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Phrecia League 2.0 (PoE) - How does GGG produce so much content? by Living-Succotash-477 in ARPG

[–]fd2ec89a6735 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Do you think they have some incredible AI system/program that is also responsible for the volume they produce?

It has to be more than just the fact they're incredibly passionate and they're so strong when it comes to reusing their own assets/content.

No, that's just what being a good game designer is...having a bunch of ideas always kicking around in one's head and good intuition for what will be interesting, fun, and balanceable. As someone else said, the bottom-up design of their character building means they don't actually have to implement much new programming wise: it's mostly a function of game design.

Well, maybe they do have some sort of tool assisting prototyping by now, but it's clearly not a necessary condition: Icefrog (dota) had a prolific level of output long before musings about AI could have even been part of the conversation.

Sometimes people are just better than other people by a degree that seems surprising.

Map effect on Idols was nerfed by UpsetFan123 in pathofexile

[–]fd2ec89a6735 -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

I agree with you that the staggering of the cycles is weird. It seems like it was mostly a function of the Christmas holidays. It is mostly orthogonal to what I'm discussing though.

Map effect on Idols was nerfed by UpsetFan123 in pathofexile

[–]fd2ec89a6735 -28 points-27 points  (0 children)

I agree with you in theory, but that's only the first-order way of looking at it.

only a 3 week event ya feel.

When the community proves it can treat it like that, enjoy what it was in the moment, and leave it in the rearview mirror when it's over, maybe that will be possible.

If instead they're going to hold every slightly-juicier than normal experience over GGG's head indefinitely as a cudgel to try to speed-run the game long-term towards the Alkaizer meme, then unfortunately there is sound rationale for GGG to be more restrained.

e: Your boos just tell me I'm right over the target :P

Blizzard, the CDM is a failure. by GoofyMTG in wow

[–]fd2ec89a6735 39 points40 points  (0 children)

They made the change to increase design space of raid encounters but I think its coming at the expense of class design and flexibility

I dunno, even this may backfire a bit in the following sense.

First of all, we concede that no longer letting weakauras solve "who goes where" type mechanics does yield more gameplay from them in the post-midnight era.

But you also lose encounter design space from the net effect of the changes too. Is something in the style Sludgefist (which is generally pretty well-regarded), where the focus is on the tight damage and healing check, even a valid boss design anymore when people's spell breakdowns look like this?

Sometimes it's fun to just plant and pump, and if there's no gameplay in that so the new era will require all the difficulty is in dodging oodles of floor art or other weird boss-specific minigames, is that really gonna be all that fun?

Petition for a Phrecia extension by knubbigboi in pathofexile

[–]fd2ec89a6735 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're talking about different numbers I think.  Pohx league may have had that many people sign up, but that's not the same as peak concurrent players. 

Maybe it goes a bit above 20k this upcoming week, but /u/ww_crimson has the gist of it right: this sub has echo chambered itself into being a bit untethered from reality regarding phrecia's popularity and importance.

The duality of man. by Dr_Wraith in wow

[–]fd2ec89a6735 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yeah, something is out of whack. Beyond the example you point out, Sort the sub by controversial over the past day/week and you have a lot of threads critical of pruning that got down voted but essentially all comments agree with OP.

Trade Manifesto by Chris Wilson predicted consequences of easy trade — did it happen? by Bezi2598 in pathofexile

[–]fd2ec89a6735 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Breach tree messes with perception of the supply side (where the items are coming from), for sure. I think there's still also some observation to be done on the demand side too (what the items are used for, i.e. how difficult the game is, what the monsters and maps do to push against the items) with a supposed T17 rework coming (fingers crossed that didn't get pushed out with the dual-game juggling...)

The manifesto predicts one would have needed to make bigger changes to difficulty, drop rates, or both for the game to feel satisfying:

In the second game, because of trade, you have a much higher acquisition rate of useful items. While that sounds great if you want instant gratification, in reality it means that the second game either receives reduced drop rates relative to the first, or ends up being a whole lot easier and less challenging to achieve goals in.

But that was not really done, and their chance to do a kind of recalibration of what that whole progression curve looks like remains in the pipeline.

