mumbogumshoe

Here’s the thing, whenever I see these hardcore game modes, I really like some aspects of them and am annoyed by others. I think many people feel that way. Problem is, we probably don’t agree which parts we like and which we don’t. For me, I like the no manual saves outside the ship part, I like companion permadeath, I like the fast travel restriction and the only heal injuries by sleeping in a bed thing. I could do without only sleep on your ship, being forced to take flaws, and I loathe the eating and drinking bit. I just don’t see how that’s adding anything interesting to my game or even makes it harder. It just means I have to pointlessly open my inventory at random intervals and click on certain items. I always think, if this is done at all (and I feel it only fits in a primarily survival focused game), it should be that as long as you’re carrying rations you’re just consuming them automatically and not have to constantly monitor a meter and tell your character to eat. I mean, why not have me go take a dump while we’re at it, for “realism.” Who enjoys role-playing their character’s bodily functions? Anyway. I’m sure others disagree with me, which brings me to this. Instead of taking out some options or making certain aspects of it easier, which really defeats the purpose, why not let us pick and choose which parts we want and which we don’t. We could customize exactly how difficult or “realistic” we want our game to be and nobody would have to complain that this or that part is too annoying or frustrating. There could still be the supernova game mode which switches all options on and which you could play for bragging rights and an achievement, perhaps.

Thank you kilay, I will try this!

My first playthrough was on PotD as it was originally. I wasn't one of those people complaining that it was too easy but I could see where they were coming from. It provided a good challenge for me, it was fun, hard but manageable, I never felt as if I was in over my head. However, I think that if I can play a game on the highest difficulty setting and not feel "this is much too hard", it's probably too easy. That's because I'm not a great player, I'm just ok. I don't optimize every last bit, don't look for synergies in everything, don't want to obsessively prepare ahead of every fight, don't want to micromanage everything. I do all that to some extent but I don't make a science out of it. So when I went back to play the game recently I found that, after the recent patches, PotD had become too hard for me. I barely made it out of that first cave on the beach alive. That solitary rusted construct from before now has a couple of revenants and skeletons to guard it and at the raised platform that had a revenant and 2 skellies before, there's a high-ish level rotghast around now, that, while you can draw it alone, will absolutely maul you if you're not careful. The cave felt just at the edge of acceptable challenge for my first level mindstalker and swashbuckler Eder. I thought, well, you gotta overcome and soldier on but I soon had to admit, no, this doesn't feel good, it's frustrating. The looters in the flooded part of Port Maje, that I found to be a pretty challenging fight before, now have a couple more, higher level goons among them and they just slaughter me. At the digsite I get mauled by boars and a young drake. I think that's ok, this is what the highest difficulty should feel like, just swallow your pride and play on Veteran. But now this feels too easy. Not only are enemies much easier to kill now because they don't have the PotD modifiers, the high level enemies that felt overwhelming before but should actually be challenging but fun on Veteran, are (mostly) gone. I feel there is too much of a difficulty gap now between Veteran and PotD. What would absolutely hit the sweet spot for me, what I would find really fun, is if I could have all the PotD enemies, the Rotghast, all the boars, the bloody Drake but in their normal, non-PotD buffed versions. I have no idea how to make this happen, if it would be easy, difficult or impossible to do. But if there's someone out there who's able to do it and willing to invest the time and energy, I'd absolutely sing your praises!

It's not a made up word, it's Old English, and the plural seems to be Eotens. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eoten I've voted for Eoten as plural though. Old English is much closer to other Germanic languages than modern English and -en is a perfectly fine Germanic plural ending.

Oh please! You're playing a CRPG but don't get why people like to get rewards and like to level? The distinguishing feature of the genre is the reward mechanic, the loot, the leveling, getting stronger, getting new abilities. Of course the story is important, but if it was only about the story I could as well read a book or whatch a movie or play any other kind of game that tells a story. A lot of them do. To say that people who enjoy the reward part are treating the game like work is just silly. Obviously they enjoy it because it's fun. I couldnt care a rats ass for leveling. I autolevel all my npcs. I get most passive upgrades for me so i wouldnt need to micro a lot and maybe choose an ability that i never use...passives are always on. I never rush to an npc companion to get them before they are higher level. I only upgrade equipment once every 2 or 3 waves of story insteead of every map or hub plus quest In poe1 i think after chapter 1 i re equiped my party like 5x. And only in the last did i enchant. I finish every game with a pocket full of money i never use. Not everybody has Game Asperger's... I really don't care how you play your game. It's not my business, no opinion whatsoever about it. But I do find it bloody ridiculous that you act all superior and diagnose people with aspergers for enjoying the core feature of CRPGs in a CRPG.

