Hey Folks! It is that weird time between holidays, and we are down about half of our folks for various reasons. We push forward and record a pretty focused show around a few topics. We start off discussing Q-Up, a game that effectively has a lot of things to say about League of Legends, and also discuss other games like Rabbit and Steel that are themselves commentaries on other games. From there, Kodra takes Bel to task about Path of Exile II, and mostly how the game seemingly has no interest in making sure you can beat Act 1 with any build and player experimentation. Thalen has been back in Warframe and attempts to recruit us all to the fold, and honestly… it is working. Lastly, we wrap the show with some discussion about the genre that evolved out of MMORPGs… where the games are far less massive, but still sort of feel like they are a multiplayer experience in spite of only focusing on a handful of players.
Topics Discussed:
Q-Up
Path of Exile II Still Uninterested in Experimentation
Good Morning Folks. Happy Day After Christmas or as my friend Ace refers to it… Super Xmas, aka the day that you get to chill out after the hustle and bustle of the holiday. I am working today because I did not take my two weeks off like I normally do. That was a thing I mostly did to spend time with my spouse, but now that she has passed… there just didn’t really seem like much of a reason to do it. That and a lot of the folks who report to me have younger kids and I wanted to make sure they could take time off. Other than a barrage of texts and calls I mostly spent the day with my folks. I snapped a photo of my high school car that is sitting there dying a slow death to rust. I kind of wish they had sold it or given it away rather than just letting it sit here and rot. The holiday was weird, and I did not break down like I thought I might. I think more than anything I just feel hollow and numb right now. In general that is my default mode of operation, because life just doesn’t feel like it really has much meaning without my wife. I am trying to find meaning in hobbies… but I will be honest it is hard to find much zest in anything I do. I am largely going through the motions.
One of the dumb things that I gifted my mom was this Gingerbread Star Destroyer that I printed out. Star Wars was always a massive thing in my life, and I will be honest… it was more something pushed by my folks after a point than by me. I think my mom honestly got into the whole search for figures as much as I did, and has always been a big fan of the movies. This print was too cute not to make one, and I even ordered some tan filament just to print it out. I was there most of the day yesterday and while I intended to arrive around 10ish… I made far better time than expected and got there around 9:30. The dynamic that feels the weirdest is when it comes to my inlaws. Like I called my father-in-law that evening and the way he talked it was like he was expecting me to come down for the day or something. I know that they need me around because it is a connection that they have to my wife… but also I have my own family. I do need to take a weekend and go down and spend it with them, but that whole relationship was always awkward. Her mom on the other hand, was super happy to get a call from me and is always chill about our interactions.
I guess while we are talking about 3d printed stuff, this is my next project. Essentially I have bunch of Lego Mini-Figures and I never really had a great way of displaying them. For awhile I was hooked on the blind bags and this is a really cool grand stand that I am printing out a part at a time that will in theory hold them. I am not sure if I will need more than one of these but for the time being this should be a good start. It is apparently scaled to fit a kallax shelving unit. I have this plan in the livingroom to erect a few lighted storage cabinets and in theory the minifigs will go in there. I need to get rid of a few things before I do this however. More pressing project is to clear off the table that I plan on setting up the paint shelves and get those moved into the house. I also need to order the paint sets, but have been putting that off because it will be a big chunk of cash outlay. I am getting to the point though where be it miniatures or things that I am painting that I have printed out… I need some way of painting things soonish.
Over in Path of Exile II, I have been poking around with a few different alt builds. The first being patterened off of the build that is the most meta thing right now, which is poison burst arrows pathfinder. This is essentially the thing that Fubgun is using to farm content, and while powerful…. it isn’t really my jam. I am not sure what it is about it but the playstyle just doesn’t feel good. I’ve never really been that big of a fan of poison builds, and this one essentially uses a one two playstyle of laying down toxic growth pods and then using poison burst arrows to trigger them. Mechanically it just feels a bit more fiddly than I want it to feel. Lightning Arrow as an abiltiy feels way better, but sadly it ate a bunch of nerfs. My favorite bow attacks are the ones that abuse the various ice explosion mechanics, but I think they are also nerfed. Mostly I made it to Act III, and could continue to push forward… but was just not feeling it.
Instead I rolled a new character last night and plan on going explosive grenade witchhunter for it. I am not sure what it is about the playstyle but this just feels better. I guess I like things exploding more than them withering and dying to poison damage. I’ve said it before, but given my druthers if I had to choose an element, I am almost always going to choose fire damage. I like watching things explode, and once you reduce the delay on explosive grenades it feels really good. I have no clue how much I will play it, because in truth I am still having fun with the druid. I just need a break from it occasionally. I should probably be popping back into Path of Exile 1 though and chipping away at challenges, either that or diving back into Guild Wars 1 or Warframe and progressing those. Path of Exile games in general though are just really good for audiobook time, and that is mostly what I did last night.
