Brace Yourselves: Imbalance May Be Coming

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Impulse36 wrote:

I absolutely welcome this change and the impact it could have on new players trying to break into LLDing. I can only speak for SC but the well of nice LLD items dried up long ago. Occasionally you can find a nice piece here or there, but overall they are too few and too far between. The supply just isn't there.

Sure as a new player you could start small and acquire a handful of decent items. Maybe throw on a goldrim to compensate for your pitiful resistances. But only a handful of builds could actually compete with shitty gear (a puncture build if you had a decent bow, or a build with double ungils). A new player could also start a character in one of the temporary leagues and spend their currency acquiring a set of nice LLD gear and then wait patiently for the league to merge for any real competition.

Any change that helps breach the gear barrier is excellent in my mind. The theory, planning, play, and competition is what makes the PvP so enjoyable, not amassing sets of gear to let rot. I won't deny there's a certain satisfaction acquiring a godly piece of gear that no one has close to, but come on, squashing ants gets old fast. You want an opponent that might actually bloody you.

Nice copy pasterino bro :D +1 btw. Totally agree with you.

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AleronDescends wrote:

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GrindcoreTHRALL wrote:

People here complaining about it being too hard to break into LLD imo are lazy.

While this would normally fall under the definition of an insult, I'm willing to give you the benefit of doubt. However, I still do not find it fair that you can claim a word in this discussion when you haven't even given the effort to read this thread.

To argue against your claim that we're all "lazy" somehow, though, don't forget that some of us have put in just as much time PvPing and getting better skill-wise as you have grinding. Not necessarily overall time, but in terms of rate of time spent per day, I'd say maybe some of these "whiners" are even more dedicated than you. And you seem to hold some belief that the richer you are, the more dedicated you are. You could not be more wrong. Some of these LLDers have started out rich, and gotten everything through buying and crafting (not to discredit their dedication to PvP, but rather as a point against your statement).

And if you think any one of us are mentally weak after sticking in this game for so long, you are dead wrong.

you have no idea how much time I have put into pvp. For u to say others put in more time than me is pretty funny since u play a completely other league. If anyone has put more time in than me and still whining about a gear barrier, they are doing it wrong. Work smarter not harder.

Also please do not act like you know what I have read in this thread. I am much more active in pvp feedback than u will ever be, so dont down play my ability to comprehend this section.

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GrindcoreTHRALL wrote:

you have no idea how much time I have put into pvp. For u to say others put in more time than me is pretty funny since u play a completely other league. If anyone has put more time in than me and still whining about a gear barrier, they are doing it wrong. Work smarter not harder.

Also please do not act like you know what I have read in this thread. I am much more active in pvp feedback than u will ever be, so dont down play my ability to comprehend this section.

I don't think anyone here is complaining primarily about the inconvenience that getting gear poses to them personally; they like pvp in spite of the grind and see the potential it could have if it were given more attention. While we put up with it to try pvp out, it's easy to see how barren pvp is because of how inaccessible it is to new players.

If you want pvp to be the same handful of people forever and force people to grind all day for items, yeah ok whatever but if that's the case you can't complain that no one plays and that it gets no attention from GGG(why would they care about it if almost no one plays?).

My decision would be to make a sandbox league like someone suggested; infinite items in a test environment for people who want to pvp with 0 barrier to entry, totally separate from existing things to keep the grinders happy.

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SirEdwards wrote:

Nice copy pasterino bro :D +1 btw. Totally agree with you.

Ha ha this thread was just so much more poppin'

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MrEnzyme wrote:

If you want pvp to be the same handful of people forever and force people to grind all day for items, yeah ok whatever but if that's the case you can't complain that no one plays and that it gets no attention from GGG(why would they care about it if almost no one plays?).

Grinding for LLD items is considerably less time consuming than grinding for end-game PvE items - I'm pretty sure everyone can agree with that. With that in mind, time consumption or long grinding is obviously not the barrier that prevents people from entering pvp. Just think about how many players are currently running low-life builds and how much currency they're dropping to do it. And that's just one build out of thousands that players are willing to invest hundreds of exalts in.

Why are players willing to make this sort of investment in their PvE builds and not PvP? Because GGG created such a massive infrastructure for those builds. Everything from Act 1 to 3 in Normal, Cruel, and Merciless along with the entire mapping system incentivizes players to spent huge amounts of time and currency min-maxing and optimizing their PvE builds.

You argue that PvP gets no attention from GGG because no one plays it. Have you even considered the fact that no one plays PvP because GGG gives it no attention?

EDIT: To be clear, I'm definitely not shit-talking GGG here. They have factually ignored PvP because of other, more pressing priorities, and I personally believe their priorities are correct. I'm just aiming to explain why more players don't engage in LLD. I strongly believe that a high investment in gearing is not even close to being a large factor.

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MrEnzyme wrote:

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GrindcoreTHRALL wrote:

you have no idea how much time I have put into pvp. For u to say others put in more time than me is pretty funny since u play a completely other league. If anyone has put more time in than me and still whining about a gear barrier, they are doing it wrong. Work smarter not harder.

