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

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21

“That why it has a prefix BS.”
Lol

I agree with everything except for your opinion on the Labyrinth. It’s actually my favorite part of PoE because of how thematically rich it is (super crazy lore area that goes so hard into the lore it wildly changes the gameplay). The SSF Uber-lab grind does suck, yes, but otherwise I think it’s a wonderful area of game design.

It’s totally optional (after the 3 or 4 times you do it to ascend, of course), completely unique from the rest of the game, is chock full of secrets, changes daily, has it’s own ladder (there are issues with that but it’s not the lab’s fault), and very farmable for profit if you desire to make a character tailored to farm it. The RNG for enchants does suck, yes, but it’s PoE so the entire game is RNG anyway.

I sincerely cannot begin to describe how much I deeply value and appreciate the lab’s existence ever since my first expedition into it while experiencing every aspect of it. Top tier music, top tier graphical design, top tier theme-focus, top tier lore and lore notes, top tier voice-acting, and top tier gameplay as well.

I have a friend who hates lab. I watched him once stand right next to a blocked trap door getting increasingly frustrated at it not opening while it’s blades slowly damaged his character until it died. I still laugh at that memory.

Clearly, there is a type of player lab just IS NOT for. That’s cool. But don’t lump such a pinnacle of game design and breath of fresh air in the ARPG genre with the rest of dated and wrist-damaging mechanics and design decisions just because you dislike it, please.

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22

An auction house requires a significantly greater amount of coding than a trading system. For a new game, I think their time could be spent in countless other ways – end game systems, tuning character skills so that each one is useful (e.g. more builds are viable) and adding new classes/specializations. Eventually, down the line, you could begin to put in automated systems such as an auction house. You also reference a counter to buying your way to success, but the entire premise of this section is about convenience, not imbalance or “buying your way to success”.

Other than attacks that have a telegraph, such as the Golem’s Crossbow attack, what attacks are hitting you off-screen?

What death penalty could they conceptualize that doesn’t punish time in some form? If they take away 4 echoes, which is the current penalty, that’s a time penalty (and on higher echoes a significant one). If they take away gold, shards or loot, that’s a time penalty insofar as the farming that was invested in those items. What would your preferred penalty be?

A lot of this post reads like you want instant gratification, massive convenience, and an easy path to loot or victory conditions. Do you know what the complaint is when too much of that is implemented to please the player base? The game is boring and goals are reached too easily. Or, no one complains, they just quit. If that starts happening, then EHG is going to have to monetize the game for the short term, rather than the long term, and that gets really sticky really quick.

If you ever take psychology courses in college, one of the first things you learn is that a multitude of studies show that people tend to appreciate more achievements that are earned through significant effort. Everyone thinks they want it to be easy, but those who actually traveled the hard road express enhanced satisfaction when it’s all said and done as compare to those who were given the rewards or allowed an easier path.

You could YouTube half a dozen videos of WoW raiders screaming with (nerd) joy after downing a boss that they practiced for weeks on end. Show me one where the same screams were elicited from a boss killed on the first day. ARPGs don’t have the luxury of designing super detailed boss fights; its much harder when there’s no holy trinity or permanent tank/healing mechanics. The grind to retry the boss, whether for loot or for your first kill is part of the journey/process and WILL be part of your satisfaction when you overcome those trials.

All of that being said, I do agree with others who have suggested in the past that boss mechanics should show up in the campaign in lesser forms so that players can acclimate or “practice” before the true grind begins.

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23

But don’t we already have a death penalty? If you die, you get set back 4 echoes. You can’t instantly retry a boss fight. You might also be unlucky and not get that quest echo you failed at if you redo 4 normal echoes.

In terms of progression you already are set back.

There’s no way to go glass cannon and die your way through the monolith.

It’s totally ok for now without any additional XP loss, imho.

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24

I am referring to PoE forums. Its is in fact one of the most requested change. & many did quit due to that. That doesn’t mean poeple did not quit for other reasons.

