I'm fine slowing down in PoE2 but ...
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The problem, Viron, is that for every person who wants and loves the Boom Boom Zoom Zoom Faster Faster FASTER Meta, there's at least one person who equally wants a Path of Exile that functions at the natural pace of builds that don't require a four-digit sum of divines to create. And for everyone one of either of those players, there's probably at least a hundred and fifty potential players who bounced off of low-level Path of Exile because the low-level game is dogshit compared to newer, shinier, flashier games where you feel like a badass even at low levels and get to grow into an even bigger badass... instead of the Path of Exile method of forcing you to spend at least two hundred divines - provided you know the magical methods of MAKING two hundred divines - before you can consider yourself "functional".
Path will always be faster than other games of this type. That's inevitable now and Grinding Gear knows it. That doesn't mean they cannot or should not try and do a better job by The Average Player. "Aspirational Content" is absolute fucking horseshit. That Righteous Fire build that got linked a few posts above? It took an entire community pouring an utterly unreasonable amount of wealth into one single character to get to that level for the sake of their favorite streamer. Nobody else will EVER get there. No one posting im this thread will EVER have a character even ten percent as powerful as that ridiculous assemblage of too much currency. That is not "aspirational". That is fucking depressing. The sheer existence of that build makes everything I've ever done in Path of Exile worse by association, and I don't find that particularly exciting or "aspirational." I don't mind other people having better builds than I do. Fuck, I hope they do, I'm not amazing at this game. But I'm allowed to want the thirty-odd percent of Path of Exile I'm allowed to play to be fun and functional and worth playing, and right now it just isn't great. What's wrong with hoping the new game makes it better rather than worse? |
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" The pacing of the game will dictate a lot of the longevity but wont be the only deciding factor. Preferences for these things will differ from player to player. You can look at the newly released D4 or even POE to see such things in action but obviously there is much more to pull from. POE has gone through MANY changes over the years, let alone from one league to another and I dont think its unreasonable to say that POE 2 will likely go through similar, if not the same life cycle as POE did/has. I very much doubt that we will be looking at "The good old days" with prevalent desync cyclone or minions/spark crashing everyone around without even trying to build for it to do so but I do expect parts of the game to be changed up from what it currently is, not just from previous life cycles but trailers. That being said who tf knows. Will find out soon enough. On a side note I found it quite amusing that when some people were complaining about the difficulty of the campaign I jokingly said give them a taunt totem and taunt on totems became available for a single SP xD. Even better was saying the game will soon be so easy we will have totems which do everything for you... Crucible league? xD |
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" I don't really understand why people feel the need to hyperbole like this. I don't really disagree with all of your points, but all your budget 'estimates' are of course way off. I've played every league since Legacy league, and I've never spent more than 50-60 divines on a build - with one exception being Sentinel, where I dropped a mirror. And what does all of those characters from all of those league have in common? They were all able to do 99% of the game WAY before I'd invested 10-20 divines. The early game of PoE can ABSOLUTELY improve (and that's why PoE 4.0 is a thing). But the ONE thing I like about PoE's progression, is that you actually FEEL the progression. Your character gets faster, stronger and you utilize more and more skills. In certain other ARPGs, your character feels the EXACT same at level 100 as it does at level 25; same skills, same speed, same relative power - as you can't really invest in the same stats the way you can in PoE. It is probably my favorite aspect of PoE. And your interpretation of RF is of course pretty off topic. RF is popular because people can do 99% of the game without much of a budget, and pretty much self-found. Sure, you CAN scale a build into heaven, but you don't have to - at least if you're "an Average Player". I've never done an Uber boss, and I'm perfectly fine with there being things in this game I haven't reached - yet. Does that make me feel like I'm not "allowed" to do it? Nah. So I hope your post is more about you don't find the "thirty-odd percent" of the game fun because of mechanics, which is fair, and not because there are percentages you cannot do. But when you use "allowed to do", I get lost and unsure if you're being serious - because you are of course allowed to do everything. But we all want the game to be better - and the game can undoubtedly be(come) MUCH better than it is today. I just hope they thread carefully and don't lose the unique sense of character progression PoE has over other games. I'm all for slowing the game down a bit, and I think it would make the game much easier to balance, at least defensively. Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you.
