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[Sordid]

The reason why its always online is the hub area where other plays move around. You can see them having shiny things, and as that is their only income and actually in game marketing to make you also look at other character and buy cosmetics.

Okay, that does make a certain amount of sense, though not entirely. If it's just a matter of seeing others having shiny things, surely it wouldn't be difficult to program a bunch of bots to run around town and show them off in offline mode. I suspect it's also a question of making you want to have shiny things so that they can be seen and admired by others, in which case the bots wouldn't work. The flaw in that reasoning, in my mind, is that if I'm a solo player, I don't give a damn about others in the first place. In that case if I buy shiny things at all, it's because I want to look pretty to myself, and then the aforementioned bots would work fine to motivate me to purchase. Not to mention that I'd be willing to actually pay for the game, like I said, precisely to have these revenue-generating measures waived. I think GGG should rethink their business model a bit. Thanks for explaining, though. At least now I know what the reasoning behind it is, even if I don't agree with it.

Than there is again economy :"Path of Exile’s economy is the most important element of the game to us. It’s why we designed it to be played exclusively online"

Didn't Diablo 2 solve this issue more than ten years ago? IIRC you could make a battle.net-based character and participate in the economy or a local character for playing offline or over LAN. Again I feel GGG haven't quite thought this through. Or even looked at how it'd been tackled previously.

Agree about your other point that if you play alone they can have some thing done on local (actually, that should be done no matter if you play alone or in group). But you know what they will say, you can have map hack and cheat easier if its done on local (and that is true in a way).

That's probably true. I've never been a fan of this kind of carpet-bombing approach to misconduct prevention, though. Better to punish cheaters than limit and annoy everybody because somebody might cheat, IMO.

[Aklyon]

Last i'd heard D2 was overflowing with hacked items despite its 'solved problem', but then again it is rather old. They've had quite a long time to do that sort of thing.

[boki]

Didn't Diablo 2 solve this issue more than ten years ago? IIRC you could make a battle.net-based character and participate in the economy or a local character for playing offline or over LAN. Again I feel GGG haven't quite thought this through. Or even looked at how it'd been tackled previously.

D2 was never designed with a working economy in the first place (PoE is actually the only arpg game i know that is from ground up designed to have a somewhat working economy and huge focus and balance around it, d3 was on beginning in a way but they changed it later). D2 economy is something that people made it them self with rune trading and similar. You could very easy farm and get a lot of highest level item uniques and sets that made the content in game easy. Blizzard changed that a little later when they added ubers so you need to farm for rune words so you can have some chance against them (it similar to atziri in PoE). But that is when a lot of dupes helped with that so people could get it easier.

That's probably true. I've never been a fan of this kind of carpet-bombing approach to misconduct prevention, though. Better to punish cheaters than limit and annoy everybody because somebody might cheat, IMO.

Yea, its like DRM for cheaters. All people are punished with the "DRM" so its harder for cheaters to cheat. I would much more prefer that they invested in cheat detection more than hurting the game play it self.

[nenjin]

And just what exactly is your definition of "actually playing the game", pray tell? How many hundreds of hours have you had to farm before you were strong enough to take on Merciless Dominus?

Maybe 16 hours of actual farming (i.e. finding the easiest, least threatening area to farm.) The rest of my time was spent methodically going through the whole game, every area and flinching away from nothing.

[Aklyon]

You know, a offline SP version would be nice, I'm not gonna argue against that. Most ARPGs seem to be based on singleplayer. But I've never thought of the onlineness as drm, since some games just are online games. Not in the way that AAA titles try to put it (the blatantly DRM method that backfires constantly as in Simcity, or in a less major-publisher way the way trendy has dungeon defenders eternity setup, with the new balancing and other things hidden behind servers that don't exactly hold up), it just is an online thing.

Don't mind me though, continue with whatever economic or desync-related argument boki has going.

[Sordid]

Didn't Diablo 2 solve this issue more than ten years ago? IIRC you could make a battle.net-based character and participate in the economy or a local character for playing offline or over LAN. Again I feel GGG haven't quite thought this through. Or even looked at how it'd been tackled previously.

