What not to do: Lessons from PoE from a 1400 hours PoE ex-player (part 1)

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264

No, I get your point, but

is very different to

They are completely different points. I’m not a fan of the arena as I find the game mode tedious, but I wouldn’t say that pushing your abilities or build against harder mobs takes no skill.

Also, I’d imagine that the devs use the ladder as a broad guide towards balance which is useful during beta.

How people enjoy the game, or how they choose to improve their skills is, as you say, entirely up to them. And the ladder is a good way to show progress (or the lack thereof) for certain skills.

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I guess I should give context. Do you thing those who placed on the ladder with the busted “Life on Kill” idol with Abomination Acolyte be allowed to keep their place? That was clearly an unintended mistake that was patched very quickly.

I agree with the second portion of your post entirely.

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That’s a very short term problem since the ladder will be reset when 0.8.2 hits, though I do understand where you’re coming from. There’s only 1 at #8 using Abomination & one at #16 on the Acolyte ladder, so I wouldn’t think it’s much of a problem. Plus I’d rather have the devs spend their time on fixing stuff rather than weeding out players from the ladder for using stuff that got patched/fixed.

And another at 44. So 3 out of 100 Acolytes.

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That was an example of an exploit that was made public. How does ANYONE (other than the devs) know what the intended output of our builds is supposed to be? Right now I totally agree with you that the devs are using the ladder as a way to bug test and do updates/patches on.

My career in game development started back in the Gold Box era. I do know a couple of things about gaming :slight_smile:

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I couldnt agree with you more @ShadyTricycle

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The best thing Ive read and seen this year between in-game and forums! <3

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Every economic activity is made for profit, whether in the form of cash or reputation. Profit is not the problem, poor design is.

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271

Does anyone play Outriders here?
I think it has the best difficulty management here, that please people who just want to play for “narrative” & min/max power player.

Let me explain the system used by outriders.
There is your usual progression, then their is world tier. Higher tier means higher level mobs, (so harder) but you also get more xp, better & higher level loot.

Boom, everyone is happy. Power player can paly at higher tier & reward with better gears & bragging rights, while super casual can still enjoy the game.

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272

Except it didn’t revolutionarize anything really. To be clear, the original intention of not having gold and giving everything a value was a means to an end, the end goal being that bartering was meant to be the main form of trading (because this is something that Chris personally experienced and he wanted in the game). If you played PoE back in the closed/open beta days when Chris Wilson was posting his thoughts on the forums, this is precisely what he said.

The issue is that in reality and in practice doing this didn’t achieve much. For example, orbs such as Chaos/Vaal and Exalted’s are pretty much used the same way gold is. Granted its slightly more annoying because you have table where you have to see how many X’s of chaos is an exalted (there are sites like poe.trade which made this a lot easier) but the critical point is that it didn’t achieve its stated goal, i.e. having bartering as the main form of trading.

In terms of fundamental economics this is hardly surprising especially when you look at what happens in the real world, the only places in the world that function with bartering as the main form of trade are ones where the society/community is incredibly small and there are limited goods (think native tribes in Papua Neu Guinea) OR for highly rare/unique goods that are hard to value (i.e. collectors art). The problem is that as soon as you expose your games to millions of players (which is what PoE did) basically humans do what they are very good at which is that they scale and make the whole process more efficient which in this case means creating a common currency (w/e that happens to be is irrelevant). People spending time bartering is incredibly ineffecient and risky (how do you value this item, how do you know that this shoe is the same “value” as your coat?) hence why all societies agree on some common currency.

Even though it looks good on paper, right now in PoE something like 90%+ of the trading is not bartering but rather a more annoying form of auction house trading. The elite of PoE do engage in bartering but its not the experience for most players. Even though orbs like chaos orb have value, just like in reality with gold most of that value is not in the inherit physical properties of the item but rather in how liquid it is in the economy and/or its generic abstract value (i.e. gold is a very good conductor and has other real world uses such as jewelry but by approximate estimates something like 75%+ of the worlds gold is actually stored in safes/bunkers just like the main use chaos orbs is a form of currency for trading rather than rerolling a rare).

I guess PoE could have achieved its goal if it prevented global trading, i.e. when you create a character you get put in a bucket of another 1000 characters in the world and you can only trade between those characters.

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273

I basically agree with all of OPs points.
XP penalty in POE is a pain in the ass literally speaking ^^. For example here in LE for my it is punishing if I loose progress in the Monoliths, if I lost XP on top of that would be frustrating. I think many of the players, like me, are here because they are looking for something different then the grindfest mechanics from POE, like going through the story for each character, completing all the Atlas maps TWICE, delving deep until it feels rewarding, the leveling of the NPCs for instance in Heist, all around it is a torture. A normal working person does never ever have the time to do all the things and get into the endgame, where the games actually are the most fun.

I will see what direction the development goes and decide where to spent my money then. Until now it is deffinately LE, I hope it will stay that way :slight_smile:

Cant wait for PART 2, keep it coming !

