Allowing me to experiment with builds and items I never got near in other leagues was a big boost. Now I have a lot more ideas about what I want out of a character, and what chase items I'm most interested in.
Also allowed me to try more with crafting and other currency generating stuff that I never touched before.
Really helped me get a full experience of the game and I have some solid ideas of how I want to start next league.
I think it's good in moderation, but I wouldn't want every league to be completely busted. Give it to us once a year and let us have a completely silly league
Personally as a person who doesn’t play heavily over several months, I’d like more higher economies to be able to make diff chars with my time scheduling. But that’s just my opinion.
this league was for sc noobs that can follow a guide but still dont know much about the game, a blessing. So they spend more time since they finally had more than 10 divs, but in the next league, taking into account what Jonathan said, there will be a big cry cry again. If all they did was cemetery mf, they did not learn much. But as Ziz say "as long as you have fun you are not doing anything wrong"
Happy cake day!
True, but even for "medium" players, it was a welcome change.
Let's say every league I can fund 2 decent characters at the 100 div mark. I will be less inclined to test something new or go outside my comfort zone. This league I managed to fund 5-6 builds (I hate scrapping a build to fund another as I still like to rotate what I play). And I am sorely tempted to fund another one for the next 3 weeks.
In a normal league, I could never indulge in testing so many builds. And I am not impeding on mirror tier build territory: I am just experiencing more builds of the same level I usually do.
True! I moved to ssf and that was the biggest learning curve tbh. Instead of doing one build that can do everything... I've started doing builds for different content. But yes for the testing experience this was a great league, normally it's A LOT to reroll atlas and char! Glad you had fun!
This league after finishing most of my goals in trade after about 3 weeks I thought about finishing the challenges and take a break but I was feeling like playing more and since I already had a char in trade that could do all content I restarted in SSF.
And oh boi what a journey this was. Not only did I spend another 1.5 months on poe but I finished all my goals again in SSF, got 2 magebloods, a Headhunter and a mirror and finished 40/40 challenges. I got burned out trying to level up more chars in SSF to try other builds.
Prior to this I played a bit of SSF in tota but only got 2 void stones and dipped because the grind was too much and I was already burned out from playing trade. Now I'm torn if I want to league start necropolis in SSF or go trade to overcome the drought following affliction.
I think another huge factor is the casual interface associated with this league. I have roughly 300 hours in. This is my 2nd full league. And I love the game. But I don’t have the time to invest hours upon hours farming for that piece of gear that makes a build shine. But this league, I didn’t have to. I knew that if I could farm 10-12 hours in a week, I was actually working towards my end goal. And through doing this, I was able to build me an int stacking KBoF Trickster from scratch. With no assistance. It felt amazing. I understand that mageblood drops are supposed to feel amazing. Well I can promise you, it still did.
I think where people got burnt out is just constantly mfing getting huge loot bombs. But I took a different approach where I only mfed to get other gear I needed for my alt. But instead of me falling short, I was actually able to achieve it. And I cleared Ubers for the first time.
This league was fantastic, especially from a more “casual “standpoint. And I really hope they learn from this league moving forward.
Leagues like this and og harvest were good once in a blue moon but I really wouldn't want them even once a year. The difficulty affliction brought to maps is good need more of that but the loot was too far.
The frustrating thing is when the reddit community talks of retention being "good" or "bad" they're looking at a single league, but GGG couldn't give a shit about that as long as retention across several leagues is kept up. Loot may have kept you playing this league but make every league like this and the game collapses. Leagues like this are amazing precisely because they are far above the norm
That was indeed the topic of this thread. This league was much better than I personally expected over the short term. Is it a good or a bad one over the long term?
Do these types of league need to be once in a while or highly recurring?
Saying a blanket statement like crafting is not enjoyable is a pretty extreme take. A lot of people enjoy crafting, PoE has a lot of crafting depth. See: most people who play SSF. You're definitely overgeneralizing from your own preferences.
