Alternate game mode for casual gamers

I was going to write up my own post to talk about this issue, but may as well tack it in here.

A few core problems... The amount of xp/time per death starts getting ridiculous after about level 92. This makes dying a few times in a single encounter totally demoralizing. I often give up on a league right about then as I am no longer having fun.

So, if you still expect to gain levels the rational thing is to avoid difficult, or even simply NEW content that you don't understand. I often find myself sitting on things I could do, I just can't deal with the inevitable xp loss that will accompany actually trying to learn stuff and get better. It's very unfriendly to non-veterans.

One idea I had would be a blessing selection on the pantheon screen. If going to try something new you might change to a blessing that dramatically decreases xp loss, with a similar decrease in xp gain, and maybe a minor decrease in item qty/quality. Alternative blessings can be available for other situations.

But the upside is that it promotes learning new encounters, and serves as an escape hatch if you get in over your head. For example, new players that don't know the resistance hits are coming.. Which might scare away new players. Gives people a chance to regroup to fix things.

People really should stop gaslighting other people that just want to experience the game in their own pace.

Someone beating a game in easy doesn't affect nor cheapen in any way or form another beating it in the hardest difficulty. It's really disgusting that PoE breeds players that think it does.

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exsea wrote:

why does hardcore exist then? why does ruthless exist? why does gauntlets exist?

Because those modes fit the design philosophy of this game. You have to be, extremely lost or not paying attention to what the developers have said for near a decade now, to not understand this.

You should know the answer to this question.

Will post this again for your reference:

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Mashgesture wrote:

Ruthless hardcore and ssf are not comparable examples.


The game built itself and caters to decision making and challenging play.

This applies to ruthless, ssf, and HC. Which is why they were made.


"Easymode" does not.

So no you cant use these as comparable examples.

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koratrice wrote:

A few core problems... The amount of xp/time per death starts getting ridiculous after about level 92. This makes dying a few times in a single encounter totally demoralizing. I often give up on a league right about then as I am no longer having fun.

Level 92 to 93 takes 1 and 3/4 t16 maps with full breech. So...

I'm really not sure what to tell you if you are struggling with xp loss at 92.

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Z3RoNightMare wrote:

People really should stop gaslighting other people that just want to experience the game in their own pace.

actually i do like it when they gaslight.

makes it easy for me to identify people who dont have the best interest of the community and makes it easy to ignore them when i see them post.

theres a difference between saying "naaaah easy mode isnt for me"

against "i dont think we should have easy mode" and "easy mode? play standard!".

the former is a personal opinion. the later is pure spite.

spite born from the fear of other people gaining access to tough content in the game and making their achievements "cheapen". not many people can kill uber pinnacles so killing uber pinnacles right now is something to be proud of. but to them if everyone can kill uber pinnacles, then it makes their achievement... less impactful.

its exactly as what asmongold mentioned. people want to keep the game harder so that they can be proud of their in game accomplishments.

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exsea wrote:

its exactly as what asmongold mentioned. people want to keep the game harder so that they can be proud of their in game accomplishments.

Which is really weird to me. PoE is not even close to being a hard game in my books, it's just that somehow people equate time consuming and hostile game design to difficulty, which is laughably wrong. Nothing hard in wasting 50-100-200h to farm a Mageblood for the 10th time with a slightly different league, it's just... mindlessly boring...

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Z3RoNightMare wrote:

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exsea wrote:

its exactly as what asmongold mentioned. people want to keep the game harder so that they can be proud of their in game accomplishments.

Which is really weird to me. PoE is not even close to being a hard game in my books, it's just that somehow people equate time consuming and hostile game design to difficulty, which is laughably wrong. Nothing hard in wasting 50-100-200h to farm a Mageblood for the 10th time with a slightly different league, it's just... mindlessly boring...

lets be real. i m pretty sure a lot of "top percenters" in POE right now are just using meta or a build guide or have their build be based on some of the top builds.

if everyone went ahead and used the same build they could get the same level of achievements.

for example some builds hit the entire screen and can tank uber pinnacles without requiring them to move much or even at all. trivializing the entire encounter.

then these same people would just say the game is easy and shoot anyone or everyone down who dare say the game is difficult or hard in any way.

