please get rid of MF, make players WANT to play SSF

i played the game without trade.

i was slamming exalts and it really felt good making my decent gear better and sometimes stupidly strong.

GGG's trade manisfesto is actually ironic.

if players get enough drops they wouldnt NEED to trade.

yet we feel we need to trade as we dont get upgrades fast enough.

the game is in EA, we're NOT dropping a huge range of weapons that we dont use. yet it takes a long time for me to get a weapon that i really want. i DO get really good ones once in a while. but it takes a lot of time.

now imagine when we have more weapons that we dont want dropping.

once i started trading.

trading instantly became the BEST way for me to play.

i was stuck. i couldnt do harder tier maps. my resists were wrecked.

but with trade. I FIXED EVERYTHING.

the huge con is, now i really have little reason to exalt slam. its better for me to save up to buy what i need.

as for MF. i've said it a hundred times and i'll say it again.

mf on gear forces players to optimize. the existence of MF necessitates GGG to balance drops around MF. dont play MF? fuck you, here have a few wisdoms scraps and t1 waystones. it feels bad.

if you're weak, you're effectively punished for being weak as you cant fit in mf.

mf only serves the players that are using highly efficient builds.

its creating the player gap that is prominent in poe1. i fucking hate that gap. a gap definitely will happen but mf helps make the gap larger.

taking a step back. i really enjoyed my "SSF" experience in campaign. tho it needs more tweaking.

if the drops/crafting is more generous i d be SSF.

ggg please. i now want poe2 to release where players dont feel like theyre forced to trade.

i want to play poe2 "full release" SSF.

EDIT 31/12:

just "podcasted" a rhykker vid otw to work, he sums up my feelings somewhat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClEYk76nVEk

"

exsea#1724 wrote:

GGG's trade manisfesto is actually ironic.

"We know that trade is bad"
"But we allow it anyway. We even made a website with a one-click whisper! And a currency exchange!"
"No, allowing direct purchases goes too far"
"A loot buff for SSF so players don't have to deal with trade bad? Who do you think we are?"

GGG is either incredibly naive or they profit from trade too much (selling stashes).

I'm basically ssf except for the currency exchange. I have a hard enough time "crafting" with the few orbs I find, if i couldn't get more i'd quit. Buff orb drops and kill trading is good with me. I refuse to go to an external site to trade.

"

drallcom3#6603 wrote:

"

exsea#1724 wrote:

GGG's trade manisfesto is actually ironic.

"We know that trade is bad"
"But we allow it anyway. We even made a website with a one-click whisper! And a currency exchange!"
"No, allowing direct purchases goes too far"
"A loot buff for SSF so players don't have to deal with trade bad? Who do you think we are?"

GGG is either incredibly naive or they profit from trade too much (selling stashes).

You need more stashes on SSF anyway, too keep all the bases and stuff you may "later use on another character", and now with reforging bench it's so much worse. I keep every useless unique i find because yeah it's useless but hey if i destroy it i may never find it again and what if i find a use for it? Even if they aren't premium stashes the sheer amount of them should be enough to compensate.

"

Karishin#7986 wrote:

I'm basically ssf except for the currency exchange. I have a hard enough time "crafting" with the few orbs I find, if i couldn't get more i'd quit. Buff orb drops and kill trading is good with me. I refuse to go to an external site to trade.

I've said it before that if they increased the drop rates of ALL basic currency around 200-300%, SSF would be in a far better place and trade would be far less valuable, just by the fact that players could actually attempt to roll for their own gear.

Even with MF, unless you spend every possible spare slot on it, you just don't get enough currency to even maintain your own juicing of maps, let alone using any of that currency for your own gear. My current Monk has at least 75-100% MF and there are rares I kill that drop literally nothing. In T15/16 maps. It's absurd.

There's really no excuse for why currency items are so rare. If they increased drop rates, the market would self adjust to the new drop frequencies. Yes, there would be a bit of a shake-up as people figure out what the new baselines are, but it's not that big of a deal and they shouldn't hold up an increase like this over the trade community's crap that is mostly self inflicted by this issue.