As far as my Druid goes, I have taken down Kulemak and Xesht and am working on farming up the splinters for King in the Mists and Olroth so I can progress those league mechanics. I am mostly just farming a bunch of t15s and trying to earn some currency. The next big upgrade I want to do to the build is to get a Defiance of Destiny, which will require me to swap around some of my resistances. I should be able to do this by just swapping my belt, but the extra survival of Defiance should make things more comfortable. Mostly I do plenty of damage right now, and any points that I spend will be going into survival. There are some points that increase my regen, so I am probably going to go down that path because again recovery makes things more comfortable.
The other big thing that I need to do game wise over the next few days is grind out a bunch of the sparrow racing event. Essentially I am down to just the brute force things, where I need to throw a stupid amount of snowballs, and complete some more races. I want the dumb snowmobile speeder skin. I know there is another phase of the event that is going to be happening around New Years, so we will see what that requires as well. The Dawning has been pretty great though, and all of the snowball fights and such are pretty fun. They revealed the next banner and it is effectively a mythic redo of Kabr, and I have to admit I am not terribly interested in him. They changed up his weapons from Pulse Rifle and Heavy Machinegun, to Scout Rifle and Linear Fusion Rifle… and I already have characters that fill that role that I like. Helhest is my precision character of choice, and when it comes to Scout Rifles I am likely going to play Umeko. So I might take a hard pass on this banner and just bank up pulls for whatever comes next.
Anyways! I hope you have a great rest of Christmas week and I will see you next week as we slide into the end of the year.
Good Morning Folks. This is going to be a bit of an academic topic, that stems out of a brief conversation that I had with a friend of mine about Path of Exile II and why mapping in that game just isn’t as fun. I am having a similar conversation with another friend about why the campaign feels worse for them in particular, but that is something that I am not going to dive into really. Basically there is a minimum bar of functionality that is required to get through the campaign, but once you have achieved it… the campaign is honestly one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. I landed on the term “Progress Engine” to describe what is missing in Path of Exile II. Essentially video games for me, or at least the best ones… are really adept at answering the question “what should I do next?”. They have a natural flow and set up a series of short term, medium term, and long term goals for the player and accomplishing any of them feels really good, like ticking something off a list. Path of Exile II is missing this lattice of things to do that provide a clear answer as to what you should be doing with your time. This exists through the campaign, but largely falls apart once you reach maps, and I believe is also why the attach rate at the end game is seemingly so low. Folks either roll a new character and experience the part of the game that works… the campaign… or they are so profit minded that all they care about is exalts/chaos/divines per hour and provide their own internal motivation.
Path of Exile 1 – Atlas of Worlds
So lets start off with talking about the Atlas of Worlds, which really feels like a pinnacle of progress engine design. This screen might be incomprehensible for a new player, but once you understand it… you see a bunch of carefully structured tick marks. The base atlas is made up of 115 individual maps, 100 normal maps and 15 unique maps and progressing through this rewards you with an Atlas Passive point for each new map that you run under the requirements for that tier of mapping. Early in Atlas Progression it feels like every single map that you finish is contributing towards some broader goal, and then later you start structuring your maps in such a way as to try and produce the maps that you are missing. Additionally you have 12 Favored Map slots which allow you to skew the drop chance towards dropping specific maps, and there is a sequence of boss encounters that unlock Voidstones, which allow you to increase the level almost all map drops so that eventually you reach a point where you are only getting T16s and almost always getting the maps that you want to run. This is in itself a massive reward of being able to do exactly the thing that you want to do over and over for rewards, and it is achieved through a bunch of micro objectives, that in themselves feel good to accomplish.
Path of Exile 1 – Atlas Passive Tree
The payoff for atlas progression is the Atlas Passive tree, which allows you to shape the content that you are running so that over time you can slowly focus things in on exactly the endgame that you want to be doing, and then do it ALL the time. Effectively you can reach a point where you are sustaining map drops for exactly the maps that you want to be running, and then forcing exactly the content that you want to be running on those maps. This has allowed me to deep dive into specific atlas mechanics and really learn them at a meaningful level. Atlas progression also gives you access to more Atlas Passive trees, with a new one unlocking at 50 and at 100 maps completed so that you can quickly shift up your strategies as your mood shifts. These new atlas tree unlocks are themselves medium scale objectives that feel amazing when you accomplish one. Path of Exile 1 is all about running ONLY the content that you want to run, and giving you a bunch of tools that allow you to force exactly that. If you don’t like Ultimatum, then you can literally block it from ever appearing on any map that you run. As a picky eater… that gets squicked out by specific things in my food… I will always appreciate systems that allow me to granularly exclude the parts of a game that I do not want to participate in.
