The coming Gift system encourages party playing too much

yeah, unbalanced cringe
single player (literally ssf, no matter which option you choose before character creation), but in a group this doubles your drop kekw
I also laugh when everyone calls and waits for “MULTIPLAYER”

coop != multiplayer, but there is nothing from “MULTIPLAYER”, only a stupid system of party gifts

imho game already ruined after 1 post “gifts instead of the expected trade” so no matter what would be with game in future

1 Like

Co-op is, in fact, always multiplayer.
Multiplayer is not co-op, but very often includes it. Possibly more than the alternative (pvp).

I’ve seen this idea that “coop != multiplayer” in a few places now and I’m really interested to know how you would define multiplayer.

If you were to list out the minimum requirements to call any game a multiplayer game, what are those requirements?

1 Like

Team loot drop benefits will be a problem if there are rewards for players getting to some endpoint first. PoE shows this pretty well. Even if the mechanics are different, the results are the same. Team play is abused to gain an advantage over the general population of a game.

trade(and craft for other people and different builds u dont want to play), boss services, guilds and their activity and some other stuff
and what I see in LE - playing in party, I can’t think about this like multiplayer. just game with friend, like split screen in 2005

1 Like

Could you define “other stuff” for me please?

I would also just like to confirm that this means that Diablo 1/2/3 are all not multiplayer games right?

6 Likes

I believe what is happening here would be considered ‘moving the goalpost’.

5 Likes

I’m not sure if it is appropriate to call playing in a group a 300% more multiplier for loot.

As mentioned before, there’s class specific gear that drops that doesn’t make sense to gift to everybody.

Next, I personally will not stop on every item that drops that I can’t use and check out if any of my team members want to have it. I’ll set my loot filter and blow through the game. There will be lots of usable stuff for others left on the ground. A group of 4 will have better chances of finding specific items. But if they want to take full advantage of it they will also take x times longer to complete content because they constantly have to check items between each other.

You also seem to always look from from the perspective of somebody that gets feeded by all other party members. Do you think this will happen? So you play with somebody and he drops a good sword you could use on your Sentinel. But what if the guy that drops it also plays a Sentinel. Or he plans to do. Maybe the item is so damn good that the dude thinks “wow, I’ll just create a Sentinel next to use this sword”.

He doesn’t get anything in return from you unless you have something similar useful for him dropping for you so you could simulate a trade by gifting stuff to each other. But normally nobody would have an incentive to share his loot with you. It’s not that everybody on the internet and in games is nice and wants others to be happy., I guess.

And last, it’s not a real more multiplier for loot. You drop the same amount of loot as if you play solo. So does everybody else. Its instanced loot for the party, not shared. It only becomes shared if you do what I mentioned above and stopp after every mob group to post item links in chat and gift thinks left and right. This is not very realistic. People will only stopp if they see specific uniques drop. Maybe not even then, if you’re playing with strangers that just want to clear content fast.

The only thing that makes MP kind of “abusable” is when groups of friends commit to feed specific things to each other, like boss drops. So doing a mono boss run to acquire a specific item can be used to increase chances if the group commits to give the desired item to one guy in the group if it drops.

If you’re playing with random people, most likely they themselves will have a specific goal when doing boss runs. So if you’re farming a specific boss and join others that do as well, its likely these people are looking for the same items that you do.

So if you have friends that just play the game for feeding you, you will have an advantage.

Else I don’t see it as a problem. MP always has a benefit compared to solo play. This is the nature of MP. If you want to artificially erase any of these benefits, its not MP anymore.

3 Likes

So playing with other people in a group isn’t MP?

Games can change significantly over their development lives (just look at the early beta videos of PoE & compare it to the current league) so to write a game off while it’s still in EA without having launched MP just because it doesn’t have your preferred implementation of trade now is incredibly shortsighted. But that is your choice.

It’s up to 300% more (if the party is coordinated & has a reasonable idea what the other players want).

1 Like

That might happen as a paid with real money service. It is not impossible.

Talk through lootfilters once in a static group and exchange stuff after each mono. That’s not rocket science and easiely doable.

I think High LP uniques are equaly bad then good exalts.

Just want to point out that there are always ways to work around problems but I still think it’s no reason to remove trade at all.

Sure or if a dedicated group equips a twink or whatever. No matter who you ask at some point the glass was half empty for everyone ;).

1 Like

I think the general difference is that in multiplayer, all players co-exist in the world together. They interact with the world together, the pass each other while traversing the world, etc etc. In co-op, players only interact in instanced groups after some sort of match-making.

Is LE going to have players all co-existing, at the same time, in city hubs? Are we going to pass one another while fighting NPCs in the various zones? Is there going to be a purpose for cosmetic items, other than one’s own visual pleasure?

POE is a hybrid, in this aspect. Players co-exist in the town hubs, but combat zones are instanced per group/player.

