Map drops - assessment of 2.0.0, and changes coming in 2.0.2

Good post, Qarl.

So it CAN be done after all?

So people who complained were right?

Too many 'im leaving' threads here and - more importantly - on reddit to ignore?

Your map RNG has two issues:

- drops 68 in 75+
- drop streaks. most maps i drop (i play in the low end as i have no incentive of leveling past certain point) i drop in bursts: 5 maps, 7 maps. or NOTHING. as if your rng seed generator had a cough. same happens with gem drops - you get one per map and then a burst of several gems in a short time span

with gems - noone cares. with maps - if one hits few such bursts, he is set. but if somehow these do not happen, bye bye maps

just even this rate out, make the bell fatter but lower instead of slim and spike'y

btw - i just wonder why it is a news NOW, while from what i see that very issue was very well known in beta?

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Qarl wrote:

While when running a map doesn't matter (and "building a map base" provides psychological benefit, rather than statistical benefit), the hardcore players run lower level maps run that wouldn't be run on a standard league.

That the leagues had a very different shape was odd to us, and something we had to examine and see why. The "wall" was much more pronounced on Standard and Warbands than Tempest.

This makes perfect sense and I'm glad its being acted on. The proposed change of smoothing the curve of 74-79 is not taking any of the challenge away. In the end this means more challenging maps for everyone to run. Hopefully this patch will also address that second point and require less 68-73 maps to be run to reach mid tier maps as well.

The ideal scenario to me would be less trivial content & more challenging content. Hard to argue with that no matter if you're SC or HC.

Hopefully sooner than later... what you have done with the map drops this patch is fucking crap and I am about to walk away for good and the elitists can have this game.

I have gone 20 level mostly solo mapping and have gotten 6 level 74 map and no level 75s. All of my 74s have been rolled to over 100 quality, and still nothing. Waste of time and a bunch of bs.

And instead of letting us play, we are being mined for data, how nice. This is bs and I really dread logging in now.... it's not fun to be stuck at a wall. I didn't even log in for patch 1.3, and nothing changed in 2.0.

All you casuals out there are just playing to make the elitists rich in more ways then the game has to offer.

Sounds good!

Good to hear that GGG finally acknowledge that there is a problem. My status from the last time I posted about map drops being bad didn't change at all. I am still stuck at 73 maps now at level 87. Im stubborn and don't like buying maps because I believe the game should still be providing it at no cost.

Can't wait for 2.02, because while it is confirmed that there is a map drop problem, the difficulty spikes of higher maps is something to ponder about too. Even if it is intended to be more difficult as you go up levels, I doubt adjusting map drops will help improve that drop off at 74 dramatically with the damage spikes from even the blue mods those maps bring.

Still, the response is great. I'm a happier poegamer after this post.

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Qarl wrote:

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Is data rly enogh to balance around it? I think a key thing u missed is the problem that LOWLVL maps dropp in 79+ I have never felt a more frustrating feeling in Poe then getting 68-75 maps in a 80-82 map it feels worse then eteranL/exalting I hope a person that actually plays the game @GGG can tell u more about it its disgusting feeling.

The stats aren't all we use. In fact the staff in GGG who run live maps were of the opinion that there would not be a literal wall, it was mostly play style.

Always nice to know the initial response to feedback is "The players are full of shit". At least you're fixing it now.

this is a game, it is supposed to be fun and challenging. If you gate fun and challenging content so that players either cant access it or have to spend 10 hours running shit, no fun, no challenge content for every hour of proper content they are allowed to access then guess what? You have a shit game and people are going to say hey, enough of this shit game I quit.

Weve been telling you that for 2 and a half years and I just hope that one of these days you actually get it while you still have a player base.


let

players

play

the

damn

game

I am fine with the new map system, but I am not fine with unexpected disconnects as a result of using a portal to go back into maps and losing the map entirely. Wish this would get fixed or at least a response from GGG that they are looking into it.

I appreciate that this is a thing you're paying attention to and want to take action towards aiding. That said:

1) I'd like to know if you have any data regarding the selling of maps to other players, because the market for it is a thing that is exponentially bigger now than ever before precisely because of the map changes.

2) In your looking at the curve of map acquisition, please remember the difficulty of the bosses in the 74 map tier and your +2 changes being largely irrelevant for those bosses, many of which (I'm thinking of Jungle Valley, Labyrinth, and Torture Chamber specifically) are so hard that they become progress stoppers, preventing many players in both league types from getting past a 74 map pool. (Hilariously, talking to some players has given me the impression that the 68 Desert Map has a boss with difficulty and terrible scaling on par with the 74 map bosses, which is strange considering the Dried Lake version of the boss in Merciless is much easier even with the map levels being one level apart).

3) Act 4 Merciless, much like Atziri, was sold to us as an alternative to low to mid level mapping, and yet the difficulty of the mobs combined with the low level of the areas (Merciless Malachai spawns in a level 70 zone which is absurd when that's a mere 3 levels into mapping as well as given its difficulty) makes this a very hollow claim.

4) Zana needs another lookover. I feel like you made the map changes and completely forgot about the master that is supposed to be all about the maps, y'know? Her dailies failed to follow through with the map changes and they're much lower level than they ought to be at higher Master ranks.

5) Please please please for the love of god take another good hard look at Map affixes and how much Quantity bonus they give relative to their difficulty. As it stands, there is plenty of risk and no reward for that risk because the hardest, most unbalanced maps are only run for masochistic purposes, not because they drop the most loot or give the most experience (they don't).

Currently, I'm getting the same vibes from the quantity on maps that I got when Ambush Strongboxes rolled 1000%+ rarity, which is to say, a highly meaningless number meant to give the illusion that you have a chance of getting something cool when you won't.

Really looking forward to seeing what comes of this.