Also XP lost on death is not staple of most games. I am not referring to losing progress from a last checkpoint or save point on death, but losing progress that you may accomulate for hours , days or even weeks. Very few games used this (notable D2, Grim Dawn but both allow recovered from corpse).

Also I did mentioned in my OG post, there is a need for penalty for dying, but keep it punishing but not over the line of frastration.

25

As far as lab. I think many in PoE forum suggest waypoints at key location, say after the Iazaro fight.

I think if the traps do flat damage as oppose to %damage & people who are poor at traps can out lifepool the traps. that would be nice. Or that you can disable the trap, by beating optional bosses, or farm some key, that will be okay as well. YOu trade doing extra for not not going through the trap mechanic. or you are good at troiaps & skipp the optionla time consuming effort to disable them.

The enchant especially helm enchant is just well too much RNG due to the amount of outcome, same with loot. Thats why end game has eloved to trading or crafting for gears.

I think there should be a balance between gears from loot that drop & crafted gears. I think LE is slit to omuch to crafting but its another topic for another day.

26

If all endgame is built like monolith that’s right.

Just take a look at the average player without to much time to spent on playing like 10h a week. If I had that little time to play I would avoid games with death penaltys like the plague because I want to have a good time with my hobby and it realy hurts enough if your toon dies.
The setback from the echos is okay but loosing hours of progress is a nogo for me. I played LI2 back in the day and when I died in the lategame the progress of hours was gone. When I was a kiddo that was okay to deal with because I was able to play 10h on some days but today I stay away from games like this. Even PoE seems a bit troubblesome.
Yes there should be a penalty… no weak one like in D3 because you don’t care for repcosts but loosing XP like in PoE is to much from my point of view. I don’t say this because I die a lot but I realy think this is a source of frustration for a lot of people.

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27

I just wanted to point out sa few things. I said there shouldn’t be off screen attack, my reference is PoE. Also its good LE do not have, its just a reminder (an suggestion of course) athough I cannot see why one would disagree.

Also I do know most game doset you back time on dying. The keyword is “heavy”, which means to keep it reasonable. If you fail a boss fight, allow restarting you at the waypoint before the fight, rather than the entire level/chapter leading to the fight that may take 30mins. hours, or worst. complete reset that required hours or days of work in case of PoE (which brings to next point)

As for the last point, on instance gratification, that is a misrepresentation. I never said boss fights should be easy or do not required effort, or be done in first day. I am saying people would like to retry after failing.

In PoE, the latest end boss, Maven, to be able fight her, you have grind a lot of end game maps, for me, 1.5 months which is fine since I play casually.

For me, if you are able to do all the contents leading to her & grind for 1.5 month (milage varies on person to person), I think allow me to have a refight with 10-30mins or next hour wouldn’t be instance glaorification. You still have to beat her.

The problem is, for a refight. you have to beat 100 unique maps bosses, beat 10 arena fights (each with 10 bosses) before you can make the Maven’s writ orb to fight her again. That would take days or more than a week for a 2-3 hours/day or so gamers. I think this is too accessive

In fact the hardest games allows that, Doom Eternal, Dark soul series etc. In context of ARPG. if you failed a boss fight, if its a gear/level issue, you should be able to upgarde your character & retry, or that you think you play bad or do not understand the fight well, & you should be able to retry not long if you improve the understanding of the fight.

Having to spend days, even weeks to refarm a boss fight, especially if you died due to mechanics that can only be learned from expeience from replay boos fight is pushing limit of frastration.

28

I agree that there should be a trading interface but I am not really sure if a Auction House is the right thing.

Do you remember what happened when Diablo 3 had an auction house in the beginning? I do not have to remind the details but what happened in the end that the AH was removed from the game.

This should be an experience to learn from. In D3, AH basically removed the need to do farming runs in the end game. It also removed the thrill of finding the next upgrade by exploring in the game. And aren’t these things the main reason we play a loot based game.

