The 6-8 hour mandatory tutorial

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BaumisMagicalWorld#0673 wrote:

The only relevance they have in a discussion is when a low challenges person is talking about endgame and game balance while having no related challenges completed, or, even worse, the easy ones unchecked. Then there are those who never play leagues and have their profiles privated, parroting "knowledge" they suck off from people more knowledgeable than them while constantly belittling others, in an effort to appear more credible on the surface.

lol describes every interaction and comment you make on these forums to a "t" right here: unless its on full display, no one can possibly know more or have more experience than you....so its best to just write them off and not pay attention. And naturally taking all of those comments as personal attacks rather than actual, REAL information contradicting your classic talking points.

I'm not going to take this further because I know how it goes...but I just love how much that paragraph describes every interaction.


All that matters is the content of the post. Private accounts mean nothing. Years active mean nothing. Challenges mean nothing. If the content of the post is bad, then the player has no idea what they are talking about. If you jump on the "account judgment"....then you have immediately lost the argument. Just like that last line you wrote in the quoted paragraph, that attitude is merely a smokescreen designed to cover up your own inadequate knowledge by pointing out "oh well you have a private account, so you have no idea what you are talking about". It's the easy way out....complete write off and disengagement.


Someone made this comment I believe earlier in this thread, but I'll paraphrase a bit: one need not be a professional chef in order to be an effective and knowledgeable food critic.

lots of people take days to complete campaign.
the elite vets tend to forget other people exist on this planet.
not everyone tries to plow through the maps to reach endgame asap.

A lot of people like to do full clears of maps even during campaign.
some people are altaholics... point is, not everyone clears it in one day in 5-8 hours, in fact most people probably take at least a few days.

As a mainly HC only player, whos been playing since Beta, I consider a league start character to completion of A10 at 5-6 hours pretty fucking good for me. Even twinked up alts is sometimes a struggle. I'm by no means the fastest or best player out there. With that said, I genuinely struggle to want to play new leagues or restart a new character now after dying because of the thought of spending so many hours being absolutely bored out of my mind playing the same acts for the literally 1000th time.

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

Why do we play arpgs for years on end, even though ultimately the game loop is just grind grind grind grind repeat repeat repeat repeat? It's because we LIKE that game loop. We LIKE to grind and progress. We LIKE to kill monsters (for years). These are the things we LIKE.

But the repetition of the campaign has: the weakest amount of killing monsters, the weakest amount of grind (no drops), the MOST interruptions to the gameplay loop repetition that we LOVE so much. It almost has no connection to the REAL game...which is mapping, former league content, bossing, etc. All the things we choose to do year after year because we like them.

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Phrazz#3529 wrote:

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

repetition is not the problem. its repetition of content that is very poorly designed for repetition and we find repulsive to play.

While this is a very good point, I still struggle to see how killing monsters during the campaign is "repulsive". It's not like you have to visit town more than once or twice each act, and can more or less just keep killing monsters.

But as I said, this isn't a hill I'm ready to die on. I'm not against an alternative way to level an alt. I welcome it, as long as they do it right. And balanced.

heres the thing for me, i dont mind killing the monsters but in my head im not really doing that, even tho im doing that.


i have this thing where if you give me maps the point is that i kill monsters and grind levels, get loot, and thats what i do.

but if you give me a task i just do the task, thats what my brain focuses on. ill give examples:


lab. the point was get to the end and get the enchants. theres monsters in there, i run right past them, if they get in my way i kill them but only because thats easier i guess? when people ran lab for enchants did they kill mobs to get xp and loot like it was a map? i didnt, i run through, im hyperocused on that goal.

heist. the point is to get to the chests and then the thing at the end. theres monsters in there, u run past them, i kill them if they get in my way... see what i mean? see this trend?

delve, theres monsters... im not grinding xp and item drops from the delve monsters in delve. they get in my way and i kill them. im looking for fossils and the nodes rewards at the end.