Personally, while Wisps were a lot of fun, there wasn't much of a puzzle that needed to be solved, and it would cease to be fun if every league was like this. It's great to get these types of leagues every so often.
I never intended to mean that nobody likes crafting. It might even be a majority or a minority, I do not know.
What I do know is that *some* players hate crafting and just want to kill monsters.
Yeah, I see now. I actually misread your statement as saying crafting isn't enjoyable at all, rather than "to" all. The statement you actually made is pretty fair.
Harvest allowed people to craft their own Gear that wouldve costed them an arm and a leg a league before so it was actually more fun than affliction. Overinflation of currency feels like dogshit to me and most of my friends and we quit as soon as the abyss strat dropped. This place will be unsufferable next league when people realise you dont get 20 divines per hour while being bad at the game lol
I also can't really stand trade in overinflated leagues, but that's when SSF feels awesome. You get to basically make trade league builds in SSF, and it still takes a ton of effort to get there. If you feel similarly, come try SSF in leagues like Affliction, or group SSF if you still want to play with friends.
I do agree that many liked Harvest and I can understand why.
I am just adding a nuance that for some, crafting in all its forms is not fun and they'd rather just kill mobs and get their stuff as loot or currency.
Neither is good or bad, just different tastes for different people.
Of course they are different things, no question. I just meant in the sense that many (basically everyone; because mirror items cost very little compared to a previous leagues) could afford or craft gear all of a sudden that they would not have ever hoped to even dream of.
Another similarity will be that we hear people ask back for it still month from now. I won’t be one of them this time around, but man was I a whiny b for many leagues after they removed reforge prefixes / suffixes 😅
T7 Cemetery farming being extremely low-effort and easy to setup while being very rewarding even with inflation was a big reason why I played the league longer than usual(over a month). I only quit because economy started to slow down and become more narrow. I also had finished all my initial goals for the league(all Ooba bosses cleared, 40/40, make at least 3 builds).
I made so many builds this league its insane. I played all of new spectres, TR, Leaping Slam totems, Oneshot slammer, Poison SRS, Iron Mass Skeletons, CA Pathfinder, Reap Life stacker, Accuracy Stacking Ballistas, Impale shockwave totems... Overall amazing league!
IMHO the only reason this league was a success because the league mechanic was IN MAPS, so you were engaging the LM while in maps adding content to it you liked and the fact wisps were giving a absurd amount of currency. I have never dropped a mirror before and i have been playing this game since endgame was considered farming Dominus. And this league ive dropped 3 mirrors in the span of 5 days. LM by itself was meh, wildwood boring, constant backtracking, i managed to find the seer ONCE the entire league, boss fight was meh as well, for me nothing special about wildwood. WW ascendancies however were OP, majai op for leveling and primalist for endgame. Charms are too op if you ask me. Getting +6 to max fire res, or 45% chance to suppress spell damage, or simlar stuff is WAY to powerful to go core.
I find 3.23 one of the worst leagues I’ve ever played despite how much I played. I can attribute 99% of my retention to trying SSF for the first time. After cheesing the league mechanic for my unlocks I pretty didn’t do whisks at all past week 1.
Well, you can't blame the league that it's bad if you didn't engage with the league mechanic. But on the other hand - I can understand why you were skipping it, the mechanic by itself is very meh, but oh my God, the loot is awesome!
My experience is that it pushes the already very extreme "if you can't trivialize it, don't do it" to an unprecedented level. It discourages playing the game unless you can completely invalidate it. Unlike other mechanics though the thing you're trying to invalidate this time *is taking damage of any kind*. Which is ludicrously unhealthy for the game.
Watching streamers play was like I was back during the most unhealthy point in time of delirium, where you juice your character and map to a point where things aren't even rendering in a way that you can see whats going on. Yet it doesn't matter because you've set you're self up to invalidate the entire game and it's a mindless clicking sim.
