campaign.
Sure, but then we get into the territory of the game’s cost vs the game’s worth. Keep in mind that LE costs half what D4 costs. The more you pay, the more you’re entitled to certain expectations.
I think this remains the number 1 problem.
I think everyone looks at this problem backwards imo. Everyone gets to really high corruption really easily because the classes are unbalanced. But even if they were not, right now all level of gearing that isnt BiS is literally extremely fast. You might spend some time getting exalted items on the right bases, but that crosses imo into really good gear.
At this point I unironically think we actually need gear nerfs in early game with gear buffs in late game. 3/4 lp should be rare, probably not astronomical odds rare. But really what happens is, you pick your character, you grind out to the mid 90s level, and you have all decent yellow gear and some 1lp uniques. Then you hit your 2lp uniques. Then suddenly you can no longer improve your character. So the first 50-100 hours of a character blink by lightning speed you are leveling, getting all these mini upgrades, then suddenly to get another upgrade you need 1000 hours? the curve is all messed up frankly.
Samething with normal vs empowered monos, the reason normal monos are so braindead and easy is because players have cracked out gear by the time they are to lagon most of hte time. You never have to stop to farm up gear/levels. You simply blast through all of it. Many builds by the time they have hit empowered are at the point that 200-250c isnt even a problem.
The LP mechanic is such a driving topic in progression because its all anyone has. You simply get rare/exalted gear way to easily and early so all thats left is pimping out your unique slots with lp. I think there needs to be a fundamental rethink on the progression curve and how players gear up.
Yes and I always play different mechanics or trade stuff to get what I need and don’t have at hand at the given moment.
Yes that’s almost like I have to play the game to get something done in it 
. I play all possible mechanics in PoE so I get all the stuff I need sooner or later anyway. Well at least sooner then a 4LP drop in LE 
.
Well okay… I talked in D3 terms. First you got your set then you got your ancient and primal and whatever the season offered and then you started to minmax. In D3 terms that’s a lot of room. Then again I was not always intrested in playing a season in D3 longer then 3-4 days. So racing through it felt right.
Even when I play PoE SSF I don’t have the same issues with PoE that I have with LE. I simply guess it’s something mental that makes bad system A look better to me then bad system B .
At least untill the devs are actualy stupid. Luckiely most devs are rather smart and have more informations then the dumbass who calls them names and demands things. But tbf it has at least some kind of entertainment value.
All fine, even if it would’ve been targeted at me the responce is civil ^^.
My bad I ment the mastery passive trees to be specific. Some of them are simply outdated af but those are completely implemented.
That’s why I never make promises to anyone . It’s like the announced dodge roll. I’m pretty sure I’ll hate the implementation of it because it’s a unresponsive clunky mess untill I get used to it and never want to miss it again. Would the game be incomplete without it? No. Would I be mad if it isn’t in the game next cycle? No, others maybe ^^.
Yes they started with it while they had other endgame systems in mind and named and made known untill they dropped them for wathever most likely valid reason. I could’nt even remember the names from the top of my head but simply knowing stuff didn’t made it into the release version of the game is disheartening for me. I understand there are reasons for this and still I don’t like it .
I disargee. I can have expectations all day long no matter if a game is 1k or f2p. I just need to make up my mind if a game is worth it to me. I don’t write about LE because I’m completely indifferent about the game and don’t care. The opposit is the case but I simply don’t go with the “small team” “compare it to” “remeber when X released” flow.
Oh, you have 0 chance of getting a BiS item in SSF in PoE. Well, maybe not 0, but certainly a lot less than getting a 4LP on CoF.
I think I already said this to you, but I think it’s mostly that real BiS gear in PoE is so unattainable that most people don’t consider it when talking about BiS. They consider getting a single corrupt unique BiS and are done with it.
As opposed to LE where getting the actual BiS is considered as having to be obtainable.
I consider a corrupted unique to be on par with 1/2LP. And 4LP is on par with the aforementioned 6-link/max quality/enchanted/double corrupt.
