Good Morning Folks. This weekend on the AggroChat podcast, Tam brought up a topic that sort of went in a bunch of different directions. The idea basically was a discussion around how he as a game designer, could build a communications system in an MMORPG that encouraged players to interact with each other. We know that forced voice chat does not work, and in the games that have open voice chat… the first thing I do is disable that option. We also know that pushing players of wildly different skill levels into the same content only leads to toxicity. We also know that across the board… MMORPGs are struggling. While Steam only represents a tiny slice of the FFXIV player base… it has seen a 78% drop in players since its all time peak in June of 2024. While again not representative of the totality of the player base… Steam does tend to allow for viewing trends and if it is happening there… it is usually also happening in the larger pool of stand alone client players.
I think one of the challenges of MMORPGs is that they are effectively being driven off a cliff by the most hardcore and as a result vocal player base. Here is a hard truth that we need to understand. If you use gaming forums, reddit, discord, or post about video games on social media… you are already among the most hardcore players in a given fandom. If you are regularly engaging in raid or other challenge content… you are further filtering your bias down to the needle point of the most serious of players, and they cannot survive with only your support. The challenge for developers is that as a whole, the feedback they have been getting is that the content needs to be harder in order to cater to the most dedicated players. However doing so… continues to push things out of bounds for the most casual players to a point where they feel like they can no longer justify that $15 per month in order to log in and do some busy work each day. When you lose casual players… you lose staff and money to make significant improvements to the game.
I think in part, Classic World of Warcraft has been so popular because it hearkens back to an earlier game design ethos. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are masterpieces of zone design, and in both case… the fights were not actually that challenging. You needed 20%-30% of the raid that had a clue what was going on… and the rest could more or less be populated with warm bodies that were pushing buttons, and also getting to experience content they might not be able to otherwise. I started out as one of those warm bodies, and then eventually over the course of years of raiding developed the skills necessary to lead and function at a high enough level of get recruited into more hardcore groups. The thing is though… the golden age for me were those first raids. We had fun. It was a party atmosphere with comms filled with bad jokes and even worse stories… as we all fail-boated our way through the content to eventually get shiny loot. When these games got super serious focus time… they just stopped being all that enjoyable.
If a game exists in this mode, where it is being driven by the most dedicated players… eventually it starts to shrink in size and with it comes downsizing of the studios. You can look back at all of the games that I used to play fairly seriously… and eventually dipped out of because of cost cutting and lower frequency of content. I played the heck out of Destiny 1 and 2, and got frustrated when they started vaulting content… in part because they did not have the resources to keep updating it. I played the heck out of Rift but eventually bailed because it could not consistently keep a player base interested in the game in order to do much of anything. Wildstar was amazing… but its raid content was way the hell too complicated for most players and the casual content while great… just did not have enough meat on its bones to keep people engaged. Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV were driven by decade long story arcs… and both began to flounder a bit when they lacked the story chops to keep people coming back for more.
In truth… I shifted my focus away from MMORPGs and began devoting the majority of my time to ARPGs where I could group up with friends if I wanted to… but the majority of my time was spent soloing. Other games have similarly become way more solo focused, like Elder Scrolls Online which churns through regularly story content updates… all of which can be completed in their entirety without the help of other players. We’ve lost this whole era where doing group content was a heck of a lot of fun, and I believe it is in large part because the players driving the narrative are the players craving challenge in their games. This also coincides with the birth of Streamer culture, and the focus on showing off how good you are at games in a public manner. If you are not doing something on the hardest of hardcore difficulty modes… then you are wasting your time… or at least that has become the prevailing public sentiment. However none of this takes into account the fun factor. Players who get their satisfaction by doing the sweatiest content ever… are a minority in the total player pie.
