we have a winner

my edit may assist you there, but also, that's a really easy one: Blizzard do not balance DIV around trade. Thank the Mother.

But also as I said, no ARPG in history other than PoE has been actively, aggressively balanced around trade (LE might be -- I will concede I didn't play that one past beta and before they made a trade faction, was it?). Not even D2 -- the content Blizzard North made for that game *after* trade went bonkers (and everyone was duping SoJs anyway) was purely endgame. At no point did they go, oh shit, everyone's trading, better make the core game harder or they might finish it too soon.

Because they already had our money, right? We can play a game-as-product for 5 hours or 5,000 hours. As long as it doesn't have mtxes, this doesn't really matter to the developer, especially one who isn't looking at expansions.

But a GaaS cares deeply about active player counts, about retention, about players not getting bored of their game too quickly. In essence, a GaaS lives or dies on its metagame. Not the metagame as in which build is best and which skills are currently stronger than others -- that's just shuffling the deck for the same set of cards. Doesn't fundamentally change the game you are playing, just how you play.

No, the metagame is that thing that players who are *serious* are expected to engage with even though they can play for ages and not do so. For MMOs it's typically numerical -- dps calculation, raid efficiency, maybe some pvp. For MOBAs, we are looking at rankings, KDA, role min-maxing.

In essence, we're talking about a hook.

For PoE, it's none of these because an ARPG typically doesn't care about any of the above. I'd say it's clear speed, and good luck min-maxing that without trading.

Trading, however, isn't the hook. It's the worm.

The worm to keep up with the game, to get that build you saw Streamer X run, to copy that Build of the Week (What, you thought that feature was just for community entertainment!?)...

The hook for PoE is stash tabs. You might not need many but you're gonna need more than the game inherently provides.

And this whole approach of worm/hook makes for terrible game design, because it prioritises the wrong things, most notably quantity over quality.

Being F2P and relying on a trading worm/storage hook leading to balance based on that model made PoE a much worse game than it could have been, and yeah, I WILL die on that hill.

Maybe PoE 2 will be different, but as long as it's f2p and owned by a company notorious for massive profits=bottom line (with the proviso that International Exiles have a fairly healthy resistance to said parent company's usual approach to monetisation in games), I strongly doubt it.

Yeah the games as a service architecture is a problem from that perspective but its gotten to the point where GGG isn't increasing engagement anymore, they're just making the game miserable to play because you're not grinding for progress, you are grinding for the hope of hitting the .0000001% loot pinata that lets you switch from your league starter to the actual build you wanted to play. They've made it so obnoxiously hard to actually farm instead of gamble that its just not worth the frustration to me and I doubt that I am alone in that regard.

Fair enough. I haven't played in quite a while so I'll take your word for it. Seems weird to me that they've stopped working towards new engagement and are relying on retaining existing players as supporters but eh I am absolutely sure GGG know what they're doing with PoE1 and PoE2.

There are too many factors we plebs cannot see in that regard.

That said, misery-playing is real and a LOT of gamers do it. The longer and lower the lows, the higher the high when you finally win. This is gambling psychology 101. The game is finding how much the player is willing to suffer before calling it quits, and how many of them you can keep in moderate pain because they KNOW that win is just one theoretical dice roll or flip of the cards away.

And what little I know of the addictive/gambling personality...it's nowhere near as logical or rational as you might think.

And I imagine a game being both free to play but also offering vast opportunities to invest in it via mtxes and supporter packs allows people to self-validate there in an almost paradoxical way. "It's just a game"/"Gosh I have a lot of mtxes and supporter titles": i.e. "I can walk away at any time"/"I do not want to risk buyer's remorse so I'll keep playing and using these mtxes I paid for".

The .00001% drops have always been ingrained in PoE‘s game design. Different from then is that you have way more ways to acquire wealth and consistently. What I read here is a lack of knowledge or a lack of will to learn

Wait, wasn't this thread about DIV? I've spent over a decade talking about PoE. More DIV in GD please.

Its not a lack of knowledge or will, its a lack of desire to expend enormous amounts of time for minimal rewards with my favorite content (uber bosses) gated behind the worst designed content they have released in years and obnoxiously hard to access, on top of general nerfs that hit many of my favorite standard builds basically killing any real desire to play the game.

"

CarbotZergling123 wrote:

Its not a lack of knowledge or will, its a lack of desire to expend enormous amounts of time for minimal rewards with my favorite content (uber bosses) gated behind the worst designed content they have released in years and obnoxiously hard to access, on top of general nerfs that hit many of my favorite standard builds basically killing any real desire to play the game.

You consider it the worst content BECAUSE YOU CAN'T DO it.

Man this thread hit almost every common thread about poe's issues, just from a guy saying d4 won, essentially.

Some people have a lot to vent.

Play what you enjoy.

At ten pages I guess it's safe to say that this thread is the real winner.

I can do t17s without too much issue, I have builds that instaphase ubers and can facetank the uber shaper slam and uber maven memory game, doing t17s is not particularly difficult for me, they're just uninteresting rippy garbage added as an extra layer of grinding between actually doing ubers and got loot everywhere else drastically nerfed.