Path of Exile has changed it's audience...
|
Let me preface this by saying, it has been a couple of years since I've REALLY played. I usually lurk in the abyss of off-topic. A delightful place that has been molded not by just me, but others as well; where you can take a "chill."
The prefabricated notion that PoE was always going to be a latter "Diablo Clone," was never the mission. Do you think everyone from GGG sat at a round table and said, "let's make the game more complex and dissuade the casual gamer from enjoying it?" So what is casual..? I think many use the word casually; it is not what you think it is. I would consider myself casual, as I play to distract myself from the complicated shithole that college classes are. Though I find myself just copying and pasting builds. Was that intended? Maybe, but what game do we not copy and paste? Isn't that real life as well... We copy people to achieve the grandeur of their success in hopes we turn out a little better? PoE audience is simply put... A salad. That's actually a good thing. Maybe sometimes that salad gets a visit from salmonella, there is a recall and the process starts all over. Are we eating a Caesar salad... No, more like a Kimchi Salad; it's an acquired taste. Anyways... The game is not for every audience these days. There are only A FEW master crafters, most hide behind a computer in their moms' basement, and others are successful twitch streamers. Though, they have something in common. They have LOTS OF TIME... and unfortunately suffer from addiction. Think of every crafting bench like this:  Enter a crafters hideout and you will notice the bright colors, and crafting benches perfectly aligned with their stash. They have subconsciously created a mini-casino. GGG has gone GOD MODE. Not only have they implemented the addiction, but they have made their audience CREATE subconsciously their own casinos. Creating the best item is EXTREMELY ADDICTIVE... These days gathering resources to craft is a breeze and guess what there are even more types of currency. If you haven't crafted you are truly missing out. -Cheers "Another... Solwitch thread." AST Current Games: :::City Skylines:::Elite Dangerous::: Division 2 "...our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong." -Adam Bear Last bumped on Jul 12, 2022, 9:56:37 AM
This thread has been automatically archived. Replies are disabled.
|
|
|
Copy and pasting builds isn't really playing the game though @solwitch. Your bypassing all the mechanics, learning's, failures and potential engagement with the game. Why have any of this games deep mechanics when you just follow an "i win build" and make no choices or take no risks along the way?
Agree it probably feels like an exponential slot machine if your waiting on specific drops and min/maxing at end game every single time you play the game. |
|
" You cannot experiment learning the mechanics and the build in POE...Cuz respec's cost a hell of time and currency. Any streamer in this game will actually recommend you follow a build guide if you do not know what you are doing, cuz of the reason above. Also the topic was about the crafting system and POE casinocraft. Which I agree with. Beside the fact that you have to have a faculty degree to understand crafting in this game, you have to use 3 external tools to check if what you want is possible and how to do it, after all of this hassle you just go with the casino craft process were if you click incorrectly you are forced to start over and waste more and more and more time. Even though they tried to make crafting a little bit more understandable and a little bit deterministic ( excluding harvest league) , the game simply relies on this core casino mechanic to make people waste more and more time in the game, instead of playing casually , having fun with other builds and trying atlas mechanics, instead of thinking , hmm should I try to craft this for my TornadoShot build or should I just save and buy something for this build, or should I just buy it already crafted... Yeah, veteran players already know what they are getting into, either farm till your dead, play the gamble game or hope to RNGJessus for good crafts with less currency invested, but new players retention is saying that the before mentioned are bad for new players. Never invite Vorana, Last To Fall at a beer party. Last edited by Vendetta#0327 on Jun 29, 2022, 1:59:34 AM
|
|
|
There were few things I said more to newcomers during the beta than 'your first character will almost certainly be a failure'. And I said it not to discourage them but because learning by failing was such a strong point of pride in the PoE that was. There was something almost sacred in the way the game reminded us no one gets it right the first time, whatever 'it' might be. Learning is an iterative process, an accumulation of dead ends either faced or avoided, until the path through to one's objective is all that remains.
