Thoughts on playing the game over time (reflection and request)

I’ve taken a break for a while from LE and I played PoE again, and I realized why I don’t play PoE anymore; the constant league resets. I know some people love them, but I’m a more casual player; I play an hour a day every now and again. I won’t be in the league charts or arena top lists or anything, and that’s fine with me. However, with PoE it feels like you are funneled into that life because, if you don’t participate in the new leagues, you can miss out on fun new items or experiences or what have you. Thus, you are encouraged to play more, the game becomes your new home, and the circle of gaming life continues.

I don’t know if I’m in the majority or minority as a casual player, but all I ask is that there is a venue for the game to be fun and playable even if we don’t play this game for a living. I like the game, I enjoy it, I have fun, but I won’t play it 10+ hrs a day to stay at the top of lists or to make videos. I liked PoE at the start, but I felt their game direction was “forcing” me to play it too much for my liking to ‘keep up with the Jones’s’. Even if it’s just a small footnote shard or something, a place for casual players who won’t or can’t keep up with the bleeding-edge players without making them feel like they’ve missed out on game items/events would be a nice thought.

Just my thoughts, do with them what you will.

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Yeah, one of my friends really doesn’t like the league resets either. Mike did say some weeks/months ago on a stream that they wanted to get all the “league” content out to everybody (ie, league and standard), though what that would mean for league I don’t know (other than it just being a quarterly ladder and economic reset for anyone who wants that), nor whether that was anything more than just his personal preference.

Having also taken a long break, basically the entire year…or close to it and seeing a wild Llama…could you tell me what patch builds would work unbroken on the current one? I noticed that most of the classes, at least on the forums don’t look like builds have been made recently…or maybe they’re posting somewhere else…not sure

Also don’t forget your my father

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Last Epoch Builds is probably the best place yo go tbh.

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I know that not every league content goes core, but things like Elder, Atziri, Sirus, etc. all went core and most stuff does. Delve, Abyss, Beastiary, Breach, etc.
So I agree that it can feel like you’re “forced” to play the game a lot in order to keep up and also experience everything in a league, but I’d argue that if you really (and I mean REALLY) enjoy the game, you could also play standard.
But yeah I know what you’re trying to say, it actually feels like you’re forced to devote most of your time to a new league or else you’re missing out.

Seems like things have really died down, I was looking for something of interest but appreciate it, I had forgotten the link, very helpful on seeing what’s changed

The league concept on PoE has more negatives associated with it than positives.

1 if the league content sucks, like Archnemesis and Sanctum (although people will disagree with me on Sanctum, but i hate it) then what do you do ? you quit, or you just keep playing standard (which has a broken economy). what’s the point of playing a league and skipping the league specific content ?

2 folding the league content has made PoE a mess. I spent a fair amount of time NOT doing content, and now spending points in my atlast tree just so certain content won’t even show up.

3 the league difficulties and interactions are almost always broken. things are too hard, or too easy, or have terrible feedback. or dumb UI stuff. it’s beta testing for 3 or 4 weeks.

so I’m with OP, not really sure what the point of a league is. just roll out the content on some sort of fixed interval and call it good.

if people are interested in racing or whatever , come up with a separate system to make that exciting for people who like that sort of thing, but a league is not the way to handle that particular idea.

Do you know how long it takes to make meaningfull content additions? D3 was released 2012 and RoS 2014 and on top of it RoS wasn’t that much new content in story maps enemys skills and so on and so forth… it just revamped the game. Rise of the Necromancer was an even bigger laugh 3 years for a new class and minimal new creatures and map layouts.

That was Blizzard… what do you think how long will EHG need to come up with new meaningfull content? 5 year cycles? The game would be dead without repeatable content that offers some kind of gameplay switch to the players in a meaningfull time frame of 3-4 months.

On top of that it’s pretty weasy when it comes to LE there are only 2 forms of mindnumbing endcontent so you don’t realy have a chance to not play certain content :D.

That’s a doubble edged sword. You keep the “big buys” playing and streaming with races what leads to exposure of LE for “free”. Only a small percentage of players is participating in that kind of thing but the benefits of it are big. A Hack and Slay without races or some kind of worldfirsts or whatever will dimish in popularity quickly and only appeal to a very small niche of players that will never see the dawn of a dlc or addon because their precious little game that don’t appeal to the masses who in the end pay for the development of additional content.

I don’t like seasons and races and whatnot as well but I think nowdays it’s a nessesary evil because the ammount of content needed to please the people isn’t developable from the getgo and needs a long success of a product to get more content for it.

I know it takes longer than the current PoE league interval, that’s for sure.

We would have to be specific about “meaningful” content addition.

adding 3 uniques . not particularly meaningful, and not a long time to add.

adding another act. meaningful. and a long time to add.

also , where’s my Falconer ?!! :smiley:

However, generally speaking I agree with your point. Not adding “meaningful” content on some sort of “reasonable” time frame is probably going to cause a slow death. or maybe not. I think you are more certain of that than I am.

