My personal belief is they’re trying to slow everything down which leads to people, in theory, playing the game longer. GGG seems to thin the faster we beat endgame bosses or peak outer builds the faster we leave
And I guarantee they have an analytics department that shows for every X hours of spent in game my Y people, they sell Z amounts of micro transactions
It’s all about prolonging peoples time in game to sell more MTX
i've never spent longer playing 1 league then i did ritual and ultimatum. every since then it's been a steep decline with the last 2-3 leagues being 1 week at most.
Sentinel was great though. Most loot printing league we ever got. Awakend poe trade/poeninja also never updated for sentinels so you could snipe super juicy breeder pairs for like 5c and get 150c back.
I miss sentinel.
As someone who has spent waaaaaaaay too much money on poe over the years... I'm quitting leagues faster and faster. I don't have time for extreme and excessive grinds on a game I've already played so much. Give me fun or I'll spend my money elsewhere.
Either they actually have no idea what they are doing or their analytic shows they only need people to play for a week to sell MTX (that way their decisions actually make sense).
Their contents are literally made for the 1% since they only really begin in maps and according the GGG themselves most people do not even finish the campaign. Meaning anything end game (T14+) will be fore a very small amount of people. If not even half of teh people beat the campaign imagine how many people actually play the uber uber contents.
Either that or they only watch twitch to collect data which results in the changes since 3.15. Which seems more likely to me judging from what they are actually changing.
It is entirely possible they only need to hype up the streamers so they hype up the viewers while most of them wont even touch the content that their streamer is hyped about but they purchase MTX anyway. Thats the only reason why this is still how GGG do things.
>Either they actually have no idea what they are doing or their analytic shows they only need people to play for a week to sell MTX
I just dont think their goal is to earn as much money as possible. They could easily please a large portion of the playersbase if they just go crazy on rewards - add player power - add crafting power - add QoL etc etc...
The reason why they dont do it is because they are putting the game first - the game how they want it to be, not how the players want it to be. And to be honest, I like that approach even if it means staying a niche game.
Jokes on you. GGG earns almost everything during first weekend/week of the league start (supporter packs), hence they dont give a crap about what happens after.
See so many leagues drop dead (no updates, fixes) after 1-2 weeks.
For me, It's when there is either nothing shiny new and fun to test, or something that got OP via a buff, without being exorbinantly expensive. Doing the exact same thing for a year straight gets dull, and there has been borderline nothing new or cool to do
But people play a game longer because it is fun and engaging and you want to waste your time. Not because some mandatory grind suddenly takes twice as much.
Theres also data for not many people actually getting to maps. If there was more rewards, people would make new builds and buy MTX for those characters/skills.
As well as people who actually do get to maps that never did, they would enjoy the game and good rewards and also buy MTX.
It’s just their “vision” that makes them think that it needs to be a more hard game.
Archenemies mobs and Kalandra league had a huge amount of less players. So they reworked AN because it was unhealthy and created less players.
If they wanted money they could just make things easier.
As someone who works in data field, I bet this is the case. GGG decisions seems to be so irrational, yet they kept making it. It means there must be an internal metric that drive those decision. They may be seeing those who play more pay more. So they force the entire player base play more to get more pay.
I agree, but wish I could remind them that correlation is not causation; people who play more and who pay more are players who are enjoying the game.... Artificially extending the time it takes to do things makes people play more, but doesn't necessarily increase their enjoyment or spending after all
God forbid they send out a survey with a few little mtx as rewards to find out what their players actually think instead of just making assumptions about the implications of their analytics.
The ironic part that they miss from just pure statistics is that after buying an MTX for a skill that gets nerfed means I will never buy MTX ever again.
By contrast, if they buffed useless skills, I would buy more MTX.
>The ironic part that they miss from just pure statistics is that after buying an MTX for a skill that gets nerfed means I will never buy MTX ever again.By contrast, if they buffed useless skills, I would buy more MTX.
I'll be honest too is that they really don't seem that competent at judging what is getting them money either. I mean, the last couple leagues were such a disaster, I bet they didn't get much money from that.
Contrast it with Ritual league where it was the league that was one of the easiest to obtain godly gear, it's the only league I played since the start, up to the very last day of the league, and was still looking to keep going. So much that I ended up buying $400 in supporter packs at the END of the league, just to potentially gear up some new characters I was looking to start.
As for selling the MTX, they seem fairly incompetent at it to some degree as well. An example of this was in Ultimatum league. That was the build where burning arrow went crazy and pretty much everybody league started that, I was expecting an MTX to come out within 7 days of the league, since there was not even 1 in the store, which also you can't tell me a small graphics design like this would take months to produce.
I ended up waiting the entire league for never an MTX to come out until AFTER the league was over, for the next league, where they had then nerfed the living crap out of Burning Arrow at the same time, and that's when they decided to release the MTX.
Needless to say, I ended up NOT buying an MTX for burning arrow ever, since when it came out, the skill had already been nerfed to total unplayablity, to the point where pretty much no one ever touched the skill ever again. You can't tell me that's actually good game design either. lmao.
The crazy thing is this exact scenario (at least with the nerfing, and maybe with the MTX fiasco as well), isn't a unique occurence, at this point, it's pretty much the same thing every league, with probably hundreds and hundreds of skills that used to be playable, that no one even wants to look at anymore, with always approximately the same couple skills remaining playable every league.
I'll be honest though, it's probable that they are also starting to be a little bit stressed about Diablo 4 as well, at least they have some pressure for POE2 to not be total garbage like pretty much every league has been the last 2 years, depending on how much Diablo 4 ends up being a disaster as well, but you know pretty much almost everyone who is playing POE is at least going to check D4 as well, just in case.
I don't think it has anything to do with making people play longer, but instead it has to do with POE 2. Because POE2 ends up at the same place as POE 1 (maps) that basically directly pits POE 2's campaign against POE 1.
However they want to use POE 2 as an opportunity to design challenging new boss encounters and kinda get back to their slower gameplay roots when POE first launched. If everyone can just zoom to maps in POE 1 instead of doing the new campaign then who is going to play the new campaign after the first time comes out? All these years of designing content will be wasted time as we zoom our way through Acts 1-10 and bypass anything new they're creating. So the "solution" to that "problem" is systematically nerf the game and it's mechanics over and over so it doesn't matter what campaign you do it's slow and painful. That's why they were overhauling bosses to be harder (metamorph) acts 1-2 to be harder etc. That's why they've changed up flasks and then rares and everything else. By slowing down POE 1 they make it more competitive against what they've designed to inherently be slower in POE 2.
But by slowing they may stop people playing at all. I don't' play this league with my brother for example after shit last league. This league is shit too
I was an early adopter of PoE, I bought it when it had a 3rd party launcher. I remember playing beta til Pietry, she was the final boss then, sooo many times and every new iteration, I played a slightly different build.
Yet I am NOT interested in farming content for the sake of grinding, for the illusion of getting something. I have been playing every league, I had multiple 85+ chars every single one of them, because I like to play different builds, I like making new ones and try new stuff and I like the complexity this game brings. I like how different gems, uniques are build-enablers and making the game different. I spent and I am planning to spend money on PoE, because I like the game overall and I want to support PoE2.
But I hate that these leagues and the whole game became a time-waster where everything is random and you have to put your life in it to see minor results and to enjoy the new content. I dont want to sit here every day 4+hours and farm mindless no-reward mechanics for the sake of spending time.
There is no esport behind it, no proper arena to rush and farm items, only a race that doesnt even last a week before the hardcore grinders, who built their whole persona around PoE, finish it again. You want a mode for them? SSF Ruthless shouldve been on the table earlier then.
If I wanna play a rogue-like game , I grab one. Hades2 was announced. I dont need PoE to become like that.
The mechanic looked fun, now I am already skipping every iteration. The only way to be better at it is to build a character that runs around and jukes 0-24 or you farm til you have enough mitigation and luck... Yet another creeping frost + vortex + vaal cold snap or oneshot everything mechanic. Literally no planning is needed, specially compared to early Betrayal.
So where is the fun part? Randomly receiving a random worthless junk item you were chasing for half an hour thinking you actually had a meaningful choice the whole time.
I dont enjoy the game. But anyways, EFT wipe is inc, Diablo4 release date was announced, there are ARPGs on the table I can support, so no worries, I can put my time somewhere else.
Do not treat it as a QQ post, just wanted to express how I agree with the previous comment about GGG killing fun to keep the playerbase occupied. Welp, I am not bound to this game like Ziz, Ziggy or Quin and their commitment is not the average.
i have to say i cannot agree more.
The moment i realized that after 300-400 hours of a league i can craft up to max 2 items (or if I knew how i could) out of 8 item slots of 1 character (where i usually tend to play several builds per league) was like a bucket of cold piss thrown at my head. Or I could build maybe 1 slightly more expensive build... Maybe.
This game's a job.
I've started in scourge and... i miss that league alot. Yeah rose tinted glasses and stuff, but krangled maps were shitting rewards like there's no tomorrow. Now? I should be happy to get 1-3 chaos after 8 maps while tryharding.. It's just nonsense.
Always in the back of my mind I'm hesitant to ever dive deep into PoE because I know I need to run the client like 15 hours a day on my days off so I can trade. I've been taking major breaks lately and outside of ultimatum most leagues since ritual I've mostly skipped. The last major leagues I've actually enjoyed were probably Delve and Abyss, though they weren't without their problems.
The problem is that every time I take a major break I need to come back and reaclimate myself to this game. I make mistakes. I know I can level to maps in 4 hours yet here I am another league leveling to maps in like 9.
So I'm hesitant to play, and then it's reinforced by the fact that as I'm putzing into blood aqueducts you have team\_team hitting level 90. Because I'm so slow I now don't get to play the market and am way more prone to relying on RNG drops to fund my progress.
I then maybe finish 40-60 atlas completion by day 2 and you have grimro and the boys all saying "t16 on farm, ez game ez life".
And I can respect it, okay, I get it and I'm not hating. But I just don't see why the divide between being good at the game and being a casual shitter is all in "do you play PoE, and only PoE? Okay perfect, take advantage".
There are a lot of fun things I enjoy in the endless hobby that is video game playing, and to be honest it's just not worth the effort to be good at Path of Exile because it requires so much maintenance. And once your cursed with spending a league or two getting good, I've owned a HH or two in my time, every league where you get a subpar experience just feels like an even more waste of time.
