Reminder: Selectable Character Gender is a "Minimum Bar."

No-one cares about this except terminally online people.

Here's what gamers actually care about:
1.) Gameplay
2.) Gameplay
3.) Gameplay
4.) Gameplay
5.) Gameplay
6.) Gameplay
7.) Gameplay
...

"

ArtCrusade wrote:

I have had my mishaps in the past and I can tell you from experience that it resets after a while. After how long I cannot tell you, but I'd guess something like half a year without issue

There are at least 2 players that I know of who have earned themselves a permanent Probation. I will not mention names.

"

xjjanie wrote:

"

ArtCrusade wrote:

I have had my mishaps in the past and I can tell you from experience that it resets after a while. After how long I cannot tell you, but I'd guess something like half a year without issue

There are at least 2 players that I know of who have earned themselves a permanent Probation. I will not mention names.

That's okay, my friend. I totally did.

___

We are pretty far off-topic here. Sorry, Numbers-sister.

How about if I bring up another of those 'minimum bars'? Non-story levelling method. If any game needs one of these, it's PoE 1. And if PoE 1 won't get it, you'd better hope and believe PoE 2 will. It could be the most amazingly well-written campaign in the history of, and people will still get over it after a few times through unless it has massive room for deviations a la BG3...and somehow I don't see that happening.

Boy sure would love to be wrong though. An ARPG with that level of narrative flex? Whoo nelly.

But more realistically, GGG would do well to copy pretty much every ARPG since D2 and have some sort of 'story free' means of levelling alts. Okay, Titan Quest didn't have it but Sacred 2 kinda did, WH40KIM totally does, D3 did and does, DIV does, Wolcen does...not sure about GD or LE, to be honest. Either way, I'd bet my left and right if GGG were to make PoE 1 today it'd have a non-campaign locked method of playing alts baked in standard. Left, right and maybe even middle.

Yeah E9 is the last forum-goer that I remember getting a perma-probation. Nobody is getting banned from PoE for basic commentary on the forums.

In fairness if you have been here north of a decade (or even less), and managed to survive the dramatic shift with the CoC implementation, you are very likely in varying degrees of disfavor with GGG moderation; some of us on our last legs in terms of progressive discipline. To be honest, my ambivalence towards the game as of late probably has saved me from this fate. I have no doubt that eventually GGG will do something I really dislike and I will catch it for something relatively minor like "needlessly negative".



Back to being somewhat on topic, "minimum bar" is probably a bridge too far for almost any recommendation or feedback on anything. You are right C, that the gateway for entry on new characters after a campaign has been completed, really holds PoE back. Ironically, this was originally designed to help with retention, but I think players now have shifted from what they were 10, 15 or 20 years back. Actually the D4 Devs commented on this behavior recently. That players don't want uber uniques to take years to find, or never find anymore, like it was in D2. Players simply won't commit the time due to all the entertainment options we have now. Chase items are one thing, but designing items with the intention almost no one finds them, is increasing falling out of favor genre-wide.

Basically creating a barrier now, doesn't make new players grind, it makes them quit or seek alternatives. I do tend to agree. For example, D4's skip campaign option has allowed me to re-roll and play far more than I would have in PoE, or even in D4 if I had to do that each time.

For leveling, GGG has data & tech in this area, with endless ledge and Delve-only events being done previously, so I don't exactly know why they are so stubborn with alternatives. I hope they have something to help with this in PoE2, but I HIGHLY doubt it with all the effort going into the campaign/story.

If GGG truly does want to expand their market reach, then they will have to at least bend somewhat on these accessibility options and barriers for entry. They keep claiming PoE2 will be far easier to get into, without sacrificing much, which I will have to see it to believe it. Is PoB, Craft of Exile, TFT really going to be obsolete? Color me cynical on that stuff.

Good news is that with some of the recent press on PoE2, it's come out that the EA later this year(November?) will be essentially be the full version of the game (with some endgame probably hidden I would think). We should get a pretty good idea if what they are saying, and what we experience, mesh.

NGL, I was like 'wtf does Cats on Crit have to do with this? That was a great April fools!'

...also, did you see that someone called my unique a 'hidden item' in another thread? My god that made my day.

I am perfectly, 100% down with chase items provided the 'chase' is something more concrete than 'kill random shit until it happens'. That's not a chase. That's just rolling fucking dice for an indeterminate amount of time.

Which is also fine. Just don't call it 'chase'. The whole entire complete fucking point of a 'chase' is knowing both what you're chasing and, to some degree, how to chase it. Frankly, 'chasing a dream' is more deterministic than 'chasing' uniques in some games.