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29

Thats why I said allow auction house but make trade limited.

My idea is to add a special trading orb (that will be consumed after trade) that is either very rare drop that cannot be target farm or trade, or you need to do some 30min quest for an NPC (like socket quest in D2) to recieved it.

Then gamers will only trade for things they desperate need that just won’t drop for them, rather than play the currency farming /trading game which what PoE (& old D3) is now.

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30

In my opinion the trading should be limited to the items of your level. Meaning that you could not buy items early unless you can already use them.

I find for example that the current way things are implemented in D3 works rather well. People are still playing it endlessly going to higher and higher Greater Rifts and difficulties and finding better loot while doing it. Heck, I myself am still playing the seasonal content all the time even I’ve been playing it since the very beginning :slight_smile: You can trade items in D3 only if the item dropped while you were hunting together in a multiplayer game. And I find it quite fair. And one more thing, even it’s not an ARPG the exactly same system is in World of Warcraft. Unless the item is a BoE (Bind on Equip) you can only trade it with the people who were in your party when the item dropped or was looted.

But I agree, there should be some secure way / interface for trading.

We’ll see what happens when multiplayer support kicks in.

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31

Ive played PoE more than probably anyone here and theres a trend going around on the PoE reddit because of the last Harvest manifesto

See lots of PoE players are actually mindless and follow the bandwagon and the bandwagon currently is to hate on PoE due to GGG nerfing insanely easy overpowered crafting - Ritual league is dying down so people are checking out LE (because some streamer told them to, remember they cant think on their own) and because of the honeymoon period they are now acting like this game is the second coming and GGG dont understand anything

Truth is next league will probably be another huge launch the same players will be there opening their wallets.

I just laugh at this all now, its pointless to even discuss

points like this, not even worth pulling apart but you get SIX TRIES against a boss, not ONE, SIX. If you d/c the outcome is the same whether its LE or PoE, LE has ONE try and if you get randomly one shot then thats it for you, go redo more maps - this perfect example of what I mean one game does it different but now PoE’s way is apparently WORSE.

Same as crafting. Because GGGs crafting can be borderline impossible to get perfect gear and LE’s crafting is IMO too easy. PoE players now want deterministic crafting for EVERY affix in the game which is NOT what the PoE devs wants at all

PoE wasnt ever meant to be a fair or easy game, the devs want you to die and overcome challenges thats why Harvest is nerfed, personally I feel PoE is so easy now compared to when I started I actually clear maps while falling asleep sometimes

33

I agree. Although this is bit off topic now I’ll say some thoughts as well. I do not propably have your PoE experience but I’ve done my share in there. I just have never really been taken into PoE world. My experience is in games like D2, D3, Grim Dawn, Victor Vran, Sacred etc. Anyway, I still keep reinstalling PoE from time to time and getting further and further in it :slight_smile:

PoE was not meant to be a walk in the park. It has a quite complex character building system atleast for the new players. People are mostly mindlessly following builds posted on forums and sites which host PoE builds. No thinking at all. But the fact that PoE has quite a compex system in there makes it also so that you can basically nerf your character completely by doing wrong choices.

The loot that drops in PoE is so vast and diverse that you need to use loot filters, yet PoE does not have an ingame method to design those filters unlike Last Epoch which does have it (and does it quite well as well). For those filters you need to browse the internet and seek for popular filters and customize them, outside the game, which is a VERY poor experience. To be able to fully play the game you basically must go outside the game. Not the correct way to do it. LE has the ability to do filters inside the game AND import them from outside the game.

And yes, the current discussion about the recent meta crafting nerf, it’s actually ridicilous. I have not reached a state in PoE where I would’ve been able to craft those items but I find it very silly that people are crying over it. Adapt. Nerfs happen in every game, and not limited to ARPGs.

But I trust LE developers that things will turn out to be well and I am eager to see how the multiplayer works, that includes possible trading.

Now, I’m going back to LE and gather some lewt <3.

