Worried about the Plains

[malekas]

I have a bad feeling PoE will end up just like the Kuva Fortress. Players will get their amp, Gara, and maybe the new stance mods, but after that there's really no reason to go there anymore.

 

Focus still only has a few good nodes, so I really don't need to bother with the Eidolon Lens. 

 

A lot of players still don't like operator mode, and operator mode is barely used outside the Plains, so there's no point in farming that stuff. 

The rewards from the Bounties are total garbage. 

And all of the other new resources are only used for Plains related content. 

 

I just don't see a long life for the Plains. There's nothing in there that will progress a player in the game. Nothing that will prepare them for sorties. No forma or potatoes. It's a terrible source of anything not related to the Plains. 

It really is Kuva Fortress 2.0. An amazing looking area that doesn't offer anything. I've only played in the Plains for a few hours, but it's already starting to feel like it's back to Sorties and Fissures for me. 

[OniDax]

Yeah, I doubt it'll have long-term appeal. I think that's due to the lack of many appealing rewards, the lack of diverse gameplay options/tools (i.e. multiple vehicles, the ability to approach missions through stealth or frontal assault, lack of recon tools to facilitate tactical gameplay, etc), and the unappealing environment, which will get stale quickly due to the lack of terrain diversity and a lack of a populated Plains (the actual Plains, not the Cetus relay).

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

I think it's a different situation that what happenned with Kuva Fortress, personally.

With Kuva Fortress, they released a kick-&#! new tileset, but gave player litterally zero reasons to go there because it basically offfered almost zero rewards (and didn't even have kuva on it... what's the point of a kuva fortress if you can't farm kuva there).

I feel like Plains has the exact opposite... It's like DE said "We want them to spend the rest of their lives in the plains", so they made everything extremely tedious and annoying to grind and get to force you to spend time there... But to be it's been a day and I feel like "meh, that's just too much work for so little payoff" and I already feel like quitting and playing something else. Heck, there's about as much grind in the plains as in the rest of the whole game alone (a whole new set of materials, a gazillion blueprints to buy using standing and that each require a heavy number of farmable resources... Everything reeks of tediousness.

Whoever is is charge of balancing these rewards (probably scott) needs to take a hard look at the numbers and look at actual player data.

Like, WHY THE HELL DOES FOCUS 2.0 require players to max out all skill tress when trophy data from PS4 show that 0.2% of the playerbase unlocked all nodes in a single tree (btw, unlocked all nodes, not maxed all nodes... I'm sure that data would be dramatically lower). I mean, I'm no expert, but shoudn't that tell you it's a terrible idea to make a new system that requires heavy investment in all focus trees to reach max potential, something that 99,8% of your fanbase didn't do because it was grindy, tedious and kinda pointless... Maybe there's a lesson to be learned here, maybe people don't like the operators that much... Maybe focus gains are too slow and tedious to gain... Maybe people don't feel like paying for greater lenses and they feel like the affinity to focus conversion ration is skewered...

But alas, for some reason, there's always someone at de that thinks it's reasonable to ask for a million mutagen samples for a hema, that it's fine to make players spend million of focus just paying for the way capacity slots to even be able to sink points into actual focus abilties...

Edited October 14, 2017 by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra

[fr4gb4ll]

can't speak for anyone than myself, but i just enjoyed running around the plains doing nothing than farming new resources, shooting dropships and birds and spend an hour or so just fishing.

also, there are many possibilities to bring new kinds of missions and events into such an environment - so no real use of getting worried here. ofc, DE needs to be creative too, to keep us "entertained" out there, but thats what they always need to do, plains or not.

[Lost_Cartographer]

50 minutes ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

I think it's a different situation that what happenned with Kuva Fortress, personally.

With Kuva Fortress, they released a kick-&#! new tileset, but gave player litterally zero reasons to go there because it basically offfered almost zero rewards (and didn't even have kuva on it... what's the point of a kuva fortress if you can't farm kuva there).

I feel like Plains has the exact opposite... It's like DE said "We want them to spend the rest of their lives in the plains", so they made everything extremely tedious and annoying to grind and get to force you to spend time there... But to be it's been a day and I feel like "meh, that's just too much work for so little payoff" and I already feel like quitting and playing something else. Heck, there's about as much grind in the plains as in the rest of the whole game alone (a whole new set of materials, a gazillion blueprints to buy using standing and that each require a heavy number of farmable resources... Everything reeks of tediousness.

Whoever is is charge of balancing these rewards (probably scott) needs to take a hard look at the numbers and look at actual player data.

Like, WHY THE HELL DOES FOCUS 2.0 require players to max out all skill tress when trophy data from PS4 show that 0.2% of the playerbase unlocked all nodes in a single tree (btw, unlocked all nodes, not maxed all nodes... I'm sure that data would be dramatically lower). I mean, I'm no expert, but shoudn't that tell you it's a terrible idea to make a new system that requires heavy investment in all focus trees to reach max potential, something that 99,8% of your fanbase didn't do because it was grindy, tedious and kinda pointless... Maybe there's a lesson to be learned here, maybe people don't like the operators that much... Maybe focus gains are too slow and tedious to gain... Maybe people don't feel like paying for greater lenses and they feel like the affinity to focus conversion ration is skewered...

But alas, for some reason, there's always someone at de that thinks it's reasonable to ask for a million mutagen samples for a hema, that it's fine to make players spend million of focus just paying for the way capacity slots to even be able to sink points into actual focus abilties...

Remember... lenses used to give more, but people complained focus grinding was too slow, so DE's grand plan to alleviate it was to... reduce the amount of focus earned per affinity point and introduced the god awful focus ball spawn thingy, which actually turned out to be a net loss overall in focus gain.

Every developer has a crippling flaw, and DE's is that they have cool ideas but poor design sense.   It's like Peter Molyneaux is making the decisions.

Edited October 14, 2017 by Littleman88

[malekas]

46 minutes ago, fr4gb4ll said:

can't speak for anyone than myself, but i just enjoyed running around the plains doing nothing than farming new resources, shooting dropships and birds and spend an hour or so just fishing.

also, there are many possibilities to bring new kinds of missions and events into such an environment - so no real use of getting worried here. ofc, DE needs to be creative too, to keep us "entertained" out there, but thats what they always need to do, plains or not.

The Plains are fun, I won't deny that. You just don't get anything out of playing there.

And not to sound like a complete pessimist, but I have no faith DE will change this problem. History shows they're really good at making things fun, but they suck at making things rewarding.