by Lujo on Sat Mar 31, 2012 3:37 am
What Avatar said.
I KNOW newbies are finding the game difficult, but what I'm complaining about is the following - what you need to learn for the game to stop being difficult is NOT what the game is trying to teach you or giving you reasons to beilieve is important. You can get better at what you're expected to do, develop your strategies, learn about monster abilities, glyphs, gods, items and all that, and really get somewhere, but then hit a difficulty spike that can't be accounted for or forseen by simply playing the game.
Because it requires a perspective that's the opposite of what you've learned so far, or rather, which requires you to gauge the worth of various elements in the game in a way different than before. Making this perspective shift makes you a number of times more powerfull as a player, but at the same time requires you to "forget what you learned" and start ignoring so much stuff that it easily leads you to the qestion of why the game made you learn it al in the first place?
As it is now, if there was a tutorial that showed how to kill bosses at lvl 4 the learning curve would be a lot less steep. Or at least one which pointed out that it's the proper way to look at things. You could give it to players after a tutorial that thought them what each button does, and then just give them a run by of all the gods, and everyone would be a vet in no time.
As it is, the game IS more difficult when you start out and play intuitively. It was made steadily more difficult by collecting rewards from quests back when I took that problem to it's logical conclusion and simply stopped rewarding my efforts with item unlocks - that made the game a lot easier. As long as you don't avoid fighting monsters, unlocking the Goos makes the game a lot more difficult than it was before - had Avatar not unlocked the Goos, his other boss would've had a better chance at being an easier one (speculating). And the answer to "Why should I even bother with stuff that unlocks monsters?" shouldn't really be - lol, noob, you're supposed to fight bosses at lvl 4, monsters aren't that important.
Basicaly, because of not having acess to info about features and their effects on gameplay and their level of necessity, people spend their time unlocking, learning ot use and rely upon stuff which is not at all needed to do the really impressive stuff - it's actually detrimental to that. And if the end game challenges sort of REQUIRE you to acknowlegde that so many features CAN and SHOULD be avoided or not interacted with, then you end up feeling like you wasted a whole lot of your time.
It's like with the "low hanging plantation of conversion points cheeze". A powergaming vet probably never stopped to think "wait, why have I been given everything I need to completely demolish the game right from the get go? Why unlock anything then?", or that Monk had a godlike ability - more cheeze = more fun, right? But a casual/regular guy, once he learned the basics, felt really pissed off, confused and insulted because either the devs were morons to not spot this, or the community were being... well, morons, for not spotting it. And it turned out that the devs were trying to goad us for god knows how long to "take advantage" of stuff they've overbuffed a long time ago (purely for testing urposes), but we never noticed. What's worse the general response was - buff EVERYTHING else! And thank god that devs didn't go that way...
Don't you, gjaustin, feel just a little bit stupid for assuming you were supposed to have a rocket launcher at an archery contest? Or think, YAY I DON'T EVEN HAVE TO AIM THIS THING! Because the guy who prepared for the archery contest by actually learning to shoot a bow would. And quite a bit dissapionted and insulted, at that. And could probably get better results with said rocket launcher if you could convince him to degrade himself as a human being, adimit that his assumption about an archery contest requiring him to be good with the bow and arrow was wrong, and pick up a rocket launcher.
So I don't feel like I'm seeing it wrong, or seeing it right either, but that the game had for various reasons taken a turn for catering to the powergaming bunch as opposed to the general public. Which I wrote about a long time ago, when I called this mentality elitist. It turned out not to be on purpose, or rather, it turned out not to be desired, and I've been mostly content since.
And also, could someone please nerf the damned AA's? Has anyone allready?
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!