Does always on-line and trade-centric make PoE better or worse?

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Ozeko wrote:

Trade makes the game somewhat multiplayer. It's nice to save up for an item and trade for it. I say somewhat multiplayer because POE to me feels mostly like a single player game like dark souls that has multiplayer features.

Online only is only a problem for people in developing countries, backwoods areas and the United States where the internet is monopolized and goes in and out whenever it wants

Fixed it for you.

always online stops the rampant hacking-all-the-best-items part. Fine in a game like Grim Dawn or Wolcen that, ultimately, nobody cares about the integrity for

Trading is necessary in any game that calls itself massively multiplayer. It's just depressing there's only two games I can think of with decent free trade right now, and that's oldschool runescape and path of exile

PoE looks better has more depth and always has something new up its sleeve. Console performance is quite bad but still very playable. I for one have zero interest in Wolcen. It looks terrible and offers nothing terribly different to PoE. I don't why people are promoting Wolcen here.

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Anyway, if you want to engage with my argument, Arrowneous (pronounced something close to'erroneous' right? Suddenly appropriate!), how about you do that where I posted it and not just casually link to it as though expecting people to go read it? You're either: a) furthering your argument by way of piggybacking on mine when you should be just making your own; or b) luring me back here with all the subtlety of a dump truck on a Ritalin tear. Or both. But little else.

So it took you 7 years to understand my double meaning PoE account name. Well done sir!

With tons of complaints about PoE's bad performance from day 1 (I am a survivor of POE: The desync years) as you are and think today's PoE quality of play is night/day better than that was. But that's just one of many problems GGG is saddled with by having been such a cash poor garage startup company in 2005. And back then crowd funding/sourcing wasn't an option so GGG had no choice but to roll their own game engine from scratch. I get that. But it doesn't help to want to play PoE endgame and can't because of netsync problems that everyone else in the arpg game business doesn't have. So providing an off-line way to play is desirable to have to eliminate all the latency/timing bullshit we must put up with playing PoE.

I see I did get you to post here to confirm what another PoE player put in a post that you were now playing Wolcen thinking Wolcen Littleknife = PoE Charan so that question is answered. Thank you.

I will be looking for an arpg that my 2 BFFLs and I can play as a summer trio so maybe Wolcen might be good for that. PoE certainly isn't as they are super casuals to the max. We 3 completed D2+LOD, TQIT, Dungeon Seige 2, Torchlight 2, and D3+RoS, but our PoE trio party back in 2013 never made it past 1 month. I'd have to go way, way, way the hell back to find my posts on that but suffice to say it didn't work out. Not because of QoP problems, we never got that far into our trio play of PoE in 2013. No, it was the fact that they want to do all content and don't want to skip anything. So when we encountered a rogue in the caverns that we couldn't get at ranged (twisty little passages that all look alike and all that) that was one-shotting us all (rogue exiles used to really be nasty) they finally gave up and skipped trying to kill it but that really soured them on playing PoE much further after that.

So here we are in 2020 in the final year of playing the 6-link gear chase and still suffering from bad QoP from PoE being an on-line only arpg. Doesn't matter what causes PoE netsync = poor QoP, it just is. I am pissed that GGG didn't dump supporting Windows 7 long ago to get me to upgrade much sooner so I'd have found out years ago that 99% of my bad QoP was internal timing problems between PoE and Windows 7. Since all my other online games ran perfect on Win 7 why should PoE be wrecked by the operating system. Well it was and only with the formal end of support of Windows 7 on January 14th and my subsequent upgrade to Windows 10 (see my other post on that) did I come to learn that PoE has good to, dare I say, great fps running on an 8 core cpu. I now see 200 fps in the mini-graph (maxed out in my hideout) and in much of my playing of maps. I know it's my fault for not upgrading sooner but I wasn't thinking "hey PoE will play good on Windows 10" when everything else was great on my Windows 7. Netsync under Windows 7 just didn't work well for me when the client processing loads got high (too many individual creatures to calculate for). So offline and local network party playing of all other arpgs has worked with Windows XP (D2, etc.) and Windows 7. Even Borberlands 3 party play was great. Only PoE has failed on QoP. That's really soured me on PoE.

