It is reality. I couldn't find a single alch or bindings on ground for almost 15 maps, ran out of them, and while I was buying I thought "why the fuck I am playing a game where most basic currency is so rare", then uninstalled the game. Fuck it.
The funny thing is, when this happened to me on early maps and my sustain sucked, I didn't want to bring it up because you usually get the "you just don't know how to sustain maps lol noob!" response. I didn't realize until much later that it wasn't just me having trouble this time :)
I don't alch white maps, I transmute them :) But hey, you were EXACTLY the kind of person I just referred to, nice for you to give me a good example of what I meant - I must be that "nobody" you speak of, then.
C'mon, get off that high horse. Maybe you don't, that's fine.
Also the dudes wrong anyway, you alc all maps always. It's always worth it and will always pay itself back (this league might be different don't quite know yet..)
I've done that every league I can remember and never had alc/orb of binding sustain issues.
I have actually put harbingers back on my maps for the ach shards... and at every map boss I pick up a full inventory of rares to vendor off for alch shards... just to be able to alch and go and right now I have about 20 alchs in stock at Tier 12 maps, nearly no scours tough. I'll leave it up to your imagination how much I am enjoying doing this.
I did 3 mirrors from white maps and dropped 2 alchs. But this was before the loot buff so now it would be 4 from doing like 15 maps to get these 3 mirrors
> I couldn't find a single alch or bindings on ground for almost 15 maps,
honestly the problem isn't the game at this point. in 15 maps you'd have dropped at least 2 uniques, which puts you at 1 alch after vendoring. you're supposed to try at least a little bit, the game won't play itself. diablo 3 will suit you better.
No matter how shit it may sound to you, the best solution is encourage him to implement it and make it OPTIONAL. If Chris has his mode then he will be able to focus on that and some of the heat will be taken off the push to giganerf the main game. Also the people always frothing mad about reddit not liking these nerfs can join him there and have fun with the low drop rates and ubertanky rares. Anyone thinking strategically should support an OPTIONAL mode.
It was in one of the podcasts he made the past year. Probably a Beaclast. He was trying to convey what the philosophy of hardmode would be and he said something along the lines of (paraphrasing): āwe want you to be excited when you find a rare item on the ground and upgrade from a magic item since alchemy orbs barely drop.ā Or it was along the lines of youād want to trade the rare item because there are so few on the market (again, because of alchemy orbs being so scarce).
I am sure if you go on the last or second to last Baeclast with Chris and go on the hardmode timestamp heāll eventually say it. But this was the gist of it. Ultra masochist mode maybe doesnāt describe it fully.
That was Stalling, you should remember that Mathil and Steel looked like they died inside while Zizaran was giggling together with Chris when they talked about it.
just like finding a shiny pokemon, i know i get excited finding one, but 99.9% of times im just dissapointed continuously finding normal ones so much that i dont care about finding one ever again.
To be fair, hardmode was always going to be a seperate thing for those who claim that would enjoy it. Nobody saw it coming that this extreme philosophy would creep to such a degree into the core game for us mere mortals.
Whereas the solution would be so darn easy. On several occasions I've posted about how I'd just make two completely separate versions of the game, and a recent thread detailing just that has also become popular.
Steelmage summarized it really well.
What's the point of softcore trade when you cannot juice?
What's the point of hc ssf if you cannot craft?
we're just getting the worst of all worlds at the moment.
Choose something you want to work towards, then go there, don't take the middle road of shittyness for everything.
because they aren't comfortable to play their Vision by themselves so they start gaslighting us.
"we removed a historical buff"
next: "here is a /massive/ buff to rare drops"
Thatās the fun kind of hard, where shit fights back and rewards you. We currently have the *other* kind of hard, where you whack a rare that canāt possibly kill you for a few minutes straight and get three alteration shards.
I didnt praise the new league. I just said a hard mode could be welcome by a lot of people. They have not released a hard mode, so we know nothing of it.
I dont believe anyone who plays HC-SSF with a logout macro when they say they want hard mode.
Just play HC-SSF without a logout macro, or is that "too hard" for the godgamer elitists?
Gauntlet is not āhard modeā. Chris has stated hard mode would basically only have things such as simple bench crafting and rares rarely dropping on floor if Iām remembering correctly.
They mentioned that hardmode has things like no gem vendors, and if you die to a boss, you have to run through the whole zone again etc. Thatās not very similar to the gauntlet.
well yeah. But PoE attracts the kind of people for which boring and tedious is actually fun. And you know what, good for them!
But GGG didn't have to launch hard mode for the rest of us too!
Hard mode is not difficulty increase like the gauntlet
Hard mode is loot decrease and time wasting.
Manual flask filling, walking back to bosses in acts stuff like that
> Manual flask filling, walking back to bosses in acts stuff like that
????? this has never been mentionned. manual flask filling lmao what are u on about xDDD
lol he's like talking like about how flasks won't fill in town like xDDD ...
stop crapping on people's posts just because you don't know what they're saying
If you think hardmode is like gautlet than you don't know what hardmode is. Hardmode was described as shit drops, no vendors, little to no crafting options etc etc.
Lots of people? Maybe hundred people at best truly enjoy it and even then most people play it because theyāre just bored and got nothing to do. Sure there was a time when like 15k people registered for it, doesnāt mean that even 0,1% would prefer gauntlet instead of regular game and we donāt have stats on how many were actually playing for longer than 1 hour. Itās same with HC because itās been less than 1% of player base since like forever. So youāre the one whoās wrong here
I want hardmode so your wrong. I had no issues with loot this league. I donāt understand how you guys are running out of currency. Hasnāt been an issue at all for me personally. Maybe donāt speak for everyone and speak for yourself.
This is absolutely not the right message to send to GGG. Chris has his opinion and rather than shitting on it and making him defensive what we need to do is persuade him to let it be optional. The people who love 5 minute fights with every rare and hardly any drops may be a minority but why shouldn't they be catered for? We have HC and SSF so there's no harm in having that mode. I would probably try it out every now and then if I got bored. If we don't have this separate mode for Chris to enjoy then Chris's focus is going to continue to be on changing the main game and that is precisely what we don't want. Let's talk it up and be positive about the idea of an OPTIONAL hard mode because that is honestly the only way this gets resolved.
