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

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123

This is the key point, imo, and something that OP seems to get really stuck on.

If reaching level 100 is not the goal, why are you measuring your progress by your exp bar?

There are plenty of other ways to measure progress in ARPGs. Content completed, currency earned, loot found. You claim that you don’t care about leveling up, but then bitch so much about how penalizing the time loss is. So obviously you do care. Pick one.

What about everything else that happened during that period you were playing between deaths? You’re ignoring the loot you found, the content you’ve played, etc., and only focusing on one way to measure ‘progress.’ In all of those other ways, you haven’t lost any time at all. You’ve still made currency, are closer to getting better gear, have been running enjoyable content (or, if not, that’s a separate problem, throwing time away doing things you don’t enjoy for some reason). But when you choose to only focus on exp loss, you’re the one making yourself miserable. Not the penalty. Not the game. If you really don’t care about hitting level 100, then stop measuring your progress only by xp.

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Hopefully :). I don’t like setbacks like I had in LI2. We don’t talk about 1 hour of grind back then but almost a day of grinding :D. I don’t even like the ammount of Xp loss in PoE but I don’t mind it that much because I never played PoE with much dedication.
An XP loss is fine as long as it is in a certain range. That’s a big problem thou because whats the right ammount? 1%? 10%? 3,7416%?
Gold loss is a joke as long as it isn’t % based like die once loose 10% of your gold. In a game where trading is a thing this can be hurtfull.
Another example: A random item shatters if you die up to destructive shattering where you need to get new gear. That’s fun because you need to go for something and keep secondary gear.
I’m not against to pay for my mistakes no matter if I can’t play the game because I don’t have the hardware, make shitty builds or make gameplay errors or even from a DC once in a blue moon or a bug i ran into once or twice untill I get the problem. If I don’t have any drawbacks from being killed i see no need to make good builds and do some stupid stuff I never have done with drawbacks to my toons death.

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It depends on how often the dc’s or crashes happen.

Of course this is frustrating, but it does not outweight how much i personally would like to see the exp penalty.

Because GGG does not want to split the communtiy too much.

Even SSF was NOT in their vision fo PoE and it was not part of their initial design.

They will probably never ever do another “community split”, they already have 4 different “communities”

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Yep, I think most wil agree that a (genuine) player mistake in a game should “sting” a little, but not “hurt” too much. If the game is too easy (no challenge), we disengage, simple as that. I think there are ways to balance the disparity in the playerbase as to what stings and what hurts (some of us have thicker skins), in different ways. Leagues, difficulty settings (like Easy, Hard, Soft and Hardcore, SSF etc.) are one way, though it separates the player base into groups. This works well enough in sports as far as I know.

Another is to have an adaptive game, with a “smart” mechanic, like the “rubber banding” in Mario Kart: if you get too far behind, you get boosted closer to the rest of the players, so it’s still fun for all. Don’t think this will survive for long in the competitive and “protective of their achievement” crowd I sense around most ARPGs, though. Many simply do not want everyone to have fun, if it diminishes their dedication/skill/achievements in the game.

Yet another is to ask the player each time they die: “lose X% XP and respawn or disconnect and lock access to this character for X minutes?”. This way, you choose how much your time is worth to you :slight_smile:
Any other constructive options?

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Thanks for sharing your opinion!

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XP loss in PoE is the main reason I don’t play any character >95lvl there. too frustrating. My last character - summoner carrion golem necromancer. And it was expensive (by my standards) - over 60 exalteds. But sometimes it still does die. Because i’m not young I don’t have reflexes good enough to dodge any attack or spell. And if i die at lvl94 it is very frustrating but I can compensate somehow. but after 95+ it is a no-go.
Btw that is why most 100lvl players reached that lvl just by doing beachhead maps rotations… Nobody wants to risk :smiley:

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129

NO ONE said there shouldn’t be penalty, & I I said like 1000X tiems its not about “Git Gud”, yet time and again, people keep using the same argument. implying people not wanted to have XP lost is because they are bad at the game, & not wanting to be punish for being bad. Strawman & insulting.

if you bother to read, you know I wanted to have punishment for death, but one that is uniform across all levels. from lvl1-100.

None of us can be proven to be better than another, & its an ARPG, where you beat mobs by overpowering them.

Lets not petend its a skill base games with high skill ceiling or gap. You get further mostly by grinding more & gettng better gears.

The key point is people do not want to lose process, as not everyone has as much time for gaming as others.

