Lesson #19: Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them - What the design of Magic The Gathering can teach this community and GGG

[u/KingKongGorillaKing]

Lesson #5: Don't confuse "interesting" with "fun"

This explains the relative "failure" of some leagues, Synthesis or (the initial) Bestiary being the prime example. While both seemed very interesting on paper, they were too tedious. Throwing nets or building the Synthesis paths was interesting, but that's were it ended.

Lesson #11: If everyone likes your game but no one loves it, it will fail

I hope both GGG and Reddit realize that if the game starts to cater to the lowest common denominator, it will quickly lose it's "soul." A very good product is always slightly controversial, or not for everybody. If PoE was an ice cream flavor, it certainly wouldn't be vanilla or chocolate and it shouldn't try to be. You shouldn't want it to be.

Lesson #13: Make the fun part also the correct strategy to win

The best way to play the game should be the most fun way to play. This is why I believe build diversity is not the end all be all, what is more important is that the best builds are the most fun builds. But even more so, the best end game strategies should be the most fun ones.

Lesson #19: Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them

This is the one that I think is most important right now, because it tells both the community and GGG. GGG should listen to the community and take their concerns seriously, but they should absolutely not take their ideas on how to fix things seriously.

These lessons are all taken from the excellent article https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-1-2016-05-30 by Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic the Gathering.

[u/bebopbraunbaer]

If you want to time travel a little bit you can check out the comments last time this was posted (4years ago )

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/6cmchs/20_game_design_lessons_from_20_years_of_mtg

[u/Yashimasta → u/bebopbraunbaer]

What I find most interesting skimming through that is most of the names in that thread I don't see on here at all. It really lets you know that this sub really is different than it was 4 years ago.

[u/TowerBeast → u/Yashimasta]

This sub had just shy of 100k subscribers when that post was made.

Now we have nearly 450k. The culture of this sub has changed dramatically in that time.

[u/ksinn → u/Yashimasta]

Way more toxic now lol its embarrassing really

[u/Yashimasta → u/ksinn]

A few weeks ago I would have said that it's not that bad, but I've been a bit more active since the Baeclast episode and it really is. There's a few people who are super active on here and very negative and yet they always get upvoted. The mods have some new rules coming very very soon and I hope it results in a better sub.

[u/Insecticide → u/Yashimasta]

I'll repeat my previous reply because it got downvoted to non-existence despite the fact that I think it is a reasonable take and I wrote it out in a polite manner without offending anyone. If anyone disagrees with my opinion, I'll encourage people to reply to me and have a discussion about it.

Here is the original comment:

I think we could use some restrictions, because fresh accounts or accounts that are 8 months old and have 3 posts on this entire website shouldn't be able to participate in this sub.

Additional clarifying comments:

Many other subreddits do this approach of having restricted access. It prevents people from creating alt accounts immediately when they get banned. Today, at the time of this comment, the mods just posted a meta update about the subreddit and in there we have updates to their ban policy but all of that is useless if someone can simply make a new account and come back.

In my opinion, users should need a certain amount of karma to be able to post here. This isn't asking much. This is like when companies put a 10$ barrier in online games to discourage people from botting and cheating non-stop. If people had to go through the trouble of acquiring karma on a new account (or being shady and buying reddit accounts) they would think twice before being assholes in this subreddit because it would be annoying to them to keep facing this small barrier each time they were banned.

[u/sauska → u/Yashimasta]

threads and people should just be banned for toxic comments. ok they can make a new account but subreddits can be setup where a new account cannot just post for a set amount of "age"

[u/residentmouse]

Lesson #13 is what resonates for me. Players will always try to win, and yes they will complain when that isn’t fun, or simply leave the game.

And simply put, trading is the best way to “win” from every angle: gear upgrades, boss fragments, unique acquisition, wisdom scrolls, etc etc. It is far more “efficient” to run maps and trade for items than to pick them up.

It’s not nearly as fun but that is a GGG problem to solve, not a player problem.

[u/siedler084 → u/residentmouse]

Players will always try to win, and yes they will complain when that isn’t fun, or simply leave the game. [...] It is far more “efficient” to run maps and trade for items than to pick them up.

There is a great quote from game designer Soren Johnson about this:

"Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." (emphasis mine)

[u/THOG_Excaliber198 → u/siedler084]

From that same article and also incredibly relevant:

“The reason to kill tank-mages and ICS is that a single, dominant strategy actually takes away choice from a game because all other options are provably sub-optimal. The sweet spot for game design is when a specific decision is right in some circumstances but not in others, with a wide grey area between the two extremes. Games lose their dynamic quality once a strategy emerges that dominates under all conditions.”

[u/Wermine → u/THOG_Excaliber198]

Games lose their dynamic quality once a strategy emerges that dominates under all conditions

And thanks to internet, that strategy is found 1000 times faster than before. And once it's found, everyone knows about it.

[u/Erisymum → u/THOG_Excaliber198]

aura stacker

[u/nazzyc → u/siedler084]

I mean, being succesful is also fun. And especially not being as succesful as others can be really frustrating, when the gap is as gigantic as it is when you look at the difference between picking up only currency, and taking the time to identify every rare that might be relevant to you.

[u/EtisVx → u/siedler084]

Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game

GGG: player can't optimize the fun out of the game if we do it first!

[u/Gniggins → u/siedler084]

Thats not players optimizing the fun out of the game, thats the game being poorly made so the best way to play it isnt fun.

[u/Josparov → u/Gniggins]

Pam: they're the same picture

[u/Nerhtal → u/residentmouse]

It is a problem i fervently hope they solve because I would much rather actually find upgrades on the floor then just pick up odd shaped gold on the floor i take to a bazaar full of people who strangely ignore you quite often.

[u/NobleV → u/Nerhtal]

Nothing makes you feel better than beating a tough piece of content AND getting an upgrade. Killing Sirus the first time in a league and getting absolutely nothing feels like absolute garbage.

[u/jayteebeex → u/NobleV]

The 2nd, 3rd etc are no fun either

[u/Luwuluwu → u/NobleV]

The excitement of I killed A9 sirus is almost always bombed by wow it dropped nothing :(

[u/Feeding4Harambe → u/NobleV]

But sirus drops so much insane good loot for the beginning. His helm is worth 1 ex at league start, the jewel was worth an ex and the gloves around 50c. He literally has no bad drop. And when you get to the good stuff, he drops insane support gems and awakener orb is allways a multi ex drop. If you have ever played SSF you know how insanely strong his drops are...

[u/flapanther33781 → u/Feeding4Harambe]

He literally has no bad drop.

Not dropping anything after taking multiple hours to get to him is a bad drop.

Null is a bad drop.

[u/Feeding4Harambe → u/flapanther33781]

Unless you do him lower than aw5 he drops a unqiue every time.

[u/The_Lone_Watcher → u/Feeding4Harambe]

Do you remember MbExtreme's first Sirus fight? Sirus dropped an Orb of Transmutation. Granted it was A1, but still!

[u/Fala1 → u/Nerhtal]

They need to utilize fractured mods more.

I remember playing an ES character in synthesis. A shield dropped. It was a suboptimal base but it had a fractured t1 ES mod. I knew straight away it was both feasible for me to craft it, and that it would be an amazing upgrade for my character. Yet because it was a suboptimal base it wasn't anything overpowered.

That's exactly the type of granular upgrades they need in the game.

[u/cowpimpgaming → u/Nerhtal]

People say this a lot, but drops will never replace trade. If your drops get better, then so will everyone else's. Average item quality will go up, and thus the average quality of items on trade sites will increase as well. You will almost never find better stuff on the ground relative to the crowd farmed source of items that is the pool available on trade. You need to trade less or play SSF to have a chance of finding upgrades yourself, realistically.

Now, a more realistic scenario is improving the odds you find something on the ground that is better than what you craft. This is the problem that needs solved right now. Smart loot and drop only modifiers are some of the solutions I have seen that make sense for this issue (if you see it as an issue).

[u/flapanther33781 → u/cowpimpgaming]

People say this a lot, but drops will never replace trade.

100% true.

If your drops get better, then so will everyone else's.

It's not even about that. In a game where build diversity + RNG are a thing then the odds will always be greater than zero that the drop you got - while it might be a good drop - will not be useful to your character. That's why trade exists.

If GGG could ensure that the drops you got would apply to your build, or if GGG could ensure that every drop you got could somehow be combined into an improvement to your current gear - THEN they could get rid of trade. But until they do that, they can't.

[u/Magstine → u/cowpimpgaming]

The only way drops can replace trade is if they make trade less efficient - but the the majority of the community is pushing to make trade more efficient, while simultaneously complaining that drops aren't good enough ¯\(ツ)/¯

[u/EquipmentNo4826 → u/Nerhtal]

They are solving it by making the trading experience as shitty as possible without outright removing it

[u/Silentknyght → u/EquipmentNo4826]

It won't be solved unless it takes more time to trade for the item than it takes to find it. As long as it's (significantly) faster, people will always take that path, even if it's not fun.

[u/EquipmentNo4826 → u/Silentknyght]

Well, since the chance of finding good rares is slim, basically zero if you want an influenced mod and actually zero if you want dual influenced items there is much room for ggg to fix trade by shoving more shit down our throats.

[u/Darcetos → u/Nerhtal]

The only solution for your problem is SSF. If you can find an upgrade on the floor then someone can find better upgrade for you that you wanna buy.

[u/ploki122 → u/Darcetos]

But that just goes back to putting the onus on the player : In an ideal scenario, the most optimal way of playing is also the most fun. We're so far from that.

[u/Tortankum → u/ploki122]

ok then you would be ok with ggg removing trade?

[u/ploki122 → u/Tortankum]

As long as the game is built around trade not being necessary for a bunch of stuff, 100%.