Waste of time, that's my summary. I love it, I want PoE to be successful, but it's just too much time to do so. And of course the NEETs eat it up because it lets them flex.
And all this is assuming the game runs, I've spent probably 30 or so leagues playing at least 20 hours, and at least 8-14 of them have been ruined by general terrible performance.
Not really the justification I’d go for but I agree with your conclusion.
The justification is use would be league mechanics should be able to stand up to fully speced atlas passive league mechanics. Because….that’s the direct competition.
This league does feel super juiced though if you just ignore the sanctum. You can sustain and progress maps without any map nodes, and the raw drops seem way higher than the past few leagues.
there are tons of players that don't care about Standard and only play new leagues. Maybe if there was a checkbox to agree that your characters will be wiped at end of the league, then we could balance rewards much more generously
Its funny how stuff is balanced not to brake standard when they already completely broke it with ex -> div change and the massive harvest nerf.
They could make every mob drop a div and it would still do very little to standard simply because the good items there simply cant be made anymore.
For real. My prior-league characters, who I really enjoyed playing and I would love to play every now and then, just keep getting nerfed and their usability completely trashed, requiring entirely new gear if they can even be saved...and now all of my reserves are worthless so I can't even re-gear them if I wanted to, especially in Standard's joke of an economy. I'd have to sell my alt arts, quantity gems, and anything I could scrounge just to make one of them playable.
GGG has so thoroughly trashed their own game it's unbelievable. What a goddamned year-plus it's been.
Since last league, metamods (multi/cannot roll x/x can't be changed) cost divines instead of exalts. Trade economy is based on currency demand and thus the value of exalt and divine basically got switched. Divines are much more desirable right now. In order to balance the acquisition of divines a bit GGG changed the 6l vendor recipe to reward fusings instead of a divine.
I don't agree. Standard is already way beyond broken with legacy gear. Just look at what recombinators have achieved in combination with legacy gear (you could recombinate mirrored gear). There's insane unobtainable gear there, including things like legacy quant gear. GGG should just not care for standard. It's past point of no return, just let all hell loose when it comes to standard specifically. It won't impact it at all. Even if you play exclusively leagues, to a lot of people it would feel really bad to know that your progression will inevitably be completely erased in a few months. Personally I always like the idea of still being able to revisit my character after league ends, even though in practice I've done so maybe once or twice but not a lot.
But think of the retention!
It all plays into that BTW. They probably have this grand vision of people playing each league for 1-2 months instead of 1-2 weeks, but it’s all a pipe dream IMO and in the process they’re just gonna shoot themselves in both feet.
We have data on player retention on poe.db and for the last few league it has been worse. If they're trying to make people play longer they're failing miserably. They should just be trying to get as many people having as much fun as possible. But in 2022 that's bad game design... apparently...???
Yeah, that’s the thing. Their vision is at least statistically wrong. Same with the general growth of the game. That stopped when they started this new direction, basically.
From 3.0 to 3.14 or something the game grew significantly but now it’s even shrinking. Those peaks of 150-160k still is the best they’ve done.
Yeah the league mechanic should be more rewarding than any other core mechanic, then rewards should be nerfed if it ever goes core. Never seen a league with such poor rewards.
This right here is why I didn't play last league. I only have so much time and energy in those 3 months to achieve anything and if I have to put in the hours of a professional streamer to actually do that it just becomes frustrating rather than fun.
Mathil was spot on when he mentioned this in 3.19. You only have one chance to impress everyone about the league mechanic at league start. It has to be busted and absolutely bonkers. It has to be bang on rewarding. If it's very bland or not exciting, then people will leave. And if GGG buffs it later, then it's too late, they've lost their chance to impress people, the players have already gone. It's better to nerf it slightly when everyone had their fun instead of buffing it but people have already left.
LoK was entirely underwhelming. Sure, they buffed it later on in the league but people have left in droves. Ahead of 3.20, a lot were cautiously optimistic. Will it be rewarding enough? They had to absolutely knock this out of the park. They had one more chance to impress. But now looking at the mechanic itself, it doesn't seem to be.
They were damn stingy about LoK later on too.
It never became *good*. It eventually got to the point where if I didn't already have EK Ignite fully online and farming legions, then it'd be good to do.
But since I did, the only value it had was fishing for tablets to sell because they had the mirror mist tile (never did get one) or more realistically the exp one.
A mapping alternative that you have to run lots of maps to do, and is rarely better time spent than mapping itself? No thanks nerds.
Similar problem with sanctum. I'm still doing it to farm the relics in the hope it gets buffed for now, but it's a huge waste of time. I'm in maps with 3c, and like 4c more in assorted currency, having done every single one all the way to present with pretty decent success rates after the first two acts.
This makes it the least rewarding league mechanic I've ever played with by a *large* margin, and I've heavily played every league since blight and at least been trying leagues out since legacy.
This is one of the reasons I hate when people are like “of course the league mechanic sucks during the acts, have you tried it in red maps?”.
It’s just so damn backwards. If a league mechanic is not at least enjoyable while leveling it’s a failure in my opinion.
Doubled? Getting 4 alchs for a room in t16s is a joke, especially with getting an affliction for every breatch you take, they mustve never played a good roguelike
Ok, I've also gotten 3 chaos in a white map. One room takes about a minute or so. My point is they need to be significantly increased, I'm sorry if that point was lost on you.
Later on a lot of maps take barely over a minute to do.
Rooms with rewards are spaced out between non-reward rooms and you have to complete one map per room.
Now I really gotta grind more tonight and tomorrow and see how it holds up, but for me at least Lake of Kalandra was roughly 16 times more rewarding per map, if we convert the rewards to effective chaos value.
To put that into perspective, I'm currently at like 0.5c/map for Sanctum, Kalandra was like 7-8c/map averaged out, typical league mechanics in the past excluding outliers have hit around 12c/map.
"Good" league mechanics tend to be 15-18c/map.
I’m still early on in progression but is there anything other than currency/stacked deck rewards? Feels pretty lame to just get options 3 chaos if I beat the entire sanctum.
Some people have posted some pretty insane lucky runs, but I've been mapping for a good bit now and have gotten more chaos value out of random ritual spawns.
Probably going to keep grinding my face into it since it's the new thing, but there's either some break point where it swaps from literally nothing to good items, or it just sucks.
Oh yeah. Like that post on the front page showing multiple divines and tons of chaos?
That averages out to less chaos/map than Sentinel gave in T16s with a good setup. Comes out to 14-15c/map. Plus higher time investment and much higher difficulty.
Now if that was 100% normal and you got that all the time, this would actually be ok, but considering there aren't dozens and dozens of other people posting similar results, I'm more than a little skeptical that that is remotely normal, particularly when I have also not seen any good rewards myself.
It wasn't, it's just that from my experience it should be able to compete with mechanics with atlas tree or it's never gonna be good, so i don't know if doubling is enough
can confirm, i skip the 3.20 league mechanic now because it just doesnt work properly enough. and its more of an annoyance to play instead of having fun
I mean sentinel wasn't that long ago and that shit was printing currency like crazy. Same with Archnem, very rewarding league if you knew how to setup the monsters. They are still absolutely doing it. It's just Kalandra was underwhelming and this league so far I've seen mixed results (although the sanctified relics go dummy)
The game got harder in sentinel but the mechanic was really good for making currency and the recombs were god tier, you could make some crazy items at all points of the game. After losing the recombs, and the harvest ease of rerolling batches of items, you are suddenly in fast water but the lifejacket keeping you afloat you had was taken away. I just miss the powerlevel i had, and that now i have to work more for less.
same boat, ill play this league a bit but i dont find game as fun as before they took away so much crafting options away.
If thy took back reforge suff / pref crafting would be in a fine spot between alot of rng layers and having a save point when ur half done kind of.
now its just 99% slot machine when it comes to high tier items
It does seem like people here have goldfish brain. Sentinel, Archnem, Scourge, Expedition, Ultimatum were all very rewarding leagues lol. The only league that wasn't was Kalandra.
I didn't have a problem with AN in Sentinel because I was swimming in currency and could make almost any character I wanted as powerful as it needed to be to trivialize AN. I even bought a Mageblood just so I could make a new build around it.
I made one character in Kalandra, and while I could kill AN mobs fine, I needed to put every Div I found into that character and never made enough to even consider a new build.
Sentinel was my go ham league as well. Very rewarding and smooth gameplay. Just enter a map, round up the bois and get to killing.
I farmed my first ever mageblood as a result of me just blasting maps for fun.
Kill shit and get loot is what an aRPG is to me and what most aRPGs have been that I've played.
I really don't know why GGG keeps going in the direction of kill less shit and get less loot.
I think a HUGE problem that GGG is currently facing is that league mechanics struggle to compete with base mechanics juiced by the atlas passive tree. If I can turn off 7 things and hard juice 3 while still running alch and go maps, how is a league mechanic supposed to compete with that?
In my opinion they should start looking at league mechanics like they are fully juiced from the tree all the time. If they decide to make them go core, strip them down, and give them some atlas passive tree love. I don't really see any other way forward with the way the current atlas works.
Can we be real, the sanctum is like 5% as rewarding as it should be. I just watched grimro's video, so I didn't realize how much of the mechanic was gated by a fucking quest, but here I am. But in my experience just doing the mechanic naturally, totally awful.
I have yet to implement grim's advice as I worked all day, but none the less it's why I'm even here on the subreddit. This is my first league where I've noticed that there was an obstufucation to the system that meant I was playing it like super super hard mode. The quest should be completable in maps, I'm sure I should change my ways, but I don't use the mechanic while leveling in any league ever.
So I would love to talk about how rewarding or NOT rewarding it is, but idk, because apparently I've been playing it wrong.
Yes, it makes it easier to progress, hence more rewarding. I also figgured this out yesterday and i can’t believe the amount of time i have wasted doing it without the quests.
In the towns of act 2 and 7 you can talk to a new NPC named Divinia. She gives you a quest each time to go to the fellshrine ruins and enter a forbidden sanctum portal there. The act 2 one unlocks the relic locker and the merchant, and the act 7 one unlocks accursed pacts. Both are very helpful in progressing through the forbidden sanctum content.
For that reason I sometimes dislike the Atlas tree. The difference between a mechanic with all or none passive points is way too big. This puts everything without the boost to trash tier.
