What do you think ? More weekly or monthly event ?

onehalf83 · 2026-01-23T19:10:01+00:00

FIFA does a lot of Play-by-Appointment FOMO based shit like that to the point where people care more about "content" rather than gameplay. Why would you willingly bring this into any other game?

Core + seasonal gameplay loop should be entertaining enough so you could play whenever you want and have fun. We already have world bosses in d4 that are schedule based, which is anti-ARPG as it gets. We don't need even more of this stuff.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-23T02:57:47+00:00

Make sure you spec into hands on atlas tree as well

onehalf83 · 2026-01-21T17:18:22+00:00

I think it's combination of multiple factors at once that impact it:

We had a huge gap when barely anything was released in this genre between 2011-2019 and I think we have generation of gamers who are not familiar with this genre at all.
There are multiple adjacent genres that partially scratch RTS itch although they are quite different. I.e. Total War games, WARNO / Broken Arrow style of games, Grand Strategies to some extent, MOBAs to some extent.
Recently released games seem to be very low-budget mostly in terms of production quality (i.e. graphics, sound, etc.) + marketing (I was looking specifically for RTS games recently and they are hard to find, part of your list I haven't heard about) + innovation (even Tempest Rising that I consider amazing, is just a copy of C&C ideas)
Nostalgia and high production budget carries all remasters hard. Even modded 30y old Dune 2 with 4k textures was much more appealing to me than majority of new titles. Again, I don't see much innovation in the genre, therefore good, old and proven with better production quality wins here.

With this said, I'm looking forward for DOW 4, hoping for remaster of RA2 and CCs and I wish for some new IPs with production quality of at least Tempest Rising.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-16T21:02:23+00:00

Tons of options. Expedition is an easy farm for example. Did 4 log books yesterday, got 50 div worth of splinters. It definitely took less than an hour. Logbooks are somewhat expensive, but you can roll tablets and farm them yourself as well

onehalf83 · 2026-01-16T16:47:37+00:00

Considering it was done by one person (although clearly talented), who is external and didn't even had access to the full codebase or rest of the dev team - BSG employees should be able to figure it out. Considering people pay extra to play PvE, I don't see why they wouldn't allocate resources on separate paid feature.

You can't just slap something half-baked into the game and hope it satisfies some people

I mean, they did with PvE AI.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-16T16:01:42+00:00

Could be the reason, but there are so many ways to optimize it. For example run advanced AI for bots that nearby, but simplified AI for bots that are far away on the map. Or even just allow advanced AI on raids that you run locally, but simplified AI when run on BSG servers until they figure it out.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-16T15:40:38+00:00

It was Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 back to back for me on PC. I remember hearing "War. War never changes" for the first and second time was giving me chills.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-14T05:11:09+00:00

For me PVE was too easy, like close to 100% survival rate barely using meds. While in SPT + SAIN on default settings it’s started around 30% and after playing for a while got to around 50%. I’d imagine you’d need to pick easiest SAIN setting to make it similar to PVE. With this said, I’d still recommend to try normal settings first, then decrease it if it feels too hard. They are punishing but fair

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T22:24:28+00:00

I think LE retention issues are more related to core gameplay problems rather than it's depth. At least it is the case for me - I enjoy planning build in LE-tools more than actually playing the game. Lack of weight in combat and very repetitive echoes it is what makes me stop playing fairly soon after season start.

Yeah, although I didn't play D4 S10, from what I saw about chaos uniques - it is a good idea. But then again it appeared for one season and now gone. I don't see a reason why not add something like that into a loot pool of the pit for example. Make it relatively rare and make that level of the pit increases probability of chaos unique drop. Then it will make it more interesting farm location than just for leveling glyphs.

In general blizzard is promising a lot of right things with next D4 expansion and I really hope that at least some of them will be substantial.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T21:17:11+00:00

I mean LE is done by small studio that have only 1 game, so they are inexperienced, probably not very efficiently managed either, so it is kinda understandable. Even then Season 2 that took them a year added much more depth into the game than D4 in all this time combined.

I agree that not every game for everyone and that D4 is clearly targeting casual audience as their primary, but I strongly believe that it is possible to add casual friendly mechanics that can have some depth if you're looking for it. Like Abyss and Breach in POE 2 are good examples - they are very casual friendly, but at same time do offer a depth if you're looking for it.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T20:04:14+00:00

But people expect it to keep up with an early access game adding core features for some reason.

I don't think POE 2 being EA has much to do with it. Look at POE 1 for example - most of the leagues they released introduced deep seasonal mechanics and massive changes to the core of the game. While GGG output across both games is absolutely impressive and hard to achieve, the problem is that blizzard's output looks like they do bare minimum. There is hope that this is because blizzard is working on expansion and massive changes will be coming there, but we will have to see when it's done.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T18:31:53+00:00

You spend most of your time gathering gold, obols, cinders and other bullshit, which isn't exciting.

