After just about the longest beta period of any game ever, independently developed action RPG Path of Exile is finally being officially released. You can read all about the game through that link, but I feel like I ought to mention a few things that set it apart from other ARPGS:
Insanely deep character creation. The game's seven playable classes start at different positions on the gigantic passive skill web, and you get up to 120 skill points from levelling and quests to invest in that however you choose. It's a min-maxer's dream, but it also lets you build any given class in a huge number of ways without worrying too much about total optimisation. Similarly, active skills are handled by a gem system that lets you use any combination of skills you wish, and support each skill with up to five support gems that modify its effects in all sorts of useful and synergistic ways. All this adds up to literally hundreds of viable builds, and innumerable variations within those.
No such thing as money. Instead, items are bought and sold (with both vendors and players) with various different 'currency items'. What makes this different is that each currency item has its own standalone use, mostly in item crafting. This means that inflation is checked somewhat (as the item is consumed on use), and influences the economy and your own purchasing decisions in all sorts of ways too nuanced to cover here.
Totally free to play, and never pay to win. While microtransactions exist, they only buy you cosmetic stuff. Pretty much the only useful thing you can buy with real money is extra stash tabs, which are neither necessary nor expensive.
I first heard about the game when open beta started up in January, and I've been playing it solidly ever since. Personally, I find it stacks more fun than any other ARPG I've played. Somehow even the grinding never gets old. On top of that, the developers plan to support the game and add new content for ten years after release. Basically, go download this game and give it a try.
For those of you already playing, what's everyone doing with the revamped skill tree? Personally, my phys cleave marauder got hammered by the cleave nerfs and so forth, so I'm thinking of using the free reroll to turn him into an avatar of fire spectral throw build. Selling my soul taker should provide enough currency to get it off the ground. My rough passive tree is something like this. Goodness knows what secondary skills I'll want to use, though. Have to see what the new auras look like, at least.
Wow, i'll have to check this out. Sounds like the game that I wanted Diablo 3 to be!!
Pretty much, to be honest. I didn't want to make any comparisons to D3 in the OP, but a large proportion of the PoE player base consists of people who found that D3 couldn't hold their interest.
The new 4 month leagues are the most important factor to get me playing again.
I'm one of the many Spectral Throw Scions. I hope they don't nerf it because I based my name on the skill (jiggly_juggler), so it will be awkward if I have to use something else.
I hope this release attracts new players. Open beta felt as professional and polished as a release, better than D3's release for example, but I know some people tend to avoid betas categorically. Also I have high expectations of GGG in maintaining PoE as something fun for many years. It looks like we will have new 4 month leagues indefinitely, and if that's the case, it will be like the golden age of Diablo 2 ladder play, even a little faster with the resets, and a lot more new content each time.
Is the character creation deep, or just complicated? I saw some distinct archetypes in there, but there didn't seem to be more major options than usual, just 1% here or 1% there kind of choices, which aren't very meaningful
Insanely deep character creation. The game's seven playable classes start at different positions on the gigantic passive skill web, and you get up to 120 skill points from levelling and quests to invest in that however you choose. It's a min-maxer's dream, but it also lets you build any given class in a huge number of ways without worrying too much about total optimisation. Similarly, active skills are handled by a gem system that lets you use any combination of skills you wish, and support each skill with up to five support gems that modify its effects in all sorts of useful and synergistic ways. All this adds up to literally hundreds of viable builds, and innumerable variations within those.
It's really easy to give players lots of options. (There are an infinite number of Standard-legal decks.) Giving players lots of viable options and keeping them both balanced against each other and distinct from each other, on the other hand, is really, really hard.
So I'm skeptical of the "hundreds of viable builds" claim. I've seen this pattern in many games, including Magic. At first, the meta is wide open with lots of cool decks/builds. As time goes on the meta matures and people find the best ones. Eventually you get a mature metagame with a handful of tier 1 builds, some tier 2s, and a bunch of fun stuff which isn't really competitive on the top level.
I'm sure there's some really neat math behind this. No matter how much complexity you put in your choices, there's an effective limit to the number of competitive builds.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that such complexity is fun for those of us who enjoy it.
