What Happened with Items

@Chris

The biggest kick in the face was that people warned your team that this was nuts and the collective response was "We have EXTENSIVELY playtested the content and it feels good to us."

But YOU just said that it was not playtested enough. These two are mutually exclusive. So are you lying / uninformed, or is your team?

While seeing certain content creators, who your team has busted in the past for exploiting, quit this game is AMAZING and fills me with warm fuzzies, the justification for their departure is VERY sound. Punishing Solo players for playing alone and Flogging and Torturing the late game farming types is not the way forward, it's the way down. Like... Hindenberg or Titanic Down.

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Riektas wrote:

But YOU just said that it was not playtested enough. These two are mutually exclusive. So are you lying / uninformed, or is your team?

I saw another post that mentioned the same thing. Honestly I think Chris is just keeping with his "My Vision, My Way" mentality and a lot of the Dev team probably doesn't agree with it. But since Chris is the one with control they have to follow suit.

"I know that if we destroy the loot we will destroy the game"

I just can't understand why there is no true "beta testing period" prior to launch. There are a few dead days between leagues. Could something be done there? The time crunch is really that severe that you have to risk this outcome?

Out of touch. The OVERWHELMING majority of your players are playing solo. All you've done is force solo players to fish maps for a Solaris Touched rare, so that they can find someone on Discord to come cull it for half the profit. You have reduced the game to hunting for a loot pinata.

Just nerf the shit out of group play already, so that the game feels good to play for the 99.999% of us that aren't streaming in optimized groups 18 hours a day, and running third party programs to find "-touched" in maps. "Streamer X is getting 50 Divines and 60 Exalted in a single drop, while everyone else is struggling with map progression and is broke af" is an absolute fucking joke. Watching a PoE stream shouldn't be 'the best way to play PoE'. 50 Divines and 60 Exalted vs 5 Chaos for the rando solo player is an abomination. We are at this point, because you continue to focus on the .0001%, while implementing changes that just further cripples the majority of your player base. 3.06-3.13 was the height of PoE, and the retention numbers prove it.

I have been here since launch. After piddling around with my "unaffected on average" change in drops and then watching the loot pinata videos today, I am absolutely broken, and I lost any motivation to dump anymore time into this season. I didn't uninstall, and I will be back next season with optimism, but this game feels like absolute shit to play right now.

From what i read in the post, i agree with many things: yeah, i think few will disagree that beyond needed the nerf, but really, the real problem on the game atm is archnemesis...

Feels like you are completely changing the whole balance of the game around it, i can only guess you have a personal feel for the mechanic, because its a thing the majority of the players hated from literally day 1 and its a mystery why you insist so much on it(or why you dont budge on their damage output). Just in reducing the yellow population to account for AN mods, you are literally forcing an entire rebalance of the loot table to account for a feature that almost everyone hates...

Rare monsters being relevant is one thing, but its pretty much fact AN is overtuned, adressing defenses is okay but their damage is the biggest issue. Like, forget regular map bosses: a yellow monster with a bad combo of mods is literally harder than APEX bosses and thats not even an exageration. I would even say in a sense, AN mods are even harder than uber shaper/maven because how you need every form of defense in the 85%-ish to handle all the diferent combos that can come at you

Map affixes and expedition mods can also brick a character, but those are avoidable, players running unid maps accept the possibility of a map turning to have no leech or no regen. AN mods are not avoidable in the same way, and some combos feel just as punitive as map mods that counters your build

Also, while i agree with many of the reasons on the apology, i have to say: your design phylosophy on AN drops is completely missguided... As many already told, focusing too much the bulk of the loot on a handful of affixes makes mapping in general extremely inconsistent. At this point, feels the drop rates in general were forced to crap numbers to account for the chance a yellow monster to be innocence-touched and suddenly you get massive profit
Thats not okay, the reverse is much better: Make yellow monsters less of a chore to face and if you REALLY want that bad to make the game hard, buff the base monsters instead: Really, it would be prefferable to play a game that is consistently hard than the current state where you are plowing everything then out of nowhere a random yellow nukes you. If you want a hard game, make the whole thing harder, dont just rely on a chance encounter that spikes the diff out of nowhere, and ditto for the loot: Focus on making the whole game more consistent rather than just focusing on improving the lootshower of a monster that "might" have the lucrative affix(and thats not even getting on the point that the lucrative affixes dont even intersect with the rip-ish ones)

I won't address the clusterfuck of bad communication and decisions and I appreciate this post.

But GGG...this new loot system ain't fuckin it, dudes. The concept is sound, but the execution is absolutely TERRIBLE.

Problem? Loot is now, primarily, focused on a few specific modifiers and getting those modifiers juiced with other AN mods. Making it worse, MF cullers are becoming the "new thing" as they can dramatically improve drops to the point where sitting on Touched mobs and splitting the drops with a MF culler is more valuable than killing it yourself.

And it results in long stretches of time where you find no Touched monsters and your rewards feel like absolute trash.

Solution? Nerf Touched modifiers hard by many orders of magnitude. No mob should be dropping stacks of Divines/Exalts. Sure, I WANT to be on the receiving end of a 50 Divine/Exalt AN mob and that would feel great, but that's way too much wealth at once and it makes all the time spent in between that drop and the next one feel like crap.

Beef up more mid-range rarity/difficulty AN mods so that we have more rarity bonuses. This smooths out drops overall while still allowing for some maps to simply not pay out a ton so that people can more incrementally build up good drops/currency without hoping for a Touched mob to have godrolls.

Similarly, extend the kind of drop-modifying effects to these mobs with reduced effectiveness. Honestly I LOVE the concept and really like having mobs drop tons of white socket items or fractured items (flasks and stuff feel bad, but I can live with that) even is 99% of the time it's all trash. Seeing that more often, to a lesser degree (i.e. fewer drops with those modifiers from the mobs) would make loot more interesting as well as these kinds of drops are fairly uncommon.

This all needs a LOT more testing and it feels like, even aside from Chris not asking, the team themselves didn't understand the change they were making and did functionally zero testing. Resulting in the current situation where almost everyone hates the new loot system, regardless of if it was communicated or not.

If the goal was to reduce TFT dependence this league, y'all missed that HARD. Now TFT is just selling MF culls for Touched mobs and there are new, arguably WORSE (for the health of the game) juicing methods already popping up. The economy seems like it's going to be an absolute disaster this league.

I miss the GGG that talked about being aware of the risk of all these issues over the years time and time again...only to make multiple major mistakes that they've warned against all at once.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Maybe I'm too emotional. So I'll try to restrain myself.

If they do not fix the craft in the harvest and do not improve the loot in the near future. I think in the league in a week it will drop very much online.
There is absolutely no desire to improve your build. No more loot explosions.

In general, updates in the new league did not stretch my gameplay.
In the last 5 leagues, I played for about a month.
Now a week has passed since the start and I don’t want to play it further. It makes no sense. There is no pleasant and gradual farming, no crafting. Absolutely.

I started to play in synthesis league. And I've been playing for a long time.
Your "vision" = the worst league I've ever played in PoE.

I'm genuinely afraid to tell you what I think right now for fear of getting permabanned