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).
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 ;).
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.
Are you saying you won’t do this? How cruel!
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.
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.
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”.
I’m not sure that I understand your point. Personally I don’t argue against a real trading systems. What I said was not meant pro item gifting.
I try to lay that topic to rest for now as arguments were exchanged and I already went through circles several times. I’d like to have a “real” trading system, restrictions like you mentioned are ok and needed, imo.
But we will have that gifting system for now and I try to arrange myself with it.
What I don’t want to see is heavily nerfing the multiplayer experience by blocking every single advantage that a group has compared to a solo player.
I see people say “The current droprates are nice for ssf and I don’t care for MP”. But the same people suddenly care about MP, when they think that playing in a group would be more beneficial than playing solo.
Why do people enjoy playing coop? It’s easier, even when the games scales enemy power up. But you can focus fire, raise strong synergies and you propably will clear things faster. If you die, you can be revived or you can port to your teammate after resurrection.
Is that unfair? No. People can freely choose if they want to team up. They can also have all these benefits if they want. If they don’t want, it’s fine.
People say “I feel forced to play with others, but I don’t want to”. Right, then don’t do things you don’t want.
I like playing with others. I like the interaction, as rudimentary as it may be in ARPGs. Why should my player experience be negatively affected just because the way I play is abit more effective?
I’d also like to be able to farm stuff 24/7. But I can’t, due to my living conditions. So should all other players have limited playtime to make things more fair?
As long as the MP playstyle isn’t ridiculously more efficient than playing solo, it’s ok. I see that group play with item gifting has some advantages over solo play. But I don’t think they are so unfairly big that this means that the system has to be limited.
Yeah I realy want to see forced person at least once. I always read about them but never found them or even heared of one in my friendgroup. Maybe they are like unicorns and you need to be pure to find them… don’t know, urban legend if someone asks me.
Please, provide a source for this information.
I can say the exact same thing about multiplayer.
edit
I play mp because I like the social interactions as well as the potential synergies available when playing with other people.
I’m the kind of person that thinks, “hey if we’re all fire damage, only one of us needs to get fire shred!” though this doesn’t work out well in PoE (except for the likely small percent of players who are extremely coordinated) because “but when I’m alone I need to be able to do that too.” At least in LE, it might sometimes be as simple as a passive/skill adjustment or something.
if you imagine a static party with pre-assigned roles like DD, tank, healer or smth like that. A party of friends. Each playing the class and role he likes most. Why not share an item that would make his / her buddy more powerful and help the whole party? So they will be able to do activities faster and more efficiently. So they might be higher in the ladder. Is that possible? I think yes.
If I recall correctly channels for gearing up in D3 seasons are completely different than calls in chat looking for members of a meta group, or members for split farming. I also don’t recall any of them including “If there is something you need let me know and I will give it to you if I don’t need it”. Don’t seem to recall that in POE either. Your premise that groups that are synergizing in a multiplayer ARPG(even if friends) slow down to peruse over possible wanted items seems a bit suspect. In most all ARPGs how would you even know if an item would improve your friends character?
In D3, people literally throw all items they don’t need on the ground in town, for the other members of the group to pick from.
In most ARPGs I play the classes my friends play when they are are offline because I have more time at hand then them. In other games where I didn’t have the time or I simply don’t want to I read some guides.
To me it’s more like “In what ARPG DON’T you know what improves your friend?” but that’s just me and my time managment and I’m sure not even 51% of the playerbase are like this. I’m just a random pleb with random pleb friends and if we can manage this everyone can if they want to.
Right! So what would that be called? Maybe trashing?