Despite having "Grinding" in the game, overdoing grinding is a bad idea

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IILU81II#8410 wrote:

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xxn1927#3319 wrote:

Poor drops and practically impossible-to-use in SSF* crafting system are often justified by the fact that top players and traders reach the end of the game too quickly and end up with nothing to do. This situation is similar to that of a reader who skims through a novel quickly to see who the killer is on the last page. Expanding a 200-page novel to 1200 pages with adding filler content will have little effect on the guy to skims. It only makes it unpleasant for the rest.

It is important to keep in mind that the gamers' ecosystem is no the same as in 2013. The competition for attention is tougher and people want to see their time respected. If it were me, I'd rip the band-aid off and have no trade in PoE2. Balance the game without it and then you can easily have "meaningful combat."




* Impossible because certain crafting materials are so rare that they do not exist for most players.

Might not agree with me but thats fine of course, drops are exactly the same and so is drop rate, difference between trade and ssf is...trade!
Why do you even compare trade league where tens of thousands of players share their stuff and ssf where you are on your own?

And how does trade have impact on combat?
There wouldnt be any level 100 on hcssf or ssf, there wouldnt be players at all there if you were right.

Drops are "the same" in ssf and trade leagues, but access to trade means the most dedicated players are not just a bit ahead, they are dramatically ahead, because in a trade league, your playtime is liquid. "Tradies" (I love this term lmao, I promise I don't mean to be derogatory) can reinvest nearly all of their playtime output into more efficiency. Someone who plays 10 percent less is not 10 percent behind, they are often much further behind because efficiency compounds.

That gap does not show up the same way in SSF, where progress is capped by what a player can actually find, craft, and make work. That is why we do not see stacked level 100 leaderboards in HCSSF the way we do in trade leagues - unless something is seriously broken, and it has happened. Without trade, the power acquisition curve is flatter and much more tightly tied to actually engaging with the game’s systems.

And this is where the impact to combat and other base mechanics comes in: When power acquisition becomes dominated by market optimization, the game’s foundational mechanics stop feeling aligned with progression.

Players are no longer really encouraged to engage deeply with things like incremental crafting, imperfect gear, or learning encounters, because trade lets them skip past most of that. Progress comes from being efficient around the game rather than through it.

That also is why people feel an invisible force pushing them to "optimize the fun out of the game" - they are literally playing "around", or "out of", the game for efficiency’s sake.

We have already seen how this plays out in PoE1. Crafting systems like alts, chaos, fossils, or even Harvest are technically core mechanics, but in trade leagues they very quickly become irrelevant for most players compared to simply buying finished items. Mapping follows the same pattern. Maps stop being content and become inputs for currency generation optimized through sextants, scarabs, and bulk buying.

Over the course of PoE1's lifespan, the actual gameplay has shifted away from living in Wraeclast and towards living in trade tabs, juicing strategies, and efficiency planning rather than moment to moment play. Again, this is not necessarily bad or good - I'm just illustrating.

Combat does not fully disappear in a market dominated scenario, but its role changes. Past a certain level of power, it becomes something you pass through because your gear already does the work, rather than something to interact with as a significant or main source of progression or mastery. This is what I call the "PoE1 mentality" that shows up a lot, where players accept the absence of combat as a baseline. What even is combat - meaningful or otherwise - if you have never needed to engage with it? Their entire conceptualization of PoE exists inside an efficiency and market driven framework that starts them out at a level that already transcends combat engagement. Their perception of what PoE is at a fundamental level differs significantly from someone who has only engaged with the game (1 or 2) in a ssf format.

Even a small number of trade interactions can push characters far enough ahead that any intended "meaningful combat" window is effectively gone. Async trade and the currency market have only made this more obvious by making that bypass smoother and faster.

And to be clear, this is not a "trade bad" or "SSF good" argument I'm trying to make either. Everyone can play the game how they want. The point is that when power mainly comes from a shared economy, the game naturally ends up being balanced around players who optimize that economy. Over time, this risks shifting the player experience away from engaging with base mechanics and toward efficiency, gearing, and market interaction. That is exactly the arc PoE1 followed over a decade, and it is something we can already see starting to emerge again in PoE2.

This is right at the heart of the "meaningful combat" debate. The million dollar question is one of alignment: What should the relationship be between player effort, player power, and a player's engagement with the game’s core systems?

At one end of the spectrum, there's players who don't really care about most of the core systems - including combat - out of preference. They literally just want to powerfully blast content and get "tinks", and trade enables the easiest route to achieve this.

On the other end, we have people who enjoy the core systems and know that if the fastest and most effective path to power consistently bypasses those systems, then no amount of combat tuning can ever make them feel central for very long. And if that perpetual desire for optimization/increased efficiency is the most influential factor to direct the games future development and balance, then we end up with another PoE1. Which is great news for people who love PoE1, but a valid point of concern for the people who currently like how PoE2 differentiates itself by attempting to place a larger emphasis on interaction with core mechanics like combat and crafting.

That is why OP reflexively advocated to "get rid of trade" and enforce ssf as a baseline, because it ensures the game is balanced and designed around interaction with the game, not efficient circumvention around it, which is exactly what a high velocity trade market enables.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.