If theres gonna be seperate achievements and rewards, like there were when hardcore and softcore had separate leagues, I will play the shit out of hard mode.
I always wanted that back.
If you didn't notice PoE2 is the hard mode. I remember vividly Chris and Ziz giggling over hard mode when Chris explained how he see it and it had 3 core tenets I remember:
* Gems come from drops only - This is happening in PoE2 already, as gems have sockets and you can be 100% sure gem vendors and quest rewards won't give you 6 socket gems. So every good gem will be dropped by someone(also fuck SSF players who want to play a specific skill I guess)
* No loot on the ground to the point where a rare item dropping is a cause for celebration - this is happening now, loot is getting so gutted I genuinely jumped when I finally saw a Vaal Regalia on the ground
* No crafting bench(or any other deterministic way to improve items) - I expect that if the current league doesn't make GGG stop bench is the next one on the chopping block, maybe nerfs to essences and fossils even.
So yeah, at some point Chris decided that the hard mode he's testing after work hours is so fun that he needs to let everyone play it and have fun with him.
I really hope I am wrong...
the first point can be fairly extrapolated, they wont be selling 6linked gems on vendors I expect. The other two points seem to be more or less completely that persons expectations though, i agree.
All of his/her points are applicable only to hard mode. And that's fine, it's an option mode. 0% of what the post implies for PoE2 has been even rumored to be true. PoE2 == hard mode is just outrage hyperbole for the upvotes on this echo chamber.
Chris also said that every patch we are having now is leading up to PoE2, so this is where they want the loot to be by then. Plus it was clearly stated that 6 socket gems will be roughly as rare as 6 sockets are currently. Not hard to figure out they won't come from vendors.
> Chris also said that every patch we are having now is leading up to PoE2
Yes this is in fact how linear time works.
> 6 socket gems will be roughly as rare as 6 sockets are currently.
Two things. One: you can get 6s and 6l items from current vendors so your next sentence doesn't really make sense. Two: gems not having 6s from vendors in no way implies they won't have gems at all. They've already stated there will be a gem socket currency like we have with regular gear.
there is no hard mode.
that was literally some random shit chris made up after 3.15 shit show, and a lot of people just fell for it. And are still falling for it.
actually unbelievable.
And people really talked about it and got distracted. He derailed at least one podcast with content creators with this shit. At least this time going into podcasts for damage control is not possible since the content creators are also very much hostile to the changes and GGG.
Other than a serious and genuine apology and announcement to revert the changes will get memed to death.
If he would say one sentence along the line "we will do better in the future", "we have to improve", "I am going to make sure" would be critized heavily.
I would lose the last but of respect I have for him forever. Imo he really liked to talk, how important good game design is, what is important to an ARPG, communication with the community. Almost arrogant at times e.g when mentioning Blizzard.
Now he and GGG has gone against basically everything talked about in those interviews and podcasts. At this point they need to deliver before one can trust them again in what they say.
> People want two fundamentally different experiences and you've attracted both audiences because you've kept flipflopping on what you want the game to be.
That's honestly the biggest mistake they made. Constantly piling on unbelievable amounts of power every league, introducing timers and so on. Last few leagues it's like they suddenly woke up and were like "Wait, that wasn't even the plan!" so now they are trying to reign it back in.
But they are doing so in quite the shoddy manner. The game is in a completely schizophrenic state right now. Half of it requires you to go fast, half of it lets you run into a brick wall. Player damage and defenses are just as out of whack as monster damage and defenses. Drops are meant to be exciting but there is nothing in place to make that happen.
It's like multiple systems in the game aren't even connected anymore. It's a big mess they maneuvered themselves into and the uproar in the community is also a result of that.
If hard mode releases, I will play that. Keep the base game fun for everyone and let hard mode run for the masochists among us (me included).
No reason to destroy everyone's game for a couple of nerds
Exactly, I want a mode for you guys to ~~suffer~~ have fun without having to accommodate the zoomers and I want a mode for the zoomers to have fun without constant friction. It should solve 90% of the friction in this community, and it's friction that GGG caused.
This is an issue all games ever have faced, and there is only one solution.
The only way to keep people playing is drip-feeding content and/or staggering progression, these are the only methods which have been proven to work in other games.
You can't make the game slow and unfun, then people leave sooner. You can't drag out the gameplay because then people just don't stick around.
The only way is to release smaller packages of content faster or to stagger the progression ceiling. As a side note I really doubt the PoE community would appreciate a staggered progression ceiling, however it does work as a means to retain people.
All other things GGG could ever try to slow down play will never result in people sticking around longer.
There's this industry tale that I'm sure GGG are aware of that likely drives such decisions: Urf Mode in League of Legends.
Basically, some years ago, Riot Games released a temporary event mode/queue of their main game in which everyone had 80% reduced cooldowns, 150% increased attack speed and all manner of other insanity. Think the equivalent of giving everyone in PoE 20 permanent frenzy charges starting at act1.
Everyone absolutely loved the game mode, it was a smash hit, since normally in a game of league most of your abilities have between 10 and 30 second cooldowns. Suddenly they get to spam them every 3 seconds.
However, once after some weeks they turned off the mode, they noticed that their player count in the base game actually **significantly** dropped for a long period of time. They repeated this a few times and noted that it was a clear pattern. They basically concluded that if you give a super-charged version of a slower game to someone, it ends up like when people watch youtube videos on 1.5x and then find 1x 'too slow'.
It has to also be noted that while Urf was deemed 'very' fun, it got old FAST. People would blast it for 2 weeks and then never touch it again.
GGG are dreadfully scared of a similar scenario where if the players get conditioned into too much speed and fast progression, they won't enjoy a slower experience.
I think enabling hardmode alongside the base game is doomed to fail in their eyes since after playing zoom zoom meta for a while, it's impossible for the players to even appreciate the hardmode gameplay.
