Haven't posted on here for years and while I understand that some people aren't happy with the direction of the game, I want everyone who
is happy with the current direction to also have a voice.
It's always those that have something to complain about that are loud and vocal, but the rest of the community who are liking the product are just quietly enjoying it - that's just the truth.
I urge GGG to not forget that.
Let's not forget two things about the game:
Originally, if you played PoE when it came out - this was back in the days when Piety was the "final boss" in the acts -
it played just like PoE2 does now in terms of pacing and difficulty. And it was awesome and a breath of fresh air.
The philosophy of the game has never been about zoom-zooming through content and having incredibly accessible power levels for your character.
It had to be earned, and going back to that pseudo-elitist philosophy made me happy and come back to the franchise, and many other players that I know as well.
Most of these players lost the will to play when the game wasn't challenging anymore, and while you might not care about these players, like it or not, it's the super sweaty hardcore top-end dudes that put in most of the hours in games like these, and they are the ones who make most of the content you watch, and most of the guides that you use, and they are also the ones who keep the competitive part of the game alive by constantly pushing its limits and innovating through creative build-making.
We missed the slow, deliberate PoE that felt like a survival game (especially on Hardcore) - where you had to manage your resources carefully and make the correct game decisions to find success.
I stopped playing PoE1, for example, when it became 80% of sitting at base crafting and trading and only 20% of zoom-zoom gameplay where you encountered like 6 league mechanics in the span of a single minute. The game had no more soul for me, it was dead. The game I knew didn't exist anymore.
I don't want to play an item-flipping economy simulator, I want to fight Lovecraftian scale horrors that want to take my head off and use it for supper.
I don't want PoE 2 to also turn into a braindead loot generator for cheap dopamine release just because Zizaran thinks he didn't receive enough loot (all respect to Ziz, but I think specific streamers are listened to too much by GGG and have way too much influence over how things are changed).
In the last dozen leagues in PoE 1, we were watching builds kill things off-screen without even seeing them, or without even getting to interface with most of the mods and interesting mechanics that even rare enemies had to offer.
Even rogue exiles melted like butter when, in the past, encounters like Haast were genuinely difficult.
The last time I played PoE 1 - I oneshot Haast with my build without even seeing him implode. This is not engaging gameplay. What am I even playing if I can oneshot something that genuinely terrified me years back from off-screen without even seeing it? That particular moment felt so underwhelming and lame that I just quit the game.
And I was super hardcore about PoE1 as well. I was one of the first players to kill pre-nerf Malachai when it came out, etc. And from that point on - it just became more and more annoying to play it.
When they showcased PoE 2 I was finally like "hell yeah, we're back on the menu!"
I've worked in game design myself for a little over 8 years now and I honestly expected better game design decisions from GGG for PoE 1. I was weirded out about how much power-creep was allowed in the game and how much of basic game design theory was discarded and thrown out of the window.
I believe this happened because the "community" (actually just the loud minority who campaigned for incompetent changes) were listened to way too much. At their core, GGG are a diplomatic bunch and I think they take feedback to heart a little bit too dramatically. Or used to, at least.
I'm sharing this so the devs can hopefully read it and not forget that
the average player is not well-versed in game design theory at all. They think they have all the simple solutions, but they don't understand that simple solutions don't exist in this field of work. They fail to understand the full implications of changing isolated elements when every system is interconnected.
The end-result of following this sort of incompetent feedback will be to just remove the campaign altogether or make it optional and then package that as a "QoL feature". Make enough of these small concessions and you suddenly have another Diablo 3.
If you were a heart surgeon, you wouldn't just listen to some random people's opinions about how to do heart surgery because they've seen every episode of Dr House, right?
To the people saying "omg it's such a simple fix..." - I'm sorry but
having used the toilet your whole life doesn't make you an expert in toilet design, okay?
There's a very fine line between feedback (the player's objective experience) and complaining (the player's subjective/anecdotal experiences) - and I believe most of what we see on these forums and on reddit is just that.
I'm genuinely curious, why does a random streamer who isn't even a game designer have so much input about what needs to change in a game genre as sophisticated as the aRPG genre?
I understand he's an experienced player, but some of the questions he asked in the interview and his inability to comprehend basic design philosophy really irritated me.
