Map Changes in 2.0.4

oh, and by the way....Read cumfleas post above - he's bang on right with everything he says & probably comes closest to expressing how the vast majority of players feel about POE being hijacked by the elite minority. Perhaps some of you were around & can remember how the Moral Majority (which was neither) fucked things up in the United States decades ago. Hey, it's deja vu all over again.

So what? More time to lv 100? Oh great just keep your path of repeating maps going far away. How can those lv 100 members makes this game unbalance? For 10 more skill point?

Don't you guys see the problems is TOO HARD to reach 100 instead of too easy? For most of the players,They leveled for a long time to reach a level like 90 to complete their builds. When they try to hit up, the mapping system and experience suck. So every one go to a SAFE and BORING build,like incinerate for instance.After one or two weeks, when most of them find that they just playing a build they don't like and just wasting time in similar maps. the only choice is to AFK.

What? Switch to now char and try to level it to 100? LOL no way! Have you ever count how many players with those NOT SAFE but FUNNY builds can level to 100? 1% or 2%? Compare with Incinerate and flame blast?

I PLAY POE FOR I CAN TRY LOTS OF INTERESTING BUILDS NOT FOR REPEATING MAPS WITH A STUPID BUILD TO GET 100, YOU GET IT?

Although I see the reasoning for the changes to map experience.. It's a quite unfair change to the vast majority of players.. but I guess since GGG does adjust/tune/balance the game around the top 0.1% of über wealthy streamers.. I guess it's no surprise..

I am however.. rapidly getting bored of PoE due to changes particularly in the last 6 months.. and with drops the way they are, these "top tier" end game changes are quite irrelevant to me and most people.. and your insistance on the "social aspect" of trading.. is killing this game and my interest for it faster and faster every day.

I really had expected Awakening to be a positive change, but so far it's mostly disappointing..

Leveling solo was already a huge pain in the ass. This is another change that does little else other than hurt the solo player.

This is all so funny. Years ago I played closed beta. When the game went live (open Beta) everything changed for the worse. Tons of people complained Chris wouldn't listen to valid suggestions. The GGG response was "this is not a game for casual players" (of course they were more than happy to cash the checks of casual players. I left some time ago (yrs). I came back when I heard they had finally dealt with desync (after yrs claiming it was a feature).

I see the basic philosophy has not changed however. If I am to believe what I read there are around 100 People with a lvl 100. How many total people play POE? I dont know. What I do know is that is a tiny fraction of players with lvl 100 char.

IMHO Chris while apparently a decent businessman is off his tree with the mustn't make lvl 100 obsession.

I had multiple lvl 99 char in D2. Everyone that played had lvl 99 chars in D2. Hell you could make lvl 80 in a day doing cow lvls. That is not a problem here. I will most likely never go above 90 if I make it that far in POE. I am a casual player. Do not be afraid Chris the casuals will never get 100.

Map Tier's: My thought's

I fail to see how covering up the confusion of players by sweeping the map level's under the rug so to speak will be less confusing than the current system. In my mind you have only but further complicated things for newer players. While colour coding them may be a good thing for us to identify them in our stash tabs we did and still do have the search filter in our tabs.

what happened to Diablo 3 and WoW? Look no further than the response to this manifesto! Blizzard decided to actually listen to people like this...... Stand strong GGG, stand strong.

I'm very much in the same boat as most of the posts in this thread that are more than one sentence long.

I feel like the map tier system is convoluted and will just confuse people. The game is based around a level system, changing this throws things off like the map's difficulty, the maps starting level, the item level of drops used for crafting. As many have stated, it seems like a cover up for the map experience changes.

As for the experience changes I wouldn't mind too much if I'm getting higher level maps more frequently to comfortably compensate. Though, it seems incredibly stupid to change the end game leveling curve because Etup and Havoc hit level 100 in two weeks. Most players don't have nearly as much time to devote to the game, and most streamers (who can spend all day on PoE) don't even attempt to hit level 100. Balancing the end-game and leveling speed around two players is absurd. Hitting level 100 should be a challenge, but you shouldn't discourage people from attempting it before they've even created a character.

Overall I'm hopeful for the map drop changes. I am however concerned about the map tier system, and the leveling and experience balance around some artificial "ideal" that GGG has for about two players.

I see this getting, as somebody pointed out, a little too toxic. I've also heard the map system called boring, and repetitive, an assessment that I guess you could say is fair, but I don't agree with fully. And by not fully, I really don't agree with that.

Let's first give credit where it's due: The map system is a really innovative piece of endgame architecture. That was doubly true when it was first created.

The idea that mods on maps could be changed around with the same currency used to manipulate items was the nose in front of our face, but it was a simplistic slice of genius. The map system has done a lot of stuff right. If its weakness is repetition, that is its strength also. That it can be repeated as many times as it has with all these trillions of combinations of mods is staggering, when you think about it.

Still, it's time to acknowledge that if you're going to improve it, you need to first ensure that the improvements you make aren't castrating the strengths of the system. The primary strength of the map system is, in my opinion, its dynamism. The death of dynamism is homogenization.

You're supposed to get aberrations like etup from time to time. They're the exceptions that prove the rule. If it takes the best guy you've got two weeks to do something, nolifing all the way, that's pretty damn good.

The truth is, the map system is fine. It's just most likely not sufficient all by itself.

The problem isn't people are reaching 100. It's that for those people, 100 is the end. There's nothing to do following that point. Fix that problem, and suddenly it's not so bad that people reach 100 anymore.

We need a new endgame, and lorewise, you've already given us the perfect excuse to go anywhere. After killing Malachai in Merciless... you're at the helm of the Imagination Machine itself. You could go anywhere with that. You could have it spawn an endless dungeon. You could even wake it up and fuck up the previous three acts all to death, new enemies, random mods, whatever you wanted to do.

There's real problems with what you're proposing doing with the map system right now. All the same, it's not fair to the progress that's already been made or the people making it to come down so harshly. Hopefully, the larger community is addressing this in such a way that communicates the potential we see within the map system, and not just a bunch of vitriolic bullshit.

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DonJangles wrote:

what happened to Diablo 3 and WoW? Look no further than the response to this manifesto! Blizzard decided to actually listen to people like this...... Stand strong GGG, stand strong.

You seem to be misunderstanding. Nobody is calling for a replication of Diablo 3's system. Well. Some people are, I'm sure, but a lot of the complaints in this thread are valid. They're just not being presented in a helpful way.