- For the very last time, GGG. One. Last. Time:

Dear GGG,

I've played your game since Beta, and, for your own good and the good of the community (and regardless of the backlash I will provoke and ignore completely) I feel the resolute need to make ONE single important thing clear to you...

-- Having your players go from 100% hit points to absolute zero in less than a second IS NOT good game design. -- It's bad. Very bad.

Especially for Hardcore players across the planet, who flock to your creation for depth of variety in options, encounters and experiences... for their hard work to suddenly be torn from them for no good reason whatsoever... and without an explanation...

Your company NEEDS to employ a damage and fight details track and breakdown, the way World of Warcraft does. There is no excuse not to.

You are now the industry leader in the Action RPG genre. Please. You know your mistakes. Fix them. Address them.

Listen to your customers. We will make you rich.

Sincerely, AND FOR THE FREAKIN LAST TIME.

LISTEN TO ME.

this all started because of layered defence.

some games implement block where its easy to block but block reduces damage to a certain amount depending on the shield and other multipliers.

u can hit what? 80-90% block last time? i cant recall. then we also had evasion which ggg kept tweaking it was hard to get high numbers. then we also had dodge. players were stacking all 3.

all 3 mechanics would negate ALL damage. having layered defences still allowed you to get hit but statistically you would NEVER get hit. if you had 75 block, 50 dodge, 50 evade. in every 4 hits your block fails. but then half of these unblocked hits are either dodged or evaded.

GGG did not like nerfing players back then because they were still a growing company. they needed players to enjoy the builds that they worked so hard to get going and in turn those players would continue playing the game and eventually throw money at GGG.

so instead they made things hit HARD. if its almost impossible to get hit, they want to make sure that the ONE TIME u get hit, you die.

of course theres a sentiment that "dude your defences are weak like a paper towel". ultimately it all stemmed by GGG's need to challenge the top 1%ers.

which sadly solved nothing. a lot of things in POE are balanced around the top %ers but its usually the ones lower down the ranks that get affected the most.

the reason why t17s and uber pinnacles exist is to keep the top %ers happy. if you're weaker, t17s and uber pinnacles practically dont exist to you.

GGG could have rebalanced everything and reduced the power creep but its too late now. nerfing everything will cause players who are already accustomed to how it is now to cry in outrage.

i really hate one shots and in poe, even if you build your defences high, its still possible to get one shot due to how multipliers can build up to huge amounts.

as much as i m on with you on "1 shots bad". its already part of the game with no real solution unless GGG is willing to do a massive revamp which could alienate its existing playerbase.

i think its too late to expect anything to change in regards to this at this point. instead i just have to put my trust in GGG that they've learned a lot from Protoype of Exile into the real PoE which is PoE2.

"

Mequias wrote:

Your company NEEDS to employ a damage and fight details track and breakdown, the way World of Warcraft does. There is no excuse not to.

Ohh there is an excuse and a good one.

WoW is a sedate game, everything limited by cooldowns and any mosters you come across are basica as fuck including the bosses, everything is easy to track.

Path of exile has white mosters able to attack multiple times per second in pack sizes in of 20 or more, with FAR more mechanics going on, not including map mods or complex gear, NOR a player that can get to 20aps, triggered attacks, cast on attacks etc, there is so much shit to track and output to a client that it would be a bad experience if they tried AND even worse for you becuase you would not understand why you died anyway.

Yes let's take this juicy map that i didn't read and jump into the middle of 30 monsters and let them hit me all at once, that surely couldn't go wrong with my "op" build

I'm completely for an optional death log, it would be nice to know what damage type killed you so that you don't have players getting killed by X damage type while thinking it's Y when the game often fails to make that clear visually (Monstrosity Piety deals pure lightning damage with her spinning blood orbs, Maligaro's purple bombs deal 70% fire and 30% chaos damage, and so on).

That being said, blanket statements like "Having your players go from 100% hit points to absolute zero in less than a second IS NOT good game design" are pure nonsense. There are a LOT of players, even players with a decade of experience who should know better, who continually build paper-thin defenses and refuse to stop charging face-first into dangerous content. It's not automatically the game's fault when people get "one-shot;" I'd even go so far as to say it's the game's fault less than 1% of the time. Handwaving away player agency like this and refusing to hold people accountable for their mistakes is very dangerous and leads to garbage game balance.

A death log would be extremely easy to make and deploy and have virtually zero impact on servers.

Like introducing a new mtx world be worse at this point.

They just don't want players to know what killed them and how. It's their aesthetic choice. It's why vendor recipes are introduced unknown. They love people trying to figure out weird things, to the point they introduced fishing items that don't really do anything.

"

Mequias wrote:

Listen to your customers. We will make you rich.

you see, that's the problem, we already made them rich, and now they don't need to listen to us anymore

"

roundishcap wrote:

A death log would be extremely easy to make and deploy and have virtually zero impact on servers.

And it will show nothing.

So you will know what hit was last, from the 2454 hits your char got in last second? Or you really must know all of the longread of that? And you have time deciphering this db?

OP and all — doesn't even imagine what's going on in PoE asking for this.

Outside of pinnacle bosses, most deaths aren't technically 1shots, but rather a series of smaller hits so rapid that it looks like one. A simple "last hit" death log would, in most cases, give you the damage value of a single trash mob. Outside of previously-mentioned pinnacle boss fights, you will glean little to no information from it and how you might be able to avoid that.

Asking for a more advanced death log that tracks the last 10 or so hits would likely require a lot of backend programming that will just add to the growing pile of things impacting game performance.