Listening to the community too much is what ruined PoE 1 for many of us.

"

ShadyC#1006 wrote:

... By the way, this thread, in PoE 1 General Discussion, sat around idling as the 3rd most recently active thread for like 24 hours with nobody posting in it.

Look around.

Nobody is here.

It's the same ~10 posters, on the official forums.

And I would bet money that most of these posters don't even play the game more than 5 hours a week.




You dismiss my Steam data? Well here you go. Another exhibit for you to dismiss.

Are you just baiting people to call you names so they get banned? Why do you say such dumb things?

a lot of us just dont post in the forums ... doesnt mean we arent here


ive been playing since open beta.

"

hornfeld#7213 wrote:

I agree with everything op said. So many games have been ruined over the years because of vocal minorities whining on forums.

It's honestly adorable hearing that tiny minority telling GGG not to listen to the minority. Oh sweet summer child, you are the minority now — the GGG fanboys who’ll applaud anything Jonathan does. Look at online status which dropped to 0.1 patch levels within just a week — the same numbers we've seen only after two months of 0.1 start.

There’s literally nothing to do in the game. And no, I don’t mean for the “I log in for 30 minutes, poke a white mob and feel accomplished” crowd — I mean for actual hardcore players. There’s no build variety, no endgame, no crafting, and no loot either. A masterclass in game design. They buried all late mechanics in the game,

You’ve got like 200 hours in PoE 2, you're still giggling like kids on Christmas morning because you're playing a meta build and running your low-tier map with zero juice, feeling like kings of the world and true gamerz.

The game isn’t hard — can we please stop calling mental torture “difficulty”? It’s just slow, tedious, and mind-numbingly boring. If we’re comparing to Souls-like games, PoE 2 is on the same tragic trajectory as the first Lords of the Fallen — copying every mistake like it’s a checklist.
Waiting 20k online today when LE league starte

if you want to argue with me, please read my thread first
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3762066/page/1

and tell me, my boy, where im wrong

I completely agree. 100%. Game should always remain challenging. That's the core of POE. There are other less challenging ARPG games.

GGG should indeed focus on this type of players. We are the ones who will remain loyal and will stay if the game is still interesting and challenging.

Personally I'm not hardcore, hardcore, but I like to create my own build, think my character through and through and overcome obstacles without copying dumbly any build. This is how I get enjoyment and satisfaction. If you want to just kill stuff without thinking, there are phone games for that.

Example the New Monster Hunter Wilds has been heavily criticized by the community for being way to bland and un-challenging. Always has been a fan of MHFs and I'll never play this one. I lost faith in it.

I hope I won't loose my faith in POE.

"

hypochrist#0488 wrote:

I completely agree. 100%. Game should always remain challenging. That's the core of POE. There are other less challenging ARPG games.

GGG should indeed focus on this type of players. We are the ones who will remain loyal and will stay if the game is still interesting and challenging.

Personally I'm not hardcore, hardcore, but I like to create my own build, think my character through and through and overcome obstacles without copying dumbly any build. This is how I get enjoyment and satisfaction. If you want to just kill stuff without thinking, there are phone games for that.

Example the New Monster Hunter Wilds has been heavily criticized by the community for being way to bland and un-challenging. Always has been a fan of MHFs and I'll never play this one. I lost faith in it.

I hope I won't loose my faith in POE.

and how you suppose to "think your character through" when there is quite 90% of classes are buried and unplayable gimmick?

Pathfinder, Chronomancer, Stormweaver, Chaluya, Infernalist, Blood Mage, Whitch Hunter, Warbringer - all this classes were murdered and became completed trash.
like 80% of passive nodes were gutted and overnerfed, removed sockets killed all diversity. How you suppose to make any build when all endgame loot were guted?
How you can make good build when like 80% of skills is completed trash now?

Unfortunately, PoE2's main problem is how it interfered with PoE1 updates. If PoE1 weren't so affected by PoE2's development, we wouldn't see so many complaints from players wanting the easy, frictionless, zoomy gameplay. These players would simply play PoE1's new leagues instead. I can't wait for a new PoE1 league so they'll stfu and move on.

"

Acaste7#4977 wrote:

Or you're just not worth the time.
Like, at all.

Counter-arguments you bring up are boring and misinformed.

Sorry.

And yet you weren't able to refute any of them. And you're right, there was no counter, that would have needed you to actually posting arguments, but all I can see are opinions pronounced as they were facts.

"

tntedesco#7536 wrote:

Unfortunately, PoE2's main problem is how it interfered with PoE1 updates. If PoE1 weren't so affected by PoE2's development, we wouldn't see so many complaints from players wanting the easy, frictionless, zoomy gameplay. These players would simply play PoE1's new leagues instead. I can't wait for a new PoE1 league so they'll stfu and move on.

Yeah, they really f'ed up there. I want nothing more than to "play PoE1, stfu and move on", but it would look real bad and be bad advertisement for PoE2 to have all the big streamers play PoE1, so it is what it is.

While your post reflects a strong personal opinion, much of it leans on nostalgia, speculation, and flawed assumptions that don't align with the actual trajectory of Path of Exile or the data we do have. Claiming a “silent majority” supports the older, slower version of PoE is not only unverifiable—it’s contradicted by how GGG has evolved the game over time. If the majority of players truly preferred the pacing of 2013-era PoE, GGG would have leaned into that design philosophy, yet the game has consistently moved toward faster, more rewarding gameplay loops. That’s not because the developers “sold out”—it’s because broader engagement data, league retention, and revenue models reward excitement, variety, and smoother progression. Players vote with their time and wallets, and the numbers support the direction GGG has taken.