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Level 92 to 93 takes 1 and 3/4 t16 maps with full breech. So...

I'm really not sure what to tell you if you are struggling with xp loss at 92.

I'm on level 95 this time around... further than I've ever been, because I've died less than other times I'm assuming, and those deaths have been staggered one-offs rather than 6 deaths in a row by coming onto something the build (or my knowledge) just can't deal with. Part of that is by NOT DOING content that's available to me, but is likely to kill me multiple times. That's a perverse incentive format. I'll give those things a whirl after I level or die enough to bring me back to the beginning of the level.

I used 92 in my example because that's the point where losing 50% of an XP bar has often just pissed me off enough to walk away from the game and come back in 6 months. But level 92 is not the point.



as per struggling:

1) your t16 maps I'm assuming are the juiced-to-high-heaven t16 maps? That makes it more likely to get wiped. Maybe multiple times if it's simply a flaw in your build or lack of knowledge on how to handle things

2) Many players will hit level 92 without even starting T16s, let alone one juicy enough to level in 2 maps. The XP gain is slower.

3) The devs seem to be indicating that they are irritated that everyone is told to look up and play a given build put together by experts. They seem to think it's because it's too complicated to understand how gems work and interactions. That's not it.. they're told that because the game becomes freakishly punishing later on and there's no way for a newish player en-route to know if they're going to hit an offensive or defensive brick wall. Even veterans basically defer to the build-gods.

4) Not everyone buys perfect gear. Certainly not newer players, who I would think GGG would like to become regulars.

5) Providing a valve, with pros and cons, to help people that want to learn IS A GOOD THING. The game right now goes out of its way to discourage acquiring experience (as opposed to xp.) If you want to think of it as enabling "practice mode", that's fine. It lowers the stakes and makes the deaths irritating, but no longer quit-inducing. Over time you now have more players that can handle these things, and that's good for the community. Having a large player base walk away from the game when Kitava screws them over the first time and convinces them that Diablo IV is more their speed is not good for GGG.

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koratrice wrote:

1) your t16 maps I'm assuming are the juiced-to-high-heaven t16 maps? That makes it more likely to get wiped. Maybe multiple times if it's simply a flaw in your build or lack of knowledge on how to handle things

Nope just regularly alched and chiseled maps.. roll your favorite mods.

5x, 1c breach scarabs. Breach on the device and breach atlas tree. Even slower opening/close node.

Can do something similar with Abyss as well.


Here it is in all its glory.... used it for 4 characters....

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koratrice wrote:

Having a large player base walk away from the game when Kitava screws them over the first time and convinces them that Diablo IV is more their speed is not good for GGG.

.... Lmfao ...

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exsea wrote:

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ExsiliumUltra wrote:

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be as free of bullshit unreasonable mechanics

And therein lies the problem. There is just so much bs from ten years of trying to satisfy the 16 hr per day gamer.

i would remind everyone that poe evolved to where it is today because devs needed money.

the game started out as a VERY SLOW game. it was even touted as being a "classless" game very early in the game's life cycle. i cant find the post anymore coz we're talking about something 10 years ago.

the game progressively became harder and harder but whatever it was. people came back to poe and they gave money to GGG and kept the game afloat.

but as part of the "keeping money coming" they needed to keep players happy. players figured out how to ABUSE layered defense. they found ways to multiply their damage by doing a gazillion hits/projectiles persecond.

so the game kept getting harder and harder where players could use very specific builds to technically become immortal.

