I don’t recall any threads asking for that.
Got any links?
In my experience players will frequently ask for things that will make them hate the game once implemented.
It usually takes the form of “Diablo 3 is too easy. Back in the day we had to work hard just to get a Skorn.” Which was true. It’s usually accompanied with humblebragging.
You know that PoE item grind is 20 times slower than D3’s yet PoE announced yesterday an 11% increase in player base for their current League/Season?
Have you thought that maybe you are the minority regarding this aRPG issue?
This release has seen 11% higher peak player numbers than any previous Path of Exile release
It’s anecdotal based on past events so open to interpretation. For instance people asked for D3 to be easier and still do even though so many get bored by it and wander off.* PoE is an absolute crap game in my opinion just so you know where my bias lies. There’s no question the grind in D3 is beyond easy. The grind in PoE is just stupid. There’s a balance to be struck and those two are opposite extremes. That 11% increase may or may not have anything to do with the grind. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being in the minority. The minority is often right. Truth isn’t a consensus.
- I think that’s a lot of what’s wrong with modern gaming. Players want games to end and have a sort of closure rather than endlessly chasing a goal that can never be achieved. That’s a topic for another time and place.
I agree. This further shows the majority like a more grindy game than D3, be it a crappy one.
There are many stupid things in PoE, but SSF item progression there rocks. You slowly upgrade your character power and min/max until you reach your goal. The journey there always delivers although as we both agree it’s still a journey in a crap destination.
Blizzard aim to maximize their income from D4 thus tunning their game for the majority is what they’ll do. And I fully support that since a game without fresh blood is a dead game (see D3).
Having an end regarding reaching the gameplay you seek should exist in any game. Endless grind for more of the same stats like D3 paragon is pointless however.
I already said that there are many posts that want gear drops to occur less frequently.; however, there are very few (if any) stating that someone quit seasons early due to free respecs. These are not intimately related.
No, it wouldn’t. Extending the item grind =/= free respecs.
I have played PoE little. We are discussing respec cost where the topic of item grind has entered into the conversation. I am not sure why an 11% increase in participation in a PoE league is relevant unless it meets 1 of the 2 criteria:
- Did the league change item drop rates in comparison to the past?
- Did the league change how PoE handles respec costs in relation to the past?
PoE player base growing shows the grind is liked.
Both influence player’s participation in the game.
D3 players quit faster than PoE players. ARPG players enjoy the grind when it’s meaningful and it brings them progression.
You have these options how to structure the progression grind and the respec costs:
1] Free respecs and fast progression (D3)
2] Free respecs and slow progression
3] Respec costs and fast progression (Your thread)
4] Respec costs and slow progression (PoE)
The D4 developers should choose the scenario that motivates most players on average resulting in highest player’s participation time. I’d say this is the middle ground - free respecs with loot penalty.
Really? It is quite common.
Especially in the D4 threads.
D3 gear acquisition is way too fast. I thought it was one of the few things nearly everyone could actually agree on.
Indeed.
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And are you going to update it if the player base dropped significantly after a week or month or going to ignore it? I mean, it happened before for PoE.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/fk4kst/playerbase_on_steam_dropped_by_25_in_4_days/
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2890774
D3 and PoE are different games. I do not think you can conclude that is simply due to the people liking the grind.
Did Season 19 in D3 have a higher participation rate than season 18? Did the grind change? Did respecs change?
Also, I saw this site that: It seems to me that the number of PoE players varies dramatically as a function of time. I assume peaks corresponds to early patch/season releases in PoE. It seems like it has the same player dropoff as D3. Players reach a max within a couple of weeks of season start and then drop off. This would seem to disprove several of your ideas. P.S. the imgur link has the full image (greater time range). This image here is cropped due to the forum software.
Path of Exile - Steam Charts
https://imgur.com/a/786P2tY
I choose option 5
- Free respecs and appropriate progression (the goldilock’s progression: not fast or slow but just right)
PoEs respec costs and gear progression are both too slow (without trading, way too fast with trading). D3s respecs and gear progression are both way, way too fast.
I wont say they should meet in the middle, because they should not. PoE is still closer to getting it right than D3. But yeah, D4 should be in between the two, albeit closer to PoE.
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Which is the same as free respecs with loot penalty equating progression X. Those who don’t free respec have better drop rates again equating progression X.
X should be then tuned in such a way to result in highest player’s participation. This is achieved by creating a satisfying MTBU curve for the majority of players keeping them active throughout the Season.
The MTBU threshold is reached way later in PoE than in D3 resulting in far greater player engagement.