34

I would appreciate if we do not go off topic. This is about improving LE, & learning from other games, in this case PoE.

This is not about PoE bad/good or discussion about system in PoE.

Just because title is discussing what OP (me) think are issues in PoE doesn’t mean I dislike poE, or think it is a bad game., otherwise I wouldn’t be spending 1400 hours in & over 600€ on it.

Its not just about agreeing/disagreeing, but also discussion, suggestions. Keep them coming, but focus on topic.

The harvest crafting, & crafting has nothing to do with focus on this topic, but if people like to discuss crafting, I am happy to start a new thread discusing various crafting from different games.

I have no stock in Harvest crating position, but as a confesion, I do have a discord TFT account & as as a trader/buyer on TFT (which is a channel to mainly trade craft). 15 vouches or so

I have my take about crafting in general, but I feel I already have so much discussion points here to have room for discussing crafting.

35

I guess but I started PoE when there was zero loot filter, so when GGG added a loot filter it was the single best update they ever did and they kept it out of the client because it gives them more functionality. 3rd party tools is one thing and GGG are just lazy as ‘someone else’ will do it however without some sort of community moderation you saturate a game with tools and it becomes a tool simulator you spend more time on that than the game which is why I think GGG held off from doing it. Their game now is drowning in useless tools which you dont need any (I dont use any tools except a logout macro program for my xbox controller)

Ive used the LE planner made by Dammit from Grim Dawn a lot a long time ago and personally I dont really like these type of min/max programs as it creates toxic mindset of people “didnt reach xx DPS shit build” and it also homogenizes builds cough PoB cough

36

I also started without any loot filters, I think my last PoE play run was done without any filters as well. I do not use min/max build planners either, except when I have experienced the content and character building by myself enough. I just recently started using GD build planner from grimtools and I have played GD since the release day.

Too many persons ruin the early game experience by going through the easy route. I see new people asking for power leveleling and min/max builds in the in game chat. And many of them are coming from PoE.

37

your arrogance continues to amaze me.

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38

I would like exp loss as a penalty for death in LE. I think back at one of the things I love to watch during PoE league which is the watching the race to 100. IMO no exp loss would make softcore/ SSF SC races a lot more insignificant. Echo loss is annoying and I hope as the game progresses this isn’t a game design finalized feature to replace exp loss death penalty like people are coining it to be.

39

I would argue LE gearing is more impossible to have perfect gear then PoE. Yea you can get 4 t5s with some effort but I would think what qualifies as “perfect gear” in LE would be multiple t7 rolls on all your gear or even 4 t7s which is statistically possible, probably more rare then a mirror.

40

Why would that be? I’m not familiar with races to 100. But my guess would be that a XP penalty on high levels, may decide the race. If people are unlucky and/or get a disconnect in an important phase this could be the end. No chance to ever get up again.

With no XP death penalties the race is undecided till the end, even if somebody is unlucky. he/ she might compensate for this. The XP bonus lists because of losing the streak is also not that insignificant in a race# I guess.

This sounds a lot more exciting to me.

In sports it’s also boring when the winner of i.e. the current soccer season is already decides 5 weeks before the end of the season, because the gap is to high to be closed by any competitor.

Also I personally don’t care about other people racing. A mechanic like this would affect my own experience in a negative way.

If it’s possible there could be race leagues that have different rules. That would be ok for me as it doesn’t affect me as long as I do not join.

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41

People who want to get to 100 fast play in group (bonus xp) on high exp/low risk maps like T15 breachstome Harbringer maps. It is barely a test of skill. You can AFK in group & watch youtube in these exp farming group game as long as you stay at back & make sure do not get one shot, & its pretty hard as Harringer maps are unique maps that wil not roll dangerous mob mods.

I also think having XP penalty for a miniority of race to 100 players, for everyone is not a good reason for the implementation.

Also, Arena & other future possible LE contents that test how far players can go is already WAY better than level to 100 which is more about grind than skill, or strength of your character.