Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Tamrielo
We have a pretty small group this week as we are down a Kodra, Ammo, and Thalen for various assorted reasons. We start off the show with Tam talking about Viewfinder a bit which winds its way to Bel talking about the coin pusher indie Clockwork Owl. Grace has been playing a lot of XVI and we talk about the Giant Kaiju Battles that take place when two Eikons fight. Bel got into the Palia beta this week and he talks a bit about what feels like Stardew Valley the MMO. Many of us stopped playing whatever we were playing this week with the launch of Baldur’s Gate III, so we spend a bit talking about that game in largely general terms. This leads to a discussion of JRPGs and CRPGs and how they are generally telling stories in very different ways. We close out with a few topics and Bel shares that he no longer has concerns about Path of Exile II.
Good Morning Friends! We are going to go on a bit of a journey. I’m very much in Path of Exile mode with the new league starting some 16 days from now. I have been playing around with various build ideas and trying out new things. This also means I am consuming a lot of content which in turn causes the YouTube algorithm to dredge up even more of it for me to watch. Trade is an extremely important part of Path of Exile, whether or not you want to admit it. If you are playing without access to the trade market, you are absolutely playing on the hardest difficulty settings. Solo-Self-Found is absolutely a game mode, but it is also one that expects you to know quite a bit about the even more obtuse crafting system in order to fix your resistances and craft your own gear. I feel strongly enough about this that I took the time to cobble together a rather detailed dissection of a trade encounter in an attempt to demystify the process.
Then I stumbled onto this video from All-Trades Jack who has been going on his own journey through this game much like I have over the last few years. He has an excellent video talking about the merits of following a guide which I highly recommend watching. Essentially he reached the point that I did two leagues ago, where I finally was willing to engage with the Trade system. He honestly talks about many of the very sane and reasonable objections that I also had. Trade in Path of Exile is needlessly cumbersome and it requires a human element to the trades that I have not dealt with since Everquest and setting up a trader in the Nexus. It should be as simple as putting items in a publicly flagged trade stash tab and then allowing players to purchase those items through an in-game auction house. However two leagues into wrapping my head around the trade economy… it works the way it works for a reason.
One of the core problems with an Auction House system is that it often allows for arbitrage, or essentially buying cheap goods and then selling for a profit margin. This is ultimately how the real-world stock market works, so it makes sense that players will figure out ways to carry over this same logic into a video game. In World of Warcraft, this has led to an arms race over the years of Auction House tools and changes to the way that the Auction House worked, in order to try and throttle the equivalent of “fast trading”. Essentially in an Arbitrage system, there is essentially an invisible broker sitting in the middle of a trade always making sure that prices trend upwards. This is an oversimplification because I don’t tend to engage in “economic pvp” as some call it. I know it works and I have a mount in Classic WoW entirely thanks to the fact that my friend Stargrace is extremely skilled at playing a market and looking for opportunities.
This is not me passing judgment on the system, but just saying that it isn’t really my jam. World of Warcraft specifically has systems in place to help limit the impact of runaway arbitrage. When you use an item, it often binds to your character meaning that you cannot then turn around and sell it after using it. When the game launched bags were not bound to the character, and as a result the bag cartel became one of the most rampant marketplaces. I remember getting very threatening messages when I crafted my first Mooncloth Bag and dared to price it cheaper than all of the other bags on the market. From Burning Crusade and beyond, all bags were set to bind to the character on equipment. BOE as a system is likely largely a result of the trade economy that WoW Devs were all too familiar with in Everquest where all of the gear was tradeable effectively forever. Nothing was ever truly removing gear from the economy because I could use the same Lamentation for 50 levels, and then trade it off to the next person when I got an upgrade.
Path of Exile is similar to the original days of Everquest in that almost everything in the game is freely tradeable between your characters or any other player in the game. This allows for some really interesting decisions where I can take maps with modifiers that I cannot personally run, but sell them to players who have builds capable of running them. I can also take every piece of gear that I find and sell it to any other player, or even when I decide I am done with a character use those items to fund my next character. It is an economy begging to be set ablaze by arbitrage, and there are in fact discords devoted to buying items in bulk for the purpose of flipping them. However, this is not something that the game itself supports, and by default, trade seems to be purposefully cumbersome and requires several human touchpoints in order to stop rampant flipping.