The assertion that hardcore players "carry the game" because they make guides and push content is also deeply overstated. Yes, top-end players are valuable for surfacing issues quickly and contributing to community knowledge—but they are a minority, both in population and spending. Live service games like PoE survive on long-tail engagement, not just 0.1% of players pushing Uber bosses. GGG has stated in interviews that their monetization model is supported heavily by casual and mid-core players—those who buy supporter packs, cosmetics, stash tabs, and play every league even if they don’t engage with top-tier content. Without that playerbase, the game simply would not have the budget or support for the kind of development scale it has today.

Equating “difficulty” with “good design” is also misleading. The original PoE was difficult, but also unpolished. Many skills had terrible scaling, core systems were unintuitive, and early endgame was repetitive and opaque. Just because the game was slower and had more punishing resource management doesn’t mean it was better designed. Difficulty is only one component of design—and it’s not always synonymous with engagement. Modern PoE still offers decision pressure, build complexity, and high-stakes gameplay—but does so while respecting player time and rewarding investment. If one-shots and fast clears feel bad, that’s not inherently a pacing problem—it’s a tuning or balance issue, not a reason to revert the game to a decade-old philosophy that most of the playerbase has moved on from.

Your frustration with streamers like Zizaran having influence also overlooks how feedback ecosystems work. GGG doesn’t treat streamers as designers—they treat them as power users. Streamers help uncover balance issues and exploits quickly because they play intensely and under public scrutiny. Their feedback doesn’t come from authority, but from exposure. When someone is playing 10 hours a day for weeks and testing the limits of every system, that feedback becomes useful—whether or not it comes wrapped in design theory. Pretending GGG just blindly listens to whoever yells the loudest ignores how they’ve historically made changes: cautiously, often months or years after data and community trends emerge.

On the issue of the campaign and “dumbing down” the game—there’s no evidence that GGG plans to remove meaningful content. They’ve floated campaign skips as a quality-of-life feature for alts, not new players. That’s not a design compromise—it’s respecting player time. Repeating the same 10-hour process for every new character doesn’t add meaningful difficulty or depth—it adds tedium. The idea that removing that friction makes the game a “loot pinata” like Diablo 3 is an oversimplification and doesn’t reflect the actual feature design GGG has proposed.

Finally, your analogies—comparing player feedback to amateur surgery or toilet design—are both condescending and misrepresentative of how game development works. You don’t need to be a heart surgeon to say, “this hurts.” Players give feedback based on how a game feels, not how it’s built. And that feedback is often valid, even if it isn’t framed with technical vocabulary. Good developers don’t dismiss that—they interpret and act on it. In fact, many of PoE’s best improvements over the years came from exactly that kind of feedback: frustration with trade, convoluted crafting, UI clarity, and power spikes. Ignoring that because it didn’t come from someone with “design credentials” would be a catastrophic design mistake.

Stepping back, the core issue with your argument is that it presents a personal preference—favoring slower, more punishing gameplay—as objective truth, while dismissing opposing perspectives as either ignorant or corrupted by streamer influence. It assumes that older design philosophies are inherently superior without acknowledging the many ways the game has improved since then—not just in systems, but in player agency, content variety, and overall polish. While it’s completely valid to prefer a survival-style PoE experience, asserting that the game has “lost its soul” or that anyone who disagrees is misinformed or part of a “loud minority” oversimplifies a complex, evolving game. Your argument doesn't fall apart because of your opinion—it falters because it treats opinion as fact, nostalgia as evidence, and disagreement as ignorance. A meaningful conversation about game design requires more than just conviction—it requires a willingness to recognize that your ideal version of PoE isn’t necessarily the best one for everyone, nor for the long-term health of the game.

I agree in part with OP. Best PoE was 2012-2015.

And yeah I remember those times in hardcore, being forced to do PUBLIC RUNS in ledge act 1, in fellshrine ruins act 2 and later in docks act3 to get drops and improve gear to be able to progress, becase little resis crafting etc.

Those times were really glorious, with one-shot bosses like Kole (which you run through trying to avoid him in hardcore), also Perpetus, etc, etc.

Nerfing the game year after year after year, people now cry about a Monkey which is an optional boss that can one shoot you, and other stuff.


I dont like many many many things about PoE2 still, but for other different reasons.

But I agree PoE 1 at the early stages was something UNIQUE, for a niche of players like us, with separated itself from a zoom-zoom players.


Honestly I think it should have stayed that way, even if we were a minority. People with zoomzoom mentalities have many games at their disposal anyway.

And yeah, I dont see a reason why PoE1 can be made in one way and PoE in a different one.


Anyway, I totally understand why GGG made PoE1 the way it is now over the years, I totally get it. They prefer more players, console players, casual players, new players, all together cause obviously thats better for the future of the game and more money.


But I just come to say I agree with OP, you're not alone mate. I played extensively many thousand of hours from 2012-2015, doing a lot of competitive races in early stages also, those were fantastic.

But yeah, game turned into crap year after year after year. More content? Yes. But it turned slowly into another Diablo3, another random copypaste ARPG waaay too different than the amazing original one. Was fun while it lasted!
Sadly we are a huge minority here, man. We really are.

If only they would make an offline way to make an old version...




PS: I still dont like PoE2, nor PoE1 since years. I plasyed ocasionaly, but honestly even D2R looks to me way better feeling than PoE1 or PoE2 or D3 or D4 honestly.

Just my opinion.