GGG is Doing a Great Job

Clearly, GGG knows the game needs work. After all, this is why they have aptly titled this current patch 0.2.1 instead of 1.2.1.

I wanted to do something positive on here and call out the good things GGG is doing. It's so easy to focus on things which we all know need work, or even completely re-worked as players.

Campaign: It's super challenging and I felt mentally + emotionally rewarding as a player the first time through. I have a great many characters at or above 80 and 90 now. I enjoy seeing myself get better and more efficient with each playthrough!! Still: Nothing beats a fresh character with no stash to rely on. To me it felt like every boss was a logically placed gear check which could be overcome with a few map runs.

Online play: When this game was pushing 250k-500k online numbers, the online play was straight up fire!! It was a true blast, and I enjoyed every run I did where players had skill + gear to match the difficulty.

Loot Drops: The game does feel like it rewards you from my perspective. Yes, using online trade will certainly fast-track you to power. If you play long enough and have your loot filter tuned to where it isn't excluding a ton of nice potential rolls, you'll find plenty to sell/trade. There were days where I sold spears only on DotH early period and I would make an easy 100-300div a day on the side as I ran maps and collected amazon gear I didn't need. I don't know what to tell people other than the gear does indeed drop. More-so now that they upped drop rates and rewards. Will drop you a big hint... chaos orbs have turned so much garbage into gems on my end. There's a reason they are relatively pricey. Learn to alter loot for better rewards. Learn to cut losses quickly to stay afloat!!

Gameplay:
Besides warrior, there isn't much a clever player can't come up with to dominate the battlefield. Once I quit looking up builds and learned how the game works a bit more, the game felt like it opened up. It feels really liberating

Friends:
Unless you are doing SSF or some solo type scenario that makes you happy, you should be in a group. Even if you guys hate one another and can somehow manage to get a good group going, you are better off in a group than not in a group. This game packs on the rewards for group play and was really I feel like designed to run a minimum of 4 players in a party for it to truly get great. Social butterflies and pretenders will flourish in this game. That's nice to see for a change. Group play is so much fun!

Leadership:
The upper leadership is taking a lot of flak on here. Stop and consider: They aren't just building a game. This isn't some AAA game where its built and these guys are all laid off. This is fully sustainable company from our contributions as players. The upper leadership here is building a team, and ultimately the cross-game coding experience they gain will lead them to be truly amazing video game coders if the GGG vision/model works. Stop and consider what this means, ya'll. A company taking care of it's employees... In that industry. Good on you, GGG!! A game company with a heart and soul!! Put out some more MTX, I'll hit the support button as soon as my wife isn't looking.

Challenge:
I'm 1250+ hours into this game and it's still challenging to me. That's a very good thing! Haven't you all had a game you played where you were able to put the cheats on at will? It was fun for a little while, then the game quits being fun. I for one am glad PoE2 did not go the PoE1 route. It looked like they were, and they pulled the brakes. Good on them! If I wanted PoE1 I would be on there playing it. Good on you, GGG!!

Concept Design:
I see people really raking GGG over the coals because of oversights. Be reasonable. Stuff will get fixed. The guys/gals/pronoun-of-choice building this game are geniuses, but they cannot possibly anticipate you and I. They're human, not all-knowing. Give them some time because the concepts here are really awesome on characters. Stop and ignore something that didn't pan out like you thought. Consider when you read it and were attracted to it, you knew you found a great concept. But then reality sank in: It's Early-Access Beta. Give them some leeway, GGG has very great ideas in PoE2. Carving and polishing a diamond takes time. Every person on the design team has life outside of work, and it isn't some massive massive Ubisoft type team. Be reasonable, they are doing a great job.

Communication:
Despite people saying GGG is poor at communication, I for one think they are excellent communicators. When you combine all the different online venues they use to disseminate interviews/info/updates/etc, they are great at communicating. Case in point: Everyone is all frustrated over lag. Look online. They addressed this. It's a DDoS attack scenario they faced. When I stopped and just looked at what GGG actually said rather than what I hoped they had said, they've been super transparent with everything. I would honestly say more transparent than most companies to the point they even owned up to a mistake with servers and needing a rollback. That's integrity and communication.

GGG is a great dev team, and PoE2 is going to shred all other ARPG's once it's done. Watch.

Agreed.

+1

I also think they're doing an excellent job. I think Jan-Mar was a steep learning curve for them, because they didn't have previous experience with a game the size of PoE2, which is much larger in scope and player base than PoE1. But that was unavoidable. Jonathan started in a garage with Chris, and Mark came up through PoE1. They aren't corpos with years of experience dealing with millions of players.

One thing that makes me smile ruefully: people talk about how much they miss Chris Wilson. Chris Wilson received a thousand, maybe 10 thousand times more hate than Jonathan is receiving now. GGG had to ban people for making personal threats against him that would be illegal in some countries. For all the entitlement that can show up online about PoE2, it's tiny compared to some moments in PoE1.

agree esp. about orbs and turning trash to treasure with them. it feels much better than rng in practice, they've done a spectacular job on this imo, it is a massive improvement over the old PoE1 system.

also Warrior is lots of fun to play with so don't quit on him OP!

overall nice and wholesome post.

Concerning communication, it would be nice to know what to expect and roughly when.

If they tell me when the balancing is planned, I can stop looking for updates.

Those are mostly fine points OP, but I must disagree on the communication. It would be more satisfying to observe GGG interaction within these Feedback threads themselves. A dedicated time slot could be set up once every fortnight for a GGG rep to interact on these forums. They could Q&A, relay player concerns to the devs, or set up thread polls/bounce ideas off the community.

Outside of performance issues, my greatest concern for the game is timely balance adjustments. I think they are falling very behind in that department.

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LeFlesh#9979 a écrit :

Outside of performance issues, my greatest concern for the game is timely balance adjustments. I think they are falling very behind in that department.

I agree, balance adjustments not being implemented mid-season is a big mistake. I watched an interview where Jonathan said they wouldn't make balance adjustments during the season because it would "feel bad" for players. But they don't seem to realize that 75% of players using one busted build and allowing them to run rampant for an entire 4 months has more negative consequences than positive ones.

It also comes across completely tone-deaf to players in Standard, who will always be susceptible to the negative effects of balance adjustments.

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LargeHairyMan#4219 a écrit :

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LeFlesh#9979 a écrit :

Outside of performance issues, my greatest concern for the game is timely balance adjustments. I think they are falling very behind in that department.

I agree, balance adjustments not being implemented mid-season is a big mistake. I watched an interview where Jonathan said they wouldn't make balance adjustments during the season because it would "feel bad" for players. But they don't seem to realize that 75% of players using one busted build and allowing them to run rampant for an entire 4 months has more negative consequences than positive ones.

I think their workforce planning includes 2 months before the new season starts for each of the two games.

If that is true, they are now on POE2 and will be done with balance in time for the start of the new season.

Maybe an ok idea for two released game, not so much in a rough beta that did cost a lot of money.

I doubt it. They don't know what they are doing. The plan and vision is not good and if they spent this time to fix bugs then ill give them a point but we have no bug fixes and no balance. Also crafting and drops are s...t.