So why is it that you look at the equivalent in PoE and go:
-“Oh, that’s so unattainable it doesn’t even enter into my considerations and BiS to me is something of less quality but achievable”;
But then you look at LE and go:
-“Oh, that’s so unattainable that I must have it and it should be easier to get it”?
It highly depends on the game mode I play. SSF is a hard nut to crack and every item that increases my toons wellbeeing is highly appreciated .
I think the biggest problem is there are numbers added to it. I can look in a databank how god or bad the droprates are and see numbers so small i cant even imagine them when I was used to work micrometer and smaller dimensions ^^.
When you take said numbers and look how possible it is to get said item and you find out it’s more likely to be struck by lightning then something is wrong in a game… from my point of view .
To be clear i think LE will do well without catering to my needs and without making 3 and 4 LP items SLIGHTLY more obtainable.
To be fair, you can also run those numbers on PoE. The problem is that for LE it’s easy: getting 4LP of unique X is Y%.
But if we look at even just the odds of a double corrupt in PoE you can also get actual numbers. You have a 25% of adding an implicit and there are about 175 vaal implicits. So that means you have a 0.1% chance of getting the implicit you want. If you double corrupt, you have a 0.00008% chance of getting it. And that’s only the last step. Just take each steps chances and multiply it until you get the final result.
Isn’t that more of an issue of the scaling mechanic itself then rather then the gear though?
Feels more like that’s an issue that there’s nothing to ‘overcome’ directly beside some shady unclear situation which always goes one step further as soon as you reach your goal, because there’s always a higher corruption there.
Not really. A 4 LP unique and a perfect Exalted result in the perfect legendary. It’s ‘get lucky twice and you have it’ and nothing beyond that.
Agreed, which is why D4 is so badly received. We can already see that LE goes another route though, which is good. They’re trying to use the path PoE had in this case… and that one functions as we know.
We can’t expect LE to have the same depth of content for leagues though as PoE has since they’ve needed years and quite the amount of devs getting into their company to provide that in the first place.
Agreed, their 1.0 was a very bad decision. It provided a sudden influx of money but over the long-term it’s a bad decision they made. We’ll see if it was ‘enough’ though, EHG removed the learning-wheels the moment they decided to make it 1.0 and now they got to deal with the ‘big boy’ problems rather then being excused for the product not being released yet.
Yes, exactly.
Positioning the right expansions at the right moment is important. EHG needs to learn that part still, we can only hope they do learn that. GGG has already down how to do it after several year long mistakes they did, overall since around… a year and a half now they’ve never failed to provide a single non-enjoyable league which has at least somewhat improved their game overall in at least one aspect. And especially with the last one they made it so the game has been given more player agency then ever before, something I argued about over there around 4 years before they implemented it finally… and surprise… it turned out exactly as good for their game as I expected.
I do, which is why LE is under quite a ton of scrutiny from me, I don’t take well to being delivered a product which isn’t ‘whole’. I’m fine with waiting on a product for a long time until it becomes ‘whole’ but never ever tell me you’re providing one which is that and then it’s not.
Yes, and the following points you mention are all the depth of the system. You have so many ways to make a item ‘better’ in some way that you’re always able to do ‘something’ or at least try a singular time to improve something you have.
This is still lacking in LE, which I’m talking about when I say that the current content doesn’t align with the itemization at all. We got a solid functional base mechanic for crafting. We got a solid functional base mechanic for improving uniques… we don’t have the content available to even handle those solid baseline mechanics provided yet though… not to speak of making them more in-depth over time as that’ll require even more content to allow.
Which is exactly what PoE did over the years and why it’s working out so well… and would even better if there’s a comprehensive guiding mechanic in-game for players towards reaching their itemization goals.
BiS being easy to acquire seems good for the player but is bad in reality. If your effort to acquire something is low then it has no intrinsic value to the mind. A ‘lucky drop’ is always far less worth for our brain then something created through effort. Both provide a bit of a different mental reward to us… hence why both aspects need to be taken into consideration.
The ‘effort’ part simply is limited in LE which causes the downtimes between luck to be lackluster. Which is understandable I would say.