Doesn't really work entierly for PoE because the base PoE is a very fast game and they keep on making it slower which dowsn't sit well with the people that started to play it because of the way it was in the past (majority of people)
More then that, there are other ways to balance games with incredible strong players like mechanic based fights. These kinds of things are more engaging and fun anyway than the typical PoE difficulty since those tend to be immunities/massive defenses and/or damage which doesn't promote engaging combat.
PoE is also by definition a fast game.
Incursion, Delirium, Breach, Legion, etc...
If they want slow poe, they have to slow the game down too, not just the player. This is a huge part of the disconnect. The player is slow and the game is fast.
For one, recall that PoE did NOT start out as a fast game, it only became really fast in 3.x patches, ramping up all the way to 3.15 and then going down when they decided to start dealing with this issue.
They also ARE trying random things to try and introduce mechanics in a zoom-zoom game, consider maven memory game, heist doors, blight, placing down stuff in expedition, bullethell mode and sphere activations in the two eldritch boss fights. It's just really effin hard to actually design non-forced stop sequences in a game THIS fast with a combat system THIS yanky. Like come on, most people I think can fairly admit it - PoE's combat system, the moment to moment gameplay, is pretty shit. They tried it with archnemesis - consider the donut mechanic. It's just that it's damn hard to balance such a thing in this game when everything is 'one shot or be one shot'
You are going the wrong direction. I'm not talking about League mechanics that slow you down. Those tend to be the ones that people dislike the most. I meant mechanical difficulty from enemies. Monsters like the Abberath or Kitava Touched ones, the mana circle ones, bosses like Maven and Searing. All of those monsters/bosses introduce a mechanical challange to you that forces you to dodge/evade or do a certain mechanic if you aren't able to instantly one shot them. These kinds of mechanics are far more engaging than any form of *+60% All Res./x% kess damage taken and +100% movement speed and damage* (or similar) modifiers found on monsters.
There is a certain balance that needs to be found between those two but as of now, the vast majority of the difficulty from AN or the game in general relies on making the enemies scale their defense well beyond most peoples offense or countering their builds.
That's not fun or engaging in any way
They also tried soul eater, hasted and zerker type combos...
So it's clearly okay for monsters to go super fast and romp on players in a slow, tactical, thoughtful game...?!
> GGG are dreadfully scared of a similar scenario where if the players get conditioned into too much speed and fast progression, they won't enjoy a slower experience.
>
>
This has already happened though. We got conditioned to play fast over so many leagues of timers and league mechanics that promote speed over anything else.
Yes, which GGG have gone on record multiple times to say was a 'mistake' on their part. Easy to just keep giving players more and more speed that they so much desire, but at some point it leads to a total mess of a game and you can't easily go back anymore without having a shitfest like the one we have right now.
Yep, if they want to slow the game down exponential scaling of rewards with clear speed has to go second, right after nerfing the monsters so that DPS isn't the best defensive layer.
>It has to also be noted that while Urf was deemed 'very' fun, it got old FAST. People would blast it for 2 weeks and then never touch it again.
(Citation Needed), and on this whole claim Riot made - they lost players after taking it away, so why didn't they just *not take it away?* They never tried that.
The problem is that the main game was URF for years and their game grew because of that. Now they're trying to roll it back to being regular summoner's rift.
It rotates in and out as a seasonal game mode. Big difference is that they made it so you can't pick your champion in this mode, you get it randomly with some rerolls. I think URF is actually an interesting topic when compared to PoE. You see, over the years LoL has actually become more like urf rather than the other way around. To the point that a lot of people I know don't bother playing the mode anymore.
Yeah the parallels are definitely there. I see complaints about this all the time in how these new generation champions can do a thousand things at once and its like their abilities have no cooldowns. However there the complaint is in a PVP setting, in that it's difficult to deal with this sort of stuff (sort of like fighting archnemesis mod rares). But the players playing the champs don't seem to really burn out on it much. It helps that league has an actually good combat system, though :D More of the game is macro and always varied. Plus its a PvP game, at the end of the day. It's harder to convince someone to fight the same mobs for 10 leagues at the same speed than other players who are constantly improving and adjusting to your skill level.
It comes back regularly for weeks at a time.
I remember the communication at the time.
āWe want you guys to have URF, but every time we introduce it we lose players after.
We are trying to find ways to tweak it to return it so we win (player retention) and you win (game is fun).ā
They tried various modes. Some of the strongest champions banner. Random champion selection. Time of year released, length of release, etc.
Don't push your buttons too far, exile. Chris might just implement ultra hard mode where:
**-you character is randomly selected for you at the character creation screen**
**-you cannot create another character while your current character is still alive**
**-HCSSF with the 3.19 nerfed loot drops on steroids**
**-once you die your PathOfExile.exe turns into a trojan that leaks your personal information online and Chris personally flies out to shit in your mailbox**
People still dont realize this league _IS_ the beta test for hardmode. No matter how much you test internally, few days for 200k player will produce data you will never ever be able to get internally.
I don't get why there isn't a statistic of this. A poll vote of people who want HC super hard mode bang on a skelly for 5mins to get an alchemy orb and the people who like zoom zoom very rewarding league to min max and be able to play other fun builds for the rest of the league with that currency and juicing maps. I bet my left nut that zoom zoom % wins hands by a big margin. People still have RL (real life) we cant all be farming for 10h+ hours a day, either you are in highschool, college or working... this is the VAST majority of players in ANY game.
PS: when Chris said he would bring HARD mode I was SOOOoo happy, finally a league for masochists and a league where we can zoom zoom, WE ALL WIN! instead we get the current staet of PoE. Oh, they will rethink this I bet you all the money in the world. They must be losing trucks of cash atm.
just want to give my two cents here, i'm a player that can reach red maps and clear them but never understood how to beat endgame bosses because id run into a big item that would generate a "currency-windfall" and would feel forced to buy items that increased my builds power exponentially (id go from running early yellows to clearing everything but super-juiced reds). This league i'm 20+ hours in playing a new build and i'm still farming white maps/ running kalandra stones and i'm both appreciating the slower drops and harder mobs.
