Development Manifesto: The Atlas

Damn son.

None of this really gets at the fundamental flaws with the Atlas system, in my opinion. It's great that there's a grid for tracking progression, but players will quickly find that the "bypasses" that you're talking about, as well as the more available and obvious ones from trading maps and boss kill swapping, will always be superior to trying to progress as intended. Naive play via the adjacency mechanics is severely penalizing. For one, trying to start out with none of the completion bonus active is slow, and results in a lot of waffling at the lower tiers (as GGG has already noted.) And then, even once things get going, trying to complete all the maps within a tier gets increasingly difficult, since each map you unlock adds to the drop pool, reducing the chances of getting the uncompleted adjacent ones to drop. And perhaps worst of all, the best-case reward for killing a map boss, the +2 map, can never happen under naive Atlas progression. To prevent being locked out of these drops, a player should always purchase a Tier X+2 map before running their Tier X.

I love the reworks to the maps and the bosses themselves, and I think the endgame is better than it's ever been, but I don't feel like any of the system-wide design goals have been achieved. As a guide for how to build a map base for new players, the incentives are totally out of whack with the signalling.

Chris hear me out, please add a feature where you can edit a note in the maps on the atlas as we do in friend list, like Crypt Map- Edit note: dont use curses

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Qarl wrote:

When any big system is released, it is hard to get everything right in the first pass. This manifesto post outlines changes we want to make to the Atlas in the near future.

Shouldnt there be one or two for the labyrinth as well?

Serious question, do you have any contract or sponshorship that doesnt allow you to speak about said content?

I love how people feel so entitled about the atlas. This is an entirely optional end-game system and GGG never had to add it to the game. They did because they want to improve on end-game and we don't even have to follow the atlas if we don't want to. We can still just do regular maps.

So, everyone, stop getting your panties in a bunch and take your atlas entitlement and leave it at the door. Leave GGG alone.

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monkuar wrote:

I love how people feel so entitled about the atlas. This is an entirely optional end-game system and GGG never had to add it to the game. They did because they want to improve on end-game and we don't even have to follow the atlas if we don't want to. We can still just do regular maps.

So, everyone, stop getting your panties in a bunch and take your atlas entitlement and leave it at the door. Leave GGG alone.

Except for the part where the atlas dictates which maps can and can't drop.

Please add a search function to the Atlas so it can highlight on the map a map you type into a search box.

No search function?

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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monkuar wrote:

I love how people feel so entitled about the atlas. This is an entirely optional end-game system and GGG never had to add it to the game. They did because they want to improve on end-game and we don't even have to follow the atlas if we don't want to. We can still just do regular maps.

So, everyone, stop getting your panties in a bunch and take your atlas entitlement and leave it at the door. Leave GGG alone.

Except for the part where the atlas dictates which maps can and can't drop.

No it doesn't. Map drop rate is RNG, and you can find any in any other regular maps. You can also buy them. I've ran my old legacy maps (2.0) and found new ones for the atlas.

Atlas is entirely optional and a privileged end-game system. That's a fact.

Edit: I don't mean any map tier (obviously, around the same tier only)

The map drop ratio since the Atlas was introduced is beyond horrible, it really feel like you achieve nothing and is the most frustrating experience I've ever had with PoE so far. I strongly suspect that the map drop system was heavily nerfed according to the bonus system wich is in fact not a bonus at all but simply a way to come back to the previous map drops ratio.

I get that this game is F2P and that gating content behind RNG is the best way to keep your player base active. I endured this for years but right now this is simply too frustrating and made me stop playing the game entirely.