It might be Stockholm syndrome, but I have reached a place of acceptance that All-Trades Jack has yet to arrive at. I accept that the cumbersome nature of trade, and the inconvenience of needing to stop what I am doing in order to sell an item… is a fair tradeoff for having the ability to find reasonably priced items for the vast majority of the league life span. We are currently at the end of a league and the trade market is a bit tight, but my reasonably priced items are going like hotcakes as a result. I will say that the inconvenience factor has changed what I am willing to sell. I am no longer going to personally list 1 Chaos items because frankly, it isn’t worth my time to stop doing whatever I happen to be doing to pop into my hideout to complete that trade. In Sanctum my bulk bin was 1 Chaos, in Crucible my cheapest sell price was 5 Chaos… and going into the next league I fully expect the lowest price I am willing to sell at will be 10 Chaos.
While my personal price point has trickled up, it is not that I am charging more for individual items… it is just that I am only selling better quality items. There are enough dedicated traders out there who are more than happy to take on smaller trades to make sure those 1 Chaos uniques are in plentiful supply. I’ve basically figured out a way that I can live with the system. Would I like it all to be automated and require zero human interaction? Absolutely. However, I am not sure if I would like the ramifications of that system. I get the impression that Grinding Gear Games does not want their trade economy to devolve into a flippers paradise. I feel like they would like to reward players for going out and doing content and then selling the items that they find in the wild. Much of why I never really engaged with the Auction House market in World of Warcraft, is that it felt like it was stacked against the folks going out and doing the content.
Anyways I’ve made my peace with the system. I’ve tried to release content both in written and video form in an attempt to demystify it. There will still be folks who want nothing to do with the system, and at least among my circle of friends I am always willing to interact with trade for them when they are looking for something specific. Last league, I had a bag slot that had currency belonging to Thalen for example, and when he wanted something he would just send me the trade site link and I would snatch it up for him. I’ve reached the point where I am comfortable enough navigating the system that I don’t mind doing it for others. I’ve yet to touch the bulk trading options like TFT, but at some point, I could see myself dipping my toes into that market for no reason other than to get rid of some of my vault clutter. That said I keep buying new tabs in the guild bank so I can start sharing excess things like maps, because after a point I am generating them faster than I can run them.
Anyways! I doubt All-Trades Jack will ever read this… but I figured I would at least share my thoughts on the matter.
The post Inconvenience as a Feature appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This weekend was a bit packed with both Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest in Las Vegas and ExileCon happening in New Zealand. Throughout the weekend I consumed quite a bit of information related to both, but of the two events the one I had been looking forward to the most was getting some more information regarding Path of Exile II. I wrote a bit in June talking about my hopes for the game, especially in light of not really feeling Diablo IV. Quite honestly I had reached a fairly unhealthy level of hype for the game and had begun pinning my hopes on it coming in and being the one game to unite them all. This was at least influenced by me dealing with the emotional hit after waiting a decade for it… Diablo IV was really just not designed for my tastes. This weekend was a bit of a second volley though as I am realizing that Path of Exile II may also not be for me. Maybe we as gamers should learn not to pin our hopes and dreams on something we’ve yet to play… but the heart wants what the heart wants. Gamers in general would be a lot less toxic if we were better at handling disappointment.
A lot has changed since Exilecon 2019. At that point, it was announced that POE1 and POE2 would effectively be the same game, and essentially would just be an additional campaign that dumps out into the same endgame. In the four years since the last ExileCon, a lot has changed… not the least of which has been deciding that the two games had simply grown too far apart. Now the plan is to have two games that share a pool of microtransactions, but each has its own gameplay and content. We got to see a lot of gameplay, and I have to say… after seeing what seemed to be a much more slow-paced and almost soulslike style of combat… I am kinda glad that Path of Exile 1 will remain intact. Watching the above gameplay demo… gave me some of the same concerns that I had watching gameplay from Diablo IV, that maybe it just isn’t for me. I don’t get my joy from reveling in difficulty… I get my joy from blowing up entire screens of enemies and getting a massive loot explosion.