[u/BegaKing → u/ploki122]

Yep this 100% I'd be more than fine with taking away all item trade. I would like trade to stay for frags currency etc, but if we ever got to a point were items could be crafted/found in a state that it neccesirates taking away trade I'd be more than fine with that.

[u/J33bus8401 → u/Tortankum]

100% that's basically the takeaway from this lesson isn't it? Trade is the best way to "win" (winning being literally any goal you can set for yourself) and it's not the fun for most people.

[u/J33bus8401 → u/Darcetos]

That's not actually a solution to a problem. SSF isn't actually something different it's just a vanity tag that you played the game suboptimally.

[u/thetilted1 → u/residentmouse]

They have fixed some issues with trading being the best way to progress before with the changes to how map drops work, where your uncompleted maps have a much higher drop rate than completed maps. Made filling out the atlas without trading so much simpler. Hopefully they can figure out solutions to the other problems in a similar way.

[u/Ulthwithian → u/thetilted1]

Have they improved? Yes. Have they fixed the issue? No.

I know that if I am missing a map I need (for atlas competion, spawning a Conqueror, getting a Maven invitation), the best way to do it is to trade for it.

Can I run adjacent maps in an attempt to get it? Yes. Can I use Horizon Orbs in an attempt to get it? Yes (if you know what you're doing). Can I do Zana missions to reset her inventory in an attempt to get it? Yes.

What is the guaranteed way of getting it? Trading. And because I do not like Trade, I know I'm being less efficient, which makes me less willing to play the game.

You simply cannot make it 'easier' to get the maps you need by methods other than trading and somehow make it 'better' than trading.

The only real way to do this is to make maps cost more than the average currency you would get by running maps that could drop the map you're looking for. And without very heavy-handed practices (e.g., controlling the market), GGG cannot control the prices on the secondary market for maps.

Even Zana's costs are too low for this.

[u/thetilted1 → u/Ulthwithian]

It really doesn't become an issue until you get to the higher tier maven fights where you need most of a region to get an invitation, and by then you generally have a large enough pool of maps that you don't get hardstuck on a specific map drop that commonly.

The combination of changes seems to have done the job for sizeable chunk of the playerbase since we used to have threads (rightfully) complaining about map trading constantly in previous leagues and they seem to have mostly stopped since the changes.

I wonder if its the combination of having many things to work for that kind of prevent this for people, for example if you don't have a map for a region you need for a Conqueror you can just work on your Maven levels in another till it drops.

[u/schlogen_ → u/thetilted1]

This doesn’t seem to be the case for me at all. Running t16s and beat Sirus a5 but like only 100 bonus

[u/thetilted1 → u/schlogen_]

Its more of the adjacent map bonus helps fill in some missing spots while you progress conquerors alongside doing zana missions compared to how it used to be with elder where you would need a bunch of specific maps to get your orbs based on where elder spawned making it a pain in the ass if he showed up where you had a small map pool.

Also needing a generic map from a region makes progression feel much smoother than the old system, even if the full watchstone grind is way to long.

[u/deviant324 → u/schlogen_]

I’m at 105 completion in SSF and I’m in low red maps, idk what ya’ll are doing to your Atlas

[u/L1zz0 → u/schlogen_]

Im at t14s 16 watchstones and i have 40 bonus. I have like 13 acid caverns maps :(

[u/RadiantSolarWeasel → u/L1zz0]

It's adjacent, uncompleted maps that are more likely to drop, so you have to run a broad variety of maps to really notice the difference, but as someone who's solo'd their atlas to ~154/120 so far this league, it's very noticeable.

[u/deviant324 → u/L1zz0]

At that point you must actively be doing something wrong, are you only doing magic maps or something?

I’m at 13 watchstones T12s and have 105 completion in SSF

[u/Mondrifter → u/residentmouse]

yeah trading is too powerful, and its not the most fun way to win, ggg knows this and wants to change it, the problem i have is that this has been the case since i started playing in essence league and they STILL havent figured it out

[u/Erisymum → u/Mondrifter]

An engaging trade economy is fundamentally at odds with the idea of a loot-based reward system.

At each extreme either:

all items become fungible with each other and you're now playing a glorified cookie clicker (D3 during the AH) OR there is no economic aspect to the game but at least the stuff you pick up is useful (Destiny 2)

And everything between is a compromise. I don't think it really can be figured out completely.

[u/J33bus8401 → u/Mondrifter]

They specifically don't want you trading constantly, and they decided to balance that by making trade not fun. So unfortunately they are intentionally making the best thing to do as not fun as possible.

[u/Markuscha → u/residentmouse]

Trading is a win by itself because it's the best way to acquire currency. I'm not playing this league, but the last 3 leagues my starting strategy was to chaos recipe until I can start to flip items or do some easy one-step crafts and I've made more $/hr than high red tier mapping while doing things outside of the game.

[u/mortyfox → u/residentmouse]

That's why i will ever be someone that believes that no Arpg should be balanced around trading ever.

If people want to trade, let them, arpgs are singleplayer games in essence, let each people decide how they want to approach the game.

But if then you enter the game, trade for everything, and complain there is nothing to do, it's your own problem, try to trade less next time.

[u/Wermine → u/residentmouse]

What? Killing Act 2 Treasure Goblin for loot over and over and over in a party isn't how Diablo 3 is meant to be played?

[u/fitsu → u/residentmouse]

This is part of the problem with trade in this day and age the value of an item is dictated not only by it's demand but also by it's supply but to bring supply (drops) up to a point where drops feel good will make the supply so much higher than the demand that everything becomes worthless because there are so many players and we are so informed, connected and good at games these days. Proof of this is how in D2 items that used to be considered extremely rare throughout the ladder (like shako) become worthless in 3 days or how according to PoE.Ninja 18% of the playerbase is using Rumis, a unique flask so rare I don't think I've seen one drop in the last 3 leagues yet even with that huge damage and still arguably quite low supply it's worth a whole 5 chaos.

I don't believe a world can exist where trade is a thing but drops still feel meaningful, I simply don't think it's possible anymore. I think going the D3 route, making it so you can only trade without your party if it drops while others are there and otherwise the game is SSF. Then they can drastically increase drop rates of well rolled rares to compensate.

[u/AsiaDerp → u/residentmouse]

I do not care about "winning", I just want to be allowed to play the game. And by playing I do not mean endlessly farming yellow maps so I do not die over and over.

This league is the 3rd time I try to build firestorm but this league I give up before I get my first Siris. Not only do you need to deal with bleed and freeze as usual, now poison and ignite are also something you need to deal with (because again, you get hit more, a 2-3k hit is still enough to apply a big enough DOT to kill you if you do not remove it), and if you do not blow up the screen you just simply get fucked. Before I can at least still do enough damage to get by and it still allows me to progress towards end game with my shit firestorm builds, but this time it just doesnt work. Every time I run into a tanky rare with speed I my fucking dead. It just feels so bad to paly when you can barely move with all kinds of slow throwing your way and tanky enemies are very common and as suauly, every single god damn thing hits like a truck in this game. We just kill them before they do anything before but now they do stuff, and you cannot do much about it unless you play with immune builds and have enough flask slot to deal with all kinds of poison and bleed and ignite and freeze the enemies are throwing at you.

I do not need to farm 20 maps an hour to feel good. I dare say it goes for most people when most people are not running around with a 20ex+ build. My build may get to the point of being a 30ex build eventually, but I can get by with 2-5ex, it just takes longer to kill end game bosses. But this league you either have 50ex to put into something you love to play, or you just play something you do not want to play.

EDIT: I login and thinks to myself if my Anomalous firestorm becomes 21 I am going to give it a few more days, but it turns 19. Whatever, I am just going to see if they are going to do anything to fix the problems next league.

[u/Mondrifter → u/AsiaDerp]

can i get a pob for your build? im always interested in what kind of setup people with this kind of complaints are running

[u/EmmitSan → u/residentmouse]

POE is chalk full of fun things, which is why it is a great game, but it’s also got a ton of in-fun optimal strategies. Examples include but not limited to: choosing the “do nothing” button in a betrayal encounter, not running the second or third incursion encounter if the room sucks, trading your sextants instead of using them (until your build is optimized to run juiced maps), using your currency to buy instead of craft gear, etc

[u/faytte → u/residentmouse]

If there was a league type with no trade but much better drops it would be wildly popular. Add in deterministic crafting for this non trade league and you would have something that I feel most people woud prefer.

[u/BlowITA → u/residentmouse]

That's one of the reasons why I think that, if they're gonna give us a "Hard Mode", they should also introduce a "boosted drop rates SSF mode" where you get everything as efficiently as if you were in trade leagues. It's 3 different concepts of winning: a win in current game is amassing currency through any means available to do whatever you want with it; a win in Hard Mode is overcoming the higher difficulty enemies and item scarcity; a win in "boosted drop rates SSF mode" would be interacting with as many systems in the game as possible and trying out as many builds as you want without having to turn the game into a fulltime job.

[u/Grimm_101 → u/BlowITA]

They are giving themselves hard mode. They just may make it available to us as well.

Sound like it is moreso an after hours project that may turn into something.

[u/Ulthwithian → u/BlowITA]

They would need to Void the SSF mode you're suggesting, but I would certainly play it.

The subtext of Hard Mode is increasingly irritated to me. "Play how we like to play or how we want you to play, and you'll get catered to. If not, get bent." Obviously more polite than that, but the same sentiment applies. If masochistic players get a masochistic mode... why aren't other player segments getting modes for them?

[u/Goldballz → u/residentmouse]

They should add a special item that drops in maps and are autopickups. Every single trade with players would drain that special item. Higher value trades would drain more of that special item. This would kill all the market players since they literally won't be able to buy out items faster than they can farm for those tokens.

Another thing I would suggest would be that league mechanics should not be tradable. That way everyone will need to actually interact with the game.