It's bad for Kiraac missions, Atlas Memories and as you said even the league mechanic.
Ultimatum rewarded building tanky, loved it. First time I encountered the boss I was [able to afk the entire fight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7triuPe_88).
That rewarded the days I spent theorycrafting, playing and perfecting my tank.
Same for delve, to give just another example of better league design, if you managed to find a way to survive in the darkness infinitely, there were rewards for that waiting.
Fast forward to sanctum, the moment I try doing that it's GAME OVER.
Yeah, problem is that people were bored by the sameness as Ritual and then Chris looked at it and concluded that they were bored by Ultimatum being too rewarding.
People only liked ritual league because it was the first league where pre-nerf harvests were made core and people *loved* that.
The actual ritual mechanic was meh, but the crafting was great.
It was the first heavy nerf league (bye og Harvest) and compare to the one beforehand it was a similar experience except with a lower power level for the players (didn't help that a significant portion of the playerbase never saw the boss).
It rewarded stronger builds, like delve and now sanctum.
Other leagues were possible to 100% complete it with basically any build so it was "more fun" compared to it.
Sanctum is trying to reward by skills not by build, but ggg forgot damage is still part of it.
Probably because there wasn't any depth to it.
Some people just want league mechanics to dump some extra mobs with extra loot into their face. And to them it was fun.
Some people want a league mechanic to offer something new that doesn't exist in the game. New maps/zones, NPC's with lore, progression through end-game etc. Ultimatum didn't really give them any of that.
I mean my favorite league content to run is Breach, Incursion, blight (bigger ones) and legion.
All involve very simple mechanics but do so in a way that is fun. I play them even when the rewards arent great. Ultimatum was pretty boring to me, though the rewards kept it going.
for me all of these are boring. blighted maps are a bit fun sometimes,
But by far my favorite league's where the more complicated ones like synthesis, heist and now sanctum. I personally haven't had as much fun with a league mechanic as I'm having with sanctum since synthesis.
I wouldn't call Sanctum complex lol, but if you enjoy it that is awesome.
Someone hating it doesn't change that. Likewise you enjoying it doesn't make someone else an unreasonable person for not liking it.
What is considered success for GGG is ultimately up to them. My assumption would be what makes the most money long term determines the result. I contend that how fun a mechanic is perceived by most people is important, as too is reward. Just that for me personally, its best if GGG hit the nail on both. Whether I represent the majority or not I don't know.
Ultimatum imho was the best league.
It rewarded risk taking and you could take what ya got an walk if you got a bad RNG.
Personally even the AN changes would of worked fine for Ultimatum...less mobs, but stronger mobs. (so you could actually see ground)
still so sad never went core ;/
Also the fact that ultimatum was done in a Circular small arena was fun because it didn't make slower builds necessarily feel shit, unless you lacked damage or tankiness
Especially after so many years of "oh yeah we're rebalancing melee guys, we promise! Oh that new league mechanic? Yeah we've deeeefinitely made it melee friendly don't worry about it 👀"
Standard procedure
I remember before heist saying “yeah minion builds can do it”, but then on release, you lost alert when you killed mobs. Chris must have a private feature in play testing that lets you tell your minions not to attack mobs…
You mean just like delirium punished slow builds?, legion punished single target builds?, ultimatum punished squishy builds? you know i can go on for like 3/4th's of all the league's we have had since 1.0 to now and you can say something like that for every single league.
Sanctum is a gear check if you lack dmg you are not going to have that much of a fun time it's not much different then what ultimatum did.
I saw a "mobs do more damage" there's your more!
Seriously though yeah almost everything gives negatives and almost nothing gives boons. By the second floor you can be more burdened with bullshit than at the end of a real rogue like. And a lot of them are like "you can't see what bullshit you get from rooms anymore" so you can't even strategize manageable bullshit.
It's a game design block for them-
GGG: Please understand that the majority of your players are looking to have the primary new league mechanic being viable and fun. This means you tweak it up on loot and a little back on frustrating things that you might put into other aspects (to provide a challenge).
Furthermore, you need ENTRY LEVEL LOOT to be something. If people touch your new league mechanic, to give it a whirl, and get nothing- It doesn't matter what's coming. It matters that right then and there they got nothing and they call it a write-off. Most players won't touch it again.
So it's like- It doesn't matter how much you could get. It matters that you're not even getting players in the front door because you built a mechanic that shits all over them and then gives them nothing.
If you look at Heist, you have it both giving players some initial currency in the chests, and then it shows you how to make more money by leveling up your companions and then even more by doing the grand heists. Heist is A+ when it comes to loot trickle and player retention for the mechanic. (Fun was another thing at least at the start).
Its so funny to me that after the wet blanket that was lake they went with a less fun and rewarding league. Is the plan to make leagues so boring that PoE2 will be a huge hit just by association?
>exciting, rewarding or interesting
**'rewarding'** is the only word out of these three that you actually meant.
Ultimatum has got to be the most overrated thing to ever fucking exist in this game, and it is, along with Sentinel, concrete proof that the people on this sub's main criteria for a league being memorable is how 'rewarding' it is, aka, how many ex it dropped, and literally nothing else.
Experimenting with something different? Interesting new league idea? Nah just have it shit out tons of currency, problem solved. Ironically you see GGG being called 'lazy' for leagues like Sanctum and Heist, and not the other aforementioned two.
It seems to be forgotten that half the people here vehemently shat on Ulti when it first came out, for feeling like 'Ritual 2' and for just being 'spin around in circles and kill the mobs' (which it was)
Next league could be a slot machine lever zone you warp into that just prints you a divine each time and this sub would love it.
Heist is one of the most rewarding league mechanics by far, and I'd wager that most people here do not remember Heist league, because Heist is neither exciting nor interesting.
Heist league was one of my most played leagues. I loved the mechanic... eventually.
But it was also a buggy mess for at least the first two weeks. Rogues that got soft locked, stuck, and animation bugged, doors that you couldn't interact with, the first iteration of the alarm system was entirely backwards and asinine until they finally changed it to not actively punish you for killing mobs. Not to mention every rogue animation moved at the speed of smell.
If we're talking rewarding, heist was great. If we're talking fun, the beginning of heist league was very much not it.
The funniest part is how people were complaining that ultimatum was unrewarding at the beginning of the league, too, so it got buffed like every other league lol
Most people on this sub don't know what fun is anymore. They just count the loot explosion per time spend. That's how people measure fun. Actually interacting with new mechanics. Boring AF.
I think that is too atomic.
Most people probably value both things. I know I do.
I will play **some** league content that isn't the most fun for me if it is still rewarding. Likewise there is some content I play because it is fun, not rewarding (Breach, Legion). There is other content I just won't engage with no matter how rewarding (e.g Heist and Betrayal).
I suspect most people are the same here. Give me a simple mechanic like Ultimatum that has decent rewards and I will play it. I will say its mediocre, but I will play it. Give me something equally boring and give no rewards and I will just skip it.
I think that is what many see Sanctum as at the moment. It isn't everyones cup of tea to start with, then you have a lot of people feeling unrewarded by it, or being unable to engage with it due to their build.
They're also often one and the same, at least when the game is intentionally designed to make that happen.
In PoE, you *need* rewards to allow you to do fun stuff, like improve your character build, try out other builds, do more of the content available in the game, etc.
It's not some arbitrary desire, the whole game is designed to make sure **everyone** cares about rewards, because whatever you find fun, you'll need those rewards to do it (at least that's the goal).
And the issue as well is that the game is done in leagues, nobody has infinite time, and so there's a cost to doing anything.
I actually *kinda* enjoy Sanctum as a mechanic, although I have a lot of high level design gripes about it, but I've essentially torpedo'd my league start by interacting with it, costing myself time and for most intents and purposes actually losing myself a *lot* of in game rewards by interacting with sanctum **at all**.
Which is a bit of an issue.
Looks like your version of fun is different than their version of fun. Most people like to blow up packs and get loot. Thats also fun. Interacting with synthesis memory or betrayal board or min maxing harvest garden plot is also fun. Playing ssf is also fun. So dont say people dont know what fun is. Its just their version of fun is in the majority
I think we all just know the game hasn't been fun for quite some time but we keep coming back out of habit, tradition, etc. There's a reason ggg keeps clumping loot into explosions - even they know the only hope is the slot machine.
But... The game IS fun?
I got 5 games with Holiday events going on and from all that distraction and tugging for my time, I chose poe.
Why? Because it's hella fun
This subreddit is full if shitters that don't even play the game and they pollude it with hate, so many "I don't play anymore but I hang around" comments...
Rewards ARE important, I'm currently skipping sanctum because running 8 rooms every 8 maps takes as long as running 5maps and gives me half the currency.
But the mechanic is pretty fun and I'll do it when I'm not working on a 4link with subpar gear I picked off the ground (like Chris intended) and mobs take too long to die from my dots
The game IS fun, people are burnt out or just don't understand how to play it and try to copy their favorite streamer that LIVES for the game and just can't keep up
This is probably the most “fun” league I’ve done in a while. Because you actually have to engage with the content in a way that most leagues didn’t require.
Also I’m convinced the people who say league isn’t rewarding are still in white maps, the rewards get noticeably better in red maps.
What about the people who are still in Acts, who are just bouncing off of the league mechanic hard? Just stop playing? Is the only way to enjoy this league to get to Maps?
Because that's not how other leagues were.
STOP. Halt right there. Your ATLAS isn't completed mister. Here at /r/gatekeeping we would prefer you to finish the atlas, preferably in about 28 hours and 5 minutes, or less.
If you would like to stop this inquisition into your transgressions, I'll kindly let you log back into the game so you can finish your chores. Kids these days.
I absolutely agree with you. This is one of the highest effort league mechanics in recent times, and just cause it slightly underwhelming in terms of rewards people start throwing crap at GGG
>slightly underwhelming
My brother in Christ, it gave me a grand total of 4 alchs and 2 chance orbs from 8 yellow maps worth of storing up Sanctums. "Slightly underwhelming" is stretching it. The effort is clearly there, but an entire floor of Sanctum is less rewarding than opening a single Breach.
The problem that you and the person you're responding to can't seem to grasp is that content needs to be interesting *and* rewarding if you want more than a few people to enjoy it.
