GGG, There is no reason to balance your game around vocal minority.

You have your vision for PoE 2 and you deploy it.
Then we see roughly around 2-3% of playerbase giving strong negative feedback.

Sadly, in this minority there are some that are seen (streamers/youtubers) and then some dedicated to share their feedback publicly a lot, creating multiple forums/reddit posts and bloating it by commenting the same opinions over and over to similar posts.

You then have tendencies to react and change your initial design because of this minority, which doesn't represent the actual feedback, but only a bad portion of it. This hurts the game and developers and their work satisfaction as well.

I believe PoE 2 is project of passion, as well as a business.

Please consider the following:
- In 95% cases, people share negative feedback (not only in gaming). When things work fine, people don't feel the urge to share feedback. You are hearing only the bad news.

-> If you want to gather more relevant data, make an in-game short poll to gather feedback from all active users.
Wanna make it more business oriented? Pull feedback from those who invested X amount of money into the game, or from everyone, your choice.

PoE vocal minority is a bit special and very negative, please consider them too, of course, but keep your eyes and ears open and ask the happy players for their feedback too. 0.2 is awesome since day 1. There was no need for recent changes.

GGG is literally making changes that I requested on this forum, so I'm feeling upbeat about the state of the game. But I doubt they did it because of anything I said. Instead, they looked at user metrics and quit moments, and they saw a lot more people weren't bothering to finish the campaign.

User feedback matters, but user behavior matters a lot more. GGG is deploying lots of changes quickly, so they must have seen trends in their metrics.

I'm happy for you, if the recent changes to make things easier actually make your gameplay more enjoyable :)
Ideally yeah, metrics should be a key factor and we won't find out.. but sometimes it definitely looks like changes are made based on a wave of feedback from small % of players.

I really doubt GGG will listen to the naysayers in regards to the philosophy behind PoE2.

They made that extremely clear by slowing down the game and going in the direction of "meaningful" combat rather than reverting to PoE1 fast combat and movement.

However, it's worth noting there ARE issues which clearly needed to be looked at and some more which still need to be.

Or if GGG disagrees, then they can explain why this or that change is not coming, then we can discuss and argue it and they/we might change their/our mind.