The Self Found League

"

I suspect a gigantic shitstorm will come out of that.

Meh. Easily resolved. If we were to think that many stash tabs were required, the default number of stash tabs in the league could be set to a higher number. The total stash tabs would be league + purchased. Done.

As for your offline mode request, GGG has been pretty clear that this isn't going to happen; if you really do want to talk about that, could you do me a big favor, and make a thread just for that?

Thanks,

--C

"

Courageous wrote:

As for your offline mode request, GGG has been pretty clear that this isn't going to happen; if you really do want to talk about that, could you do me a big favor, and make a thread just for that?

Thanks,

--C

Okay, like, I won't bother making a thread if you can show me where they've been so adamant that this isn't going to happen and why.
Or I can just be stupid, whichever one you want to see me do.

I am honestly unable to see what bad could come of it, as a possibility.

I suppose that, since the game is in Beta, it could potentially be weird with legal stuff and dirty bastards mining for their beautiful art assets and other intellectual property.
But is that not what EULA's and the like are for?

Click forum search. There's like 1K hits on "offline mode." I don't have anything "in" discussing this with you, so don't ask me for a source. It's often repeated around here, though. By mods, too.

--C

OR realize it's a common question and check the thread about them, where you'd see this quote:

"

29. I want an offline mode.
The day this happens is the day we have hacked characters and items. The only way to keep the game economy secure is to keep it 100% online. Allowing the game to run locally would allow the processes of the game to be accessed by anyone, allowing them to "crack the code" and find ways to add hacked items and characters to the online version. This would ruin the ladder, the economy, and the experience for everyone.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/36080

So no, no offline.

@milchut

All we want is no trading. That's pretty much it. The 'no drop' is just to avoid people 'fake trading' since people will, for some reason, try to trade in a 'no trading' league instead of actually playing in a normal trading league.

As far as Stash tabs, since we don't get the option of alts then we can just allow multiple tabs for the league. If a 'wait but that's unfair to those that paid' thought came, we can remind that the donations aren't meant to give you an advantage over others and, along with that, you still get the tabs while in default/HC/all other places. Honestly, I don't care if others get a stash advantage over me, but I understand that's my opinion and it might be an issue for many others.

Iron Man mode is far more than just no trade. It's also no vendors. Sounds like a fun mode but it's not what this suggestion is about.

But NO, I don't need an offline mode. Even when one existed in Diablo, I mostly only played that for the story. I went multi so I can have the option to play with others. I'm casually social: I don't make close friends but I like working with randoms.



Mostly this is a way to allow the devs to apply features/changes that benefits self-found without breaking Default/HC's trade system.

That...sounds to me like the person who wrote that is quite stupid.
because they don't know what "offline" is supposed to mean.
Perhaps I'm the one who isn't sufficiently educated about how video game servers work, but going off of past experiences (recent ones, relative to games like D2) there should be no way for a proper "offline league" to affect the online servers.
Unless the servers are terribly badly secured and the account security is non-existent and GGG doesn't know what they're doing.

And it would appear to me based on a few livestreamed interviews with Chris, that GGG is in fact highly educated in regards to these things. From the thread you linked

"

Chris wrote:

The solo play is still played on our online servers which means there are no hacked characters because the data is stored serverside.

Is that quote meant to say: "Someone could decipher the RNG and make a bot to abuse it!"
Which....I'd say is no worse than grinding and having more freetime than other players, at the end of the day.
And bots are supposed to be against the rules anyway I thought?


No, in fact, I believe the quote may have been taken out of context! With all due respect to the fellow who embellished his opinions into a board sticky, here's the full quote:

"

All of the game can be played either alone or with a party. If you're playing with multiple people, then the difficulty and rewards of the area scale up.

Many members of our development team prefer playing completely alone, only interacting with other people in towns to show off the items they found.

The solo play is still played on our online servers which means there are no hacked characters because the data is stored serverside.

I don't trade often, myself, purely because I don't want to deal with spamming a message in chat, and I don't want to deal with timezones and Bidding-by-post (see: trade forums)

I can appreciate that not everyone necessarily plays the game for the crafting and trading. I understand that.
But what makes you feel like it's something that needs it's own league?