D2 was never designed with a working economy in the first place (PoE is actually the only arpg game i know that is from ground up designed to have a somewhat working economy and huge focus and balance around it, d3 was on beginning in a way but they changed it later). D2 economy is something that people made it them self with rune trading and similar. You could very easy farm and get a lot of highest level item uniques and sets that made the content in game easy. Blizzard changed that a little later when they added ubers so you need to farm for rune words so you can have some chance against them (it similar to atziri in PoE). But that is when a lot of dupes helped with that so people could get it easier.

Well yes, but my point was that if the reason for the always-on thing was to protect the economy, giving people a completely separate offline version wouldn't compromise that because the offline version couldn't interact with the economy at all.
Though I do agree that D2 wasn't designed with an economy in mind in the first place and the rampant cheating didn't exactly help.

You know, a offline SP version would be nice, I'm not gonna argue against that. Most ARPGs seem to be based on singleplayer. But I've never thought of the onlineness as drm, since some games just are online games. Not in the way that AAA titles try to put it (the blatantly DRM method that backfires constantly as in Simcity, or in a less major-publisher way the way trendy has dungeon defenders eternity setup, with the new balancing and other things hidden behind servers that don't exactly hold up), it just is an online thing.

I disagree with that. Dark Souls, that is an online thing with its invasions and messages and ghosts and all that stuff. The quality of your experience is diminished if you play it offline. Not so with PoE. PoE doesn't have any of that, it's just an ordinary singleplayer/multiplayer ARPG that forces you to play online for no reason even when you're playing alone. It has no mechanics whatsoever that take advantage of being constantly online. As a solo player you wouldn't even know it's being played online if it weren't for the constant desync problems. The quality of your experience would not only not be any worse if you could play it offline, it would actually be increased. I think it's a damn shame that a game where the online aspect actually contributes significantly to the experience still allows you to play offline if you want, while a game where the online component serves as nothing but a detriment doesn't. One of these games is doing it wrong, IMO.

[Mono124]

While it does kind of suck that it is based on RNG, I still love POE's crafting system. Rather than simply upgrading my armor every 4 levels, I upgrade every 10 or 11 levels and stack up orbs so I can actually create the gear I need. If I craft all my new armor into +20% quality rares that add armor and resistances, as well as have enough slots and fused slots to use my skills, I don't need to upgrade for another 10-15 levels anyway, or until I start actually noticing I'm being roflstomped. Sure the currency system is a bit strange, but if you know vendor recipes you can easily make almost all of the orbs you will use throughout the game (not including really late endgame when high value orbs are useful). Every time I level on any of my characters, I go to each town and buy items for a few scrolls that will net me a chromatic, or jewelers orbs, or possibly even a divine. Generally I net around 6 chromatics every time I level, and if you just pick up pretty much every blue item you find and sell it, you can boil those orbs down into fusings. While chaos orbs are the standard trading currency, and maybe I've just been lucky, it seems much easier to just find a bunch of alcs and use them along with scouring orbs when chaos orbs are in short supply... or just trade that div you aren't going to be using for another 30 levels and get a ton of other orbs.

[DemonOfWrath]

To move discussion on to something different, in the past 5(?) or so months since I last had a go at the game has the balance started shifting away from being designed away from screwing over ranged and/or squishy characters? Love the game, played it a lot but I just can't bring myself to play it again since my preferred playstyle is basically intended to not be viable.

Before anyone jumps on me for that comment (I don't expect people to here, but I know for a fact if I said that on the official forums I'd be instantly dogpiled), my main character has been each time I've played a full glass-cannon fireball witch (hey, it's fun). Started in closed beta, had no real problems with that build once I'd played it a lot and I was probably the only high-ish level person doing such a thing, certainly the only one without minion totems (I used dual shock nova totems of all things, required some damn good positioning to use well). Running maps was a matter of knowing how to position, how to place totems correctly, how to advance safely, how to utilise all my spells and where one slip meant dead. And that's not counting some absurd things I ran across (flicker strike map boss that could 1-shot me was hilarious, I managed to kill him only dying once but that was damn hard). Wasn't easy, but enough experience meant I got good at doing all of that and eventually I could do most stuff without too much worry.

