1.2.0 Improvements to New User Experience

Mmm interesting read; it's quite a positive aspect to see Development Manifestos return.

I feel like it's extra work on your part to provide dev manifesto information GGG, and some could argue, it too could be better spent on developing content.

However, there is great strength in laying a solid and insightful foundation from which people can converse about and grasp key features of the game. This in turn lets people visualize the possibilities of the greater potential within their character or play style.

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While I understand that a better tutorial isn't an exciting feature to hear that we are going to spend developer time on

I totally disagree, as you said it's key for player retention and by improving it you guys will be able to improve the game overall so keep it up guys =D

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In my opinion, the most important thing for new players are (I also totally agree about the feeling of power, but I don't think is as important):

- Tutorial

I think that focusing on POE specific things like gems, sockets, passive tree, etc should be the priority. That's because the ARPG aspect is easier to learn by ourselves, and also many players played some kind of ARPG before, or even if they didn't they are gamers anyway so they can learn that fast.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to not do that. It's definitely important, but I think that POE specific stuff should came first.

- Readability

This is HUGE!

When you log into POE for the first time, the fonts are big, the tool tips are confuse, the minimap is the worse thing EVER (completely useless for a new player IMHO) the HUD is big and the art direction of the game is very very uniQue (it's awesome, but uniQue, so new players may think that's ugly before really understand it).

So I think that improving those aspects could be a huge win for new players. Make them feel like the game has more Quality, and help them to understand the art direction a little bit better in the beginning.

- Improve the HUD (it can also bring better usability in general)
- Improve the minimap. It's probably very hard to do, so maybe you guys can improve that at least on the beach and the first two or three maps.
- Make the overall size of the HUD, fonts, tooltip, etc more pleasing to look at.

Also, the beach has very few details, feels like that's the first map you guys did (it possibly is XD).

Improve the beach, make it look better, more details, more elements like houses, people died on crosses, etc maybe even work on the monsters there.

And congratulations for this Development Manifesto, this is awesome.
It's a very important community relation, and more than that, getting feedback from players that really care about it is key for you guys to improve. Actually, there's no other way to improve.

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mucker wrote:

GGG please don't compromise your brilliant vision just to bring in a bunch of babies.

This "just to" it's maybe "to be or not to be" for this game. Chris can write what he want, but it's obvious, that his "offensive" is probably result of serious playerbase dump, especially since SotV and streak of bad decision related to development and balance of game.

And it seems, that "noobs" are not willing to return from this "shallow BoA fest" and no wonder, combat in RoS and general playability is incomparable better that here. And it seems, that being self-found is also quite a fun for a lot of ppls.

It's not obvious at all it's a wild assumption based on a brainwave in your head.

What is obvious is that GGG is aimed maybe a little too much for "hardcore" players.

There is nothing wrong with making the game more understandable for more common players too while nothing changes in regards to hardcore mechanics and systems.

This is nearly a positive thing and there is not much to argue about here, unless you want to argue for the other reasons...

You start comparing with RoS, but I've tested RoS and stopped pretty fast. You shouldn't see everything in black and white.
RoS has a very good combat system but very poor character customization. Self found is very nice but when the itemization sucks it get old quickly.

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Startkabels wrote:

It's not obvious at all it's a wild assumption based on a brainwave in your head.

Think what you want, I live long enough to know reasons for such "management engagement".

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tmaciak wrote:

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Startkabels wrote:

It's not obvious at all it's a wild assumption based on a brainwave in your head.

Think what you want, I live long enough to know reasons for such "management engagement".

+1

in 3 days my steam Dark Souls 2 copy will activate. i bet that many, many poe players also await this day.

few loud-mouths here and there (we all know the names) even some with big wallet are not enough to SUSTAIN the game

and what should be obvious to some of these loud-mouths: their number is quickly crunching. there is nothing more telling that most hardcore fanbois snapping and leaving. i wont give the names because it is against the rules but im pretty sure you also can tell who is missing from the usual 'whiteknight attack team' that invades any 'negative' post

Training Wheels Mode

So okay hear me out. Install Hearthstone. Yes I know, it's a Blizzard product and I'm Satan because basically they killed Diablo or something. Whatever.

Check out that 'Suggested Cards' feature in the Hearthstone deck creator. It basically draws out three of the available cards from your deck and forces you to make the choice you believe is most optimal from that very small sample of your whole deck. This could be recreated for the passive tree in Path of Exile. This would allow noobs to experience a far more simplified version of Path of Exile, learning the mechanics through the slow introduction of new elements in a controlled way, until they feel confident enough to toggle Training Wheels Mode off and have full control over their build.

This actually flows somewhat intuitively when you consider that quest rewards are often new skill gems. The player selects what they feel will be most ideal for their character from the small range made available at quest completion. Actually, my idea is sort of an extension of that premise. Players will need to acclimatise to the element of randomisation because, well, they'll be scavenging their loot and finding the occasional gem from outside of this controlled framework that they need to implement into their build, therefore learning how to factor chance into their planning. And it will be planning, because the visual element of the game would more or less force a new player to observe that the node they're selecting leads to something on the tree.

Basically, it prevents people from branching out every which way or maximising one element (usually this element will be raw damage) and setting themselves up for later failure.

What I'm saying is, the problem with Path of Exile's first impressions is a choice overload, forcing people to learn too much too fast. If we slow the introduction of mechanics down a little and allow people to learn on a steady curve rather than a sheer cliff, I think PoE will retain more new people who're otherwise scared off by the impression of needing to learn this enormous amount. I'm not saying my idea here is the best one or even a pretty solid one. To be honest I've been abusing opiates pretty hard the last couple days. But still, game design trends toward introducing gameplay elements in progressive chunks for a reason - "it makes it hard" is not a valid reason not to.

ps. dear chris,

please make the templar's thighs even crunchier in an update

with love,
sexythighs

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sidtherat wrote:

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tmaciak wrote:

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Startkabels wrote:

It's not obvious at all it's a wild assumption based on a brainwave in your head.