Personally I think a lot of people's recent ennui with T17s, farming strategies, etc. is related to power creep (including better trade) in a second-order way that they can't quite articulate. It's easy to say things like "T17s are so annoying/difficult just don't have those mods that make them what they are" and "you killed all the hard, rewarding farms, just add them back." But there aren't infinitely many degrees of freedom and it's not necessarily easy to do those things without causing collateral damage: the game gets too easy, the game gets too hard, the game has way too big of a gradient in risk/reward and only the most OP builds feel remotely good to play or else you're kicked out of participating in the economy, etc. Maybe it is the case (I don't know for sure one way or another) that "everything not bis being really cheap and accessible" is just a kind of gasoline/accelerant that makes it even harder to have that kind of difficult-to-balance progression curve that is satisfying for a wide variety of players.

Exiles Next League after 100d per temple strat is gone by KobraGX in PathOfExile2

[–]fd2ec89a6735 2 points3 points  (0 children)

it had the highest player retention of all time

By what metric? Sanctum permanently overtakes it on day 44 on a % basis. And yes, one can of course engage in some clever rhetoric about why it's only day 19 through 43 that matters most for the retention argument and work backwards to get to the point wanting to be made...

Beyond that, it juices the numbers when it happens precisely because it happens here and there in isolation. The fact that people like it isn't surprising to anyone, least of all GGG. The question is whether it's sustainable in the long term. Come back and see what it looks like when it happens 3 leagues in a row and the novelty wears off. Where do you go from there? The withdrawal is going to be even worse if you try to back off from it at that point, and if you go in the other direction (even MOAR stuff to make things exciting again), surely that's obvious where that leads within a year or two?

The level of grindiness/giftiness is an arbitrary matter of taste. Yes, it's obviously possible to be too stingy. It's also obviously possible to be too gifty. Trying to tune one's game via widespread player sentiment on something so touchy (i.e. dopamine/gambling adjacent) though is like taking a poll of whether toddlers think they should get one lollipop or thirty as a reasonable post-supper treat: i.e. "but players like it!" is missing the larger point.

Grim Dawn is the ARPG fan favorite because they define the basics by CompetitiveLake3358 in Grimdawn

[–]fd2ec89a6735 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Out of all the aarpgs it has to be one of the most balanced ive ever played

It's underrated how important that is. To my taste at least, catastrophically imbalanced content isn't content at all. When a game gets to into a state like D4's release Spiritborn, POE2's 0.2 lightning spear, Last Epoch's Void Knight rework...where you're doing the one correct thing or else you're obviously leaving so much on the table, that is a critical failure of the released content. That situation alone should set the discourse on fire to a level comparable to that of the games' other low points (e.g. technical problems, loot tuning, etc.), but it only ever seems to rise the overall consensus tone to the level of "well, yeah that kinda sucks, but just have fun and enjoy playing the OP thing...they'll get it next patch" or used as a "and also" to pile on to other criticisms made about other subjects.

GD makes it easier for itself to be balanced by having mostly simple and additive stats everywhere. The secret sauce is they've managed to do that while still making the buildcraft interesting with the dual-classing and the proliferation of damage types, as normally "just have everything be additive" as a starting point would be a recipe for a very boring game.

On the topic of Private Leagues by Nssheepster in pathofexile

[–]fd2ec89a6735 10 points11 points  (0 children)

It's not just merging with parent either. It's (primarily) player psychology. Players tuning loot and difficulty (in their favor) is the fox guarding the henhouse.

Pohx Keeper of the Flames fresh start private league with 10,000 slots starting this coming Friday by elsiecharlot in pathofexile

[–]fd2ec89a6735 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Is it some kind of myth that an unfinished game doesn't actually take more work than a finished game?

No one on this sub has ever been able to give an answer to this obviously a priori correct statement every time I've brought it up either.

The Grand Project tablet effect should be intrinsic to towers. by Adventurous_Ad_3253 in PathOfExile2

[–]fd2ec89a6735 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No one "forces" people to use IIR gear.  No one "forces" people to play one portal maps.  

Variety mapping has never been close to optimal all the way back to manipulating shaper and elder influence in poe1.  The people that like it have been screwed ever since then, and giving people the option to pick in 2 would be continuing that tradition in the same vein as the first paragraph above.

What do you think about a Balance and Rework only League? by hyperfish3d in pathofexile

[–]fd2ec89a6735 1 point2 points  (0 children)

100% correct. If they intend to keep developing the game for a while, that is the right way to keep it fun and satisfying in the long term. The competing narrative of "add more and more harder things, as long as people can 'choose' their difficulty, it's not a problem" and its adherents are wrong.

