POE2 and SSF

Short version:

Buffing drop rarity for SSF is not about giving SSF any sort of advantage. It's about giving SSF parity, and I think you need to reconsider your stance on that, given that you're about to make trading a lot easier.

Long version:

So... I'm watching the interview with Jonathan and Wudijo, and much like with the interview with Ghazzy, I think Jonathan is lost in the sauce when it comes to the need for balancing trade vs. non-trade modes of play for PoE2.

I understand that there people who love to trade, and that trade tends to be a natural outcome when you combine large numbers of both items and people in proximity to each other. Put in enough items together in a place with enough people, and someone will start wheeling and dealing. I get that.

The problem that you have in a games like PoE, and like Last Epoch, is that only some people love trade. For the rest of us, trade is what we do at our day jobs, because we have to, not something we in our down time, because we want to.

Trade is work. Trade is chores. I don't play game for the joy of doing in-game chores. I play games to avoid doing chores.

It wouldn't a problem if trade and SSF game modes were balanced to feel largely the same, but they aren't. If you're willing to do chores in your leisure time, trade is much, much faster than SSF. People who aren't trading because they don't love trade enough to spend their leisure time doing more of it are not being treated equitably by PoE; we're being penalized, and heavily. The result is a game whose content is balanced around the assumption that everyone is trading, where a huge chunk of your player base is playing at a disadvantage because they don't, and don't want to.

Buffing drop rates for SSF, or buffing drop rarity for SSF, isn't about giving SSF players any sort of advantage. It's getting them back to parity, allowing them to have fun playing the game, without coercing them into spending time out of the game, searching a trade site for the resources that they need to tackle in-game content, and which the game really should be capable of just providing for them.

Eleventh Hour Games have understood this, and are adding a two-track system to Last Epoch which will allow trade enjoyers to continue enjoying the enormous power advantage that trade gives, while also giving people who don't enjoy trade a way to skip the chores, and just experience the rest of the fun game content.

Jonathan, you're about to add a new way to trade in PoE which is even easier; if you don't also buff the non-trade option to at least try to keep pace, your proposed trade changes will have the effect of making trade not just easier, but mandatory. I think you need to get over your fixation on this idea that everyone trades, and maybe pull from telemetry to find out what percentage of your player base is actually trading. And I don't mean what percentage of them are playing in SSF leagues, since y'all pitched SSF as some sort of extreme difficulty mode, rather than what is actually is, i.e. the purest expression of the core ARPG gameplay loop.

Here's how:

* Restrict your query to only trade-enabled Standard and Hardcore leagues.
* Trades in PoE are all player-to-player, which effectively means that you have to join a party to trade, so you want to know how many people join parties, how frequently they joins and leave parties, and how long they spend in parties that they've joined.
* Players that are only joining parties to trade would churn through those parties, joining and leaving again after only a few minutes, over and over and over again. What percentage of players in trade-enabled leagues exhibit this behaviour?
* What percentage of players only join parties to run content, i.e. less frequently, and for prolonged stretches of time?
* What percentage of players never join a party, and thus not only aren't running content with other players, but aren't trading, either?

I suspect that the answers to those questions would be illuminating right about now, much as they were after Forsaken Masters flopped, when you pulled numbers and realized that 96% of your players at that time never joined a party, at any time, for any reason... ever. Forsaken Masters was a while ago, for sure, and the player composition may have changed in that time, but if you don't have at least 50% of your players focused entirely on just playing the game, and never doing anything which could even theoretically be a trade, then I'll be very surprised.

Please take the time to learn how your players are actually engaging with the game, rather than assuming that they're all engaging in the same way that you would... and then buff SSF so that trading isn't effectively mandatory. If you feel like the game really needs a separate, XTREEM HARDERCORE mode, then add Ruthless to PoE2, but please don't make trade effectively mandatory.

Amazing how people want to lower the bar in SSF. You select hard mode, you get hard mode. It doesnt need parity nor should they invest resources into balancing the game for SSF.

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Amazing how people want to lower the bar in SSF. You select hard mode, you get hard mode. It doesnt need parity nor should they invest resources into balancing the game for SSF.

First, I'm not talking about selecting a "hard mode." I'm talking about selecting a "trade-free mode." There's a difference. PoE1 has both Hardcore and Ruthless options available, as well as private leagues which also allow you to dial up the difficulty. SSF does not need to be a hard mode option anymore, even in PoE1, and PoE2 isn't supposed need a hard mode, because the game will be hard enough.

Second, I'm not saying that they should balance the game differently. The game should remain exactly the same game in both modes. Currently, it isn't, and the changes that Jonathan is talking about will intensify that. I'm suggesting that it should be possible for all of the time progressing through the game be spent in the game, playing the fun game, and not on the trade site, doing activities which some find to be un-fun.

Third, changes to SSF would only be needed if they tip the balance of the rest game further in the direction of trade. Jonathan is talking about adding a separate system for currency trading, and an instant buy-out system to remove the face-to-face requirement, and thus a huge portion of the friction, from the existing trade system, which does tip that balance. I'm OK with that happening, so that trade enjoyers can enjoy the game more, but I strongly suggest that it should not come at the expense of the enjoyment that the rest of us are getting from the game.

They don't want that sorry.

Its hard mode. There is harder and hardest modes as well but SSF is hard mode. The entire point of SSF is to be able to brag about what you have accomplished without the help of trade or other players.

You diminish that and you might as well just remove the SSF tag and never trade. Also if SSF becomes easier then the people who play it for its difficulty will be pissed off.

If you want that little tag next to your name you get everything that comes along with it.

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gladiatorpie wrote:

Its hard mode. There is harder and hardest modes as well but SSF is hard mode. The entire point of SSF is to be able to brag about what you have accomplished without the help of trade or other players.