Think what you want, I live long enough to know reasons for such "management engagement".

+1

in 3 days my steam Dark Souls 2 copy will activate. i bet that many, many poe players also await this day.

few loud-mouths here and there (we all know the names) even some with big wallet are not enough to SUSTAIN the game

and what should be obvious to some of these loud-mouths: their number is quickly crunching. there is nothing more telling that most hardcore fanbois snapping and leaving. i wont give the names because it is against the rules but im pretty sure you also can tell who is missing from the usual 'whiteknight attack team' that invades any 'negative' post

Let me write a decent response.

First of all calling me a fanboy is entertaining, I recommend reading through my posts and finding out I'm often quite negative about the certain concepts of PoE.

Second, you talk about white knights with loud-mouths invading negative posts. Although I understand what you're referring to, you are incorrectly qualifying my response as such in my opinion.

The only loud-mouths I see are the ones that are shouting the game is quickly dying etc. without even properly motivating why they think that. Do you actually know anything about the required wallet size to sustain PoE?

When I look at http://steamcharts.com/ I see the game on the first page of top games based on the amounts of players. Now for a free game I would say that's a very good achievement. And those are only numbers on Steam, I don't use Steam to play this game for example. I would rather ask GGG themselves about the playerbase and trends to get proper information.

So I would love to read why you think players are rapidly leaving PoE but even more so I'd love to read what you think about this topic and making the game more user friendly? Wouldn't that help new players so that there's a bigger chance they're not quiting the game as fast as they might now?

i partied a fairly new player (some weeks platyime, char in the early 70's) who didn't knew that you can apply orbs on boxes.
as this particular player didn't dare to ask without hesitation because we had a nice talk before i can imagine other players really feel stupid when they discover basic game mechanics after months of play.

i'm sure the fact that you can roll properties of boxes is described in some of the hundreds of hints and tutorials in the forum somehwere, imo a general guide about the basic game mechanics coming from ggg is really needed.

and it needs to be accessible from the game client as well. book of knowledge ftw.



edit:
easiest and cheapest way for an introduction would be a tutorial mode which is on initially and can be switched off in the options. the game already has some ingame help implemented which shows after you start on the beach which could be exploited to cover all ingame handling.
disclaimer: i don't know how much it covers already as i probably just switched it off long ago.

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Startkabels wrote:

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sidtherat wrote:

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tmaciak wrote:

Think what you want, I live long enough to know reasons for such "management engagement".

+1

in 3 days my steam Dark Souls 2 copy will activate. i bet that many, many poe players also await this day.

few loud-mouths here and there (we all know the names) even some with big wallet are not enough to SUSTAIN the game

and what should be obvious to some of these loud-mouths: their number is quickly crunching. there is nothing more telling that most hardcore fanbois snapping and leaving. i wont give the names because it is against the rules but im pretty sure you also can tell who is missing from the usual 'whiteknight attack team' that invades any 'negative' post

Let me write a decent response.

First of all calling me a fanboy is entertaining, I recommend reading through my posts and finding out I'm often quite negative about the certain concepts of PoE.

Second, you talk about white knights with loud-mouths invading negative posts. Although I understand what you're referring to, you are incorrectly qualifying my response as such in my opinion.

The only loud-mouths I see are the ones that are shouting the game is quickly dying etc. without even properly motivating why they think that. Do you actually know anything about the required wallet size to sustain PoE?

When I look at http://steamcharts.com/ I see the game on the first page of top games based on the amounts of players. Now for a free game I would say that's a very good achievement. And those are only numbers on Steam, I don't use Steam to play this game for example. I would rather ask GGG themselves about the playerbase and trends to get proper information.

So I would love to read why you think players are rapidly leaving PoE but even more so I'd love to read what you think about this topic and making the game more user friendly? Wouldn't that help new players so that there's a bigger chance they're not quiting the game as fast as they might now?

i wasnt referring to you, dont know why you thought so

and i already responded in this thread several times with a) my first time impressions b) suggestions on what and why to improve

as for the 'dwindling playerbase' - have you tried poe.xyz recently? i wanted to buy that new map (kan mun or something like that). there are NO for sale in standard (i managed to find myself one before even one being available for sale!). do a quick search for new uniques and tell me how many are there. im frequent poe.xyz user and it is VERY easy to see the dramatic (seriously) decrease in available items there.

not mentioning the desert that Evasion league is now

as for the wallet size:

Chris told us that GGG is now 50+ souls strong. even considering utterly minimal salary it adds up to very large sums monthly. server costs are another position on the bill, even cheapest hostings are costly. add to that 'fixed' costs like offices, development tools (not everything can be done with freewares/cheap alternatives), travel overhead etc. i happen to know about such costs due to my almost 15y career in industry. you need far more than few Charan's donating few 100s thousands. this is pocket money compared to costs. the most important part - salary is monthly, server costs are monthly - sustainability is required, long dry run == out of business

there is also business reality - someone (most probably) invested serious money into GGG so he can get his money back with profits sometime in the future. in most cases that future is 2, max 3 years. i think that we are approaching that 2 years mark and quickly.

SoTV was a disaster with very, very bad players response - 50% of new content (Evasion league) is deserted, Atziri and in general corrupted content is gated behind RNG/RMT and balance on release was a TOTAL JOKE. ofc few old faithfuls shall claim otherwise but usual means of judging population (chat activity, poe.xyz activity, public parties, public parties when leveling) tell a rather sad story.