GGG was VERY afraid to rework or rebalance the game.

it didnt tho, the game hasnt become harder and harder.

hellrake in tidal island used to absolutely wipe everyone, pretty much every new player would get obliterated by hellrake. voidbearers in merciless docks were a fking nightmare, projectiles could shotgun and the game would spawn multiproj hasted voidbearers that instantly kill characters with capped resists and decent life levels.

go look at the footage of kripps first hardcore death. him and a group of top hardcore players who were first on the ladder are fighting a double boss in a lvl67 map and get killed. before they get killed it takes them more than a minute to down one of the bosses, and they are in danger of being randomly 1 shot the entire time from the corpse explodes the bosses do.

that same level of players now, if 6 of them were in a party playing what is now a tier 2 map they would kill the boss in about 3 seconds with 0 risk.



in most ways the game has got consistently easier. there have always been massive bullshit damage spikes, the game in 2013, 2014, 2015 had more bullshit deaths than it does today in the same content, as in anywhere from the beach up to lvl78 maps.


you know why maps go beyond lvl78 now? because they kept on making the game easier, they kept adding player power creep which massively outpaced any increases in difficulty, so they need lvl79, lvl80, they needed bosses, and then uber versions of those bosses because the game kept becoming easier and easier and that meant that anyone half decent at the game was face stomping the hardest possible content.






heres what i believe you guys need to understand. just give me your ear and honestly try and see this from a different perspective cause i love the game and i love you guys. this isnt personal, i say what i say from my opinion of how i would make the game. GGG havent added an alternate easy mode, is that because they are protecting their sense of achievement like asmongold says? no, its because they are protecting what they think the game should be from a detached perspective. thats the same for me, i have my opinion based on how i would design an arpg because i think it makes for the best game.

i hate the death penalty. i hate bs deaths, ive gone as far as pming and emailing the devs personally in years gone by with instances of nonsense in the game asking them to please reconsider mechanics. stuff like volatile blood 1 shotting people in bullshit ways, i spoke to a lead dev directly about that and guess what? they removed it from the game, he was already aware it was an issue and already wanted to fix it, it was on their radar. im not an enemy of change and the devs arnt either, stuff is on their radars and stuff can and will change.

i speak in good faith, so follow me a bit here and see if theres maybe a different perspective to this.






they made the game easier to be more attractive to the casual side of the audience. they consistently upped drop rates, added more powerful skills, more powerful passives. they already made easy mode, they have consistently made the game more easy mode over time. if they kept making the game harder and more impossible the player base would probably have shrunk over time, it hasnt, the player base has grown and grown. this idea that theyre losing all these players because the game keeps getting harder, wheres that coming from? the player base is consistently growing, player power is consistently creeping up vastly outpacing any buffs to monster life and damage.

a shavs used to be 80 exalts and if you had one u could kill uber atziri consistently with a decent build. a shavs is now 10 chaos and with it you can kill uber atziri way easier than you could with it in sacrifice of the vaal and access her infinitely easier. you can farm 10 chaos 10x quicker now than you could back then.



they do listen to this feedback, they do understand all the points and they have buffed player power while seeking to remove unreasonable difficulty spikes. so when u guys say

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exsea wrote:

they're DONE asking for rebalancing. they've given up.

so fuck all that. the rebalance that these players want are never coming

thats not rly true is it? rebalancing happens all the time, more player power is added all the time, higher and higher drop rates of stuff has been added to the core game along with stupidly obscene loot explosions in league content.

what has never been added is an easier game mode. so 11 years of asking for rebalancing, making players more powerful and an additional easy mode, the one thing that they have never done is add an additional easy mode. its not my place to say what they will or wont do, im not the devs, but if i was gonna give up on a demand i know what one looks dead in the water to me.


and for good reason. it doesnt need to exist. the game should have a scaling difficulty that accommodates everyone.




look at torment levels in D3, the design doesnt work because there is an incentive to play T16 for increased loot so everyone demands t16 is easy enough for everyone to play.

look at ruthless, harder mode with no incentive. all the elite players in sc trade didnt go play ruthless cause theres no incentive for them.

most people will just play whatever game mode gets them the most shit for the least effort. most people will play that mode and the top players will have way more stuff and beat more content than the casuals.