There’s a difference between ‘there’s more to come’ and ‘feeling unfinished’ though.
LE ‘feels unfinsihed’ which is unacceptable for a 1.0
The ‘more to come’ is open always for any existing game since the conception of games, you just add more function/story to it and it becomes ‘more’. Not necessarily good but it does.
Which is why you can say that ‘Tetris’ is finished since it does exactly what it says it does… but LE is not since it fails to provide the promised story where it told us it would have it for example. Despite being thousands of times more complex and having much mcuh more content. It doesn’t matter since ‘feeling unfinished’ doesn’t change with size… it’s solely perception based and hence always in the hand of the devs.
Campaign, Maps, Maven in PoE
Everything else is side mechanics. Your core progression is quite clear-cut in PoE and always was. Side mechanics enhance the core experience simply… or branch out into alternative playing methods for variety.
In LE it’s also clear-cut. Unfinished campaign, monoliths, no ‘grand’ end-boss culminating the whole experience.
A distinct difference I would say.
Because it’s directly in-built into the campaign, they intentionally made it a core mechanic. Same with the map revamp. At no point in time since 1.0 was PoE feeling ‘unfinished’ in any way. It transformed itself heavily (liking it or not is another topic for that) but GGG always made sure to provide a ‘complete’ experience for a newcomer.
You can solely and only say that to a product which upholds a simple test.
Give it to a person which has never heard of the product before, let that person experience it and at the end ask ‘Does it feel like it’s ‘done’?’
If the answer is ‘no’ then it’s not finished, simple as that.
Cut-off story? Not done.
No culmination of the experience at the end? Not done.
Which is why a small-scale game like ‘Mech Engineer’ that has far less devs then LE in comparison is ‘done’ in a 1.0 but LE is not. Same reason why ‘Torchlight Infinite’ (which isn’t a really great product) is ‘done’ with 1.0 as well and since then going decently well. It upholds that one test. Give it to such a person and when they’re through they’ll easily say ‘yeah, was a full experience’.
It has nothing to do with length, amount of content or anything of that stuff… it just has to do with it being comprehensive for what it presents.
It was a very clear-cut thing before it got utterly washed out by developers trying to market their products and make a quick buck.
Either have a endlessly repeatable mechanic that in itself is enjoyable (Tetris, Pong, all of that for the simplest ones) or provide a comprehensive experience around it through some guiding mechanic like a story (hence provide the story and keep the player immersive himself into it until the end) or through ‘natural means’ by putting challenges into the way to overcome until all are overcome.
So Early-Access is when all the promised told mechanics aren’t included yet, be it baseline functions up to finishing the promised story without expanding on it… and released is when that’s all there and then you work for stuff ‘beyond’.
While during EA often extra stuff comes up to be worked on (re-work of the crafting system, implementation of the LP system for examples) it doesn’t remove the need for the initial tasks to be finished before you can call it ‘released’.
Hence EHG failed us there simply, there’s just no talking around it. And it has no meaning which variant of game model or even genre one uses there. It’s universally the same concept which people have thrown overboard seemingly and forget to remember.
And those are the exact things why I say this game is not ‘1.0 worthy’ exactly.
Before release you make a round of ‘polish’, EHG didn’t do that. Their ‘release’ was throwing in random extra stuff and ignoring the core issues the game has to even allow it to be called ‘finished’.
With the difference that the rarity of the lost item is at best a 3 LP item for the rarest of the rarest uniques in PoE (Mageblood for example). You get another ‘base’ and repeat, and from there you can endlessly adjust.
There’s barely ever a 100% breaking point, the sole way you ‘brick’ an item in PoE nowadays is by making it so getting a new base is easier then improving the outcome from a failed attempt.
Having 4 instead of 5 skills as the norm for all classes is… sounds very ‘incomplete’ in my eyes there.
That’s not balance, absolutely not.
Act 10-12
Finishing the skills for some masteries.
End-game boss culminating all the timelines to a ‘final experience to overcome’.
Those 3 I would say are actual missing content necessary for 1.0.