What you don’t hear publicly talked about is the number of players who bounce because they realize that none of the content is actually designed for them. The majority of folks don’t storm out the front door raging about how bad the game is. Instead they simply slip out a side door, cancel their subscription, uninstall the game… and then gravitate towards games that are giving them a better experience for their limited game time. There is a reason why Gacha games have seen this massive rise in popularity over the years, because they really hone in on the feeling of giving the players power… without actually increasing the difficulty terribly much. It is very easy to busily chase a bunch of objectives and feel like you are doing important things… regardless of whether or not the game is largely playing itself. They feel just connected enough so that you know you have friends who are also playing… but unfortunately there is no real meaningful multiplayer experiences.
I feel like for the most part Guild Wars 2 has done a pretty good job of catering content correctly, however there are still numerous cases where they drank the hardcore Kool-Aid and it shows. With the most recently expansion Janthir Wilds, they introduced a zone meta that is quite honestly… not capable of being completed without a large number of ringers in zone participating. As a result it is pretty rare that you actually find a group doing it, and succeeding at it. Similarly Dragon’s End to this day still fails more often than not. Contrast this with old classics like Tequatl, Octovine, or Chak Gerent that pretty much succeed damned near 100% of the time… and have full zones of players showing up every time they are run. The events that are being completed are just better designed, and it does not matter how much the “hardcores” turn their nose up at them… the participation proves it. People will come out of the woodwork for something that is chill, fun, and rewarding… and honestly does not ask that much of them.
Ultimately my theory is that MMORPGs have been struggling and shrinking… because they have been listening to the wrong voices. They lost sight of the inclusive content design that made their best zones great… and have leaned into chasing and ever shrinking piece of the player-base. World of Warcraft was a game changer. The number of people that I knew that had never really played another game seriously before that… was pretty freaking massive. However as the content kept getting more and more finely focused… the folks who did it for fun and did not have the time to devote to all of the prep work… quietly faded away. Essentially there are two paths to take… either you make it so that class design exists in a way that the difference between the most hardcore player and the most brain dead casual is about 10% efficiency… or you make the content designed in a way that you only need about 20% of the player base to be really paying attention to complete it. The best content tends to follow that second path. I am not saying do not put the double mythic extra plus hardcore content into your game… but make it for bragging rights only, and in no way connected to the flow of necessarily content.
Granted take everything I just said with a grain of salt. The fact that I have a gaming blog… already puts me on the narrow end of the “cares about games” spectrum. However I am very much a burnt out ex-raider who used to take this shit super seriously… until I realized that I would just be happier if I did not give a fuck about passing arbitrary skill checks in the games that I am playing. I mostly play ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch, where I only have to care about myself and my actions in order to complete them, and that reset on a regular enough basis that I can ignore a season/league if my devotion is elsewhere. That said… the whole conversation this weekend… did make me miss those glory days of raiding and a lot of the nonsense that used to happen on voice chat. To some extent I am getting some of this back with my small group shenanigans in Guild Wars 2, and I hope maybe we gather enough mass to be able to do some strikes at some point. I miss us progressing through Binding Coil in FFXIV and quite honestly… that was the last time when raiding with a large-ish group of people was super enjoyable for me. I had a blast learning the Arcadion with the release of Dawntrail, but that was pretty short lived.
Mostly I think we would be better of if games were designed to allow more casual players… to ride all the rides. I think the bar for entry for a lot of content has just gotten too high in order to keep the masses engaged anymore. That is the problem with the MMORPG design model… you need everyone bought in for them to succeed. We’ve spent the last decade filtering out who can reasonably play them… and they are going to keep shrinking unless that line of thinking changes. I say this as someone who has only one foot left in the genre… and could probably happily cancel the few subscriptions I have remaining without seriously impacting my enjoyment. If I am almost out the door… someone who is already well into the more serious end of the community… you’ve got problems.
The post The Hardcore Filter Problem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This morning I hope you will indulge me in a bit of a rant. I feel like it is time for the humble Wisdom scroll to go away… permanently. For those uninitiated into the world of Path of Exile, or ARPGs in general… any loot in the game that has affixes on it… aka Magic (Blue) quality or higher drops as unidentified. You cannot equip it until you have spent a piece of currency called the Wisdom scroll on it to reveal its statistics. In the beginning of the game this creates a subtle pressure of having to pick and choose which items you identify, because Wisdom Scrolls are a scarce resource. However you rapidly reach a point where this is just busywork. You either dedicate one inventory slot to a stack of wisdom scrolls so you can identify items out in the field, or you have a trip over to your stash so that you can perform the process of everything you decided to pick up… before often chucking the items anyway because they were not actually that good in the first place.