No such thing as money. Instead, items are bought and sold (with both vendors and players) with various different 'currency items'. What makes this different is that each currency item has its own standalone use, mostly in item crafting. This means that inflation is checked somewhat (as the item is consumed on use), and influences the economy and your own purchasing decisions in all sorts of ways too nuanced to cover here.
This is a mistake, I think.
There's a reason the use of money has prevailed in both real-life societies and virtual ones. It's really efficient as the basis for an economy compared to the alternatives. I'd guess that eventually one of the "currency items" will become the de facto standard for commerce.
Having currency being consumable doesn't really reduce inflation over money-based systems where you can similarly remove money from the economy by buying the consumables from an NPC.
Totally free to play, and never pay to win. While microtransactions exist, they only buy you cosmetic stuff. Pretty much the only useful thing you can buy with real money is extra stash tabs, which are neither necessary nor expensive.
What's their business model? Continuing to improve the game and add new content takes money. Without much point in spending money, how do they plan to make the game profitable?
Is the character creation deep, or just complicated? I saw some distinct archetypes in there, but there didn't seem to be more major options than usual, just 1% here or 1% there kind of choices, which aren't very meaningful
I know what you mean (that was sort of my reaction at first sight too), but trust me, all those %s here and there are about more than min-maxing. They make real, noticeable differences. Some of the more common stats need a lot of passives put into them for you to feel it, but hey, that's why you get so many points. And every point you put into less common stuff is important. That said, most build differentiation is not in the passive tree, but in skill and item choice. A lot of builds do overlap in significant ways on the passive tree, although the differences do mean that it's almost always very hard to respec a character without spending significant amounts of orbs of regret (the skill point removal currency item).
It's really easy to give players lots of options. (There are an infinite number of Standard-legal decks.) Giving players lots of viable options and keeping them both balanced against each other and distinct from each other, on the other hand, is really, really hard.
So I'm skeptical of the "hundreds of viable builds" claim. I've seen this pattern in many games, including Magic. At first, the meta is wide open with lots of cool decks/builds. As time goes on the meta matures and people find the best ones. Eventually you get a mature metagame with a handful of tier 1 builds, some tier 2s, and a bunch of fun stuff which isn't really competitive on the top level.
I'm sure there's some really neat math behind this. No matter how much complexity you put in your choices, there's an effective limit to the number of competitive builds.
The comparison isn't really a fair one because PoE is a primarily PvE game. The PvP will definitely suffer from this, but for the main game, your build doesn't have to be anything close to the best. It just has to be viable in endgame, and there is a huge gulf between those two categories.
This is a mistake, I think.
There's a reason the use of money has prevailed in both real-life societies and virtual ones. It's really efficient as the basis for an economy compared to the alternatives. I'd guess that eventually one of the "currency items" will become the de facto standard for commerce.
GGG seem to be of the opinion that trading efficiency is not a good thing. They've been opposed to an auction house of any kind for much the same reason. I have to agree with them. The D3 auction house (the in-game gold one, I won't bother talking about the RMAH) seemed like a great idea before launch, but a lot of people (myself definitely included) now see it as the worst part of the game, because it took all the fun out of acquiring items. This is somewhat the same on a lesser scale. As to one item becoming the default, that hasn't come close to happening yet. I'm not that well qualified to speculate as to why, but my guess is that the huge range of prices makes it impractical, and that a fair number of people selling items for currency want the currency in its own right, not to buy other items.
Having currency being consumable doesn't really reduce inflation over money-based systems where you can similarly remove money from the economy by buying the consumables from an NPC.
True, I suppose. I guess the direct factor reducing inflation is that more or less everyone has incentive to use significant numbers of currency items - most of them aren't used solely for crafting end-game gear, and the ones that are still get used in huge amounts relative to their availability.
What's their business model? Continuing to improve the game and add new content takes money. Without much point in spending money, how do they plan to make the game profitable?
A lot of players do seem to find a point in spending money, because GGG seems to be rolling in cash right now. They haven't posted sales stats in months, but they generated about $2.5 million just in the closed beta (this is a company with about 30 employees, remember). Goodness knows how much they made in nine months of open beta, or what will happen now.
