After having watched a few PoE 1 streamers I’ve observed a particular phenomenon. A portion of the playerbase doesn’t play an ARPG first and foremost, they play a trading / economy simulator game. Trading and the market place doesn’t serve to get stronger and beat harder content. A better build serves more efficient amassing of currency. They spend hours farming a currency, a precursor material or crafting a god tier item to be sold for more currency. There are multiple currencies with fluctuating exchange rates and it is used in crafting itself. Items can be retraded and currencies are more tangible than inflationary gold. Those players don’t try to create their own build or discover new mechanics basically but a new niche to farm more currency. A new season and economy reset is interesting to find a different new niche. No matter how good or bad the new season is in the end, as long as a threshold of players engages in trading it remains interesting for them.
For the better (imo) or the worse there’s nothing like that or certainly not to that extent in LE.
My observation might also be completely wrong because I don’t engage in trade.
Yes, they exist.
A small fraction but they derive enjoyment from it. PoE is interesting for theorycrafters, traders, ARPG players and even a few people from other genres partially at times. High variety of play-style.
This is the lie though that PoE’s stockholm syndrome has produced. Let’s look at Grim Dawn: I want to create the Eye of the Storm relic, so I first discover the blueprint, then I know what I need to farm/craft/combine to build it, then I build it. PoE offers no guidance or plan for you (e.g. vendor recipes) or list of things. You need to ‘learn the game’ because you have to discover everything. I want to craft X: well you need Y base and Z currency at V bench, but we’re not going to tell you that, go look it up… That’s crap really, but plays into making those with experience feel important because they figured it out. And so “PoE University” exists.
It’s not good game design, it just evolved (just as the janky unbalanced sandbox did) into the quirky appeal that defines the game, a kind of promise of ‘endless possibilities.’ It’s the bit they didn’t understand in making PoE2, it wasn’t their smart design that brought success, but unintended consequences of skills being so open. Sure, you can say it’s a great thing in the end, but it was most certainly not a result of good design, like your example with the Long Drive. It’s good for content creators.
LE should avoid this path, I don’t think the trick would work a second time, as it takes time (and luck, and breadth of content) to emerge.
And you generally need something already capable of farming with reasonable speed at that level…
Yeah, the slight distinction between ‘almost unobtainable’ but inevitable you all get there with time and ‘never practically attainable’ and no one gets there. Grim Dawn learnt this lesson slowly and drop rates have increased over time with some affix bias to ensure you at least have a chance of that super triple rare, well rolled item. D3 just implemented Primals, lol.
4T7 + 1 sealed should be attainable, because even then the stat rolls might not be great.
This is the funny irony of it all and what Grim Dawn (imo) gets right again: you target farm some mobs in the campaign: it’s the same loop, different enemy type. And you do it because you enjoy killing monsters, it’s just a different place. Instead of crazy things like tower defense, circle of slaughter (breach), blowing up dynamite or following a wagon, you just go to the area you want stuff from and do your favourite thing: slam through monsters.
It’s really simple, the trick is the loop of just using your skills and interacting with monsters must be fun. That’s it. LE just has to work on improving the combat fluidity and build on the campaign sections that are fun/tolerable/interesting to navigate. It’s why D3 kept so many players really, combat was straightforward and fluid. Though here target farming was unnecessary because you’re only hunting a small subset of specific gear.
LE just need to make good decisions going forward as they add more content, so give options without making them mandatory or janky. Not an easy task, but let’s keep our fingers crossed so we have more good ARPG experiences to enjoy. The pressure is on a strong core experience (i.e. traditional ARPG) vs variety of activities (live service ARPG).
And ironically almost nobody plays coop or actually against each other, it’s all about chat ego or posting ‘look what I found/did’ on Reddit… Well it’s also about sharing builds and talking experience, but that’s not a component of live service specifically.
Yes, no learning curve in that case.
Different type of difficulty applied simply.
Both can be enjoyable to a player, it’s a style, not a detriment or plus inherently.
Otherwise how would you explain games like Binding of Isaac, Blue Prince, Animal Well and so on? Those are games actively withholding essential progression information from the player. Why? To find it out personally, to learn, to discover.
As for the vendor recipes: They’ve been a verbally bashed feature for years now since they’re not showcased to exist or what the combinations are, in that genre a detriment. I’m not talking about them though.
As for currency types? You know they exist when you acquire them, then you can read their function. They’re straight-forward and self-explanatory. How to combine them is up to the player, nothing is inherently hidden there.
