So, I just uninstalled PoE today.

After a few weeks of not playing, I've decided to uninstall. This is the first time in many years this game has not resided on my hard drive. Please allow me to explain why.

(Hopefully this isn't a goodbye and more of a see you later. I sincerely hope the game is able to draw me back again, and I do plan to continue participating in the forums at least a little bit.)

I'm not tired of the game, and I haven't burnt out (even a little), due to my playing style. But I have lost patience with three aspects of Path of Exile as of 2019. All three are fixable, but all three have also been in place for a year or more now, so I frankly do not expect even one of them to be fixed, let alone all three.


Number 1: Play the speed meta or go home.

As of 2019, the overall majority of league mechanics are based around blowing shit up as fast as possible instead of tactically engaging enemies and using skill, rather than raw DPS, to survive. This creates a situation in which many if not most (!) primary skills are almost useless for anyone who wants to engage any league mechanics (current and past) utilizing timers. Much like a door on the second floor of a house which opens to nothing but air, or a handle on a door which can only be pushed, such skills are "false affordances" (commonly called "noobtraps") whose falseness is not evident right away. As such, they are a form of player deception.

Many players love the speed meta, and I can't deny that there is fun to be had playing Lawnmower Simulator. But it comes at a price: Playing the game in accordance with GGG-designed affordances, PoE used to be the deepest ARPG on the market, bar none. Now it is one of the shallowest.


Number 2: Why bother with proper QA? As long as we keep pumping out new content as fast as possible, we can always draw in enough new players to compensate for the fact that almost all new material has not been adequately tested.

This applies to coding bugs, it applies to design bugs, and it applies to demonstrably bad design decisions which are probably caught with just a minimal amount of player testing but are left unfixed because your aggressive release schedule doesn't permit you to address any problems in time. This approach to development apparently started with the Fall of Oriath expansion in summer of 2017, and has shown no indications of going away any time soon. Every new league sees a swathe of new problems added to the list of still-unfixed problems introduced by past leagues, and you get further and further behind.


Number 3: Ethical microtransactions were effective in the early days of fundraising for the game, but their time has passed.

The creation of specialized stash tabs was, once, about removing pain points which had been inadvertently added to the game (map management, for example, or the large amount of currency). Now, however, the quantity of (deliberately?) unstackable item bloat seems to be designed in service to "planned player pain;" i.e., to coerce players into buying more stash tabs (and presumably the respective specialized tab as well, once it comes out).

This "annoyance model" is something we expect from freemium mobile games but not from GGG. As such, to give GGG the benefit of the doubt is to say that it is not the deliberate creation of pain points for players but rather the result of spectacularly out-of-touch and untested (see #2 above) design decisions, which frankly isn't that much better. Also, the end result is the same.

The willful obsoleting of map stash tabs in Standard is the icing on the cake. For over a year now, the only adequate solution to that problem has been for players to pay for the map tab a second (or third) time. Many posters have complained that it is not ethical to require players to pay again for what they thought they had already paid for. I happen to agree.



Now, I firmly believe in "Don't cut off your nose to spite your face." I don't quit games I enjoy just to make a point. And that's why point #3 above would not be enough by itself to make me uninstall the game (I have plenty of tabs). But points #1 and #2 have been painful for a very long time now, GGG. And I don't see any indication from you in either your announcements nor your behavior to indicate you even acknowledge these three problems, let alone intend to fix them someday. Instead of getting better they keep getting worse.

To the devs at GGG, thank you very much for all your hard work over the years. I don't begrudge you the many hundreds of dollars I've pumped into this game one bit: You have earned every penny of it. And I expect that your current business strategy will be perfectly viable: You'll continue to suck in new players who will buy stash tabs. While I don't consider this the best way to create and maintain a good game, I do acknowledge that it is a way to create and maintain an effective business.

I wish you the best of luck in the future with your business.

Amen. So long and thanks for all the fish.

I agree with many of your complaints, and quitting is always an option.

If you find something that replaces PoE, come back and tell us about it.

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Shagsbeard a écrit :

I agree with many of your complaints, and quitting is always an option.

If you find something that replaces PoE, come back and tell us about it.

Grim Dawn. They are also releasing a new DLC in 10 days. It will not be free like POE's league, but it will certainly be worth more than the MTX from POE.

Damn, so hateful.

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Johny_Snow a écrit :

Damn, so hateful.

Not sure if serious. This complaint is one of the more constructive ones here. At least its miles ahead of those "Delete X" rants.

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andreicde a écrit :

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Shagsbeard a écrit :

I agree with many of your complaints, and quitting is always an option.

If you find something that replaces PoE, come back and tell us about it.

Grim Dawn. They are also releasing a new DLC in 10 days. It will not be free like POE's league, but it will certainly be worth more than the MTX from POE.

Grim dawn for me is....a sort of MEH. As in yes, it works for a while, I did play it, I don't even know, 150 maybe 180-200 hours over the years?

Thing is it does not have the same replayability as poe, I like that it does not go for the sonic CLEARSPEED meta that poe lately implemented, but unfortunately it needs to add more and more content.

I don't need new content every 3 months, but I do need it at least once or twice a year.

Titan quest was one of my main diablo alternatives back in the day, together with sacred 1 and 2 and who could forget NOX or Loki?, but those times have passed, grim dawn even if it wants to be "grim" still has many titan quest elements in it, if the dev team would go for even grittier and darker content+more frequent content releases, I would quit POE this second.

In all honesty I would want more a sacred revival than a titan quest renamed grim dawn resurrection. Yes I know ,the sacred series was not "grim" or "dark" but it had a lot of satire in it, and something that somehow made me play not hundreds but thousands of hours.

Good post, ive mainly gone to playing warframe now. I think the watering down of the base game to accommodate incursion, bestiary, delve in 3.5 was my last straw.

"don't let the door hit your ass on the way out"

See you Gibbous, it's been a long and interesting ride.