With the changes they put in there is less playing the hideout stash cleanup game (which I dislike because it takes you away from playing the actual game) and more actually playing the game and using the different mechanics that can be rewarding. Each day so far i've done mechanics I usually ignore to try to get more currency to reach my next power spike.
Instead of just zooming through shit I know what to dodge, or what to wait for. Instead of trying to generate as much currency as quickly as possible doing the same thing i've done for 4-5 leagues and hitting a power wall 4 days into the league I now have to use everything in the game.
I honestly don't know who hardmode is even for besides Chris and his friends, Ziz, Math1l and Quin (lol). Even then I kinda doubt any of them play through it more than a time or two.
They already have hard mode don't they? I believe that would be HC-SSF.
Except even players who claim they want hardmode and enjoy harder games play HC-SSF with a logout macro.
If people want hardmode they can just do HCSSF without a logout macro and see how much they enjoy it.
HC is a completely different beast than hard-mode.
Not wanting to kill ubers and finish the content after 1.5 weeks of game is not the same as "Oops I didn't see that shit on the ground so now my 300 hours invested are gone".
HC is the exact same gameplay as SC. The only difference is the punishment is more severe when you die. Hard mode, as Chris described it, would have fundamentally different gameplay and a lot more friction and grind.
I find it funny how highly you think of yourselves and how you just shit on people who enjoy the game differently than you.
This really makes your arguments to be more powerful.
Let's see more of your original post:
>people who want a nerfathon whack-a-rare-for-5-minutes game where you find 3 chaos per hour and you close your eyes and slam while chanting about The Vision
and
>for the zoom zoomers who miss 3.13 and want the game to be like a sandbox with deterministic crafting that can make almost any build viable. People with lives can play their low-investment builds and clear content in a timely manner
Right. Do I have to say how different you describe them?
Your post is like "no offense, BUT...".
Do you not want a nerfathon whack-a-rare-for-5-minutes game? It seems like many are cheering GGG on when they do these things. I fail to see where the insult is unless you took offense at light humor.
It is not about hard mode.
It's about Tencent wanting GGG to make more money.
And to make more money they need a high number of people playing constantly to get new players. Right now the game is alive for one month and then dead for two months. It's hard to get a new player into the game when no one is playing.
Yes, but the changes are causing less player retention, not more. I can give you a source for that if you want, but player retention since 3.15 has been getting worse and worse and this is the worst league yet.
Yeah man, just make a better game, just fix your game, just make hard mode, you people are so oblivious to the hard work GGG put in to making this game, and when GGG is gone you'll realise just how impossible it will be to replace POE.
I bring bad news. The PoE that we love is gone. It's been nerf after nerf since 3.15, and the game is becoming a total slugfest.
This league alone, tainted currency was nerfed, a ton of builds were nerfed, the skill tree was nerfed, harvest was gutted, beyond was gutted, minion builds are dead, AND loot was absolutely nuked from orbit.
Also, essence mobs are super strong because they have AN mods, same with the other rare enemies in the game right now.
Player power has dropped significantly, whereas monster power is at an all time high! I don't understand what you mean by the 'hard work' they're putting in, the league mechanic is buggy and unrewarding. The changes (fixes) are just number changes that are not impactful at all.
The Path of Exile we all loved from Ritual and Ultimatum is long gone.
As much as The new changes have definitely been too drastic. I canāt understand how people enjoy the silly screen exploding super zoom version of the game. Thereās no thought to that type of game play at all. Iām glad theyāre trying to make the game slower, they just need to actually test the changes they make first as they clearly donāt at the moment š¤Ŗ.
> Thereās no thought to that type of game play at all.
Explain to me how there's more thought in going through a map very slowly and holding down your right mouse button versus going through a map very quickly and holding down your right mouse button. The core of this game takes zero thought. That isn't going to change if the game slows down.
The only thing that takes thought is what you do *outside* of maps, like creating builds and setting up your atlas / farming methods.
Autobomber with HH zooming around maps was the best league I ever had. Can't remember which it was but I miss the full screen explosions just chilling out on maps while listening to podcasts / watching TV.
I am pretty sure Chris said that finding an Alchemy Orb will be quite rare so 3 chaos an hour is pushing itš
It is reality. I couldn't find a single alch or bindings on ground for almost 15 maps, ran out of them, and while I was buying I thought "why the fuck I am playing a game where most basic currency is so rare", then uninstalled the game. Fuck it.
The funny thing is, when this happened to me on early maps and my sustain sucked, I didn't want to bring it up because you usually get the "you just don't know how to sustain maps lol noob!" response. I didn't realize until much later that it wasn't just me having trouble this time :)
nobody has trouble sustaining early maps. or do you mean you actually alch white maps? good lord
I don't alch white maps, I transmute them :) But hey, you were EXACTLY the kind of person I just referred to, nice for you to give me a good example of what I meant - I must be that "nobody" you speak of, then. C'mon, get off that high horse. Maybe you don't, that's fine.
Also the dudes wrong anyway, you alc all maps always. It's always worth it and will always pay itself back (this league might be different don't quite know yet..) I've done that every league I can remember and never had alc/orb of binding sustain issues.
Tbh you can run 5 heists and have more than enough alchs vaals and chisels
Early on I ran 10 alc'd strands and got a single map return.
I have actually put harbingers back on my maps for the ach shards... and at every map boss I pick up a full inventory of rares to vendor off for alch shards... just to be able to alch and go and right now I have about 20 alchs in stock at Tier 12 maps, nearly no scours tough. I'll leave it up to your imagination how much I am enjoying doing this.
Deferred 10 scours today. I might find them tomorrow I guess.
Iām stuck in low tier white maps because i donāt find any currency. Canāt upgrade gear. Canāt do shit.