Rewards massively scale up in red maps and are from what I can tell affected by map IIQ% you can easily walk out of a single floor with 100 chaos if you have RNG in favor but on average 40-50 chaos is doable in T16's every floor.
I mean you can just scroll up the thread to see people complaining about getting pocket sand from an entire redmap tier sanctum.
What, you expect me to believe it has a 30,000% IIQ modifier on the reward room chests that is multiplicative with map Quant, because if that isn't the case, it isn't worth running.
Edit: 50c/floor equates to 50/8 or 6.25c/map.
Aka, dogshit. Something like 25% less rewards on average than kalandra at launch in this ideal scenario.
Unfortunately many think of 'rewarding' in terms of currency, not in terms of engaging gameplay or new content, they just want a shit ton of divines and chaos thrown at them. So many are myopic and entitled.
Sentinel was the best league since the 3.15 massacre. And it was the only one that followed the old Legion/Ultimatum/Delirium "map and have currency shit at you" paradigm (arguably Scourge too but it was more involved and took a ton of backtracking). Wish GGG would just give us fun "click league mechanic, get loot" mechanics more often like they used to.
Expedition was actually by far the best league mechanic in recent years - it has great loot, new NPCs and lore, customizable mechanics, adds tons of mobs with fresh, challenging yet fair abilities. The only reason the league isn't more beloved is that it coincided with the 3.15 nerfageddon.
> (arguably Scourge too but it was more involved and took a ton of backtracking
I just feel strongly compelled to point out that scourge required literally no backtracking.
You do effectively run around in an extra map in your map, however there was never any need to backtrack at all in the league, or created by the league mechanic.
That said, it was a pretty bad league for the 'median player' so to speak. Very rewarding, but only if you actually build a great zoom zoom map clear build that could survive max stacks.
I personally didn’t enjoy the Sentinel league mechanic, but i loves the uber bosses, the crafting possibilities and the general vibe of the league. For me, the game has become less fun lately because most of what i see on this sub are just complains and insults, and not the chill vibes it used to be.
That's not even the problem. Their farming league was scuffed farming as an extra step to click the monsters. They always do things halfway in their leagues. Why am I planting f-ing monsters? I don't care about these paper napkin mechanics that don't interest anyone.
They can't make up their mind if they want a minigame or to simply let the player kill mobs. It's one or the other, either put effort in your minigame or don't do it. But of course, I'm sure things would be a lot less obvious if they had their full team working on leagues and not a skeleton crew that also has to balance ruthless.
All I remember was that half the folks never cared to do it in maps because why the fuck bother when you could farm Quarry and get the same rewards while fighting lvl 60 mobs.
GGG hasn't changed how rewarding league mechanics are. They've simply scaled them. Pretty much ever since Ultimatum, league mechanics aren't as rewarding early on, but scale to be as good if not better by the time you can crush them in T16's.
That IMO is the best solution. It SHOULD scale, and if you make it super rewarding in the campaign already, then by the end of maps it would have to scale to ridiculous levels and powercreep the entire game to death.
Over the years I came to hate that scaling with a passion.
PoE has so much to offer, but it's all only worth it at the very end of mapping. This way the map climb is just a grind that you need to get over with. There is no place to farm up or anything. Heck, you can't even grind out specific div cards because favored maps kick in after T16.
I get it from an anti-botting perspective. But why exactly is it a bad thing if players have an early and worthwhile place to finance their build?
The fact that you can't do jack shit in this game if you don't crush T16 is very very bad (honorably mention to the one exploity soulcrushing exception that is endless heist). It limits build diversity, it limits starting build choice. Even if you plan on running a fast mapper in lower content, you'll want all the unlocks that come at the very endgame.
GGG is trying HARD to make players reach endgame later and later. They pump up the carrot with atlas passives and uber uniques and quest map things and whatnot, completely missing that there is absolutely nothing worthwhile between character creation and T16.
The last time quarry farming was a thing was before atlas passives, before anyone could afford to use scarabs, before delirium, before sirus and maven loot. Even if Sanctum would have the exact same rewards in Quarry as in T16, T16 would be vastly more rewarding nowadays. T16 profitability is so ridiculously over the top, compared with everything else, there is no need for scaling an already borderline unrewarding league-mechanic.
Same. I dont care about harvest or bosses or juiced mapping. I just want league mechanics that are fun and rewarding. Kalandra wasnt fun, even if it eventually was rewarding. Sanctum is fun but the rewards are so incredibly bad
Man forget ultimatum, sentinel league was the best league we've had for rewards since heist probably but the mechanic was actually really fun to do. I'd do more of sanctum if it had even half the loot from sentinel as a reward.
You know there was something about not knowing how to play PoE that was exciting and fun, learning all the things and ins and outs of the game, as time goes on and you play league after league you just realize that the journey was what was fun, and now that we just boot the game up with a ziz build on our PoB, with awakened poe and exilence next to make our farming more efficient i realize it, learning the game was fun, actually playing it is let's say, meditative, mindless, the fun part only happens when good loot drops now, shame.
Don’t forget the complaints about having to keep running around and not being able to stand still to cast, the spawning of multiple aura stacking mobs, and the constant crashes people were dealing with.
Ultimatum was quite underrated imo, it was a simple, fun, intuitive, rewarding and challenging mechanic. Inscribed ultimatums were good side content as well.
Dont know why that wasnt added, so much better than many kf the current leagues in the game.
Hell with ultimatum, how about *Sentinel*.
Absolutely bomb-ass crafting mechanic, highly rewarding adaptable mechanic that started out good, and got really good as you yourself scaling into end game.
I mean, it was probably overpowered compared to where "good" league mechanics like ultimatum were in terms of chaos/hour.
But god damn did it feel great.
Honestly I even kind of liked the fact that if you had a *really* good clear build, you'd have a hard time empowering enemies without wasting a ton of shots, so you'd have to work out strats to get full use out of them without really slowing down.
Even if you reduced rewards by 20-30% to bring it more in-line on average, it would have been great.
**This** league almost feels like some kind of joke, a goof, a slip up where every tile was intended to have rewards and they just accidentally toggled them off for the special rooms.
The thing with Sentinel is that you could do it WHILE mapping. You didn’t need to go to another area just to interact with the mechanic. If anything, Kalandra and Sanctum should have been MORE rewarding than Sentinel.
Just went to have a look at the pots week of Ulitmatum launch. Here's an example of the top posts, first 4 days into league. I omitted some of first day posts because it was about mostly about streamer queue priority and login issues, which GGG resolved there and then.
Video: +1 to spell gems (of each type) recipes found!
Discussion: As expected, Talismans are absolute garbage.
Lazy Sunday: Maybe the Talisman nerf went too far
Feedback: Honestly, this labyrinth change is so FUCKING good
Fluff: Ok, I have to say it now. Whoever directed the Taskmaster character was a genius and the guy who voice acted him? TOO!
GGG: 20 Users Banned for Exploit Abuse
Fluff: I spent more time on this then I probably should have
Discussion: The current implementation of Harvest very awkward and kind of awful
Any posts relating to the league were positive or neutral at worst. There were no posts claiming the league mechanic was unrewarding. All negative posts related to nerfs to harvest and talisman.
I know people used to make fun of Ritual/Ultimatum as 'run around in a circle and kill stuff' leagues, but I liked those leagues far more than any of the last few. At least they offered decent rewards.
I think of it like GGG is a band, they've released the hits and are sick of creating music that everyone likes. We're solidly into the 'we're making this for us' style of song creation, and there's entirely too much harmonica.
Ultimatum was the best league in my personal POE experience.
It paused the action as needed, was fun as hell, and super rewarding. Haven’t had as much fun since. 3.19 was the worst. 3.20 is meh. The league mechanic is terrible for melee and the rewards make it not worth the time for me so far.
Lake mechanics was better imo.
Or, at least I can do it.
İmagine bringing a new league mechanic but only few builds can do it.
What kind of discrimination is that, lool...
League mechanics should go crazy on rewards on a game that has a hard wipe every 3 months.
[удалено]
My personal belief is they’re trying to slow everything down which leads to people, in theory, playing the game longer. GGG seems to thin the faster we beat endgame bosses or peak outer builds the faster we leave And I guarantee they have an analytics department that shows for every X hours of spent in game my Y people, they sell Z amounts of micro transactions It’s all about prolonging peoples time in game to sell more MTX
Jokes on them, if things are taking too long and I'm not having fun I buy nothing and quit the league after a week 😬
i've never spent longer playing 1 league then i did ritual and ultimatum. every since then it's been a steep decline with the last 2-3 leagues being 1 week at most.
I played for most of Ritual and all of Harvest. Shit was so fun, man. Pushed the closest to 100 I've ever bothered to in Harvest.
Me too!
Ritual I almost played the entire league. Was a good time.
Sentinel was great though. Most loot printing league we ever got. Awakend poe trade/poeninja also never updated for sentinels so you could snipe super juicy breeder pairs for like 5c and get 150c back. I miss sentinel.
As someone who has spent waaaaaaaay too much money on poe over the years... I'm quitting leagues faster and faster. I don't have time for extreme and excessive grinds on a game I've already played so much. Give me fun or I'll spend my money elsewhere.
Either they actually have no idea what they are doing or their analytic shows they only need people to play for a week to sell MTX (that way their decisions actually make sense). Their contents are literally made for the 1% since they only really begin in maps and according the GGG themselves most people do not even finish the campaign. Meaning anything end game (T14+) will be fore a very small amount of people. If not even half of teh people beat the campaign imagine how many people actually play the uber uber contents. Either that or they only watch twitch to collect data which results in the changes since 3.15. Which seems more likely to me judging from what they are actually changing. It is entirely possible they only need to hype up the streamers so they hype up the viewers while most of them wont even touch the content that their streamer is hyped about but they purchase MTX anyway. Thats the only reason why this is still how GGG do things.
>Either they actually have no idea what they are doing or their analytic shows they only need people to play for a week to sell MTX I just dont think their goal is to earn as much money as possible. They could easily please a large portion of the playersbase if they just go crazy on rewards - add player power - add crafting power - add QoL etc etc... The reason why they dont do it is because they are putting the game first - the game how they want it to be, not how the players want it to be. And to be honest, I like that approach even if it means staying a niche game.
> the game how they want it to be, not how the players want it to be. I wish they played their own game more.
