First steps towards making loot feel better overall.

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Faustus coupled with a crafting mechanic as deterministic and powerful as provisioning wombgifts is an absolute recipe for disaster, a game killer even though many might not realize it just yet. Sure it's good for short-term fun by providing insane power creep, but it has much more dire and less obvious consequences. Player retention is on the decline, and there's a reason.

Players now simply have access to too many items way too fast, be it uniques or rares, at basically no cost. It reduces the need to grind, the need to sink time into the game, the need to dive into its core systems, etc. It also diminishes character fantasy as goals are reached sooner, hence leading to lower overall player retention.

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Firstly : listing items at Faustus needs to require some kind of artificial friction so that items are prevented from completely flooding the economy as fast as they currently do; which would in turn allow them to retain a semblance of scarcity and value over time ; while also preventing players from gearing up too quickly for a low cost

Secondly : provisioning wombgifts shorten the overall progression and lifespan of any individual player's league by allowing for a faster journey from start to end, and more importantly by skipping the early progression struggles; which is completely antithetical to a game based on grind. In addition the process doesn't require effort, put points in the tree, click, and you obtain insane upgrades with almost no effort.

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The two aforementioned mechanics combined also lead to several other mechanics and farms becoming sub-par at best, if not obsolete; which is both terrible design as well as negative for the game as a whole.

It is not about profit making, it is not about gate keeping any particular demographic of players, it is simply about the overall health of the game, and its progression curve.

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Introduce friction to Faustus and remove provisioning wombgifts from the game altogether, and that alone would already be a huge step towards loot feeling better overall. Progression would feel more progressive and rewarding hence more fun, in turn leading to the game having higher retention. If not people have less things to chase, hence less fun, hence players will quit faster every single league from now on (we're already seeing this so any argument that players are currently having more fun is mute).

League start is the most crucial and special time in POE, and these two systems completely shorten if not eliminate one of the most fun time frames of any new league, catapulting players forward as well as flooding them with items. If you give players amazing items too fast, if someone has less things to chase and upgrade to, they will naturally play less.

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Now, I see people coming claiming that the genesis tree will be nerfed, but the problem here is that provisioning wombgifts are basically impossible to balance by nature : either it will be absolute trash or not good enough and nobody will take it, or they will just be good enough (or too strong) that everyone will be focusing that mechanic during any future league start... printing sick items and flooding the economy. In both cases, it's a negative outcome, and bad design.

And also to clarify just in case, I am NOT advocating for the removal of Faustus or asynch trade; all I am saying is that some kind of frictions that can either limit or regulate the amount of items each individual player is able to post, or how, needs to be introduced. Or if it's not a limit, there should be a price to pay for mass dumping items. Could be gold, could be something one unlocks the further one's character progresses, a combination of both, or some other system entirely.

Any competent game designer knows that players are their own worst enemy, and that when given the choice the latter will almost always choose the path of least resistance. It is a game designer's job (and duty) to restrict players, by introducing and maintaining friction.

You don't start a game of monopoly by having houses and hotels on every street or there would be no point in playing (and if there is a point in that for some, it just shortens the game by definition); the same way you shouldn't start a play through of Path of Exile by being handed such powerful items so fast, and swimming in items that cost nothing at the click of a button.

Speeding up gear acquisition as early as immediately following a league start, as well as it simultaneously impacting and invalidating several farms and crafting methods as a direct byproduct, has dire consequences on both short-term retention (how much time a player will put into a single character); as well as long-term player psyche (future replayability, that being a direct result of the fun had previously).

Less fun being had by players overall directly correlates to poor retention, and vice-versa.

This game is all about grinding, it is the core principle and pillar of a game of this type.

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TLDR:
Introduce friction to Faustus so that the economy doesn't get flooded instantly and so that items are able to retain any semblance of scarcity and value over time. Also remove provisioning wombgifts from the game altogether both to combat rampant power creep, to restore the place and value of alternative farms and mechanics, the overarching goal being to increase fun hence overall player retention down the line. Those two changes alone would already be a huge step towards loot feeling better overall.

Better solution would be to make the game ssf only and not waste a bunch of dev time dealing with the economy.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

Better solution would be to make the game ssf only and not waste a bunch of dev time dealing with the economy.

Pretty much this

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

Better solution would be to make the game ssf only and not waste a bunch of dev time dealing with the economy.

sure, its EXTREMELY HARD to deal with tree which annihilates early progression and trivializes crafting. I don't even know what developers can do about provisioning wombgift! Maybe delete this abomination and never again add such system in poe? Nonono, let's disable trade league where 99.999999% of ppl play and leave only SSF. And we also can make ruthless core, it gonna smoothen backlash of ppl who are unhappy bc endgame is trash, aspirational endgame is absent bc of 3.27 patchnotes, and tile loot farms are №1. All the players gonna play r*thless and gain dophamine when support gems drop.

