Poll on 'Killing guards raises the Alert bar'

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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cacmeister wrote:

TLDR:

I wish people would invest in a league for at least a week before they shit on it. GGG created something nuanced and quite elegant in its challenge and we the consumer cried because we couldn’t be bothered to try it and critically think to overcome its obstacles first before complaining that it was unfair and too hard.

people did think and did overcome its obstacles. the way they did it was to run past all the mobs so they had 30+ agro mobs chasing them shouting and shooting stuff everywhere and just didnt kill them so they could open all the chests.

there was nothing elegant or nuanced about it, the conclusion of how to best tackle the challenge was just degenerate, idiotic gameplay that wasnt really fun and made absolutely no thematic sense at all until you got the items and levels to essentially turn off the gameplay all together and revert it back to a simple killathon.

That kind of gameplay might very well have proven unnecessary by advancing and engaging with the leagues' progression system (Grimro was already able to completely nullify the Alert system - before this change), turning the Alert system into an incentive to push you to properly kit our your team. Which is why that guy was asking people to wait a week before passing judgment on it.

But even besides that, there are other solutions that aren't particularly convoluted or further complicate matters than what they seem to be doing now. The poll mentions some. Rebalancing the alert mechanic is the simplest, and in fact was the expected change. Or add options to reduce it during heists. Or even go ahead and remove it from killing, but raise it from chests - it was stated to work essentially as a dynamic, player-determined loot meter after all, whereas now it sounds like it might end up being a whole lot of nothing before long (since apparently Alert from chests is also being nerfed). Instead they seem to be once again trivializing the challenge of a league within days.

well they just did it badly and this is the unfortunate fallout i feel.



i dont really see how it makes sense to force people to play a really bad game for a week to end up at a braindead rampage mode. a lot of people are not going to be pushed to equip their guys, theyre just gonna leave the game because its really shit, and what did the people who stuck around till it turned into braindead killing gain from having played it in an idiotic way up to that point really?

essentially at no point is there a really interesting, good, challenging mode of this on offer. weve gone from its shit and then its braindead to simply its braindead, and given braindead is better than shit that is surely an improvement?




we could theory out a lot of ways the alert system could be used better for sure.

it might be cool if when you agro a mob it gives a certain amount of alert, say it gives 2.5% alert, and then when u kill it it removes 2.25% of that alert. this way if you agro 20 mobs at once the meter will spike by +50%, once you kill them it then drains back down to +5% that stays on the bar. Thats fine if you had no alert before that, but say u had opened a lot of chests and already had 60% alert that would trigger the lockdown. You would need to be cautious and only agro say 5 of the mobs at a time, lure them away a bit, kill them etc. So the more alert you gather the more slow and careful you need to be.

you could have the alert level play a lot more into the lockdown. So say the alert % when lockdown is triggered multiplies the damage and life of the monsters in lockdown, if you had 10% alert thats 10% extra life and damage, if ur alert was 90% then its 90% extra. if a mob hits for 3k life normally with a big slam and now its hitting for 6k because u got virtually 100% alert thats a big deal right?

i think theres ways to make the alert meaningful and have it impact how you play, how greedy you are and have the resulting gameplay still make sense and not feel absurd. I dont know if i like the idea of level up your guys and the alert system doesnt matter any more, i think it should always matter to some extent but level up your guys and you can do new things is definitely an essential progression system.

I feel like its a big task, its more than just rebalance the numbers, we might even be talking rejigging the layouts, how many rooms are on offer, how the mobs are placed depending on what factors the new alert system will play on. I think alerts need taken back to the drawing board and i dont think it would be good to leave people just kiting through the entire map like idiots in the mean time.




I dont think theyre dumbing down the league with this change, i think the gameplay was already dumb followed by dumbed down once u levelled ur guys. what about the damage changes etc tho? i dunno, i cant say, ive not played red map tier heists with a properly geared character so i dont really have a perspective on it to know if that was really needed or was just dumbing down.

If they addressed these concerns of mine, I'd be happy for them to re-instate mob deaths raise alarm: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2943589/page/1#p23527423

As a hotfix to the situation, I think they made the right call while they figure out a better solution.