I’ve been playing PoE since early open beta, probably like a lot of people here, but I’ve also never been a particularly high level or hardcore player. I’ve barely if ever traded, never came up with my own kickass build, never topped a league or race, and mostly just slogged my way through with suboptimal builds I found “fun” through sheer stubbornness.
– Trading
Trading as a concept is a great way to remove frustration with drop rates, make multiplayer feel like more than just a chatroom, and add another dimension to a game. The problem is execution. We all know the reason’s PoE’s system is just painful to use, and even if it weren’t so utterly dependent on outside tools it would still be obnoxious to deal with PM spam, scammers, and flakes on all sides.
An Auction House isn’t necessarily the solution you want here. Any fully automated system is going to completely cut out a lot of the player interaction and be perpetually subject to botting. If the game ever gets popular it’s just not a winnable arm’s race, there’s always going to be more people putting more time into coming up with bots than there are devs to fight back.
Plus there’s the economy issue. You can’t have an exchange of goods without some kind of system of value. People who’ve been playing longer will simply always have “more” of whatever that store of value is. I’m not even going to pretend I’m an economist, so I’ll just leave it at saying that you don’t want newer players permanently locked out of the economy, but you also don’t want people to have no faith in anything having or holding value.
– BS One-shotting
This is kind of low hanging fruit. I don’t think anyone out there is seriously arguing that a zero-warning instant death for a properly leveled and geared player is legitimate, the real argument is where the line between fair and BS is drawn. I like that LE makes an effort to telegraph things, but it almost feels like it’s gone too far in the other direction and I feel more like I’m playing Mario Party than an ARPG.
In LE’s defense I think a lot of that comes from being early access. Better animations that don’t obviously look like the boss mechanically auto-tracking my character and replacing the circles/lines with in-universe effects could go a long way to eliminating that.
– Exp Loss On Death
I can see both sides here. On the one hand if there’s no fear or consequences for death then you trivialize the entire game, there’s no “cost” to bad decisions or lack of investment in gear and levelling and no benefit in the other direction. You can just keep suicide-running mobs and bosses until you get through. Likewise on the dev side there’s no need to consider if something is underpowered, excessively situational, or too rippy.
On the other hand death penalties can also have negative effects. When dying means losing hours of their life people get a lot more invested in survival and feel a lot worse about dying. Usually that results in three things: Slow and stale gameplay from “playing it safe”, a lot less diversity in builds and gear, and skewing of the economy as people chase the meta.
Personally I do think death needs to have a penalty associated with it otherwise there’s no challenge or thrill. But I also think that penalty needs to have some hard backstops in order to avoid skewing gameplay negatively. For example in PoE when people get past a certain point on the way to the next levelup many go sealclubbing in lower level content rather than risk losing that progress. That’s an unhealthy dynamic.
One idea might be some kind of milestone system so you can only lose so much progress. Backsliding to the start of the most recent 1/4 of the bar and getting stuck there is frustrating but not ragequit inducing. Alterantively losing only the experience you’ve gained from the “map” that killed you seems outright fair. You won’t make any forward progress, but you aren’t outright punished for trying. If you exempt under-levelled skills from this it’ll even encourage people to experiment with respeccing while staying at-level for their character instead of going sealclubbing just to grind up a new skillset.
– Lab Mechanics
Again I’m a bit on the fence here. Manual dexterity has its place in an ARPG, we’re not playing a turn based game for a reason after all, but when people are more afraid of a misclick or character pathing issue than real gameplay that’s just broken design. Especially when you get booted from the entire multi-instance labyrinth and lose exp as punishment. If your content’s so annoying and opaque people make entire third party utilities for it, and a whole economy springs up around carries, it’s time to rethink the design.
Personally I just don’t see this being a thing in LE as it’s currently built. Mobility skills are basically mandatory for lab style gameplay and PoE’s skill system let’s that work. You can keep a levelled gem on hand and swap it in temporarily, there’s no equivalent in LE. Likewise you can rebind a hotkey without unsummoning minions or losing an aura. Without those things getting changed I don’t see them making a PoE style lab, it would force people to respec an entire skill just for that.
But they do to a degree, if your build revolves around not getting/avoiding dex which results in very low accuracy then one option would be getting resolute technique which means you don’t ever have to worry about accuracy but you can’t crit. Similarly if you are playing a mobile/dodging character the revolves around using ES as a buffer and staying on full health for certain items you would get ghost reaver (these keystone passives are the ones that tend to be at the edge of the tree).
As Deteego explained at length a lot of that “diversity” is only skin deep. You’ve got maybe a handful of skills and potential builds for each class that are viable for all content, and that gets narrowed down even further if you either aren’t already rich or don’t want to grind and suffer through trading.