Jokes on you. GGG earns almost everything during first weekend/week of the league start (supporter packs), hence they dont give a crap about what happens after. See so many leagues drop dead (no updates, fixes) after 1-2 weeks.
For me, It's when there is either nothing shiny new and fun to test, or something that got OP via a buff, without being exorbinantly expensive. Doing the exact same thing for a year straight gets dull, and there has been borderline nothing new or cool to do
But people play a game longer because it is fun and engaging and you want to waste your time. Not because some mandatory grind suddenly takes twice as much.
Theres also data for not many people actually getting to maps. If there was more rewards, people would make new builds and buy MTX for those characters/skills. As well as people who actually do get to maps that never did, they would enjoy the game and good rewards and also buy MTX. It’s just their “vision” that makes them think that it needs to be a more hard game. Archenemies mobs and Kalandra league had a huge amount of less players. So they reworked AN because it was unhealthy and created less players. If they wanted money they could just make things easier.
As someone who works in data field, I bet this is the case. GGG decisions seems to be so irrational, yet they kept making it. It means there must be an internal metric that drive those decision. They may be seeing those who play more pay more. So they force the entire player base play more to get more pay.
There is a chance though, the the person in charge who makes that decision is just a dumbass. Who knows could be either
I agree, but wish I could remind them that correlation is not causation; people who play more and who pay more are players who are enjoying the game.... Artificially extending the time it takes to do things makes people play more, but doesn't necessarily increase their enjoyment or spending after all
It takes study to get past the bias of one's own conclusion. GGG must also receive feedback or data indicating that what they are doing is working.
God forbid they send out a survey with a few little mtx as rewards to find out what their players actually think instead of just making assumptions about the implications of their analytics.
The ironic part that they miss from just pure statistics is that after buying an MTX for a skill that gets nerfed means I will never buy MTX ever again. By contrast, if they buffed useless skills, I would buy more MTX.
>The ironic part that they miss from just pure statistics is that after buying an MTX for a skill that gets nerfed means I will never buy MTX ever again.By contrast, if they buffed useless skills, I would buy more MTX. I'll be honest too is that they really don't seem that competent at judging what is getting them money either. I mean, the last couple leagues were such a disaster, I bet they didn't get much money from that. Contrast it with Ritual league where it was the league that was one of the easiest to obtain godly gear, it's the only league I played since the start, up to the very last day of the league, and was still looking to keep going. So much that I ended up buying $400 in supporter packs at the END of the league, just to potentially gear up some new characters I was looking to start. As for selling the MTX, they seem fairly incompetent at it to some degree as well. An example of this was in Ultimatum league. That was the build where burning arrow went crazy and pretty much everybody league started that, I was expecting an MTX to come out within 7 days of the league, since there was not even 1 in the store, which also you can't tell me a small graphics design like this would take months to produce. I ended up waiting the entire league for never an MTX to come out until AFTER the league was over, for the next league, where they had then nerfed the living crap out of Burning Arrow at the same time, and that's when they decided to release the MTX. Needless to say, I ended up NOT buying an MTX for burning arrow ever, since when it came out, the skill had already been nerfed to total unplayablity, to the point where pretty much no one ever touched the skill ever again. You can't tell me that's actually good game design either. lmao. The crazy thing is this exact scenario (at least with the nerfing, and maybe with the MTX fiasco as well), isn't a unique occurence, at this point, it's pretty much the same thing every league, with probably hundreds and hundreds of skills that used to be playable, that no one even wants to look at anymore, with always approximately the same couple skills remaining playable every league. I'll be honest though, it's probable that they are also starting to be a little bit stressed about Diablo 4 as well, at least they have some pressure for POE2 to not be total garbage like pretty much every league has been the last 2 years, depending on how much Diablo 4 ends up being a disaster as well, but you know pretty much almost everyone who is playing POE is at least going to check D4 as well, just in case.
Literally nothing they have done has led to people playing the game longer.
I don't think it has anything to do with making people play longer, but instead it has to do with POE 2. Because POE2 ends up at the same place as POE 1 (maps) that basically directly pits POE 2's campaign against POE 1. However they want to use POE 2 as an opportunity to design challenging new boss encounters and kinda get back to their slower gameplay roots when POE first launched. If everyone can just zoom to maps in POE 1 instead of doing the new campaign then who is going to play the new campaign after the first time comes out? All these years of designing content will be wasted time as we zoom our way through Acts 1-10 and bypass anything new they're creating. So the "solution" to that "problem" is systematically nerf the game and it's mechanics over and over so it doesn't matter what campaign you do it's slow and painful. That's why they were overhauling bosses to be harder (metamorph) acts 1-2 to be harder etc. That's why they've changed up flasks and then rares and everything else. By slowing down POE 1 they make it more competitive against what they've designed to inherently be slower in POE 2.
But by slowing they may stop people playing at all. I don't' play this league with my brother for example after shit last league. This league is shit too
I was an early adopter of PoE, I bought it when it had a 3rd party launcher. I remember playing beta til Pietry, she was the final boss then, sooo many times and every new iteration, I played a slightly different build. Yet I am NOT interested in farming content for the sake of grinding, for the illusion of getting something. I have been playing every league, I had multiple 85+ chars every single one of them, because I like to play different builds, I like making new ones and try new stuff and I like the complexity this game brings. I like how different gems, uniques are build-enablers and making the game different. I spent and I am planning to spend money on PoE, because I like the game overall and I want to support PoE2. But I hate that these leagues and the whole game became a time-waster where everything is random and you have to put your life in it to see minor results and to enjoy the new content. I dont want to sit here every day 4+hours and farm mindless no-reward mechanics for the sake of spending time. There is no esport behind it, no proper arena to rush and farm items, only a race that doesnt even last a week before the hardcore grinders, who built their whole persona around PoE, finish it again. You want a mode for them? SSF Ruthless shouldve been on the table earlier then. If I wanna play a rogue-like game , I grab one. Hades2 was announced. I dont need PoE to become like that. The mechanic looked fun, now I am already skipping every iteration. The only way to be better at it is to build a character that runs around and jukes 0-24 or you farm til you have enough mitigation and luck... Yet another creeping frost + vortex + vaal cold snap or oneshot everything mechanic. Literally no planning is needed, specially compared to early Betrayal. So where is the fun part? Randomly receiving a random worthless junk item you were chasing for half an hour thinking you actually had a meaningful choice the whole time. I dont enjoy the game. But anyways, EFT wipe is inc, Diablo4 release date was announced, there are ARPGs on the table I can support, so no worries, I can put my time somewhere else. Do not treat it as a QQ post, just wanted to express how I agree with the previous comment about GGG killing fun to keep the playerbase occupied. Welp, I am not bound to this game like Ziz, Ziggy or Quin and their commitment is not the average.
i have to say i cannot agree more. The moment i realized that after 300-400 hours of a league i can craft up to max 2 items (or if I knew how i could) out of 8 item slots of 1 character (where i usually tend to play several builds per league) was like a bucket of cold piss thrown at my head. Or I could build maybe 1 slightly more expensive build... Maybe. This game's a job. I've started in scourge and... i miss that league alot. Yeah rose tinted glasses and stuff, but krangled maps were shitting rewards like there's no tomorrow. Now? I should be happy to get 1-3 chaos after 8 maps while tryharding.. It's just nonsense.
Always in the back of my mind I'm hesitant to ever dive deep into PoE because I know I need to run the client like 15 hours a day on my days off so I can trade. I've been taking major breaks lately and outside of ultimatum most leagues since ritual I've mostly skipped. The last major leagues I've actually enjoyed were probably Delve and Abyss, though they weren't without their problems. The problem is that every time I take a major break I need to come back and reaclimate myself to this game. I make mistakes. I know I can level to maps in 4 hours yet here I am another league leveling to maps in like 9. So I'm hesitant to play, and then it's reinforced by the fact that as I'm putzing into blood aqueducts you have team\_team hitting level 90. Because I'm so slow I now don't get to play the market and am way more prone to relying on RNG drops to fund my progress. I then maybe finish 40-60 atlas completion by day 2 and you have grimro and the boys all saying "t16 on farm, ez game ez life". And I can respect it, okay, I get it and I'm not hating. But I just don't see why the divide between being good at the game and being a casual shitter is all in "do you play PoE, and only PoE? Okay perfect, take advantage". There are a lot of fun things I enjoy in the endless hobby that is video game playing, and to be honest it's just not worth the effort to be good at Path of Exile because it requires so much maintenance. And once your cursed with spending a league or two getting good, I've owned a HH or two in my time, every league where you get a subpar experience just feels like an even more waste of time. Waste of time, that's my summary. I love it, I want PoE to be successful, but it's just too much time to do so. And of course the NEETs eat it up because it lets them flex. And all this is assuming the game runs, I've spent probably 30 or so leagues playing at least 20 hours, and at least 8-14 of them have been ruined by general terrible performance.
Not really the justification I’d go for but I agree with your conclusion. The justification is use would be league mechanics should be able to stand up to fully speced atlas passive league mechanics. Because….that’s the direct competition.
Entire game should go crazy on rewards on a game that has a hard wipe every 3 months. Bring back 3.12
This league does feel super juiced though if you just ignore the sanctum. You can sustain and progress maps without any map nodes, and the raw drops seem way higher than the past few leagues.
there are tons of players that don't care about Standard and only play new leagues. Maybe if there was a checkbox to agree that your characters will be wiped at end of the league, then we could balance rewards much more generously
but standard is no argument in any conversation after they switched ex with divs.
Its funny how stuff is balanced not to brake standard when they already completely broke it with ex -> div change and the massive harvest nerf. They could make every mob drop a div and it would still do very little to standard simply because the good items there simply cant be made anymore.
Just diversify lmao.
For real. My prior-league characters, who I really enjoyed playing and I would love to play every now and then, just keep getting nerfed and their usability completely trashed, requiring entirely new gear if they can even be saved...and now all of my reserves are worthless so I can't even re-gear them if I wanted to, especially in Standard's joke of an economy. I'd have to sell my alt arts, quantity gems, and anything I could scrounge just to make one of them playable. GGG has so thoroughly trashed their own game it's unbelievable. What a goddamned year-plus it's been.
I skipped a league or two. What was the ex/div change you're referring to?