My question for the people in this thread is WHY you want to avoid "Trading Simulator" so badly?
Rather than do what you can as the community of this free game in Open Beta to suggest changes to the things that are wrong with this "Trading Simulator" so that --perhaps-- GGG may react to it and maybe improve the root problem of what you dislike.

"

My question for the people in this thread is WHY you want to avoid "Trading Simulator" so badly?
Rather than do what you can as the community of this free game in Open Beta to suggest changes to the things that are wrong with this "Trading Simulator" so that --perhaps-- GGG may react to it and maybe improve the root problem of what you dislike.

You make sense, against popular opinion of a thread that I endorse, and I applaud you for that. Which is also why I want to try to explain, albeit from a personal point of view, why I'm very agreeable a separate league for self-found.

I suppose it boils down to the fact that I want my drops to matter. What I fundamentally disagree with your argument is that you are assuming that most of us are endorsing this concept because we're unhappy with the trading situation in current leagues right now, and perhaps for some this might be a truthful statement. I personally however, am not particularly unhappy with the state of affairs in trades (although I agree it can be improved upon). I just like the idea of having a separate place whereby I know that there is absolutely NO alternative for ANYONE to participate in any form of self-improvement through gear other than going out there and doing the work.

It's like when I was a kid digging in the woods nearby my house for dinosaur bones together with my friend. We'll each allocate a small area for ourselves, pretend it was a patch of overgrowth remnant of the Cretaceous period, and that there was a gold mine of T-Rex bones right underneath that patch of soil for us to find. The excitement was knowing that both of us was up to our own individual luck and diligence in digging, and should either of us find anything, both of us will revel in the fact that our individual efforts paid off. In the standard leagues though, the abundance and availability of trading makes it feel like there's a vendor stand selling T-Rex bones located right next to us, and that should we collect enough dirt, roots and Nuka-Cola bottle caps we can eventually exchange all those for a piece of bone. It's just... different.

And thus, on a larger scale, in the standard league, everybody's loots don't matter, your own loots don't matter, because everything CAN be traded. I want that rush of adrenaline, I want people to know that when I get something, I got it through my own damn efforts, with no possibility that it was traded, that there's someone somewhere selling dinosaur bones for my mountains of soil and camping trash. I want to find people who share in my sentiments, play together with them, and together feel the rush and excitement when someone gets that one lucky blessing from Lady Luck and she bestows him a gear fit for the Gods. I want that to be my inspiration, to give me the juice to keep plugging on looking for my own sweet pay off.

(As an addendum: The complexities of self-found are even more evident when you come down to the whole nuts and bolts of it all, as any participant in a solo race would invariably come to realise. The blues start to matter; you start to min-max on a fundamental level, because every single piece of equipment drop has a special purpose in itself that contributes more acutely to your character growth. You probably won't get that +life +armor +tri-res gear so easily, so you have to learn to make do with the next best thing, you have to figure out what's going to work, what's not going to work, and you have to start paying close attention to all the little details that escaped you playing in a standard trading league because THERE'S ALWAYS GOING TO BE SOMETHING BETTER OUT THERE that you can trade for. No. Not in this league. In here what you get is what you get, and buddy you better be thankful you got something. So you got a good piece of gear, well, good luck 4Linking it and getting the right colours on it too. At the end, it just provides more a challenge, one that I fully embrace.)

So no, I'm not against anything GGG has on the current leagues at the moment on a whole, I just very much enjoy the idea of having a place of my own where I'm sharing camaraderie with a bunch of like minded people all digging for their own damn bones.

2 cents.

P.s: I would also advent non-stash sharing across multiple characters in this league. So you can only farm for one toon using that ONE toon. Seems to be much more in line with the whole self-found philosophy and agreeably more punishing and fun, does it not?

"

My question for the people in this thread is WHY you want to avoid "Trading Simulator" so badly?
Rather than do what you can as the community of this free game in Open Beta to suggest changes to the things that are wrong with this "Trading Simulator" so that --perhaps-- GGG may react to it and maybe improve the root problem of what you dislike.

