Alternate game mode for casual gamers

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TemjinGold wrote:

I think the issue is, it WILL change the entire game. SC Trade will see its trade volume drastically cut if as many people as you folks seem to think will move over. If you thought trade was a pain now, wait till there is a small fraction of the player base still playing in that league. A vibrant economy needs all tiers of players participating to make it work. The lower players essentially farming and selling supplies to the higher ones making the goods for the market.

Just as the casuals will quickly bore themselves in their own mode with no good items crafted (can't believe I need to spell this out but again, NOT mirror items or the like but average everyday "good" items that people seem to take for granted to exist), those who stay with SC trade will frustrate themselves with no readily purchasable crafting materials. Both ends will implode.

I've seen this all too often in the real world in corporate. Leaders who think they have a great idea but don't see the whole picture before jumping in. There is no such thing in this world as changing one variable in a vacuum. There are always unintended repercussions and it is foolish to think otherwise. That doesn't mean change is bad or we should never strive for change. But wishful thinking that "everything will be fine if only x changes" is dangerous for a business.

Most of the players who would join Casual do not participate much in the heavily-manipulated trading system now. There would still be plenty of players to price-fix the market. Plus, a lot of the players that would be interested in playing Casual are players who are currently not playing the game but would be enticed to come back.

i think trying to weight arguments with threats and warnings and promises of the business doing better etc that we always see in these sort of threads are unhelpful. i think people should just make the case for why it makes the game better, everyone could pretend these things favour their preference for the game. its a meaningless trade of hollow blackmail lite, people like mark dont strike me as the sort of guys who are going to give a crap about that kind of reasoning considering they have made this game to their Vision™ for the last 15 odd years and its been a massive success.



if people cant beat bosses then youre just not the sort of player the boss was designed to be beaten by. were not entitled to beat everything in every game, we either rise to the challenge or fail. enough people are beating these bosses for them to be considered in a good place balance wise.






i really dont like the death penalty, i hate it, when i die in game it just takes all the joy out of me and often ill just feel a bit disheartened for many hours, ill sometimes stop playing.

but dying has to matter, something has to happen when i die that i dont like. so whats the answer? gear loss/deterioration is even worse. buying omens from trade isnt really a solution because the devs have said most people dont trade, i dont like having to trade for stuff. is 50c for not losing 75% of the xp lost on death reasonable? does that make people feel ok about it? essentially you lose 50c and 2.5% xp?

if so then just have an npc sell those for 50c? kirac or someone? would that make the people who want the penalty gone happy?



id be fine with that honestly. but it has to mean something, when i die something has to happen that we dont want to happen or having a good build and playing it well doesnt matter. 50c and 2.5% xp is enough for me to never want to die personally.

There is a very specific understanding barrier going on here between the two sides:

1) Short-sighted view: how can a new mode NOT attract new customers? The ones that left/can't handle/don't like the more difficult game would definitely flock back to the easier mode right? It hurts no one because its an entirely separate mode.

2) Long-term view: the damage caused by this fracture, this devolution of the company, this betrayal of the entire core philosophy of WHY the game exists in teh first place.....would cause more people to leave the game. Maybe not immediately, but certainly over time. Plus, no mode is "truly" separate from another within a finite game audience. People will make choices on what to play and those choices affect everyone, no matter if its a large group or a small group.

There is ample evidence across all facets of business that the most likely scenario, and also the most damaging scenario, is #2. When a business, product, or company "loosens" its trademark qualities in order to try to reach an audience purely for the sake of additional revenue, the entire business suffers. Both by reputation and by actual monetary value.

Doesn't happen EVERY time, but happens frequently enough that it is the most logical and reasonable assumption of the future. Plus...its even more likely to collapse in on itself if the company then tries to maintain BOTH polar opposite qualities.


The reason for all the growth that PoE has sustained across its lifetime is BECAUSE of its dedication to the idea that it is not meant to be easy. People come to this game, play this game, and stick with this game, because of WHAT the game is. There is a reason that folks, even in this conversation, have been playing this game for YEARS! It's because of what the game is at its core. If GGG were to suddenly 180 their entire decade+ design philosophy....they would most certainly NOT attract more players than they would lose. Easier games in the genre already exist. And the folks that left PoE for those other games through the years....do not outweigh the folks that stuck with PoE and joined PoE, nor will they suddenly decide to return simply because "easy mode" is enacted. They've already made their decision to leave, and it is exceedingly difficult to re-attract people who already made up their minds.