Theoretically, the optimal scenario would be the aRPG game to offer the regular player the ability to progress his character for 90% of the Seasonal time. In the last 10% of Season, when the player’s MTBU is very high and the grind is practically pointless, the player should be able to free respec in order to experiment with stuff and experience new gameplay, as well as to participate in the competition.
The above principle applied to D3 would render the optimal duration of D3 Seasons to be no more than a month. The logical follow-up is that you have to have longer character progression in D4 in order to have longer Seasons with optimal player engagement.
You keep coming back to this idea. I firmly disagree with your premise.
Your hypothesis makes a simple prediction. If valid, one would not expect to see a dramatic falloff in PoE playerbase during season (or at least a much slower decline than what is observed in D3).
What is the data? We can visualize PoE as I posted above. The link is given below for your convenience.
https://imgur.com/a/786P2tY
From this graph, it is clear that the number of players actively playing PoE undergoes cyclic pattern that is correlated with seasons/patches. This makes logical sense and is similarly observed in D3. Likewise, we see that the number of players peek a couple/few weeks into seasons and then there is a significant decline thereafter. Late in seasons, the PoE playerbase typically is at/approaches pre-patch/new season levels. A similar phenomenon occurs in D3 seasons. To me, the kinetics seem rather similar. In conclusion, there appears to be no significant differences between PoE and D3 in seasons in terms of player engagement in relation to seasonal players as a function of tme.
Seems like the decline might happen much faster in D3, supporting Skelos argument to some degree. People usually talk about mere days, until they completed the season journey. But we lack accurate data.
Not that there is anything inherently wrong with a decline in players over time. Much more important how the game plays while people are active. Sure, if the drop-off happens extremely fast, it indicates a lack of content, but playing a game for weeks is still a fair amount of time. Trying to get the players to stay for longer, if they dont really “want” to, is not exactly a good thing. Even the most amazing game, with a season design (which I guess would automatically disqualify it from being amazing), would see players drop off over the length of the season.
If you had no “forced” season design, people might spread out a bit more, but the average individual player would of course behave the same way, with a drop off after some time.
By your very own argument, if you try to extend people’s stay by making them grind for respec tokens, when they don’t really want to, that isn’t exactly a good thing.
Why do you say that?
We do not have a good visualization of D3 data, but the PoE graph kinetics seems similar to what I see in D3; however, none of us have the real data so there could be bias.
Agreed.
As I have said many times, the goal is not to make people grind for respec tokens. The goal is that people do not respec unless they really need it. Which should require very little, or no, grind.
Hence why I would prefer a respec system with zero grind in it, all based on getting respec tokens at certain pre-determined intervals.
If respec tokens can be grinded endlessly (which I dont think should be allowed), it needs to be designed in a way where the grind gets impossibly long, if you keep respeccing all the time, exactly so people don’t actually do the grind.
Just based on forum threads with people talking about how they finish the season journey, as well as their character build, in a few days, and then stop playing the season. As well as my own experience of doing exactly that.
Anyway, the quality of the hours played are much more important than the quantity. Give me 50 great hours over a 100 mediocre. Problem with Diablo 3 is that it is both short, and bad. The two are kinda interacting here, because part of the reason it feels so bad, is exactly due to how fast you get gear. Its item progression never has a change to unfold.
I think there is significant sampling bias of people who come to the forum to state that they finished the seasonal journey in hours/first few days versus the majority of the playerbase.
I base my judgment more at looking at my friends list (problematic as small sample size and not random) and the number of games available. Both metrics have issues.
This goes against the argument that you stated
How? By making the grind impossibly long, the goal is not to make people stay for longer… since staying for longer wont actually help them get a respec, if the grind is impossibly long.
This “MTBU” concept has very little to do with respecs.
Setting the “MTBU” is not an unsolvable problem. How it is set is determined by the length of a season. Seasons should not be too long (4 months is OK, 3 months is probably better, 6 months is too long). They coincide with balance changes that change the optimal build, thereby keeping the game fresh. And the “MTBU” is set so that people can make a near BiS character in reasonable time (50% of a season seems good). Trading is a variance reduction mechanic. The drop rates with trading can be tuned such that the time it takes to make a near BiS character is the same on average, but it protects against the bad luck of not finding the items you need.
The fact that every season requires making new optimal builds is an argument in favor of free respecs. There have been 22 seasons and counting in D3, yet there are not 22 character slots for 1 build per season.
But the main use case for respec is not season respeccing, it’s swapping between different builds optimized for group GR, solo GR, normal rifts and bounties.