Path of Exile 1 – Challenge Screen
Then once all of this progression is finished, you have the final lap… of really long term goals which are made up by the Challenge system. Each league there are 40 challenges that vary from things you are always going to accomplish by just completing the campaign, to really edge case things like aggressively running whatever the new league mechanic is, and fully exploring it. Gear Grinding Goals or whatever the final one is called in a given league is almost always going to include things like leveling all the way to 100, and running a bajillion invitations or similar really long ranged goals. They give you an optional set of rewards to gather up, usually with some MTX associated with it and a Totem Pole that grows in size each time you get to specific numerical milestones. These are great reasons to keep engaged after you have effectively arrived at and conquered general mapping. Getting 40 of 40 is a massive commitment and often times requires you to start being focused on knocking these out as soon as possible. Many of them the longer you wait the harder they become to accomplish, because the trade economy means there are fewer copies of any given thing once folks check out and stop playing. However at its core Path of Exile 1 is really good at presenting a series of objectives for you to knock down and giving you a reason for doing all of them.
Path of Exile II – Atlas of Worlds
So now let’s compare the systems in Path of Exile II, and we will start with their version of the Atlas of Worlds. Instead of a fixed series of maps that drop and needing to complete each of them, you have an endlessly generating sprawl of procedurally generated nodes that effectively sprawl out forever in any given direction. Mixed in among these nodes are unique maps that provide rewards for completing them the first time, as well as specific mechanics that you can only find in these nodes. The core progression system involves bumping up your map tiers by fighting boss maps, which guarantee you a waystone drop of one higher tier, and finding corruption nexus nodes and then cleansing them on higher map difficulties. The reward for doing so is 5 Atlas Passives, but the time between Corruption Nexus nodes varies wildly based on luck of the draw. You could spawn into an area with three corrupted areas next to each other, and be able to rip through your early atlas progression really quickly. Or you could be unlock and spend hours roaming around the random grid trying to find the next area. This delayed progression ends up making each individual map feel less important, and more of a chore when you run them. Additionally you can never reach a point where you are ONLY running the maps you want, and there are going to be specific layouts that you hate, and inevitably they seem to always be gating your progress towards the nodes that you need… forcing you to run them.
Path of Exile II – Atlas Passives
Then there is the Atlas Passive system where each individual node feels less significant than the nodes in the POE1 passive tree. Additionally you are limited to only the most generic mechanics on the base atlas, and each of the individual league mechanics have their own atlas with their own progression system, that only moves the needle forward by doing increasingly more difficult boss encounters in each of those league mechanics. Traditionally bossing and mapping have been considered to be different objectives on Path of Exile 1, but in Path of Exile II you have to do both with your build in order to sufficiently progress your Atlas of Worlds and making mapping feel more rewarding… requires you to also fight a bunch of escalating boss fights in order to achieve it. In practice it just feels like there are large periods of time where you are setting up for your next burst of progression, but not really seeing much benefit from it. There are no favored map slots, no equivalent to void stones, and no challenges… so it feels like there is less progress to be had that feels tangible and provides a meaningful difference in the way you interact with the game.
Path of Exile II – Currency Drops
Then there is the general problem that Waystone drops feel like they are super rare. On average I see one waystone drop per map, so I am almost always just barely replenishing the resources that I spent to engage with mapping in the first place. I have invested in every single waystone drop node in the Atlas Passive tree, and it has not made a meaningful difference in the rate at which I find them. Then there is the problem where mapping in POE2 just has more friction in general, since you no longer get a default six portals per map, but instead get a limited amount of portals based on how many mods a given map has. If you run a juicy 8 mod map, you get a single attempt at it… which makes death feel awful when it happens. It rapidly becomes a scenario where the only thing that matters about mapping is currency acquisition, so that you can either afford to buy more waystones and tablets to make up for any of your failures. There is no real progression for the sake of progression system that is guiding you, and once you finish the campaign it largely feels like you are dumped out into a shapeless abyss without many guard rails to guide you. I think in its current state, the only players that really stick around for long are the financially motivated ones that care the most about divines per hour, because the motiviation to keep pushing to knock out objectives is truly lacking.