This will massively hurt the 1% but it will then allow GGG to balance the drop rates of items and currency accordingly, which would make running maps feel more impactful and rewarding.

[u/Urthop → u/Goldballz]

Hello lesson #19.

[u/Goldballz → u/Urthop]

I mean that solution took me 1 min to think and write, so I would hope that GGG implements something better.

But the current problem is that GGG has yet to address the issues caused by trading.

[u/percydaman]

what is more important is that the best builds are the most fun builds

I had to repeat that one several times in my mind and let it marinate. More important, best builds, and fun builds, are all pretty damn subjective.

I feel like build diversity, means more builds that can properly tackle the game. I've played many wacky and fun builds that probably couldn't get far into yellow maps without dying alot, which then makes them become not so much fun to play.

[u/wadavis → u/percydaman]

Ya. Trying to nail down what that holy grail of build diversity actually means or why it matters.

My best character this league is Divine Ire totems. Without changing any skill points, Forbidden Rite is better on a 4 link than Divine Ire on a 6 link, but it takes some of my fun away to play what everyone else is playing. My weakest character this league is a bodyswapper, hilarious but going to struggle with t16 bosses. Still the bodyswapper is a lot more fun than throwing totems at the edge of the screen or thru doorways.

[u/meadow_at_dusk]

I think there's a reason that this is the first lesson:

Lesson #1—Fighting against human nature is a losing battle

In game design (and most things where you interact with an audience), there's a saying: "Know your audience."

...

What I've learned over the years is that you shouldn't change your players to match your game; you should change your game to match your players.

Here's another good one:

Lesson #12: Don't design to prove you can do something

...

Ask yourself, "Is this decision helping me achieve the optimal experience for my target audience, or is it being done to fulfill an inward-facing need for self-satisfaction?" If the answer is the latter, you're doing it for the wrong reason.

And:

Lesson #17: You don't have to change much to change everything

...

Instead of asking "How much do I need to add?" I ask "How little do I need to add?" The change in perspective is important because the goal of any game designer (any artist really) is to remove everything they can from their game until nothing more can be removed, until the game only has the elements essential to making it work.

Quoting Mark Rosewater is like quoting scripture. You can always find something to fit your agenda. Lesson 19 is quoted on this subreddit constantly, and usually to defend GGG's decisions. Not to say that they don't make good decisions, but it's something I try to keep in mind as someone who used to read Rosewater every week.

Not trying to start flame war. Just, read the whole article series and decide for yourself how to apply it.

[u/MrTastix → u/meadow_at_dusk]

These aren't even specific to game design, they're basic design rules in general.

As someone who studied and practices design (specializing in digital media) these are basic fundaments for the practice as a whole.

The Laws of UX is a good starting point for anyone interested in some basic design rules. If you have an eye for problem solving most of these are actually rather intuitive and self-explanatory, honestly.

Remember that despite the term "law" these can be broken. A "law" is generally just an intuitive "default", something that sort of rings true as a baseline. Breaking them can be fun and interesting but it should be heavily justified.

[u/daman4567 → u/meadow_at_dusk]

Lesson 19 is also gone against directly by some very successful games, such as OSRS. The entire game is literally decided by the players, and it's still very much alive.

[u/MerkDoctor → u/daman4567]

OSRS is slightly different in this respect though, the players don't solve the games problems, the devs do, they just allow the players to get the final say. The difference with OSRS vs PoE though is the devs in OSRS actually care about customer satisfaction and make proposals to enhance satisfaction, so it typically works out well for the game as a whole. PoE is kind of the opposite, the devs actively seem to spite players for their own self satisfaction and ideals.

[u/Grimm_101 → u/MerkDoctor]

Well that is because PoE has essentially 3 large player bases that all want different things. The original pre D3 collapse hardcore group, the D3 semi hardcore players, and the modern players.

All three of these want different amounts of challenge and a different playstyle for PoE. Choosing in any direction will anger the others.

[u/MerkDoctor → u/Grimm_101]

I think most of the problem is the playerbase is (roughly) <1% pre D3 hardcore, 10-20% d3 semi hardcore (who mostly don't care either way which direction the game goes, they just like grinding ARPGs and PoE is the best one), and 80-90% modern players. GGG is currently designing for the <1% players. That's the baffling part.

[u/MerkDoctor → u/[deleted]]

I can agree with most of what you're saying, but ritual had the best retention rate of everything after 3.0 by a wide margin, and similarly good compared to pre 3.0 leagues as well. There is a big difference where retention is concerned to GGG. I agree the 20-30k "hardcore" ARPG players are on average going to be the ones to stay the longest regardless of meta, but retention of those players matters very little to PoE as a whole. Those types of players will always play and almost always be retained, especially with new content or meta shakeups.

The 70% are much more fickle, and leagues like ritual where they are retained GGG makes the most money by far. If that 70% aren't a big deal, GGG wouldn't have seen a 30+% drop in revenue on a dime and immediately start back pedaling out of panic.

Do I think the 70% need to be catered towards directly and the game be practically pointless? Of course not. However I think there is a big middle ground that GGG jumped over to end up where we are now and that's clearly hurt the playerbase and their bottom line.

Personally I as a player fall into the middle category of players that would be considered "hardcore", but not d1+2 style hardcore. Harvest and ritual were the two leagues I played the most by far (almost the whole league for both) because I value linear or at least somewhat linear progression in my games, and harvest+the ability to play more of what I wanted really pushed me to play much more because I always felt like there was something more I could achieve, and I could play many off-meta styles and still enjoy it.

Anecdotally to contrast your anecdote, most of my guild would be considered "semi-hardcore", and only 1 person has played past week 1 this league. While there are likely many FLs/guilds like yours that could be considered semi-hardcore that stayed for this patch, there are just as many or more like mine that have completely left, and really the numbers speak for themselves, this is the league with the worst retention by FAR, and it's getting worse every day yet still.

Hopefully GGG is able to find the middle ground to make most groups happy, but we'll have to wait and see.

[u/Wilde79 → u/MerkDoctor]

If GGG designed for the <1% players, and that is what made the game successful, then shouldn't they keep designing it for them?

[u/daman4567 → u/MerkDoctor]

Many, if not most, of the changes are actually suggested by players, especially balance changes.

[u/Sethazora → u/daman4567]

Lesson 19 has alwaus been demonstrably false. Its just a common pretext to avoid extra work/defend creating solutions to sell. Arguably the most successful game genres of moba and battle royales were made by players.

[u/Nohisu → u/meadow_at_dusk]

Completely agree, they are so easy to misinterpret, here's an other example:

Lesson #16: Be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them

You could argue that's exactly what GGG is going for right now, by trying to make the game harder. Truth is, if your game is too hard, then it stops being challenging and it starts being boring again, since the player feel like they don't have any agency.

What you want to hit is the "flow" state, where the game has just the right amount of challenge. And, in that regard, PoE is almost perfectly avoiding that spot (You clear screens full of monsters in a single click, so it's easy and boring, then you get OS by an attack with no visible tells and the difficulty directly skyrockets to BS levels).

[u/fuckyou_redditmods → u/meadow_at_dusk]

Selective copy pasta by OP is quite telling.

[u/Tovell → u/meadow_at_dusk]

In regards to rule 19 - it might be true when you are preparing multiple card sets over a period of 2-3 years which have the ability to be separatedly developed in most part.

But in PoE when all they have is 3 months to plan and develop things for expansion, the more knowledgable people can turn to be on the player side as we 100% have more time with game and mechanics than they do. The entire game requires from us problem solving skills: fix resistances, fit some mana sustain in my build, stack attributes and not gimp myself or some more challenging things like making a Fulcrum work etc.

Magic R&D has way more time to playtest a set despite the fact they were releasing sets as often as GGG has leagues or even more often as they do currently.

Not saying they don't make mistakes, recent amount of competitve card bans in Standard and other formats highest since ever.

[u/Pheonixdown → u/Tovell]

Eh, those timeframes are a little disingenuous of a comparison, WotC still releases a new set every 3-4 months similar to GGG leagues. WotC just has significantly more parallel development (which allows them to better balance and plan for the future).

[u/Malaveylo → u/Pheonixdown]

which allows them to better balance and plan for the future

I can't decide if this is questionable because of the current state of MTG or still true because GGG's QA is just that bad.

[u/tiofrodo → u/Tovell]

The idea behind that rule isn't that the user is a dumb fuck that can't come up with a solution to the designs problem, you can absolutely arrive on a solution to the problem with limited data simply because we all have experience dealing with different Designs our whole lives.
The difference between the Designer and the User though, specially when it come to games is that the designer has a vision of what they want it to be and he has a(or multiple) target audience(which can be as broad or as narrow you like) in mind when creating the game, and in PoE's case both of those things appear to be extremely restrictive. While the user more or less will always create a solution that only caters towards his vision of the problem, which means that there is no scalability most of the time.

[u/AbsentGlare → u/tiofrodo]

I feel like you’re missing the point. It often seems like decisions are made by those who understand the game at a lower level than many players.

The flask changes toward a reactive system demonstrate a lack of awareness about applications of systems like corrupted blood and freeze.

Rule 19 is more like “address the problems brought up by the user base but don’t blindly implement what the user base claims to want”. It doesn’t guarantee that user suggestions are bad, designers should not be constrained to avoid user suggestions because of your supposed scalability problem.

[u/Hartastic → u/tiofrodo]

I think it's partly this and partly not.

It's absolutely true that in crafting a solution to their problem, a user will very commonly suggest something that solves their problem but makes things worse for another kind of user. But it's also very common that a user recognizing a problem in a multiplayer game only solves that problem shallowly, such that when all consequences are considered (for example, as other players adjust their strategy to account for the change) it actually makes their problem worse.

