Poll of the Day > Lol what games have you been playing man?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Porky pigs haunted holiday

Finished Lies of P and Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Been playing a lot of Castlevania too for spoopy month. Finished Order of Ecclesia last night, started Symphony of the Night today.

Shiren the wanderer and 30XX.

Nothing in particular, just the ones that stay in the rotation; Slay the Spire mods, Rocket League, and GTA V.

JoeDangIt posted...

Shiren the wanderer

You know there's a new game coming in February. I can't freaking wait.

Mob Control (mobile game). Otherwise, Torchlight II every now and then.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/2/2/AAZknmAAE_JW.png

Not much recently. I've basically told myself I'm done games for good unless a really interesting live service game comes out again.

It's mostly been Path of Exile for the last couple months. Neo TWEWY was mixed in there for a while, but I've finished that and probably won't end up doing all of the postgame grinding. It'll be back to Factorio Space Exploration once I get bored of PoE, which I think may be coming. I've also got Octopath 2 waiting for me to start.

Also, I just recently started Leaf Blower Revolution, because I like having an idle game on the go.

spiderman 2
mario wonder
dead island 2
halo infinite

Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen, Alan Wake Remaster, CoD: MW2, Blasphemous 2, and I'm about to buy Alan Wake 2.

Fear & Hunger

Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged

Playing a bit of FFXI for the first time in three years, I will get nothing accomplished this month except maybe open up the Shadowlord WotG fight.

Mega Man Battle Network 6 Gregar from the Legacy Collection for the Switch

On the last quest of Tears of the Kingdom and need to do more preparation it seems.

adjl posted...

It's mostly been Path of Exile for the last couple months

I can't wrap my head around playing modern PoE with how little effort GGG Has put in over the past year and how they are killing it for a worse version of the game.

Modern PoE is still fun for like exactly one league (until level 92-94). I can't imagine doing two leagues in a row tho

Maid of Sker

Interesting game, but not interesting enough I feel like playing the sequel once I am done.

Borderlands

I've got 28 files going : each character with their 7 original class mods using only the correlating supplier's guns , grenade mods , and shield mods.

I go to a different file after each death, as I'm trying to see which character and class mod can finish the game first.

Pretty much consumes all of my gaming time, where usually I rotate between 3 or 4 games so as not to get burnt out on one particular game.

agesboy posted...

Modern PoE is still fun for like exactly one league (until level 92-94). I can't imagine doing two leagues in a row tho

Yea I have not played since Sanctum, and haven't really looked at the game except for ExileCon. It just seems REALLY depressing. The fact that bow builds are apparently meta (and have been for the past couple of leagues?) just warps my head as bow builds used to be sweatlord RMT farmer setups and always preferred my slower tanky gameplay.

Judgmenl posted...

I can't wrap my head around playing modern PoE with how little effort GGG Has put in over the past year and how they are killing it for a worse version of the game.

I've been liking it considerably more than the last time I played, actually, which was like early 2018ish (mid-Abyss League). There are significantly more options available for endgame content now than just "do the same few maps indefinitely," with the Atlas passive tree being a really cool way of manipulating the extra content that does show up in maps according to what I enjoy most or am trying to farm. It's added a lot of variety and lots of different avenues for progression, which has been fun.

The most critical flaws are still there, though, which are that the game is designed around the intention that people will trade for items and that the trading system would have been outdated 20 years ago, let alone now. The former wouldn't be the end of the world (it does over-centralize the metagame around farming currency to buy stuff instead of working toward stuff directly, which I'm not a huge fan of, but that's tolerable), but the latter strongly incentivizes playing self-found, and when you combine the two you just get a game that punishes you regardless of how you play. I've been playing SSF this league, and while I've been doing fine just focusing on my RF Inquisitor (I've had a couple of ridiculously lucky drops, actually, including Ashes on my first Eater kill), it's been more than a little frustrating wanting to branch out and try other builds but not being able to because I just haven't found critical uniques for them (uniques that would have been cheap to trade for). It just seems so needlessly limiting to have those uniques be such rare drops despite not actually being that valuable, especially with how much drop rates have been nerfed for div cards that drop uniques (even ones that you'd expect to be really common, given the low value of the uniques they give).