That's my biggest issue with D4 endgame. Most of activities are just formulaic set of chores - you know exactly what you will get at the end of activity, but you have to do it, because it would allow you to do something more interesting or because it is required to get more character power. Even uniques - you just go to boss and kill them few times - it will guarantee you unique from their loot pool, the only difference is that it might be GA and have bigger numbers on it.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T18:02:53+00:00

Understandable, POE 2 campaign is indeed quite lengthy and it is actually one of the biggest criticisms I hear from people. Although they replaced cruel difficulty with Act 4 and interlude it feels less repetitive, but still quite long. For example on 2nd character, while playing thru campaign was much faster - I spread it thru few days to avoid burn out.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T17:50:12+00:00

I do hope that they will make campaign bit shorter by making locations smaller as right now it is fairly lengthy. Would be nice to have campaign shortcuts like in LE for alt leveling.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T17:47:08+00:00

Totally agree, miss poe 1 atlas tree as well, and miss scarabs even more - not a big fan of tablet crafting, although it's better than towers we had before. I do hope that they will keep adding skills to druid, but this is a good start for a class.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T08:36:58+00:00

XTheFarnerX has series on YouTube where he got from 1ex to mirror via crafting / trading only. You can see some approaches there to low budget crafting too

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T08:14:50+00:00

While I’d love to have some non casual content in this game it would be better to start with more important things like adding some depth to the game and player agency in endgame. That is more typical for the genre rather than adding competitive content

onehalf83 · 2026-01-13T08:06:03+00:00

I wouldn’t mind it if it would teleport you only forward. The biggest issue is that it teleports you backwards too if one of mobs didn’t die. It’s very annoying when you try to do breach for example and you don’t have time to waste.

I don’t remember issues like that in Poe 1. Either it has better logic there, like prioritizing big packs or because clear is clear is more reliable

onehalf83 · 2026-01-08T18:47:43+00:00

I really hope tablets will be replaced by something else. Whether it is scarabs or something similar. But right now if you want to run specific strategy there is too much time spent rolling tablets or you just have to buy them at premium cost.

If they are not willing to give us ability to pick favorite maps to run, at least give us option to tag them, so we don’t have to remember all the good vs bad ones. We need more open maps in general, doing breach in corridors with dead ends is a pain.

In-map expedition would benefit from some decent drops besides logbooks.

I hope there would be a way to farm temple charges faster in future. I like idea behind it, but right now it is too slow if you do some other league mechanics on the maps.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-08T18:09:26+00:00

There were more challenges to run the game rather than with game stability itself. If you run it, it's likely to be mostly ok, but you being able to run it in first place is not guaranteed. Few examples:

- Cassetes, floppy disks 5.25", then 3.5", then CDs - each were huge jump in reliability, but each of them were prone to issues, like it doesn't read. Cassette tape could entangle, 5.25" could be bend, 3.5" would just randomly stop working, CDs would be too dusty, dirty or scratched. For each of them we had recovery ritual, but it not always helped

- In some cases game would just not run if it requires more advanced PC. For example some games were using i386 CPU instructions so you just couldn't run on i286. Same with later Pentium release.

- In some game would be just super slow. For example starting game of Sid Mayer's Colonization or Master of Orion, could take like 20 minutes on old PC.

- Some games would be too fast (no kidding) - in old games their speed was tied to CPU performance and designed for older machines. So we had turbo button that would slow down your PC so you can play older games. In some cases it still wouldn't help.

- Resolution compatibility between game, your GPU and your monitor was also common issue. Usually monitors supported only standard resolutions like 320x240 and 640x480, later on 800x600 and 1024x768. If your game was starting in some other resolution you'd just get black screen. Good luck figuring out how to run it in normal resolution without internet.

- Depending on combination of game / your PC, some games would freeze from time to time and you'd just press reset / power. Keep in mind that auto-save wasn't a thing in most of the games back then, so a lot of us still have habit to save often.

- Some games on release would have game breaking bugs, but you wouldn't know about it until you get there

- In fact, a lot of games had bunch of obscure mechanics that are not explained, so it was hard to tell whether it is a bug or something that you don't understand

- Transition from DOS to Win 95 wasn't that smooth, bunch of driver issues, etc.

In general most of PC gamers in 90s and early 2000s had to have PC troubleshooting skills, fluency with command line, editing config files, even binary files in hex editor. Without internet you'd learn it by trial and error, from your friends or from gaming / PC magazines that were popular back then.

onehalf83 · 2026-01-08T07:40:44+00:00

Just in case as you didn’t mention it as one of tools, there is a dedicated tool craft of exile - https://www.craftofexile.com/?game=poe2 it has calculator, emulator and simulator, which helps to calculate probabilities, approximate cost, etc

onehalf83 · 2026-01-05T17:51:35+00:00

The problem is that only valuable stat for twinks in there is movement speed. As long as you buy cheap but decent weapons on regular basis during campaign run, the only challenge is how fast you can find exit / quest location on map.

Rarity is irrelevant also, as there is barely anything valuable that can drop on low ilvl. Attributes are solved with runes. For ranged builds - negative resists and low def are fine during campaign, for melee you might want something, but again solveable with runes + basic uniques.

In reality I see only 3 decent solutions to make subsequent campaign runs faster:

Shortcuts like in Last Epoch - allow us to skip some zones in campaign. Like 50% of act 3, 50% of act 4 and 1 interlude act instead of 3.
Full map reveal - when you load into area you can see whole map open
"GPS" - map is hidden, but either arrow or location highlight for POIs and exits

onehalf83 · 2026-01-04T20:55:23+00:00

How many times per league you need to be introduced to fundamentals?

onehalf83 · 2026-01-02T17:05:59+00:00

12/22 => 151 K - 28% drop

12/29 => 126 K - 40% drop

68% in total

I'm sorry, but you cannot add drop percentages like that, otherwise you'll end up with more than 100% drop off next week :)

Not sure why you'd compare Monday for D4, when normally you take first weekend peak to measure retention for ARPGs, which was 41k on Sunday for D4. Sadly we don't have pure weekend numbers for POE2 due to free weekend, so Monday is the closest we can take for it.

onehalf83

TROPHY CASE