[u/ploki122 → u/Tovell]

As someone else pointed out, "the user sucks at finding solutions" is about individuals. There's no denying that for any given popular game the largest, most skilled, and most experienced dev team will always be on the side of players.

GGG might have dozens out developers out of hundreds of employees, but there are countless thousands of devs and designers spread among the playerbase, and they are collaborating with some of the most brilliant and skilled players... Trying to create a design that the player base won't easily solve and then trivialize is a pipe dream.

That's why you should develop for fun, instead of developing for challenge (and yes, challenge can be fun, it simply has to mot be the end goal).

[u/SingleInfinity → u/meadow_at_dusk]

Rule 1 assumes that you're making a game purely to be successful, not making a game that you want to make.

[u/orange_sauce_ → u/meadow_at_dusk]

Mark Rosewater

He's great, but I wouldn't take his word as scripture for 3 main reasons:

- He's in a position of privilege, his game is all design and theme, no technology to contend with.

- MTG design team has a lot of people who've been working for almost a decade, this is a wise department, not a wise "man".

- MTG was Lightning in a Bottle, the lead designer, Richard Garfield attempted to recreate his magic on Artifact, and he created a game that is simply exhausting to play.

​

Honestly, if I'm a new game designer, I will take Chris's philosophy over Mark's, Chris has the harder product to develop.

[u/Gumlass → u/orange_sauce_]

Yes, but Richard Garfield also did some pretty great shit on Keyforge. That game is great.

[u/Zyrixion → u/orange_sauce_]

As someone with a fair bit of design theory and systems knowledge, I would not take Chris as a point of brilliance in design philosophy either. He's managed to design the game with one of the highest ratios of negative feedback loops in gameplay in a serious production I've ever seen outside of gacha games, where that entices you to spend money to make those loops rewarding. Hell, consider all the 3rd-party tools that bear the weight of PoE's design sins. This game would fall off a cliff without Path of Building and the trade sites, just to name a couple things.

[u/Keyenn → u/orange_sauce_]

Honestly, if I'm a new game designer, I will take Chris's philosophy over Mark's, Chris has the harder product to develop.

Yet it feels like a large (majority?) amount of people are liking the game for reasons not intended by Chris. And it's really worrying that:

1) Chris prefer to value his "vision" over the fun of his playerbase

2) Think that if people liked the game for the reason X, it should be removed if it doesn't fit the "vision" instead of asking themselves if they couldn't work with it.

[u/pfSonata → u/Keyenn]

I wish this was true, but in reality GGG makes a TON of changes based on player feedback, maybe even too many.

It's actually insanely rare to find a good online game that stays true to the original developer's vision. Outcry from the community leads to changes that weren't originally designed around and as Maro says, players are better at recognizing problems than solutions. I believe that is the case with Path of Exile. Players have repeatedly demanded ultra-rewarding and accessible content, along with powerful characters to do said content, and they have largely received it, despite the game's original thesis. I am not defending this patch; I think it failed to achieve it's goals almost entirely. I am however defending the general idea of nerfs and slowing down the game to be in line with the old versions, if they were to execute it correctly.

I would take Maro's observation a step further and say that sometimes players won't recognize when a solution causes a problem, because they have tunnel-vision on the original problem it "solved", and if they were in favor of the change before it was implemented, they will naturally have a tendency to rationalize or deny any negative consequences of the change.

This might be a little bit of a rant here... but we have an absolutely incredible example of this in level-scaling in World of Warcraft. If you don't play the game, in patch 7.3.5 they made the entire game scale to whatever level you are in an attempt to allow players more flexibility in where/how they level their characters. It was very well-received by the playerbase in general. However, it caused problems on virtually all fronts. Leveling feels more boring than ever as there is literally no reward for leveling up, everything had to be very strictly homogenized to be able to properly scale with each level, including items which scale to whatever level you obtain it, causing them to lose any identity they may have once had; there are no "good" items any more since they're all the same based on what level you picked it up. Furthremore the character scaling was totally botched and is totally wonky, resulting in things like healers hitting harder than damage dealers. It also caused massive knock-on effects on old/legacy content which is commonly farmed in the game, and a million other systems that I will spare you the list of. But if you go to r/wow and ask how they feel about level scaling you will see people say it's great, and the fact that everyone has been dissatisfied with the game since the release of scaling is just a coincidence and purely because of the new expansions that came out at the same time. I think a lot of players are VERY much overlooking the world scaling as a cause of disconnection from the game world because it "fixed" a specific problem of leveling flexibility.

[u/Keyenn → u/pfSonata]

I'm not saying that the players have all the solutions. I'm just saying that when people are saying "clearspeed is fun", and GGG solution is "Clearspeed wasn't intended, we are going to remove it", it's (IMO) clearly stupid. That you may want to tweak it so it doesn't cause massive problems to the game (performance, etc), no worries. That you may want to propose additional alternatives, no worries. That you want to reward less the clearspeed (instead of putting timer to everything), no worries.

​

But it's not the direction taken by GGG. It's saying "we don't like you going fast, so you are going slow, deal with it".

[u/Tovell → u/orange_sauce_]

I will be honest, Garfield has a awful track record when you look deeper.

[u/orange_sauce_ → u/Tovell]

I wouldn't go that far, the man created a system so modular and complex, yet also rigid enough that it isn't a sandbox. He isn't a genius, but he absolutely had a massive flash of genius when he made the first set.

[u/Tovell → u/orange_sauce_]

I am not denying that he did a great job with MtG but else, there's not much of greater caliber that he was a part of. What were thos bigger ones, Keyforge and Netrunner? Maybe to some degree Spectromancer stands out but still needed something more.

Also Keyforge is more living on the technology behind it than mechanics.

His flop when working on Artifact just shows it's Magic R&D lifting the weight of magic right now and he feels like he has his biggest hits already out there.

Once again, he's great WHEN he delivers. He just no longer does it often.

[u/BendicantMias]

The full list of lessons -

Lesson #1: Fighting against human nature is a losing battle

Lesson #2: Aesthetics matter

Lesson #3: Resonance is important

Lesson #4: Make use of piggybacking

Lesson #5: Don't confuse "interesting" with "fun"

Lesson #6: Understand what emotion your game is trying to evoke

Lesson #7: Allow the players the ability to make the game personal

Lesson #8: The details are where the players fall in love with your game

Lesson #9: Allow your players to have a sense of ownership

Lesson #10: Leave room for the player to explore

Lesson #11: If everyone likes your game, but no one loves it, it will fail

Lesson #12: Don't design to prove you can do something

Lesson #13: Make the fun part also the correct strategy to win

Lesson #14: Don't be afraid to be blunt

Lesson #15: Design the component for its intended audience

Lesson #16: Be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them

Lesson #17: You don't have to change much to change everything

Lesson #18: Restrictions breed creativity

Lesson #19: Your audience is good at recognizing problems, bad at solving them

Lesson #20: All the lessons connect

You can listen to the full talk here - https://youtu.be/QHHg99hwQGY

[u/J33bus8401]

Mark Rosewater's GDC talk is the single best GDC talk out there.

[u/POEnoobpig → u/J33bus8401]

My stupid brain keeps reading this as “Games Done Cuick”

Sorry, but what does it actually stand for?

[u/Blip_Me → u/POEnoobpig]

game developers conference

[u/POEnoobpig → u/Blip_Me]

Thank you!

[u/lazulus → u/POEnoobpig]

Game Developers Conference

[u/SmoothBrainedApe17]

But GGG is also bad at solving the problems

[u/Tovell]

Please read his article but also take a look at other Making Magic articles he has. There is a well of knowledge there.

Also, as much as Chris uses Magic the Gathering booster cracking experience as his reason for some things like a mantra, he should also maybe pick some more wisdom from other aspects of the MtG and Mark Rosewater's experience.

And just besides that, I am not sure Chris is cracking much boosters anyway... He is like a trade player as he has a misprint collection and trying to get a misprint the way we are meant to get a HH would be... similiar experience. Its just not plausible without using a secondary market really.

Link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JugtZj2lRBc

[u/Satan_McCool → u/Tovell]

The funny part about the cracking MTG boosters analogy is that it's pretty much universally agreed upon that cracking packs is the worst way to get the cards you want for the deck you're trying to build. In contrast, the best way is to buy the singles you need for your deck, which I guess would be equivalent to just buying your gear off the trade site.

[u/Tovell → u/Satan_McCool]

Yeah I am aware. I am recently thinking of getting back into the game and I am thinking of actually making a Cube instead of ever cracking a booster. I feel like the booster piniata is no longer exciting, the prospect of playing is.

[u/Satan_McCool → u/Tovell]

That's the way to go. Draft and sealed are my favorite ways to play Magic, but the most fun formats WotC produces for it (MH2 and TSR come to mind, recently) are often very expensive to actually play. Designing your own curated limited formats through a cube is a lot of work, but it's the most fun I've had playing Magic ever.

[u/welpxD → u/Satan_McCool]

~~Pprrooooxxiiieessssss~~

[u/Satan_McCool → u/welpxD]

Oh yeah, definitely. Always happy to plug /r/mpcproxies

[u/Tovell → u/[deleted]]

I did not know about this one. Thanks for heads up.

I wanted to add that misprints are basically manufacturing errors and they don't happen often so this makes them sometimes the true white crow kind of collectibles for some.

But besides misprints, Chris also has on his collection playtest cards or some 1-in-entire-world pieces nobody else could have ever. So yeah... In terms of collecting magic he is the 0,01% guy.

Something like in PoE would a guy who collects Perfect roll Perfect double implicit corrupted uniques but also happens to have insane double corrupted rares with legacy mods. I've played magic for years and all over the country and with different people and never once seen anything close to his single binder.