Yeah of course. I will constantly update my lootfilters to also highlight items for all my friends. Just 10 minutes everytime we group up for a session to adjust. And maybe also inbetween playsessions, everytime one of us switches to another character. Absolutely doable when playing with 3 friends.

And everybody always plays in staic groups, sure.

No rocket science. But I’d like to stay on earth anyways.

Nothing I wrote was related on trade or an argument regarding it.

Yeah, that’s true. But in order to maximise the efficiency, there need to be 3 people to be hired to feed you. I’m not sure if this RMT model would pay off.

In other games you have people farming stuff and saving it up to sell it in bulks later. For the buyer its convenient to buy, because he doesn’t have time investment.

Now in LE the “customer” has to invest time. He has to play along those people that would feed him. And how would the pricing model look like? Would there be fixed prices for an item? So if you’re unlucky and have to to 3, 4, 5 runs to get that item even in a group? Or would you pay these guys per hour? What if you paid upfront and the items drops for you, making the effort of the other 3 guys obsolete?

Imho, the current RMT services people are afraid of aren’t really worth it. Of course I don’t know for sure and only time can tell. It just doesn’t look like a lucrative model to me.

1 Like

Are you saying you won’t do this? How cruel!

1 Like

Sounds to me like you want an MMORPG, which LE is not, and has never claimed to be.

Maybe you should look into the distinction between ‘Massive Multiplayer’ and ‘Multiplayer’.
Co-Op is a form of multiplayer wherein the players are working together against the game rather than working against other players.

3 Likes

You can’t really deny that the gift system gives an objective advantage to playing in groups. The question is just how much of an advantage in terms of leaderboards. Because if you don’t care about being on leaderboards, then does it matter as long as you can complete all content without it?

For people that do care about leaderboards, I don’t really see Solo (Self Found) mode as a great alternative personally as you can’t transfer items between your Solo characters. So junking items another of my characters can use will leave a negative feeling.

I’m interested to see if the advantage on the MP ladder is short term in that it just speeds up the progression where certain group players simply reach the plateau sooner than those that go solo. But they all can get there in a reasonable amount of time.

I think there are too many unknowns to provide specific feedback on though. 0.9.0 should reveal a lot.

1 Like

You’ve built a straw man argument here. There are alternatives to LE gifting that don’t involve erasing all multiplayer benefits.

In POE/D2, if you play solo and find a godly item you can’t use, you can sell/trade it to anyone. Open trade has a much smaller penalty for playing solo than the LE gift system. And large number of people actually prefer to play solo most of the time but be able to trade with anyone when they want.

There are also a ton of different restrictions that can be put on open trade that aren’t nearly as punishing to mostly playing solo. Bind on trade or equip, restricting slots that can be traded, limiting how many trades your account can make in set period of time are a few examples of this.

We can only talk about what we have and what the topc is about and that’s gifting. Right now gifting gives static groups that play efficient an advatange. That’s a 1-10% of the playerbase problem and I’m generous with the 10%.

People should realy stop to think they are in a disatvantage because they don’t want to play in a group in a MP coop game because they feel people who group have an advantage. In the long run playing In a static group will benefit you in terms of items but never in terms of skill.

As long as there are no group leaderboards everything is fine because individual skill sooner or later is far more important then gear.

People who think in this negative spirals can’t be helped and they’ll never be happy so stop looking others and be happy with what you got. This is not directly aimed for you @FrodoFraggins it’s just a basic observation about some people and their arbuments.

I still would like to be able to freely trade with my friends because I have far more time to play then them and that’s it. I don’t care about people I don’t play with because I don’t play with them ^^.

The devs have talked about this a bit on the discord.

We might see a change to the current “solo” mechanic. Currently it boxes the solo character into their own world with no one else including your other characters. This makes sense because the game is currently SP, so the “SSF” from Path of exile is what everyone plays currently. So “solo” is distinct from that.

But when the game goes live with MP, there could be a shift in creating more character tags, SSF being the poe version, and the current solo can be renamed to something else.

As for the topic, I very much think people are way overthinking gifting. Yes people will abuse it, just like currently the ladders are being cheated. When someone finds some broken mechanic that needs to be nerfed it will flood the leaderboards too. Leaderboards are inherently unbalanced, thats how they work. Anyone who cares about them is going to most likely be playing solo anyways as thats where the real experience for looking at who is the most tenacious is, and they will all be minmaxing and using whatever is the best ladder placer.

But for the majority of players, I think its gonna be like Raw’s take. Why would I ever pass my exalteds onto my buddy? I need them to make legendaries just like everyone else. Even a random bad base exalted with a good affix is legendary fodder. So what, we are gonna set up loot filter tetris to share rare items? for why, the loot is more then enough currently for most people to gear up without loot sharing. I sure as heck aint giving away my exalted crit multi katana to my buddy just cause im playing necro, im gonna save it for a sick ass crit build.

I know it’s probably too long but I’d go with “Proper solo not that nimby pamby wateredd down version PoE has only for proper gamers who are so antisocial they don’t even want to play with their other characters”.

2 Likes