As for the "size" of the crowd interested in an easier game mode: there is no possible way that it is a majority, or even a large percentage, of the current players. I believe someone said earlier that they believed the CORE of the game would be interested in an easy mode? This is laughably and wildly inaccurate. And frankly....it doesn't make any sense. If the CORE of the game didn't like the current game, they wouldn't be playing it! They would be among the folks that already left to find other ventures. The core gamer is most certainly not playing this game out of spite, wishing for an easier mode and complaining the game is too hard....while then continuing to play the game. This takes a very special kind of player, one well outside of the norm.

The core are the players that spend almost no time on these forums because they are simply enjoying the game.

All data and growth metrics prove the exact opposite of this theory: in fact, more and more people are interested in the CURRENT game as it stands and it continues to grow. That is the CORE playerbase. These people are not clamoring for a completely different, dumbed down version of the game. If they were, they would not be spending their time playing Path of Exile.

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harbingerofdestruction333 wrote:

snip

Well said. The "short-sighted view" is exactly the point I'm trying to point out. "Adding new thing X will have a great benefit and will definitely not cause any adverse effects that outweigh the benefit" is the kind of wishful thinking I saw a lot in corporate. It is the thing that led to the downfall of many companies.

There is a reason PoE is in a class of its own in staying power. And it's not because random nobodies like us know better how to run the game than the devs of a successful game for over a decade. The idea of broadening appeal has literally been tried to death everywhere else in the desperate short-term attempt at essentially a cash grab and rarely does it lead to good long-term.

Adding to the Porsche analogy:

Consider if Ferrari/Lamborghini were to suddenly start offering an affordable model car.

1) The SHORT-SIGHTED crowd would see that and say, of course people would flock to it and buy it! They would not look past the fact that "new cheap car = new customers".

2) The Long-Term (and likely more accurate) crowd would see that and say, maybe a few new cars would be sold, sure. But the company has a reputation and style that has been built up throughout the years. The actual attraction of new customers would not be nearly as great as people think because there are already plenty of other companies in the market, at that value, that do it better and have a longer history. People's understanding of what a "ferrari" is won't change. They might not even be willing to buy a "cheap" ferrari because that is exactly what it would be: a "cheap" knockoff of what was once considered a specialty, elite product. Additionally, the folks looking to buy the high end because of its perceived "value" and "exclusivity" will begin to look elsewhere, since the brand has betrayed its exclusive image: a core driver of the expensive sales in the first place.


In this example, it is fact that ferraris and lamborghinis sell FAR LESS cars overall than companies which sell cheaper cars. For every thousand (or more) toyotas sold, there is maybe 1 ferrari sold. But that is precisely WHY ferrari is still successful, highly sought after, and competitive in the car market. It fills a unique spot. Their goal isn't and has never been to attract "new" customers. The customers they WANT will come to them, and they do. Loss of that can and will lead to cascading negative effects throughout the entire company.


It is not as simple as some of you folks are trying to make it out to be.

PoE is not suddenly going to become as "successful" as D4 by adding an easy mode. It is pure fallacy to believe that suddenly a brand new huge crowd of people are suddenly going to be interested in the game. Blizzard as a company has become a joke in the gaming community, and turnover has been huge, because they betrayed their own image time and time again. GGG is not willing to do that, and their brand and every successive game will be all the stronger for it.

In the short-term, the revenue might not be as high. But in the long-term, the company and its games will have a much better standing and longevity.

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harbingerofdestruction333 wrote:

Adding to the Porsche analogy:

That would be a good analogy... if over the past decade GGG didn't do exactly what you said they shouldn't do, which is betray their core principles.

They would never make a trade site, never make an (pseudo) in game editor, never make an AH, never make power creep absurd, yet all of those things exist right now. Regardless, as people are claiming, PoE is as strong as ever?

PoE1 is far closer to Diablo 3/4 than it is to PoE2 balance wise from what they are advertising. Just saying.

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Z3RoNightMare wrote:

That would be a good analogy... if over the past decade GGG didn't do exactly what you said they shouldn't do, which is betray their core principles.

