Chris: ALT-F4 LEGIT STRAT

this... is... so... dumb...

sorry GGG but what you've just said is that you encourage people to cheat in your own game because you are unable to make it fun without this bullshit/cheese mechanic

i know you target d3 here, but you know what? d3 hardcore WAS hardcore. poe hardcore is puny joke when you accept that you CAN simply quit when faced with any danger and try again and again.. what is hardcore about that?

and if THIS is the reason some bosses deal immense spike damage then.. im sorry but this is beyond the bullshit

inb4 'desync is there to create rush of adrenaline'

side note: rush of adrenaline? when you kill vaal for the 20/100/500 time there is no rush and no adrenaline. i frequently watch movies while farming - so much for adrenaline. and what are the interesting boss fights? gear checks and kite-fests - nothing more, like in any game of this type

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indczn wrote:

Its probably an odd distinction, but I'm okay with zerging/portal spamming through bosses because it happens in game or fleeing via portal. However, quitting out of the game altogether crosses the threshold of being illegit. The mindset probably stems from alt-f4ing being more similar to pulling the modem connection which was common playing starcraft/poker with players disconnecting on purpose to avoid losses.

Exactly.

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syrioforel wrote:

Qarl, I can't reconcile your post with Chris's immediately followup. These two posts are at odds. If I don't use alt-f4, I'm playing a version of PoE that has alt-f4 disabled, so I'm playing a game that Chris says is unimaginable.

Why should it have to reconcile? We are a diverse bunch at GGG, and have diverse opinions about how things should be. This can lead to some spirited design discussions in the office. This improves the game greatly.

Have definitely lost a lot of faith in the dev team after reading this.
The only time several players considered alt-f4 a reasonable option was when they desynched.
Seeing the devs openly allow and suggest something as ridiculous as exiting a game while "playing" a game because they might suffer an intended death penalty is pathetic.

Okay, to solve the problem GGG should just make portals instantly port you to town as soon as you open them. Wouldn't break the immersion and would be pretty much the same as esc->logout.

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Qarl wrote:

...
In general we do allow players some options to choose their difficulty by how they play.

You can over level.

You can use twink items.

You can zerg down bosses.

You can IRONMAN.


We also know that players like the authenticity of players following the same rules they do. So we may do leagues with some of these enforced. If I thought enough people would be keen for 1 week (four months?) of Famine, I'd be keen.

Overlevelling, twinking, and zerging each have in-game costs. Twinking at least requires that you acquired twink items at some point; either a friend gave you the twink items or you earned them on another character, so you've at least demonstrated an ability to clear the content you're twinking through.

IRONMANning -- sure, though a player is clearly going out of his way to provide a challenge to himself by doing so.

Alt-f4 has a cost the largely consists of, well, restarting the game and reentering a portal (portal scrolls are inexpensive.) Most of the cost is the time required to restart and log back in.

Not using alt-f4 is different from not ironmanning. It isn't a documented feature (there's no "Did you know? Closing the game client can save you from death." tip), and there's a difference between not using an undocumented feature and not using a documented (or obvious from a short stint of playing) feature.

Especially coming from the recent (?) D3 release, where there's a logout timer to stop this kind of behavior, alt-f4 feels like an exploit rather than a feature. If it is considered key to gameplay or to the balancing of content, then maybe at least a loading screen tooltip is warranted, right now it comes off like a guilty secret ;).

(I think a medium/long-term famine league would be fun.)

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Xavderion wrote:

Okay, to solve the problem GGG should just make portals instantly port you to town as soon as you open them. Wouldn't break the immersion and would be pretty much the same as esc->logout.

to what town?

right now, the instanced "towns" take longer to load than almost any other area in the game, for me at least.
the client even crashes a few times while loading town, which rarely happens when solo entering a battle area.

unless the game or some parts of it will be run locally, there isn't anything better to do than ALT+F4.
and GGG will never make the client more than just a client.

as a player who never uses ALT F4 - despite many situations where I clearly should have, and many dead HC/Ons chars as a result - it puts me in a disadvantage compared to those who do.
and there is nothing GGG can do about it.

but designing fights according to ALT F4? that will definitely screw me over.
you can't make bosses crazy and de-syncy thinking "meh the player will simply ALTF4 if too much". that's bullshit.

I do hope at some point, that the Dev's decide they should not take into consideration Alt F4 when designing mobs/bosses. I understand what Chris wrote, but I can't agree with it.

There are so many mechanics available in this game (stun, freeze, blocking, spells, buffs, etc) that they should never have to resort to artificial difficulty just to get an adrenaline rush / harder boss fight. This game is better than that.

Leaving the game is not just "using intended game mechanics", its admitting that the game defeated you. I played D2 hardcore for a long time as well, and never had to leave the game. If I died, I died.

Class of O7 Lv80 Hardcore Sacrifice Paladin.

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syrioforel wrote:

Especially coming from the recent (?) D3 release, where there's a logout timer to stop this kind of behavior, alt-f4 feels like an exploit rather than a feature. If it is considered key to gameplay or to the balancing of content, then maybe at least a loading screen tooltip is warranted, right now it comes off like a guilty secret ;).

(I think a medium/long-term famine league would be fun.)

I think if your game is 100% perfect, then sure have a log out timer. If there is no way anything can happen that wouldn't be the players fault, again sure.

But D3's HC player base was tiny at release and I'm sure considerably smaller by now. D3 had insane server lag and completely random disconnects that killed tons of HC characters. There were weekly threads about some massive DC wave killing hundreds of characters.

I can say, that NOT losing a character every time there is a bit of server lag or every time my own internet decides to have a shit fit is miles and miles better than having a log out timer and trying to keep whatever little bit of "immersion" that being able to instantly leave the game takes away.

It's hilarious that the only people who complain about ALT-F4 are softcore players.