Vision of the game: Singlepayer or Multiplayer?

I think the normal game should stay Multiplayer with Trading etc.

But Solo Self-Found (SSF) should be getting more attention from GGG.

It should be better balanced for solo experience (e.g. give players an automatic 50% Magic Find Buff or something like that). There should also be more drops that are viable for my chosen class and less stuff for other classes, etc.

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MaxDetroit#8188 wrote:

I think the normal game should stay Multiplayer with Trading etc.

But Solo Self-Found (SSF) should be getting more attention from GGG.

It should be better balanced for solo experience (e.g. give players an automatic 50% Magic Find Buff or something like that). There should also be more drops that are viable for my chosen class and less stuff for other classes, etc.

Yeah, I already suggested this. Like: If you play SSF mode, you can't get out of it. You are forced to stay in SSF, but in return, you get WAY more loot, so that you can be self-sufficient.

Whole economy and game in general has been ruined with currency drop affected by magic find.

0 build diversity , because everyone plays those twitch builds, because they can afford to stack magic find + they can efficiently clear juiced maps with +1 k rarity

Rest of people who dont play those builds,cant progress in maps,because they cant afford to replace single stat on their gear with magic find = no drops = no currency to ''craft'' or buy items on PoE2 trade site , because items that would help them move from t10 maps to t15 , costs 30-50 divines.

That's why more and more people are quitting , add on top of that undoable trials and having to max out resistances in acts 4-5-6 not 1 but 3 times...

This looks nothing like game promoted in hype pre-release videos.

My friends and I mapped together and played through most of the campaign in a group, our main issue is the layout of many maps and areas throughout the campaign forces you into tight corridors/choke points. So you end up body-blocking each other pretty badly, it's annoying/dangerous sometimes.
Most areas need to be widened by at least one tile. Between that and Frost Wall somehow being the best way to freeze on Sorc (the most annoying skill for party play ever created) they barely want to play anymore. :(

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Jabletron#5466 wrote:

ARPGs have almost never been balanced around multiplayer. The ability to out-scale the buffs to enemies due to more party members by simply scaling your party more, has always existed. All the way back to Diablo 2.

I don't really mind this relative to how it affects my gameplay. I will basically never group up, so the game being balanced around single player just makes sense for me. And that is probably 95-99% of the playerbase.

Where it can get bad is when the Empyreon-type groups start spamming items into the economy. And that certainly does have an impact on the game. But there's basically nothing you can do about it.

You're never going to get this genre to be multiplayer-dominant, or dependent. There's just no way this playerbase wants to search for and join groups as a predominant way to play - not early, mid, late, or ultra late game.

I think the conversation is okay to have, there's probably tweaks here or there that can help one way or another. But gating content to groups is asking for serious trouble without completely changing genres.

+1 to this.

Incidentally, Chris Wilson talked about this a few years back (on a Baeclast episode, I think?). They were very much of the impression that multiplayer and PvP were crucial elements of Diablo II, and thought they'd be crucial to PoE, but didn't get around to adding robust PvP until the Forsaken Masters league... which flopped hard. Worst performing league in PoE history.

So GGG pulled telemetry, something they'd been avoiding doing (and still don't like doing) to try figuring out what the hell happened, only to discover that only 6% of PoE player base ever joined a party. 94% of PoE's players at that time were playing by themsleves, and I don't think that number has changed much in the years since.

There is something GGG can do about the "Empyreon-type groups" wrecking the trade economy, though: they can provide a properly-balanced SSF option to players who don't otherwise want to be interacting with other players, so that they can still tackle all the game's content without being handicapped by the enormous progression penalty that comes with not trading in a game that's balanced around the assumption that everyone trades.

Remember: 94% of players (circa Forbidden Masters) never partied up, in a game where joining a party, at least temporarily, in an unavoidable step in the process of completing a trade. I don't trade is nearly as popular as GGG keep assuming; it's just made to feel effectively mandatory, which is juist a bottomless well of discontent.

There's a better way, GGG. It doesn't have to be anything as elaborate as Last Epoch's system, either. Just saying.

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ARPGs have almost never been balanced around multiplayer. The ability to out-scale the buffs to enemies due to more party members by simply scaling your party more, has always existed. All the way back to Diablo 2.

Just a remark. Diablo III was super good in terms of multiplayer, and what is interesting, in all its iterations (big updates, addons, patches). D4 for some reason failed miserably in this aspect. As for POE.. always been single player.

Reminding OP that the initial wave of complaints was a lack of offline mode as there is no reason to be online in an arpg. This is a single player genre and this game is as well. Trading is a blight and never a good experience.