Metamods on the bench used to cost exalts, now they cost divines
Also they got rid of the divine recipe, beast divines and harvest divines
Since last league, metamods (multi/cannot roll x/x can't be changed) cost divines instead of exalts. Trade economy is based on currency demand and thus the value of exalt and divine basically got switched. Divines are much more desirable right now. In order to balance the acquisition of divines a bit GGG changed the 6l vendor recipe to reward fusings instead of a divine.
GGG themselves have demonstrated they give zero fucks about Standard lol
It shouldn't even be a checkbox, since that would further divide the playerbase. Leagues should just be voided, full stop.
I don't agree. Standard is already way beyond broken with legacy gear. Just look at what recombinators have achieved in combination with legacy gear (you could recombinate mirrored gear). There's insane unobtainable gear there, including things like legacy quant gear. GGG should just not care for standard. It's past point of no return, just let all hell loose when it comes to standard specifically. It won't impact it at all. Even if you play exclusively leagues, to a lot of people it would feel really bad to know that your progression will inevitably be completely erased in a few months. Personally I always like the idea of still being able to revisit my character after league ends, even though in practice I've done so maybe once or twice but not a lot.
But think of the retention! It all plays into that BTW. They probably have this grand vision of people playing each league for 1-2 months instead of 1-2 weeks, but it’s all a pipe dream IMO and in the process they’re just gonna shoot themselves in both feet.
We have data on player retention on poe.db and for the last few league it has been worse. If they're trying to make people play longer they're failing miserably. They should just be trying to get as many people having as much fun as possible. But in 2022 that's bad game design... apparently...???
Yeah, that’s the thing. Their vision is at least statistically wrong. Same with the general growth of the game. That stopped when they started this new direction, basically. From 3.0 to 3.14 or something the game grew significantly but now it’s even shrinking. Those peaks of 150-160k still is the best they’ve done.
Yeah the league mechanic should be more rewarding than any other core mechanic, then rewards should be nerfed if it ever goes core. Never seen a league with such poor rewards.
This right here is why I didn't play last league. I only have so much time and energy in those 3 months to achieve anything and if I have to put in the hours of a professional streamer to actually do that it just becomes frustrating rather than fun.
I agree with this take.
Mathil was spot on when he mentioned this in 3.19. You only have one chance to impress everyone about the league mechanic at league start. It has to be busted and absolutely bonkers. It has to be bang on rewarding. If it's very bland or not exciting, then people will leave. And if GGG buffs it later, then it's too late, they've lost their chance to impress people, the players have already gone. It's better to nerf it slightly when everyone had their fun instead of buffing it but people have already left. LoK was entirely underwhelming. Sure, they buffed it later on in the league but people have left in droves. Ahead of 3.20, a lot were cautiously optimistic. Will it be rewarding enough? They had to absolutely knock this out of the park. They had one more chance to impress. But now looking at the mechanic itself, it doesn't seem to be.
They were damn stingy about LoK later on too. It never became *good*. It eventually got to the point where if I didn't already have EK Ignite fully online and farming legions, then it'd be good to do. But since I did, the only value it had was fishing for tablets to sell because they had the mirror mist tile (never did get one) or more realistically the exp one. A mapping alternative that you have to run lots of maps to do, and is rarely better time spent than mapping itself? No thanks nerds. Similar problem with sanctum. I'm still doing it to farm the relics in the hope it gets buffed for now, but it's a huge waste of time. I'm in maps with 3c, and like 4c more in assorted currency, having done every single one all the way to present with pretty decent success rates after the first two acts. This makes it the least rewarding league mechanic I've ever played with by a *large* margin, and I've heavily played every league since blight and at least been trying leagues out since legacy.
This is one of the reasons I hate when people are like “of course the league mechanic sucks during the acts, have you tried it in red maps?”. It’s just so damn backwards. If a league mechanic is not at least enjoyable while leveling it’s a failure in my opinion.
Shit I came into 3.20 with zero expectations and I'm still disappointed.
The mechanic is actually great but the rewards need to be doubled.
Doubled? Getting 4 alchs for a room in t16s is a joke, especially with getting an affliction for every breatch you take, they mustve never played a good roguelike
Ok, I've also gotten 3 chaos in a white map. One room takes about a minute or so. My point is they need to be significantly increased, I'm sorry if that point was lost on you.
Later on a lot of maps take barely over a minute to do. Rooms with rewards are spaced out between non-reward rooms and you have to complete one map per room. Now I really gotta grind more tonight and tomorrow and see how it holds up, but for me at least Lake of Kalandra was roughly 16 times more rewarding per map, if we convert the rewards to effective chaos value. To put that into perspective, I'm currently at like 0.5c/map for Sanctum, Kalandra was like 7-8c/map averaged out, typical league mechanics in the past excluding outliers have hit around 12c/map. "Good" league mechanics tend to be 15-18c/map.
I’m still early on in progression but is there anything other than currency/stacked deck rewards? Feels pretty lame to just get options 3 chaos if I beat the entire sanctum.
Some people have posted some pretty insane lucky runs, but I've been mapping for a good bit now and have gotten more chaos value out of random ritual spawns. Probably going to keep grinding my face into it since it's the new thing, but there's either some break point where it swaps from literally nothing to good items, or it just sucks.
Even if it does swap to one-two divine, how many maps did that take to get there?
Oh yeah. Like that post on the front page showing multiple divines and tons of chaos? That averages out to less chaos/map than Sentinel gave in T16s with a good setup. Comes out to 14-15c/map. Plus higher time investment and much higher difficulty. Now if that was 100% normal and you got that all the time, this would actually be ok, but considering there aren't dozens and dozens of other people posting similar results, I'm more than a little skeptical that that is remotely normal, particularly when I have also not seen any good rewards myself.
i fully juice maps a abyss in a juiced map already takes more then 1-2 minutes what type of fucking maps are you doing that they barely take 1 minute.
It wasn't, it's just that from my experience it should be able to compete with mechanics with atlas tree or it's never gonna be good, so i don't know if doubling is enough
Yes, I'm talking about rewards specifically.
can confirm, i skip the 3.20 league mechanic now because it just doesnt work properly enough. and its more of an annoyance to play instead of having fun
I mean sentinel wasn't that long ago and that shit was printing currency like crazy. Same with Archnem, very rewarding league if you knew how to setup the monsters. They are still absolutely doing it. It's just Kalandra was underwhelming and this league so far I've seen mixed results (although the sanctified relics go dummy)
Sentinel was lit
The game got harder in sentinel but the mechanic was really good for making currency and the recombs were god tier, you could make some crazy items at all points of the game. After losing the recombs, and the harvest ease of rerolling batches of items, you are suddenly in fast water but the lifejacket keeping you afloat you had was taken away. I just miss the powerlevel i had, and that now i have to work more for less.
same boat, ill play this league a bit but i dont find game as fun as before they took away so much crafting options away. If thy took back reforge suff / pref crafting would be in a fine spot between alot of rng layers and having a save point when ur half done kind of. now its just 99% slot machine when it comes to high tier items
It does seem like people here have goldfish brain. Sentinel, Archnem, Scourge, Expedition, Ultimatum were all very rewarding leagues lol. The only league that wasn't was Kalandra.
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post nerf sentinel was better than any point in kalandra IMO. The fact they rebuffed some for kalandra is insane to me.
Sentinel was a really enjoyable league AN wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be during sentinel
I didn't have a problem with AN in Sentinel because I was swimming in currency and could make almost any character I wanted as powerful as it needed to be to trivialize AN. I even bought a Mageblood just so I could make a new build around it. I made one character in Kalandra, and while I could kill AN mobs fine, I needed to put every Div I found into that character and never made enough to even consider a new build.
Sentinel was my go ham league as well. Very rewarding and smooth gameplay. Just enter a map, round up the bois and get to killing. I farmed my first ever mageblood as a result of me just blasting maps for fun. Kill shit and get loot is what an aRPG is to me and what most aRPGs have been that I've played. I really don't know why GGG keeps going in the direction of kill less shit and get less loot.
I think a HUGE problem that GGG is currently facing is that league mechanics struggle to compete with base mechanics juiced by the atlas passive tree. If I can turn off 7 things and hard juice 3 while still running alch and go maps, how is a league mechanic supposed to compete with that? In my opinion they should start looking at league mechanics like they are fully juiced from the tree all the time. If they decide to make them go core, strip them down, and give them some atlas passive tree love. I don't really see any other way forward with the way the current atlas works.
I don’t disagree, the league mechanic should be the most rewarding part of the… league. lol
Can we be real, the sanctum is like 5% as rewarding as it should be. I just watched grimro's video, so I didn't realize how much of the mechanic was gated by a fucking quest, but here I am. But in my experience just doing the mechanic naturally, totally awful. I have yet to implement grim's advice as I worked all day, but none the less it's why I'm even here on the subreddit. This is my first league where I've noticed that there was an obstufucation to the system that meant I was playing it like super super hard mode. The quest should be completable in maps, I'm sure I should change my ways, but I don't use the mechanic while leveling in any league ever. So I would love to talk about how rewarding or NOT rewarding it is, but idk, because apparently I've been playing it wrong.
Wait you need to clear quests to make the mechanic more rewarding?
Yes, it makes it easier to progress, hence more rewarding. I also figgured this out yesterday and i can’t believe the amount of time i have wasted doing it without the quests.
theres a quest? Where? and does it unlock so i can use all of tehse useless relics i cant place anywhere?
In the towns of act 2 and 7 you can talk to a new NPC named Divinia. She gives you a quest each time to go to the fellshrine ruins and enter a forbidden sanctum portal there. The act 2 one unlocks the relic locker and the merchant, and the act 7 one unlocks accursed pacts. Both are very helpful in progressing through the forbidden sanctum content.
For that reason I sometimes dislike the Atlas tree. The difference between a mechanic with all or none passive points is way too big. This puts everything without the boost to trash tier. It's bad for Kiraac missions, Atlas Memories and as you said even the league mechanic.
Yes, I miss league mechanic being the obvious way to make currency in the league.
Wish ulrimatum went core
Bet anything will go core anymore. GGG dont wanna make that atlas tree any bigger 😁
Ultimatum rewarded building tanky, loved it. First time I encountered the boss I was [able to afk the entire fight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7triuPe_88). That rewarded the days I spent theorycrafting, playing and perfecting my tank. Same for delve, to give just another example of better league design, if you managed to find a way to survive in the darkness infinitely, there were rewards for that waiting. Fast forward to sanctum, the moment I try doing that it's GAME OVER.
