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[nenjin]

This is probably the fastest build in the game too, so I can't imagine how it feels to do on something less minmaxed for xp/h.

In a word: Sisyphean. But when you play SSF a little bit at a time throughout the year in the same league, I dunno, there's never any end to content I haven't seen.

[nenjin]

So Tencent has bought an 80% controlling share in Path of Exile.

Chris Wilson assures fans that nothing will change, that Tencent won't meddle in the development of PoE.

He might even be right. But as one youtuber commented: "Will players change how they choose to support PoE since they know the money is no longer going to a small indie dev team, but to the largest multinational media, tech and game company in the world?"

For me, with my level of involvement with PoE, this isn't a big deal. But I can easily see people who have invested deeply in PoE feeling that GGG has sold out, and traded in their independence for a big fat payday. It might also lend credence to the belief that Wilson and team may try moving on to a different game, leaving PoE with a maintenance staff and a few people to dev new content.

Time will tell I guess. I've played PoE for a long time, so if suddenly went down the Chinese P2W microtransaction shitter or something, I'd live.

[Jopax]

It's a total takeover tho, the last 20% will be transfered to tencent over the next several years iirc.

As far as possible buyers go, tencent is probably one of the better ones if you look at their other titles since they mostly fuck about with the chinese version while leaving the western one in pretty good dev control (biggest example of this would be LoL, which has one of the better F2P models out there).

Still, the hardcore backers have been alienated by this, not sure what they'll do without their regular core of supporters buying several hundred dollar packs on a regular basis. And I think it's pretty obvious they'll be doing another game in the near future, PoE is rather old and bloated at this point, starting fresh with everything they've learned over its dev cycle would be the smart thing to do, tho I doubt they'd just up and stop supporting it out of the blue, or anytime soon.

Anyways, incursion is live, get to mass murdering those vaal builders folks

[Aoi]

As far as possible buyers go, tencent is probably one of the better ones if you look at their other titles since they mostly fuck about with the chinese version while leaving the western one in pretty good dev control (biggest example of this would be LoL, which has one of the better F2P models out there).

I find that to be a rather interesting assessment, from a non-LoL person... For a while, PoE chat was filled with people talking about how it'll go straight downhill like LoL did, once Tencent acquired it.

[Retropunch]

From what I understand, LoL went from being a 'casual' game where you could enjoy it by just putting a few hours in, to a game which was all around hardcore league play (which is most popular in China). They also made champions a lot more expensive, which meant a lot longer to grind for them/more people just buying them.

I'm not a LoL fan so I don't know how annoying/awful that was, but I do know that PoE is a completely different beast, and I can't imagine they can make it any less casual than it already is. I also doubt - very strongly - they'll mess around with the microtransactions and make them have anything other than a cosmetic impact, as it's at the core of PoEs model. It'd wreck the economy if they started allowing people to buy stuff, and I'm sure they'd know that going in.

All that being said, I can imagine they might focus ongoing development around PvP as that's their main thing. I can see them making ranked PvP a big thing, and trying to e-sports it a bit. I can't imagine it'd impact on the main game too much, but it might change the focus of development away from solo play stuff.

[Jopax]

I mean, I've played LoL for years, not sure when tencent exactly aquired it but I haven't really noticed major changes in their monetization, the lootbox stuff was fairly recent and I wouldn't say it was something pushed solely by tencent, more like following what everyone else was doing in the industry at the time, and even then it wasn't all that horrible or anti-consumer for the most part since the way you could buy champions/skins outright didn't really change in that case.

ninja edit:

They haven't really jacked the prices of champions as much as they've made the IP (or whatever it's called now) gains a bit less consistent, which was mitigated by chances of getting champion shards from the boxes which would make getting a particular champion way cheaper. So it became less consistent and a bit gamblier but overall the grind was mostly the same. They also enabled getting skins and shit for free trough the same system which was cool.

Also I wouldn't say it got anymore competitive, maybe the ranked play, but that was always a cesspit of idiots taking the whole thing way too seriously and personally. Nothing stopping folks from playing the more relaxed unranked mode afaik.