The comparison isn't really a fair one because PoE is a primarily PvE game. The PvP will definitely suffer from this, but for the main game, your build doesn't have to be anything close to the best. It just has to be viable in endgame, and there is a huge gulf between those two categories.
I don't see balance as any less important in PvE.
The endgame content has to be tuned to some difficulty. If it's tuned to be challenging to for the players with the t1 builds, it will be impossible for those whose builds are merely what you call viable. If, on the other hand, it's tuned to be challenging for those players, the t1-build players will find it laughably easy.
GGG seem to be of the opinion that trading efficiency is not a good thing. They've been opposed to an auction house of any kind for much the same reason. I have to agree with them. The D3 auction house (the in-game gold one, I won't bother talking about the RMAH) seemed like a great idea before launch, but a lot of people (myself definitely included) now see it as the worst part of the game, because it took all the fun out of acquiring items. This is somewhat the same on a lesser scale.
What is the argument against trading efficiency?
I understand if you don't want trading in the first place. That's the model Hearthstone uses. Putting the emphasis on personal progression and the fun of acquiring items is fine.
But if you're going to have trading, it should be efficient. I'd rather spend 60 seconds on an AH than 30 minutes in a trade channel.
Imagine if they banned all bots from MTGO. Do you really think people would find that fun?
As to one item becoming the default, that hasn't come close to happening yet. I'm not that well qualified to speculate as to why, but my guess is that the huge range of prices makes it impractical, and that a fair number of people selling items for currency want the currency in its own right, not to buy other items.
If there's a range of prices I guess multiple items could be acting as a single currency. Effectively, you can think of item A as a dollar coin and item B as a quarter. So, effectively, they do have money. All they've done is say "you have to carry around coins instead of using a debit card. Oh, and here's a magical floating vending machine which lets you buy useful items." Which doesn't really accomplish much except making things slightly less convenient.
True, I suppose. I guess the direct factor reducing inflation is that more or less everyone has incentive to use significant numbers of currency items - most of them aren't used solely for crafting end-game gear, and the ones that are still get used in huge amounts relative to their availability.
A money sink is a money sink. It's the staple way of reducing inflation in systems where money constantly enters the system. The form is a bit different, but the idea is the same.
A lot of players do seem to find a point in spending money, because GGG seems to be rolling in cash right now. They haven't posted sales stats in months, but they generated about $2.5 million just in the closed beta (this is a company with about 30 employees, remember). Goodness knows how much they made in nine months of open beta, or what will happen now.
If they haven't posted sales stats in months…maybe not that much?
But yes, it will be interesting to see if this model works.
What's their business model? Continuing to improve the game and add new content takes money. Without much point in spending money, how do they plan to make the game profitable?
Primarily selling cosmetics is a business model that is currently working to support DotA. Players have shown that they will spend money on purely cosmetic features in games they play frequently.
I think there are definitely two sides to the argument. On the one hand, trading is still going to happen. Having no auction house basically means that this will be driven "underground" - third party websites and chat channels - similar to diablo 2. The effect is that the vast majority of players don't want to pay money to an external website, nor do they want to mess about in trading channels all day. Essentially, trading becomes limited to very high value items (which are worth the time it take to trade).
If you want to limit trading to high-value items, that's fine. But there are far better ways to do so than making it time-consuming and inconvenient to do so.
For example, you could require the use of a rare/expensive item to make a piece of gear traceable.
Having an auction house where items can be continually traded is a major balance problem. The real issue with the diablo 3 auction house is that items never expire. This means that whenever I find an upgrade to, say, my sword, then I will want to put my old sword onto the auction house. The cycle repeats over and over, so that eventually I leave a trail of increasingly powerful swords on the auction house. Everyone is doing the same thing, so the global effect is that the average item quality gradually rises. This means that yesterday's top tier items are heavily devalued by tomorrow, which in turn means that now, after just a few hours of play, nearly any new character can easily afford to purchase gear which is far beyond what they could possibly hope to find for their own level and play time. This makes the auction house the most rational place to find gear. Thus, there is literally no point in hunting for cool items in-game. No item value, plus items are easy to acquire -> no item lust -> massive player dropout rate -> the game virtually died. Blizzard recognised this in D3, and tried to fix it by buffing items (increase power), but of course this didn't solve the root problem. That is why the auction house is going away in the expansion.
