Wolcen Hype Release!

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deathflower wrote:

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aggromagnet wrote:

I know full well how it works in both games, as I've done it multiple times in both games. And some of those times in Wolcen have been where I didn't want to change more than a few points. That's where the problems with the current system come into play. There should be full reset for when it's needed, individual refunds for when it's not. Having to do a full reset and reallocate 70 or more points when you only want to change a few is really dumb.

You can create gold, create affinity, create crafting mats, etc in the Stormfall system, so it's a logical place for them to add some means of generating individual refund points. There is ample room in the game for both resets and refunds, and it would be much more in line with their own words of "experimenting" being a selling-point for the game.

It doesn't need to be, and shouldn't be, an all or nothing deal.

How about no? How much MORE would you be willing to pay to get it done? Or don't fix it at all because it is not worth doing. Successful developers need to be strategically lazy and greedy.

Having worked in and with the industry for the better part of two decades, I can safely say you don't have a clue lol. But that's OK. You do you.

You have to prove that the reviews are mob mentality and review bombing, I don't have to prove they are not, you made the claim.

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I use wolcen-universe precisely because of the inability to respec surgically. One single misplaced point and bam, gotta start over. The snapshots of wolcen-universe, while primitive, do the job.

Yeah, I use it and it's pretty useful. Good for planning ahead and good for keeping record of what you're doing. At the very least, having that record is useful for softening the blow if you do want to change things later.

The uniques might be closer to D1 in design than the sort of powerhouses you're used to elsewhere, but I REALLY love their flavour texts. Nothing says 'legendary' like a backstory for an item. I appreciate the terseness of PoE's unique descriptions (even though I mocked said terseness by writing relatively long ones) but I think when it comes to grasping an item as actually legendary or mythical, you need a bit more than a quip or a poetic statement.

I mean, you could just have the famous quote from the anvil for an item called 'Excalibur', but there is such a thing as too little information when it comes to contextualising and emphasising legends and myths.

I just found and read Morbid Retribution's flavour. Jeeze. Savage.

Some of the backstories and descriptions are quite good. I've seen a few where there were some mildly amusing shortcomings in the translation to English. I saw one the other day, I don't recall which item, where the story said something along the lines of someone "passing the pistol around/along his belt". What does that even mean? I have no clue lol.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

You have to prove that the reviews are mob mentality and review bombing, I don't have to prove they are not, you made the claim.

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. I will take that as a cue for a sign of desperation or intellectual laziness. Apology accepted.

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aggromagnet wrote:

Yeah, I use it and it's pretty useful. Good for planning ahead and good for keeping record of what you're doing. At the very least, having that record is useful for softening the blow if you do want to change things later.

POE reset all your skills during major updates or skills changes. When you come back a few months or years later, you don't remembers a damn thing. That is for like 10~20 characters.

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deathflower wrote:

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aggromagnet wrote:

Yeah, I use it and it's pretty useful. Good for planning ahead and good for keeping record of what you're doing. At the very least, having that record is useful for softening the blow if you do want to change things later.

POE reset all your skills during major updates or skills changes. When you come back a few months or years later, you don't remembers a damn thing. That is for like 10~20 characters.

The full tree resets on Standard were optional rather than forced, more often than not. They were only forced full resets when tree changes would have left your tree in a disconnected state. Otherwise, they were entirely optional and you could just ignore the option.

When they were forced on one of my chars, I sometimes just rolled a new build. Even for optional resets, I often took advantage of them and rolled a new build. For go to builds and gearing, I remember them very well. I've made copious use of PoB since its inception though. Just in case I missed something with minor changes, or in case they make very major changes and I need something to compare against.

And with Legion, they finally did away with forced resets altogether anyway. Now they're purely optional, and if your tree would be left in a disconnected state only the passives that would be disconnected are automatically refunded (and you still have the optional reset to use as well, if you so choose).

None of which is relevant to Wolcen's all or nothing approach to changing your tree. If you're happy with Wolcen's approach, well, good for you. Enjoy.

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aggromagnet wrote:

None of which is relevant to Wolcen's all or nothing approach to changing your tree. If you're happy with Wolcen's approach, well, good for you. Enjoy.

