Chris Your Design No Longer Triggers Dopamine.

Dear Chris,

Just writing another post to let you know I am concerned for the current state of the game.

Believe it or not Chris. It's not the Scourge game mechanic that's turning people away, its your lack luster rewards system through out the game that's putting people to sleep mate.

The key element of playing any game is the sense of power progression. Specifically the way you have broken down all the lets say "secondary defensive layers" (such as curse immune, ailment immune, stun immune, bleed immune, corrupted blood immune, block, spell block, spell suppression, spell dodge, life regen, life leech, energy leech, ghost shroud??? endurance charges, reflect immune, etc) and made put them as smaller increments on gear and passive tree is absolutely destroying the sense of player power progression. One of the main reasons people continues to play is for that big damage node on the skill tree. They keep leveling up and get more damage get that dopamine and everyone is happy. Now tell me who the fuck is motivated to level from 90 to 94 for 30% spell suppression????

Secondly the loot from playing the game is way too underwhelming, where do i get the dopamine if everything i find is worthless? the fact that the best way to get your best item is via gambling and sitting in your HO (not playing the actual game) is aweful. Further more the absurd amount of away to boost quantity in a map or what ever meta way to farm currency needs to go. The mass quantity of worthless uniques that drops from these "juiced" map is ironically exactly the reason why almost everything is worthless. Unlike your game design. but we want QUALITY loot not QUANTITY. We want to get loot thats meaningful not just a screen full of vendor trash.

This is why I have no motivation to play this game right now. Even though I thought the scourge mechanic is pretty decent, being able to switch between 2 world is a creative design. But you have got to fix the progression system and the rewards this game gives you, it feels like an absolute waste of time to play right now.

thanks again for not reading this Chris. I awaits for another disappointment in 3.17. Hopefully all the Streamers you pay to play this game don't start playing Lost Ark with viewers you paid for.

Sincerely, Your biggest shill,
BSA

Agreed!

from my guess, the average player needs 3 iterations of gear until his personal t12 maps endgame.

let's completely ignore trading cause selling an item just makes another players not needing to find this item and the other way around.

so that's 30 items the game needs him to find and evaluate as useful during the 12 weeks (or 84 days) of expected playtime which results in the game theoretically dropping a useful item every 3 days to make him feel rewarded over that time .

in reality you play a league much shorter but more than one useful item per day is the most the game can give you either by trade or finding it yourself without clogging the trading database.

---

there are solutions to this issue:

* more item slots on the character (which you disliked)
* enforce more gear iterations (which you disliked)
* making more players aware that the game wants to challenge them to ignore rare and unique items (which you don't want to)
* force players to sell only as much items as they purchased
* more chase items so people grind for currency after they found all other gear they need

there are probably more ways. but, so far, ggg only went for the last option. and it's a motivation i do not share. i'm not a donkey who falls for the carrot before his nose.

It's also not helping that every league design lately has been influenced by a brilliant idea from the past. They're no longer unique; they feel like bandaids. Except Harvest and Heist, those were the most unique leagues we've had for a long time.

Ultimatum? Ritual 2.0
Expedition? Blight 2.0
Scourge? Delirium 2.0

GGG is lacking the creativity to bring something unique to the table other than some... uniques. And it's showing. I don't know if it's their creative thinking that's lacking lately, or just the inability of the outdated engine to handle implementing new, exciting ideas.

PS. We still have no way of obtaining ultimatum uniques...

Game is being balanced around over committed "freaks" who play too much or at maximum efficiency.

This results in bland, empty experience for those who play less or are less efficient. All the real "payouts" are tidily locked away behind the extremes.

I assure you that Chris' design does still trigger dopamine. Namely Chris' own.

He's got his face frozen in a grin since 3.15 and times are only looking to be happier.

I remember a time when i got a shavs drop and I was blown away and started spamming it to my friends.

now days I dont link anything cos my friends stopped playing.

To be honest the topic of rewards is a gigantic can of worms and it has it evil roots in Increased Item Quantity and Increased item Rarity.

GGG would have to first kill off those stats by completely removing them and then they could rebalance their drop behaviour. Otherwise those magic find parties with fully stacked rarity/quantity drop a mirror each map making stuff erven more worthless.

Truly the stats Increased Item Quantity / Increased Item Rarity plus party bonus is the evil root why playing the game the "normal" way feels unrewarding and shitty.

I get that the rarity/quantity system was a spiritual delivery from Diablo 2 from more than 20 years ago but today having a mf character just to play a fun character that isnt mf is not my personal definition of fun.

My 2 cents.

"

BaneslayerAngel wrote:

I remember a time when i got a shavs drop and I was blown away and started spamming it to my friends.

now days I dont link anything cos my friends stopped playing.

In my case it was Lioneye's. Bow, just to be clear. That used to be the top tier drop back in my early days; back when we still had difficulty modes and Piety was endgame content.

I still have a legacy from that time somewhere in the utter mess of standard stashes.

"

zzang wrote:

To be honest the topic of rewards is a gigantic can of worms and it has it evil roots in Increased Item Quantity and Increased item Rarity.

GGG would have to first kill off those stats by completely removing them and then they could rebalance their drop behaviour. Otherwise those magic find parties with fully stacked rarity/quantity drop a mirror each map making stuff erven more worthless.

Truly the stats Increased Item Quantity / Increased Item Rarity plus party bonus is the evil root why playing the game the "normal" way feels unrewarding and shitty.

I get that the rarity/quantity system was a spiritual delivery from Diablo 2 from more than 20 years ago but today having a mf character just to play a fun character that isnt mf is not my personal definition of fun.

My 2 cents.

They should just remove quantity. So all the uniques are once again unique again. Then they need to revert the support gem nerfs, so the uniques are no longer trash again. And this would open up build diversity too, as many builds can now function and progress all content with uniques.

I honestly cant believe how Chris could have got this so wrong.