[u/welpxD → u/Tovell]

Mark Rosewater's huge body of writing is maybe the single deepest oeuvre in game design. If you read an article a day, it would take you like a year to get through them all, and you would be a much better designer at the end of it.

Honestly the fact that he puts them out for free is scandalous, people would pay hundreds an hour if he charged for consulting. But don't tell WotC that!

[u/Rekonstruktio]

What I've learned over the years is that you shouldn't change your players to match your game; you should change your game to match your players.

Yeah.

[u/Dexiefy]

Problem with this one:

Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them

is that its not entirely true or rather is being misinterpretted by lots of people. Now do not get me wrong, most ideas on how to fix issues in games that come from community are dumb as shit, but that does not mean it is all of them.

There were cases in the past, in various games that made devs implement 'fixes' that community came up with and everything was just fine. As long as the idea takes into consideration game's surrounding systems it does not matter who the idea came from. If its a good idea, its a good idea.

That quote, when misinterpretted technically tells you as dev 'your community is all retards that can't ever come up with a solution' and that simply makes you deaf to good suggestions and enforces the idea that you always know better, which you do not.

You might be bad at something, that does not mean you never get the right answer.

The point made by Mark Rosewater is most definately valid, problem is with it being tossed around by gamers as means to 'stfu noobs, you know nothing and [insert company author is a fanboy of] know everything and always do shit right', just as OP shows in his [mis]interpretation of that quote.

[...]but they should absolutely not take their ideas on how to fix things seriously.

[u/Zarnakk → u/Dexiefy]

I think a better wording for it would be "your audience has the proper context and information for identifying a problem, but does not have that for finding a solution."

It shifts it away from the "players dumb, devs smart" misinterpretation and towards "players can be right, but lack essential info devs have, like engine specs and budget/time."

There's also the fact that we tend to have a bias towards a game providing an immediate burst of fun that risks burnout.

In short, players can come up with correct solutions, but identifying problems is the player's high-ground, finding solutions is an uphill battle.

[u/turtles_and_frogs]

I've always said that one of the biggest problems in PoE - bloat - was fixed by MTG. Both have a standard league. Both introduce new mechanics and content every quarter. The difference is that MTG also cycles out old content out of Standard. PoE doesn't, and I think that's a big mistake. It makes the game hard to get into, and hard to balance. If PoE did cycle out leagues like MTG cycled out sets, then GGG could reintroduce old systems, we could different and fun combination of mechanics, they could sell private leagues with cycled out mechanics.

[u/ploki122 → u/turtles_and_frogs]

I'd argue that PoE's biggest issue is irrelevant to MtG : Barrier of entry. By being a PvP game, MtG always allow you to play against similarly unskilled players. However, PoE pits you against harder and harder challenges endlessly to try and stop the best players.

In PoE, there are massive hurdles before the challenge becomes optional. The amount of knowledge and preparation required to kill A10 Kitava is actually insane.

[u/plato13 → u/ploki122]

The barrier of entry isnt killing kitava tho, it is picking up your first skill gem and kill hillock.
Being a PvP game creates much higher barrier of entry than a game that picks up in difficulty as you play it.

[u/ploki122 → u/plato13]

The barrier of entry isnt killing kitava tho, it is picking up your first skill gem and kill hillock.

IMO the barrier of entry is everything leading up to Kitava. In a game with such depth, the campaign is purely a tutorial that lets you slowly but surely understand the mechanics of the game to let you push into variable challenges. There are no variable challenges through the campaign, given that everyone has to go through the same events.

Being a PvP game creates much higher barrier of entry than a game that picks up in difficulty as you play it.

How so? Being a PvP game means playing against other players, and as long as you have a matchmaking system that makes sense, you'll quickly end up being faced with a challenge corresponding to your skill level, no? And that doesn't even only apply to computer games... Tournaments are created around the idea that "as you get better, you face tougher opponents".

[u/[deleted] → u/turtles_and_frogs]

I think cycling is bad for PoE cause then it limits availability of league specific items like build enabling uniques, cluster jewels(if Delirium were to be cycled out fe.) and will gimp build diversity even further.

Allowing you to choose what content to interact with is a much better approach for PoE. Atlas passives are a good step in this direction but they come in play way too late in the game. They need to give you like 32 atlas passives just for finishing the campaign and allow you to have 4 points in each basic region by the time you get into maps.

[u/Nakorite → u/turtles_and_frogs]

Don’t mention the game has too many features on reddit mate. Downvotes ahoy.

The fact that someone like me who has played quite a few leagues and still is daunted by a league start due to my lack of knowledge of mechanics like heist should tell people that the game is a total nightmare for new players.

[u/SageWindu → u/Nakorite]

Depending on who you ask, that's a good thing since that means all the undesirables will be rooted out.

Funnily enough, while the hardcore players may enjoy that, the game won't be able to sustain itself and will eventually collapse due to lack of players. Your Mathils, your ZiggyDs, your Zizarans, those guys will be fine and just keep playing. Casuals like you and I? They'll begin to feel they don't belong and will point out to others why they feel they don't belong and that mentality is going to spread like a rather potent poison. Sure, you'll get the odd person who'll see the complaints and view it as a challenge (i.e. "I wonder if this is as bad as everyone says it is..."), but those people will pale in comparison to the folks who'll see the complaints and just move on to something else. Hell, we're literally seeing this as I type this comment.

[u/TheBlueRabbit11]

Lesson #11: If everyone likes your game but no one loves it, it will fail

I hope both GGG and Reddit realize that if the game starts to cater to the lowest common denominator, it will quickly lose it's "soul." A very good product is always slightly controversial, or not for everybody. If PoE was an ice cream flavor, it certainly wouldn't be vanilla or chocolate and it shouldn't try to be. You shouldn't want it to be.

Sorry dude, this just seems like an empty statement. Do you or the article have a single example of a game that everyone liked but no one loved? That doesn’t actually mean anything. The more people like a game, the bigger the core group will be that love the game.

And then, what does it mean by “cater to the lowest common denominator”? Is that denominator getting rid of wisdom scrolls? Implementing a better trade system? Giving us chase items and implementing more deterministic ways of crafting? Again, what you said about catering to the lowest common denominator is meaningless. Is there an example you can share of what that would be?

[u/I_Hate_Reddit → u/TheBlueRabbit11]

The idea behind this is that a game where half the people love the game and half the people hate it (things like Death Stranding? I guess, or Dark Souls) is usually better then a middle of the road game (I'd put games like Battlerite, Dota Underlords, etc in here... Yeah they're goodish games, but other games in the genre have more fans... And more haters too).

OP is against the "casuals", so he's trying to twist this point to mean 'more players, bad game, less players, good game', which is not what this point is about.

[u/Bakanyanter → u/I_Hate_Reddit]

The idea behind this is that a game where half the people love the game and half the people hate it (things like Death Stranding? I guess, or Dark Souls) is usually better then a middle of the road game (I'd put games like Battlerite, Dota Underlords, etc in here...

It's funny how as of this comment, PoE recent reviews is exactly 50% positive and 50% negative out of recent 4361 reviews on Steam. Seems like PoE is following #11 pretty closely, but again I think half of these lessons are a bit outdated or not that great in the first place.

[u/Acturio → u/TheBlueRabbit11]

the idea behind the lesson is that your game needs to do something special for it to be successful, if not then its not gonna keep people in for long since there are a lot of other games that do the same that you can play and have a fresh experience in them. If you want to see examples of games like that they are all the average games you can think about, you liked them(you didnt have anything bad to say about them) but you didnt love them which means you will probably forget about it and never recommend it to anyone.

Mark also mentioned that doing something that evokes a strong response in people will be more likely to evoke strong negative response as well but he is saying that this is ok since games dont need to be loved by everyone, its ok to give the best experience for some people since you can never create something for everyone.

[u/ploki122 → u/TheBlueRabbit11]

You can boil it down to "players have limited time and will spend it on their favorite game". Your game can be 6/10 in everyone's mind, but everybody will play the 8/10 game that half the other people hate (1/10). So basically : pleasing everyone will leave you with great reviews and no players.

But that doesn't apply to PoE, because the "everyone" that OP is trying to ditch as extra weight is the people rating it 8/10. It's true that you can't just release a game that everyone likes slightly... but you also can't just release a game that 3 persons love, and nobody else plays. Neither are profitable.

[u/iswedlvera → u/TheBlueRabbit11]

Most of them seem to come from someone with a big ego who has trouble taking feedback from his community. Just because this game designer has learnt these lessons doesn't make them gospel, they are in no way applicable to all feedback. Also chocolate and vanilla are great flavours and sell well because of how good they are. Saying poe shouldn't be chocolate or vanilla is stupid. It's basically gatekeeping so you can pretend to enjoy a niche product.

[u/ImNotABotYoureABot]

On #13:

I think this is next to impossible in an economy based game, as long as 'winning' constitutes making currency. (And I'm not sure what other definition makes sense in this context.)

Supply and Demand applies. If the best endgame strategy is fun, everyone does it, and supply of the resources that particular strategy yields will increase, which drives down profit. Unfun strategies will always tend to be more profitable. The only way I see around that is to give optimal, fun strategies a massive barrier of entry so that only few people can do it, but that is obviously worse.

The principle of the lesson can still be applied to PoE, though - excessively profitable and unfun strategies need to be nerfed quickly so that players who aren't willing to pay in fun won't feel being treated unfairly.

[u/J33bus8401 → u/ImNotABotYoureABot]

I think if you asked people who play PoE most people wouldn't say that winning is making currency. I would bet that "winning" would be mostly defined as completing some content. Making currency and trading is mostly the best means to an end and not an end itself.

[u/ur-average-geek → u/ImNotABotYoureABot]

delirium :)

[u/Sheizsa]

Great post! #13 is also used on software design thinking, specially UI/UX sessions. If they want a button here, there is a reson and not having it there will cause pain points and lower adoption.

