So, I just uninstalled PoE today.

Constructive feedback:

Three leagues per year and three months with race / micro events or anything that doesn't force them to rush agenda giving them more time to deal with both technical and design stuff would be fine to me aslong it guarantee some not-so-rushed content.

Agree with OP. gameplay is too fast todays. tis new league "rush to object gogogogogo!" is a bit too fast paced. time to cap game movement speed to 130% and give melee builds more tankiness.

game feels like Diablo 3 right now, just go rift (map,memory) and kill/move fast.

Yeah +1 to OP's post. It's getting annoying.

Particularly the point #2.

Point 3 is spot on.
It's called p2w, but once you mention it swarms of white knights will peck you for days to come.

Totally agree with OP.

I've been a lot on and off in the last years due to life things, but this is sadly an off moment due to game mechanics that I just can't stand any longer.
I don't like playing on timer, I don't like dying because a game event freeze my pc, I already do beta testing for work so I don't want to do it for fun.

There was a time when I was very glad to give my money to GGG and ignore major problems because I could feel they cared for the quality of their game.

Now, well, they care but for other thing$...

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return33 a écrit :

The ammount of monsters you mow in delve or incursion or synthesis is absurd...
Maps feel empty compared.

Too much cast speed, too much movment speed .... monsters die instantly.

I would really like a game where i see monsters and fight them - not just kill things 3 screens off.

We really need a slow down in the game. Something like:

Increase monster life by 500%.
Dimishing returns on attack, cast, move speed ...
Increase rewards by 10 times to make up for the "kill less, be slower meta".

Go get/craft your gear yourself, like you're supposed to, and the meta will be slow af.
And yeah I'm going to finish some things, will try at least, and this mess flies like a zoom zoom turd to a recycle bin.

Cya, Gibbousmoon.
I can relate to a lot of what you wrote, but I'm not at the same point, yet. PoE keeps dragging me in - but I wonder for how long that'll be if the game keeps going in the same direction.

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gibbousmoon a écrit :

Number 1: Play the speed meta or go home.


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

Those are really so bad... Cant even tell which is worst lol

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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.

I tried this after quitting last league in a week - it scratched part of the itch but not all. It is a good game, but does not have the depth. And the new expansions make the grind a little too long - I was level 63 and still not done the first difficulty.......

OP's point on speed meta sparks true for me. I played a Storm Brand to 86 and the new content was easy-peasy. Then I started a MS Jugg (yeah, yeah, I am a meta whore, get over it) and the memories were annoying. Having to STOP and fight is a detriment in memories. So I am skipping the content until maps with the Jugg - which seems a waste but far more enjoyable. Ironically.

I felt refreshed coming back after a couple months break, so this crappy league has not got me down as much as many - I was just happy to be playing again. The base game.

But we need bloat solution (cough - leaguestones - cough) or else this game is in trouble.

"

gibbousmoon a écrit :

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.

Number 1: Play the speed meta or go home.

Spoiler

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.

Spoiler

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.

Spoiler

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.

Thanks for the thoughtful and constructive feedback, gibbousmoon. I have not been here long enough to appreciate the significance of your absence and the other seasoned players in the thread, but I hope it means something eventually sinks in at GGG HQ.

I pulled the trigger about a month ago or so during the one-shot league. It was frustrating as hell, even after the nerfs, so they were mostly locked away (then farmed in Blood Aqueduct with hope of unlocking more crafting). What eventually pushed me over the edge was the random one-shots or deaths, where I had no chance to react, and the very, very punishing XP loss. I had a character at level 94, 4 more than I ever had before. One death every 4-5 hours' session meant no progress was made.

Your above points are all very valid and I agree with them, and I would also like to mention a few more, from my own experience, and lending on this excellent video that made the rounds a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3WkaqDYtXQ (in this thread)

>> #1 Rate Wars (or one-shot the screen or get one-shot yourself). There is simply no balance. You one-shot (or easily kill) the entire screen, or you get the same treatment yourself, or near enough. The typical sign of this, coupled with high regeneration and/or leech, is that the life meter spikes up and down constantly between full life and near death. When incoming damage spike is too high, you get one-shot. There is really no middle ground.

