Self-Found (League) [Thread outdated!]

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OverUsedChewToy wrote:

I'll put my own preferences in brief:

Low drop rates affect the current endgame:
*I reached maps and played through several consecutively. It was fun but they ran out. Hours of grinding docks and lunaris later I gave up trying and haven't much touched the character since.

Trading is not fun for me:
*I don't have much free time for PoE and trading is not fun at all for me. At all. It's a chore. I payed an exalt fro two Doedre's damnings simply so I didn't have to waste time searching.

My drops are affected by trade even if I never trade:
*The fact that trade exists implies even a self-found player has their drops impacted by the presence of an economy. This is detrimental to that playstyle option.

My friends don't play much PoE:
*I don't have the opportunity to party much and public parties are usually another stressful chore since it forces me out of my preferred, more laid-back playstyle.

My drops are affected by party play even if I never play in a party:
*The fact that party play exists implies even a self-found player has their drops impacted by the presence of this capacity. This is detrimental to that playstyle option.

Multiplayer breaks my immersion:
*I like PoE's atmosphere and tone as much as the actual slaughtering of monsters but trading and partying (publically at least) does absolutely nothing to help that. Town instances aren't so bad to me, where you can just ignore players without gameplay repercussions.

Those seem reason enough in my eyes to introduce something to accomodate for the prevalence of solitary play if my reasons are common among the playerbase.

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totalbackline wrote:

Is it so hard to understand that some players view alteration farming and trading as a joke and would just like to see more items drop. Running a mule to act 1/2 cruel just to pickup a reduced mana gem quest reward is silly. Give the self found player the tools needed to succeed, we'll do the rest.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

I've never understood the class warfare in this game. If you were "rich" what would you buy? Just more items for different alts? You could just as easily continue looking for gear. Playing self found increases the value of every drop, and its rewarding because it has that "you built it" feel.

I had a friend who found a soul taker the other day. He sold it for a bunch or exalts. Bought all new gear and then face-rolled content. A few days later, he sold his gear and bought more gear for another alt saying he was bored. Its because he didn't "earn" it. It's empty and isn't fun. Many people want to FIND their gear, not farm alts until you can BUY it from someone else. It's a loot find game. Not a loot purchase game. Lesson that can be learned from "another game".

When you play self found, every rare matters, every chrom matters(including GBR link socket gear), every alt matters which becomes your jeweler,fuse source. I think for those of you who are competitive there is an appeal knowing that any gear you have, you found/crafted, and you could compare that to what everyone else has found/crafted.

I literally debated(and still do a little), upgrading to an eternal member just to have a unique that gave bonuses while not in a party. Something like 1% IIR per level, and .5% IIQ per level when in solo play. Or scaled benefits for continuous gameplay sessions, building slowly over time as you continue to play in a "combat zone" up to a maximum total(like a timed skill but in reverse).

That being said I didn't want to spend a grand on a concept that I'm not sure GGG wants. I know they love the idea that this is an online multiplayer game and have "balanced" the game based on that. All I'm saying is there is a significant portion of solo players that would very much enjoy a buff to our preferred gameplay experience.

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Ozsmeg wrote:

This whole self-found thing seems to only exist because the trading and obtaining of equipment via other methods seems like cheating. But in addition to that it is also annoying, complicated, takes too much time and means you have to deal with a variety of idiots, morons, children and people that are just there to make RL money.

The Self-found requests seem to most people to be logical because it removes this requirement to spend a large amount of time trading rather than actually playing the game.

Self-found opens the opportunity to log in, play then game have some fun and then go to bed. If you get a drop that is beneficial and enables you to progress great. If not then maybe craft something. But avoid the endless sitting in town spamming trade to buy or sell something. Which for me at least and probably alot of other people is not enjoyable.

At the moment that option in one of the leagues is so difficult because it's tailored to trading and means that progression through drops and self-crafting alone is extremely long winded.

I think what people are looking for is a league which is ladderless, increased drop rates so they can play the game and avoid spending 50% of there time trying to find an upgrade. The most logical way to have control over the currency hording and RMT is to remove the game functions that enable those to be beneficial.

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12013 wrote:

The bottom line for me is very simple:

If POE adds better self-found "support" (which for me at a minimum means disabled trading in exchange for greatly improved drop rates; that doesn't have to mean another league if it can be done without one), then I will continue playing and throw even more money their way. I do admire what GGG has created so far and I've had enough fun to make it well worth the multiple packs I've already bought. But if the experience for a solo self-found player remains the same as it is today, then I'll just be playing to pass the time until the Diablo 3 expansion comes out.

I don't give a damn about your "economy", and I don't care to be forced to interact with other people in order to enjoy my game.

I have much more fun finding and crafting my own upgrades and being pleasantly surprised with my drops and inspired to build new characters around them. The problem for me with any game that forces all of its players into one giant economic pool is that the drop rates necessarily have to be tuned so punishingly low that the no lifers don't flood the "economy" with their leftovers. This in turn makes the pace of rewards grind to a halt very quickly for a solo self-found player, resulting in a frustrating and unsatisfying experience.

I've got a bunch of characters, a couple in the 50's and 60's, and two that I've pushed to 77 and 80, but with most of the rest stalled in the 40's. Playing solo self-found through Normal is fine, while you're still finding regular upgrades. The pace begins to slow down sharply in Cruel though, such that it's not uncommon to go multiple levels without finding an upgrade. It slows to a crawl in Merciless though, to where it starts to feel pointless to even keep playing. I leveled from 70 to 80 literally without seeing a single upgrade, but I pushed on thinking maybe I just had bad luck and it would get better in maps. Instead, I can't even fill my inventory with yellows after clearing a map, and I know before I even look that 99.9% of them aren't worth looking at.

The result is that you're forced into trading if you even want to improve your equipment at all, and "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny." - Yoda

Once you take that shortcut and trade for items, you've made it exponentially more unlikely that you will ever find an upgrade to your equipment, and nothing short of a miracle drop will ever be satisfying again. Don't kid yourselves that POE is any better than Diablo 3 in this regard just because POE doesn't have an auction house. An auction house is simply more convenient and accelerates this corrupting influence. Every time you ask for the trading experience to be improved, what you're really asking for is for the item finding process to become less fulfilling.

Now, paid leagues might be a solution, assuming 1) they're coming out any time soon, 2) they aren't priced out of the reach of solo players, and 3) you can raise drop rates to acceptable levels. I haven't heard anything encouraging about them to know whether they'll fulfill my expectations though.


I have a dream, that one day a character I'm leveling up will randomly find an exalted orb, I'll use it right then on a piece of equipment I'm wearing without feeling like I wasted it, and I will not be judged for my chosen play style but for how much fun I'm having.