i like delve, its closer to enjoying killing and the gameplay of the little machine and the darkness and running around with the flares etc is fun for me. i really enjoy it i wish i found it a bit more rewarding.

i liked the rewards of lab, i was bribed sufficiently to put up with its gameplay.

heist is shit and i never do it. its a running past monsters simulator and i dont care enough about its rewards to force myself to do that stupid gameplay on a loop.




i like playing games, actually playing, i feel like a lot of this content the gameplay is trash, its not what i came here for and the contents appeal is all about the reward. ur bribed into doing something you would never want to do if it didnt have the reward. i dont like that.


im 43, i remember games as a kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmEhC91k3MI

press fire to start, click, ok now im playing a game. and its just gameplay and i enjoy it and im playing the game to enjoy that gameplay.

i dont like the map systems constant rolling maps etc, i think its needless busywork that actually brings very little to the table thats meaningful. but once i have 10 rolled maps i just throw them in and im gaming, im enjoying the gameplay and then theres a layer of drops and character building which i also enjoy on top.

thats me and arpgs, i like the gameplay, i like the character building, i like the item systems.




i can play a campaign once and love it, im explorng the areas, hopefully the story isnt too locked into these town convo text walls which really need to stop, honestly any arpg with even 1 instance of that youve failed, stop adding them, find a better way to tell a story this is trash, seriously. but ok, aside that, ill enjoy the campaign hopefully.

if you keep making me play through it i will not play it like that any more. it then becomes like heist, like lab etc where its a task im rushing through asap to get the reward, which in this case is being a high enough level to play the game. that bit from the old games press fire to start is now do this entire campaign of fetch quests and bullshit busywork as fast as possible in order to play the game.

so i dont think about killing monsters and getting loot. i kill a monster if it gets in my way, i dont pick up most loot because its slowing me down. i dont listen to dialogue or take in story because its slowing me down. suddenly every aspect of enjoying that campaign on the first playthrough is now completely incompatible with how im now playing the game which is do this task as quick as possible.

being good as this is doing it as fast as possible. the game mastery is now skip all story, skip most items, skip most monsters, skip everything you can, just do this absolutely meaningless busywork trash gameplay for hours simply to get it done.



im just not buying that as a game, as something i want to do with my time. its absolute trash and the story of every arpg is also trash and the fetch quest leaver pull nonsense they get us to do is trash added for the sake of adding it. the entire thing is diablo did this so everyone now has to also do it and no one is stopping and fixing it. all the devs skip through the story etc, no one believes in this its utter shit, why is it happening?


you could tell a story in the game, while im playing. i could be escorting someone as a bodyguard or a companion and you can tell me the story and give me purpose through spoken dialogue in the zones as i am playing. the banter between heist npcs is awesome, do that, tell me a story and direct me through a campaign like that while im playing. show dont tell, tell dont read this wall of text in town bullshit me, find ways to tell a story and give the player purpose that are compatible with the gameplay loop of the game. you dont actually need this big story, this isnt witcher or BG, people dont come here for a story and you didnt make a game to tell a story so stop adding a story campaign that plays out in a way that shuts down the gameplay of the game you wanted to make.


chris talks about needing dialogue to be skippable because basically no one wants to read it. jonathan talks about forcing players to fight monsters to stop the behaviour of people just running past monsters. you could fix both of them by just not adding a campaign that is incompatible with the gameplay.

^this is such an excellent summation on the "problem" of campaign repetition I hope that people actually read it entirely.

It's actually, almost word for word, how I feel and why I dislike things like Heist, Delve, Sanctum, Lab, TOTA, etc. I didn't choose to play (and continue playing) Path of Exile because I wanted to play ALL GENRES of gameplay.....

These design choices take what I LOVE and keep coming back to year after year....and removes it entirely from the equation. Or minimizes it to the background or negligible.

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Bleaq#5977 wrote:

Being a Veteran of PoE with 8k+ hours in this game, it is an understatement that i enjoy this game. In fact i enjoy it more than any other game i have played so far. But lately i haven't been able to cross the hurdle that is the campaign.