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274

It’s hard to say that you “quit” a free game (POE), but I have “given up” on POE due to EXP loss and that’s how I got here to LE.

So, now you know there are those of us who think the EXP loss in POE is a deal-breaker.

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Trading - I come from the point of view that having to meet up with people and trade, even though outside resources like trade/buy/sell websites are tedious, is necessary to bring a community together. These extra steps I think make a community stronger. The downside is obviously those pesky butt nuggets that take advantage of new players and rip them off, etc.

I couldnt agree with you more @ShadyTricycle

In the near decade I have been playing Path of Exile I have literally never interacted with a single trade partner more than completing the trade. Ever.

What brings a community together is consistent, regular, meaningful interaction. Quake, Half-life, and Counter-Strike all had real communities because they were based on dedicated servers. People consistently and regularly interacted with the same groups of other players. MMORPGs build communities by requiring players group up to complete content and providing systems allowing players to organize who they do that with on a consistent and regular basis, beginning with friends lists and escalating to clans and guilds.

“Matchmaker” based games on the other hand are the disastrous opposite of this. They force players together… but not consistently, not voluntarily, and not regularly. Which means every round people believe their success or failure was determined by random people they didn’t choose to play with and will never see again. You couldn’t design a more perfect recipe for toxicity if you tried to on purpose. This is why everything from League to Fortnight to CS:GO is an absolute cesspit of rage, abuse, and trolling compared to older games that used dedicated servers.

Path of Exile’s deliberately awful trading system is as relevant to the community as Amazon Marketplace is to Portland’s community.

If you want to make Last Epoch a community based game the only way that’s going to happen is by incentivizing or outright requiring players actually play together rather than solo and providing them with the appropriate tools to self-organize.

That’s how Warframe did it and it’s why they have one of the best communities of any game I’ve played.

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Or to put it in another way, if you want to make a community based game it should be designed from the start to be a community based game rather than making a (mainly) solo game and tacking on community features half heartedly.

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Word.

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One more thought on the very idea of an EXP penalty.

  • I play this video game. It is, quite literally speaking, a “pass time”. Something to enjoy and pass the time. That is what games are.
  • To make it fun, they add the idea of “progression”. Progression can take a lot of forms - character power (aka Level), gear potency (including uniques), and more powerful bosses and challenging fights.

Now, character level progression WILL, at some point, end (at level 100), and then the player would need to engage in the other forms of progression (gear, new bosses/boss mechanics, new modes (like Monolith vs Arena vs some new idea). If there isn’t enough progression alternative to Leveling (to 100), then hitting 100 means a “dead end”. i.e. Roll a new character, try a new build.

So, in the end, if the Devs of this game want to sustain players for longer, they need to design more progression (aka “end game”) instead of slapping on an EXP penalty as a “forced delay mechanism”. That is both lazy and ultimately self-defeating. Developers have limited time & deadlines to meet. If they are going to spend time, it should be spent on End Game and not things that don’t help retain players and in fact, just turn them off of the game.

One thing I’ve learned about games is that different people enjoy different things, but ultimately, it boils down to what someone thinks its fun. Since you can’t standardize that, let the players have the leeway to have fun their way, and don’t penalize people for things either out of their control (glitches, random one-shots, ISP connection issues) or for just not being “elite” gamers. Games like this should be forgiving to allow all sorts of players to enjoy them, and an EXP penalty does not fall into that category at all.

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279

Well, thought I’d share some thoughts in this megathread :slight_smile: I’ve a little over 7k hours in PoE and that doesn’t mean much.

The XP penalty, or any strong penalty, does not go well in combination with unfairness. A crash, a bug, (offscreen) oneshots and important targets that are impossible to see because of screen clutter come to mind.

Penalty * level of skill to succeed * 10 = amount of feeling of accomplishment
Penalty * level of unfairness to failure * 100 = amount of frustration

GGG also ‘let go’ of their control. There is no finetuning and balance has been long called a clown fiesta (and other terms). Millions or billions of dps, whatever. Groups impacting the economy of everyone, whatever. It is quite a volatile stack of RNG. GGG through time has learned about some benefits of this. It is good for emotional reactions, for one. Those emotional reactions yield results through videos, streams and chat. They even openly said in an interview they actively pursue these reactions. It has also put them in a momentum that is very hard to get out of, as in it is very hard to reverse.

A total reset would come to mind, but how would they validate that against the investment of players in MTX and existing expectations? And so they ended up testing various impactful things. One of those was Harvest - aka deterministic crafting. The result being that the playerbase got split up in basically 2 camps. One that loves it and one that hates it. With all the strong emotional reactions still in tact, mind. And boy did they get some. Wow.

