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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4133 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 9, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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My brother picked up PoE this league, and I was considering joining him. But I have this sneaking suspicion that I'll just be piloting someone else's PoB settings through a bunch of levels. Not sold on that.

The build may be theirs. The loot is yours, the trades, the items you acquire, and the other builds those items enable. PoE does an absolutely amazing job of having the gear impact your playstyle; the variety of builds is amazing. My favorite of all time was probably the old Chains of Command / Writhing Jar Flaskfinder build, which generated a snowballing hurricane of animated artifact swords with which to Cuisinart the mob population of a map.

Also, how you play it is on you. The game also does a very good job of striking a balance between chill mob slaughter, and sudden spikes of significant difficulty. A decent build can handle most things, but there's a whole variety of ways to push things just a little too far, with disastrous consequences. The gameplay feels like it has a fair bit more mechanical complexity than Diablo 3 or similar games. The endgame presents a whole lot of problems, and a lot of the best mitigations require well-timed action on the part of the player.

I've been bouncing in and out of the game for years now, and it does have its problems. The regular patch schedule will break your stuff, sooner or later. This last time around, the Exalt/Divine swap was the breaking point for me, throwing a serious wrench into my long-term wealth accumulation, right after I felt like I was recovering from the fated items removal.

Eh. If you're at all interested, I'd recommend giving it a try. It's far and away the best version of diablo anyone's ever managed to make.

I've just always felt like if I'm playing someone else's build I'm not really the one playing. Like, why not just watch a streamer at that point.

I have 1000 hours into PoE, so it's not like I just don't like the game or whatever. Maybe it's just an idiosyncrasy of mine. I'm the same way in card games like Hearthstone. I will not follow someone's deck. Why would I even play at that point?

Interesting! I'm the exact opposite; I use other peoples' builds in pretty much every game that allows them. I've tried making my own, but the truth is for POE I'm there for the loot, and figuring out trading is more than challenging enough. When you've got a guide, you still have to actually implement it, and that means finding enough value to get the gear, and that's an adventure in and of itself.

I feel like loot (by which I think we both mean currency) isn't a challenge because you can get it trivially without any risk. And at that point, you're just boringly grinding. Of course, you can choose to engage in harder content for more loot per hour, but you don't really have to because you can just grind easier content. And if the loot isn't a challenge, and your build wasn't really "yours" to begin with, at what point do you do anything that you're proud of and that you're responsible for? That's what I feel like is missing by just buying and following a build.

If you don't choose to do harder content then... you don't choose to be challenged? That sounds like it's not the game's fault.

If you don't choose to do harder content then... you don't choose to be challenged? That sounds like it's not the game's fault.

Generally, in these sorts of games, the developers put exclusive rewards behind challenging content so that players have no choice but to partake in the challenge if they want to advance. In PoE, since the rewards players care about are fungible and exchangeable currencies, there's little incentive to advance in content.

"Why would a player do something in a way that's not as fun" is a very naive impression of how gamers, and humans, operate. As @ZorbaTHut likes to point out all the time, the thing the player is striving for is not necessarily what will be fun - developers have to ensure that it actually is, and not assume players will stop what they're striving for and switch to the fun thing as soon as they discover it. In PoE, players strive for currency. If farming for currency isn't in and of itself fun, then you can't assume players will stop farming for currency and go do what's fun (the fun being the more challenging content).

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