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" I'm a new player who got to experience both ends of the spectrum this league. I've mostly played at a below-average level, learning encounters and all the game has to offer in terms of content. Honestly? The game DOES have stuff to offer everyone. At my true level every mildly cool drop is potentially an upgrade. My first crafting project ever was a Vermilion Ring with Flammability on Hit, and slowly gathering the stuff I need, simulating the steps on Craft of Exile, and then finally birthing it, was a heck of an experience. There's always stuff to do or plan. Wheb a friend gave away his Mirror to me and I managed to sell it at its peak price, and I got gear from a mutual to try out a Flicker Strike Slayer with insane damage and a mirrored version of SpicySushi's GG axe, Mageblood also included, I got bored of him sooner than my SRS starter, who's built on beef and survived level 25 of Delirium until bad luck with modifiers struck. I followed a KB Ascendant build and while she was fun, she had none of the feel my starter and my first LA alt had - of building something with mediocre, non-optimized play, true joy of finding stuff off the ground or crafting, or scrounging up Chaos to buy something off Trade. All of these characters can do much of the content at varying speeds, with two very stark paths of gearing. Now I just spend my days staring at PoB and wondering how to spend the rest of my Divines, on something not overplayed, but some idea I could cook up which is unique, not necessarily a destroyer, but bordering on meme. To do the content you truly aim for, you don't need speed and only speed. Even if you do Breachstones having Flame Dash is adequate. Movement speed and clear speed while obviously efficient are not the only thing you need. Sure, those streamers have the pull to do whatever they wish, they do have the sway, but really, why care? GGG shouldn't balance around them sure, but this is juat the way some people play. In every gaming community this happens. For someone who supposedly doesn't care about others' builds, streamers and "rich" players in general seem to bother you to the point of depression as you yourself admit. Not healthy. witch enthusiast, send occ/ele/necro builds
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" Is the game "compulsory" you to do "I can't see" build though? The whole point of this post is to not throw away those FUN options, instead of throwing away those FUN options limiting endgame goal of FUN-dopemaine builds Like imagine if one day GGG limit every action speed to 100% max only and removing HH and mageblood ... do you still wanna play the game just because everyone have the slow speed now? Do you really feel happy about just because everyone is playing the same slow speed as you? Of all the investment you still can't make your character very fast anymore ... for what purpose? What kind of power I'm a fantasizing here? An old man? Pfff .... I know I'm exaggerating but ... you get the idea, TL;DR: Make the speed option available and not compulsory and also don't limit it. My YOUTUBE Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz7SYVrfQWKi0NJiAJJMusg Last edited by VironLaw#2874 on Jun 18, 2023, 10:04:20 PM
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There's an in-between that people seem not to realize that PoE actually already hits pretty well.
Ideally, both zoom-zoom and slow-methodical playstyles should exist in PoE, and they should get a similar amount of "loot-per-hour" at similar levels of investment. This is really hard to balance, because unless they add a hidden "loot-per-hour" counter which bases your loot solely on playtime, it has to boil down to "loot-per-monster" and/or "loot-per-mechanic". And if it boils down to "loot-per-monster", people will try to optimize for zoom-zoom speed through the monsters which slow-methodical players should be killing. There are a few ways to change this up, though at truly prodigious levels of investment this all breaks down. First, you can have different types of loot come from different mechanics. As an example - some things just don't really drop outside of very delirious maps and Simulacrum 30. Generally, a Flicker Striker or a Magic Find LA Deadeye won't be able to beat Simu 30. They might get pretty far, but they won't get all the way through it. Of course, a 5-mirror 200m DPS Flicker Strike character might be able to get through it, but once you've gotten to 5 mirrors of loot invested into a single character, that *should* be possible. Second, you can have timers. Things like Blight will take a certain amount of time, regardless of how fast you're killing things. So at that point, you are optimizing for not dying, since dying takes up time. Things like Syndicate can fall into this a little bit too, since most of the loot from running Syndicate happens after you beat Catarina. And while you can zoom-zoom through maps to a certain extent, you still need to run a certain number of maps to get through it. Third, you can make Magic Find viable. That way, you're trading some zoom-zoom more directly for loot. A Magic Find character will generally be slower than a true zoom-zoom character, and will need to at least somewhat prioritize different content. PoE already does all of this, and does it well. I've been worried that PoE 2 is going to force rotations and such on us, but the process of writing all this out made me realize that it's a very well-designed game, and generally GGG does a good job making different play-styles viable without invalidating others. And sure, they could do better on all of this, but there's always a "better" to reach for. |