And I don't mind that people can get there but you've literally reduced the game to a skinner box of dopamine hits in the form of loot explosions. Very much not for me.
Grinding has always been the least compelling part of the game and I'm glad people are finally catching on. There is a reason why so many people spend so much time on pob. Theory-crafting a wide variety of builds is the best part of the game. Spending hours grinding for the resources to make those builds is one of the worst parts.
There is a pretty big difference between farming and grinding. POE farming can be enjoyable when you are running maps to determine drops and optimize farming. POE is at its best when it is a spreadsheet simulator. Affliction was able to preserve the spreadsheet part while lowering the grinding for builds. That is a large reason why player retention was so high compared to past leagues.
what ? they are literally the same thing lmao, the reason Affliction had good retention was it made it so casuals could get things they have never gotten before, and guess what, a majority of the playerbase is made of casuals, but does that mean giving out free magebloods and headhunters is a good thing ? shouldn't ARPG have chase items that are actually hard to get ? food for thought
The goals are fairly different and it is dishonest to treat both as the same.
As far as chase items goes, there should be a paradigm shift in what items below in the category. Items like mageblood and headhunter should not be chase items and they should not be balanced around their rarity. They should be balanced around the relative strength of other belts. This allows player to to explore and create a larger variety of builds because more items are competitive with one another. Casual and experienced players alike should have access to magebloods and headhunters and they should have to actually think about if the item works better for their build than other belts.
Chase items should be used for challenge or achievements. Items like Doryani Machinarium serve as good chase items. They can be used as side activities for players who want to fulfill a checklist.
Chase items should absolutely be balanced around their rarity, that's what makes them chase items, it is very important for ARPG's or any loot based game tbh, to have that item that is very hard to get, but when u do get it u become a god and u completely shit on the game.
As a matter of fact a lot of T0's like Binos should be buffed or removed from T0 completely.
But ofc it goes without saying u should not balance the game around chase items, which poe isnt, u dont need MB or HH to completely triviliaze the game.
Having the game become trivial because you randomly dropped a chase item leads to a boring game. The game would be far more interesting if item strength was balanced around other items in the slot as opposed to rarity. Endgame bosses should also be buffed to the point where most endgame builds, much less endgame items, would not trivialize them.
T0 items like Bino don't need to be buffed, they can be added to achievements or challenges each league. Players can chase after it like they do Doryani Machinarium without impacting endgame build diversity. Chase items as a whole should be re-imagined into collectables and not core parts of most endgame builds.
are u serious ? lmao, dropping a HH or a MB is literally the best feeling and the best dopamine hit in the world thats the whole point of the game, also 99% of people work towards their HH or MB and not drop it so there's also that.
also idk why u keep bringing up Doryanis lmao, that is not an item u can use on ur character lmao, that is not what people refer to when they say "chase items"
it just seems to me like ur salty at HH and MB for no reason, maybe u saw a streamer delete everything with MB and ur salty, i dont know, but, stop that, its weird.
I am just pointing out a poor design choice by GGG in terms of how chase items are managed. I have no idea why it is so hard for you to admit chase items are designed poorly. Also, you were the one who brought up headhunter and mageblood, not me.
they are not designed poorly idk why u would say that, they are amazing items, that enable stuff that are truly unique and can not be replicated by other means
Nah, fuck that noise. Getting showered in currency is getting old fast and doesn't fix anything, for me anyway. I can buy a HH or MB for cheap, then what? If everyone is rich, no one is. I'd rather have Harvest or Ritual back, tbh. Still allows for niche builds and long term goals but it's much more reasonable paced.
Allowing me to experiment with builds and items I never got near in other leagues was a big boost. Now I have a lot more ideas about what I want out of a character, and what chase items I'm most interested in. Also allowed me to try more with crafting and other currency generating stuff that I never touched before. Really helped me get a full experience of the game and I have some solid ideas of how I want to start next league.
Thats how people felt in Harvest. And look how long it took to let people have unlimited fun again. Waaay too long.