Next year right before PoE 4.0 I'll have to put all my Oni-Goroshi swords in on tab and take a screen shot for posterity as the 6-link gear chase will be over (end of a PoE era) and maybe the end of my PoE playing (too soon to know) as the whole of my limited PoE build knowledge will be destroyed and I'll be playing in the "Upside Down" world of PoE 2 with linked gems and having to relearn on a ton of skill mechanics. Or I'll just say "no mas" and quit.

I'm not that familiar with Wolcen but if they have an offline mode AND player trading, then I hope they never let the offline mode go online ever. Character editors/mods are rampant in most games that don't somehow offsite character data. Cheating is just more rampant in offline games.

Wolcen and other games that have a fixed upfront cost to players so it can also afford to have an offline mode because they already received their cast up front. In fact, it is heavily beneficial to them to have players not playing online because that greatly decreases their opex.

At some point games like Wolcen will have to do something to continue the cash flow or they will stop development and/or online multiplayer. Most of the influx of cash will come at the initial delivery of the game. If the DLCs are free, then their business model will eventually (and likely quickly) fail.

The MTX model doesn't work terrible well with offline games because inevitably people will find a way to get those MTXs without paying for it. Additionally, MTX cosmetics thrive on the vanity of you and others. If it is just solo play, then players are less likely to be vanity driven.

POE was no doubt developed as a server/client model and probably has that ingrained in the DNA of its code, which would likely be costly to untangle and recode. Furthermore, exposing the entire game code to the player base (as an offline mode would require) makes it a lot easier to find and exploit vulnerabilities in the code for the online game.

Lastly, it does not suit their business model at all. Taking what I said above about MTX, it would destroy the way they make money. The vanity of cosmetics matters less in offline mode and people would find a way to have those cosmetics, extra character slots, stash tabs, etc. without paying for them anyway; that is almost guaranteed. You could place an upfront cost to get the offline mode, but there would also need to be a recurring cost rather than free updates every 3 months else you risk what I described above occurring with the inability to fund development.

In Summary, there is no cost benefit to them to provide an offline mode relative to what they are doing now. It also introduces additional security risks to the game. Those risk exist today, but are significantly less likely to be exploited if people don't have the code. Perhaps when they release the last patch for the game they'll consider selling an offline mode in conjunction with that (though I believe they are on the record that they will close up shop without an offline mode being provided).

Im here since the Closed Beta and I've never heard about Littleknife. There goes your so called "former ruler of the Wreacleast"

Oh, and modding will be allowed in offline for Wolcen...so, ya know, if someone adds some cool skills or they give a way to expand or create custom campaigns/bosses you can fuck around with them without GGG crawling up your ass about tampering with the client...

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LeetbakaDX wrote:

Oh, and modding will be allowed in offline for Wolcen...so, ya know, if someone adds some cool skills or they give a way to expand or create custom campaigns/bosses you can fuck around with them without GGG crawling up your ass about tampering with the client...

Yes! The coolest thing about D2 now are the mods:

Path of Diablo
MedianXL

And I absolutely loved this Titan Quest mod back a decade ago:

Titan Quest – Lilith The Will of Demon : Battles of Jalavia

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Nubatron wrote:

At some point games like Wolcen will have to do something to continue the cash flow or they will stop development and/or online multiplayer. Most of the influx of cash will come at the initial delivery of the game. If the DLCs are free, then their business model will eventually (and likely quickly) fail.

The MTX model doesn't work terrible well with offline games because inevitably people will find a way to get those MTXs without paying for it. Additionally, MTX cosmetics thrive on the vanity of you and others. If it is just solo play, then players are less likely to be vanity driven.

I can't help thinking that their bold claims to have future expansions and dlc completely funded by MTX sales are complete hot air. In a few weeks when the hype has died down the game won't have nearly enough players willing to buy MTX to fund that kind of development.

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Nubatron wrote:

At some point games like Wolcen will have to do something to continue the cash flow or they will stop development and/or online multiplayer. Most of the influx of cash will come at the initial delivery of the game. If the DLCs are free, then their business model will eventually (and likely quickly) fail.

The MTX model doesn't work terrible well with offline games because inevitably people will find a way to get those MTXs without paying for it. Additionally, MTX cosmetics thrive on the vanity of you and others. If it is just solo play, then players are less likely to be vanity driven.

With the GGG F2P business totally dependent on mtx sales then it makes no sense for GGG to have added SSF. There is no "Oh, that cosmetic is cool beans... I want one" in town playing SSF.