I don’t envy them (regardless of how many people answered)… what can you take away from such a poll?
All it says is “figure out some innovative way to satisfy people who want more challenge for higher returns, while not making things grindier or more demoralizing for more casual players”.
I think the most obvious answer is twofold:
- Institute leaderboards… even if you don’t succeed in eliminating dupers & exploits in the short term… just put them in already, and
- Create a separate “tryhard” realm, with punishing conditions, much less loot, and perhaps some gimmicky survivalist conditions that would be fun for such people. Add collectibles & gauntlet challenges unique to this mode (but add other such collectibles to the normal mode too).
The people in the “just right & too slow” range would stick with normal mode, the people in the “too fast” segment would gravitate to the tryhard mode.
HC & SC enabled in both. Variety is healthy.
I don’t think anything to do with build/class balance affects its success or failure. Just needs leaderboards all around to make it “make sense”. It would simply help if the devs also got the engine & the math under control. Once that’s achieved, it probably wouldn’t take a lot of ‘resources’ to maintain such separate modes. PoE does it, no problem.