You diminish that and you might as well just remove the SSF tag and never trade. Also if SSF becomes easier then the people who play it for its difficulty will be pissed off.

If you want that little tag next to your name you get everything that comes along with it.

Then they can call it something else. I don't care about a tag next to my name, I just don't want to extra chores in a leisure activity. The Eleventh Hour team understand this; I just want my favourite ARPG to emulate this one feature of my second-favourite ARPG with the sequel, and not go backwards.

I honestly don’t see a point in SSF having different drop rates.

Also „on par with trade“ is really vague, 100 trade players spending 100 hours in Poe have 100 different results in wealth based on rng, pace, build, strat, knowledge of economy and mechanics and other stuff

However you‘d need droprates on steroids, like t7 cemetery kind of thing but x100. There is just too much different stuff and variables in order to be „On par with trade“, even then you won’t be able to get a lot of stuff cause of probabilities (synth items, double corrupt implicits, specific timeless jewels, witch was taken etc)

What’s even the reason to ask for better drop rates in SSF? Feeling of missing out on items? In my opinion that’s natural for an (good) arpg, some stuff is and should just be (almost) impossible to obtain so you either get that dopamine hit on valuable drop/craft/etc. or cumulative „work“ your way towards that goal(s)
Anyway in Poe1 you can already target farm many things like mageblood, even in SSF and beat all content in a more or less reasonable amount of time (even without fancy super rare items)

So I don’t really get your point, you can play the game already SSF, obtain a huge amount of items and target farm t0 uniques, beat all content in SSF. No reason to expect poe2 to be different here. So whats the deal?
Imo you‘re (you = the player in general) not entitled to get everything you want in an arpg by finding it yourself.
Many People in D2 haven’t found a single griffon or tyraels in over a decade of playing it(they may have traded for it tho!) and it‘s not being a problem, haven’t really heard any complains, so why is it such a problem in Poe/poe2? I’m sorry but I don’t get SSF mentalities.

If we take D3/D4 for example, they are very SSF friendly by nature and idk about your experience there but not a single item drop in those games is exciting, knowing what you just found is nothing really special with high drop rates

I‘m a trade enjoyer and think buffed SSF drop rates would be a mistake, but that’s just my opinion

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Rikku wrote:

If we take D3/D4 for example, they are very SSF friendly by nature and idk about your experience there but not a single item drop in those games is exciting, knowing what you just found is nothing really special with high drop rates.

Interesting examples. I played D3 back when it had an auction house, and only way to gear a character was to buy it off the AH. It sucked, but it didn't suck because the AH existed: it sucked because simply finding a good drop on your own was nearly impossible, leaving the AH as the only viable option. I think that if rest of D3 had been good, the AH could have worked, but it wasn't, so it didn't, but blaming D3's AH for that felt like a stretch even to me, at the time, and nuking it the way they did felt like an over-reaction. I think trade and non-trade can live together harmoniously in the same game, and in a week's time we'll get to put that theory to the test.

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Rikku wrote:

I‘m a trade enjoyer and think buffed SSF drop rates would be a mistake, but that’s just my opinion

I feel this may be where the divide exists, here. Trade enjoyers love to trade, so adding more trade to the game for everybody is something that you're totally on board with, because what's the problem? Trade is great!

The problem, of course, if that not everybody enjoys trade, and adding more pressure to trade for everybody, without also adding a better trade-free options for those that want them, has the potential to negatively affect the experience of those who don't enjoy trade.

How many of those people exist? We don't know, do we? Which is why I suggested that GGG pull some data, and check. I suspect that there's more people avoiding trade than you might expect, but until someone checks the numbers, we're stuck just assuming things. I'd rather see GGG do the reality check, and then decide how to move forward, rather than deciding first, and then engaging in a fact-free rationalization exercise, without ever checking their metrics. I could be wrong. Maybe the overwhelming majority of people are trading, and I'm the oddball. If so, then fine. But I want to see numbers on that, or a coherent manifesto that looks like it was informed by the numbers.

The current position on trade is incoherent. Trade is, simultaneously, a critical part of the game's identity, and yet can't be part of the game itself because it has to have friction to disincentive trading. GGG are talking about adding instant buyouts, and a separate currency trading system, but it won't be an auction house because.... reasons. Which Jonathan has struggled to find words for, in two interviews in a row. At least last time, he was willing to look at what Last Epoch was doing, and think about it. Today, the answer's just no, but with no better reasoning given.

I'd like to come away from the next interview, in which this question will 100% come up again, with the sense that they've actually thought about it, and can communicate their reasoning. These last two interviews left me feeling like Jonathan started with an answer of "no," after which he struggles to come up with some sort of an excuse for why it's a no. What happened to "no excuses?"

That's what I want, more than anything: coherency. If the answer is no, and there's a good reason for that no, and there's some data to back that up, then fine. I may not love it, but superior information + superior logic = something that I'll give way to. Jonathan hasn't given me that, yet. Sometimes I love that GGG are not as metric-driven as the AAAs are, but this is not one of those times.

For what it's worth, i am totally with you OP. I want POE without trade, not an "even worse grind, like 100 times worse" mode but half of the community doesn't even understand that.
I also don't think GGG understands and i am sure they don't care anyway. The whole "trade is the lynchpin of ARPGs and everything else is heresy" type of thinking is so deeply ingrained in GGG and large parts of this community, a proper SF mode simply ain't happening.
I refuse to abandon hope but i am aware that i am an idiot for not doing it.

GGG can easily add a mode balanced for SSF in addition to all the other modes.

It will not affect other modes, just like other modes don't affect each other (significantly).

Everybody can live in their own bubbles (people still play standard) and be happy.