That's a really easy problem to solve. You can break the cycle by making items bind to your account either when you equip them or when you trade/sell them. So each item can only be used by up to 2 players.
I'll agree that pain-in-the-ass trading isn't the best solution to the problem. Nor is it required to enforce a sense of "value" as people will still ogle over raid gear and the like. But like much else in PoE, if it "worked" well enough for D2, it's assumed it will work here. And we've seen the train wreck that results when you have no solution at all.
That's a really easy problem to solve. You can break the cycle by making items bind to your account either when you equip them or when you trade/sell them. So each item can only be used by up to 2 players.
It helps significantly (and it's pretty bone-headed that D3 lacked this) but it doesn't fix it. Sure you won't be selling your just-replaced sub-godly item when you upgrade to godly, but you are going to be throwing those sub-godly items onto the AH from now on instead of using them, and thanks to your godly items, you're going to be farming the sub-godly faster.
This isn't a new problem to RPG land, and theme park MMOs have their own solutions, which generally involve making some aspect of Best-in-slot acquisition untradable. But you need a sense of actual power caps or tiers to make BiS identifiable vs. everything below that which is tradeable. So that just gets us back to why trading exists at all in the first place.
I see trade functioning as a mere band-aid for loot acquisition being so ridiculously random in Diablo, and it takes some very un-"Diablo" ideas, like crafting and class-specific loot biasing, to effectively remove trading from an ARPG. But then there are a minority of people who actually like trading, so this compromise non-stance at best lets trader sharks enjoy their sharking while scaring off people who don't.
For those of you already playing, what's everyone doing with the revamped skill tree? Personally, my phys cleave marauder got hammered by the cleave nerfs and so forth, so I'm thinking of using the free reroll to turn him into an avatar of fire spectral throw build. Selling my soul taker should provide enough currency to get it off the ground. My rough passive tree is something like this. Goodness knows what secondary skills I'll want to use, though. Have to see what the new auras look like, at least.
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
I will always firmly stand by the belief that Magic is a game first and a collectable second.
Pretty much, to be honest. I didn't want to make any comparisons to D3 in the OP, but a large proportion of the PoE player base consists of people who found that D3 couldn't hold their interest.
I'm one of the many Spectral Throw Scions. I hope they don't nerf it because I based my name on the skill (jiggly_juggler), so it will be awkward if I have to use something else.
I hope this release attracts new players. Open beta felt as professional and polished as a release, better than D3's release for example, but I know some people tend to avoid betas categorically. Also I have high expectations of GGG in maintaining PoE as something fun for many years. It looks like we will have new 4 month leagues indefinitely, and if that's the case, it will be like the golden age of Diablo 2 ladder play, even a little faster with the resets, and a lot more new content each time.
It's really easy to give players lots of options. (There are an infinite number of Standard-legal decks.) Giving players lots of viable options and keeping them both balanced against each other and distinct from each other, on the other hand, is really, really hard.
So I'm skeptical of the "hundreds of viable builds" claim. I've seen this pattern in many games, including Magic. At first, the meta is wide open with lots of cool decks/builds. As time goes on the meta matures and people find the best ones. Eventually you get a mature metagame with a handful of tier 1 builds, some tier 2s, and a bunch of fun stuff which isn't really competitive on the top level.
I'm sure there's some really neat math behind this. No matter how much complexity you put in your choices, there's an effective limit to the number of competitive builds.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that such complexity is fun for those of us who enjoy it.
This is a mistake, I think.
There's a reason the use of money has prevailed in both real-life societies and virtual ones. It's really efficient as the basis for an economy compared to the alternatives. I'd guess that eventually one of the "currency items" will become the de facto standard for commerce.
Having currency being consumable doesn't really reduce inflation over money-based systems where you can similarly remove money from the economy by buying the consumables from an NPC.