There are a bunch of different ways that games generate these progression engines. Probably my favorite example to drop upon is Guild Wars 2, which is the game for people who like focusing on various objectives. You have the Wizards Vault which is essentially what that game refers to as daily quests, which has daily, weekly, and seasonal objectives. Then when you are roaming around the maps there are constantly events firing off which provide micro objectives allowing a player to ping pong between them, feeling fullfilled while accomplishing little bursts of activity. Then the achievements section of the hero panel is filled with various objectives, many of which are made up of smaller multi part objectives giving you various sundry things that take hours, tens of hours, and even hundreds of hours to accomplish. For the “number goes up” players there is a global achievement score for your account that unlocks various minor reward chests each time you hit a new milestone.
Guild Wars 2 – Crafting Legendary Armor
Then for the folks who want really long term grinds… there are Legendary Weapons and Legendary Armor pieces that are shared account wide and give you more flexibility in the way you build your characters. Even these come in various flavors that will dicate just how much effort they require. The legendary starter kits give you a massive boost in this progress and shave hundreds of hours off the process. Then there are things like the Gen 2 legendary weapons where you have to jump through a long series of hoops to craft the precursor weapon before factoring in all of the resources required to turn that then into a legendary weapon. All these serve as mile markers on your account and ways of visually being able to show and track your progression as a player. Any time I am faced with not knowing what to do next, I dive into the various legendaries that I have started and see what sort of progress I can make towards them. There are also really low effort things like world boss or meta trains that you can hop on to feel like you are making incremental but generally non-specific progression.
Destiny Rising – Events Screen Fighting for Attention
I would be remiss if I did not talk at least a bit about the other end of the spectrum… namely mobile games with the sort of progression engines that they have. Namely they are all about deluging you with a bunch of required systems that themselves only require a few minutes of your time… but have so many stacked on top of each other that you feel like you need to spend a few hours a day working on them or your risk falling behind. These are all games with largely micro objectives, with limited medium term… and some really long and financially egregious long term objectives. Completing any one gacha character is unobtainium without a multiple hundred dollar financial outlay. Then there is the challenge where both the amount of time that you can commit to something, and the amount of progress that time will earn you are hard gated… so that they will keep driving you towards the cash shop. Some of these are worse than others, and I rather enjoy Destiny Rising that I am using as an example. However it can be exhausting to log in and see thirty windows lit up waiting on your attention that all require just a few moments of your time. This is esssentially progression engines stretched to the point of breaking and is maybe a bridge too far for most players.
POE2DB Player Fall-off in Path of Exile II by League
Fate of the Vaal has so far had the fastest drop off of any Path of Exile II league. POE1 Leagues tend to have more of a slowly declining plateau that they reach quickly that slides slowly as the player count drops off as we get closer to the next league. POE2 on the other hand tends to be pretty rapid and pretty constant, not really starting to plateau until you are a few months into the league. My guess behind this is that as folks get into maps, they tend to drop out of the game because there really isn’t much connective tissue there to keep them engaged. The game is missing a progression engine to keep them invested in the long term. The currency aquisition folks stick around because they are self motivated by their own version of “number goes up”, but I think they tend to be a much smaller portion of the larger pie, especially with Path of Exile II. Completing the campaign feels like it represents a larger part of the game. Not only does a full campaign run take much longer, but it also is much more meaningful than anything that comes after it.
Path of Exile 1 – Delve Endless Grid
I love Delve in Path of Exile, and for the most part the POE2 atlas system seems inspired by this system of endless progression. The problem is however that Delve is a bunch of micro objectives, with any given delve path taking a few minutes, whereas even the fastest maps are at least 5 minutes because the layouts are not as clean as they were in Path of Exile 1. Bad nodes feel more damning when it takes longer to clear them. In Delve you can pretty quickly rush to the next objective node, and as a result none of them feel that bad. You chase the nodes that you care about, which are more clearly marked on the map, and each of them feel super rewarding because the is a tiny bit of effort to clear any of them. It isn’t so much that I want Path of Exile II to just copy the homework of the Atlas Progression system from Path of Exile 1, and more a case that the Delve Atlas just does not feel good. I am open to other solutions, but whatever the case I think they need to rework the entire atlas progression system to give us more bursts of short term progression, rather than the aimless wandering nature of trying to find the next bit of progression that we have right now.
Anyways. Like I said this is more of an academic ramble than anything else. Did I completely miss the point? Drop me a line below.
