POE: The Best of Games and the Worst of Games

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xxxmarok84xxx wrote:

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Chris wrote:

The addition of currency items like Orbs of Alchemy and Exalted Orbs allow players to modify their items in a more directed way. The extent to which this game system is important depends on how often they drop.

Chris there are people like me who found 1 ( some 0 ) exalted orb drop in more than 1 year of playing PoE. So please...

Chris I'm so bad at this game, please ! mercy!

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johnnysd wrote:

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Galtrovan wrote:

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Odoakar wrote:

Also, what irks me a bit about Chris post, is that he makes comparisons with how it was to grind in D2, but forgets that the average gamers age has risen significantly. When I was 16-17, I had all the time in the world to do meph/baal runs, but right now, the situation is quite different. The things I was able to do with D2, it's not possible to with PoE. It's not realistic to expect the same dedication from gamers today, what they had with D2 decades ago.

Interesting market survey, btw:

http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2013.pdf

My gripe about PoE vs D2 is that GGG likens back to D2 but then in PoE gates the high-end items behind content you cannot access. In D2, with enough time and effort I could acquire/self-find everything in the game barring runes greater greater than Ohm and Tyrael's Might. Why? Because once I had a strong enough character, I could repeatedly run the areas of the game that were able to drop everything. In PoE, the best stuff is gated behind maps I'll never be able to access. I think this is complete bologna. Items being rare is not the issue. It's that I cannot even play in the areas of the game that drop the items I'd like to be able to find. Even the rich, team/multi-player, trading players have a hard time keeping a map pool to run the content capable of dropping the top end items.

I think people forget one of the brilliant elements of D2 was that normal hell level monsters could drop any item in the game. It was more efficient to run Ball or Mephisto but if you found a Windforce it was going to be from a normal or champion monster.

I've only got two words... ok mor ethan two words.

Hell act 1 The Pit

Personal opinions, nothing more. I on the other hand, love the 'trading/gambling/ system. It's actually the most addicting aspect of the game for me, finding loot/currency and amassing wealth from it, it's fun. I've always loved playing mmorpg's because of the trading but I hated the grinding. This game has best of both worlds

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drewiey wrote:

Chris I'm so bad at this game, please ! mercy!

Please allow me to rewrite the truth:

Chris i refused to trade for exalted so far and i refused to buy orbs for dollars like almost every top player.


Of course drop luck is all about skill yeah.

As a self-described representative of the (relatively) silent majority here, I feel I must speak up for a moment.

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johnnysd wrote:

The "crafting" system is a complete abomination. Sorry but it is true. It adds literally nothing to the game other than annoyance and frustration and serves no strategic or skill value, rather simply a nested completely random slog through tons of orbs just to get features of an item to progress in the game. There may be underlying "economy" and grinding rationales behind the orb system but the reality is that is not fun on any level and really brings the enjoyment level of the game down significantly. There should be enough barriers in build, gear, monster AI, stat stacking etc...to make progression difficult and thought provoking not to need a gambling system on steroids to grind everything to a screeching halt. I am not convinced it does anything to make people play more, but it certainly will make people leave. It should be completely scrapped and overhauled to be honest. It is abysmal.

-1.

Now I'm not a huge MMO/RPG buff (never played D2), but this game has easily the most fun and interesting crafting system I have ever encountered in a video game. Most of the crafting systems I've encountered before amount to

1) farm up materials/recipes
2) get guaranteed reward
3) maybe exact stats of reward depend slightly on luck and/or exact materials used

But the POE crafting system offers two things the others lack:

-A little bit of thought, knowledge, value judgement, and perhaps even cleverness, is rewarded (Chris used the word skill, I would not). Not very much, but more than in the crafting systems of other games I've experienced.
-RNG can can really make or break you.

I personally find that these two things (combined with overall good design/implementation) make the POE crafting system by far the best I've encountered. It rewards a bit of knowledge, which motivates me to understand game mechanics and actually think about how best to invest my materials, which is a nice break between map runs. The disappointment of spending lots of currency for no reward is offset by the thrill of of the occasional great roll. And honestly, if you don't want a game where RNG can make or break you, you probably shouldn't be playing POE in the first place. I like the lotto aspect of the crafting system as much as I like the lotto aspect of the drop system. People suggest that RNG makes skill worthless, but that just isn't true.