[u/ThePromise110]

This is probably the best article MaRo has ever written, and is almost certainly the most impactful and resonant GDC talk ever given.

[u/danievdw]

Chris actually alluded to Lesson#19 there.

​

The question was, 'Are there moments when the community is just completely wrong....' or in those lines, and he answered that, but also elaborated. Stating they have to do that all the time. They look at the complaints and what people are complaining about, then look at the actual data, and see it's not related. Then they have to take a step back and figure out what is actually causing the symptom that is similar to what the people are complaining about.

​

The podcast was actually very informative. I honestly hope they never stop doing a weekly Q&A like that, as it will go a long way in restoring everything that is currently a mess surrounding PoE. Chris did not just give answers, but was also enlightened on many subjects and issues, that will now get attention, and we got answers and information and clarification on many things we were unhappy about..... Imagine making even just a bit of that progress every week... The game might just get back it's beloved status.

[u/Sardaman]

I hope both GGG and Reddit realize that if the game starts to cater to the lowest common denominator, it will quickly lose it's "soul."

If you somehow don't see where the game was going (faster and faster killing, higher and higher numbers, easier and easier crafting) as catering to the lowest common denominator, I'm not sure how pulling back and actually making the game require more thought again would qualify either. What are you attempting to warn against, here?

[u/Fyregrass]

I see people cite Lesson #11 as a good reason as to why making the game more casual player friendly would be a bad idea.

I don’t think the game has to lose its depth, complexity and top end difficulty if it chooses to be friendlier to new players.

Act 1 is a terrible new player experience and that was made worse this league, fixing this isn’t going to make PoE lose its soul.

[u/Tesrali → u/Fyregrass]

I love your content dude but I think challenge is the soul of a game, so if the acts aren't challenging (or grindy in the positive sense) then that does contradict the soul of the game.

For me personally I rerolled yesterday and act one was the most fun.

[u/Sorr_Ttam → u/Tesrali]

Poe is not a hard game and has never been a hard game. It has been an unfair game, but POE has never had much difficulty to it. Arpgs in general are not hard games, and the mechanics behind an arpg prevent them from being difficult in the way that a game like dark souls or mlb the show are difficult.

[u/Tesrali → u/Sorr_Ttam]

All games present a challenge in some form or another---a problem for the player to solve. I think "hard" is a non-sequitor.

The early game of POE not challenging veterans has been contributing to them burning out on it. <3

[u/Fyregrass → u/Tesrali]

I polled my audience recently and 81% said they did not enjoy doing the campaign more than once while 68% said the new player experience was not good enough to hook them to PoE the first time.

I think you’d likely find PoE would have 2-3x as many players if the campaign was not actively deterring people from playing the game. On the other hand, when I think about this game’s difficulty, I think Sirus, Maven and Uber Elder do a much better job at challenging players than a tedious 10 act elongated tutorial in which you experience gameplay that feels like it came out of the 1990s.

[u/AbsentGlare → u/Tesrali]

Do you make new characters just to play act 1 over and over again?

[u/onikzin → u/AbsentGlare]

No, but I'm happy to run the campaign 2-3 times per league

ok fine the runs after the first are in twink gear

[u/Surf3rx → u/Tesrali]

I'd say you're in the minority.

[u/Arianity → u/Tesrali]

so if the acts aren't challenging (or grindy in the positive sense) then that does contradict the soul of the game.

It's not that the acts can't be challenging. But as content for new players, it should be challenging at a level appropriate for new players

For me personally I rerolled yesterday and act one was the most fun.

But that's kind of the problem. Act one is not (and fundamentally can't be) designed for veterans. That's where new players get onramped.

That doesn't mean the game can't be challenging, but it should not be in the spaces shared with new players.

(For a longer discussion of why, see this post where i went into more detail)

[u/MarmotOnTheRocks]

Lesson #1

Being stubborn and ignoring your audience/customers is a shitty way to be a game director.

[u/Sierra--117]

Dude did you just diss chocolate ice-cream 😡

[u/Aquila_OZ]

Thanks for the link. An interesting read.

[u/Kyrilz]

You cant apply the idea of winning in PoE like you donin MTG. Two different genres. We can use math on a very basic level to balance MTG ( pretty much down to comparing apples to apples between two cards ). What feels fun for some people might not be realistic. GGG is in no way responsible to make what people have fun with an end game viable ability ( which is what winning is in PoE, although thete are multiple ways of playing end games as there isn’t just one end game ). It’s also impossible to do it because of how much chaos there is. The control meta in MTG is NOT fun at all for example, but strong. The more things you introduce the more chaotic everything else becomes. Chaos creates more chaos exponentially. POE needs some QoL if they feel like giving us and some UI ( placement ) improvements. I’m happy to talk to anoyne that thinks they can “balance” the skills. Lets get it down to math and you’ll see how it’s impossible.

[u/Burgerburgerfred]

Don't 11 and 13 contradict each other for POE?

Especially highlighted during this league. Many (I would assume most) love this game because if you invest enough resources into a build you can make it work to clear all content. It may not be the fastest or the easiest, but it can work. Plus the small chance of finding something that no one thought of that can compete with the "meta" is a great thing to chase.

This league there are pretty much only a few builds that can reliably clear endgame content in a timely fashion without risking random deaths every map and it's easily the least popular league in a long time. No one is happy being forced to play one of the top 3 builds and it not even being worthwhile to make additional characters to sink built up wealth into to see if you can make some offshoot nonsense kill a9 awakener.

IDK maybe I'm misunderstanding something here or maybe I'm wrong about the sentiment of the playerbase but for me and almost anyone I talk to about this game the allure is in the variety and previously the fact that almost any skill except for the absolute worst ones could clear all content even if they weren't necessarily "viable".

[u/thefuddy19]

Not only is 19 my favorite number it’s my favorite lesson. It resonates with me and I think it is very important for both ggg and especially the community.

[u/erpunkt]

I know jack about mtg but from what I've experienced with past leagues they can be dissected more or less into few "rules". These rules reoccur in all various leagues and have different ways of interacting with the player, partially catering only a specific type of player.

• complexity

• micro management

• mapping

• rewards

• restrictions

Ignoring initial problems with all leagues I think that Delirium was the most balanced league in regards of those rules.

It was very straight forward without any micro management, it did enhance mapping instead of being separated from it and the rewards catered to build makers/crafters (cluster jewels) and pure mappers (variety of valuable drops), while only being restricted by time but not by space.

Harvest for example had a lot of micromanagement, was fairly complex, broke the mapping flow and had very crafting oriented rewards.

Ultimatum had nothing for crafters and had a very confined area while the rest of the map was "empty". Ultimatum can also serve as an example of how a different approach might have made it more enjoyable by designing the "restrictions" more like Delirium instead of Ritual.

These comparisons can be made with all the leagues and it will uncover the good and bad implementations of the "rules" fairly quick.

[u/SmoothBrainedApe17]

You missed lesson 1?

Lesson #1—Fighting against human nature is a losing battle

In game design (and most things where you interact with an audience), there's a saying: "Know your audience." Well, guess what? Your audience for game design is humans. They come with a complex operating system. It's quirky at times, but it can be understood. Just remember that humans are quite stubborn. They like to do things the way they like to do them and it's hard to change their behavior.

What I've learned over the years is that you shouldn't change your players to match your game; you should change your game to match your players. Don't get yourself into a fight you're probably not going to win. Human behavior is a powerful force. We are creatures of habit and instinctually fear change. Yes, there are things that come along—like the cell phone—that humans change their behavior around, but don't assume your game is going to be one of those revolutionary things.

[u/Myrmida]

GGG should listen to the community and take their concerns seriously, but they should absolutely not take their ideas on how to fix things seriously.

People are "bad" at fixing things because solving complex problems requires iterations, trying out different things etc. It's not that people inherently have bad ideas, it's that nobody can know for sure whether an idea works out or not beforehand (except for really dumb ideas). So it would be better to say, "GGG should not just implement any idea regardless where it comes from, but should try it out thoroughly to see how it works out".

[u/dicedragon]

13 is why mtg does not get any more of my money.

I dont want to open 50 packs to get the newest most op mythic rare and then win. I want to play at my local friendly table where we ban wrath of god because having some dumb ass control spammer literally sucks the fun out of the game.

if you have been playing magic over the past few years, things like teferi being the dominate strat is not "fun" nor interesting.

So sorry op, if GGG wants the game to be mono red and teferi, then its time to stop giving them money.

[u/Heavenly_Demon]

it certainly wouldn't be vanilla or chocolate and it shouldn't try to be. You shouldn't want it to be.

I love vanilla ice cream and i take this as a personal attack.

[u/Aphrel86]

Lesson 19: The audience is considerably better at solving problems than ggg who do weird dumb blanket nerfs that affect hundreds of builds to nerf one niche build.

[u/Klarthy]

Lesson #19: Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them

I've always found this statement to be purely game designer arrogance. While the vast majority of solutions are not great, there are some that will be. In PoE's case, this is because we, as players, don't have the same long-term vision in talking about design decisions. We don't create new systems, we typically suggest to revise, extend, and polish existing ones.

A good game designer at some point will say that the current system needs scrapped, nerfed, etc and design a new complementary system that might take thousands of hours to implement between design, programming, art, music, sound, testing etc. Players don't have the time to design+suggest sweeping changes, especially well-thought out ones that have gone through multiple iterations and people. We aren't privy to the design discussions for mechanics that are going to be introduced 1-2 years down the road either.

We already do have many of these problems solved well enough in the form of 3rd party tools.

[u/MrTastix → u/Klarthy]

Well coming from a designer, it's more that it's not the job of the user to fix the problems.