Why don't they just do those things like they do with the permanent buffs to resistance and skill points etc during the campaign? i.e. kill this side boss or quest and get this item to increase magic find or gold find? i.e. then cap at like 150-200% etc.

Or how just do a magic drop/gold/currency skill tree thing like the end game too? like how when you complete the maps on t1 you get 2 points etc. but do that with the magic find. They could honestly do more with the expedition dude and have him do a whole system with magic find since he is 'expedition' but I heard it was way better in poe1.

I don't blame people trading but many of those defending it will argue the game requires trading to be playable while neglecting the fact it's fundamentally balanced around it. Ofc you don't want to play ssf if 95% of builds are unavailable to you by punitive levels of rng. PoE2 ssf suffers even more because they took deterministic crafting out so you are even more funneled into limited meta builds that function without specific items. But then you play trade and spend all your time fomo-ing about the economy *shrug*

why would ssf be something they want to encourage? most people already dont trade, why would you want them to put themselves in a space where they cant have friends, cant interact with other players, cant party and be an active part of proper guilds etc?


you are all on these forums, something in you wanted to reach out and communicate with other humans that share your interests. we are inherently social animals and all we have achieved as a species has come from working together, forming social groups. its how we derive most of the meaning in our lives.



why would it be a good thing to encourage players to wall themselves off from playing with other people?






you dont have to be ssf to not trade. im not trading in poe2, do i want to be in ssf? fuck no, i want to play with my friends, i have friends who have never played arpgs who will be interested in this game when it goes f2p. should i say yeah play, but sry i cant play with you i have to play only solo?

why would i do that? why would it be good for the game to make players think and act like that?


it would be awful for the game. poe1 lived on its community. look at anything big, magic the gathering, warhammer, its all about community, friends, people interacting and sharing their hobbies together.






not trading, yes, not trading is probably a more fun way to play the game. thats why they dont make an AH, its why they dont have super easy trade within the game client. they definitely need to do better in terms of the loot right now, i dont think its more loot i think its more alchs, more essences and they need to rethink a lot of the mod pool changes.

but the concept of an ssf mode encouraged by increased drops is absolute cancer.

"

drallcom3#6603 wrote:

"

exsea#1724 wrote:

GGG's trade manisfesto is actually ironic.

"We know that trade is bad"
"But we allow it anyway. We even made a website with a one-click whisper! And a currency exchange!"
"No, allowing direct purchases goes too far"
"A loot buff for SSF so players don't have to deal with trade bad? Who do you think we are?"

GGG is either incredibly naive or they profit from trade too much (selling stashes).

its not about being naive or selling stash space. they genuinely think it makes the game better and honestly they have a more thought out take than almost any player ive heard commenting on it.



its extremely rare to see a player talk about the trade/drop rate debate in the forums who even understands GGGs position on it. ive yet to see anyone able to offer a convincing counter argument.

"

exsea#1724 wrote:

i played the game without trade.

i was slamming exalts and it really felt good making my decent gear better and sometimes stupidly strong.

GGG's trade manisfesto is actually ironic.

if players get enough drops they wouldnt NEED to trade.

yet we feel we need to trade as we dont get upgrades fast enough.

the game is in EA, we're NOT dropping a huge range of weapons that we dont use. yet it takes a long time for me to get a weapon that i really want. i DO get really good ones once in a while. but it takes a lot of time.

now imagine when we have more weapons that we dont want dropping.

once i started trading.

trading instantly became the BEST way for me to play.

i was stuck. i couldnt do harder tier maps. my resists were wrecked.

but with trade. I FIXED EVERYTHING.

the huge con is, now i really have little reason to exalt slam. its better for me to save up to buy what i need.

as for MF. i've said it a hundred times and i'll say it again.

mf on gear forces players to optimize. the existence of MF necessitates GGG to balance drops around MF. dont play MF? fuck you, here have a few wisdoms scraps and t1 waystones. it feels bad.

if you're weak, you're effectively punished for being weak as you cant fit in mf.

mf only serves the players that are using highly efficient builds.

its creating the player gap that is prominent in poe1. i fucking hate that gap. a gap definitely will happen but mf helps make the gap larger.

taking a step back. i really enjoyed my "SSF" experience in campaign. tho it needs more tweaking.

if the drops/crafting is more generous i d be SSF.

ggg please. i now want poe2 to release where players dont feel like theyre forced to trade.

i want to play poe2 "full release" SSF.