They would never make a trade site, never make an (pseudo) in game editor, never make an AH, never make power creep absurd, yet all of those things exist right now. Regardless, as people are claiming, PoE is as strong as ever?

PoE1 is far closer to Diablo 3/4 than it is to PoE2 balance wise from what they are advertising. Just saying.

How is creating a trade website going against their "core principles", which is that trade is important and central to the game? The AH is literally brand new now, very limited, and we have no idea what it might look like later. And again....how does it betray their principles?

GGG is not anti-QoL (overall)....QoL changes like flask automation, AH, trade website, and other newer changes, does not betray any sort of principles. Nor does it change the gameplay all that much. They could do more on this front. Incessant clicking, for example, has no real bearing on gameplay and deserved fixes long ago. Still waiting on that. None of what is being discussed is implying that PoE is "the perfect game".

Power creep is a very real problem, and GGG has made HUGE attempts to combat it. It is pretty selective to ignore this. They have spoken on the issue. Their goal is not to eliminate Power Creep, but to minimize and balance it as much as they can. But in a game like this one, power creep is inevitable and non-preventable. I will not pretend that they haven't made some BAD calls...but these weren't with the intent of betraying the core game; they were done with the intent of innovation. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. They have worked very very hard to make sure the fallout from bad design choices didn't tank the game writ large (such as OG harvest).

PoE 2 doesn't exist yet. It is rather silly to claim "balance" comparisons on a non-existent product. Won't dignify this with any further followup.

And no....PoE 1 is nowhere near D3/D4. That's kind of the reason why this thread exists, right? The fact that it ISN'T like those games?

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harbingerofdestruction333 wrote:

How is creating a trade website going against their "core principles", which is that trade is important and central to the game?

First: Never said trade isn't important. Stop implying things i'm not saying nor even refering to.

Second: the fact trade manifesto basically said so they were forced to make the trade site?
"Then came the forum-scraping bots. Smart community members worked out that they could automatically crawl the forum and insert all of the items into a database, creating an instantly- and accurately-searchable index of all items for trade in Path of Exile. There was nothing we could do about this, because it's almost impossible to stop people gathering information from a public website.

A trade ecosystem evolved where players would search for items on trade websites to quickly find what they need, but would have to manually contact the user in-game to perform the trade. While this was a lot quicker than before, we grew to accept it but were worried about one aspect in particular: To create trade forum threads easily, users would download third-party programs and enter their account details (or at least web session IDs). While these tools and their authors never took advantage of this in an illegal way, it was a potentially dangerous situation for our users and we really needed an official solution. We made it so that Premium Stash Tabs can expose their contents to trade sites on a public API.

So that's where we are today."

They didn't want to. They were forced to. They are against making trades quick. They were forced to make trades quick. End of story.

And before you think i'm implying more things, no, i didn't say easy. I said quick. Exactly like the trade manifesto said.

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harbingerofdestruction333 wrote:

GGG is not anti-QoL (overall)

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harbingerofdestruction333 wrote:

None of what is being discussed is implying that PoE is "the perfect game".

Ok? Nothing to do with i have said, but sure.

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harbingerofdestruction333 wrote:

And no....PoE 1 is nowhere near D3/D4. That's kind of the reason why this thread exists, right? The fact that it ISN'T like those games?

You're right, PoE1 is nowhere near D3/D4. PoE has vastly more screen clutter and useless loot than Diablo.

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Z3RoNightMare wrote:

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I'm simply not interested in continuing a discussion irrelevant to the topic at hand, nor with someone so clearly already aggressive from the first post. This will be my only reply, sorry.

I encourage you to read more carefully and respond more carefully in the future as well, as you misunderstood the point directly in the part you quoted...to clarify this quote: I said that "trade being important" was a core principle set out by GGG, not anything in your comments. They evolved their systems on trade by necessity to continue to conform to their initial principle, not to act against it. This is explicitly stated even in the manifesto you posted....they didn't want to do it, but recognized it was necessary to keep their core systems intact. Again, not anti-QoL. Additionally, earlier in that same post you quoted, they stated what I already quoted as their core belief for the game.

So, in as simple terms as you can understand: if it's in GGGs best interest, there's enough support from the community to do so or they are forced to do so, they will do it, as they have done countless times before. :)

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Mashgesture wrote:

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If you say so. :)