Then if we talk about balancing for 1.0:
The last ‘polishing pass’ which is usually a ‘beta’ in olden times. Which means feature complete but ironing out the kinks so it feels overall good and provides no massive disparities.
This has also not be done by the way.
Also… 1.0 is not the place to implement new features, 1.0 is a simple roll-over from 0.9.xx in a development cycle. The sole reason why we often see 1.0 having new major features is because they’re internally tested by the devs in some way, we just don’t see this polishing work happening.
Nobody in their right mind can tell me that the release of MG in the state it released had proper polishing work done because that would be a lie. They fucked it up, plain and simple, the minimum requirement of quality control hasn’t been done… otherwise we wouldn’t see the missing affixes in the search. Not even talking about UI issues or nonsensical QoL stuff like a ‘one click redeem’ button for sold items missing. Those could theoretically happen when railroaded in a way. The missing affixes? Bad bad sign.
Hence not warranting 1.0, simple as that.
No matter how ‘small’ the missing content is… not acceptable to ‘release’. It’s a bad behavior from companies, shouldn’t be excused, ever.
As a customer of a finished product I’m always entitled to receive it in a finished state.
My entitlement related to the situation hence.
We can call it ‘nitpicking’ at times since it’s ‘mostly great’… but I’ve gone over from excusing small - or in terms of story large - parts being missing for any reason.
Yes, and that is another major issue. Sure, things can change during development… but if your sales-pitch for the core mechanics isn’t viable enough to make people support your game then maybe work on that for a little bit longer then have it come back biting you in the ass afterwards.
If you promise something, people pay for that in mind and then you ‘release’ it with even a single of the promised points not included then… yes… people will shit on you for obvious reason. And they’re ‘entitled’ to do it, you broke a promise after all, reasons be damned, not the customers thing to deal with, you as the one providing a product broke basically the contract, it’s only understandable for backlash.
Huh? I made 2 mirror-tier items with a SSF character before fully switching to Standard there. It just takes knowledge and effort, but you can absolutely do it in a deterministic fashion if you know how. But… you got the peak of the mountain in sight rather then being covered in clouds and fog.
I didn’t say it was easy. I said it was easier in LE than in PoE. There’s a difference. Much like it’s easier to get a BiS 4LP unique in LE than it is to craft a 2/20 in D2. It doesn’t make it easy to get. Just easier than those 2 examples which are really extremely hard to get.
That undercuts what you said, though. It was years before Maven was released. In fact, it was years before Elder was released.
Initially, PoE was campaign and proto-maps (a map like system way far from what they have now). There was also no “grand” end-boss culminating the whole experience until 3 years after launch.
It might also be argued that Julra is the “grand” end-boss, since she was made to be a sort of “stand-in” pinnacle boss until they released one.
I don’t understand what you mean. Whenever you try to corrupt an item, there’s a 25% chance that it will roll into a random yellow. That totally seems like bricking a unique, to me.
And unless they added something since I stopped playing, whatever vaal implicit you got was the one you had and you couldn’t reroll it, even if the affix effectively cripples your build.
That is not what I was talking about.
2 of those 3 were what I was saying was missing. The end-game boss (like Elder/Sirus/Maven, which, I remind you again, didn’t exist for 3 whole years in PoE) could be said to be either Julra, or Orobyss, since it’s obvious he will be the final boss in the campaign.
Mirror-tier items doesn’t automatically mean it was BiS. Were the items max quality, enchanted and double corrupted where all affixes are what you want them to be and both vaal implicits are the ones you wanted? Because that’s the equivalent to 4LP in LE. It’s the absolute best you can get after which there is nothing more to improve upon.
It is now though, part of the ‘transformative’ releases PoE has.
Back then it was killing Dominus, which can be counted as a finished story since you beat the guy exiling you. You’ve done your task.
Then it was killing Malachai in Act 4, that’s the first ‘expansion’ of a already finished story. You took care of the underlying issue.
Then they expanded it to 10 Acts and hence Kitava being released through killing Malachai, still… a finished story.
Is LE’s story currently finished? We got 1.0, it should be, right? It doesn’t matter what LE will be in 20 years or tomorrow.