Oh please! You're playing a CRPG but don't get why people like to get rewards and like to level? The distinguishing feature of the genre is the reward mechanic, the loot, the leveling, getting stronger, getting new abilities. Of course the story is important, but if it was only about the story I could as well read a book or whatch a movie or play any other kind of game that tells a story. A lot of them do. To say that people who enjoy the reward part are treating the game like work is just silly. Obviously they enjoy it because it's fun.

It obviously makes a difference because they have much more to work with. If they pace it similar to PoE1 it won't be a problem. That's why I'm not worried.

The gripe you appear to have (the balance issue with hitting the level cap) can also be solved by an adjusted scaling system. The problem with losing incentive is imo best fought, as someone already stated in the thread, by good endgame writing/quest design. I feel like that aspect was done well in PoE - by the endgame you were interacting with some pretty interesting people/beings. Yeah that's a big part of it and I know they're doing it, a more comprehensive level scaling system, I mean. It's gonna be optional because many people think that any kind of scaling is of the devil but that's fine, I trust them to do it well and I'm going to turn it on for sure. The second point, that I've been hitting the level cap far too early, isn't going to be remedied by this, though. I understand that people enjoy playing with a fully realized build but I don't feel the appeal so much myself. Leveling up, getting stronger, is one of the core elements of RPGs and when it's not there anymore, I always lose interest a bit. A good story, interesting quests and encounters, challenging combat still make the game interesting, but an essential element is gone and it can't just be replaced. You can have a good story, interesting quests, challenging combat and leveling, after all. For me it would be perfect if you hit max level just before the last dungeon or quest or whatever in a game like this. Have that be a long one, with several hard combat encounters and a really tough end battle so I can still play my maxed out character a bit, but that's it. Anyway, I'm not too worried about PoE2. With 20 levels there's a good chance that it will take substantially longer to hit the cap.

I think the OP has a point (even though he's a bit rude about it). Last play through on PotD I hit the level cap shortly before WM2. I was already feeling too strong at that point for a while. I still had the 2nd part of the expansion, Crägholdt, a couple of side quest sand the Burial Isle to go. All of that felt way too easy even though I used the level scaling option where it was available. This is one of my biggest gripes about the game, I felt it was handled very poorly. It's fine if you hit the level cap a bit before the end but not hours before, with so much content still to go.

Quick new update from bob over at fig, Slacker Backer money stands at 54,020 right now.

I've asked Josh on his blog if fewer trash mobs would lead to a reduction in combat frequency. Here's his answer.

New update about the slacker backer money. It's standing at $49,494 right now, up just a little bit more than 4,000 compared to yesterday. That's not good. If it continues like this we'll probably not make the 5 million goal. On the bright side, the 4.5 million goal is in the bag.

What's interesting is if there will be overall a significant decrease in combat encounters with most of trash mobs taken out or if the amount of combat stays more or less the same with trash mobs getting replaced by uniquely placed tactical encounters. If it's the latter, I'm all on board with reducing the trash mobs, if it's the former I'm not so sure. PoE is a combat heavy game and I like it that way. I build my characters and party for combat effectiveness and I want lots of opportunities to test them. Combat is fun, even against trash mobs, if it's not really that same after same again slog. That can really become tedious. At the very least you need to have a bunch of dudes you can steamroll every now and again to make you feel how powerful you have become.

There's a good chance that something will happen during those 2 months that gives us a bit of a bump. Maybe another small media blitz towards the end. Then we'll lock in that last stretch goal as well.

New information! Through the backer portal we have $42,261. So it seems as if we're making about as much there as on fig. We've also almost cleared the 4.5 million stretch goal.

Yeah, that seems doable! Especially since once the fig pledges are over at the backer portal some people might be upgrading their pledge. I'm certainly considering it, after all, new paycheck and all that.

New Slacker Backer update from fig: today we're at §45,219 (paypal not included!). We seem to have arrived at an average of about 7,000 a day. If that holds and we make about an equal amount on paypal we'll get the 5 million if they leave it open until mid-April.

