CASUALS can't get profit from actual gaming

The premise of the OP is genuinely fascinating, and a little baffling. It seems to fit very neatly with a pet theory of mine, and yet also leaves me with a bunch of questions.

Like... if you're playing the game casually, which is to say treating it like a game rather than like a second job, why is profit your primary motivation? Surely you should more focused on whether the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun?

If the moment-to-moment gameplay isn't fun for you, why would play this game (or any game) at all, as a recreational gamer? Why wouldn't you be playing something that feels like it better respects your time?

My pet theory is that the moment-to-moment gameplay is basically OK, but that GGG has pushed end game as the "ne plus ultra" of PoE to such an extent that it has pushed people who would normally be having fun just playing the game into grinding the end game economy like they're trying to earn enough in-game currency to make rent, or something, and that it's hurting the experience overall.

The game isn't finished, so there's still a lot of room to improve, but if you could ignore the end-game economy grind, and instead play a properly-balanced SSF experience which allowed you to still experience everything in a league at your own pace, would that feel better for you, even with the game as it is?

A while back, I saw an analysis of publicly visible Steam user data (not for PoE or PoE2, but for Steam overall) which found that the average active Steam gamer has about 7.5 hours a week, on average, to game. Given a 16-week league length, that's about 120 hours. Should GGG be balancing the game so that an SSF player can reasonably finish all the game's available content on at least one build in that time?

What if the game had some "light socialism" (i.e. catch-up mechanics, pity timers, prevention of duplicate uniques) in the item game? We currently only have gambling and trading to turn gold into items, one of which isn't reliable, and the other of which is a win-more zero-sum system that gives a heavy advantage to those who can afford to spend a hundred hours in the first week building in-game wealth. What if that weren't the case?

I know Jonathan is convinced that trading is the ultimate expression of the ARPG game-play loop, but that loop is normally described as "kill monster, collect loot, grow stronger, repeat." It doesn't normally include a step where the player takes time out from monster-slaying to role-play as the part-time manager of a consignment store. Is the extent to which GGG are emphasizing trade, and building and balancing around trade, possibly under-cutting other things they're trying to accomplish with PoE2?

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50ShadesOfAutism#4419 a écrit :

Dude it's all RNG, what effort? lol

And yes, the majority of gameplay mechanics and items should be available to all players. Right now, almost none of the truly end-game stuff is seen by players. Somewhat deterministic crafting, cool uniques that are actually useful, etc. Leave a few for the super nerds, but most (not all!) should be accessible for everyone.

Yep its all rng.
Has nothing to do with how good your build is, how good your farming strategy is, how time effective you are, your knowledge about the game and what to loot and how to craft it and how much to sell it for, etc, etc.

Its just rng. Thats why your struggling while others arent.
Just unlucky... :(

Its a fair point, best to not waste any time trying to improve.

Maybe you will be more "lucky" next league? And if not then you always have plan B. (Plan B = go to forums to complain and write about player retention numbers).

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Nyon#6673 a écrit :

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DistributedAutomaton#5739 a écrit :

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50ShadesOfAutism#4419 a écrit :

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The cheapest one right now in Fate of the Vaal (SC) league is 177x Div. You might want to learn how to use the trade site before giving advice to others.

I searched on the official trade site just now, and the first hit for SC Fate of the Vaal was for 24 Divines. Are you searching "Instant Buyout and In Person"? If you only search "In Person" the prices are much higher.

No hes talking about the aspect of the cat version. Which is alot more expensive.

I see. "Spirit of the Cat." Yep, it's 170+.

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Nyon#6673 a écrit :

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50ShadesOfAutism#4419 a écrit :

Dude it's all RNG, what effort? lol

And yes, the majority of gameplay mechanics and items should be available to all players. Right now, almost none of the truly end-game stuff is seen by players. Somewhat deterministic crafting, cool uniques that are actually useful, etc. Leave a few for the super nerds, but most (not all!) should be accessible for everyone.