What's their business model? Continuing to improve the game and add new content takes money. Without much point in spending money, how do they plan to make the game profitable?
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
The comparison isn't really a fair one because PoE is a primarily PvE game. The PvP will definitely suffer from this, but for the main game, your build doesn't have to be anything close to the best. It just has to be viable in endgame, and there is a huge gulf between those two categories.
GGG seem to be of the opinion that trading efficiency is not a good thing. They've been opposed to an auction house of any kind for much the same reason. I have to agree with them. The D3 auction house (the in-game gold one, I won't bother talking about the RMAH) seemed like a great idea before launch, but a lot of people (myself definitely included) now see it as the worst part of the game, because it took all the fun out of acquiring items. This is somewhat the same on a lesser scale. As to one item becoming the default, that hasn't come close to happening yet. I'm not that well qualified to speculate as to why, but my guess is that the huge range of prices makes it impractical, and that a fair number of people selling items for currency want the currency in its own right, not to buy other items.
True, I suppose. I guess the direct factor reducing inflation is that more or less everyone has incentive to use significant numbers of currency items - most of them aren't used solely for crafting end-game gear, and the ones that are still get used in huge amounts relative to their availability.
A lot of players do seem to find a point in spending money, because GGG seems to be rolling in cash right now. They haven't posted sales stats in months, but they generated about $2.5 million just in the closed beta (this is a company with about 30 employees, remember). Goodness knows how much they made in nine months of open beta, or what will happen now.
I don't see balance as any less important in PvE.
The endgame content has to be tuned to some difficulty. If it's tuned to be challenging to for the players with the t1 builds, it will be impossible for those whose builds are merely what you call viable. If, on the other hand, it's tuned to be challenging for those players, the t1-build players will find it laughably easy.
What is the argument against trading efficiency?
I understand if you don't want trading in the first place. That's the model Hearthstone uses. Putting the emphasis on personal progression and the fun of acquiring items is fine.
But if you're going to have trading, it should be efficient. I'd rather spend 60 seconds on an AH than 30 minutes in a trade channel.
Imagine if they banned all bots from MTGO. Do you really think people would find that fun?
If there's a range of prices I guess multiple items could be acting as a single currency. Effectively, you can think of item A as a dollar coin and item B as a quarter. So, effectively, they do have money. All they've done is say "you have to carry around coins instead of using a debit card. Oh, and here's a magical floating vending machine which lets you buy useful items." Which doesn't really accomplish much except making things slightly less convenient.
A money sink is a money sink. It's the staple way of reducing inflation in systems where money constantly enters the system. The form is a bit different, but the idea is the same.
If they haven't posted sales stats in months…maybe not that much?
But yes, it will be interesting to see if this model works.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
Primarily selling cosmetics is a business model that is currently working to support DotA. Players have shown that they will spend money on purely cosmetic features in games they play frequently.
If you want to limit trading to high-value items, that's fine. But there are far better ways to do so than making it time-consuming and inconvenient to do so.
For example, you could require the use of a rare/expensive item to make a piece of gear traceable.
That's a really easy problem to solve. You can break the cycle by making items bind to your account either when you equip them or when you trade/sell them. So each item can only be used by up to 2 players.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
It helps significantly (and it's pretty bone-headed that D3 lacked this) but it doesn't fix it. Sure you won't be selling your just-replaced sub-godly item when you upgrade to godly, but you are going to be throwing those sub-godly items onto the AH from now on instead of using them, and thanks to your godly items, you're going to be farming the sub-godly faster.
This isn't a new problem to RPG land, and theme park MMOs have their own solutions, which generally involve making some aspect of Best-in-slot acquisition untradable. But you need a sense of actual power caps or tiers to make BiS identifiable vs. everything below that which is tradeable. So that just gets us back to why trading exists at all in the first place.
I see trade functioning as a mere band-aid for loot acquisition being so ridiculously random in Diablo, and it takes some very un-"Diablo" ideas, like crafting and class-specific loot biasing, to effectively remove trading from an ARPG. But then there are a minority of people who actually like trading, so this compromise non-stance at best lets trader sharks enjoy their sharking while scaring off people who don't.
Have you heard of League of Legends?