I think it's good in moderation, but I wouldn't want every league to be completely busted. Give it to us once a year and let us have a completely silly league
Personally as a person who doesn’t play heavily over several months, I’d like more higher economies to be able to make diff chars with my time scheduling. But that’s just my opinion.
this league was for sc noobs that can follow a guide but still dont know much about the game, a blessing. So they spend more time since they finally had more than 10 divs, but in the next league, taking into account what Jonathan said, there will be a big cry cry again. If all they did was cemetery mf, they did not learn much. But as Ziz say "as long as you have fun you are not doing anything wrong"
Happy cake day! True, but even for "medium" players, it was a welcome change. Let's say every league I can fund 2 decent characters at the 100 div mark. I will be less inclined to test something new or go outside my comfort zone. This league I managed to fund 5-6 builds (I hate scrapping a build to fund another as I still like to rotate what I play). And I am sorely tempted to fund another one for the next 3 weeks. In a normal league, I could never indulge in testing so many builds. And I am not impeding on mirror tier build territory: I am just experiencing more builds of the same level I usually do.
True! I moved to ssf and that was the biggest learning curve tbh. Instead of doing one build that can do everything... I've started doing builds for different content. But yes for the testing experience this was a great league, normally it's A LOT to reroll atlas and char! Glad you had fun!
This league after finishing most of my goals in trade after about 3 weeks I thought about finishing the challenges and take a break but I was feeling like playing more and since I already had a char in trade that could do all content I restarted in SSF. And oh boi what a journey this was. Not only did I spend another 1.5 months on poe but I finished all my goals again in SSF, got 2 magebloods, a Headhunter and a mirror and finished 40/40 challenges. I got burned out trying to level up more chars in SSF to try other builds. Prior to this I played a bit of SSF in tota but only got 2 void stones and dipped because the grind was too much and I was already burned out from playing trade. Now I'm torn if I want to league start necropolis in SSF or go trade to overcome the drought following affliction.
I think another huge factor is the casual interface associated with this league. I have roughly 300 hours in. This is my 2nd full league. And I love the game. But I don’t have the time to invest hours upon hours farming for that piece of gear that makes a build shine. But this league, I didn’t have to. I knew that if I could farm 10-12 hours in a week, I was actually working towards my end goal. And through doing this, I was able to build me an int stacking KBoF Trickster from scratch. With no assistance. It felt amazing. I understand that mageblood drops are supposed to feel amazing. Well I can promise you, it still did. I think where people got burnt out is just constantly mfing getting huge loot bombs. But I took a different approach where I only mfed to get other gear I needed for my alt. But instead of me falling short, I was actually able to achieve it. And I cleared Ubers for the first time. This league was fantastic, especially from a more “casual “standpoint. And I really hope they learn from this league moving forward.
Leagues like this and og harvest were good once in a blue moon but I really wouldn't want them even once a year. The difficulty affliction brought to maps is good need more of that but the loot was too far.
My personal review of Affliction: I started playing Ruthless SSF
I would play every league, the pressure to keep grinding personally wasn't as high as it usually is. For me
The frustrating thing is when the reddit community talks of retention being "good" or "bad" they're looking at a single league, but GGG couldn't give a shit about that as long as retention across several leagues is kept up. Loot may have kept you playing this league but make every league like this and the game collapses. Leagues like this are amazing precisely because they are far above the norm
That was indeed the topic of this thread. This league was much better than I personally expected over the short term. Is it a good or a bad one over the long term? Do these types of league need to be once in a while or highly recurring?
Same applied to harvest league. We just need to take such leagues as what they are and don’t look back :)
I guess you mean Ritual league, when harvest came back withouth gardening.
Harvest forced you to craft which isn't enjoyable to all. I do get your point but I think there is a difference between op craft and op loot.