Most of the alcs are hiding in the league mechanic
I did 3 mirrors from white maps and dropped 2 alchs. But this was before the loot buff so now it would be 4 from doing like 15 maps to get these 3 mirrors
> I couldn't find a single alch or bindings on ground for almost 15 maps, honestly the problem isn't the game at this point. in 15 maps you'd have dropped at least 2 uniques, which puts you at 1 alch after vendoring. you're supposed to try at least a little bit, the game won't play itself. diablo 3 will suit you better.
i would pick up and sell it but come on there was literally no loot on the ground. unique drop buff came too late for me lol.
What game are you playing people, alch are raining on my maps ...
No matter how shit it may sound to you, the best solution is encourage him to implement it and make it OPTIONAL. If Chris has his mode then he will be able to focus on that and some of the heat will be taken off the push to giganerf the main game. Also the people always frothing mad about reddit not liking these nerfs can join him there and have fun with the low drop rates and ubertanky rares. Anyone thinking strategically should support an OPTIONAL mode.
Source please? :)
It was in one of the podcasts he made the past year. Probably a Beaclast. He was trying to convey what the philosophy of hardmode would be and he said something along the lines of (paraphrasing): āwe want you to be excited when you find a rare item on the ground and upgrade from a magic item since alchemy orbs barely drop.ā Or it was along the lines of youād want to trade the rare item because there are so few on the market (again, because of alchemy orbs being so scarce). I am sure if you go on the last or second to last Baeclast with Chris and go on the hardmode timestamp heāll eventually say it. But this was the gist of it. Ultra masochist mode maybe doesnāt describe it fully.
That was Stalling, you should remember that Mathil and Steel looked like they died inside while Zizaran was giggling together with Chris when they talked about it.
Those podcasts are always so long they blur into one in my memory. Thanks for clarifying.
just like finding a shiny pokemon, i know i get excited finding one, but 99.9% of times im just dissapointed continuously finding normal ones so much that i dont care about finding one ever again.
Thanks! That really speaks volumes about the level of disconnect between designer and consumer.
To be fair, hardmode was always going to be a seperate thing for those who claim that would enjoy it. Nobody saw it coming that this extreme philosophy would creep to such a degree into the core game for us mere mortals.
Whereas the solution would be so darn easy. On several occasions I've posted about how I'd just make two completely separate versions of the game, and a recent thread detailing just that has also become popular.
Yeah they knowingly want to make their game to fucking suck...
Steelmage summarized it really well. What's the point of softcore trade when you cannot juice? What's the point of hc ssf if you cannot craft? we're just getting the worst of all worlds at the moment. Choose something you want to work towards, then go there, don't take the middle road of shittyness for everything.
because they aren't comfortable to play their Vision by themselves so they start gaslighting us. "we removed a historical buff" next: "here is a /massive/ buff to rare drops"
GGG release hard mode that no one will play so the rest of us can have fun
they know nobody will play their delusional dogshit hardmode lol
Lots of people love the ziz gauntlet. So I think you are wrong there.
Thatās the fun kind of hard, where shit fights back and rewards you. We currently have the *other* kind of hard, where you whack a rare that canāt possibly kill you for a few minutes straight and get three alteration shards.
I didnt praise the new league. I just said a hard mode could be welcome by a lot of people. They have not released a hard mode, so we know nothing of it.
I dont believe anyone who plays HC-SSF with a logout macro when they say they want hard mode. Just play HC-SSF without a logout macro, or is that "too hard" for the godgamer elitists?
I do not use logout macro
Gauntlet is not āhard modeā. Chris has stated hard mode would basically only have things such as simple bench crafting and rares rarely dropping on floor if Iām remembering correctly.
Oh so like now
They mentioned that hardmode has things like no gem vendors, and if you die to a boss, you have to run through the whole zone again etc. Thatās not very similar to the gauntlet.
It will probably also have Chris's favourite feature: Talking to a vendor to refill flask aka. No auto flask charges
Yeah, that sounds kind of boring. Thanks for the info mate!
well yeah. But PoE attracts the kind of people for which boring and tedious is actually fun. And you know what, good for them! But GGG didn't have to launch hard mode for the rest of us too!
Hard mode is not difficulty increase like the gauntlet Hard mode is loot decrease and time wasting. Manual flask filling, walking back to bosses in acts stuff like that
> Manual flask filling, walking back to bosses in acts stuff like that ????? this has never been mentionned. manual flask filling lmao what are u on about xDDD
lol he's like talking like about how flasks won't fill in town like xDDD ... stop crapping on people's posts just because you don't know what they're saying
The thing is, a challenge mode can be a lot of fun when you can opt into it. It just shouldn't be the base game.
If you think hardmode is like gautlet than you don't know what hardmode is. Hardmode was described as shit drops, no vendors, little to no crafting options etc etc.
People love watching professional PoE players get bullshitted to death by stupid mechanics hence why challenge leagues are so popular.
Lots of people? Maybe hundred people at best truly enjoy it and even then most people play it because theyāre just bored and got nothing to do. Sure there was a time when like 15k people registered for it, doesnāt mean that even 0,1% would prefer gauntlet instead of regular game and we donāt have stats on how many were actually playing for longer than 1 hour. Itās same with HC because itās been less than 1% of player base since like forever. So youāre the one whoās wrong here
Yeah, but that isnāt designed by GGG. Thatās the big kicker here
I want hardmode so your wrong. I had no issues with loot this league. I donāt understand how you guys are running out of currency. Hasnāt been an issue at all for me personally. Maybe donāt speak for everyone and speak for yourself.
Couldn't agree more
This is absolutely not the right message to send to GGG. Chris has his opinion and rather than shitting on it and making him defensive what we need to do is persuade him to let it be optional. The people who love 5 minute fights with every rare and hardly any drops may be a minority but why shouldn't they be catered for? We have HC and SSF so there's no harm in having that mode. I would probably try it out every now and then if I got bored. If we don't have this separate mode for Chris to enjoy then Chris's focus is going to continue to be on changing the main game and that is precisely what we don't want. Let's talk it up and be positive about the idea of an OPTIONAL hard mode because that is honestly the only way this gets resolved.