I have to admit I had some concerns in the back of my head. It seemed like Path of Exile was really pushing its Ruthless mode very hard. I spent some of the weekends playing Ruthless (shown above) just to get a feel for it, and it took me way longer than I want to admit just to get through the first act. I think Ruthless was essentially Grinding Gear Games’ way of testing the waters to see how players were going to feel about some of the design decisions that they were going to be making with Path of Exile II. In fact, at the start of the Crucible, they decided to make the league start race be in Hardcore Ruthless Solo-Self-Found… and had the lowest race participation in Path of Exile history. So it makes me wonder… if the decision to split the games was made rather recently taking into account how the core Path of Exile audience seems to be allergic to that game mode. During a given league, there tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand players who participate in Ruthless as compared to the multiple hundreds of thousands that play the traditional trade league.
That isn’t to say that Path of Exile II does not interest me at all. In spite of not really feeling like an ARPG to me, I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of Diablo IV after all. The game seems to be leaning more heavily into class fantasy and creating some more clearly defined swimlanes for each class and ascendency. Essentially every attribute combination now will have two classes for a total of twelve with thirty-six ascendency classes in total. I’m really excited to see what the Druid and Monk for example play like, and I think even if it continues to double down on “super hardcore mode” vibes I got, since I won’t really be paying anything extra for it… it is likely going to be similar to the Retail vs Classic WoW dichotomy. If you have access to both you might as well dip your toes in occasionally.
There are a lot of really neat ideas that will be coming to the game. I like the concept of weapon swaps and being able to assign different skills to different weapons and have them change gear automagically. I also like the idea of being able to have conditional passive tree skills assigned based on which weapon set you are currently using. This is going to create a lot of really interesting build possibilities, but I am also concerned about some of the other things that appear to be happening. It seems as though movement abilities for example are just gone, as are some of the quirky spell types like brands, and it also feels like Auras will be significantly weaker than they currently are. Flasks are also designed to be more reactive than a defensive layer as they are today, which again… all of these things are probably better for new players but will serve to make POE2 feel wildly different than the original game.
I think the biggest concern I have is just how slow combat felt. In the demo embedded above, the characters seemed to spend more time rolling around on the ground than actually fighting things. This is what Dark Souls feels like to me… and that is not exactly the fantasy that I want to lean into with an ARPG. Like I said before I want to melt entire screens of monsters at once and pick through the remains looking for treasure. It feels like at some point they made a decision that Path of Exile would be the zoomy game and that Path of Exile II would be more slow and methodical. My hope is if this decision has officially been made, they maybe ease up a bit on the reigns of POE1 since many of the last few league’s worth of changes have seemingly been to slow things down a bit. Don’t get me wrong… the demos look really cool but I think it can be summarized best by what want of the devs said. To paraphrase they said that they wanted people to see the game and think it looks like a really good action game, not necessarily an ARPG.
It isn’t just a “me” thing… I’ve had side conversations on social media over the weekend about my weird feelings regarding the POE2 reveal. Additionally… I watched a lot of streamers playing the game and seemingly trying to hide some measure of disappointment. They were warned before sitting down to play that the game was a bit overturned, but all of the ones that I saw streamed… got wrecked and overwhelmed as they attempted to play POE2 like they would have approached POE1. The only person who really was successful as a whole was Kripparian, who admittedly is primarily a Ruthless mode player so likely approached the game from that standpoint rather than trying to gather up big packs and nuke them down quickly. Mathil seemed to have really mixed feelings about the game, and a number of folks who watched from home shared their concerns in live talking head reactions. So I at least feel like I am not alone in this.
Now this may be “copium”… but like I said I spent a lot of the weekend consuming POE2-related content and saw lots of different folks from GGG talking about the game and more specifically the demo that was available. It sounds as though they specifically wanted to slow down the gameplay so that it would record better and show off all of the work that they have done on the animation and skill design front. Players had no access to the skills screen and were effectively forced to play the builds that were presented to them. Based on some information like seeing how far off the gear that Kripp started with for example as compared to a few of the drops he got during his demo… it seems like they were trying to play mid-game content with starter gearing. So taking that into account… the game may be WAY faster when you actually get to play and gear your own character and design a relatively optimal build. If they are designing the game to be completed with bad gear and bad character templates… then maybe it will be good for brand-new players.