Good Morning Folks! My build in Path of Exile 2 is in a pretty good state. At this point I have 75% to all resistances, even Chaos Resistance and am sitting at level 88 with most of the major passives taken. Anything after this point is mostly just window dressing, and will probably go towards survival if I can find something to pick up. I could in theory optimize my gear a bit more, and probably will do so as I continue to get more currency to spend. The build is a lot of fun, because I am mostly just leaping around the map causing magma fissures to errupt under things and dealing ignites that often finish anything in the pack that did not die immediately to the slam. Rares I either need to molten crash multiple times, or simply slam one or two times to chew through them. I’ve specced into Shrine generation on my atlas and most of the time that means I am running with a speed shrine which allows me to slam faster than my mana will keep up.
I upgraded my Cloak of Flames slightly to one that causes 15% of damage taken to be recouped as mana, which helps with the mana regen woes a bit. I’ve also swapped over to using Ngamahu’s Chosen which causes my rage to spike randomly when I take fire damage. The biggest problem with my build is that I am still using Xoph’s Blood because it gave me a ton of fire resistance, life, and reduced the fire resistance of things around me. However because of this I have somewhat painted myself into a corner because this one item is accounting for almost all of my Fire Resistance. At some point I want to swap this item out for a well rolled Defiance of Destiny which will massively improve my general survival… but I will need to shuffle a bunch of other gear slots in order to make sure I am still fire resist capped. I am far from having to worry about this because I do not have anywhere near enough Divines right now to fund this little swap.
As of last night I have finished the Corrupted Nexus grind and have my maps up to t15s, which represents the highest tier in the game that does not require corrupting maps. I need to work on the various bosses for other league mechanics so I can start unlocking those atlas passives, and I also need to buck up and get my third and fourth ascendancy done. I hate Trial of Chaos and Trial of Sekhemas… so I have been putting them off. If I were wealthy I would just pay for a trial carry, because I assume such things exist out there. I know I can probably easily do a T3 Sekhemas, because with the leap slam of fiery doom thing I have going on I should be able to shred any of the adds that spawn during the maps. I just hate how fiddly the whole process is, and I hate the debuffs that you ultimately rack up while making it across three floors. I think that is more than anything… I hate how long it takes to progress a Trial all the way up to the 3rd boss and 4th bosses. It is fucking miserable to have to do 30 to 40 rooms of a mechanic that you already do not like.
Over in Destiny Rising, we got together yesterday afternoon and knocked out the two strongholds we had unlocked for the guild. Then Ace and I stuck around and played some Morgran’s Hunt which just opened up again. We managed to grind out 14 of the gold chests, and then in theory will get together maybe tonight and grind out the last six. I like this event but the bonus is precision shots, which means our best pirate gal Maru is out of the question. Worse than that if you have a Maru that gets randomed into the group with you… they can royally fuck up you getting the precision objectives. This Maru was really trying super hard… which meant that we did not get any of the objectives met. We did however manage to pull 5 keys multiple times which is pretty wild because we have never gotten more than 4 keys at any point in the past.
I’ve really loved the Dawning event so far. The snowball fights are fun, and so is the sparrow racing. I did not expect the building a snowman thing to be so cute. These are the two stickers that I unlocked yesterday and they are both adorable. I love Skorri and Jolder doing the yelling at the cat meme thing. I also really love the whole Gwynn and Attal dynamic, which is super cute. For as shitty as the Halloween event was, I was worried that The Dawning would be bad… but it has been pretty amazing. I am wondering if this means that they took the feedback to heart on why Festival of the Lost did not work at all.
Other than that, Thalen talked about Warframe on the podcast Saturday, and as a result I logged in a few times yesterday and poked around. I have been working on leveling Mesa Prime and really need to just focus on something. I want to unlock the Excalibur Umbra, but am in a place where I don’t have the key relays unlocked that are required to get access to specific quests. This is the challenge with my account, is that because it is so damned old… I predate the current system of unlocking content, which means I have completely nonsensical missions completed. What I really need to do is just focus on unlocking the star map. I claimed I was good at grinding during the podcast, and I need to put my money where my mouth is and just throw on an audiobook and grind out the starchart.
So that is likely what I am going to be doing this week. I just got access to Mars Relay this morning so in theory I will at least work on grinding out access to all of the planets, which should in theory unlock access to the massive backlog of quests that I have waiting for me. I am not sure what has changed but I don’t find myself getting anywhere near as motion sick as I once did in this game. I am also not leaping around like crazy all the time and purposefully not doing bullet jumps… which itself is helping a bit. I would love to get into Warframe because I know it is very much like Path of Exile in that it has massive amounts of depth just under the surface. I would also love to start building out various prime fames that I have not yet collected the bits for, and know that I have enough plat saved up that I could in theory start buying bits for them from the open market. I would genuinely love for 2026 to be the year that I truly grokked this game.
Anyways. I am working most of this week, and I need to go do that. I hope you are all having a great holiday season.
