This game does have a bit of a problem with time wasting in general, and this is after countless QoL updates along the years. I remember back in the AOM days you could spend a hundred hours trying to find a single hat recipe to complete your set, you just needed a little bad luck and the game could completely screw you over.
I bet back in those days if you dared question the loot drops you’d get the same asinine boomer response you get here, “just play a dozen more hours”, as if everyone had that kind time and/or patience. Cheating was also suggested. Not much has changed. Seriously though. Make new character? Like what? How is that a solution??? I honestly think this kind of attitude prevents the genre from flourishing into the mainstream. Hence why we currently only have like 3 loot ARPGs to choose from. Do we even lose literally anything from reducing the cap on spirit guide services?
The reason why we got all these QoL buffs over the years, not just the new invertor services but also the MI drop system overhaul, the increased materials drops, component part removal, mastery bar respecc, iron bit transfers, etc. is because sinking players’ time like that is simply antiquated, bad game design. And I do think there’s still work to be done, mostly in relation to crafting and yes, respeccing for new players. Ideally you’d want people to stop using cheats for simple time saving measures. If I had crafted all my Conduits legit I’d probably have 500 more hours of my playtime spent gathering flowers in Ugdenbog. Not to mention all the SR75 grinding for Iron Bits.
Grinding is part of the ARPG genre, love it or hate it. If you don’t like it, there are plenty of other games you can buy and be finished with in 12 hrs. :}
Plus, pretty sure the 30+ million that popped off and bought D3, the who-knows-how-many have played PoE, the 6+ million that tossed down on GD, and so on…
…is a clear indicator that diablo-likes went mainstream looooong ago
Those mmorpg’s… the hotbars, the UI/interface - go back to diablo 1, diablo 2. Now look at mmorpg layouts and interfaces… look familiar? Yeah. Diablo helped pioneer that shit.
think you missed the parts where
A, you can respec an absurd degree before price go up to where it matters
B, the price caps out and isn’t really that big a deal by the time you’ve respecced 4-600 points for the price to cap out
if you can’t afford to respec, even respeccing to try every single skill; then you have a "you"issue, where you aren’t looting enough crap to pay your bills
obviously respeccing shouldn’t be free in vanilla
congratz on being the mega derp response in the thread
Grim Dawn hasn’t sold 6 million. And D3 has a lot of those QoL features Grim Dawn lacks, even though it has immense gameplay issues elsewhere, and it is still being a grindy ass game.
This is what I mean by antiquated thinking. Mindless grinding being a genre tradition is just a completely meaningless statement. The point is that it is a bad tradition, just like there are good traditions in Grim Dawn that were brought from TQ, like returning skills and double masteries.
Back in the day you could grind for 12 hours getting a couple MI weapons with decent rolls, yet Crate decided fix that issue anyway seems like they do hate that part of the genre, as any normal person would.
It was many, many months ago that the owner divulged that they were approaching 5 million copies sold (including dlc) - the lions share being the base game. I took the liberty of conjecturing that during the months since that post that they might very well be closer to 6 mil by now. On that point I will allow that you “might” be right but personaly I’m leaning that they might be closer to 6 now.
Perhaps @medierra might be kind enough to pop in and illuminate - it has been a bit since we’ve had an update on that
Besides D3 reaching mainstream success, i believe Crate isn’t interested in reaching mainstream. They purposely made their game to be niche. Sure, they have added QoL over the years, but i don’t think they are interested in reaching the level of QoL in D3, which means making their game ultra casual.
And another point for the Spirit Guide costing money is to make sure the player eventually sticks with a build.
Even with a free Spirit Guide and no external tools, you’re still
Wasting time mashing skills over and over again to respec, which no one really wants to do too often.
Forced to make 36 characters to cover all possible class combos.
I’d say the above are sufficient at making dedicated players continuously leveling alts, especially when endgame leveling rewards are more powerful than ever. Most players aren’t that dedicated either, so at worst a free Spirit Guide just means a more casual player can get back to the action more quickly and easily. The horror!
As to the “it’s too late in the game for this sort of change” crowd, Crate literally just (public playtest spoilers) reworked the functionality of converted Physical Damage. Granted, that’s not a very player-facing change, but it’s still a huge mechanical alteration. And removing the respec cost is like…two-three database entries and can be done in ~5 minutes. Not the largest change ever.
Does it need to happen? I’d argue not. Does it ruin the integrity of the game we all love? No.
Honestly, it’s more a “shit like this has been requested on occasion here and there over the years and they don’t seem inclined to change it” kind of thing.
Dunno if I would 100% say they wouldn’t do it (they’ve surprised us before) but I’m going to put my bet down on highly unlikely.
And I’ll publicly state, as well, that I really could care less if they did or didn’t. It’s not that big a deal.
Sure, while we’re at it we can remove more reasons to use bits by making crafting or transmuting completely free and dumb down other features of the game that are already relatively simple and pose no problem while you’re playing normally like the Spirit Guide.
Am I wrong though? The Spirit Guide is one avenue for spending bits and is more important while levelling, it also serves a purpose as of now for Aether Crystals other than crafting them into Shards for a small handful of components that use them. If it becomes free, Aether Crystals becomes close to useless.
To sum up the thread and my stance personally - I’m in the camp of “don’t try to fix a problem that doesn’t exist”.
Thing is, it’s not a real sink. It’s only prohibitive to those still learning the game which artificially makes the game harder than it should be. The existence of a cost on respeccing does not have any impact on the “iron bit economy” of endgame.
Only for Devotions, and you could remove the Iron cost but keep the Crystal cost thereof.
Well, it clearly does exist for some. That’s why we keep seeing this thread over the years.
How are aether chrystals useless besides devotion respeccing? They are used a lot in crafting high level components, and although easy to farm they still get used up quite frequently.
If this is the case then I could just as easily turn the question around and ask again why does anything need to change? You are right that it’s not a sink even though I mentioned it’s a way to spend bits in my earlier post. Everyone gets plenty of bits so where is the problem? Is there a need for the Spirit Guide to change?
I don’t know about you but this is a topic I have almost never seen, and even then, it does not give an accurate idea of how many people have had the problem and if it is enough to make any change.
If every time 5 or 10 people have a problem, I don’t discount that they should be heard out first but should we make every change that they ask for?
You’re right, i forgot they’re used in a lot of standard component crafts as well. I’m so used to just making them on a dime that I forget nowadays
LOL. Everyone was “learnig the game”, and everyone was spending some of the money to respec every now and then, but somehow no one died because of that? I mean, it starts at 50 bits per point! And it doesn’t skyrocket for a very long time. Respeccing 100 points will cost you maybe 20k bits, and you can make this amount of money in a few minutes. How hard and punishing can it be? No one knows, apparently.
If you click those and read through you’ll find that, long ago, I had been an opponent of reducing or removing respec costs too. It’s only recently that my opinion has swapped because I’ve put more thought into it.
Back in the day people frowned on the idea of resetting attributes, alleging that those are things that “should be a core character choice.” Now we have Tonics of Reshaping (or is that the Devotion one? I always get them confused).
You are I are conversing in a thread created by someone who clearly thinks so.
I can agree on some things being streamlined like respeccing attributes as I restarted quite a few new characters as a new player over it and later on installed Grim Dawn Defiler as a solution until Ashes of Malmouth became available.
But I don’t think making the Spirit Guide free is something that really needs streamlining, I suppose you and i can agree to disagree with each other in this case.
Make all faction gear free! It punishes new players to pay $ for gear they earned by building rep with factions! I put myself in harm’s way for them and that’s how they repay me? And those experience potions at 20k each? The nerve of these people!
