The LACK of information

I completely agree personally. This game constantly drives users to third party resources, and that's the biggest factor I've heard cited for people that refuse to pick up the game. Some secrets and discovery can be great, but the absolute depth of it is kind of insane. The fact that it's impossible in game to know what mods are even possible at all in an item is kind of ridiculous. Still my favorite game and I've grown used to it, but something they should seriously steer away from imo.

+1

GGG doesn't expect you to google/YT everything, they want you to learn from trial and error(aka clicking it and finding out)


don't know what frogs are? CLick it, realize they are safe but unrewarding monsters that give XP(the fact that they have higher xp is largely irrelevant)


spoon feeding everyone information is completely unneeded.

Civ 4 had a wiki inside the game. It is a hard to figure out game but you have all the information hidden inside the game. It's to much text for today and the grammy winning soundtrack would make it so that every snowflake bursts out into tears but since poe requires a phd anyway a wiki might aswell be in the game for people to read.

There is a very big difference between the game sharing details about in-game "items" and the game spoonfeeding players everything.

Example 1: I'm going to go for the most well-known example here, Screams of the Dessicated. The game tells you that you receive shrine buff x but only while your flasks are disabled. The game also tells you that there is an ascendancy that makes you immune to poison and gives you an extra ring slot but you cannot use flasks.

Example 1 showcases how you can use in game knowledge and reasoning skills to create a synergy between items/mechanics/passive skill tree keystones. This is excellent game design as it gives you all the information you need and lets you connect the dots.

Example 2: I am going to use OP's example here - area contains frogs.

This is prime example of bad game design because the player cannot actually use their reasoning skills to divine that frogs give extra XP. They have to google it, or click it and see what happens. Now the "click it and see what happens" thing wouldn't be inherently bad, and in this specific example it isn't. But there are SO many instances where "click it and see what happens" is absolutely a horrible thing to do, because this game is insanely punishing in a lot of cases. Remember the video with the guy who uses Mirror of Kalandra to mirror his lvl 5 rare wand in Mud Flats?

Personally, if I just "click it to see what happens" then later down the road I'd discover I just wasted the rarest and most valuable currency in the game on trash, I'd be pretty pissed and frustrated. Almost nobody wants to experience that.

To sum it up: good game design is when all the necessary information is provided to you, and you are left to use that information in a clever way to come up with interesting and rewarding strategies. When the game doesn't provide you with all the necessary information and you have to google it, that is NOT good game design.

If the game promoted sitting around in PoB trying out various things (which ironically is also a 3rd party tool) and encouraged you to think things up, yeah that would be great. But in reality most of the time the game is so convoluted that all it promotes is looking stuff up on google or watching a 5min video to explain something that should've been clarified in game.

The problem with the community equating this to "game promotes learning and discovering things" is very simple - older players like myself have gradually learned most things as they were introduced, watched a ton of YT videos on various hidden interactions, got accustomed to 3rd party tools like poedb, POB, Craft of Exile, etc - so much so that it's become second nature to us. That doesn't mean it's right, or that it's the way it should be, and you're failing to see what all this looks like to a new player who hasn't played through 20 leagues worth of mechanics and interactions. It's overwhelming and looks like a shitfest, and it doesn't encourage anyone to naturally explore the game. It just encourages them to copy strategies off of streamers on youtube.

This game has the potential to be absolutely INSANE in terms of actual experimentation to get amazing results - but often it so severely punishes raw experimentation that it's almost never worth doing it. Imagine if we didn't have a POB and every time you'd want to make a build and fidget around your skill tree trying different things you'd need to respec, re-calculate attributes and resists and whatnot, eHP (which isn't displayed in game), dps (which is by no means remotely accurately displayed in game), etc. You'd spend months just trying to build a viable tree. What if you wanted to craft an item - the game doesn't tell you what mods it can roll ANYWHERE in the game. You'd need poedb or COE to see what's BiS for your build. This is NOT good game design. All these 3rd party tools that exist and are vital should be part of the actual game. Not something the player needs to learn about from reddit or YT.

Well if you're trying to level a character, this becomes the go-to Mirage Wish.

That's my point, you can't make these informed decisions because you don't know.

Once you've googled it, then you'll mostly always go for that option to level your character. It's the same as people knowing breach and abyss gives more exp. People specialize atlas tree to max exp quickly early on.