Also please do not act like you know what I have read in this thread. I am much more active in pvp feedback than u will ever be, so dont down play my ability to comprehend this section.

I don't think anyone here is complaining primarily about the inconvenience that getting gear poses to them personally; they like pvp in spite of the grind and see the potential it could have if it were given more attention. While we put up with it to try pvp out, it's easy to see how barren pvp is because of how inaccessible it is to new players.

If you want pvp to be the same handful of people forever and force people to grind all day for items, yeah ok whatever but if that's the case you can't complain that no one plays and that it gets no attention from GGG(why would they care about it if almost no one plays?).

My decision would be to make a sandbox league like someone suggested; infinite items in a test environment for people who want to pvp with 0 barrier to entry, totally separate from existing things to keep the grinders happy.

It would be cool if they added an additional Colosseum that u could prefab characters, but just flipping what LLD currently is into something completely different is absurd. I do like the idea of a point like total to make characters and enter a queue with quicksaved characters, but the current league specific pvp which has already farmed and crafted items shouldnt just turn easy mode. They should have a pvp expansion with the sandbox league idea separate from current pvp.

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Bhaisabh wrote:

With that in mind, time consumption or long grinding is obviously not the barrier that prevents people from entering pvp.

lol

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Bhaisabh wrote:

You argue that PvP gets no attention from GGG because no one plays it. Have you even considered the fact that no one plays PvP because GGG gives it no attention?

Yeah this is a chicken and egg thing to some degree, but do you seriously think that when new people try pvp out and get obliterated by veterans with gear they don't get turned off of it? I've seen pvp get dismissed out-of-hand by people who don't play it because "it's all about gear" countless times(and they're not wrong). Saying it's not a problem preventing new people from joining is so far from reality though, just wow.

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GrindcoreTHRALL wrote:

but the pvp with already farmed and crafted items shouldnt just turn easy mode

Yeah letting people actually play pvp is pretty terrible, we can't allow that. We'd better also add a requirement that your character is at least 500 hours old before you're even allowed to enter pvp matches, to keep pvp from becoming too "easy".

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MrEnzyme wrote:

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Bhaisabh wrote:

With that in mind, time consumption or long grinding is obviously not the barrier that prevents people from entering pvp.

lol

Yeah, I guess you could non-responsively laugh. But at the end of the day, if every person who bought a Shavs/CoE for a low-life build also made a high-end LLD build (at a fraction of the cost), the pvp player base would minimally increase ten-fold.

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MrEnzyme wrote:

do you seriously think that when new people try pvp out and get obliterated by veterans with gear they don't get turned off of it?

Yeah, I imagine it's a similar feeling when they get smacked around by Palace Dom or even Merci Dom - I know I had a shitty feeling the first time it happened to me. This feeling isn't exclusive to pvp. It takes a considerable amount of time and currency to breeze through end-game maps and beat Atziri/Uber Atziri. However, the majority of players are still willing to make this investment, but they are not willing to make a fraction of this investment in LLD. This huge discrepancy is my point, and if you're too stubborn to acknowledge it, I won't waste any more of my time.

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MrEnzyme wrote:

Saying it's not a problem preventing new people from joining is so far from reality though, just wow.

I clearly said that I don't think the gear/time investment is preventing new people from joining. Obviously preventing new people from joining would be a problem. I just don't think gear/time is "preventing" them from joining because they're willing to make the same/larger investment in other parts of the game.

From what I've seen, most LLD'ers don't HLD and thus probably don't do a lot of late pve grinding (maps) as well. It's pretty rare. That and/or a lot of trading.

To clarify... Top LLD'ers also having top HLD builds.

I think that's what mostly sets LLD apart from HLD. LLD'ers don't like the insane grinding needed for HLD. 200+ exalt builds and all that crap. Some are over the 1000's.

LLD has a lower benchmark for entry... but it's still a relatively high one at that.

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Firebrand76 wrote:

From what I've seen, most LLD'ers don't HLD and thus probably don't do a lot of late pve grinding (maps) as well. It's pretty rare. That and/or a lot of trading.

To clarify... Top LLD'ers also having top HLD builds.

I think that's what mostly sets LLD apart from HLD. LLD'ers don't like the insane grinding needed for HLD. 200+ exalt builds and all that crap. Some are over the 1000's.

LLD has a lower benchmark for entry... but it's still a relatively high one at that.

No, I totally understand that.

But PoE has a LOT of players that do the fairly "expensive" end game content. But only a fraction of these players participate in HLD or LLD. For whatever reason, there are a ton of players who have the currency and time to participate in PvP but choose not to. This can be attributed to a variety of reasons (such as the lack of PvP infrastructure like ranking, tournaments, etc. ) but "high gear/time requirement" is DEFINITELY not one of them.

If just 50% of these "end-game" PoE players also participated in PvP, how large would our PvP community be? Would we be satisfied with our activity level and size or would we still be pushing for a lower entry barrier to LLD?