Still, though, it's been fun. I haven't actually played since posting that, though, so I guess my interest has run out. I didn't expect to stick around past the end of the league anyway.

Judgmenl posted...

Literally saw someone playing Ancestors with a 100 life build abusing knockback or something absurd and there are apparently people running CI with less than 500 ES.

Yeah, Tattoos have made for some pretty ridiculous builds. The amount of build variety out there right now is pretty wild, even by PoE standards, which is pretty cool.

Mario Wonder
Bladur's Gate 3
gotta get back on Pikmin 4 and Tears of the Kingdom
Dragon Quest Monsters Codi Edition

adjl posted...

I've been liking it considerably more than the last time I played, actually, which was like early 2018ish (mid-Abyss League). There are significantly more options available for endgame content now than just "do the same few maps indefinitely," with the Atlas passive tree being a really cool way of manipulating the extra content that does show up in maps according to what I enjoy most or am trying to farm. It's added a lot of variety and lots of different avenues for progression, which has been fun.

Yea you missed a LOT of good leauges in that time. Your perspective makes a lot more sense. There was a really rough patch the last couple of years between expedition and Sanctum where GGG just was not giving a crap and was openly hostile towards players with some of the worst game design decisions imaginable. For me Ruthless + ExileCon was a "last nail in the coffin for me" along with nerfs to some of my favorite builds like Ward Loop (I was one of the first people to ever experiment with the build) and mechanics (I was making around 10 div/hr doing Flawless Chayulas solo in Sanctum). GGG then going out and making two leagues that I thought were awful in comparison and then focusing on Ruthless (and lying to the community) really rubbed me the wrong way.

adjl posted...

I've been playing SSF this league

I played exclusively SSF between Incursion and Expedition and I missed out on so much. Game got so much better (for me) once I returned to trade and could make the builds I wanted to make. There was a period where I was basically being pidgeonholed into playing builds I didn't like because they were easy to gear, and this was a point in the game where I went and got 36/40 in a league like Heist SSF.

adjl posted...

RF Inquisitor (I've had a couple of ridiculously lucky drops, actually, including Ashes on my first Eater kill)

You might appreciate this then:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/9/97a8b7fd.jpg
Keep in mind that was the league before Ashes came out. (And yes I got a Demigod for that race).

adjl posted...

branch out and try other builds but not being able to because I just haven't found critical uniques for them

Speak of the devil, I did NOT read this before posting my previous comment about SSF vs trade. Now imagine being a trade person (I am not even a party trade person, I am just good at crafting and finding out of the box currency makers) and then being pushed Ruthless for 6 months and no metagame changes.

Mostly, I just really don't enjoy trading the way PoE does it. If there were an auction house or similar thing, I'd be fine with it, but having to personally contact people every time I want to buy stuff and hope that they actually answer, plus how awkward it is to list stuff to sell myself (though at least they have their own trade website now instead of a third-party one carrying the whole system), I find it's just a miserable experience that I'd rather avoid altogether.

I played Torchlight Infinite very briefly before Ancestor League started, which is what prompted me to get back into PoE because TL:I is such a shameless ripoff of it, and there are quite a few things from Torchlight that I think PoE would benefit from. Namely, there's actually an auction house, and most of the crafting system hinges around being able to lock 1 affix for a reasonable price (or 2 for a much less affordable one), with relatively few currencies used for multiple different crafting operations. Easy trading makes the whole experience so much better, and the core crafting philosophy of "This affix is the most important, let's see what else I can get" is so much more accessible than PoE's approach of having so many different currencies and so few deterministic crafts. I do like fractured items, but getting them is a pain (they're relatively rare and you need to identify every one that drops to find anything worthwhile) without just buying them, which is bothersome when playing self-found and trying to rely on crafting to improve gear.

adjl posted...