Skip forward ages to about when act 3X came out and I figure I'll jump into the game again (starting from scratch, same-ish build but I had to relent to skele totem since dual was no longer possible, thus my previous strategy was rendered invalid) and the shift in design was damn obvious. Non-expansion act 3 wasn't bad at all in that regard actually, Piety took a few goes before I figured out how to do her safely but overall it was fine. Act 3X and some of the new maps? That shit got rediculous. The new maps weren't that bad, except for boss areas full of mobs that you have to take a portal to, so it's basically a check of "can you survive being dropped into the middle of 20-ish enemies" which for a character designed to kite and not take hits means dead. But whatever, I can trade bad maps away, fine.

The real problem is a bunch of enemies introduced that force you to be in melee range (no, being a ranged character is not fun when you run into the bubble guys, it simply isn't) and others that punish you for trying to take the style of avoiding being hit rather than tanking the damage. The prime example of both of these being Dominus, the worst-designed fight I've ever seen because his final form is basically "you stand within my melee range or die in 2 seconds, btw my minions will swarm you as well and you can't run away from them this time because of blood rain". Like ugh, the only way I could beat that fight solo was to drag him down the stairs to the arena entrance by dying repeatedly, and then distract him to face the other way from you so I could actually attack without being swarmed from all directions.

That... was much rantier than I meant to make it, sorry, but I was pretty upset to see the balance with regards to character builds go so heavily towards "be tanky and melee or go away", when it didn't used to be anything like that.

[Jack_Bread]

Personally, I've never had an issue with creepy bunny Dominus. I've played a lot of different builds, melee and range, and he's a pushover in his second form for me usually. My builds usually fail horribly in Merc, too. It's first form Dominus that usually murders me repeatedly.

[nenjin]

*snip*

While I haven't played in a while, I will say: try playing melee. It is no cake walk. Exiles will make you wish you were never born, and some fights you're basically forced to eat multiple deaths to whittle a boss down because you can't DPS for shit while moving.

[DemonOfWrath]

I have tried melee as well. It obviously has its own difficulties but it's not being actively pushed out the way the opposite is from my experience. Honestly I always found the bosses to be pretty easy even as a sub-optimal melee char (ie building to try and abuse righteous fire before getting anywhere near enough stuff to actually use it so I have a lot of life regen and hp and that's about it). Long as you know about the boss' abilities that is.

I'd rather eat deaths because I'm figuring out when I can get hits in than eat deaths because an encounter is designed to be nigh-impossible for the archetype I want to play.

[Aklyon]

Honestly, I've had more difficulty trying to play melee than ranged, unless you count Molten Strike. (that is a pretty nifty skill there.)
But that might just be me being terrible at melee in this game, since as far as i know, the problem has always been tankiness, not necessarily ranged vs melee. Thats why there was much excite in the Fosaken masters reveal thread when it was explained there was less life nodes in that bit we could see of the new tree because there would be more life per level; which means less path of life nodes and more important things.

[kcwong]

I'm a bit disappointed by the fusing change.

1. It's tied to one of the Masters
2. You need to level him up to max to use the recipe
3. The level up process was described as a "multi-year" grind by Chris
4. It costs you 1500 fusings

I had hoped it would be based on how many fusings you've already applied, slowly increasing the odds. Instead we have this.

1. Path of Trading
2. It will take a player with other responsibilities (or other games to play) a very very long time to get 1500 fusings.

I'd like to keep trading to a minimum. ROLE PLAY! We are exiles on a very hostile island, we don't do window shopping all day, darn it.

Well, at least a Tabula Rasa dropped for me a few days ago - my first and only 6L.

[Jack_Bread]

3. The level up process was described as a "multi-year" grind by Chris

What? Can you source that? That seems a bit ludicrous.

[kcwong]

3. The level up process was described as a "multi-year" grind by Chris

What? Can you source that? That seems a bit ludicrous.

Doh! I read it incorrectly. Chris said it isn't meant to be a multiyear grind; it's a challenge in 3-months leagues. So I guess access to the recipe is no problem; it's just the 1500 fusings.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/985838 (search for the word "grind")