It makes for poor gameplay. Either you faceroll through the world and one-shot/kill everything in sight while sipping some tea and reading a book on the side, or you get insta-gibbed (and lose 10% XP).

>> #2 XP penalty. Yes, yes. Everybody loves to hate it, and white knights love to troll about it with the usual "git gud" handwave. Slight backstory: I'm not a streamer or level 100 merchant, but I am not bad at the game. I've got to T16, managed to complete Vaal Temple the first time through it deathless (admittedly a close call). I've seen a lot of what the game has to offer, more than probably 90% of players. To the white knights this is nothing to brag about ofc, but I feel like I am pretty adept at the game. But I do get killed here and there. Not often, but maybe once a 4-5 hour session, at least in the later stages of the game. The result of this, despite playing more hours than I care to admit, is that I get practically zero character progress. It can be excruciatingly frustrating. There simply has to be a better way. Hell, just remove the whole thing and it would be an improvement. Wouldn't matter for the level 100 crowd, they probably go (mostly) deathless as it is. But it would make the experience much more fun for everybody else. Have a death counter more visible if people absolutely need to wave their e-peen around.

>> #3 Don't do hard content. Obviously tied to the above point, but it's an important one. The consequence of the existence of the XP penalty (at least in its current harsh form) is that, if you want to progress, you cannot do the hard content. Especially when I get to around level 85-90, I will postpone doing the tough content, even map bosses sometimes, until I have levelled up. Obviously this makes for pretty damn boring gameplay. When I then level up, it's suddenly okay to take on tough stuff like a Delve boss, or Catarina (another complete feck-up by GGG's part), or T16 maps, or Elder, or Atziri, or the later Labyrinths, or Guardians. The most interesting content in the game is therefore practically locked away until it is "safe" to face it. If you die several times, you won't lose 50% XP or suchlike.

>> #4 RNG walls. GGG loves to gate their content behind RNG walls. Ideally multiple of them for the same content. No example is needed, we all know them. Seems like the central design philosophy of the game is the Russian matryoshka doll, the one with one doll inside another, inside another.

>> #5 The speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed. My first league was Incursion, and I hated it. Get in there, don't get anything done, pop out again. Four wisdom scrolls drop. "Well done, exile". F*** off. Do us all a favour and dive head-first into a Devourer. Thanks.

Mostly played that league without engaging with the league content, as it always left be extremely frustrated and agitated, always regretting going in again. "Maybe it will be different this time." No. It won't be. It will still suck because you can't kill the entire temple in two seconds whilst teleporting to a door. I quit before the launch of the current league, but it looks like much the same, or astonishingly, even worse. The consequence of this, of course, is that people get baited into using speed metas. Last league I used Winter Orb. Mainly because it sounded interesting and I wanted to try it out, but it also proved to be pretty good at just killing stuff everywhere pretty fast. I've never used 100% movement speed or silly stuff like that, and I see people with even more. I'd honestly get a headache from that, just zoom-zooming around. Way too much visual clutter all over the place (without touching on all the green puke syndicates and Catarina spewed all over the screen). Lock it down, hard, to max 30% or something like that. At least try to balance some of these crucial features in the game.



This is long enough already, so I'll try to summarise. All these points tie together. You can't balance the game without dealing with all of them. The balance is simply way out of whack, and the game has some very serious deep-lying issues. They need to be tackled, and it needs to occur in a much more professional and sustained way than during hectic league development.

Overall, I don't like the direction the game is heading in, and I've not even touched on the horrendous pushing of bling-bling effects or the much worse gambling boxes. They keep adding content that favour speed (both in movement and DPS) over anything resembling actual balance. Delve sounded good, but ofc the implementation was not. RNG walls all over the place, and try to find something in the dark, and you very easily end up dead.

So I have moved on to other games, and other genres. I've never played WoW or Diablo (any of them), but I do love actual role-playing games, and strategy games. So I'm back doing them, and loving it. Such a different experience to POE. Sad to say, but it's true.