Mostly, I just really don't enjoy trading the way PoE does it.

absolutely my biggest gripe with poe. give me a goddamn AH even if its flawed. i HATE haggling

What baffles me is their justification for not having one. Maybe they've changed their philosophy since I heard them say this a few years ago, but they insisted that Diablo 3's shortcomings were because trade was too easy and that over-centralized the game around trading. While D3 was over-centralized around trading because that's what made the most money, that over-centralization was a consequence of exactly the same loot philosophy that PoE uses, which is to have large amounts of stuff drop that's good for other builds but probably not the one you're playing. Trade being "too easy" just provided a way to work around that problem that didn't suck (except for the money part, which is why it sucked). Taking that same philosophy and making trade annoying and inconvenient doesn't solve the problem, it just forces the whole game to hinge around an annoying and inconvenient process. If the game worked properly without trading, having a trade system that sucks would be fine (see: Grim Dawn), but they've gone with the worst of both worlds and it's a real shame because it would be a phenomenal game if they would actually pick a lane.

Of course, a big part of it is making you go to other people's hideouts so you can see all the cool microtransactions you could be buying (plus the effective paywall on serious trading in the form of premium stash tabs), and they're not about to give that up.

last season (that i played. probably a few years ago) i scored a mageblood card (more than enough to finance any realistic build) and i settled on a friend doing it for me at a 20% cost because i'm not subjecting myself to that shit

poe itself is fantastic but its systems suck

And you didn't gamble for a full set with Harvest? Where's your hopeless RNG addiction?

adjl posted...

What baffles me is their justification for not having one. Maybe they've changed their philosophy since I heard them say this a few years ago, but they insisted that Diablo 3's shortcomings were because trade was too easy and that over-centralized the game around trading.

No this is just how Chris thinks. Chris believes the game should have friction and many things the players like are usually antagonistic to his design vision. Playing trade and paying attention to streamers really shows a lot of interesting facets to the game's itemization, namely around TFT's existence and harvest gambling and a funny recent example of the latter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYlFTSIHtk0
In sanctum I gambled over 100 divines worth of ancient orbs to try and roll a mageblood when I finished my build.

adjl posted...

And you didn't gamble for a full set with Harvest? Where's your hopeless RNG addiction?

lol, this is how entrenced harvest gambling is in PoE.

Judgmenl posted...

Chris believes the game should have friction

There is some merit in that, I'll concede. As tempting as it is to say "it's annoying to not be able to do X, so we should just be able to do it," if you change the game to accommodate all such suggestions, there often isn't much actual game left. Drop rates are a good example of that: Not getting drops is annoying, but if drop rates were high enough that you could reliably get every unique by playing for an hour, the game would lose its appeal pretty quickly. There's a middle ground where you do have to provide some resistance to players reaching their goals to make those goals actually feel worthwhile to reach, and it's not always easy to differentiate between sensible quality of life fixes and changes that will nerf the sense of progression.

PoE's trade system is absolutely a quality of life problem, though. Yes, people would progress faster if trading for the gear they need didn't involve messaging fifteen different people before finding somebody willing to leave their map, but that method of slowing people down is just not enjoyable gameplay. Pacing can and should be balanced in ways that don't involve pretending it's 1998 and online gaming was just invented.

Judgmenl posted...

lol, this is how entrenced harvest gambling is in PoE.

To be clear, I don't actually think that's a good idea for anything except a streaming stunt. Harvest has been quite useful for SSF, though. I'm a big fan of the conversion options, particularly the essence one for getting Essences of Horror (though the Random Number Gods have not blessed my attempts to roll a Fire Trap helmet and I've burned through far more of those than statistics would suggest is likely trying to get +30% DoT and Burn Damage support).

I rather like PoE, but trading is trash agreed

Just bought Return to Arkham and beat both Asylum and City on the hardest difficulties (new game+ for Arkham City)

now just playing the bonus stuff for City and also playing some Destiny 2 on the background.

Also trying to finish my recent play though of Persona 4 Golden but that has slowed recently