Feedback for Settlers as I'm done with League

This is not to hate on PoE or the League. This is just my feedback...

The gold grind is on par with what I would expect from a pay to win game, like Lost Ark. It feels highly 'predatory' and a real step in the wrong direction in my opinion. Gold should not be the focus of the League mechanic, it should be complimentary to it.

Currently with near maxed out Town and around 70 workers I am required to pay 10k an hour in wages. This is not including final upgrade costs in the 40k+ gold range. Assume you can run a high tier map and get 8k gold per map, it is easy to keep pace if you are online and playing. This is where this mechanic enters the predatory phycology of gaming with the fear of missing out. It's a tactic used to great effect in mobile games and other pay to win games like Lost Ark.

The focus should be on the mines, mining and smelting and shipping, disenchanting and map runners. Currently all of this side of the actual town is just gated behind a time fence, it is not exactly engaging. Rewards for shipping and map runners is nothing even close to what was shown in the league reveal, it feels bland and apart from a few lucky divines, it is just a source of light bubblegum currency. Which is not equal to the time invested, if you consider the amount of maps you run to make the gold and the time you wait to stockpile the materials.

Being able to log off and let the town run overnight is a great idea, until you consider the wage cost and you will likely have it running for a few hours. Yes, you can drop the quality of the workers and have it run longer, but the time it takes those workers to produce goods is blown out making the reward ladder even longer to climb.

Wages need to be lowered and or gold increased. Take the focus of of the league off gold.
Shipping needs to produce exciting results, make it take even longer but have it return real reward for your time.
Map runners are a little bland, the sheer randomness is impossible to justify, sometimes it's ok but mostly its a waste of a map.

League is great in concept, poor in execution. If you are enjoying it and having fun, that's great keep going I am not trying to take anyone's fun away and by all means disagree with me, this is one persons feedback.

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relik155 wrote:

Map runners are a little bland, the sheer randomness is impossible to justify, sometimes it's ok but mostly its a waste of a map.

I agree with everything else you said, it was exactly my thoughts even before the league went live and it feels and goes exactly as I thought it would....an afk cellphone gamer's wet dream. But certainly not PoE, or even remotely resembling "good" game design.

BUT

The map thing I disagree with....presumably your mappers are running maps that would have just been sitting in your inventory all league anyway. So in that respect, at least 100% dead items now have a little value. Can't be a waste of a map if the map was just going to sit there unused anyway.


Even worse...it clearly shows GGG's new path is feeding much more into the worst addictive qualities of modern gaming, and less on GOOD gaming.

My map runners are comming back with lifeforce and a bunch of other useful stuff so yea these are pretty neat.

.

The gold grind should be there to make the town balanced once fully upgraded. I also don't think it's GGG's intention to give you everything 4 days into the league... the league is here for 4 months (probably).


That said, I do understand (and experience) that gold early on is drained quite quickly, and we have to make choices... like "wait longer" and hire lower tier workers... or settle with some "lesser" rewards (for now). Or do hire better workers, pay their wage, and thus farm more gold yourself. The list goes on and on and on to what's possible and how to manage your town.

I got lucky for example, that one of my first mappers had a divine from a white tier 1 map...

I understand some people might not like that rewards are time gated this league. However, on the bright side for most if not all casual players, it's perfect to for example actively farm (gold) when they play (don't focus on the town) and at the end of the day, manage your town and set it up to run when you're not playing. -> this way you get A TON of rewards by simply logging in the next day thanks to your effort of the previous day.

An empty treasury, isn't the worst either, everything just pauses, you don't "lose" rewards; it just takes longer.

Take a casual laid back approach and rewards will come.

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FutureFear wrote:

Take a casual laid back approach and rewards will come.

It's a shame that every criticism of this league mechanic comes down to this: rewards.

So few people seem able (or willing) to separate "design" from "reward".

Good rewards does NOT equal good league mechanic. It helps, sure, but its bait for the masses. GGG can get away with terrible decisions...as long as we get paid for it!

I do not ever see it that way. I will play what I like to play, regardless of whether its rewarding or not. Certain league mechanics that I favor are known to be way way way less rewarding than others: but I will continue to play them because they are well designed and fun (Betrayal). When I'm able during the spring and summer, I play leagues for their entire duration. I'm in no rush, I don't expect a mirror tier build in a week.

This league mechanic SCREAMS (at the top of its lungs) "I am out of ideas". No more active league mechanic (mining ore is pretty dumb when you critically think about it....its just Niko with an extra step), now we are resorted to the tried-and-true town building resource manager idle game that has been done hundreds of times on cellphones everywhere. Not only the core concept, but that implementation is also deeply flawed, such as the need to constantly flip back and forth into kingsmarch (only available via waypoint btw, very strange...multi clicks from a map), or the need to actively store your gold or backtrack to pick up gold. And then the whole ore smelting issue. And the mapper deaths.

It's the classic inability to separate "league mechanic" from the rest of the updates. People really like the melee updates (i don't). People really like Warden and other changes. People like the foray into a Currency Exchange. None of these have anything to do with the league mechanic.

The whole idea of an afk town builder was just wrong to begin with, and then they have problems with the town on top of that.

But hey.....as long as you get rewards who cares? Why don't we just stop mapping altogether? Once you get to level 80, you just get 2 divines every hour for free!

.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

But hey.....as long as you get rewards who cares? Why don't we just stop mapping altogether? Once you get to level 80, you just get 2 divines every hour for free!

yeah right now we have "spend 2 hours actually grinding and get 0 divines", thats so much better!~

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Bosscannon wrote:

yeah right now we have "spend 2 hours actually grinding and get 0 divines", thats so much better!~

Lets say it for what it REALLY is:
"Spend 2 hours grinding, so we can spend 4 hours afk, and get 0 divines"

That's the problem with this type of structure: the grind is fake. The grind only exists to feed the afk machine. You are working so you...don't have to play. So what if it is mostly "supplementary" income....true design should have your PLAY rewarded, not your waiting.

Honestly I fired my map runners since they cost the most wages, I stopped disenchantment because u have like 300k dust,

Now I just send out shipments fulfilling requests.

Rewards are very very minimal. But removing 2 jobs made the gold feel more stable.