I think most people here still severly overestimate the average players builds/skills/gear

I'm pretty sure if GGG showed us some statistics you would see that maybe like 5% of players have killed guardians and maybe like 1% has done shaper/and or uber atziri
I'm kinda tempted to do a vote here in jsp to see how many here have actually done them. Pretty sure even that would be less than you'd expect.

GGG balances the game according to it's playerbase. It's no longer meant to be the "slow paced hardcore game made for hardcore gamers who only play hardcore and have a hard on" like they originally marketed it
Which I understand. It's a business after all, and expanding your playerbase is crucial if you wanna compete with the big boys

I still wish GGG would focus a bit on the pvp aspect. A good pvp environment would motivate so many people and it would add so many years to the games lifespan.

So the game isn't easier, it is us who are better players?
i disagree tho, imagine SSF to 100 years ago..

its a mix of both. the game was more difficult back then because u didnt have access to alot of stuff you have now and because ppl were alot less knowledgable

idk I pretty much played SSF back then cause poe trade didnt exist and using forums to buy and sell shit was annoying

but Im not denying that the game got easier. I'm saying that even though it got easier, most of the end game bosses are still untouched by most players
So making the road to the end game more difficult seems a bit counter productive imo

Now if you make the end game bosses a lot harder the casual players who never reached them definitely cant do them in the future either.
Adding new bosses is always good though as it gives the tryhards something to test their e-peens against and it also gives the newbs a goal to strive for

largely this
there is a reason only 0.75% (thats right, not even 1%) complete 36 challenges which are largely just playing the game 5 hours a week and you will accomplish all of them.
the end game isn't too easy, and there is only a small portion of the community that actually steam rolls it.
More players could do it with infinite portals like d2, that is why they limit it to only 6 portals.

well in my case, ive never killed uber atziri or shaper or pale council, but to be honest i didnt really bother to try rewards arent worth the investment, i prefered doing random maps

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=76249742&f=160

Just to hit on this discussion points --

From a rough basis -- 75% of our community smashes the content that the game currently offers -- We are a collection of people that cranks out 24-36+/40 challenges compared to the rest of the community that have trouble with that feat.

---------------------------

I think in order to answer how to "fix the clear speed meta" you have to answer the question -- Why is clear speed the meta?

Clear speed is the meta because, as it was pointed out in the thread above, smashing strand maps as fast as you can is more profitable, and namely much easier than trying to clear content like uber / shaper that drop "build enabling" uniques.

People like to do things fast.. (even if they suck they can probably understand this) so yeah... how do you change this?

I would say -- You buff high end boss content drop tables -- This is going to offer more incentive to be clearing the upper limits of the game -- Or you nerf the drop rates -- Make regular farming more grindy -- in turn making the high end content more appealing.

Edit ----------------

Going back to the first post -- I think the game revolves more around building wealth (and the natural greed of each individual) versus more the experience gain --

So. I think the experience itself is fine -- You need to adjust the drop rates instead of experience. This way people that want to farm experience can still smash strands / poorjoys -- and climb to 100 quickly... but you need to be killing higher content for more returns.

This post was edited by Ctrain2 on Apr 23 2017 09:16am

It's hard to stay unbiased when it comes to judging the difficulty of the content, I'll give you that. But there's no denying that more and more people are capable of doing the end game content. So much so that things like Uber and Shaper just aren't worth the cost investment for the rewards very early on in a league. The market gets completely flooded. Brain dead metas get established, players copy paste builds and manage to push through content they normally wouldn't be able to do.

But that's just bosses. The average player with mediocre gear and a shit build hardly ever gets to experience all the monster mechanics because the ever increasing amount of "more" multipliers just makes him one shot things in a map as well.

Anyone that gets to end game where the "real game" starts doesn't actually get to experience the game for what it is and that's kinda sad. I'm not the kind of person who wants the game to go back to a slow crawl, I just want the game to provide some sort of challenge when I'm on my way to what's supposed to be a hard boss. Think Diablo 2 chaos or baal runs. Not a huge difference in kill speed. Just slightly slower. Slow enough that you sometimes have to deal with the monster mechanics if you're not a hammerdin bot.

This post was edited by CMBurns on Apr 23 2017 09:22am

agreed

this is so fucking true. u cant even be profitable for killing the 'hardest' content.