Crafting Bench. There are the so called ‘meta mods’ which the function is explained, but not everything adhered to meta mods (fossilcrafting for example overwrites it). That’s something which should be told, simple. But also still easy to find out personally.
As for the base: different bases at different places is not bad design, they’re unique outcomes from that content. As for the right base for your build? Well… chose it! You get nigh every possible one presented vastly before you reach late-game (red maps) in PoE. As long as you interact with the mechanics and keep your eyes open rather then blindly clicking. ‘Oh, so there’s special bases in Ritual? Cool… lemme check that out and see what they do!’, ‘Oh, this Heist blueprint gave me this weird ring-base which has one extra suffix? That’s neat!’ and so on. Those are exploration type mechanics, much like you won’t know what uniques can drop from a boss unless you look it up at the outside. Should those be revealed in LE? Yes? If you think so fine, if ‘no’ then there’s no basis for arguing against it, they’re the same.
Because when done then the direction one leans into needs to be completely consistent. If exceptions apply we need to look as to why that happens and how it can be replicated for best results.
Agreed, plus crafting flexibility, you could ‘fix’ everything no matter what it was. ‘Hrmm… this didn’t work out well, but maybe if I re-roll only the prefixes then it would look better, lemme see!’, especially allowing SSF players to actively adjust items which have sub-par total outcomes but have potential left while no other upgrade has been found.
It opens avenues simply, it’s not bad itself.
Not really? I mean, it depends on what you wanna farm. General T16 maps are easily farmed. Blighted maps in 70% of the case (otherwise tower-placement RNG screws you) don’t even need any gear worn if you know what you’re doing. Heist is also quite easy.
Then there’s things which need a good build, like Breach, Abyss, Legion, Harbingers. Those cause hard hitting stuff to spawn.
But you don’t need them for the baseline acquisition of the most important crafting methods at all. And Delve… is somewhat in the middle. If you got a reliable source of phasing (a unique amulet provides that for low-life builds permanently as example) then you won’t get body-blocked, which is the major reason to die in delve. Upper areas and knowledge on how walls - and hence fossils - generate make even higher areas quite rewarding.
We’ll see if LE learns this lesson over time. Nowadays it should be one that’s baseline knowledge of design for the genre though.
There definitely needs to be more coherent reliable design methodology provided for game developers, to avoid the classic pitfalls which long-term players and other dev-teams have found out over decades of playing or creating games.
To be fair, some of those crazy design are really… really enjoyable!
Abyss is great, Harbinger too, love the absolute hordes there. Heist is a interesting concept but not fully fleshed out, needed to be more complex as it leans into that. And Blight is a very enjoyable - also not fleshed out though - design idea, combining the looter ARPG with tower defense and hordes? Great! Sadly the engine couldn’t keep up with the original version, which was a ton more mobs and making it so exciting as you literally got swarmed.
But yes, GD has done it surpremely right in their design. But their core issue is replay-value long-term. Replayability is not high in GD compared to live-service games like Torchlight Infinite, PoE or also LE actually. They need those crazy mechanics to provide a more reliable method to lure in old players which otherwise are ‘done’ with the game. That mandates the experience to be sufficiently different from all former ones, hence why they’re so ‘crazy’ in comparison.
It’s a side-effect of live-service games and the risk attached to making such a game.
It would generally be a very good thing to do, after finishing campaign and entering empowered monoliths you get access to a ‘uber campaign’ where the specific mob-types with specific drops are available. Which is a viable option.
We need to still think about the ‘beyond’ part though, because once it’s done the game needs to progress further anyway. GD doesn’t have that issue, they can simply polish and expand on already existing systems since they have no ongoing extreme costs like servers.
Yeah, not an easy task.
And also one EHG has showcased to be… not the best in for now. 1.2 definitely made up for a boatload, but the time investment needed makes it unsure if the same quality can be upheld with a ‘normal’ pacing. We haven’t seen that hence for now… and they’ll need to provide that to us so I can say ‘yes, that would be a good route’ 
Yep, not inherently, it’s a side-effect.
But the effect exists, so it had to be taken into consideration. It’s a bad mental position overall, not positive to have in such an environment… but we can’t stop to behave how we’re wired after all, and the setup leads to the people using it to have this trait more often then not… otherwise you can play true offline too after all, wouldn’t need to have the live-service aspect.
I am done with this leagues content. Maybe if there was some sort of seasonal journey which could earn you cosmetic rewards I would keep playing for a bit longer. Even then it’s not too likely because I only play full offline where you can’t use cosmetic microtransactions.
If those two things change there is a good chance I will play for a longer period of time and also start buying supporter packs.