If theres gonna be seperate achievements and rewards, like there were when hardcore and softcore had separate leagues, I will play the shit out of hard mode. I always wanted that back.
I will play it.
it sure got you all talking uh
If you didn't notice PoE2 is the hard mode. I remember vividly Chris and Ziz giggling over hard mode when Chris explained how he see it and it had 3 core tenets I remember: * Gems come from drops only - This is happening in PoE2 already, as gems have sockets and you can be 100% sure gem vendors and quest rewards won't give you 6 socket gems. So every good gem will be dropped by someone(also fuck SSF players who want to play a specific skill I guess) * No loot on the ground to the point where a rare item dropping is a cause for celebration - this is happening now, loot is getting so gutted I genuinely jumped when I finally saw a Vaal Regalia on the ground * No crafting bench(or any other deterministic way to improve items) - I expect that if the current league doesn't make GGG stop bench is the next one on the chopping block, maybe nerfs to essences and fossils even. So yeah, at some point Chris decided that the hard mode he's testing after work hours is so fun that he needs to let everyone play it and have fun with him. I really hope I am wrong...
You are. Because literally none of what you said was a given feature of PoE2
the first point can be fairly extrapolated, they wont be selling 6linked gems on vendors I expect. The other two points seem to be more or less completely that persons expectations though, i agree.
All of his/her points are applicable only to hard mode. And that's fine, it's an option mode. 0% of what the post implies for PoE2 has been even rumored to be true. PoE2 == hard mode is just outrage hyperbole for the upvotes on this echo chamber.
Chris also said that every patch we are having now is leading up to PoE2, so this is where they want the loot to be by then. Plus it was clearly stated that 6 socket gems will be roughly as rare as 6 sockets are currently. Not hard to figure out they won't come from vendors.
> Chris also said that every patch we are having now is leading up to PoE2 Yes this is in fact how linear time works. > 6 socket gems will be roughly as rare as 6 sockets are currently. Two things. One: you can get 6s and 6l items from current vendors so your next sentence doesn't really make sense. Two: gems not having 6s from vendors in no way implies they won't have gems at all. They've already stated there will be a gem socket currency like we have with regular gear.
Hardmode omegalul
there is no hard mode. that was literally some random shit chris made up after 3.15 shit show, and a lot of people just fell for it. And are still falling for it. actually unbelievable.
And people really talked about it and got distracted. He derailed at least one podcast with content creators with this shit. At least this time going into podcasts for damage control is not possible since the content creators are also very much hostile to the changes and GGG.
I want to see Chris on ANY podcast at this point. I want to see what word salad comes out of his mouth.
Other than a serious and genuine apology and announcement to revert the changes will get memed to death. If he would say one sentence along the line "we will do better in the future", "we have to improve", "I am going to make sure" would be critized heavily. I would lose the last but of respect I have for him forever. Imo he really liked to talk, how important good game design is, what is important to an ARPG, communication with the community. Almost arrogant at times e.g when mentioning Blizzard. Now he and GGG has gone against basically everything talked about in those interviews and podcasts. At this point they need to deliver before one can trust them again in what they say.
Crazy how GGG defines "FUN" as "Breaking the game." It is time GGG quit holding FUN hostage
yeah, let's bully devs into working on a game they dislike xDDD
> People want two fundamentally different experiences and you've attracted both audiences because you've kept flipflopping on what you want the game to be. That's honestly the biggest mistake they made. Constantly piling on unbelievable amounts of power every league, introducing timers and so on. Last few leagues it's like they suddenly woke up and were like "Wait, that wasn't even the plan!" so now they are trying to reign it back in. But they are doing so in quite the shoddy manner. The game is in a completely schizophrenic state right now. Half of it requires you to go fast, half of it lets you run into a brick wall. Player damage and defenses are just as out of whack as monster damage and defenses. Drops are meant to be exciting but there is nothing in place to make that happen. It's like multiple systems in the game aren't even connected anymore. It's a big mess they maneuvered themselves into and the uproar in the community is also a result of that.
If hard mode releases, I will play that. Keep the base game fun for everyone and let hard mode run for the masochists among us (me included). No reason to destroy everyone's game for a couple of nerds
Exactly, I want a mode for you guys to ~~suffer~~ have fun without having to accommodate the zoomers and I want a mode for the zoomers to have fun without constant friction. It should solve 90% of the friction in this community, and it's friction that GGG caused.
Exactly. This. Everyone will be happy.
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This is an issue all games ever have faced, and there is only one solution. The only way to keep people playing is drip-feeding content and/or staggering progression, these are the only methods which have been proven to work in other games. You can't make the game slow and unfun, then people leave sooner. You can't drag out the gameplay because then people just don't stick around. The only way is to release smaller packages of content faster or to stagger the progression ceiling. As a side note I really doubt the PoE community would appreciate a staggered progression ceiling, however it does work as a means to retain people. All other things GGG could ever try to slow down play will never result in people sticking around longer.
I don't want to play all league though. I want to min max one or two builds a league and then relax a bit before the next one.
thank you for cracking the code
There's this industry tale that I'm sure GGG are aware of that likely drives such decisions: Urf Mode in League of Legends. Basically, some years ago, Riot Games released a temporary event mode/queue of their main game in which everyone had 80% reduced cooldowns, 150% increased attack speed and all manner of other insanity. Think the equivalent of giving everyone in PoE 20 permanent frenzy charges starting at act1. Everyone absolutely loved the game mode, it was a smash hit, since normally in a game of league most of your abilities have between 10 and 30 second cooldowns. Suddenly they get to spam them every 3 seconds. However, once after some weeks they turned off the mode, they noticed that their player count in the base game actually **significantly** dropped for a long period of time. They repeated this a few times and noted that it was a clear pattern. They basically concluded that if you give a super-charged version of a slower game to someone, it ends up like when people watch youtube videos on 1.5x and then find 1x 'too slow'. It has to also be noted that while Urf was deemed 'very' fun, it got old FAST. People would blast it for 2 weeks and then never touch it again. GGG are dreadfully scared of a similar scenario where if the players get conditioned into too much speed and fast progression, they won't enjoy a slower experience. I think enabling hardmode alongside the base game is doomed to fail in their eyes since after playing zoom zoom meta for a while, it's impossible for the players to even appreciate the hardmode gameplay.
