Self-Found (League) [Thread outdated!]

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Scorched wrote:

What you all want is a league where everything is a lot easier to achieve.

Well since all I want is an SFL without any other changes except perhaps some to getting gems being easier to save time....

Yea, easier.

lol. Just lol.

I am terribly confused by some people's apparent need for a separate league just to do self-found. I almost never trade in this game and I have not really found myself stagnating before I get to the end of Act 3 Merc. People are saying "If we disable trading, we can increase the drop rates for solo players!" Well yes, but that implies there is something wrong with the current drop rates for solo players. There simply is not. It is absolutely possible to progress through the game without trading, I do a lot of it. If you want to play self-found just do it. You neither need nor deserve a buff in drop rates for that.

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SpudOfDoom wrote:

I am terribly confused by some people's apparent need for a separate league just to do self-found. I almost never trade in this game and I have not really found myself stagnating before I get to the end of Act 3 Merc. People are saying "If we disable trading, we can increase the drop rates for solo players!" Well yes, but that implies there is something wrong with the current drop rates for solo players. There simply is not. It is absolutely possible to progress through the game without trading, I do a lot of it. If you want to play self-found just do it. You neither need nor deserve a buff in drop rates for that.

Do you play hardcore or softcore? What do you think of the crafting system?

I play softcore almost exclusively, mostly because my internet is pretty jittery at times.

I think the crafting system is pretty good. Alt, Alch, Chaos and socket orbs will give you pretty much everything you need. I agree that the most annoying thing is to upgrade items when you are at the point that you need specific links. I think the buff to 4-link rates will help a lot with that.

Of course, you'll be a lot worse off than when you make your character with trades/twinked items, etc. but it still seems to be at least viable from my experience. The main thing is that you will need to build under the assumption that you will never find a unique.

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SpudOfDoom wrote:

The main thing is that you will need to build under the assumption that you will never find a unique.

Very good point there. My self-found experience went rather well, and was built under similar assumptions.

So a constructive question for everyone: Do your self-found plans revolve around particular uniques, or a particular five- or six-socket gem combination? If so, please explain your reasoning.

Hi

SFL 1+

I tend to build around the gem quest drop. The issue I have with SFL in the standard league is the lack of crafting materials. The orb drops do not drop regularly enough to promote crafting over trading. I play a average of 3-4 hours a day and finding a chaos, regal, alch, etc. is like waiting to see the blue moon. Meanwhile I sit and craft with shit loads of trans,alts,augs at lvl 78, sarcasm:yah blue items!... SFL isn't about trading and raining items, it is about orbs dropping at a reasonable rate without player stacking mf to allow crafting at a more regular pace. Qarl knows the drops are iffy in this game and needs to be fixed, perhaps if monsters started dropping fragments of all orbs that might help or more complex crafting recipes.
I find 4l easy enough its the 5l...

Mostly though I want to play a SFL because I am tired of 2 things: not enough crafting, to much inflation in trade.

Every league requires things that would make it a unique playing experience SFL would/could offer:
1)No trades with other players.2)No mf rolls on blue or yellow items.3)Increased rare/high tier orb drops NOT items.4)No party benefits, permanent loot allocation.5)More complex recipes and orbs for crafting specific mods on items.

Still waiting to see these new changes and how they will work on SFL oriented players.

cheers

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Scorched wrote:

Claiming the so called economy is responsible for the lower drop rates, the bad linking chances so that everything spins around trading. Correct me if I am wrong but I have not seen a post from GGG that says the drops are lower because you can trade.

This demonstrates the level of understanding of most people against SFL. You don't need a dev to state the obvious: games with economies have to be balanced around said economy or else the game goes to shit.

Here's a simple demonstration of trading affecting game balance:

10 items drop for you:
5 are garbage;
1 is good for your life based melee character;
1 is good for a freeze pulsing alt;
3 are useless for all your characters but would be good for a facebreaker, sporker, or lowlife character.

In a trading league you trade those items you can't use for ones you can.

In SFL you vendor them and get a few alts and maybe an alch. Same time spent as the trader, but less than half as much useable loot.

The game designers have a set goal for how fast players should acquire items and wealth: too fast and players get bored sooner, too slow and they get frustrated and quit.

If you provide trading but don't balance around it then you get an excess of loot making it so traders have too much loot too fast and get bored. If you do balance around it then you have people who don't trade getting too few items and getting frustrated.

Whether you agree with either playstyle or not the fact is both exist and both want to have fun in this game but really co-existance under the same drop-rate is going to leave one or the other shafted.

There may be some outliers who don't get frustrated with self found in its current form or who wouldn't get bored with higher drop rates in standard, but don't let that fool you into thinking that both playstyles are currently balanced or ever could be with the same ruleset.