But yeah, GGG will really need to rethink player acquisition and retention. Or maybe not. Maybe PoE 2 will just be that good, the kind of 'damn good' I mentioned earlier where any and all flaws are accepted as part of the masterpiece. We'll see soon enough.

cats on crit was the best april fools event in poe in a long while. the fortnite event was interesting but after the initial hype died down i kinda ignored it entirely.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

We are pretty far off-topic here. Sorry, Numbers-sister.

Eh. The topic was lost years ago.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

How about if I bring up another of those 'minimum bars'? Non-story levelling method. If any game needs one of these, it's PoE 1. And if PoE 1 won't get it, you'd better hope and believe PoE 2 will. It could be the most amazingly well-written campaign in the history of, and people will still get over it after a few times through unless it has massive room for deviations a la BG3...and somehow I don't see that happening.

Boy sure would love to be wrong though. An ARPG with that level of narrative flex? Whoo nelly.

But more realistically, GGG would do well to copy pretty much every ARPG since D2 and have some sort of 'story free' means of levelling alts. Okay, Titan Quest didn't have it but Sacred 2 kinda did, WH40KIM totally does, D3 did and does, DIV does, Wolcen does...not sure about GD or LE, to be honest. Either way, I'd bet my left and right if GGG were to make PoE 1 today it'd have a non-campaign locked method of playing alts baked in standard. Left, right and maybe even middle.

Jonathan is on record in recent interviews (the last ~5 months, I believe) as "not loving" the idea of a non-campaign level skip. He knows it's a huge community ask, but he's stated he's strongly resistant to it. His preferred solve is, rather than allowing players to skip the campaign, trying to find ways to make the campaign fun to play every time, no matter how many times you've done it, so you don't feel a need to skip it.

I...don't know how reasonable/plausible that solve is, really. The Altmonsters who can crush the campaign in three hours and play forty alts a league are never gonna care about anything below red maps anyways, and frankly those aren't the people asking for a skip. It's the folks who take a week or two to grind through the campaign and who might only play two or three characters a league, if that, because their limited playtime and lack of Market Mastery means they can't commit to the new-character grind when they know that's twenty to sixty hours of basically throwing away all progress just to catch up to where they were. Those folks aren't really gonna care how cool the campaign is to play once they've done it thirty or forty times and all they want to do is try some of the new stuff in a league.

On the other hand I do get it, zooming through the campaign once only to press "SKIP SKIP SKIP" every subsequent character does feel like it cheapens the experience quite a bit. Heh, though it occurs to me as an ironic tie-in to the original long-failed topic that most of the people screeching for campaign skips and thus the elimination of any/all "story" from Path of Exile are also the ones generally trumpeting about how the different classes in the game are definitely their own unique and distinct characters with their own unique and distinct stories that cannot possibly be modified/swapped out for opposite-gender options.

Message seems to be that people only care about the game's story and artistic integrity when they can use those things to bludgeon people and ideas they don't like. So, typical Internet. Ah well.

You start the thread by insulting people
Then you go on how you're the victim all along because people don't reply positively to you attacking them right away. I mean, why would they?
And then you again go how "people only care about the game's story and artistic integrity when they can use those things to bludgeon people and ideas they don't like"

Honestly I find it weird that anyone even bothers replying to you.
Especially any positive messages.

You just shrug off any post with any criticism as trolls.

"

1453R wrote:

On the other hand I do get it, zooming through the campaign once only to press "SKIP SKIP SKIP" every subsequent character does feel like it cheapens the experience quite a bit.

I agree with this paragraph.

One of the things PoE nails more than other ARPGs, is the feeling of progression. You're so weak in the beginning and so strong in the endgame. The contrast is huge, unlike other games where you're character feels almost the same, just with different numbers. To take away 2/3 of that progression just feels wrong on so many levels.

I understand why people are asking for a campaign skip. I also understand why the developers are reluctant. But you do have to respect it on some levels, because this would arguably make the game more... Accessible and probably more popular. I like to see that some developers aren't just thinking about those factors (jab, jab).

I still think that alternatives are a better solution than a skip. Anyhow, regarding PoE 2, it should be a problem for at least a few years. If this is something people "demand" from the get-go, I clearly do not understand the world anymore.

"

imanubcake wrote:

You start the thread by insulting people
Then you go on how you're the victim all along because people don't reply positively to you attacking them right away. I mean, why would they?
And then you again go how "people only care about the game's story and artistic integrity when they can use those things to bludgeon people and ideas they don't like"

Honestly I find it weird that anyone even bothers replying to you.
Especially any positive messages.

You just shrug off any post with any criticism as trolls.

Weirdly, when they asked me "how can I fix this" and I answered honestly, I didn't get a response back.

This entire thread can be summarized with "The spirits that I called"