We can blame this trend on Diablo, and creation of the Scroll/Tome of Identify. Since Path of Exile was essentially a giant love letter to Diablo 2 specifically… we got the wisdom scroll and also the teleportation scroll. I feel like it is way past time for both of these concepts to die. I get that there is something interesting about picking up an item and taking the risk that it might be useful… but we don’t play games in the same way that we played Diablo 2. You might clear a level and find two or three items that are even of the right type for the character you are building. In that scenario it is not that big of a deal to chuck it in your inventory in the hopes that it might actually be good. The opportunity cost of the Identification scroll is minimal, especially given that players are already used to sacrificing inventory grid real estate for charms. It is quaint and anachronistic… but still something I would consider to be poor game design.
However when you consider what loot looks like in Path of Exile it becomes less forgiving. I am already running fairly strict loot filters and still see lots of items that are potentially good… but most likely vendor trash. The GGG team has said countless times that they want loot on the ground to matter. However so long as we cannot see the stats that roll on the item… I am never going to pick up that random Imperial Skean that is sitting there on the left side of the screen… even though it is entirely possible it could have rolled with +2 to skills, and two Damage Over Time Multipliers making it far better than anything I am currently using. It was generated… cost processing cycles to do so… and is effectively dead on arrival because it is not worth the time to pick it up and identify it in the vague hope that maybe it might be useful. Instead as players we chase currency drops that we can then use to buy ideally rolled items from other players, when those items might have been rotting on the ground all along.
The thing is… even Grinding Gear Games knows this is bad design. They have all but removed the Wisdom Scroll from Path of Exile II and have entirely removed the concept of a Teleportation Scroll. Essentially they matter briefly in early Act 1, until you unlock and NPC called The Hooded One. Once you have done that.. you are never going to pick up another Wisdom Scroll or manually identify an item ever again. You can click on the NPC, choose Identify Items and it will unmask an entire inventory full of stuff. Diablo III for example still had unidentified items… but they just required you to click on them in your inventory… and by the time Diablo IV rolled around everything drops identified. Last Epoch has no concept of unidentified items and allows us to fully filter items based on the quality of what dropped… and is a much better game for doing so.
Why did I write an entire article complaining about this common practice? Not sure honestly. You can do something a million times and then one time it feels like it is a bridge too far. It mostly started as me mourning not having an NPC that would identify all of my items for me that Path of Exile II has. Then became a little stab of frustration every single time I had to click on a scroll. I only picked up this Full Wyvernscale because it is a good base and I am trying to grab some level 85 bases for Kodra to craft on. I did not expect it to be a good item, and were I mapping for myself… it is highly unlikely that I would have picked it up. Most uniques I completely ignore unless I know that it is something that might have value, or it is something like in this case that I have not picked up yet this league for the unique tab. It just feels like it is time for this practice to die.
Maybe it had a reason for existing… like for example maybe loot was not treated as itemized until you unidentified it in Diablo and as such required less memory as it was simply a stub. I know this is not the case in Path of Exile because attributes are assigned to the item regardless if it is hidden by identification or not. There have been exploits in the past that allowed people to see what the stats were on an item before using a wisdom scroll on it. This made it super risky to buy any item from another player that had not been identified. Mostly I just feel like it is time for this entire construct within the genre to die in a fire.
The post Wisdom Scrolls Need to Die appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I have an affliction… and it is Path of Exile league start fever. This is how you know I am a mess and fully bought into whatever nonsense Grinding Gear Games is selling, because right before the launch of a new league I get into this pattern where nothing quite works. I’ve never been one to test builds out ahead of a league start… but lord I am pretty close to this level of madness. I am still spending quite a bit of time poking around in Dune, and had a few close calls yesterday crossing the desert between the first area and the second area. I went back south to pick up the remaining intel that I missed, and when I was about to make the run across the gap a worm popped right in front of me forcing me to turn back around immediately. Then after that cleared I made another run at it, and then had a worm pop shortly after I got to the other side.