Or people are missing the point in which POE approach has its own flaws which is to discouraging players from making reset and full reset are not optional when initiated by GGG when it is online. The secrets of 'review-bombing' is to exaggerate of those problems and give excessive emphasis to those negatives.

Looking at it in isolation; POE Skill refund system is awful.

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aggromagnet wrote:

Some of the backstories and descriptions are quite good. I've seen a few where there were some mildly amusing shortcomings in the translation to English. I saw one the other day, I don't recall which item, where the story said something along the lines of someone "passing the pistol around/along his belt". What does that even mean? I have no clue lol.

At first guess, with no context, I'm going to say 'holstering'. Which item was it?

I mean, I'm used to Engrish so Wolcen's occasional stumbles don't even begin to faze me.

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deathflower wrote:

The secrets of 'review-bombing' is to exaggerate of those problems and give excessive emphasis to those negatives.

Now this I find relevant. When I peruse the negative reviews, they're very similar in what they get caught up on. That's no surprise: those things really do stand out and likely define the experience. There's a lot of hyperbole (I'm sad to admit even a few friendly Exiles' reviews I've seen are quite...exaggerated in places) behind it. But the positive reviews tend to say different things, and rarely with much exaggeration. I don't believe Wolcen was completely review-bombed but I do think you can see a fairly small number of issues prevalent in the negative reviews underlined, bolded and highlighted ad nauseum. Several of those issues have already been fixed; some haven't, and new ones have arisen, likely in the haste to fix the initial ones.

People very rarely praise a game that works well for working well. It's just assumed that this is the baseline for a game worth playing at all. They are, however, very quick to condemn it for working but not very well. I suppose this is why positive reviews are diverse but negative ones are repetitive. If you like Wolcen, chances are you like it for personal reasons. But if you dislike it, you probably dislike it for the same reasons as anyone else who dislikes it.

That's why I don't think it was a review bombing. It was just very, very easy to get stuck on what doesn't work and therefore miss what does. And here the negative reviewer would rightfully point out that when this much doesn't work, what does work pales in comparison. I cannot disagree. But what does work, works very well for a certain type of gamer. And that certain type might be more common than the reviews would indicate, which means there *might* have been bombing.

Because as I type this, almost 47,000 people are playing. It's midnight here in Australia, very early morning in the US, afternoon in Europe. Not a peak time by any measure. So that number really does belie this apparent 'failure' I'm seeing both in user reviews and critical responses. So what's going on? Did all those people try for a refund but were refused so are just playing it because they have to? With all those other games out there? I don't think so.

The next few months will be very interesting steamcharts-wise. I am expecting relative stability and gradual decline as players become 'done' with the game for now...unless the Wolcen team *really* balls it up, which going by comments and feedback they do every patch but those user numbers don't lie. They're still a huge achievement compared to any other indie buy-to-play ARPG to date.

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deathflower wrote:

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aggromagnet wrote:

None of which is relevant to Wolcen's all or nothing approach to changing your tree. If you're happy with Wolcen's approach, well, good for you. Enjoy.

Or people are missing the point in which POE approach has its own flaws which is to discouraging players from making reset and full reset are not optional when initiated by GGG when it is online. The secrets of 'review-bombing' is to exaggerate of those problems and give excessive emphasis to those negatives.

Looking at it in isolation; POE Skill refund system is awful.

I, for one, have never said GGG's system isn't flawed. I don't really think it is, it's just limited--and sometimes that limitation is exactly why it works well. It's not optimal if you want to start over, but it's very effective if you only want to adjust something in your build.

I did say that there was room for both resets and refunds to exist in Wolcen, however. Which, to you, is a "no" because of something to do with developers needing to be lazy and greedy (what? lol).

GGG's full resets are, most of the time, optional and always have been. Obviously you yourself aren't clear on how they work, even though I did explain when/why they have or haven't been optional.

Also, nothing I've said about the passives has anything to do with review bombing. You're lumping the two together on your own because...reasons?

I would suggest you try reading again, but I doubt there would be any point. Moving on...