People often bring up "constructive criticism" to mean "solve the problem you have for me" but nobody should ever expect that from someone who spends their resources on your product (whether time or money).

The designer is incentivized to figure a problem out and then solve it because they make money doing so (either as an employee or via company profits). The end user does not have this same connection, they just want it to work as they feel it was advertised to do so.

Really though, the main question for figuring out where an issue lies and how you might solve it is asking "why". "Why" is the most important question in a designers repertoire and it can often be overlooked. It might sound annoying to be constantly asked "why" but it's important to keep asking it until you figure out the true root cause of the issue, and even users can do this to try and gleam some basic info from themselves.

Asking "why" is a basic foundation of problem solving and information gathering, alongside the classic "who", "what", "where", "when", and "how". Also known as the Five Ws and How. These questions should also form the starting point for basic critical thinking and analysis.

[u/Klarthy → u/MrTastix]

I'm an engineer/developer, so I'd like to think that occasionally I have ideas that would be appropriate to iterate upon for implementation in anything I have thousands of hours of experience with, especially when it's a user-facing feature. Worst case scenario is that I'm iterating my own design skills.

[u/firebolt_wt → u/Klarthy]

While the vast majority of solutions are not great, there are some that will be

Yeah, but if you have the skills to read all the players solutions and recognize which are good, it's likely you also have the skills to design a good solution yourself to begin with.

[u/plato13 → u/Klarthy]

Even as a designer, it is hard to give good suggestions for a game you play but lack inside information about.
Elegant solutions within existing constrains, is an essential part of what makes good design. But as a player you dont know about most of the constrains and dont know of other problems in the process of getting solved, creating a new context for the problems you are trying to solve.

This is not because they wouldnt be able to make good design decisions, its because they lack the information to do so.

[u/MotherInteraction → u/Klarthy]

I guess you never watched the talk then? MaRo doesn't say, that players can't offer good solutions, but to take those solutions with a grain of salt, because players don't know your tools and limitations.

Imo this point is more about players not needing to offer solutions for their criticism to be valid.

[u/Furycrab]

Lesson 11 is definitely a sorta controversial one. However POE took off somewhere after 3.0 in terms of both number of players and quality of content. Trying to make the game taste closer to the game it was before I think is somewhat of a mistake, and probably why 3.14 and 3.15 have been so rough even thought they aren't technically worse than a good number of 3.0 releases.

Lesson 13... Build diversity I think is important here, because if the correct strategy after trying out a new skill is to just swap to a better one to enjoy success, the game has failed somewhere. There will always be a meta and certain things that are better than others, but if too many things don't seem to be able to meet a minimum bar of success on a similar investment of time, the correct strategy isn't going to be fun.

Lesson 19: This one I more or less agree on, but they are seriously doubling down on many of the more controversial changes for the sake of a future game that current paying customers might never play. Which isn't really addressing concerns of the people who have left or quit early.

Sorry if this comes off as jaded, but I watched the Podcast and while I loved what the Baeclast crew did, I was left unsatisfied because for the friends that quit 3.15 early, I don't feel I have anything great to tell them other than... Maybe in 3.16 and 3.17 things might get better, or they might not? And they apologized for a bunch of stuff making it to the game untested or unfinished like they did when Heist Launched.

I'm not looking forward to Act 2 and 3 being "retuned". Hope some of you are ready for the Beyond bandits being somehow buffed.

[u/vtlmks → u/Furycrab]

Looking forward to unkillable Oak ...

[u/Furycrab → u/vtlmks]

Watch them give all the Act 3 legionnaires that annoying shield ability from Expedition and "accidentally" give the various Beyond Unique bosses 10x more lethal attacks, and the meme becomes that every now hates beyond and no one wants to run Fortune Favors the Brave with because it's back on the map device after 3 leagues of being gone.

It feels like they are just scared to death of this idea that someone might say the POE 1 campaign is faster/easier to run than the POE 2 one, so they are making sure the POE 1 is properly miserable to run to give themselves a lot of room for POE 2 to be equally unfun, especially for inexperienced players.

[u/EtisVx → u/Furycrab]

And they apologized for a bunch of stuff making it to the game untested or unfinished like they did when Heist Launched.

They were doing it at regular basis, and will keep doing it again and again, because apology is free, while making stuff not broken on delivery requires an effort.

[u/Gumlass]

The corollary to lesson 11 is that if no one likes your game, it has already failed. It's already a niche game. Of all the people that COULD play POE, only a small fraction want to.

And evidently, 30% of the players that did love the game are starting not to ...

​

Also, Lesson 13 is 100% the problem right now. There is only a few builds that currently "work" when it comes to the rewarding parts of the game. GGG should be aiming to have it so most players have build that they WANT to play, that's also a good choice for most content.

[u/Cole-187]

5 is completely subjective, Nexus was fun to a lot of us, pathing/crafting/playing the memory fragments all included. Also not sure how you even compare throwing nets in Bestiary to pathing in the nexus in Synthesis. Synthesis was both interesting and fun.

11 Agree.

13 Makes absolutely no sense. What does "the best way to play the game" even mean in PoE? Best way to do what? Farm xp? Bosses? Level a new spec? Also how do you make it the correct strategy to win? What exactly constitutes a win in PoE?

19 Hard disagree; I've been playing PoE since 2011 and over my years I've seen a lot of good suggestions on how to do/fix xyz from regular community members. This implies that ggG has some divine decision making thus they should never take suggestions from community members despite them actually being good on a number of occasions. Take 3.15 for example, power creep was recognized as a problem, and the patch notes is how ggG tried to solve it, can't say it worked out now can you?

[u/koolex → u/Cole-187]

The reason why 19 is typically true is because players lack most of the analytics, history, game design intuition, and internal discussions on why the team picked A over B. It doesn't mean the community always produces bad ideas but the vast majority of solutions from players are pretty bad, and the good ones usually still have some large tradeoff like it's a huge engineering project or it's going to conflict with this other system, etc. That's only obvious when you actually have to implement the idea though. Again players do a great job of finding problems but it's almost impossible to propose a good solution without being on the team.

[u/Demiu → u/Cole-187]

This implies that ggG has some divine decision making thus they should never take suggestions from community members

Exactly

Game companies (including GGG) often excuse bugs because ten/hundreds of players interacting with a game is more manhours spent "bug hunting" than any QA team can do.

This applies to design too. Out of hundred of thousands of players you're almost guaranteed a better idea drop.

Even on a subcommunity like reddit, to every problem with the game there has been a proper solution posted and they even took GGG's desires into consideration. GGG continued to throw it's toys around, cry "our game our vision" and tell us our feelings wre wrong... and here we are

[u/MaXimillion_Zero → u/Cole-187]

Synthesis was both interesting and fun.

The dungeon building was. The crafting with fragmented items was a terrible system.

[u/MercuryHead]

I love lesson 19. Harvest deterministic crafting at the power of Ritual League is NOT the solution this game needs. But people wanting it demonstrates a fundamental problem with loot and crafting currently in PoE.

This is why I am optimistic that the introduction of smartly rolled gear will solve a lot of the problems the community has. It makes crafting a lot more feasible because the probability of having a good item drop is a lot more likely. I also think they are experimenting with other less potent forms of deterministic crafting such as Rog.

[u/allbusiness512 → u/MercuryHead]

There are too many dumpster tier mods that exist is the problem. When is reflect physical damage to attackers ever going to be useful? Never.

[u/sideg1030]

Mark Rosewater to save the day again

[u/BioSemantics]

Jesus Christ, this weird elitism again?

This is the one that I think is most important right now, because it tells both the community and GGG. GGG should listen to the community and take their concerns seriously, but they should absolutely not take their ideas on how to fix things seriously.

Some portion of the PoE community just absolutely gets off on attacking the PoE community. Whether it is the HC vs SC debate, or SSF-by-the-way, its always been this way, and its always some form of insecurity manifesting as elitist superiority. You should definitely not just implement anything the community tells you to do, but you shouldn't discount community ideas just because they are community idea. That is what this 'rule' implies. By the way, this 'rule' isn't base on evidence of any kind, its just the average company interpreting feedback and realizing a lot of it is impractical in one way or another (whether its dev time or technical limitations). Thus they made a 'rule', based purely on their perception.

I hope both GGG and Reddit realize that if the game starts to cater to the lowest common denominator, it will quickly lose it's "soul." A very good product is always slightly controversial, or not for everybody. If PoE was an ice cream flavor, it certainly wouldn't be vanilla or chocolate and it shouldn't try to be. You shouldn't want it to be.

This is more of that elitism as well. A lot of people play PoE a lot of different ways with different standards, goals, and self-created benchmarks. What you might find 'lowest common denominator' others might find challenging, and vice versa. The game can contain Chris's vision (i.e. SSF, SSFHC, masochist mode), while still catering to portion of the player base that has kids and lives. Since SC trade definitely pays for the majority of the game because it represents the majority of players, maybe don't alienate though who love it zoomy and full of diversity.

These lessons are all taken from the excellent article https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-1-2016-05-30 by Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic the Gathering.

This is hilarious. So a few of things.

1) A ARPG is not a card game. Taking examples of one thing and applying to a different entire platform and kind of play is not necessarily a good idea. Just as an example, In a TCG you collect cards over time, which can always be relevant because you can play with those cards with your friends, even if they are no longer accepted in tournament play. The closest PoE comes to that idea is standard play, except lots of people hate standard and you can't play league content in standard, whereas in MTG you can always take new cards and use them with your olds card, when playing with your friends. That divide makes PoE very different from MTG, and yet Chris is obsessed with a MTG-like development cycle. There are a thousand other differences that make MTG and PoE very different.

2) MTG is now owned by hasbro and has been generally considered to be 'fucking up', which is to say there are lots of cool new cards, new sets, etc. plenty of things to be happy about but the player base is still upset, especially the arena player base. The reason is thathasbro is hell bent on doubling their profits from Wizards of the Coast, and that means shoddier products and obvious cash grabs. MTG is not something you want to be emulating right now.