Punishing people for the most previous thing; gametime is Awful.
I work 2 jobs, 1 full time, one part time. I can only delicated 1-2 hours cap a day playing game. maybe 4-5 on weekend if lucky. 1-2 hours processs loss may not sound much to some people.
But that is 1-2 full gaming sessions.

If you disagress, provide a counter argument. The “Git Gud” argument need to stop.

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130

Well this was quite the thread to read through.

  1. Trading:
    Yeah there has to be lessons learned from D3 and PoE here. Vanilla D3 was an obvious monetary predatory practice, the RMAH and the droprates showed that Blizzard were trying to subtly MTX the hell out of the playerbase and they got caught. The follow up we got was no trading at all which created the weekend long seasons with loot pinatas we have now, not good for long term game health.
    For PoE, Chris and Co. would absolutely love to kill off trading as he’s stated numerous times, trading just gives players too much power immediately. So what did they do? Make it excessively inconvenient and monetize it with stash tabs.
    There’s space for a nice middle ground here.

  2. BS One-shots:
    I think we’re alright here as the balancing on the defense reworks keep happening. I haven’t dealt with anything too egregious unless I’ve buffed up Monolith bosses to the extreme without knowing/paying attention. The problem with D3 is the near-infinite scaling, and unavoidable attacks (Hi Jailer!) with PoE it’s the stupidly incoherent defense mechanics and their layering. While I’ve grown to not be a fan of 100% mitigation stats (like Dodge) and DPS=Healing (Life Leech) due to the strain it puts on the difficulty design space, I’ve just come to accept them and move on. I’m a huge fan of Endurance however.

  3. EXP lost on Death:
    I can’t give an argument here as I’m fine with it as like Jerle mentioned earlier I was a huge fan of FFXI and it was brutal there for a long time. I can’t think of a penalty that could appease everyone. The Monolith penalties right now aren’t bad, sometimes annoying, but nowhere near losing days worth of EXPing and getting murdered by a lag out or desync in PoE.

  4. Lab End game boss “mechanics”:
    Again I think we’re doing ok here. There’s a good bit of trial and error awaiting us with the current Monolith bosses, like trying to fight the Emperor of Corpses with a controller is hilarious as you use your movement ability and rush right back into it’s breath nova and get gotten. Good times. The advantage is the community is putting up guides to explain the mechanics so if you don’t want to worry about spoiling it for yourself you can be prepped before you even start the timeline.
    Where as in PoE I still haven’t a damned idea what’s happening in the left over Synthesis fights, Sirus is a steaming pile of stupid that they just won’t do anything with, and GGG is too dependent on physical and chaos damage being tied to just about everything. The armor mechanic is awful (look up the calculations on how that works) and they’re continually removing sources of physical damage reduction (I miss you Soul of Steel) now with Fossil crafting nerfed, and the pending Harvest hatchet job, getting chaos res to a comfortable level is back to the goddamn slot machine.

I’m all for poo-poo’ing GGG these days and PoE’s path moving forward as anyone. I’m surprised no one has brought up how badly the game runs now. It feels like it’s being held together by popsicle sticks, rubber bands and Elmer’s glue. The fact that someway, somehow, they’ve made build diversity even worse with some of the changes they’ve had over the last ~18 months. The new skills being added are absolute jokes and are quadrupling down on the hotkey piano. It’s bad enough already if you aren’t using a flask macro. And finally 99.9999% of all loot dropped is completely and totally worthless, hence why having deterministic crafting was so important, the entirety of the playerbase had that carrot on the end of the line to chase after for longer.

Important stuff to discuss for sure. EHG is doing a lot of things right, so I have faith moving forward. One big important factor that can’t be ignored is, LE is not a F2P title, having that “box cost” is very important. Which is why we got that fantastic stash change not too long ago and it not be an MTX predatory practice like PoE’s.

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131

Kiadaw

DeftPaws

1m

I am not arguing against you but add some extra points to emphasis what you said already.

I made a thread on poE forum, that The good of PoE are very good, but the bad are very bad, & I tolerate the bad as theer is very little competition.

As an ARPG that need to get playerbase, I think IMO that it is crazy to implement features that make people wanted to turn away then welcomed more players.

PoE already cater to the elistist, hardcore arpg crowd & have a lot of decent by casual but dedicated arpgers (don’t belive me, go read the forum) that dislike PoE catering to the top 1-5% streamer & no-lifers.

These group of gamers, include me, is what LE can win over. Trying to make LE as hardcore as PoE & catering to the eleite minority I think is a bad decision.

And yes I agree, PoE success has alot to do also to do with not much competitions, & being a live service model. that allows regular updates.

