Developer Q&A - Answers Part 2

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Hilldrake wrote:

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MarkoszHU wrote:

"Have you given serious thought to providing people who don't like Labyrinth-style content options to play the rest of the game without going through the content they do not enjoy? Is there some reason it's not being done? Is there any chance it might happen in the future?"


It SHOULDN'T! No pain, no gain.
Seriously, why people nowadays expect to be rewarded without doing actual work?

The problem is not the fact that you HAVE to work, the problem is that the Work is COMPLETELY boring and REALLY, REAAAAAAAAAAAAALLY time-consuming. You need to do the labyrinth for EVERY character you do, in EVERY League, on THREE DIFFICULTIES (i know this is changing). Right now, Labyrinth farming is cool, and stuff, but you should not gate a mandatory mechanic like ascendancy behind it.

The reward on labyrinth is its Chests at the end of the Lab. Ascendancies should be something apart from it. Maybe they should add a system that when you do the Labyrinth ONCE with a specific character, let's say the Witch for example, every new Witch you make have all the points you got on the previous one. So the player thinks into making 2 Witch Builds, he needs to do the Labyrinth and Uber Labyrinth with the first one, so the second Witch he makes will get the points afterwards. This applies to every class, so if he decides to make a Templar, his second templar will gain the points, but he'll still need to do the lab with his first templar. I know this doesn't solve the problem much, but it REALLY decreases the stress for doing the Labyrinth for every freaking character.

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Mr_Cee wrote:

what else could be the negotiation of the fact that trading is a significant factor, and thus indeed important also for the success of an ARPG called?

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sometimes a rather 'hard' work, but in this case definitively better than making such a single negative answer statement.

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Now - what if like SSF is NOW, without any changes on droprates, is what GGG thinks to be the way their game should be played solo?! Hard stuff indeed; but maybe (ewxpectable from a lot of things they said over time) all "QoL" and easifyings we have now, are just changes/additions they dont wanted in the first place?

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then, why just don't play a bit more slowly? ;)

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Your statements were very vague, so I maybe suspected more than good - its really not about you but just against that 'unstoppable' topic of "we want better drops" in all possible shades of a "justification". (maybe my "eyes" were a bit missplaced there, couldnt even say what they should have said)

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Some things like mercenaries and durability might make a showing if we can work out a good way in the future.

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We plan to post a minion life/damage/armour spreadsheet and small manifesto about 3.0.0 minion balance improvements next week.

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Given that we want trade, the next question is how easy the trade should be. It seems obvious to jump to the answer of "as easy as possible, of course!" but more care needs to be taken. The easier that trade is, the more trades that traders can perform, increasing the utility that items provide to them. This has a few consequences:

The gap between traders and non-traders widens. This gap is apparent when you see feedback that the game is too hard for some people and too easy for others. Most of the time, that is proportionate to how much they have traded.
Item pricing becomes more skewed towards only very-cheap and very-expensive. Items either become trivially cheap or unaffordable. If you have ever felt that it's going to take too many 1-alch sales to finally save up for that 80 exalt item you want, then this is the reason.
Progression is trivialised. While trading for an item to get a leg up on difficult content is of course fine, being able to trivially and cheaply quadruple your clear speed on a whim isn't something that should be expected on your first character in a league. In addition, the fewer item upgrades you make on a character before capping out your items, the lower chance you have of sticking around for a decent portion of the league. Upgrading items more times (in smaller steps) is more fun than jumping right to the perfect gear.


The existing community tools (combined with our public stash tab API) already put us pretty far down this spectrum, compared to the old days of trade chat. We already view this as a crisis. That is why we are hesitant to add more convenience features.

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Item pricing becomes more skewed towards only very-cheap and very-expensive. Items either become trivially cheap or unaffordable.

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Upgrading items more times (in smaller steps) is more fun than jumping right to the perfect gear.

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Arhiti wrote:

How many questions have been translated from the Russian version of the forum?
""Ask us questions, but we will not even hear them ... ""

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enoecarg wrote:

They want to get the perfect gear as soon as possible.
That's why, they trade.
A player that think upgrading gear in smaller steps really fun will be enjoy SFF now.

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cipher_nemo wrote:

So, no, there is "no plan" for trade at the moment. And if they do secretly have a plan, then they're already misleading all of us by talking about how horrible they think the concept of poe.trade is. It reminds me of a country who sells its weapons to 3rd party arms dealers, then decries their disgust when those arms are being used in illicit activities.