3) MTG, especially right now, has done crazy amounts of damage to its overall balance. Its clear cards are coming out in under-tested forms, or at the very least being pushed for momentary reasons. More cards are being put on the banned list than ever before. Once again, MTG is not some paragon of game-play. Chris just really likes it. You can actually see a parallel here between both MTG and PoE in the sense that their development cycle is garbage and actively makes for a worse product, if you're looking for arbitrarily chosen similarities.

These rules are purely self-serving from a guy who is basically hasbro's bitch at the moment. Thre isn't anything about them that necessitates a 'good game'. Its advice from one developer self-servingly to another developer. You should take them with a grain salt.

[u/danny_ocp]

#19 is an example of hubris. No developer is the "best solver of problems"; eventually, there will be someone in your audience with a better solution for a specific problem than you. It takes a neutral and objective developer to understand this and admit their own imperfection. In fact, isn't this the reason PoE is going down the drain at the moment? Because someone has a divine vision?

[u/briktal → u/danny_ocp]

Yes, any list of rules or tips or whatever is bad if you believe they are unbending laws that must be followed at all times and cannot possibly have any exceptions or wiggle room.

[u/bonkeltje → u/danny_ocp]

This is simply not true. It takes a objective person to point out the issue yes, but players can only see maybe 10% of what the game actually is. A solution to a problem is not as simple as "just change it, lol". There's a lot of intertwined systems both on the front and backend of the game and coming up with a good solution that does not completely break everything can only be done by the game's developers.

[u/MaXimillion_Zero → u/bonkeltje]

players can only see maybe 10% of what the game actually is

Having source access doesn't mean you understand the game better than an obsessive player with 10000 hours of playtime. Technical design does of course impose some constraints on possible solutions, but not to the degree you're suggesting.

[u/danny_ocp → u/bonkeltje]

Nope. This is exactly what I'm saying; just because someone is on the other side of the fence doesn't mean you should always ignore their solutions. You're thinking exactly like the high and mighty dev, that just because you have all the data means nothing good can come out of others' proposed solutions.

[u/r4be_cs]

GGG is doing the exact opposite of Lesson #13 whenever they can.

Skills like worb are the perfect example. Most people love automated or semi-automated skills. That one happened to be very strong aswell, what a fantastic combo...

Nuked.

BV is another example (that one they explicitly nerfed to force that meta shakeup they were advertising)

As for lesson 11 and the flavours? Why is it not possible to be chocolate, vanilla and a few other flavours aswell? This game has so much depth, all flavours are possible - yet league after league they keep on adding tedium on top of tedium gated behind tedium instead of letting players choose what to engage with from a much earlier stage?

No. Do the boring campaign to do the boring atlasgrind for 1-2 weeks, hell even delve is not properly set up. I usually skip delving until i have a strong char on 90+ yet for some reason i still have to grind thru the first ~50-100 depths just to get 83 mobs that can at least put up a little bit of resistance.

Why can't the starting depths be proportionate to my char level? Or even better, why are there not multiple starting depths for players to choose from?

All these small details add up over leagues.

[u/hahalole → u/r4be_cs]

There is so much wrong

Worb is still strong blade vortex blade blast was explicitly buffed in 3.15 while nerfing bfbb

They are addressing the atlas in 3.16 as well as delve

[u/zedoac → u/r4be_cs]

Worb is still completely viable, you have no idea what you're talking about

[u/bonkeltje]

Lesson #19 is very true. I keep seeing people say that harvest or other ways of deterministic crafting is how people will have more fun playing the game but it's not a good solution whatsoever.

[u/Corodix → u/bonkeltje]

Yet Lesson #13 shows really well why harvest or other ways of deterministic crafting are a good thing, as the current way to win is trade, boring cumbersome trade.

Run into a wall because no good upgrades drop? => Trade.

No luck with rng crafting for upgrades? You're better off just using Trade.

​

The correct strategy to win always comes down to trade. SSF is not the correct strategy as you'll run into those same walls, SSF doesn't have any mechanics build in to help you in those situations.

Yet not to long ago there was a fun alternative path to win, namely harvest crafting. You could effectively find your own upgrades again that way.

​

Honestly I'd love a middle ground, a Self Found mode you can't transfer out of, with deterministic crafting.

[u/BDOXaz → u/Corodix]

Yes, it was very cool when the entire game revolved around harvest because it was so broken! Love using TFT!

[u/Chad_RD]

You’re wrong though, POE I’d vanilla ice cream , that’s why people ar e upset.

It’s just that POE used to be vanilla ice cream with any kind of fi’xinz you wanted thrown in which was then loaded into a t-shirt cannon and blasted into your face.

But then GGG looked at their creation and decided people eating the kind of ice cream they wanted was bad, despite it being delicious and financially successful. Now we get “Semi-cold soy milk tm” and it gets fed to us in a hi-chair and they don’t even make the airplane noises as it slowly approaches our mouth.

[u/tretstas]

Really don't get that hate about synthesys, was amazing to me

[u/ploki122 → u/tretstas]

The barrier of entry was insanely high; both for the "playing" aspect, with fragments being dropped and all, as well as the "crafting" aspect with random item implicits influenced by recipes.

People don't like barriers of entry.

[u/moonias]

Lesson 13 should be their priority then.

It speaks volumes in relation to trading. Trading is pretty much the only "strategy" to win, since you can't really craft your items anymore or find good ones on the ground, and it's really not fun.

But it also applies IMO a lot to just the atlas. The "way to win" is to juice up maps or kill bosses right now. And a lot of the atlas paths you have to follow a guide to find the optimal nodes to take to make currency because the others suck. They need to make them all interesting and "good".

(I really liked what Chris said around that, their plan to maybe make the atlas into 4 zones instead of 8 would allow them to make more fun atlas passives and less "filler" nodes)

And they've severely gutted some builds ability as well which forces a lot of people into builds they don't like. Or give them the feeling that they are not "winning" because they see others still zooming or killing bosses a lot faster and not dying.

[u/glokz]

However, posting problems without proposition of a solution or explaining why this Is particularly a problem and doing pros and cons analysis are not constructive and won't really be valuable opinion.

So proposing solutions is completely fine, but of course developers see bigger picture and can make better impact analysis and find optimal solutions.

[u/darthbane83]

Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them

I seem to remember Chris citing this exact lesson already so I dont tihnk GGG needs it, but the community really would do good if they realized that people saying "we want deterministic crafting" doesnt necessarily mean GGG should introduce deterministic crafting.
Their refusal to outright bring back harvest doesnt mean they arent looking for a way to solve that issue in a much better way.

For many people the real problem might be that they feel like they cant risk doing something to their item out of fear to brick it. I.ex. Exalting now could be worse than a master craft. Deterministic crafting solves that issue, but so do other solutions that might be better for the game.

Maybe getting eternal orbs back is a better solution? Maybe we want something similiar to eternal orbs but instead of infinite tries with infinite eternal orbs you just get to lock in a state of the item using a copy of it similiar to a mirror and both are untradeable as long as both exist? Maybe a non deterministic type of master craft that can be undone and peaks in power between mastercrafts and successful yolo slams?
Of course there are many more solutions that may be more elegant and better for the game.

[u/BraveNewNight]

Lol MTG isn't a good place to look for advice on balance, fun or monetization in the last decade.

[u/pojzon_poe]

Why ppl have such a hard on magic the gathering lol

Its the same crap metagame like smogon pokemons. Nothing good about it beside few viable options everyone is running..

Ps. 90% of playerbase doesnt even participate in any events..

[u/Tovell → u/pojzon_poe]

They don't have to participate in events as much as I don't have to play SSFHC or standard. Everybody plays what they find fun. Your approach is some wannabe elitist speech without any arguments to back it up or proof to you claims of numbers.

And we don't have a hard on bigger than Chris, he managed to mention MtG twice or thrice during Beaclast as his example to why he thinks some things should excite players of PoE.

[u/meadow_at_dusk → u/pojzon_poe]

The Magic design team is some of the best in the biz. It's the longest running card game, over 20 years which is double most video game franchises. It's one of the most complicated games ever made, with over 20k unique cards that all interact with each other. They release new content at least 4 times per year and deliver physical product to 70 countries. It's insane.

[u/pojzon_poe → u/meadow_at_dusk]

And the idea to revive the game was to move everything to digital form of Arenas.

I've been into MTG for some time after getting bored of smogon and tbh similarities are staggering. Yes you have 20k unique cards that have few hundred being actively used..

Similar situation to poe unique items -> we have maltitude of them, yet only a fraction are being used.

I don't mind being downvoted for having my own opinion on it :X

[u/servarus → u/pojzon_poe]

And MTG has various formats for people to play. That's the beauty of MTG, literally can be for everyone.

The try hards can go for Standard, or Modern. Go combo, go chill and so on.

But the core game is there, it is what people collectively love.

And I think you're mistaken with revival with a expansion.

[u/Arensen]

Your citing Lesson #13 here is a strange one to me, since this is exactly why GGG is trying to push for build diversity and more dynamic pack-to-pack engagements. The way to 'win' mapping in POE is currently to stack damage as efficiently as possible onto exactly one skill, automate everything else, and hold down right click as you run through the map as fast as possible. This doesn't lead to good moment-to-moment gameplay whatsoever. Sure, POE has great macro-level progression, taking your character from a slow, clumsy witch who can shoot one freezing pulse to a goddess of lightning, but the actual experience within a map is honestly fairly mediocre a lot of the time. This is precisely what GGG is hoping to achieve with both 3.15 and POE2, from what they've spoken about publicly, and I can only hope that the playerbase also sees it as fun.