So, I just uninstalled PoE today.

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k1rage a écrit :

Am I the only one who never uninstalls stuff?

I mean drives are huge these days

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鬼殺し a écrit :

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Stormy_Fairweather a écrit :

I am surprised this post has not received a GGG response yet. OP is clearly a long term pillar of the community, as well as a long term supporter, and the response has been vocal and unified.

The only surprise is that it hasnt been deadzoned to Feedback. I doubt many real TencentGGG devs even read this board. One's ego can take only so much pummeling from former allies and supporters. Support drones respond to reports. Bex posts teasers leading up to a new release. That's about it.

Gibbousmoon is a pillar of THIS community. This community hasn't been a pillar of the playerbase overall for ages.

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shoju a écrit :

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Paldamus a écrit :

Map drops were lowered yeah, but they raised them again as can be seen in the patch notes forum, under one of the hotfixes. I thought everyone knew that they raised them back up.

Dodgy that they lowered them without telling us to begin with though.

How about you fix intervention freezes now GGG?

Not all of us are seeing the "benefit" of the Hotfix to raise them back up.

Level 81, and I'm stuck grinding T3 maps, trying to built up T4 maps, because the drop rate is terrible and the drops (for me, so far) have been in a descending fashion, not even dropping same tier, most often.

I am currently not playing Standard, because I have no idea what to do with all of my garbage maps that don't spawn masters, and don't help get me back to trying to go after shaper, after I destroyed my map inventory by 2/3+ in back to back league starts, even though the patch notes at Betrayal made it sound that they would be auto converting new maps, and they just didn't.

I figured I would give them the league length to get it figured out, but after a few weeks, and being frustrated with the league, i'm left wondering if I'll make it to league end.

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鬼殺し a écrit :

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Unquietheart a écrit :

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鬼殺し a écrit :

Meanwhile every other significant up-and-coming ARPG (all two of them) has clearly defined class skills and passive skill progression logical to the character's development because, surprise surprise, those devs play PoE too.

Having also played D2 back-in-the-day, I tend to agree with your assessment. But ... I'm also curious about this comment, which two games are you referring to?

Last Epoch and Wolcen. Both buy-to-play, both early access for current and all content going forward.

Of the two, Last Epoch is explicitly being made by Exiles, and you can tell. Many of its design decisions seemed to come from a basic stance of 'we didn't like this in PoE, so we're doing it a different way -- but based on what we did like in PoE'. There is more deterministic crafting of white items from the start, no class-unlocked skills at all but every skill has (or will have) its own comprehensive tree, there are no mana potions at all (so you're constantly relying on its regen and can't just spam your skills, but some skills are free [ie signature skills from D3] or can be made free via that skill's tree), only one flask dedicated to healing -- just off the top of my head. It has a clever Chrono Trigger style time travel element that the alpha barely scratches but you can immediately see the potential for efficient but not exhaustive asset recycling, an essential part of any long-term game when you think about it. At any rate, I've been playing a LOT of that lately, devoting myself to playing a character through the alpha using nothing but one skill, just to see how far I can stretch that skill's passive tree. So far I've almost finished one run with one skill of about 30 that currently have trees...

Wolcen, on the other hand, was around as 'Umbra' for ages and looked pretty much like a non-starter but then renamed itself and turned out to be a pretty good midway point between D3's dynamic play and PoE's customisation. The alpha they released was very promising -- I sunk 150 hours into it with ease. Then that alpha stuck around for ages (it's still up) and now it's sort of treading water between that, a disappointing multiplayer tech beta, and a sometime-this-year redux-of-pretty-much-everything beta that is far less open-ended in character development, drops the free camera and seems more focused on a D3-style progression. Nothing necessarily wrong with that because I think the only reason D3 sucked as hard as it did was because an MMO maker wearing the same name as Blizzard (North) made it.

I think Wolcen's got more going for it than Last Epoch (it's been in development longer, they've finished writing several acts of content, it's using an established engine [Cryengine] and it has serious ARPG innovations such as basic attack combos based on weapon) but they're both, to me, clearly what we could call Post-PoE ARPGs. Both could fizzle and die, especially if PoE ever gets off the shooting game ropes and back into the ARPG ring, which 4.0 may well be. I honestly don't know. They're also both buy-to-play which means early access is a one-off payment and covers all content going forward. Compared to some of the savage ongoing not-quite-necessary-but-let's-face-it-pretty-necessary costs of an evolving, expanding free-to-play, that one-off payment feels like a bargain, which it really shouldn't.

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Chiroxun a écrit :

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shoju a écrit :

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Paldamus a écrit :

Map drops were lowered yeah, but they raised them again as can be seen in the patch notes forum, under one of the hotfixes. I thought everyone knew that they raised them back up.

Dodgy that they lowered them without telling us to begin with though.

How about you fix intervention freezes now GGG?

Not all of us are seeing the "benefit" of the Hotfix to raise them back up.

Level 81, and I'm stuck grinding T3 maps, trying to built up T4 maps, because the drop rate is terrible and the drops (for me, so far) have been in a descending fashion, not even dropping same tier, most often.

I am currently not playing Standard, because I have no idea what to do with all of my garbage maps that don't spawn masters, and don't help get me back to trying to go after shaper, after I destroyed my map inventory by 2/3+ in back to back league starts, even though the patch notes at Betrayal made it sound that they would be auto converting new maps, and they just didn't.

I figured I would give them the league length to get it figured out, but after a few weeks, and being frustrated with the league, i'm left wondering if I'll make it to league end.

https://clips.twitch.tv/InnocentEsteemedJuiceKlappa

video for you and some cry babies here...

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Unquietheart a écrit :

Neither of those was on my radar. Wolcen looks beautiful (and also, looks a lot like PoE), but these days I guess we've become spoiled for good looking environments. I note that recent reviews tend to be on the negative side, which is too bad.


My own personal categorization of ARPG ranges a bit broader. I've personally been hoping that Borderlands 3 will be decent. But that's not sword&sorcery, so perhaps many won't think it counts.


Regardless, I'll have to keep an eye on both of those, thank you.

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gibbousmoon a écrit :

Spoiler

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.

Spoiler

The usual WKs, trolls, and nasty people who like to say "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" (plenty of overlap among the three) will most likely be summarily ignored, so don't even bother unless you are particularly eager to (re-)demonstrate to everyone here what kind of a human you are. Newsflash: Everyone knows already. Your behavior is a reflection of your character.

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.