I'm not saying the crafting system shouldn't be changed. It's good right now, but surely it can be made better. For example, I agree with others in this thread that the eternal orb should just be removed. It makes items with 6 good affixes much more easily available, but only to the wealthiest players. In the meantime, the rest of us should basically never use an exalt for crafting since we can't afford to get an eternal first.

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johnnysd wrote:

Then there is loot. POE does not really have loot, it has core items and orbs. Period. All you get as you play the game is an endless sea of white gear, occasional blues rares and uniques with random sockets that invariably need to be modified using incredibly low drop rate orbs and the terrible crafting system. There is very very rare joy in finding anything in POE. In fact drops are so bad, that it is actually more efficient to sit in town and "buy" items with the crafting orbs, because you are never going to find what you need, and the orbs you have because of the completely random nature are completely useless for trying to actually craft something. For a game that originally promised no currency and a barter system, POE is the most currency-concentric game I have ever played.

Of course POE has loot! Yes you often need to quality/socket/link it, but the loot is still important. My main wears a nice mix of found and crafted gear (and two traded items... I don't trade very much). You point out the undeniable fact that trading is the most efficient way to get good gear, but you (incorrectly, I think) blame this on the crafting and loot systems. In a game with a large population and free trading, trading is going to be more efficient than crafting or searching, just like in real life. As you point out, some people accumulate much of their wealth just sitting in town and advertising and trading up and up and up. Just like in real life where some people get rich mainly by investing. It's even easier in a game where much of the playerbase is easily ripped off due to the lack of clear, established, values of items. Without some system to actively combat this, such as limitations on free trade (Bind on Equip) or item sinks (breakable/destroyable items), it's always going to be easier, as a less-than-one-hour-a-day player, to buy the vendor trash off a more-than-ten-hour-a-day-player, than it is to find gear myself.

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return33 wrote:

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drewiey wrote:

Chris I'm so bad at this game, please ! mercy!

Please allow me to rewrite the truth:

Chris i refused to trade for exalted so far and i refused to buy orbs for dollars like almost every top player.


Of course drop luck is all about skill yeah.

This is silly, you have no proof top players paid real money for orbs.
I think the skill part of drop rate, is knowing what to do with what you get . Basically, learning to use w.e drops you get to your advantage.

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drewiey wrote:

This is silly, you have no proof top players paid real money for orbs.
I think the skill part of drop rate, is knowing what to do with what you get . Basically, learning to use w.e drops you get to your advantage.

I know of 3 top players in the top 10 of the ladders who were banned for RMT.

I'm not really sure about this, but aren't the top racers always the same people? Basically, the guys who always manage to win races, do it consistently on every new race? Do races take skill? Are these guys subjected to the same RNG system as everyone else?

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ToxicRatt wrote:

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drewiey wrote:

This is silly, you have no proof top players paid real money for orbs.
I think the skill part of drop rate, is knowing what to do with what you get . Basically, learning to use w.e drops you get to your advantage.

I know of 3 top players in the top 10 of the ladders who were banned for RMT.

Yes, I myself am aware of that. I guess I should rephrase. What he said is "almost every top player". You need proof to make a claim like that.
There's always going to be cheaters, but to claim that everyone at the top is cheating( well in all fairness he said "almost") is too far fetched.

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drewiey wrote:

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return33 wrote:

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drewiey wrote:

Chris I'm so bad at this game, please ! mercy!

Please allow me to rewrite the truth:

Chris i refused to trade for exalted so far and i refused to buy orbs for dollars like almost every top player.


Of course drop luck is all about skill yeah.

This is silly, you have no proof top players paid real money for orbs.
I think the skill part of drop rate, is knowing what to do with what you get . Basically, learning to use w.e drops you get to your advantage.

Yeah i had one exalted orb dropped in a year. I'm so so bad at this game. Only if I had a better spec and better build more exalted orbs would have dropped :-( Shame on me.

There are a lot of people who dont use the trading channel neither the forums and play only solo but I'm not here to talk about this.
My post was about pointing out what Chris said "use exalted orbs to modify your equipment". How I am supposed to modify my gear when i get 1 ex drop.