Nope. Can't be fixed. The people who want the Self Found League are asking for it because drop rates are presently low specifically to control gear capable of defeating end-game content from entering the game too quickly. And that's because trading itself is a highly efficient vehicle of getting gear to players. The very presence of trading is, in fact the problem. So there's no fixing it.

Further, self found players tend to regard trading as a kind of cheating. And yet, because the game has gear entering the game at a very slow pace due to trading itself, the game a self-found player plays in a game like this is just a bit too painful to play self found.

This is specifically why the Self Found League also request IIQ/IIR bonuses in the league.

Capiche?

"

Milchut wrote:

That...sounds to me like the person who wrote that is quite stupid.
because they don't know what "offline" is supposed to mean.
Perhaps I'm the one who isn't sufficiently educated about how video game servers work, but going off of past experiences (recent ones, relative to games like D2) there should be no way for a proper "offline league" to affect the online servers.
Unless the servers are terribly badly secured and the account security is non-existent and GGG doesn't know what they're doing.

I think you will find that it's a case of at the moment being online only there is NO WAY that anyone can access the game mechanics either to modify or to know how some of the mechanics work and how the equations for rolls and drops etc are calculated.

As soon as you have an offline mode then every player has the entire game and all its (currently hidden) mechanics on their pc and thus able to find out info that the game devs DON'T want players to know because the knowledge can give an advantage.

"

Courageous wrote:

"

My question for the people in this thread is WHY you want to avoid "Trading Simulator" so badly?

The people who want the Self Found League are asking for it because drop rates are presently low specifically to control gear capable of defeating end-game content from entering the game too quickly. And that's because trading itself is a highly efficient vehicle of getting gear to players. The very presence of trading is, in fact the problem. So there's no fixing it.

Further, self found players tend to regard trading as a kind of cheating. And yet, because the game has gear entering the game at a very slow pace due to trading itself, the game a self-found player plays in a game like this is just a bit too painful to play self found.

This is specifically why the Self Found League also request IIQ/IIR bonuses in the league.

Capiche?

Completely true. I'm old enough that that solo self found offline single player argps are what I've played since they started being made and I much prefer getting all my gear through random drops off mobs I've killed as there is something much nicer about killing something and getting a random unknown drop as opposed to killing mobs, getting whatever the currency is, sit on trade and just buy item xyz.

It's the difference between an unexpected present turning up and just buying something from a shop.

Also using the trading simulator means that most of the time you know what you want to buy before you even get it, where is the fun and enjoyment of getting the unknown in that. It purely becomes save up x amount, buy item.

As Courageous mentioned I feel buying is cheating, if it doesn't drop from something I killed (or barrels, crates etc) then I shouldn't have it. In single player argps I refuse to buy weapons, armour etc from the ingame merchants for the same reason. Health and mama potions were the only thing I used to buy.

I hardly play anymore, I even have effects for skills that I bought for new characters that I cannot be bothered to create, let alone start playing, because I'm bored of the "have to trade and useless drops" constantly and CB was more fun than OB now is.

The biggest problem I have with all of this I don't know whether the devs intend to do anything about this or whether I'm simply not the type of player they want playing PoE. If there could be some comment from a dev regards this (nothing in the dev manifesto) then I can either hang about and hope it improves or stop wasting everyones time and quit completly.

"

As soon as you have an offline mode then every player has the entire game and all its (currently hidden) mechanics on their pc and thus able to find out info that the game devs DON'T want players to know because the knowledge can give an advantage.

Yeah. The reason "we'll have hacked characters" is true, and maybe there is even a good reason to prevent in a solo game, but it does not naturally follow that those hacked characters would impact the multiplay experierence, because one is not obligated to allow SP characters into the MP game at all.

However, one needs to think about the business interest in prohibiting hacked characters even in SP play. You can't dismiss that as a valid business objective. You don't have to like it, but if they have a business reason for that (and I can imagine one), you can't disregard it as "stupid."

--C

"

If there could be some comment from a dev regards this (nothing in the dev manifesto) then I can either hang about and hope it improves or stop wasting everyones time and quit completly.

Well, you're in luck. I recall personally seeing a positive comment on self found leagues from the devs within the last 30 days or so. No ETA, but they are positively inclined. No details, either, although I can't see how they'd fail to know that they need to up drop rates in such a league.

--C