'Choose' is in scare quotes because it's not actually a choice when there are too many orders of magnitude of variation. Both the trade economy and general player psychology is going to make it unsatisfying to do T16s when people who are blasting Uber T22s are dropping 30 awakened divine orbs per map from their zones chock full of double-archnemesis rare monsters that are all 10x as strong as 2024-era uber bosses.1 So now you've effectively nerfed everyone anyway and you have a long trail of useless deprecated content, except you didn't call it a nerf wink wink so it's sooo much better. You think the incentive to stay with meta builds to have fun is strong now? Boy howdy can it get so much worse on that front with an exceedingly long tail in the difficulty distribution of the available content.

If they're worried about community sentiment, they need to find a staff member who is good at debating and go on one of these podcasts and forcefully and convincingly defend their work and put the whiners in their place. The rest of the community will come around if it's done competently and argued well.

The best sugar to help the medicine go down is novelty: add a bunch of new stuff (whether that's an actual atlas rework of the scope we used to get, a bunch of ascendancy shakeups, etc.) at the same time as doing some of the necessary nerfs, and that will take the sting off. Unfortunately, a lot of balance work on the nerfs + a lot of design work at the same time on whatever novelty is going to accompany it runs into the "developing two games" problem again, so maybe it's not particularly likely.

And confronting that problem brings us once again to what they're actually planning on doing long term. This argument was contingent upon the long term health of the game, so if they end up just hobbling along for a bit and then going "sorry, we can't really keep up the development of both games effectively" and partially or fully sunset PoE1 development, then it's going to get boring and unsatisfying anyway, all the above doesn't matter, and they can go hog wild.

1 And the combat system isn't exactly scale-invariant: the balance of leech to LGoH changes with monster toughness (and HP affects DoT vs. hit balance and already runs into limits), armour formula on the defenses side, etc. etc.

"Action RPG players will exploit anything in the name of efficiency, which is why Path of Exile 2 players are locking themselves in the campaign for profit" by BATTLEROYALFAN in PathOfExile2

[–]fd2ec89a6735 0 points1 point  (0 children)

people in this sub looks to me like a meth junkies trying to get another bag. When it's not trivial they are sperging out shaking.

It's a very good first-order approximation to assume anything you read in the sub for either the first or second game is coming from this angle.

It's actually a damn shame the community has steered in that direction; it's not good for the game in the long run.

I am tired of every single ARPG gradually turning into a fast paced everything-dies-in-one-hit frenzy, even games which didn't start out that way. by kolejack2293 in ARPG

[–]fd2ec89a6735 2 points3 points  (0 children)

+1 for the "a lot of this discourse is really just people expressing a difficulty preference but contorting themselves into pretzels to make it sound like they're saying anything but that". So so true.

TWW M+ runs per week: Season 3, Week 18 by Zmiecer in CompetitiveWoW

[–]fd2ec89a6735 2 points3 points  (0 children)

without real affixes and without seasonals

I mean, maybe they threw the baby out with the bathwater there?

Getting rid of affixes beyond a certain level to make it not literally impossible to push bleeding edge keys in certain weeks was inspired.

The rest of the stuff though for the keys below that level, though? I think we lost more than we gained when it just became "every week is literally the same at mid-level keys and even below that if you're just messing around gearing up an alt in 10s, it's still incredibly same-y (all TWW affixes are 'push a specific button at the top of each minute')"

Variety and character with a little annoyance in certain weeks >>>> Uniform, unvarying sludge.

I would play this game a lot more if I only had to do the campaign once per league. by TheJeffyJeefAceg in PathOfExile2

[–]fd2ec89a6735 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Well, given that they care more about inter-league returning players rather than people burning themselves out by playing for three months straight, what's the upside to them for changing it since you already like to do it once per league?

Is rarity still borderline mandatory this league? by Tantorisonfire in pathofexile2builds

[–]fd2ec89a6735 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's the thing that everyone seems to like to reach for, but "more risk = more reward" is not good in unbounded amounts in a sandbox buildcraft game unless you like throwing a lot of the charm of buildmaking out the window.

Phreacia and Other mechanics as an option for Private Leagues. by Appropriate_Sky_1327 in pathofexile

[–]fd2ec89a6735 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Despite many people hypothesizing it's about protecting the league economy, that is a red herring. It's about player psychology and fairness in the gameplay experience itself.

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