Path of Exile has changed it's audience...

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

...

On the other hand, 'Path of Exile has changed; it is audience' is probably not entirely far from the truth either, given so much of it now is a reality TV show in which streamers play the game and people just watch.

...cut...

How sad is this?
Honestly, are there still players who buy (or support) a game to have fun in their free time? ... because I think it's not fun to watch another gamer ... I would like to be the performer of the game and exercise my ideas and skills. (but this may just be my opinion!)
If I just want to watch, I choose a good movie, a TV series, or a competition of my favorite sport at a high level ... uhh ... do you want to see what poe wants to be an esport? ... uhh ... if it were so, I left in time, so as not to witness this.
Or maybe I'm just plain old, just like poe.

(forgive my english ... it's not my language)

"

DalaiLama wrote:

Is that what the discharge players were doing? I didn't understand much about the game during the fellshrine runs, but the game was forgiving enough that a player could figure out their own builds and somehow pound their way to the endgame with stuff they found. The character thus made may not have been anywhere near the most efficient, but the whole game was accessible.

Now we have nuclear powered bears on unicycles fighting against map bosses with antimatter death stars, and the monsters in between are no more meaningful then the wet sand in a gold miner's sluice box with the occasional shining fleck showing up in the loot filter.

Agreed. The game changed too much to my liking and has forgotten its roots. I only care about campaign number 2 now.

lol idk some people who are like, watch like 30 hours of youtube and think there's no problem there.

"

鬼殺し wrote:

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.

Very eloquent circumlocution filled with countless generalizations. Let me guess, you don't get very far in the leagues before quitting?
Do you get easily overwhelmed in general? Trick to not getting overwhelmed is to not delve too deeply into any particular mechanic or feature.

I wish PoE had more content. Would be nice if, going forward, all new league mechanics became core. I miss scourge, ultimatum, and even talisman altars. I also wish crafting was truly random, without weight bias towards low tier affixes. We can only dream.

"

darkdhaos wrote:

"

鬼殺し wrote:

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.

Very eloquent.

Thank you. :)

Try rephrasing the rest of what you said a little less combatively and I may respond further.

Or maybe that is my response.

+1 to them being precious about cutting stuff, this is the biggest change for me in how they used to approach content additions vs how they now approach them.

It can be summarised very quickly, they didn't core synthesis, but they would now. At some point the cost of developing a league, despite it only taking them 3 months anyway became a cost they weren't willing to toss away anymore and they just started adding things wholesale.

Like i'll be honest, I can't believe Einhar is a master or they kept the mechanic at all. Red beasts and maps is fine, the blood alter mechanic is not. There are about 5 valuable beasts and all the rest, and their crafting options may as well not exist and that has been the case since its inclusion.

They were careful once whereas now it feels like it'll do becomes the answer to everything. That makes sense when its about additions and meeting a schedule but when its about subtractions it really doesn't. They did get precious about it.

Salient point about the increasing cost of leagues there. I am not sure how many people know this but GGG officially rebranded league updates as "expansions" a few years ago and I think it was a bigger deal than most of us realised at the time.

After all, how many devs straight up cut expansions out of their game? The shift from seeing league gimmicks as temporary modifications that MIGHT go core with some decent rebalancing to actual expansions whose place in the core game is guaranteed barring some catastrophic impact is, all puns intended, a game changer.

And I believe it all comes back to them putting too much effort into leagues not as fun variants on PoE but on flashy overly ambitious modes that absolutely do not fit into the core game. But those flashy new things sell packs before they are even released and inevitably prove to be anything but universally pleasing so maybe it's all just business...as usual.