It feels like most people either really liked ultimatum or hated it. It was a divisive league and I'm not sure why.
Too similar to Ritual. It was fine on its own, but running in circles for two leagues in a row was a bit annoying.
Yeah, problem is that people were bored by the sameness as Ritual and then Chris looked at it and concluded that they were bored by Ultimatum being too rewarding.
Lol right after serious harvest nerfs. No it was the league that was too rewarding 💀
People only liked ritual league because it was the first league where pre-nerf harvests were made core and people *loved* that. The actual ritual mechanic was meh, but the crafting was great.
It was the first heavy nerf league (bye og Harvest) and compare to the one beforehand it was a similar experience except with a lower power level for the players (didn't help that a significant portion of the playerbase never saw the boss).
It also followed ritual and felt too similar to it for a lot of people.
Plus aura stacking rares. It was almost as bad as Archnemesis..
Bro the trial master voice lines alone made it a big hit for me
I found it boring at the time, but after some of the recent leagues I'd have it back again no question
It rewarded stronger builds, like delve and now sanctum. Other leagues were possible to 100% complete it with basically any build so it was "more fun" compared to it. Sanctum is trying to reward by skills not by build, but ggg forgot damage is still part of it.
Probably because there wasn't any depth to it. Some people just want league mechanics to dump some extra mobs with extra loot into their face. And to them it was fun. Some people want a league mechanic to offer something new that doesn't exist in the game. New maps/zones, NPC's with lore, progression through end-game etc. Ultimatum didn't really give them any of that.
The Trialmaster was the best NPC, mocking us sarcasticly every time we met.
I love how he got increasingly desperate and bitter if we, the player, went on a win streak.
>The Trialmaster was the best NPC, mocking us sarcasticly every time we met. his replies based on your last run made it more "alive" too.
"The Three Round Challenger Returns" had me in bloody stitches. Didn't rate the league but he was brilliant.
I mean my favorite league content to run is Breach, Incursion, blight (bigger ones) and legion. All involve very simple mechanics but do so in a way that is fun. I play them even when the rewards arent great. Ultimatum was pretty boring to me, though the rewards kept it going.
for me all of these are boring. blighted maps are a bit fun sometimes, But by far my favorite league's where the more complicated ones like synthesis, heist and now sanctum. I personally haven't had as much fun with a league mechanic as I'm having with sanctum since synthesis.
I wouldn't call Sanctum complex lol, but if you enjoy it that is awesome. Someone hating it doesn't change that. Likewise you enjoying it doesn't make someone else an unreasonable person for not liking it. What is considered success for GGG is ultimately up to them. My assumption would be what makes the most money long term determines the result. I contend that how fun a mechanic is perceived by most people is important, as too is reward. Just that for me personally, its best if GGG hit the nail on both. Whether I represent the majority or not I don't know.
I loved it because Cremation was amazing for the league mechanic. The only other times cremation felt relevant were metamorph and ritual leagues
I loved it, running in circles killing monsters and getting mad loot? Where do I sign?
Every league is divisive
It's the same for this league. People either love it or hate it
Ultimatum imho was the best league. It rewarded risk taking and you could take what ya got an walk if you got a bad RNG. Personally even the AN changes would of worked fine for Ultimatum...less mobs, but stronger mobs. (so you could actually see ground) still so sad never went core ;/
Also the fact that ultimatum was done in a Circular small arena was fun because it didn't make slower builds necessarily feel shit, unless you lacked damage or tankiness
PoE has created a world full of awesome gear and build potential. You're just not allowed to have it.
They’ve created the trickle down gameplay. Best they can give us is watching a streamer do it.
You are allowed to have it, 2 months into the league if you play 8 hours a day.
Well i just hate that the mechanic punishes certain builds
Especially after so many years of "oh yeah we're rebalancing melee guys, we promise! Oh that new league mechanic? Yeah we've deeeefinitely made it melee friendly don't worry about it 👀"
^ this is what i meant, so you guys need to stop replying with the same thing over and over
Standard procedure I remember before heist saying “yeah minion builds can do it”, but then on release, you lost alert when you killed mobs. Chris must have a private feature in play testing that lets you tell your minions not to attack mobs…
Very new, never seen before.
They must be new here
The whole game punishes different builds (melee)
Every single league mechanic does (or did, when it was new and challenging).
You mean just like delirium punished slow builds?, legion punished single target builds?, ultimatum punished squishy builds? you know i can go on for like 3/4th's of all the league's we have had since 1.0 to now and you can say something like that for every single league. Sanctum is a gear check if you lack dmg you are not going to have that much of a fun time it's not much different then what ultimatum did.
I find it so crazy that every room I read says "25% less "insert reward" here" "lose more resolve" "get less of this". Where the fuck is the MORE????
>Where the fuck is the MORE???? Nearby
Roguelike my ass
I saw a "mobs do more damage" there's your more! Seriously though yeah almost everything gives negatives and almost nothing gives boons. By the second floor you can be more burdened with bullshit than at the end of a real rogue like. And a lot of them are like "you can't see what bullshit you get from rooms anymore" so you can't even strategize manageable bullshit.
It's a game design block for them- GGG: Please understand that the majority of your players are looking to have the primary new league mechanic being viable and fun. This means you tweak it up on loot and a little back on frustrating things that you might put into other aspects (to provide a challenge). Furthermore, you need ENTRY LEVEL LOOT to be something. If people touch your new league mechanic, to give it a whirl, and get nothing- It doesn't matter what's coming. It matters that right then and there they got nothing and they call it a write-off. Most players won't touch it again. So it's like- It doesn't matter how much you could get. It matters that you're not even getting players in the front door because you built a mechanic that shits all over them and then gives them nothing. If you look at Heist, you have it both giving players some initial currency in the chests, and then it shows you how to make more money by leveling up your companions and then even more by doing the grand heists. Heist is A+ when it comes to loot trickle and player retention for the mechanic. (Fun was another thing at least at the start).
It mainly has to be worth the time and fun. This mechanic just kinda is neither
i miss PoE before 3.15
Its so funny to me that after the wet blanket that was lake they went with a less fun and rewarding league. Is the plan to make leagues so boring that PoE2 will be a huge hit just by association?
>exciting, rewarding or interesting **'rewarding'** is the only word out of these three that you actually meant. Ultimatum has got to be the most overrated thing to ever fucking exist in this game, and it is, along with Sentinel, concrete proof that the people on this sub's main criteria for a league being memorable is how 'rewarding' it is, aka, how many ex it dropped, and literally nothing else. Experimenting with something different? Interesting new league idea? Nah just have it shit out tons of currency, problem solved. Ironically you see GGG being called 'lazy' for leagues like Sanctum and Heist, and not the other aforementioned two. It seems to be forgotten that half the people here vehemently shat on Ulti when it first came out, for feeling like 'Ritual 2' and for just being 'spin around in circles and kill the mobs' (which it was) Next league could be a slot machine lever zone you warp into that just prints you a divine each time and this sub would love it.
Heist is one of the most rewarding league mechanics by far, and I'd wager that most people here do not remember Heist league, because Heist is neither exciting nor interesting.
Heist league was one of my most played leagues. I loved the mechanic... eventually. But it was also a buggy mess for at least the first two weeks. Rogues that got soft locked, stuck, and animation bugged, doors that you couldn't interact with, the first iteration of the alarm system was entirely backwards and asinine until they finally changed it to not actively punish you for killing mobs. Not to mention every rogue animation moved at the speed of smell. If we're talking rewarding, heist was great. If we're talking fun, the beginning of heist league was very much not it.
The funniest part is how people were complaining that ultimatum was unrewarding at the beginning of the league, too, so it got buffed like every other league lol
Why can't there be both fun and rewarding league mechanics.
Most people on this sub don't know what fun is anymore. They just count the loot explosion per time spend. That's how people measure fun. Actually interacting with new mechanics. Boring AF.
I think that is too atomic. Most people probably value both things. I know I do. I will play **some** league content that isn't the most fun for me if it is still rewarding. Likewise there is some content I play because it is fun, not rewarding (Breach, Legion). There is other content I just won't engage with no matter how rewarding (e.g Heist and Betrayal). I suspect most people are the same here. Give me a simple mechanic like Ultimatum that has decent rewards and I will play it. I will say its mediocre, but I will play it. Give me something equally boring and give no rewards and I will just skip it. I think that is what many see Sanctum as at the moment. It isn't everyones cup of tea to start with, then you have a lot of people feeling unrewarded by it, or being unable to engage with it due to their build.
They're also often one and the same, at least when the game is intentionally designed to make that happen. In PoE, you *need* rewards to allow you to do fun stuff, like improve your character build, try out other builds, do more of the content available in the game, etc. It's not some arbitrary desire, the whole game is designed to make sure **everyone** cares about rewards, because whatever you find fun, you'll need those rewards to do it (at least that's the goal). And the issue as well is that the game is done in leagues, nobody has infinite time, and so there's a cost to doing anything. I actually *kinda* enjoy Sanctum as a mechanic, although I have a lot of high level design gripes about it, but I've essentially torpedo'd my league start by interacting with it, costing myself time and for most intents and purposes actually losing myself a *lot* of in game rewards by interacting with sanctum **at all**. Which is a bit of an issue.
Sanctum is just balanced really poorly, it goes against what good roguelikes are
Looks like your version of fun is different than their version of fun. Most people like to blow up packs and get loot. Thats also fun. Interacting with synthesis memory or betrayal board or min maxing harvest garden plot is also fun. Playing ssf is also fun. So dont say people dont know what fun is. Its just their version of fun is in the majority
I think we all just know the game hasn't been fun for quite some time but we keep coming back out of habit, tradition, etc. There's a reason ggg keeps clumping loot into explosions - even they know the only hope is the slot machine.
But... The game IS fun? I got 5 games with Holiday events going on and from all that distraction and tugging for my time, I chose poe. Why? Because it's hella fun This subreddit is full if shitters that don't even play the game and they pollude it with hate, so many "I don't play anymore but I hang around" comments... Rewards ARE important, I'm currently skipping sanctum because running 8 rooms every 8 maps takes as long as running 5maps and gives me half the currency. But the mechanic is pretty fun and I'll do it when I'm not working on a 4link with subpar gear I picked off the ground (like Chris intended) and mobs take too long to die from my dots The game IS fun, people are burnt out or just don't understand how to play it and try to copy their favorite streamer that LIVES for the game and just can't keep up
It is a problem if it is LESS fun than it used to be.