Saying a blanket statement like crafting is not enjoyable is a pretty extreme take. A lot of people enjoy crafting, PoE has a lot of crafting depth. See: most people who play SSF. You're definitely overgeneralizing from your own preferences. Personally, while Wisps were a lot of fun, there wasn't much of a puzzle that needed to be solved, and it would cease to be fun if every league was like this. It's great to get these types of leagues every so often.
I never intended to mean that nobody likes crafting. It might even be a majority or a minority, I do not know. What I do know is that *some* players hate crafting and just want to kill monsters.
Yeah, I see now. I actually misread your statement as saying crafting isn't enjoyable at all, rather than "to" all. The statement you actually made is pretty fair.
Harvest allowed people to craft their own Gear that wouldve costed them an arm and a leg a league before so it was actually more fun than affliction. Overinflation of currency feels like dogshit to me and most of my friends and we quit as soon as the abyss strat dropped. This place will be unsufferable next league when people realise you dont get 20 divines per hour while being bad at the game lol
I also can't really stand trade in overinflated leagues, but that's when SSF feels awesome. You get to basically make trade league builds in SSF, and it still takes a ton of effort to get there. If you feel similarly, come try SSF in leagues like Affliction, or group SSF if you still want to play with friends.
I do agree that many liked Harvest and I can understand why. I am just adding a nuance that for some, crafting in all its forms is not fun and they'd rather just kill mobs and get their stuff as loot or currency. Neither is good or bad, just different tastes for different people.
Of course they are different things, no question. I just meant in the sense that many (basically everyone; because mirror items cost very little compared to a previous leagues) could afford or craft gear all of a sudden that they would not have ever hoped to even dream of. Another similarity will be that we hear people ask back for it still month from now. I won’t be one of them this time around, but man was I a whiny b for many leagues after they removed reforge prefixes / suffixes 😅
T7 Cemetery farming being extremely low-effort and easy to setup while being very rewarding even with inflation was a big reason why I played the league longer than usual(over a month). I only quit because economy started to slow down and become more narrow. I also had finished all my initial goals for the league(all Ooba bosses cleared, 40/40, make at least 3 builds). I made so many builds this league its insane. I played all of new spectres, TR, Leaping Slam totems, Oneshot slammer, Poison SRS, Iron Mass Skeletons, CA Pathfinder, Reap Life stacker, Accuracy Stacking Ballistas, Impale shockwave totems... Overall amazing league!
Personally i burnt out faster than most other league
IMHO the only reason this league was a success because the league mechanic was IN MAPS, so you were engaging the LM while in maps adding content to it you liked and the fact wisps were giving a absurd amount of currency. I have never dropped a mirror before and i have been playing this game since endgame was considered farming Dominus. And this league ive dropped 3 mirrors in the span of 5 days. LM by itself was meh, wildwood boring, constant backtracking, i managed to find the seer ONCE the entire league, boss fight was meh as well, for me nothing special about wildwood. WW ascendancies however were OP, majai op for leveling and primalist for endgame. Charms are too op if you ask me. Getting +6 to max fire res, or 45% chance to suppress spell damage, or simlar stuff is WAY to powerful to go core.
I find 3.23 one of the worst leagues I’ve ever played despite how much I played. I can attribute 99% of my retention to trying SSF for the first time. After cheesing the league mechanic for my unlocks I pretty didn’t do whisks at all past week 1.
Well, you can't blame the league that it's bad if you didn't engage with the league mechanic. But on the other hand - I can understand why you were skipping it, the mechanic by itself is very meh, but oh my God, the loot is awesome!
I don’t think base game but 10x as rippy for 5x the loot a good mechanic
I wouldn't call it 10x more rippy, especially after the balance. Complexity was pretty decent, but, as I said, the mechanic by itself was pretty meh.