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" So I'ma paraphrase myself here: Many players don't realize that removing the obstacles (such as putting in cheat codes, or by playing a pre-solved meta game instead of the game) can make the game insanely rewarding, (short term fun feeling like "I'm getting away with something") but then immediately boring Your experience is a good example of this. When you had to work for it the game (the obstacles) was more compelling, when you got it handed to you suddenly the obstacles were already "pre solved" gear on the ground is worthless when you have purchased mirror gear. And a full half (or more) of the games core loop is deleted for you. Like whats the point of looking at loot on the ground any more? Especially if you understand that that you have a better chance of being hit by a falling space rock in real life than you do of finding a upgrade on the ground. The only conceivable way the game can remain fun when your build is "pre solved" is if you enjoy the game kind of like you enjoy an FPS shooter... for the moment to moment action. But POE's Lawn mowing moment to moment thing (the meta of playing it for many "clear speed" focused players) is only fun for so long before its just endlessly mashing 1 button and endlessly exploding the slightly different colored blurs of monsters that never fight back and only leave "on death effects" that fast players ignore (because they're long gone) and slow players suffer (because we're still on the screen picking up loot we didn't filter out when they explode). Its interesting to see a new players take on this. I've had almost exactly the same experience myself. I've earned a HH (flipping in trade) and got bored, I've been gifted guildies "done for the league" items on occasion and it actually ruined the rest of the league for me. When SSF came out around Legacy league I literally found myself nearly unable to play trade even when I wanted to intellectually (because it was a bad league for SSF but amazing for trade, for example Synthesis league). THe reason some people gravitate to SSF and also Ruthless is that these modes kind of force honest or "proper" playing of the game as Chris put it once. At least they do for a limited time and only in some regards or degrees. The reason I think a lot of players want "engaging combat" is that they want THE GAME TO BE BALANCED AROUND ENGAGING COMBAT. Pandering to players who don't want consequences for their mistakes is a perfect description of what went fundamentally wrong with D3 and 4. If they wanted mindless mobile game time waster gameplay they sure did make some perplexing choices and marketing statements for 6 fucking years. Last edited by alhazred70#2994 on Jun 19, 2023, 6:51:02 PM
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" This is a fair accusation. To explain: I'm not really concerned what other people can do. Streamer guy got hundreds of players to pay him to make an obscenely overtuned build - okay, great for him. Glad he got to experience the game at that level. I get annoyed/irritated/upset when people like Viron insist that the game be actively modified, balanced, or changed in such a way as to make Boom Boom Zoom Zoom Faster Faster FASTER compulsory. They like that playstyle, they want more of that playstyle, and they think that people who aren't Boomer Zoomers are playing PoE wrong and don't matter so everything should be constantly zoomy zoomy gogogoGOGO all the time, for everyone. At the slightest hint that Grinding Gear is taking some time and effort to make natural-place play more engaging and rewarding, these folks go absolutely apeshit over the "nerfs" to Boom Zoom and start demanding that Grinding Gear instead throw all their resources behind improving Boom Zoom at the explicit and malicious expense of Natural Pace play. Mostly, because they feel like everyone "graduates" to Boom Zoom anyways and only scrubs and dummies don't push to go as fast as they can. Heh, now I'm aware I sound like a cranky grandma, and there's probably some of that in there. Fair cop. I just also don't want Grinding Gear to give up on the more visceral, engaging and fun interactions Path of Exile 2 seems to be shooting for. They're improving the moment-to-moment gameplay in the game and making skills intrinsically more fun to use and I'm here for it. Especially when more intrinsically fun moment-to-moment gameplay could go a long way towards fixing The Melee Problem and making melee-oriented people actually happy for once. Yeah, melee Boomer Zoomers won't be happy, but then again I don't think I've ever once in my life seen a happy melee-oriented Boomer Zoomer. But man, didn't that Aggorat staff gameplay look sick as fuck? I get that some people don't like combo builds and they don't want to have to rotate between half a dozen skills, and they won't have to. One-button gameplay will be perfectly fine. But I am fucking here for that cool-ass shit they're showing off recently while ALSO being aware that it's low-level mid-campaign gameplay where nobody goes proper Zoom Zoom fast anyways. I am loving the potential and mostly ignoring the facxt that it'll end up at the same stale crappy Zoomy-Zooms endgame. Who knows? Maybe we'll get super lucky and the Natural Pace folks will be able to enjoy endgame themselves without having to figure out the magic way to make a hundred divs by day 3 of a new league. People forget that for a huge portion of the playerbase, five divines is a lot to spend on a build. Path of Exile still needs to work for those players. They'll never see/defeat pinnacle bosses, and that's...not great, but acceptable. They should still be able to get through yellow maps without being shamed out of the game though, ne? |
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The thing is, I don't think what they mean by slowing down is what reasonable people think slowing down means.
They just mean time to level 100 and not pace of play. |
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If you're unwilling to slow down the end game pace, you're not willing to slow down the pace (that's a fine stance, just be honest about it).
And just to put my own skin in the game, I'm ALL for reducing the pace of combat down. Significantly. By like 50%. I'd like to make a full second count for a 'fast' unjuiced mob to go from the left of my screen to the right side, even in the end game. As it stands this is roughly the speed of a midspeed mobs like a walking Rhoa or large spider. Last edited by Northern_Ronin#6465 on Jun 20, 2023, 9:36:39 PM
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