I am in no way fast at this and on a fresh league start, it usually takes me 6-7 hours to slog my way through.

But having done this 100+ times i am now at a point where i, at league start, play for 20 or so minutes, or until i crash, and just can't get myself to continue or log in again.

I sit and look at this like homework i don't like doing and wonder why i have to. Do i have to? No i don't and put on a movie or something.

I see streamers on YouTube playing the game i love because they can get past the dreadfully boring and slow campaign and i don't. You would think just doing it would be easy enough but having ADHD it is about as easy as doing any other thing i don't enjoy.. Not easy at all.

So, this rant is meant to ask you the reader or if luck is by my side you developer. Why do we have to play through the campaign for the gazillionth time?
It is so slow and boring and not fun for anyone.

Here is my suggestion to remedy this: After you defeat some endgame boss (say Maven or whoever) and thereby show you have some understanding of the game. You get an option to start at 58 with 2 or 3 labs done. Bad gear that can only be traded for scroll fragments and 2 or 3 maps to get you started.
There..

Why do we have to start so slow when the game is so fast and meant to be played fast? Imagine a racing game telling to to drive 5mph for 6 hours before you get to race.. Would you play that?

Guess you should quit. Developing a game for less than 0.1% of players is developing a game for no one. Clearly you don't enjoy this type of game anymore, and you are asking to remove a core design philosophy of this genre of game. Thats like asking to remove pvp from a battle royale, or asking to remove hunger and thirst from a survival game.

You might enjoy Diablo 4 or Torchlight Infinite more. Their a snooze fest and you can casually walk through all the content they offer with your brain shut off.

Please name literally 1 RPG or ARPG where you don't have to repeat the story on a new playthrough. If you ever find one, its probably garbage, and theres a reason no one talks about it.

Feel free to stay in standard and wait for the content to come there. Then you get your dream, never having to replay the campaign ever again.

This games success, and the only reason it could afford a sequel, is due to players having to start over from scratch on a new league. If we could start a new league with existing characters, or skip the campaign, etc, players would quit in 1 day. That's not a sustainable model.

They wont change it because its in their interest for you to spend more time in their game, they got steady income and there is no reason why would they move finger about it. You would burn out quickly anyway, after you see what your build can do, you do 1-2 maps, you are done. You finally get Mageblood you farmed few days for, you do several maps you see how build performs now, and that is it you are done.

After you level up and see how build performs what is the point of making another build, for what, to farm currency again? To do same thing in different way. That is why league is dead for months.

i like playing the campaign because i never played that much to get deep enough in the endgame grind to "beat the game". haven`t beaten most of the final bosses myself.

endgame leveling is broken anyway, you either get lucky to get into alot of "xp parties" like pure breachstone runs or untainted paradise maps with no real danger to your char or you spend hours over hours doing the same content with no real progress.

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the only problems i have with the campaign:
- it`s too easy after you bought the right items
- despite the promises in 2012, their random level generation never really worked so that you had the feeling of playing a different area all the time.

I'm going to brush off the skip everything and start at a higher-level part of this because that's never going to happen.

An alternative leveling path introduces a new headache for GGG. They will be in a constant loop of balancing the campaign vs the alternative. I'm not sure that's a headache they would want when the game is already a nightmare to balance. And just to clarify, the two paths needs to be close to equal because otherwise one will always be chosen due to efficiency even if it is less enjoyable.

I think they could instead offer ways to move through the campaign more effectively after the first run through.

A few simple potential options:

1. Waypoints are unlocked permanently during a league once they've been unlocked the first time.
2. Killing Act 10 Kitava gives a permanent experience, loot and movement speed bonus while in the campaign areas with any character during the league. To make this even more fun, maybe it has stacking benefits for each time kitava is killed (with diminishing returns of course).

I'm sure there are more potential things. Just tossing out random stuff.