Once again:
If you give someone not knowing anything about the game, neither the history nor the goals… will the current state be a ‘finished product’ for them? No.
Hence the whole argument just doesn’t hold up.
Yes, which is the sole chance to ever remove the option to make a better item from it.
The only. Every other outcome makes it either stay the same or improve it in some way.
Uniques being corrupted is something which usually is only done with doubles as well, so that’s the similar mechanic to LP in LE. The one mechanic which has a non-reversible fail-state.
Similar to having a negative affix on your exalted and that one roling on it.
Yes, which is also the least important point of the trio. Hence we still have 2 others causing an issue. Not to speak of the last ‘polishing phase’ of development being screwed up.
Well, no, since I wouldn’t be able to mirror them with corruption 
Max quality… yes. Enchantments have been removed, they don’t exist anymore. Double corruption happens with a copy of the same mirror-tier item, at times corrupting an item is also not BiS, specifically in that case since it was a cogwork ring and a belt, both having no better implicits then provided.
Maven was released in 3.13 (Jan 21), almost eight years after the first league (Anarchy/Onslaught June 13). Shaper was released in 2.4 (Sep 16) which was a mere 3 years after 1.0, Elder was released in 3.1 (Dec 17).
That is not what you said, though:
Dominus didn’t culminate the experience since after that you moved on to maps (such as they were back then). And you didn’t have any other boss after that.
Whereas in LE you at least have either Julra or Orobyss, both of which can fill in that role.
This is not true. There are vaal implicits that actually hurt your build. For example, an implicit that adds fire/cold/lightning damage and that screws up your elemental equilibrium. And other cases as well.
It did though?
Was the story unfinished?
The - forgot what it was called back then - was a end-game system simply tacked on for people wanting to play on. It wasn’t a story-integrated part until Shaper came out… at which point once again it was a finished story.
PoE always had a finished story in some way, LE doesn’t.
LE tries to tie in the end-game without a finished story into the story… which can’t work well in the state.
LE has no natural end-point to the story.
No matter how you twist and turn it, that’s the case there. And we have no clue of what the heck Orobyss is for us in terms of storytelling… obviously positioned as the end-result which we need to beat but the game does literally jack-shit to put him into that position story-wise currently.
Yes, and life leech hurts a low-health ward built.
So same situation, just less pronounced in LE.
We’ll likely see more of those coming up in the future as well unless EHG wants to limit their game massively… which would be a bad call over time.
We will never agree on the importance of the story, so there’s no point in continuing that discussion 
I’ll give you the missing skills, though. Although I feel like the endgame mechanics are more important than all of that.
Not the same situation, though.
In PoE you can effectively brick the item so that you can’t use it in your build, because it’s effectively worse than a non-corrupted unique and you have no control over that.
However, in LE, you have total control over what affixes you get, so at worst it will be a slightly better unique. Never will a legendary be effectively worse than the unique unless you try hard for that.
Oh, for the live-service aspect definitely.
It’s all just coming from different perspectives at once, which makes it a bit hard to voice properly.
The aspect of it being life-service and the major points important to keep it long-term lasting.
The point of being a customer and having basically a contract of some kind with the one providing the product (promises before delivery are also things taken into consideration there)
The overall position of how ARPGs generally become successful.
It all leads to aspects which one can disagree on easily, especially without knowing 100% of the situation… like why specific things were delivered at specific dates, how the financial aspect of EHG is, how their development team is put to work on different aspects of the game and so on and so forth.
Also I probably think we can both agree that EHG could’ve handled it better in how they provided their product overall, but hindsight is always 10/10… as long as they learn from it and make things better after it should all be fine.
Ehhh… with FP that’s not quite true, but I get where you’re coming from there.
LE has far more ‘item bricked’ states then PoE has currently, but given that’s something which hasn’t always been there and implemented through the variety of crafting mechanics in PoE that’s something we’ll also likely see coming over in time.
It’s a quite complex topic after all, and especially so since we mostly have the ‘baseline’ system barely solidified yet as it changed once along the beta.