1.2.0 Improvements to New User Experience

Like i wrote in the strongbox forum:
"You should really add so the itemlevel is shown too and explain its power on the affixes."
for newbies

+1 for tutorial.

I just want to share something with you guys just to give you how some new players might experience PoE.
I had a hilarious encounter with a new player yesterday.

I created a game called something like "Weaver, need help" in Cruel and this guy joined.
We went into the weaver's nest and soon he started to complain about the lag in the map. He said said something like: I don't know what is going on but the lag in this map is terrible.
So I tried to explain that it's not lag but desync he was experiencing and if it was lag it's not caused by GGG's servers
So he responded and told me he had a Nasa computer and never has lag etc. and that it had to be the server. He also started ranting about a lot of bugs in the game.
So I just told him I disagreed about many bugs because as far as I know there are really not that many bugs and again I tried to explain that it was desync and recommended him to read on the forum.
Then he said that he never reads the forum so I said well ok, that's fine but I wish you luck playing PoE without reading the forum.

Next we walk into a room with an Invasion boss and it was the little Elemental Skeleton (whatever this guy's name is). This dude is not really though but more like a resistance check.
I knew that my resist where almost capped at that point so I just started tanking. But in the middle of the fight I backed up for some reason and now this new player started facetanking mister Elemental Skeleton Invasion boss.

Now this is going to be interesting I thought, and I saw that mr Skelly was preparing to cast.
As soon as the new player got hit he instantly DIED, he was once shot!!
I couldn't help to ROFL hard looking at the poor guy on the ground who refuses to read the forums. In the chat window I read his rant: I never ever touch this buggy game in my life again!! -logout-

That last line says it all, while his death was clearly the outcome of poor defenses, he blamed desync. Because for him desync was just some bug he didn't understand.

how do you tell that last death he blamed to desync? it does not come from your story

and some maps for some poor amd card owners ARE laggy as hell

but the point is - one potential customer gone. and he was the 'more probably to donate' if he got so far in Invasion

"

Startkabels wrote:

"

FillInTheBlank wrote:

Quest rewards need to be improved in some way. Giving an unid rare as a reward is a nice gesture but the chance of it being useful make it almost less useful than the support gem I might have needed.

I don't really know what a solution would be, I just know that right now item quest rewards are not in a great spot.

I also guess gem rewards might need a look over, sometimes a class doesn't get a gem you expect it would.

What I would find rewarding is to have a vendor add a mod to an item, with 3 options: strength mod, intelligence mod or dexterity mod.

Alternatively let the player choose more then 1 item from the list of reward items (Not for all quests).

"

sidtherat wrote:

how do you tell that last death he blamed to desync? it does not come from your story

and some maps for some poor amd card owners ARE laggy as hell

but the point is - one potential customer gone. and he was the 'more probably to donate' if he got so far in Invasion

It's not! It was due to his lack of resistances obviously!

"

sidtherat wrote:

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.

Dude the map is called Mao Kun! If you want to find it you have to use the correct name.
If have just tested it and get several results, and note that this is a unique map.
Anyway, saying that players are rapidly leaving based on results you get in Poexyz doesn't make any sense at all. There are all kinds of other factors that are influencing those results.

Everything you said about costs is utter logic, nobody needs to have a long history in the industry to come up with that. But you have no insight in GGG's financial stuff so I'd rather leave financial management up to them and I have no reason to assume they're having financial issues. In fact they are making good profit out of those microtransactions as far as I know. The only ones who can say anything about the long term are the guys for GGG themselves.

Anyway and still, a better user experience and less steep learning curve is still completely positive in my opinion and nothing you've said makes me think otherwise. Actually the most you said was offtopic :)

Im really happy to hear about more effort being put in to a tutorial of some kind.

To clarify, Im firmly with Scrottie, no tuts, just a raw game, oppressive, uncompromising, challenging. But, I understand this game isn't being made exclusively for people like me and him who just want that harshness. Ive felt like this game needs some kind of 'way in' for new people for a long time.