There is just enough friction that I find I have ground to a halt. The resources that I need… I cannot get, because I am once again deadlocked by the main story quest. However I have apparently not explored enough of the second area to even be able to see where I need to go. Traversal in the second area is just frustrating enough… that I find myself logging in, mining some easy resources… and then logging right back out. Essentially in the second area the biggest problem that I am having, is the increased presence of the Sardaukar. They made my life miserable when I first entered the zone at night, and I wound up getting chain frozen by their stun beams and burning through all of my bandages. This has scarred me a bit and has made me super hesitant to tangle with them again.
There is also just more ground to cover, and it is way more open… meaning that not only do you have to dodge worms, but also Sarduakar at night, and quicksand and drumsand the rest of the game. What I feel like I need is a Stilltent, which exists in the game, but is apparently not unlocked until much further down the tech tree path. Sandstorms are still terrifying and they seem to be of much higher magnitude than they were in the starter area. I am back to questioning if I am enjoying myself enough to deal with the frustrations to claw out of the hole that I am currently in. Tam has a base to the north and in theory I could make a run for it and then attempt to survey more of the area which will hopefully uncover where my next story quest is at. However when I have the time to play… lately I have just been playing more Guild Wars 2.
Side note… my Bi Pride wings have brought me way more joy than I thought they would. I ended up buying a proper game license for my second account during the recent massive sale, in part just so I could claim a set of the wings. I am not necessarily deeply engaged in Guild Wars 2 at the moment, but I am logging in every night just to make sure I am keeping my daily quests farmed down. I’ve bought the Legendary Weapon Kit, all of the Mystic Clovers, all of the Mystic Coins, and am now buying all of the cheap gold sacks and once I have finished with that I will probably pick up the last few items of cosmetic gear from the set that started last season. I’ve knocked out most of the weekly quests and hopefully Thursday we can do some of the Fractals and knock those out as well.
In a move that completely shocked me… I played some Path of Exile II last night. I started up a Crossbow Warrior with the intent of going down the path of trying the Warbringer Armor Explosion build. There was a build showcase three months ago circling around using the Warbringer armor break tech to cause screen wide explosions with a crossbow. It was one of those things that I kicked around the notion of starting, but never actually did. Since I appear to be in a Path of Exile mindset right now, rather than wasting my mojo in the real game… I figured I would pop into the sequel because playing any amount of that… is going to make playing POE1 feel amazing. All in all the leveling has been pretty smooth and I knocked out the first act last night. I would like to push this far enough to get to the point where the tech comes online and I can see how well it works.
However I am very much in this mindset of everything I am doing being very shallow and temporary. Goratha posted a build guide behind the Rolling Magma Mines concept which is worth checking out if you are interested in such nonsense. Right now at this moment I plan on doing a slams start and moving into Righteous Fire Chieftain when I can bring that online early in Act 2. I know that is the boring option… but also it is the predictable option and I know how to get it up and running and farming currency to do other things. There are a lot of builds that interest me, and I cleared out a bunch of available character slots last night so that I can create some of these fringe builds that interest me. I would rather do that from a stable place once I have unlocked my atlas and generated some currency, rather than trying to figure something out… getting frustrated… and then rolling a RF character later.
The post Holding For Trarthus appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Waiting Room by Fugazi is not only my favorite song from that band… but one of my favorite songs of all time. Right now I am very much sitting in the waiting room, waiting on the Last Epoch servers to come up and the Tombs of the Erased season to start. I did a very dumb thing. I took the day off work, which almost certainly means that the game is going to be unplayable for large chunks of the day. This is pretty much the rule of game launches… that you never take time off for it. However in this case I have a backup plan, or at least some chores that need to get done around the house. So once I wrap this post I will be going in the backyard and continuing the leaf removal process that we have been doing for the last few days so that we can properly open the back yard and set up the patio off our bedroom.