I think it should be "relatively easy" to reach Maps in Self-found. I say "relatively", because of course you don't want it to be a walk in the park to get past "Merciless" difficulty.
However, maybe it's just me, but too much RNG and little time can make Self-found not viable basically. You get stuck in a certain part, and just can't get past it.
Happened to 2 of my chars in Act 2-3 Cruel I believe. Don't have time to reroll/grind, so didn't play more.
I tried trading, but I'd spend hours and hours searching trading threads, looking for the right items I could use, and not even getting a PM from people, so yeah not going there anymore. Should be possible to get to end-game with self-found.

...well maybe I just suck at this game. But it's a nice game and I want to play it to the end (don't care about trying to reach 100 or getting godly gear or whatever, I just want to know what it feels to play in maps and have some fun with end-game builds, their customization, etc).
So there are 3 options for me:
1)Please make this process easier to me: Basically what people say in this kind of threads. Make a "better" crafting system, make self-found "viable" or whatever, etc.
2)Please give me the tools to be better at this game with the little time I have: The other alternative is actually getting good at the game. To know every single detail, know exactly which build is viable, how to create and sustain it, how to react to each different situation, know every enemy and know how to approach them with your particular build (have general knowledge of mechanics so you can approach them with any build you make), be a master theorycrafter, etc. But yeah that requires too much time and effort, which I don't have.
Simple things like having a way to toggle the damage you and monsters take per hit would be a step in the right direction for instance, since you would have an easy and fast way to compare different configurations of your char (for example for how much HP you get hit, or how much HP you hit your enemies).
Another option would be having better statistics. The ones in the Char window are basically useless to me, other than "bigger number = better". Real-time statistics would be better for instance. For example, have some counters or something in the screen, which tell you how much HP you get hit per second when you are in a fight (max and average), how much time you spend evading hits from enemies (min, max and average), how much damage is mitigated by your armor. For each of these statistics, you could have a counter for the current one (for example a counter for the current hit on your armor), and for average/max/ming/etc.
If it's presented in an user-friendly and useful way, it could make theory-crafting and the like much easier. Of course it should be toggable, in normal situations you don't want to see that shit.
I guess other options are better documentation/guides/etc? But yeah the game is huge and the possibilities are huge, it's quite hard to make that sort of thing, at least in the level I'm thinking of (not the ones that are already made, which are either too general or build-specific).
Mostly having a better way to know exactly how your current configuration works, and if you get new items/gems/etc, have a way to know exactly if it will be better for you or not. Not this "get unique item X, then get specific gem Z, then farm until you get to specific keystone Y" stuff that's on every "guide"; but more of a "okay, you are level X in zone Z. At this time there are several kind of items, currencies and gems that can drop for you. If any of these drop, then maybe you can do something like this to survive better and shape your build in a certain way. Then you could go get the stat node X to try and do another stuff, but later you can scourge it anyway when you advance to the next Act. Bla bla bla". I think stuff like that should be integrated into the game a little bit better, not just be random advice from people in it's forums. Or rather, that should be the way YOU figure stuff out, but that info should come easily from somewhere, and I think the game could help you more into getting that mentality.
3)Meh: I guess I'm fucked and will spend my time doing something else then..? But this would suck, I like this game.

SFL -1

Summary of most posts - - -

Its either this:

"GGG I really enjoy your game, but I'd rather not trade and as such I'm finding it difficult to progress and craft at a rate that I would personally deem acceptable. I understand that this game was designed with the concept of open trade between players in mind, but please use your very limited development resources to completely rewrite and/or re-balance the algorithms used in looting and crafting so that this crap is enjoyable to me."

Or this:

"GGG I really enjoy your game, but I'd rather not trade and as such I'm finding it difficult to progress and craft at a rate that I would personally deem acceptable. I don't want increased drop rates or any tweak to the game's mechanics though, because I MOST DEFINITELY don't want an easier game. So please waste your time creating a league where our particular brand of self-finders can slowly come to the realization that we could've been doing this all along in the leagues as they were."

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Subversus wrote:

SFL -1

Summary of most posts - - -

Its either this:

"GGG I really enjoy your game, but I'd rather not trade and as such I'm finding it difficult to progress and craft at a rate that I would personally deem acceptable. I understand that this game was designed with the concept of open trade between players in mind, but please use your very limited development resources to completely rewrite and/or re-balance the algorithms used in looting and crafting so that this crap is enjoyable to me."

Or this:

"GGG I really enjoy your game, but I'd rather not trade and as such I'm finding it difficult to progress and craft at a rate that I would personally deem acceptable. I don't want increased drop rates or any tweak to the game's mechanics though, because I MOST DEFINITELY don't want an easier game. So please waste your time creating a league where our particular brand of self-finders can slowly come to the realization that we could've been doing this all along in the leagues as they were."

Those are some nice generalizations there, but PoE's innovative crafting system will never be able to truly shine so long as everything revolves around the trading short circuit. A hungry upstart developer like GGG should be eager to strike the dirt in pursuit of the next great innovation. The whole league framework makes things like this easier than they would be in other games. It's one of PoE's greatest strengths. But it should not be used because... ????? Eh, no reason. Everyone, go back to spamming giant walls of items in trade chat.