They tried many things that made a lot of players wonder why the hell GGG would do such a thing. It often seemingly did not make sense. The core of this is lack of control. They have issues steering their game according to well defined strategic concepts and the more they enjoyed the benefits of this emotional momentum the more it started working against them. They have a large playerbase, but there is also a lot of unhappiness. In that sense they still enjoy the ARPG market situation and I think I’m not alone when I say it would be nice for them to have stronger competition (go go LE!).

While I applaud them for making such a successful game, I’ve so often facepalmed over their decisions. Delivering content is surely their strength, but only so much strength can be applied before something breaks. One better be on top of the cost of repairing whatever that is or suffer escalating problems of technical and gaming debt.

So I’d advice 11th to take it one step at a time and to stay in control. It’s all about the long game. Easier said than done. GGG has learned how far it can push things while still enjoying revenue which allows them to focus on counters to possible competitors in the mid term. PoE2 will be an example of this.

They are now strictly a business, their playerbase is for them to experiment with at will. They know and utilize the power of addiction and gambling quite well. But a casino is a different thing than an arpg. In which one would a world with lore better fit? Which of the two urges most for stories and heroes? PoE has long been more about currency drops than it has been about character development and roleplaying context (yes, the RP in ARPG still stands for roleplaying).

So my advice there to 11th is to focus on the world first and on the gambling and RNG second. It is flawed in PoE. This is a vulnerability Diablo 4 is going to enjoy maximally.

And well, recently, GGG took a ‘big pile’ (their own words!) of money given by the playerbase of PoE and used it to hire streamers that were innately not so interested in PoE and gave those (among some other well known streamers) priority in the recent league, aka a race event to those who go for the ladder. A strong manifest of greed followed by a ‘sorry’ that has now basically turned into a sorry-meme. This wouldn’t have been as big of an issue as it is now had they not burned through so much goodwill of their playerbase.

Well, I don’t need to advise what to do there. It’s just another facet of the cost of loss of control.

Anyway those are some thoughts, I tend to rant on when writing :slight_smile: thanks

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280

This is quite true and something I feel I have confirmation thanks to the PoE2 reveal and the following league with Metamorph. Metamorph was them implementing the shapeshift tech in early for us to beta test it in the form of a league. Blight felt like an Alpha test for followers pathing algorithms and interactions. Delirium was new fog tech. Etc. Etc. The new skill additions don’t seem to work well with the current gem system, but would be more interesting with PoE2’s. I could go on and on.

What was it now two(?) years ago with the “Salvage Box” fiasco, the recent league stash tab cash grab and now the streamer priority situation should just show you what GGG are after now. Someone said recently, “If EA or ActiBlizzard would have done what GGG has done since Exilecon. Everyone would have torched them and walked away.” Probably true, aside from the FIFA Ultimate Team addicts that fuel EA’s profits. But that’s what GGG has done, built up a cult of personality still promoting the ‘small scrappy indie dev that solely continues to exist thanks to you! Our loyal supporters!’ As @EHG_Mike has said on a dev stream, LE having a sticker price/box cost is pretty important for a number of reasons and one I fully endorse as f2p gaming keeps going the way it’s going. But enough dumping on that PoE has become.

For death penalty, perhaps a gold penalty ala durability loss but not durability loss could work. It’s still a hinderance on a form of progression, effects all modes of gameplay including SSF (remember gambling and rerolling monoliths is a thing), limits your trading options and would add more importance to gold. Just a gold subtraction algorithm for when death occurs I guess, just spit balling.

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An item “Damage + Repair” feature would be actually kinda nice. I mean, we already have item damage. Just add in the “Repair” part, and then have a chance (not 100%) that an item (or more than one) can get damaged on a death. It shouldn’t get exorbitant but should add up if you are dying over and over to a hard boss, for example.

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I want to put my few words on this topic
I can’t play POE anymore…I personally HATE 1 thing - ORBS
Tell me please…what items do you have in your inventory after clearing maps?
Let me say - shards, div cards, maps, orbs, silver coins, perandus coins… some 6- socket items … holy shit!
I’m tired of it! No one wants to pick up items… all of it now are useless!
All the people need “influenced items” …
I want the game where i will pick up Boots, Gloves, Chests, rings… instead of coins and shards

And the second point - Leagues… all these mechanics/Unique items (1000 or more?)…well… it’s useless! Who needs this?
Every time when I find “Unique” items … this isn’t event…it isn’t surprise me. This moment is stupid
Every league you must do the same things… it’s irritating moment
I love POE before Atlas…it was really good for me, but after (

Sorry if I made mistakes, I’m not a native speaker

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What…? Items useless ? What the hell ? You do pick up orbs to craft the bases you pick up… On the ground. That sentence of yours… Doesn’t make any sense. Even influenced items are “picked up on the ground”, be serious please, if you’re not really understanding something, try to avoid giving such definitive looking advices.

I won’t even talk about the things like “Leagues mechanics are useless, who needs this ?” – “Every time when i find Unique items, this isn’t event… It isn’t surprise me, This moment is stupid”, one more time, what the hell ? Uniques useless/not rewarding ?