Frustration Based Mechanics

In regards to almost every system in the game (crafting, end game mapping, pinnacle bosses, skill gem system, on-death effects, ascendancy system, etc.):

Can we please move away from this "slot machine" style game design where the low lows where you are frustrated and disappointed make the "jackpots" have more contrast thus making the game more abusively addicting to play?

I'd love to experience a happy middle ground where there is still RNG involved but I don't feel demoralized 5 times an hour while playing this game because I've lost x amount of time investment/currency/content/xp/items due to harsh punishing poorly designed frustration-based mechanics.

Every single system is designed to be frustrating/tense 95% of the time, chill 4.9% of the time, and rewarding 0.1% of the time. In order to increase the amount of time you can feel chill and rewarded, you have to suffer through a ridiculous amount of tension and frustration until you are in a place where your level of gear/currency opens up the best content and allows you to ignore frustrating mechanics while being rewarded much more (rarity/success rate and access to more rewarding encounters with a higher success rate). The end game is designed in way which rewards being able to IGNORE mechanics as opposed to learning and overcoming them. I love the idea of not being strong enough to do something, so you come back and do it a little bit later, but the execution of this concept in PoE2 is horrible and needlessly punishing.

Literally 0 people are happy to go through the crazy amount of hours of mapping just to get to a high % first time failure encounter (any of the pinnacle bosses) that upon failing resets your progress to the next one. God forbid you aren't playing an extremely powerful build (which are gated by time/currency).

Why did we take the recent lesson we learned in POE 1 of "front loading" atlas passives/mechanics so that they feel good doing early on as opposed to needing to invest an inordinate amount of time or currency to get the same result? Does it really make sense to need a bunch of divines (or a ton of hours) + a strong enough gear state + succeeding in a boss encounter you have 1 chance to do just to get 2 passives so that your map content is slightly better?


9k hour PoE 1 player here. Been here since the closed PoE 1 beta. Unhappy with the steadily increasing investment into these addiction-cycle-based design decisions. I don't mind needing to learn mechanics, I don't mind failure states, I don't mind complex crafting systems, I don't mind hard gameplay, but this ain't it.

We need one of those "I'm so glad ggg learned from PoE 2 when making poe 1" posts

Its had the opposite effect on me. Now I dont spend currency on most things anymore because Im tired of gambling and being disappointed. Instead I just save all my currency and buy things on trade. Screw vision crafting.

"

Waitn4D4#0477 wrote:

Its had the opposite effect on me. Now I dont spend currency on most things anymore because Im tired of gambling and being disappointed. Instead I just save all my currency and buy things on trade. Screw vision crafting.

This is literally the opposite of what they were "trying" to design with PoE2, and they failed to execute, unfortunate. Jonathan said in interviews that you get tons of currency to craft items with, yet you absolutely do not and crafting itself is so punishing and unfun that it literally makes more sense to run maps, pick up currency, and trade it for an item some other player hit the lottery of luck on.

Poorly designed mechanics.