[nenjin]

Well if GGG did move on to something else, I'm pretty sure the quality of regular league content would decline. (Depending on who you ask, maybe that's not possible )

But leagues are the meat and potatoes of PoE. If they started suffering do a change of focus and resources for GGG, I think it would have direct impact on PoE's continued popularity.

[Retropunch]

Well if GGG did move on to something else, I'm pretty sure the quality of regular league content would decline. (Depending on who you ask, maybe that's not possible )

But leagues are the meat and potatoes of PoE. If they started suffering do a change of focus and resources for GGG, I think it would have direct impact on PoE's continued popularity.

I agree to a point, but I think leagues are mostly important for long term players - which is important overall, but there's a hell of a lot of content (like an insane amount) for those coming to it fresh/who aren't hardcore fans.

However, I would very much imagine that they'll combine leagues with more PvP focused play. It would be an easy (and pretty obvious) move to have a sort of Dark Souls type invasion of other players as a league. Add to that a bit of ranking, and it'd get in a whole host of new players that are interested in ganking.

[nenjin]

RANKIN 'N GANKIN.

[Jopax]

Yeah, that'd be a surefire way to get most of the playerbase to skip that league.

PoE already has (albeit poorly implemented) PvP that's barely played by anyone, forcing something similar on the rest of the playerbase would be a bad idea.

[Rex_Nex]

Incursion is almost certainly going to be seen as the best PoE league to date; it's fun, rewarding, challenging, a change of pace, and while there's some crashing issues, the league as a whole is the most stable in memory. I'm hoping we see a bit more content in the way of new rooms added mid-league, but I can't complain either way. The only thing I dislike is navigating the final temple - having only a fullscreen map to navigate such a large area with is a bit frustrating.

I'm really curious whether or not they plan on keeping the mechanic around after the league. The norm would be to add it in its entirely and reduce the spawn chance from every zone to every 10 zones or so, but I don't think the mechanic would work at all after that. Having to go 110 maps on average to open a single temple would make the entire system unusable, but you can't reduce the number of incursions required or players won't have any chance to modify the temple.

[Jopax]

While I agree that the league is brilliant (you could easily build an entire game around these mechanics I think) they went a bit too far with the rewards. In terms of profitability it outclasses pretty much everything else we have in the game. Sure it takes a bit longer to setup but being able to get league specific uniques, tons of currency, quality gems, div cards, maps and really strong rares all from a single run and in good quantities will mess with the game economy in the long run imo.

So if they want to introduce it to the core game they'll probably have to cut the returns from it quite a bit (which is fine imo, as long as the t3 rooms are a guarantee of something good like they are now). Ideally I'd love to see her as a regular or map only master whose daily was a single incursion, that way you'd be guaranteed a run every ten days or so even if you almost never met her in maps.

[Rex_Nex]

Looks like we struck too deep, Delve League was just announced. An infinite dungeon with deadly darkness. At least we have discount Patches to guide us.

Not too keen on the whole cart-guiding aspect, but an infinite dungeon with infinite difficulty is something PoE really needed. I think it's pretty important for the game to have something that challenges your build regardless of how overtuned it is, and mining far enough down will be a way to do that. I want to see what their take on rewards is, though; I do want a reason to keep pushing my build and the difficulty of the dungeon, but I also know infinitely scaling rewards is a really easy way to destroy the economy.

[Damiac]

Every so often I come back to this game, but it never manages to grab me. The setting and plot are just horrible, but it's not as if Diablo 2 won any oscars, and I hated parts of that game too.  It just feels like it's missing something, and at the same time, to properly make currency and build your character, you have to collect certain items, keep going back to town and selling stuff, and filling up your stash.  I always feel like they keep adding crap to keep my stash overstuffed, to tempt me to buy more slots. This was obviously not a concern in diablo 2, although there was limited storage, you couldn't spend more money to get more (Unless you wanted to buy another copy of the game I guess).  It felt like you were given the amount you were supposed to have.

I dunno, maybe that "missing something" feeling means they're doing something right, and I should spend money to make it better, but I will never spend money on a free game, it would ruin it for me.

[Descan]

Uh, Diablo 2 had methods to get items onto alternative characters for the stash space.