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exsea wrote:

for example the uber pinnacles. you cannot expect a new player to organically learn how to deal with the uber pinnacles.

you cannot expect a new player to even reach an uber pinnacle. if a new player could even reach a boss like that the game would be a shit game and lose most of its dedicated players.

i dunno what organically is supposed to mean. lots of people beat those bosses and all of them were new players at one point. any point where we are talking about the difficulty of an uber pin boss vs an imaginary new player is a nonsense discussion.




when the maven does her memory game just say it out loud. im 42, my brain is mush from spending my entire 20s eating mushrooms at drum n bass raves, i cant remember actors names from films i watched 2 days ago. i deal with the memory game by saying it out loud.

top, right, left, right, left


say it, repeat it, repeat it again, repeat it as you are doing it.

the more you play the boss the less nervy the experience gets, just make an op char and mass farm the boss until theres no nerves in the encounter, then ur mind will be clear enough to deal with it.

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lets be real. i m pretty sure a lot of "top percenters" in POE right now are just using meta or a build guide or have their build be based on some of the top builds.

if everyone went ahead and used the same build they could get the same level of achievements.

then why are they complaining about needing an easy mode?


what u seem to be suggesting is the problem is build balance, so why is this not a thread about build balance?



this is the problem with this thread, it doesnt know wha the problem is. its build balance, no its not its boss balance, no its loot drops, no its 1 shots and player defences, no its ease of content access....



its a nonsense. everyone who wants an 'easy mode' has a different idea of what exactly is supposed to be easier in this mode.


the devs will listen to people if they come out and say I think X is too hard for me and needs changed, this is my evidence for it, and if its reasonable they will probably change it in a way they feel is appropriate.

if people come and say we need X change to the game for a million conflicting and confused reasons and if you dont heres a bunch of threats that people who are not me that i am just imagining exist in my mind are going to quit playing the game or never pick up the game then its unlikely to happen.

theyre not gonna add 100 different versions of easy mode for the 100 different versions of easy mode that are being demanded.

guys this mode already exists its called Diablo 4


In all seriousness its hard to imagine how anyone would find SC trade in standard or leagues to not be "casual mode" already. but I guess I could see some types of players (the average "single player" type chris has talked about who's mostly SSF but playing in trade league because there's no offline mode and "SSF is a challenge mode" turns them away) who doesn't group or not often and who wants to do most everything themselves while not meta gaming but only have a couple hours a week... yeah I can see that. Maybe they have Diablo 4 amounts of playtime but love POE's clearly superior itemization and vastly more fleshed out content, and interesting eventual endgame "aspirational" goals.

I guess I could get behind the idea of a casual mode, as single player ARPG enjoyers are not much of a part of any economy in the game. And forcing them in with the SC trade "sweat blasters" doesn't benefit anyone.

The thing is IMO POE needs a big "refactor" of difficulty anyway. IMO it should also have a "Medium core" something between the farcical triviality of SC trade blasting and the 5 challenge modes that are aimed at the variously sweaty time wealthy players. You can say "just be a streamer/meta follow gamer and the whole games is easy" but thats not how most people play games, and its silly from a business standpoint. The difference in perspectives in POE thats on display on this forum is just kind of insane; on one hand you have 40/40 "this game is too easy" SC meta blasters who want GGG to make SC trade harder but they don't want to play the harder modes that already exist, while on the other hand you have people with a life, job and family who find even SC trade to be overly thirsty for their time. Right now we have super trivial SC trade, and 5 "challenge modes" that are all reasonably categorized as "hard modes".

There's not really a good argument (that I can anticipate) against having better balanced difficulty modes to pick from. But it would require a re-factor.