So... I think what you're trying to say is: You want drops catered more to our builds and less general drops for trading purposes?

At least, that's what I got out of it.

"

Bacon_Overlord#1834 wrote:

So... I think what you're trying to say is: You want drops catered more to our builds and less general drops for trading purposes?

At least, that's what I got out of it.

He wants Magic Find/Rarity, which influences currency drop rates, eliminated from the game and currency drops rebalanced around SSF play as the expected default, so he can have the fun of slamming his own gear and still get to Endgame. Many longtime ARPG enthusiasts despise trade regardless of how good it is because to them, the entire ARPG Experience is about finding your own loot and making your character an unstoppable ubergod with it.

Example: over the holiday break I rolled my own new crossbow for my Grenadier Pathfinder. my brother found an Advanced Bombard crossbow with +6 to Projectile Skills (and 1-4 added cold damage), which he gave me. Say what one will about the ludicrous overtuning of +Gem level mods (personally I hate it); +6 to Projectile Skills is one of the most valuable mods a crossbow can get. I Regal'd it, got 22 mana gained on killing an enemy. Not great, but mana costs are a real thing in higher-level gameplay and mana on critter death helps keeps things rolling in maps, so I figured "Eh, still worth a shot". Exalted it, got 10-25 added physical damage. Cool! Base phys damage is the engine that drives the weapon, so we're hitting a minimum viable floor for the thing. Just need to try and get the Increased Physical roll and we're golden. Exalted again...7 to Dexterity. Sad Trombone sounds.

Had a crossbow at this point that was, as Jonathan Rogers said, "Almost Good". Had an amazing +Projectile Levels roll, a solid flat phys roll, and three forgettable-to-bad rolls. And I had Chaos Orbs. I could either patch the thing, or I could ruin it forever and scupper my entire investment if I Chaos'd off the +6 Projectile Skills mod. But the odds were in my favor, so click the button............and away goes the pitiful 1-4 flat cold damage, replaced by 76% Increased Physical Damage. Bingo. Had a weapon worth far more than the currency used to create it, and which effortlessly carried the character the rest of the way into endgame. Once I recalibrated to my now gargantuan mana costs and the idea that I only needed one or two sets of grenades to clear a pack, rather than a dozen salvoes.

That's an awesome story I'll remember for a long time. Unremembered: the many times I've regaled/exalted an item only for it to fail completely and wind up doing nothing but costing me useful currency without providing any benefit whatsoever, either turning into regal shards or getting thrown into a stash bin to rot.

Finding a Sapphire ring with 88 life and ~80 total tri-res on it on the ground? Amazing. Being completely unable to patch my resistances at endgame without trading because I need specific resists and randomly slamming gear until I get them is prohibitively expensive no matter how often loot drops? Opposite of amazing.

Seeing a really cool build interaction in this game about creating fun and interesting builds, then realizing it's completely nonviable for SSF because SSF literally cannot make ANY builds due to having to plan around having no access to ANY gear? A fantastic reason to never play SSF - and no, "fixing currency" won't make SSF attractive. does your build want any build-enabling unique item, no matter what that item is? no longer SSF viable, SSF builds need to be functional using white gear or they're not SSF viable.

Path of Exile, in general, is not an SSF-y game. It's designed more towards creativity and expression, and trade is a vital tool for realizing those ambitions. Eliminating trade the way Exsea is backdoor proposing would not make POE2 a better game. It would make POE2 a worse game.