How to fix the excessive "admin" involved in endgame grinding

This post is about the excessive "admin" or "project management" that players are required to do as part of endgame mapping, and has a suggestion as to how to fix it.

Basically, In POE 1 we just rolled maps, bought scarabs, and chucked them in the map device. Every map we ran felt relevant and fun. But POE 2 endgame grinding requires too much "admin" - work that feels laborious, that doesn't make you appreciate reward more, but that is compulsory. Here's the issue and what I would do to fix it:

Problem 1: running rewarding (fun) maps requires players to set up towers around an area, which itself requires players to run a lot of maps with no league mechanic and low rewards that aren't fun. Towers also aren't fun because they're a pathway to rewards rather than rewarding in themselves, and because they are small without many monsters.

Problem 2: the infinite atlas requires players to keep track of all of the nodes that they have set up, but as players map their visible atlas area soon becomes absolutely massive with millions of nodes they can run and there is no way to navigate around it or figure out where you should be looking to run your good maps.

Solution to both: the infinite atlas should be replaced with an itemised atlas that is put into a map device that has a certain number of towers, map nodes, citadels, whatever else. This number can be fixed, based on ilvl, or players can roll them. Players insert this into their map device and they can not remove it until all the nodes have been completed. Any node can be completed at any time - in other words players can start with their towers and work from there. Current penalties for dying in maps still apply (I think these are fair).

In the itemised atlas, towers can be made to feel more like real content by being expanded to be closer to the size of citadels and maybe also by receiving a difficulty / reward bonus that increases the more towers in your itemised atlas map that you complete. Maybe they also include a map boss. If you die then the tower shuts down and you can not use it to juice. This makes them more of a focal point rather than admin.

It would not be necessary to make the itemised atlas something that can contribute to juicing (ie by adding mods to the atlas overall). There's no need to give it rarity etc or allow people to add delirium orbs to it or whatever, and if this was possible then juicing might get completely out of control. But, if implemented this idea would make the current map rolling system feel less punishing since if you rolled an okay atlas then you might enjoy running your bad maps more. If this was made an option then special currency like maven chisels could drop from tower bosses bosses to make it possible. The itemised atlas also does not have to be tradeable, it could just be a cheap purchase from a vendor in your hideout to let you continue to play the game, although if this is the case then the number of nodes should be fixed at item level breakpoints.

Wow. You think that stealing Last Epoch end-game and mixing it with POE mapping, by forcing us to micro-manage it was bad idea?

No waaaaay.

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EightInchFloppyDisk#2190 wrote:

Wow. You think that stealing Last Epoch end-game and mixing it with POE mapping, by forcing us to micro-manage it was bad idea?

No waaaaay.

I've never played Last Epoch so I have no idea how it works there.

The idea here is to reduce the need for micro management. You put the tablet in and that's it until you run all the maps, you can't remove it. Then the tablet disappears and you get a new one. They could also be kept small, like 15 nodes all up or something.

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Satricion#4335 wrote:

The idea here is to reduce the need for micro management. You put the tablet in and that's it until you run all the maps, you can't remove it. Then the tablet disappears and you get a new one. They could also be kept small, like 15 nodes all up or something.

It was not end-less. You start in refuge, you fight for some nodes, and then you reset it. Even if you decided to go nuts, and avoid resetting you, you could finish max around 200 maps. And then it would reset anyway.

No loading, no dragging around the map, everything nice and close.
The reset also comes with rewards and so on...

The towers give visibility, and you path around, picking the reward nodes you like only.

This what you see is DELVE implementation of this system, with REWARDS being the league mechanic themselves.

You die - you lose the reward. (this is also stolen)

Last Epoch endgame had flaws, and GGG picked all those flaws to make even more flaws.

A slot machine with another slot machine in it...
And you have to manually pull the lever each time.

Classic.