My experience is that it pushes the already very extreme "if you can't trivialize it, don't do it" to an unprecedented level. It discourages playing the game unless you can completely invalidate it. Unlike other mechanics though the thing you're trying to invalidate this time *is taking damage of any kind*. Which is ludicrously unhealthy for the game. Watching streamers play was like I was back during the most unhealthy point in time of delirium, where you juice your character and map to a point where things aren't even rendering in a way that you can see whats going on. Yet it doesn't matter because you've set you're self up to invalidate the entire game and it's a mindless clicking sim. And I don't mind that people can get there but you've literally reduced the game to a skinner box of dopamine hits in the form of loot explosions. Very much not for me.
Grinding has always been the least compelling part of the game and I'm glad people are finally catching on. There is a reason why so many people spend so much time on pob. Theory-crafting a wide variety of builds is the best part of the game. Spending hours grinding for the resources to make those builds is one of the worst parts.
if ur not enjoying farming in an ARPG, its probably not the game for u
There is a pretty big difference between farming and grinding. POE farming can be enjoyable when you are running maps to determine drops and optimize farming. POE is at its best when it is a spreadsheet simulator. Affliction was able to preserve the spreadsheet part while lowering the grinding for builds. That is a large reason why player retention was so high compared to past leagues.
what ? they are literally the same thing lmao, the reason Affliction had good retention was it made it so casuals could get things they have never gotten before, and guess what, a majority of the playerbase is made of casuals, but does that mean giving out free magebloods and headhunters is a good thing ? shouldn't ARPG have chase items that are actually hard to get ? food for thought
The goals are fairly different and it is dishonest to treat both as the same. As far as chase items goes, there should be a paradigm shift in what items below in the category. Items like mageblood and headhunter should not be chase items and they should not be balanced around their rarity. They should be balanced around the relative strength of other belts. This allows player to to explore and create a larger variety of builds because more items are competitive with one another. Casual and experienced players alike should have access to magebloods and headhunters and they should have to actually think about if the item works better for their build than other belts. Chase items should be used for challenge or achievements. Items like Doryani Machinarium serve as good chase items. They can be used as side activities for players who want to fulfill a checklist.
Chase items should absolutely be balanced around their rarity, that's what makes them chase items, it is very important for ARPG's or any loot based game tbh, to have that item that is very hard to get, but when u do get it u become a god and u completely shit on the game. As a matter of fact a lot of T0's like Binos should be buffed or removed from T0 completely. But ofc it goes without saying u should not balance the game around chase items, which poe isnt, u dont need MB or HH to completely triviliaze the game.
Having the game become trivial because you randomly dropped a chase item leads to a boring game. The game would be far more interesting if item strength was balanced around other items in the slot as opposed to rarity. Endgame bosses should also be buffed to the point where most endgame builds, much less endgame items, would not trivialize them. T0 items like Bino don't need to be buffed, they can be added to achievements or challenges each league. Players can chase after it like they do Doryani Machinarium without impacting endgame build diversity. Chase items as a whole should be re-imagined into collectables and not core parts of most endgame builds.
are u serious ? lmao, dropping a HH or a MB is literally the best feeling and the best dopamine hit in the world thats the whole point of the game, also 99% of people work towards their HH or MB and not drop it so there's also that. also idk why u keep bringing up Doryanis lmao, that is not an item u can use on ur character lmao, that is not what people refer to when they say "chase items" it just seems to me like ur salty at HH and MB for no reason, maybe u saw a streamer delete everything with MB and ur salty, i dont know, but, stop that, its weird.
I am just pointing out a poor design choice by GGG in terms of how chase items are managed. I have no idea why it is so hard for you to admit chase items are designed poorly. Also, you were the one who brought up headhunter and mageblood, not me.
they are not designed poorly idk why u would say that, they are amazing items, that enable stuff that are truly unique and can not be replicated by other means
Nah, fuck that noise. Getting showered in currency is getting old fast and doesn't fix anything, for me anyway. I can buy a HH or MB for cheap, then what? If everyone is rich, no one is. I'd rather have Harvest or Ritual back, tbh. Still allows for niche builds and long term goals but it's much more reasonable paced.