Yep its all rng.
Has nothing to do with how good your build is, how good your farming strategy is, how time effective you are, your knowledge about the game and what to loot and how to craft it and how much to sell it for, etc, etc.

Its just rng. Thats why your struggling while others arent.
Just unlucky... :(

Its a fair point, best to not waste any time trying to improve.

Maybe you will be more "lucky" next league? And if not then you always have plan B. (Plan B = go to forums to complain and write about player retention numbers).

Try playing 2h a day, doing all content cos doing one thing over and over is too boring for normal person and then we will talk about good profit in game.

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Nyon#6673 a écrit :

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50ShadesOfAutism#4419 a écrit :

You sound like Jonathan reading the teleprompter. Sure, the loot is great, the game is next gen arpg nirvana, blah blah blah. Look at the player retention. After the holidays when people go back to school / work and no longer sit in front of their computers with time on their hands, it will only get worse.

Ah yes the classic "have nothing to argue with so time to bring up imaginary player numbers and pretend like I know anything about them".

There is zero point discussing player retention with you when your
A) Obviously clueless on how player retention, game releases or early access works.
B) Just trying to derail the conversation because you have no counter argument.


Being a "casual" has nothing to do with you being able to get currency. Or specificly in this example being able to do vaal temple.

The vaal temple has zero barrier to entry, its farmable in white t1 maps with no downside.
The boss fight isnt a gear check, the boss has low hp so you dont need high dps, its litterally just a skill check.

Its has nothing to do with people being casual and playing less and everything to do with people being bad and refusing to spend time improving and isntead wasting time complaining on a forum.

Retention is the number one metric for any business to stay afloat. Even in my contracting business, gaining new customers costs far more than someone who has already paid me 10k or more calling again and saying, whenever you are slow, just put me on your schedule. It is pretty idiotic to think player retention does not matter.

Either way, GGG sacrificed 10 years of growth for a declining starting player population in both games. Because they know better than the people putting 1000s of hours into their games since closed beta, guess they forgot most of their "trust me bro" decisions got pushed back by the community before Chris left... it would take a couple patches. Still, when they would finally relent, the game got better.

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Moregaze#2933 a écrit :

Retention is the number one metric for any business to stay afloat.

No. Jonathan even addressed this in a recent interview. Retention isn't a metric. Returning to the next league is what they care about. GGG makes money in the first two weeks of the league.

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Nyon#6673 a écrit :

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50ShadesOfAutism#4419 a écrit :

Dude it's all RNG, what effort? lol

And yes, the majority of gameplay mechanics and items should be available to all players. Right now, almost none of the truly end-game stuff is seen by players. Somewhat deterministic crafting, cool uniques that are actually useful, etc. Leave a few for the super nerds, but most (not all!) should be accessible for everyone.

Yep its all rng.
Has nothing to do with how good your build is, how good your farming strategy is, how time effective you are, your knowledge about the game and what to loot and how to craft it and how much to sell it for, etc, etc.

Its just rng. Thats why your struggling while others arent.
Just unlucky... :(

Its a fair point, best to not waste any time trying to improve.

Maybe you will be more "lucky" next league? And if not then you always have plan B. (Plan B = go to forums to complain and write about player retention numbers).

No one is struggling. This ain't Dark Souls. The game is just tedious and boring. Running through these maze like maps, one shotting tens of thousands of mobs with miniscule loot, and for what? So you can buy a new weapon with +10% damage, so now you can slam an extra affix on the map and still clear well? There is no gameplay. The whole endgame is just a movement speed and dps simulator.

The funny thing is that personally I would be fine with simple mapping if the character building was deep and complex. It isn't. PoE2 is not only not Dark Souls, but it ain't Factorio either where you have the insanely deep economy and production as the backbone for fighting the enemies. Here, you just pick dmg and defense nodes on the tree and grind for equipment with more dmg and speed, so you can clear faster and / or can run higher difficulty maps. The game is essentially braindead. The only bottleneck is the time you allocate to grind. That's the game's only real currency. Wasting your time. You can have the best build in your head, but you will still need to put in hundreds of hours of mindless grinding before you can buy a set of nice things to play with.