Also, maybe that’s not a bad thing - maybe with a solid foundation it will enjoy good sales and longevity ? I recently tried to get back into Grim Dawn, and it just lacks something even though generally speaking i think the GD world is absolutely fantastic. PoE gets me back in for exactly one reason, to try a new build.

I am absolutely positive about one thing , the current PoE jet set, i.e. the people reaching maps in 5 hours and making “expensive” builds are never playing LE. They should not be the target audience.

I’m actually much more worried about what GD did wrong, for me personally, that i’m not really interested in playing it even though i think it’s really well done.

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Umm…not sure what league is but I think you may have replied to the wrong person. I was just talking to Llama about how it seems like not many builds have been put out. Last time I came by, I remember tons being constantly posted. Anyways, take care.

oh. yes. i was attempting to reply to the thread “generically” not to any one person, obviously i pressed the wrong reply button.

So is a league content additions, or just a gimmick? If it’s the former, what’s the harm in releasing on a schedule, and doing a better job testing so the content is balanced and/or relatively bug free? If it’s a gimmick, then why is it so important to the longevity of the game?

I’m also against leagues, since it has the side-effect of making the league the only gameplay people actually care about. Just look at PoE, Standard is a cesspool, that no one cares about, not even GGG. Some content makes it there, some doesn’t… others make it there in a Frankenstein form. Either you play the league when it’s current, or you might not get to see that additional content, or see it when it’s even relevant. That’s just crappy design.

IMHO, what GD did wrong is not make additional content that felt like additional content. It just felt like more of the same old content. Outside of one new profession and their version of the arena, there was nothing “new” added to the same. Just more of the same. Even their time portal thing added in the desert expansion, was just a watered down version of the arena add-on.

And, to add insult to injury, with every patch, you had to completely rework your gear/components just to keep playing your character. Since every patch they completely reworked all the legendary item stats and set bonuses.

It depends on the leagues you look at. D3 season with a ton of gobbo spawns isn’t worth to be callead a season in any way shape or form from my point of view. PoE had some leagues that were equaly boring content wise that throw an additional mob pack here and there. I don’t think this is quality content and I only play it when I’m bored and have nothing better to do.

It’s important because it offers the illusion of fundamental change while the real change is the ongoing addition of new skills as well as items and balancing. That’s the biggest part and the biggest issue I see with LE. Most of the uniques we have are trash and the uniques that have been added since I play LE aren’t that greate either and have been added in a pace where I start to belive EHG needs 3-4 month alone to add 3 new uniques.

A lot of people I know are storming seasonal content like it’s a complete new game just to stop playing 1 -7 days later and move on to play whatever.

Frankenstein was the doctor -.-.

But you said it, it’s only an illusion. If it’s real content, then it can handle the scrutiny, and testing, a content patch should go through, and not rely on the gimmick of a ‘season’. D3 leagues are purely a gimmick, and it’s why hardly anyone plays D3 anymore, except for the die-hards, or the casuals who pop in to get their season rewards and then stop.

POE is a mix of both. They offer real content, but then the gimmick of the league mechanic, that may, or may not be deemed worthy to be rolled into the actual game for the non-leaguers to play. This is the problem with leagues, at the core. Withholding content for those who don’t wish to start new characters every league.

If you want to do races and start-overs, then just offer that on a separate platform, but let those who don’t want to be assed with having to start from scratch just to interact with new content play as well. Leagues should not force people to start from square 1 just to play the game.

Afaik new content is also available in non cycle playmode. Iirc Mike said something like that in a livestreaam some time ago.

There are people out there that think the PoE skilltree i so complex and awesome and full of magic possibilities. I say it’s a bloated mess that is by design overcomplicated to give people the illusion that it’s awesome. You know PoE at the end of the day you take the best path to keynodes for your build and skill as much as possible defence while picking the offensive cherrys on the way. Overcomplicated crap that works the same for every build what makes it boring, repetetive and there is always a mathematicly best way for whatever build.

That’s what I call an Illusion. Call out a tripple drop rate league and people will play it like crazy because “them lootz!”. I would most likely play it as well because I like to test builds and stuff but I woul’d know from the announcement that the whole season is a complete clusterfuck of the most braindead idea only topped by “MORE GOBBOS!” in D3.

Yeah but look at the manpower Blizz and GGG have at their hands and compare it to EHG and the speed they show when they aim to do bigger patches like MP for example. Do you think they are even capable of making content every X months that is worthwhile and up to their standart?

I WISH there was a game with a small update every three months and a big update every 6 months but this would mean a giant studio a ton of devs and artists and crunchtime for all of them. Maybe Tencent is capapble of burning money this way but by all means I don’t think EHG is capable of pulling this off why there will by cycles and I’m okay with that approach.

I once talked with a Dev when I was in a friends and Family test and talked with them about ideas I have for a multiplayer ARPG and he ripped me appart about my not payable, not profitable and not programmable ideas… at least he liked the ideas but he saw no way to make them possible. I think EHG wears the same pair of shoes:… they try to do the best in the best possible way with the least cost and most profit… like everyone else ^^.

That was Mike’s thoughts on what he’d like to see, not the official line (unless they confirmed that in one of the last 2 streams).

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