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DexDeus wrote:

Something that might be worth doing is an exilipedia that can be accessed through game menu's which explains game mechanics for new players. A lot of new players wont be as into this as i was and spend their time on the wiki learning things as they play they just want to play. Having it in game means its quick and easy for them to do it. Think of the civipedia in civilisation games and you get what i mean here.

It'd be a lot of work to do but it could be done over the course of a year, like 1 article a week just on the basics and such and can be added to over time. In fact you could ask permissions from the wiki guys or ask people to make threads to contribute to it.

The community would then essentially write it for you, youd just have to check it was accurate and build the interface, then just paste it in - easy.

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Rufus82 wrote:

It was this Kripp video that helped me understand what it's all about. He gets the negatives out of the way first up. Then when he goes into the positives, he really gets excited about it. The enthusiasm was contagious.

I suggest that in the Classes section on this website you create some super basic build video guides. By basic, I mean really basic. Trees that are 40-45 points, a run through Normal. They don't need to be the foundation for a mapping build, just something to help people grasp the potential of this game.

An example might be a Fire Witch. You can explain in the video that there are passives to benefit fire spells, explain why you chose a certain pathway (did it have good access to life, mana regen, cast speed?). The edit can show how at the start things were simple, but they got more interesting as you progressed. And goals. The videos should explain how the build has goals it is working towards.

I like both these ideas, basic low level video guides, maybe with brief video clips of the different ways that character could look in end game just to trigger some inspiration but without showing endgame trees or explaining everything. That would be really cool.

The expedia thing is something thats never crossed my mind but I could see that being really useful. Global is full of questions from new players constantly, thats cool and its always good to have social things like that but the bare basics could do with some love. theres already enough info pressure on how to succeed in endgame to keep the game mysterious.

They could even make a tutorial zone, just 1 little area you progress through and it explains the basics to you. It would be an option like creating a char in the leagues, play the tutorial, done.

whatever, I think if it helps people get to grips with the game and stick with it, its a good thing.




Regarding attack speed, I like it. Obviously they dont buff the 1.7 aps weapons or the 1.55 bows etc, then it doesnt matter at all with regards to what goes on in endgame. You cant get enough crit early game to make crit matter but yeah, for those base weapons being available at ilvl78 for ele builds late game, they need to look at the crit vs speed issue there for sure. But I think they can handle it without it having late game impact at all.



Player retention is important for all devs making these sort of games, it would be silly not to invest energy in this area, especially now that a lot of the game is where it needed to be for a long time.

I think SotV was a great addition to the game, I dont mind that its gated behind rng grinding, its better than it being gated behind trading. Anuh is right though Chris, crafting is a trading pyramid, by design not everyone can get there.

POE is not ARPG. Its RLACPG = Racing/league Action Role Playing Game.

It all about racing and leagues! Make that clear to new users.

Classical end game killing mobs to farm loot, not working in POE, sadly so.

Attack speed is important to change.

I am forced to make specific builds relying on faster if smaller responses from my character, so I can not feel like I'm sitting around waiting to interact with the game. This is my personality and play style, but I can empathize with new players' reactions to slow speed. It is for this reason I won't use 2h melee weapons. (slow attacks that can miss and requite an additional swing are frustrating)

Another thing that frustrated me to no end is that I was fully capable of appreciating the depth, but I neither had socket/link combinations to work with, nor had skill gems. I was forced to grind through the boring bits to the higher levels when "proper" items would drop, and I might accidentally get a skill gem that would work with my chosen/available skills.

A fuller depth of the game needs to be brought down *very* quickly to the lower levels. Like right away. Players having options to, say, add fire damage and see the mana cost increase will immediately see depth in skill modification.

Making skills more various and available and lower level, and providing more 2L 4S-capable-items, and 3L 6L-capable-items would be a help, I think.

Resource regeneration was also a serious annoyance. It's not fun to blow things up spectacularly and then return to occasionally whacking something ineffectively. And missing a lot. Get rid of hit mechanics.

None of this addresses how utterly worthless self-found and crafting is to new players.