In case you are not familiar with Factorio, it isn't an arpg at all, but has very simple top view fight mechanics. You are either strong enough to fight the enemies or you aren't. Sure, you can kite and positioning is important, but overall fighting enemies is super basic and is nothing more than a benchmark for your current defenses and firepower (sounds familiar?). But then, in Factorio you are bottlenecked by the factory design you have in your head. If you come up with a better design, you can grow your factory tenfold in just a matter of minutes. PoE2 on the other hand is not a strategy game. It's convoluted, yes, but very shallow. The economy doesn't come from creativity and problem solving, but rather from mindless RNG infested grind.

So the building is dumb. But so is the gameplay. People realize the game has nothing to offer after the campaign and they quit.

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NicknamesOfGod#1810 a écrit :

Like... if you're playing the game casually, which is to say treating it like a game rather than like a second job, why is profit your primary motivation? Surely you should more focused on whether the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun?

Probably due to the horrible crafting system that makes it so that unless you spend time buying or farming 100s of white items, you are unlikely to see an actual upgrade for days' worth of effort. The only way around that is to trade.

At least in PoE1, if I am unlucky, I can craft my way out of it and progress in a short time, and actually get all the mods I want minus one gamble, which is a vieled modifier, and that gear will be good enough for 99.9% of the game. Then I can try the harder crafts later.

But, since the lootagedon via three base rate nerfs since Sentinel, raw divs are always a problem in PoE1. So I have to farm something to sell to get divs instead of playing how I want, which is mostly SSF/Self Crafted, and only using trade for the harder to drop items like exceptional gems and uniques.

Path of Exile 1 & 2 have a massive problem with the experience below the horizontal asymptote. Which is the "lowest" point of the exponential curve the loot is on, primarily due to their insistence on groups being responsible for the vast majority of raw currency liquidity in the trade market (which is why they nerfed Sanctum).

Affliction allowed solo players to experience the game as most groups experienced it, and there is no going back. Seeing the gulf between 1 raw div in an hour or two to the 10-30 raw div an hour strats is really souring both communities. Not saying they should have parity, but the gap can come down quite a bit, and the game would be better for it even if the top end is lowered.

Very few regular gamers are going to like doing something like Heist contract bulk sales or spamming one tileset. ARPGs are about killing monsters and getting loot, but unless the monsters complete a tileset in both games, they are pointless at this point.

They need to address this at some point, or they will continue to lose players. Alters filled the gap for a long time in PoE 1, but they nerfed those twice now, if memory serves.

People don't like to work for free or hoping that the lottery ticket their boss gave them instead of cash is going to win. That is true for work and is also even more true for a hobby.

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50ShadesOfAutism#4419 a écrit :

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Nyon#6673 a écrit :

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Dude it's all RNG, what effort? lol

And yes, the majority of gameplay mechanics and items should be available to all players. Right now, almost none of the truly end-game stuff is seen by players. Somewhat deterministic crafting, cool uniques that are actually useful, etc. Leave a few for the super nerds, but most (not all!) should be accessible for everyone.

Crafting can be somewhat deterministic, with how deterministic depending a lot on the specifics. In some cases you can guarantee that you get for example some chaos resistance.

I would imagine that via the league mechanics, more of partially deterministic crafting methods are going to be added.

SSF players routinely end up with gear that has mostly useful and needed mods by level 90.

I'm not sure what the truly end-game stuff is. If you mean like, Headhunter or Atziri's Disdain or Ingenuity or such, then sure, it's entirely possible to play several leagues with solid builds and solid farming strategies and not see them. For example, right now, out of the 175 characters on poe.ninjas HCSSF list, 5 are wearing Headhunter, compared to 51 out of 652 on the HC list. About three time proportional difference.

But to many builds, those items start to be pretty much the best they can get.

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Hubert#4734 a écrit :

You just need abuse economy or be hideout worrior to make profit. From doing just content you can't get wealthy.

Yes you can.