About the "big dev move"

GGG did tell us that the reason why PoE 1 is still waiting for the 3.26 league is that all the PoE 1 devs were forcibly moved to work on PoE 2.

Which does answer the "what", but doesn't answer the "why" - I admit that recently I've been too much of a doomer regarding it and saying that it's because Jonathan hates PoE 1 and wants to see it dead in favour of the vision, but there might be a much more rational explanation to it - but what could be it?

Why did GGG pull the devs which have no experience with working on PoE 2 towards it instead of just letting them work on PoE 1?

It's not too hard to guess.

#1 Jonathan needed Mark to develop PoE2 alongside him, so he wasn't available as Game Director for PoE

#2 He needed experienced end game developers, because all his team did was create a campaign, so he pulled the most experienced devs for the job - the PoE guys

#3 He probably didn't do it because he wanted to give players an endgame, but because he wasn't convinced that he could finish the campaign in the remaining 6 months, so he took a compromise that players would be happy with

That's all guesses of course, but that makes the most sense to me. #3 is highly speculated of course.

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Ondrashek06#5795 wrote:

Why did GGG pull the devs which have no experience with working on PoE 2 towards it instead of just letting them work on PoE 1?

Good question. The shallow answer will be "because PoE2 is their main priority", and behind that answer lies several other reasons, like deadline, investors (Tencent), economic planning and so on. I think it was VERY important to them to release the EA before Christmas, so "all hands on deck".

That said, I refuse to believe that PoE2 would be very delayed (if at all) if they've kept a small team working on PoE1. 3.25 launched in July, which means we should've gotten a new league around November/December. Then they came out saying that they "will begin working on 3.26" after 0.2, which means everyone was working on PoE2 since July. If they've kept a small team working on PoE1 this whole time, we would probably been playing 3.26 now.

They they tell us that they have "no senior developers able to take the director's chair" of PoE1 besides Mark, which basically comes down to bad planning and recruiting. Which brings us the answer to your question:

Because of bad planning, bad recruiting and bad leadership.

I mean, isn't it obvious? Well in case it's not.... If you start a new league of POE1, POE2 will lose 80% of it's player base. Old or new, ppl want to play the better game. In this case, a much better game.