The other big disappointment of the weekend is that the “Closed Beta” begins June 7th of 2024. So we have almost a full year to wait until players can realistically get their hands on the game. I would assume they will have an “Open Beta” period as well, which means we are realistically looking at a Q4 2024 release for the game. A lot can change in ten months. I know I will play it when it comes out, but I am also going to try my best not to pin my hopes on it. I love Path of Exile 1, and my hope is that this means that they are actually going to devote more resources to it. I heard during the event that for the last year and a half, there has been an eight-person team supporting that game, with all resources being siphoned off by POE2 to speed up its development. I would wait an entire year more if it meant that we get better leagues as a result. With that in mind… the last several leagues have been rather impressive considering how tightly constrained resources were.
I am super pumped about the next league, but that is another post for another day. What were your thoughts about POE2? Do you also have concerns or were you pumped at what you saw? Feel free to drop me a line below.
The post Digesting Path of Exile II appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
If you have not been following the saga of Glorbo, you might be confused when I posted a random comment last night like “Praise Glorbo”. Essentially fans have been trying to trip up AI-generated content on less-than-reputable websites… and likewise trying to see who will just run with it. The first instance I am aware of, and the one that made gaming press news… is a Reddit post about the introduction of Glorbo to World of Warcraft. This spawned a number of AI-generated articles including the one above that is archived here. A few days ago the Destiny 2 Community got in on the fun and spawned their own AI-Generated article about how tough the new Glorbo fight is to beat and even a post featuring tips and tricks.
So with the FFXIV Fanfest and ExileCon both taking place this weekend… I thought it was fertile ground to fuck with the AI a bit more. Yesterday I contemplated writing up a blog post talking about how Glorbo had leaked just ahead of Fanfest or ExileCon and then trying to spread it on Reddit. So far various fandoms have been more than willing to play along, and it would have been very believable for something to leak just ahead of a presentation. However, at the end of the day, I decided against it. Firstly I was not certain that I wanted the spotlight shone on my blog, or the server load. Secondly, I was not sure I wanted to be involved in the spread of disinformation… even if it is just to fuck with some AI scrapers.
This morning I realized that I could join in with the nonsense in a relatively harmless manner. A while back I went through the process of getting Stable Diffusion models up and running on the tensor cores of my graphics card. This has provided me with some weird hours of fun from time to time, feeding prompts and going down rabbit holes trying to produce something interesting from the madness. This morning I decided that I would ask the mechanical hivemind what Glorbo looked like. So we start off with probably my favorite… and easily the most whimsical that was generated off the prompt “Introducing Glorbo”.
Next up I decided to vary that prompt a bit and feed it “Glorbo the Movie”. My favorite part about this one is how confidently the digital toddler produced something that looks like properly formed words but is complete gibberish. It definitely feels like we are going in a “Pokemon” direction with this one. I am not sure what is more troubling… the fact that his hand just disappears in the fur of whatever is going on with the left creature… or the very human hand on the shoulder potentially emanating from the large-toothed beachball thingy.
Next up I decided to go down a rabbit hole of trying to ask the art mangling machine what Glorbo would look like when he arrived in Path of Exile. This one specifically is off the prompt “Glorbo The New Uber Boss from Path of Exile”. Any combination of Glorbo and Path of Exile seemed to produce this wizard-like dude with very chunky man-nips. This is the most work-appropriate version of the various images that it generated. There were a handful that looked like Vladimir Putin with very aggressive nipples, and I will spare you the damage to your sanity. That said… other than the inexplicably blue beard… I could see passing this image off as something coming to Path of Exile.
The little engine that could completely derails however whenever I started trying to get it to show me Glorbo from FFXIV. This monstrosity is from the prompt “Glorbo Riding a Chocobo”. Like I have no clue what is going on…. with this Horse/Chocobo hydra being ridden by another Chocobo chicken thing.
Even after trying to do a few generations of steering it away from the void… it just kept getting worse. This was honestly the “best” version of what I was able to get from the nonsense machine. This is some kid riding the Human-Centipede version of a Chocobo… while inexplicably wearing what looks like stilts that have a pair of shoes on them. So I am deciding my friends… This is Glorbo. This is Glorbo in all his glory when it lands in Eorzea.
Anyways thanks for indulging me in this madness. I hope you all have a great weekend. Next week starts Blaugust and I figure we will also have plenty to talk about coming out of both Fanfest and ExileCon.
The post It’s Glorbin Time appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