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132

I never said i have 12 hours to game a day and i dont. That would be really worrying for my family haha. More like two-3 hours when my wifes goes to bed and my kid is in bed.

I understand your reaction in general though.
I think you should give POE some credits beside the lack of competition. It does things out of the box in some leagues like harvest and blight for example. And being able to make absurt different Meme builds and off meta builds is why i love POE.

On the other hand yes i think way less people would play POE if there would be more competition. I still think POE will still be a big thing because of the amount of good content they have build up over the years.

I really hope that LE and D4 will succeed for the health of the genre.
Its not healthie at the moment. POE, LE, Diablo all those games benefit of healthie competition and they need to be on there toes to fight for the fanbase. Which is one of the problems of POE ath the moment in my humble opinion.

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I fully agree, i think the live service and being able to play it for free is an underviewed point that you make. You can stop for a while with POE and then come back at a new season without paying. Play it for a month and then quit again.

You always see a peek of players at the start of a season and then after a few weeks the first spike dumbles down, and so on.

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I say it 1000 times if needed as well. What kind of penalty do you think is good?

Okay don’t get mad but last time I checked the leaderboards on D3 or even LE there waas a difference in them so maybe there is a gap and some people have better mechanical skills then others. For example I’ll never play memory with kids again! These lil sh… people can memorize far more stuff then me ^^.

When I take a look at this topic I see people who don’t mind, people who think these are needed and people who dislike them completely.
You can look up some threads I made and always mentioned people with little time at hand. i even advocate for them as well as casual players when some people mention things are to easy. Then again I as mostly medium skilled player still think there need to be something that make it obvious when you play something that don’t work or if you make bad descissions or play bad. I realy don’t want to ruin your day or make you mad or something and I don’t want to sound elitist in any way because I’m not even a good player but I realy think there should be a downside to the death of a char.

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Hahaha that memory with your kids part made my day.
My kid is to young to play memory but i thing i will have the same experience as you had.
Have a good one :slight_smile:

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This is the easiest thing to fix. Make a “Casual” game mode (or call it whatever because even the most casual person is offended getting called casual) with no death penalties and 10 times the rates or whatever so people who wish to have an easy time and to achive stuff can do so. I’m totaly against ruin anyones fun but in my 22 years of gaming I learned one thing: I’m not very good in games and play them for fun. There are a lot of people with more skill then me and there are a lot of people with less skill. Still players who can handle less things then me want everything as well but they are a bit lost there. For example i know someone who is happy with LFR in WoW. he’s the first on who saya that he’s to bad for harder content. Yet again he was in every hard mode so far because he’s a great guy. From his point of view easy modes are the way to go while I play on normal while others don’t bother with anything beneath a nightmare mode.
In LE it’s darn easy to make a server that’s easy going with their own leaderboards and stuff so everyone who wants to play an easier and faster version of the game can happiely do so. With this approach noone can be butthurt in the end.

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I have personally played thousands of hours in PoE, too and agree with most of your points.
But what I take from your statement about exp loss is more personal than actual valid criticism.

You claim “many” have quit because of it and that your reference is the PoE Forum, yet you haven’t linked to one of your references. Kinda fishy.

That being said, being a rather active member of the PoE community, I have never heard of a single person who quit the game because of XP loss.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that everybody is a fan of it. Again, it’s a subjective matter. Some like to reach max level being a challenge, some want it easy as fuck. Others are somewhere in between.

Stating it they way you do is just false. I’m sure you want LE to fit your own personal preferences, but be aware that your preferences don’t reflect the entire playerbase.

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That’s the reason that games like golf which has been around for well over a century have handicap systems. It’s far from perfect but it allows everyone to play together with some level of competition despite the skill differences.

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I dont know if you answar for the company or if you have any kind of comunication means with the but I think this entire discussion can be resumed like this:

in any kind of game we have casual players, avarage players and hardcore players… if the game will be good or not rellay in which player the company is aiming when they do the game… I think POE end game is made only for hardcore players, I am a avarage player and never reach the most difficult part of the game because I dont have time for get enough currency and make good gear… I understand now that with the time I have I will not be able to do a t16 map with 100% delirium layers…