Honestly, I don't feel that re-statting companions and retraining are equivalent. Retraining gives you the option to correct a mistake you made while leveling up or to take the character into a different direction. Point being, you use it to change something that you yourself did but later came to regret. Re-statting the character means changing a significant bit of the characters core identity that you don't normally have control over. I kinda like the fact that certain aspects of the companions are off limits to the player, that you have to make do with certain things and can't change them. It makes the companions more credible as their own, independent entities in the world and muddling the line between them and self-created adventurers by opening up significant aspects of the character creation process is not something that I personally want to see. It's an aesthetic preference in a way and of course "you don't have to use it, it'd just be an option for people who want to" is hard to argue against. Who am I to deny people options? But I do feel that options like this can sometimes cause harm because they have impact on the integrity of the game world. I mean, it's clear that there are some aspects that the player shouldn't have control over, even with companions. Should the player be able to make Pallegina a Wild Orlan rogue from The White That Wends even though it makes no sense for her character and the lore of the world? I guess nobody argues for that but if someone did and came with the argument that "I'd just like the option, you don't have to use it", I'd still be against it. A line has to be drawn somewhere to protect the independence and the integrity of the companions and the game world and personally, drawing that line right after character creation seems fine to me. Maybe I'm just a bit conservative when it comes to things like this.

I can't say how many people were lost because it took so long to make it available. My guess is that it's not very many and there's still plenty of time for them to come back. What I can say with high confidence is that the reason why there have been so many fewer backers on fig compared to kickstarter a few years ago has little to do with the lack of a paypal option. Again, kickstarter doesn't offer an option to pay via paypal either and there were more than twice as many backers back then. If you want the number of paypal backers from back then, look at the difference between the kickstarter backers and the number on the thank you screen when you start PoE1. That's a bit more than 3,000. We need more than that to get us to the 5 million stretch goal. I agree that it's only guesses right now but so what, one can still try to make good guesses.

I'm sure there were, quite a few people have been asking for it again and again. Those people have been waiting for it quite some time and it's likely that they would've headed right over and pledged as soon paypal went live. But the reason why there haven't been as many backers this time around is not that paypal wasn't available. There aren't tens of thousands of paypal backers who just couldn't pledge this time. Maybe a couple of thousand, if we're lucky.

You couldn't back through paypal on kickstarter either. They made paypal available earlier last time around but none of the roughly 74,000 kickstarter backers was a paypal backer. I think you're seriously overestimating the number of people just waiting to back via paypal.

I think that 1/3 of the daily gains on fig during the campaign is a very optimistic estimation. 1/10 sounds more likely, maybe less. After all, there are no fig funds anymore which made up more than half of the money. And no campaign hype, no new stretch goals no interviews and articles in the media about it. We got about 31k in the last two days (slacker backers on fig, not including paypal), which is pretty good but much less than we got even on the slowest days of the campaign and it's only just over and still fresh in people's minds. I'll be very surprised if we make anywhere near that much a day a week from now. Would be happy if I'm wrong, of course.

Slacker backer funding on FIG stands at $31,243 at the moment. Don't know how much we have on the backer portal as of now but we should be well on our way to the crew stretch goal with that.

We've been having a little discussion about that over in the fig comment section. Basically, 4.5 million stretch goal is all but sure, 4.75 very likely, 5 million is a distinct possibility but I'm not extremely optimistic about it. We'll have about 1 or 2 months to collect enough money to get to 5 million. This already is speculation, I don't think that there has any official word on when they're going to draw the line for the pledges to count towards stretch goals. they will have to do that rather soon though to finalize the game content for the last stretch of development. There's an interview where Feargus says that the overall after campaign funds for PoE1 amounted to 1.3-1.5 million. That sounds very good but you have to factor in that the amount has been collected over a long time, over the entire development period in fact. However, as I've been told, the full reward options were only available for about 3 months so it seems likely that the bulk of the money was collected during that early time. Even without that I would expect most of the money to come in during the days right after the campaign when it's fresh on people's minds and still in the media. Later it probably slows down to a trickle. PoE2 attracted fewer backers overall. Without investments we would have made only a little more than half of what the kickstarter campaign brought in. So if we extrapolate from that, we could expect an about of somewhere around 700k over the same period of time as funding was open after the first campaign. Getting to 5 million in time seems possible but not very likely. There's also an argument that there may be proportionally more backers going to be slacker backers this time because they might have not wanted to back on fig (for... reasons). I'm skeptical that this will make much of an impact but it's posible. Anyway, this is all pure speculation and as such not extremely helpful. I do like to speculate about these things though. We won't know anything for sure until they tell us some figures. We know that they made about 13k during the first few hours when paypal was open. That's not bad...

Oh dear. I suppose I'll have to actually finish PoE then. They've also said that you will be able to set all the world states through character creation so importing the final save is only really important if you have a character you're really attached to and care about the continuity.