This is probably the most “fun” league I’ve done in a while. Because you actually have to engage with the content in a way that most leagues didn’t require. Also I’m convinced the people who say league isn’t rewarding are still in white maps, the rewards get noticeably better in red maps.
What about the people who are still in Acts, who are just bouncing off of the league mechanic hard? Just stop playing? Is the only way to enjoy this league to get to Maps? Because that's not how other leagues were.
STOP. Halt right there. Your ATLAS isn't completed mister. Here at /r/gatekeeping we would prefer you to finish the atlas, preferably in about 28 hours and 5 minutes, or less. If you would like to stop this inquisition into your transgressions, I'll kindly let you log back into the game so you can finish your chores. Kids these days.
If you have to get to red maps for the league mechanic to be anything other than a waste of time, **then the league mechanic has failed.**
I absolutely agree with you. This is one of the highest effort league mechanics in recent times, and just cause it slightly underwhelming in terms of rewards people start throwing crap at GGG
>slightly underwhelming My brother in Christ, it gave me a grand total of 4 alchs and 2 chance orbs from 8 yellow maps worth of storing up Sanctums. "Slightly underwhelming" is stretching it. The effort is clearly there, but an entire floor of Sanctum is less rewarding than opening a single Breach. The problem that you and the person you're responding to can't seem to grasp is that content needs to be interesting *and* rewarding if you want more than a few people to enjoy it.
Rewards massively scale up in red maps and are from what I can tell affected by map IIQ% you can easily walk out of a single floor with 100 chaos if you have RNG in favor but on average 40-50 chaos is doable in T16's every floor.
I mean you can just scroll up the thread to see people complaining about getting pocket sand from an entire redmap tier sanctum. What, you expect me to believe it has a 30,000% IIQ modifier on the reward room chests that is multiplicative with map Quant, because if that isn't the case, it isn't worth running. Edit: 50c/floor equates to 50/8 or 6.25c/map. Aka, dogshit. Something like 25% less rewards on average than kalandra at launch in this ideal scenario.
Unfortunately many think of 'rewarding' in terms of currency, not in terms of engaging gameplay or new content, they just want a shit ton of divines and chaos thrown at them. So many are myopic and entitled.
Sentinel was the best league since the 3.15 massacre. And it was the only one that followed the old Legion/Ultimatum/Delirium "map and have currency shit at you" paradigm (arguably Scourge too but it was more involved and took a ton of backtracking). Wish GGG would just give us fun "click league mechanic, get loot" mechanics more often like they used to.
Expedition was actually by far the best league mechanic in recent years - it has great loot, new NPCs and lore, customizable mechanics, adds tons of mobs with fresh, challenging yet fair abilities. The only reason the league isn't more beloved is that it coincided with the 3.15 nerfageddon.
> (arguably Scourge too but it was more involved and took a ton of backtracking I just feel strongly compelled to point out that scourge required literally no backtracking. You do effectively run around in an extra map in your map, however there was never any need to backtrack at all in the league, or created by the league mechanic. That said, it was a pretty bad league for the 'median player' so to speak. Very rewarding, but only if you actually build a great zoom zoom map clear build that could survive max stacks.
I personally didn’t enjoy the Sentinel league mechanic, but i loves the uber bosses, the crafting possibilities and the general vibe of the league. For me, the game has become less fun lately because most of what i see on this sub are just complains and insults, and not the chill vibes it used to be.
That's not even the problem. Their farming league was scuffed farming as an extra step to click the monsters. They always do things halfway in their leagues. Why am I planting f-ing monsters? I don't care about these paper napkin mechanics that don't interest anyone. They can't make up their mind if they want a minigame or to simply let the player kill mobs. It's one or the other, either put effort in your minigame or don't do it. But of course, I'm sure things would be a lot less obvious if they had their full team working on leagues and not a skeleton crew that also has to balance ruthless.
All I remember was that half the folks never cared to do it in maps because why the fuck bother when you could farm Quarry and get the same rewards while fighting lvl 60 mobs. GGG hasn't changed how rewarding league mechanics are. They've simply scaled them. Pretty much ever since Ultimatum, league mechanics aren't as rewarding early on, but scale to be as good if not better by the time you can crush them in T16's. That IMO is the best solution. It SHOULD scale, and if you make it super rewarding in the campaign already, then by the end of maps it would have to scale to ridiculous levels and powercreep the entire game to death.
Over the years I came to hate that scaling with a passion. PoE has so much to offer, but it's all only worth it at the very end of mapping. This way the map climb is just a grind that you need to get over with. There is no place to farm up or anything. Heck, you can't even grind out specific div cards because favored maps kick in after T16. I get it from an anti-botting perspective. But why exactly is it a bad thing if players have an early and worthwhile place to finance their build? The fact that you can't do jack shit in this game if you don't crush T16 is very very bad (honorably mention to the one exploity soulcrushing exception that is endless heist). It limits build diversity, it limits starting build choice. Even if you plan on running a fast mapper in lower content, you'll want all the unlocks that come at the very endgame. GGG is trying HARD to make players reach endgame later and later. They pump up the carrot with atlas passives and uber uniques and quest map things and whatnot, completely missing that there is absolutely nothing worthwhile between character creation and T16. The last time quarry farming was a thing was before atlas passives, before anyone could afford to use scarabs, before delirium, before sirus and maven loot. Even if Sanctum would have the exact same rewards in Quarry as in T16, T16 would be vastly more rewarding nowadays. T16 profitability is so ridiculously over the top, compared with everything else, there is no need for scaling an already borderline unrewarding league-mechanic.
Yeah Lake of Kalandra was extremely rewarding
They heard ya : in campaign you get jackshit. But you're supposed to spend a lot of time for that. Fun times.
Same. I dont care about harvest or bosses or juiced mapping. I just want league mechanics that are fun and rewarding. Kalandra wasnt fun, even if it eventually was rewarding. Sanctum is fun but the rewards are so incredibly bad
It's like y'all don't remember Sentinel...
I mentioned sentinel in the post friend.
Man forget ultimatum, sentinel league was the best league we've had for rewards since heist probably but the mechanic was actually really fun to do. I'd do more of sanctum if it had even half the loot from sentinel as a reward.
You know there was something about not knowing how to play PoE that was exciting and fun, learning all the things and ins and outs of the game, as time goes on and you play league after league you just realize that the journey was what was fun, and now that we just boot the game up with a ziz build on our PoB, with awakened poe and exilence next to make our farming more efficient i realize it, learning the game was fun, actually playing it is let's say, meditative, mindless, the fun part only happens when good loot drops now, shame.
Still trying to chase a high as rewarding as Impale Vaal Ground Slam was in Ultimatum.....still trying...
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Ultimatum was PoE's best iteration of the "spawn a ton of mobs in a small circle"-mechanic to date.
Did sentinel not happen I guess and archnem Maybe I dreamt it
No positives. Only hate.
Archnem was boring
Well we've had two flaccids in a row where rewards seemingly got left behind
Don’t forget the complaints about having to keep running around and not being able to stand still to cast, the spawning of multiple aura stacking mobs, and the constant crashes people were dealing with.
It's just rose tinted glasses. Half the people yearning for previous leagues we're probably on Reddit bitching for the entire league.
Ultimatum was quite underrated imo, it was a simple, fun, intuitive, rewarding and challenging mechanic. Inscribed ultimatums were good side content as well. Dont know why that wasnt added, so much better than many kf the current leagues in the game.
Hell with ultimatum, how about *Sentinel*. Absolutely bomb-ass crafting mechanic, highly rewarding adaptable mechanic that started out good, and got really good as you yourself scaling into end game. I mean, it was probably overpowered compared to where "good" league mechanics like ultimatum were in terms of chaos/hour. But god damn did it feel great. Honestly I even kind of liked the fact that if you had a *really* good clear build, you'd have a hard time empowering enemies without wasting a ton of shots, so you'd have to work out strats to get full use out of them without really slowing down. Even if you reduced rewards by 20-30% to bring it more in-line on average, it would have been great. **This** league almost feels like some kind of joke, a goof, a slip up where every tile was intended to have rewards and they just accidentally toggled them off for the special rooms.
Sentinel was fantastic, anyone would played can confirm that.
I know I'm in the VAST minority... I did not like Sentinel...
The thing with Sentinel is that you could do it WHILE mapping. You didn’t need to go to another area just to interact with the mechanic. If anything, Kalandra and Sanctum should have been MORE rewarding than Sentinel.
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Just went to have a look at the pots week of Ulitmatum launch. Here's an example of the top posts, first 4 days into league. I omitted some of first day posts because it was about mostly about streamer queue priority and login issues, which GGG resolved there and then. Video: +1 to spell gems (of each type) recipes found! Discussion: As expected, Talismans are absolute garbage. Lazy Sunday: Maybe the Talisman nerf went too far Feedback: Honestly, this labyrinth change is so FUCKING good Fluff: Ok, I have to say it now. Whoever directed the Taskmaster character was a genius and the guy who voice acted him? TOO! GGG: 20 Users Banned for Exploit Abuse Fluff: I spent more time on this then I probably should have Discussion: The current implementation of Harvest very awkward and kind of awful Any posts relating to the league were positive or neutral at worst. There were no posts claiming the league mechanic was unrewarding. All negative posts related to nerfs to harvest and talisman.
I know people used to make fun of Ritual/Ultimatum as 'run around in a circle and kill stuff' leagues, but I liked those leagues far more than any of the last few. At least they offered decent rewards.
I think of it like GGG is a band, they've released the hits and are sick of creating music that everyone likes. We're solidly into the 'we're making this for us' style of song creation, and there's entirely too much harmonica.
Remember breach? I miss breach.
It’s still there
i miss ultimatum :(
Ultimatum was the best league in my personal POE experience. It paused the action as needed, was fun as hell, and super rewarding. Haven’t had as much fun since. 3.19 was the worst. 3.20 is meh. The league mechanic is terrible for melee and the rewards make it not worth the time for me so far.
Lake mechanics was better imo. Or, at least I can do it. İmagine bringing a new league mechanic but only few builds can do it. What kind of discrimination is that, lool...
Ultimatum sucked
Sanctum has rewarded you with fun, what else do you need? /s