But in my opinion… if they want to make this game sucesseful for all base players they cant make the end game impossible to reach for casual and avarage players… so I think they can make adjustments in normal game mode and hardcore game mode… to target this modes for each player base, if the hardcore player base dont mind with penalty experience when they die they can have this, but I have sure that for a casual player if they lost 10% or more experience what make him play for more 3 or 4 hours to get this experience back, they will be frustrated because they dont have this time avaible to do that, that is why they are casual players…

about all the other topics that @Kiadaw posted here I think this is the solution for all them… make the game and the end game content avaible for everyone… if you like more challange things you can go to hard core, I am not saying that normal game need to be easy, but for example… you can add more boss mechanics in hardcore that is not present in normal game… this way the player that want more challanges can change the game mode and have this experience, and the players that want to at least do the end game content can do it too… maybe give more itens or more currency for the players in hardcore to they feel that they effort is rewarded or something else, but I think we have ways to make everyone feel that the game is good, everything depends in the company that is making the game…

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140

If you read what i wrote (I got it, the thread is long). I mentioned many times, but again:

THERE NEED TO BE PENALTY ON DEATH SO PLAYERS KNOW THEY PLAY BAD & IMPROVE!
(Sorry to have to write in cap, but it seems if I don’t empahsis, people missed it.)

Which you agree.

That is why a good system must be one that works universally, like 99.9% of action games out there are already doing.

A penalty that only matters for 3 final optional level. How is that a good design (not first time I said this). Also, does it encourage players to play better, or does it encourageplyaers to play safer? If PoE is the example,m its the latter.

What s a good system? 99.9% of games are literally using a already

Failed & Died? Returned to last checkpoint/save (which usually no more than 5-30mins of setback. It is used in 99.9% of action games because it works, as it balance between too easy & overly punishing. The difficultes ( & games have wide range of difficulties) come from overcoming the contents (like beating an end level boss, or clearing a hard area), which is what most gamers can accept, rather than rerolling you back to potiential hours/ days of process (which some find others, other not so).

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141

I apprecuate your effort to post. There are some misrepresenation which I want to clarify.

“I’m sure you want LE to fit your own personal preferences,
but be aware that your preferences don’t reflect the entire playerbase”
I made it clear in my first post that these are my opinons, & people can agree/disagree & I encourage discussion. (See my first post). If someone have something to add, dismissed, we are here to discuss.

The key is to be have meaningful discussion with end goal of making LE better. though debate & discussion.

“Obviously, this doesn’t mean that everybody is a fan of it. Again, it’s a subjective matter. Some like to reach max level being a challenge, some want it easy as fuck. Others are somewhere in between.”
if its a general comment for sure, but not my stand. Reaching level 100 being a challenging or not is not the point I am making. I never avocate to make reaching level 100 easier ot harder.

“You claim “many” have quit because of it and that your reference is the PoE Forum, yet you haven’t linked to one of your references. Kinda fishy.”
I did not link because my post is alraedy too long, but for sure if people want to verify

Some examples from community, I can find more, but I think you get the jess
See 2nd last post on page 4
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3072388/page/4
See first post on page 14
http://fr.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1188455/page/14

I can post more. I do get it, “Many” is a vague word & that can be interpreted different.
It could mean some or most.

In my contect, I mean to say “some” not “most” (I do not have survey result of reason palyer quit). I never mean to claim or mislead people to think MOST players quit due to death penalty.

Anyway from the forum, death penalty is a hot topic (that spin multiple pages) and is you find on first page of feedback section of forum.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3072388

A few page later , a similar one (multiple poste as well)
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3061390

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I agree with you to an extent. I have always been a very dedicated player, but I try to base my opinions around the casual and mid-level player a lot because I actually tend to relate to that playstyle more. I definitely agree about the game needing to be accessible to all people, I think that’s super important and a place where PoE fails. Nobody is trying to turn this game into PoE, but that’s not to say that there aren’t aspects of PoE that LE could learn from, both good and bad. The game is the most popular ARPG on the market and it grew from 10k players to 250k players in just a few years, which is kind of insane. It’d be kind of stupid for EHG to not look to PoE for at least a little inspiration.

When it comes to a death penalty, the sentiment is either “yeah it’s totally fine” or “I work 9 jobs and have 18 kids and 4 wives and 32 dogs and an XP penalty will ruin my entire life”. There is definitely a happy middle-ground. Honestly, I would have no idea if LE has a death penalty because every time I die I just click respawn and get back to it. I would probably care a lot more if I were closer to level 100, but right now I’m playing semi-casually so I wouldn’t notice an XP loss if there were one. This is probably how most average/casual players would interact with the mechanic.

I honest to god thought there was an XP penalty and OP was trying to argue against it, which is hilarious because that means that every single one of his points is basically moot because they’re all based on game mechanics that don’t even exist yet in LE. A very silly premise for feedback.