I don't know what you do for work, but lets imagine you work in an office where every day when you show up to the office everybodies computer is in a new spot, every printer, every pen, stapler, desk. As you work that day you're constantly playing whack-a-mole with "where is this item i need right now"

That is the nightmare of dealing with all the sctrade dopamine addicts.

The work you actually need to get done is the actual game play, the shuffling of items every day is the economy. Essentially a waste of time.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

I don't know what you do for work, but lets imagine you work in an office where every day when you show up to the office everybodies computer is in a new spot, every printer, every pen, stapler, desk. As you work that day you're constantly playing whack-a-mole with "where is this item i need right now"

That is the nightmare of dealing with all the sctrade dopamine addicts.

The work you actually need to get done is the actual game play, the shuffling of items every day is the economy. Essentially a waste of time.

Pretty much this.

Even in SC trade, I tend to play SSF 99.9% of the time, only occasionally trading ingame for specific items. The async trade is all I use now. I'd much rather just get on and play.

Imagine starting a game of monopoly with houses and hotels on every street instead of having to work for it, removing progression milestones and ultimately shortening the game.

Imagine starting a game of soccer at minute 60 (instead of minute 0), and with a 3-0 lead instead of having to work for it, removing progression milestones and ultimately shortening the game.

That is exactly what provisioning wombgifts are doing, literally. I don't know what you're all on about defending such garbage, you must be from another dimension

how many of the items you wear are from the tree? list them. share how many wgifts it took you to get them

how far into endgame can you get with 'regular' items - because tree cannot do influences, cannot do essences and chances of getting actually endgame pieces (like +2, 90%+spell damage wand with matching suffixes) is extremely low

there is A LOT of hyperbole around the tree.

it producing good chests and movement speed boots is one thing, pretending it can gear you top-down is another. it cannot.


what the tree changes is that makes mid-tier items - that some people sold for 1d or more to non-craft-savvy players - are now much more accessible.

good chests STILL sell for multiple divs and to be frank i think that good influenced chests are MORE expensive this league than previous one



and if you want longevity in this game - play multiple characters, it solves all 'longevity/retention' woes.


EDIT: i am all for limiting each player to 1 (one) merchant tab. few sellers ive interacted with had 40+ merchant tabs, full of everything (most likely guild traders). it.. isnt right. the gold price is a limiting factor for buying, but selling stuff you drop for free is another. in phrecia ive used merchant instead of vendor, just dumping everything sub 20c for 1-2c and getting 100s or 1000s of chaos for stuff i wouldnt have picked up otherwise. i didnt know you could make a solid money selling white and yellow maps. in 100s. so yeah, limit on selling slots (already working well with currency exchange) would be good. sadly - this boat had long sailed

There is no coming back from a declining player base as poe 2 is out now, lol. What did you expect?

Game is in pretty good shape. I expected that almost no one will ever play poe 1 again after 6th of december 2024, but here we are.

Be happy if 150k players are online at launch and leave the ssf players their beloved tree. Who cares about minor sc trade economy issues, as stated by other posters, lol.

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Strickl3r#3809 wrote:

Who cares about minor sc trade economy issues, as stated by other posters, lol.

The vast majority of players play SC trade so issues there need to be addressed, and the issues are far from minor.

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Strickl3r#3809 wrote:

There is no coming back from a declining player base as poe 2 is out now, lol. What did you expect?

POE2 is fucking garbage. Declining player counts in POE1 are because GGG keeps injecting bits of that same garbage into POE1, and in doing so making the game worse.

New breach, and especially the tree, is some of that POE2 garbage being injected into POE1. The same is true with Kingsmarch. POE1 keeps getting updates inspired by or based on POE2, and it keeps getting worse as a result. The disastrous 3.15 release was disastrous precisely because of POE2 bullshit getting injected into POE1, and it was the same with archnemesis (i.e. the monster modifier system from POE2) going core in 3.18 and all the awful hacks since to try (poorly) to make it work.

The only changes to POE1 that haven't been awful for the game over the past few years have been precisely the ones that had nothing to do with POE2 (e.g. instilling orbs, the atlas passive tree).

It is precisely those POE2-inspired things, things like Kingsmarch, and the tree, which need to be excised in their entirety from POE1 for the health of the game.