And of course I also encouraged people to research, to keep that wiki open, to read guides. Because imitation and, more importantly, *understanding* what you're imitating, is still one of the best ways to learn. But there is a disclaimer here: imitation either precedes originality or it loses purpose as anything but a routine. I now believe GGG fluked whatever iterative learning they infused into PoE, because they've allowed it to become the opposite of that. Failure doesn't lead to improvement, because you are left with only vague indications of how you failed. The question is multi-pronged (was my gear insufficient? Did I choose the wrong pathing? Did I neglect a defensive stat? Was that monster way stronger than the rest here?) but the answer is almost always the same: you didn't do it the way someone else successfully has. So trade for that gear maybe, get a bunch of Regret Orbs, or just start over. That last is, of course, least desirable because getting back to that point of failure is quite mindless and tiresome. Imitation only teaches when you understand it enough to dismantle the process and reconstruct it in your own way. PoE once allowed this, by being much more sanely paced and uncluttered even at the upper end; it no longer does, as the game is insanely paced and cluttered well before the Atlas now. As for the gambling/crafting aspect, I've said enough times elsewhere: PoE defiles and desecrates the notion of 'crafting' in games. Other than deterministic item modification such as bench crafting, vendor recipes and divination cards (and even those have variable ranges to 'win' or 'lose'), it is no more crafting than shovelling money into a slot machine is 'earning'. GGG pulled off a major trick when they convinced people that randomising the variables of their gear over and again in the hopes of a favourable outcome is 'crafting'. And those they couldn't convince certainly didn't stick around, because if a dev is willing to be that devious in one aspect, how else might they play fast and loose with otherwise accepted conventions? Right now, the fact that PoE is not 'pay to win' is no longer a completely positive observation or selling point; it's more like 'well, at least it's not pay to win' with the unspoken: because that's about all it has going for it. And there are, and always will be, those who are willing to slide a little further into 'pay to win' territory if it means playing a game that actually feels like one rather than a test of one's devotion to the game's systems. After my little stint with PoE2022, I really am left wondering: what does it mean to play PoE? If it's so much more than just loading the game and killing shit, then how much of what we call 'playing' is...anything but playing? 'No one gets it right the first time' I said earlier...how could we have forgotten that PoE was, is and will be GGG's first time? Not even 'Path of Exile 2' will be a truly new thing. GGG are so committed to this first time that each update of it shows us they have forgotten how important it is to start over now and then. Because in very few cases does simply adding more without consideration of the existing creation fix anything. Add too many colours of paint and you get the anti-colour, black; add too many spices and you get a strong but pointless 'spiciness'; add too many voices to a chorus and you get noise. GGG try to subtract now and then by removing a past league gimmick but they're so fucking precious about it all that they remind me of the worst of self-published authors who couldn't 'kill their darlings' and just put out these monstrous, aimless accumulations of 'things happening' with no sense of cohesion. You could legitimately remove 30-40% of PoE's content and no one who's never played it before would think 'this game needs more stuff for me to do'. Instead they remove 1% here, 2% there, and then add 5-10% and somehow expect that not to be even more bloated than ever before. The only people really happy with it are those who, after so much exposure to this incessant compression of meaning into mush, lost their ability to perceive the colours, to taste the individual spices, or to even notice that all they're hearing is noise long ago. The numb addicts who kneel helplessly at the base of PoE's towering, teetering mass of content, awed at what they think is brilliance because it blinds them but to anyone else is just a painful glare, a grotesque misuse of illumination that rather than light the way, obfuscates any sort of clarity or vision. The name says it all. Last edited by 鬼殺し#7371 on Jun 29, 2022, 3:30:30 AM
| |
|
PoE is a one way system of winnage unless you lose. I still find the league mechanics surprisingly simple, yet it may even be the PC we run our games on. & I still have 100% memory loss.
|
|
|
PoE is superficially for a 'hardcore' audience, those who want a challenge however unfair or random. Trade alleviates the challenge and with enough wealth trivialises the game. This means the most important aspect of PoE is wealth creation and by that stage you're hardly playing the game, as is, and spend most of your time in your hideout or on TFT. New players always want to know how to get rich, not how to have fun.
Luckily SSF exists for those who want a more pure version of PoE, unsullied by bots, RMT and TFT. I wish PoE had been built by GGG around SSF rather than trade, it would solve many problems I find with the game. |
|
|
When I first started playing I said I will never play these maps more than once. Wealth is a representation of farming the currency maps over and over again.
As for the multiplayer situation, it is unfortunate and I hope GGG and the team overcome a multi faceted problem with PoE 2. I believe they will try their best and more recently new servers have been implemented as a way of reducing lag. The only thing left to do is to get up and GO!! |
|
|
It would be aloof to think people aren't using real cash to purchase currency. I've caught certain streamers on their recorded videos mistakenly saying they purchased currency. Sort of have to play the game, "what's in a word." Sadly our most popular streamers.
Food for thought... "What's in a cookie..." Cookies tell us many things these days. Just keep that in mind. Edit: And people complain about harvest lol... HMMMMM "Another... Solwitch thread." AST Current Games: :::City Skylines:::Elite Dangerous::: Division 2 "...our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong." -Adam Bear Last edited by solwitch#4681 on Jun 29, 2022, 4:50:10 AM
|
|
|
A cookie cookie, my father bought KFC family feast for dinner. Hooray
|
|
" Yes. POE2 should be the ruthless vision experience and POE1 should be the zoom power fantasy sandbox to capture both audiences.
I petition to return all the fun stuff that was removed or nerfed over the years back into POE1. |
|