One of the productive things that you can do while waiting on the servers to come up, is to fiddle around with your loot filter. This is legitimately one of my favorite parts of Last Epoch is that I can customize my filter until my heart is content, and honestly… it is way more straight forward than you might think. It seems like each new league I greatly simplify my process and filter out more chaff. This is essentially the base version of my filter and they are applied from the bottom up so you sort of have to remember the order of operations. As the league progresses I will tighten my filter but right now going into the league this is what I am going to be running with.
Since they get applied from the ground up, here is a brief explanation of what each filter does:
Starting at level 5 I am going to hide all Normal aka White Items
Starting at level 15 I am going to hide all Magic aka Blue Items.
Starting at level 40 I am going to hide all Rare aka Yellow Items… and at that point I will probably delete the first two rules to free up some space. Later I will tweak this rule to remove the level requirements and start hiding Purple items.
The next rule is to hide all Idols, because most of them are absolute trash.
The next rule is a Recolor rule, which will show and color any Idols with at least two affixes that I care about on them. I trigger the Emphasis bit which puts the item names in all Caps so that I can know for certain it was triggered by a rule and that it did not just somehow slip through the cracks of my hide rules.
The next rule I am looking for any item that has an affix that I care about coloring it blue. This is my shard fodder rule allowing me to build up crafting resources that I need through salvaging items.
Next up I am looking for any item that has at least TWO affixes that I care about on it and then coloring those purple.
Lastly is my “good item” rule where I am looking for any item with at least 3 affixes that I care about and a total item weight of at least 20 tiers which I color Red.
You can do a lot more but for the time being this is what I am going to roll into the new season with. As the season goes on I will start caring about only wanting specific base types which will further limit the visual clutter from mapping.
In other filter news… Neversink/Filterblade has been updated with a brand new theme called Cobalt. I spent some time last night running with it and I really like it quite a bit. Sure it is going to take awhile to train my brain on what is and what is not something that I care about, but the colors that are being used feel fresh and new. This is in honor of the 10th anniversary of Filterblade, which really is the site you should be using for your item filter needs in Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. In a perfect world I would have EHG hire this team to rework their own item filter visualizations. The thing I miss most when playing Last Epoch is the “tink” sound from a great drop.
I’ve made it to T10 maps after spending two days hunting for another nexus of corruption. I’ve also started to actually see this again, since the T10 mobs are a bit rippier than the T9 and below ones were. I am wondering if I need to tweak my gear to add on more survival bits, or if this is just the point at which armor begins to be ineffective against damage. I’ve tried to do my third ascendancy a few times and I just can’t. Either I need to spend time farming lower tier Sanctums looking for honor resist idols, or I need a really good run of RNG in the Trial of Chaos. If I can get my next two points I can buff all of my resists up to 89. The thing that is super brutal though is there are these plants that spawn from certain monsters that throw out a ton of chaos balls… and they will just fucking rip through you and if there is too much mob density on screen you cannot even see them.
In totally not ARPG news… my friend Mog/Astella has had the foresight to create a Fediverse Hunter Squad for Monster Hunter Wilds. Since you can seemingly be in a bunch of different squads I joined this morning, and it is going to be an excellent time for anyone on Mastodon/The Fediverse that is also playing the game. Essentially you can search for the squad via the id TA8E48PM and then request to join. Mog had already thrown me an invite so this process was greatly simplified for me. Also side note if you are tired of trying to be normal on social media and want a place almost exclusively populated with fellow weirdos… then check out the Mastodon Server that I help administrate. Right now I am on Bluesky and Tumblr, but the real place I consider my home is The Fediverse aka Mastodon aka Gamepad.club.
Anyways! I really hope today’s launch of the new Last Epoch season goes really smoothly. They are getting a ton of press from various ARPG streamers, so I am hoping it pays off massively for them.
The post Sitting In The Waiting Room appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