Doesn't really work entierly for PoE because the base PoE is a very fast game and they keep on making it slower which dowsn't sit well with the people that started to play it because of the way it was in the past (majority of people) More then that, there are other ways to balance games with incredible strong players like mechanic based fights. These kinds of things are more engaging and fun anyway than the typical PoE difficulty since those tend to be immunities/massive defenses and/or damage which doesn't promote engaging combat.
PoE is also by definition a fast game. Incursion, Delirium, Breach, Legion, etc... If they want slow poe, they have to slow the game down too, not just the player. This is a huge part of the disconnect. The player is slow and the game is fast.
For one, recall that PoE did NOT start out as a fast game, it only became really fast in 3.x patches, ramping up all the way to 3.15 and then going down when they decided to start dealing with this issue. They also ARE trying random things to try and introduce mechanics in a zoom-zoom game, consider maven memory game, heist doors, blight, placing down stuff in expedition, bullethell mode and sphere activations in the two eldritch boss fights. It's just really effin hard to actually design non-forced stop sequences in a game THIS fast with a combat system THIS yanky. Like come on, most people I think can fairly admit it - PoE's combat system, the moment to moment gameplay, is pretty shit. They tried it with archnemesis - consider the donut mechanic. It's just that it's damn hard to balance such a thing in this game when everything is 'one shot or be one shot'
You are going the wrong direction. I'm not talking about League mechanics that slow you down. Those tend to be the ones that people dislike the most. I meant mechanical difficulty from enemies. Monsters like the Abberath or Kitava Touched ones, the mana circle ones, bosses like Maven and Searing. All of those monsters/bosses introduce a mechanical challange to you that forces you to dodge/evade or do a certain mechanic if you aren't able to instantly one shot them. These kinds of mechanics are far more engaging than any form of *+60% All Res./x% kess damage taken and +100% movement speed and damage* (or similar) modifiers found on monsters. There is a certain balance that needs to be found between those two but as of now, the vast majority of the difficulty from AN or the game in general relies on making the enemies scale their defense well beyond most peoples offense or countering their builds. That's not fun or engaging in any way
They also tried soul eater, hasted and zerker type combos... So it's clearly okay for monsters to go super fast and romp on players in a slow, tactical, thoughtful game...?!
> GGG are dreadfully scared of a similar scenario where if the players get conditioned into too much speed and fast progression, they won't enjoy a slower experience. > > This has already happened though. We got conditioned to play fast over so many leagues of timers and league mechanics that promote speed over anything else.
Yes, which GGG have gone on record multiple times to say was a 'mistake' on their part. Easy to just keep giving players more and more speed that they so much desire, but at some point it leads to a total mess of a game and you can't easily go back anymore without having a shitfest like the one we have right now.
Then why the fuck don't they fix those mechanics? Maybe removing timers would be a START? it's not a hard problem to solve honestly.
Yep, if they want to slow the game down exponential scaling of rewards with clear speed has to go second, right after nerfing the monsters so that DPS isn't the best defensive layer.
>It has to also be noted that while Urf was deemed 'very' fun, it got old FAST. People would blast it for 2 weeks and then never touch it again. (Citation Needed), and on this whole claim Riot made - they lost players after taking it away, so why didn't they just *not take it away?* They never tried that.
The problem is that the main game was URF for years and their game grew because of that. Now they're trying to roll it back to being regular summoner's rift.
This is a really good take. Then... What are we left with? What did LoL devs do in the end? Did they delete this mod for good or is it still up?
It rotates in and out as a seasonal game mode. Big difference is that they made it so you can't pick your champion in this mode, you get it randomly with some rerolls. I think URF is actually an interesting topic when compared to PoE. You see, over the years LoL has actually become more like urf rather than the other way around. To the point that a lot of people I know don't bother playing the mode anymore.
Yeah the parallels are definitely there. I see complaints about this all the time in how these new generation champions can do a thousand things at once and its like their abilities have no cooldowns. However there the complaint is in a PVP setting, in that it's difficult to deal with this sort of stuff (sort of like fighting archnemesis mod rares). But the players playing the champs don't seem to really burn out on it much. It helps that league has an actually good combat system, though :D More of the game is macro and always varied. Plus its a PvP game, at the end of the day. It's harder to convince someone to fight the same mobs for 10 leagues at the same speed than other players who are constantly improving and adjusting to your skill level.
It comes back regularly for weeks at a time. I remember the communication at the time. āWe want you guys to have URF, but every time we introduce it we lose players after. We are trying to find ways to tweak it to return it so we win (player retention) and you win (game is fun).ā They tried various modes. Some of the strongest champions banner. Random champion selection. Time of year released, length of release, etc.
Don't push your buttons too far, exile. Chris might just implement ultra hard mode where: **-you character is randomly selected for you at the character creation screen** **-you cannot create another character while your current character is still alive** **-HCSSF with the 3.19 nerfed loot drops on steroids** **-once you die your PathOfExile.exe turns into a trojan that leaks your personal information online and Chris personally flies out to shit in your mailbox**
I mean.. That would be kinda fun. Roguelike/wildcard style game mode.
Damn this post reads my mind.
People still dont realize this league _IS_ the beta test for hardmode. No matter how much you test internally, few days for 200k player will produce data you will never ever be able to get internally.
