How We're Developing Our Next Expansion Differently

I honestly think this is gonna make life a lot less stressful, for GGG and for the players. There's definitely some sadness involved in the dev team not being able to kind of finger paint with new ideas as they come up, but it seems like it's going to mean much smoother releases, with less having to put in huge fixes and changes really close together in the early league.

Regardless, though, we appreciate all the work you guys put in; this game IS very special, and the universe is wonderful, and we're lucky as hell to have you guys, and that you're as passionate about the game as we are. c:

So basically for seven years you had no concept on how to do things or any idea what you actually want and had devs run amok so everyone could add their little rainbows instead of consolidating what you already have. Like a 5th or 6th crafting system. And every new change makes previous obsolete. This whole feature creep thing is on you alone.
That heist is you "highest-content" league is just sad. Because in essence it's just one random area that you run back and forth with some relative one-dimensional and shallow characters, they could be copy pasted straight out of Borderlands. Which is fine until some out of whack dev decided that you needed additional gimmicks, like bunch of useless gear, alert level, fucking door opening animations. You could have left out 80% of these gimmicks and had a perfectly fine bridge league.
It doesn't help that at least since breach your leagues have been reward driven instead of lasting content.
How can you even talk about picking your battles when your balance team failed on both conceptual and numerical levels on topics that should have a league spanning agenda so many times. It's not what you balance, but the whole process that is out of line.
It has it's positive sides though. You can live of reworking the things you have over and over again and it would still feel fresh, that's how dead they are.

Chris, first let me say, thank you for posting this. But I have but to wonder if the main reason you are posting this because of the poor reception to this league?

You have built something amazing here, your company has built a lot of good will from us gamers. In some ways its like the early days of Blizzard, when they had Warcraft 2 and then Diablo 2... they could do no wrong.

Just remember, good will runs out at a time and is very hard to get back.

I for one hope your next league and your experiment works amazing and the trajectory is altered back to what we all came to love. I thank you for still being transparent in your plans, and taking the effort to communicate with us.

You have lost me over the last few leagues. I haven't bought any mtx from your store for quite awhile. I would love to get to a place where I want to play again and want to buy your MTX again. I tried with heist, and it wasn't for me at all. I lasted less than 5 hours.

I still believe in GGG, but I also feel time is running out before we hit critical mass and growth of the game starts reversing to a point you can't turn it around.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2971902/page/1#p23613713

LOL I knew it was coming

That's great and everything, but I'm most interested in answers to questions like why you think it's okay to sell a poorly-tiled single texture for $14, reskin existing assets and sell those (as opposed to letting use recolor them ourselves and sell color packs like Digital Extremes, for example), and why we are still missing features like the Character Portrait which is simply vacant, while has existed for years on the Chinese realm. We are also missing TONS of other non-game-breaking QoL features that the China realm has, like death reports, Ascendancy previews, an in-game trading house, in-game Path of Building, and of course features such as like-pickup, pets, better armor sets, and expanded inventory.

So. Will the next expansion be addressing any of that? Or will you be delaying character models until PoE 2 and leave us stuck with this outdated, embarrassing game we're ashamed to show videos of to our friends for another year as you continue slipping your release dates?

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strong stable launch, plenty of gameplay iteration and solid testing of features

pog

GGG deleting any critical comments.
So, don't bother.

Imagine a company like Blizzard typing something like this out. Thanks for everything you guys do, Chris and GGG.

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Imagine a company like Blizzard typing something like this out. Thanks for everything you guys do, Chris and GGG.

Good to know you are equating GGG's company size to Blizzard's.

Small indie game dev hypeee!