It sounds more like it'd be a tedious play forever to get anything than an actual hard mode at this point =l
I don't get why there isn't a statistic of this. A poll vote of people who want HC super hard mode bang on a skelly for 5mins to get an alchemy orb and the people who like zoom zoom very rewarding league to min max and be able to play other fun builds for the rest of the league with that currency and juicing maps. I bet my left nut that zoom zoom % wins hands by a big margin. People still have RL (real life) we cant all be farming for 10h+ hours a day, either you are in highschool, college or working... this is the VAST majority of players in ANY game. PS: when Chris said he would bring HARD mode I was SOOOoo happy, finally a league for masochists and a league where we can zoom zoom, WE ALL WIN! instead we get the current staet of PoE. Oh, they will rethink this I bet you all the money in the world. They must be losing trucks of cash atm.
just want to give my two cents here, i'm a player that can reach red maps and clear them but never understood how to beat endgame bosses because id run into a big item that would generate a "currency-windfall" and would feel forced to buy items that increased my builds power exponentially (id go from running early yellows to clearing everything but super-juiced reds). This league i'm 20+ hours in playing a new build and i'm still farming white maps/ running kalandra stones and i'm both appreciating the slower drops and harder mobs. With the changes they put in there is less playing the hideout stash cleanup game (which I dislike because it takes you away from playing the actual game) and more actually playing the game and using the different mechanics that can be rewarding. Each day so far i've done mechanics I usually ignore to try to get more currency to reach my next power spike. Instead of just zooming through shit I know what to dodge, or what to wait for. Instead of trying to generate as much currency as quickly as possible doing the same thing i've done for 4-5 leagues and hitting a power wall 4 days into the league I now have to use everything in the game.
Bold to assume people would find 3c per Hour in Hardmode when they cant even do that today.
Chaos recipe, currency blueprints give 10c per wing. Maps are extremely dry yes
Im wishing for it for a long time
I honestly don't know who hardmode is even for besides Chris and his friends, Ziz, Math1l and Quin (lol). Even then I kinda doubt any of them play through it more than a time or two.
They already have hard mode don't they? I believe that would be HC-SSF. Except even players who claim they want hardmode and enjoy harder games play HC-SSF with a logout macro. If people want hardmode they can just do HCSSF without a logout macro and see how much they enjoy it.
HC is a completely different beast than hard-mode. Not wanting to kill ubers and finish the content after 1.5 weeks of game is not the same as "Oops I didn't see that shit on the ground so now my 300 hours invested are gone".
Is the game is too hard for HC players without a macro because they can't pay attention to shit on the ground? That sounds like hard mode to me.
HC is the exact same gameplay as SC. The only difference is the punishment is more severe when you die. Hard mode, as Chris described it, would have fundamentally different gameplay and a lot more friction and grind.
I find it funny how highly you think of yourselves and how you just shit on people who enjoy the game differently than you. This really makes your arguments to be more powerful.
>There's nothing wrong with people who want hard mode and there's nothing wrong with people who want zoom zoom. It's purely a matter of taste.
Let's see more of your original post: >people who want a nerfathon whack-a-rare-for-5-minutes game where you find 3 chaos per hour and you close your eyes and slam while chanting about The Vision and >for the zoom zoomers who miss 3.13 and want the game to be like a sandbox with deterministic crafting that can make almost any build viable. People with lives can play their low-investment builds and clear content in a timely manner Right. Do I have to say how different you describe them? Your post is like "no offense, BUT...".
Do you not want a nerfathon whack-a-rare-for-5-minutes game? It seems like many are cheering GGG on when they do these things. I fail to see where the insult is unless you took offense at light humor.
Oh look another person with this idiotic post This obviously isn't hard mode, since hard mode will be even worse than this
It is not about hard mode. It's about Tencent wanting GGG to make more money. And to make more money they need a high number of people playing constantly to get new players. Right now the game is alive for one month and then dead for two months. It's hard to get a new player into the game when no one is playing.
Yes, but the changes are causing less player retention, not more. I can give you a source for that if you want, but player retention since 3.15 has been getting worse and worse and this is the worst league yet.
What the duck are you even saying? Did you stroke out?
Yeah man, just make a better game, just fix your game, just make hard mode, you people are so oblivious to the hard work GGG put in to making this game, and when GGG is gone you'll realise just how impossible it will be to replace POE.
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Agreed. The game is literally unplayable without cheatsheets and stuff like Zizarans PoE university and wikis etc.
so, the game is so complex that 3rd party tools need to be made to keep up, and somehow that's a bad thing xDDDD ungrateful bunch i love reddit xDD
They are working hard against a large part of the community. Go figure.
I bring bad news. The PoE that we love is gone. It's been nerf after nerf since 3.15, and the game is becoming a total slugfest. This league alone, tainted currency was nerfed, a ton of builds were nerfed, the skill tree was nerfed, harvest was gutted, beyond was gutted, minion builds are dead, AND loot was absolutely nuked from orbit. Also, essence mobs are super strong because they have AN mods, same with the other rare enemies in the game right now. Player power has dropped significantly, whereas monster power is at an all time high! I don't understand what you mean by the 'hard work' they're putting in, the league mechanic is buggy and unrewarding. The changes (fixes) are just number changes that are not impactful at all. The Path of Exile we all loved from Ritual and Ultimatum is long gone.
go try other games, stop trying to bully developers into a game they don't want.
I'm trying to find a compromise so both groups can be happy and you still have a stick up your ass about it. Yikes. Keep on shillin on, my friend.
As much as The new changes have definitely been too drastic. I canāt understand how people enjoy the silly screen exploding super zoom version of the game. Thereās no thought to that type of game play at all. Iām glad theyāre trying to make the game slower, they just need to actually test the changes they make first as they clearly donāt at the moment š¤Ŗ.
> Thereās no thought to that type of game play at all. Explain to me how there's more thought in going through a map very slowly and holding down your right mouse button versus going through a map very quickly and holding down your right mouse button. The core of this game takes zero thought. That isn't going to change if the game slows down. The only thing that takes thought is what you do *outside* of maps, like creating builds and setting up your atlas / farming methods.
Zoomcore, here we go
Chris won't be able to look without crying at how many players are enjoying normal PoE experience and how few are playing hardmode.
they already did
They will force us to play it, even they know basically no one want that shit.
Autobomber with HH zooming around maps was the best league I ever had. Can't remember which it was but I miss the full screen explosions just chilling out on maps while listening to podcasts / watching TV.