GGG: You’re Walking a Dangerous Path

I want to raise a warning about the direction POE2 is heading after this patch.

The new item changes – where everything rolls “really good” – might feel exciting right now, but they are participation trophies dressed up as loot. And trophies for participation always seem good at first… before the boredom sets in. Every patch since launch has been buffs, buffs, buffs. Sprinting across zones. Easy movement speed boots that almost always roll high. Boss mechanics and escape trials being trivialized because players just sprint past them. And now? It’s raining skill gems and support gems. What used to be a “YESSS!” moment when a key gem finally dropped is now just noise. The drops feel meaningless.

Back at launch, GGG almost nailed it. Sure, some boss tuning needed work, and QoL was missing, but the soul of the game was flawless. Every drop mattered. Every gem felt like treasure. Every choice felt heavy, like you were clawing through darkness with scraps of power. It matched the story perfectly — desperate, hopeless, brutal, and beautiful.

And the reason launch worked so well? Because GGG wasn’t chasing feedback. They weren’t bending the knee to whiners on Reddit or streams. They just built the best damn game they could, guided by their own vision and experience. That’s why it was cohesive. That’s why it felt right.

But now… it feels like every design choice has to survive a trial by noise. Millions of players (half of them teenagers with zero game design sense) shout “this sucks!” or “buff this!” — and because the volume is deafening, GGG mistakes it for wisdom. Just because a million people think an idea is good doesn’t make it good. Imagine a brand new player insisting “movement should be twice as fast because slow feels bad.” To the inexperienced, that sounds right. To the seasoned dev, you know it kills pacing, tension, difficulty, and balance. Listening is good. Blindly obeying is death.

And here’s the problem: when everything is handed to you, nothing has value.

It’s like giving everyone in a race a medal. The people who actually won feel devalued, and the people with the participation ribbon feel empty because they know deep down they didn’t earn it. There’s solid psychology behind this: according to Ryan & Deci’s Self-Determination Theory (2000 paper PDF
), people need competence (overcoming real challenges), autonomy, and relatedness to stay motivated. When rewards come too easily, they actually backfire – satisfaction drops, not rises. Easy loot is just a participation trophy, and participation trophies never create lasting pride.

We all saw what happened with Diablo 4: within 24 hours of launch, players were one-shotting uber bosses. The game turned into a loot piñata – gear handed out so easily that players hit near-max within a day, with certain builds deleting endgame bosses instantly. The entire campaign – this long, carefully built stretch of content – became meaningless because loot was so easy to get.

And now POE2 is showing its own danger signs: sprint speeds and easy high-rolls on gear (like movement speed boots) trivialize huge chunks of the campaign. The only “deaths” players face are from sudden spikes on bosses like Viper Napuazi or the Act 4 Wisp fight, where bad RNG punishes you. That’s not real challenge. That’s fake difficulty pasted onto an otherwise braindead steamroll.

This is not the spirit POE was built on. POE1 earned its reputation precisely because it was hard. People were drawn to the steep learning curve, the depth, the complexity. Yes, it was tough to learn – but that toughness was what made mastery satisfying. Complexity is sometimes required for greatness. And today, in the world of Maxroll, Moblytics, endless guides, Discord servers, and YouTube breakdowns, the answer is absolutely not to dumb the game down and shower everyone with loot. If anything, the bar for challenge should be raised.

While listening to the community is important, letting the crowd dictate the direction of the game is suicide. The loudest voices yelling “SHINIES! SHINIES!” don’t actually understand what will make them happy in the long run. They think they want easy loot, but what they really want is satisfaction – and satisfaction only comes from overcoming real challenge. Strong leadership means knowing when to resist short-term noise for the sake of long-term health.

Yes, right now there’s short-term excitement from shinies and power spikes. But long-term? People will leave. Rewards without effort always lead to burnout. Simple story: if you climb a mountain in a helicopter, you don’t feel like a mountaineer. You just sat in a chair. If you climb it step by step, then you feel the pride. POE2 should be about that climb, not about free helicopter rides.

That’s why I’m calling for Ruthless mode, and viewing it as a way to reconcile the divide between players who crave challenge and those who chase shinies. Right now the community is split between those who see the wisdom in preserving challenge, and those who haven’t learned that lesson yet. If GGG wants POE2 to last for years instead of months, the path is clear: make rewards earned, not handed out.

Excitement right now is not proof of good design. Boredom is coming if this path continues. I just hope it’s not too late by the time everyone realizes it.

TL;DR: Easy loot and guaranteed strong item rolls are participation trophies. They feel good at first but quickly destroy long-term satisfaction, just like Diablo 4’s loot piñata disaster. POE was built on challenge and complexity – that’s what made it great. Don’t dumb it down for short-term hype. GGG needs to resist the “shinies now” crowd, lean into difficulty, and consider Ruthless mode as a path to preserve the game’s longevity while catering for the 'Shinies Crowd'.

Too much text, here short version:

The user’s point in short:
POE2 is becoming too easy — loot is inflated, items roll too well, movement is too fast. This kills tension and long-term motivation. He warns that GGG is listening too much to loud community voices (like what ruined Diablo 4) and risks destroying POE’s core. Instead, he calls for more challenge, rewards that must be earned, and adding Ruthless mode as a compromise for both challenge-seekers and “shinies” players.

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as long as they don't balance the game around perfect loot the game will be fine. people that want to have GG loot will have it and will zoom zoom, people that don't care about that will play their way.
key here is allowing players to interact with the game on their own terms. d2 has that, poe1 doesn't have that. that's because poe1 was balanced around perfect loot, and now you need a spreadsheet to even interact with it. irony here is that people that have perfect gear and zoom zoom give 0 fucks about balance because they delete everything in the game anyway

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AintCare#6513 a écrit :

as long as they don't balance the game around perfect loot the game will be fine. people that want to have GG loot will have it and will zoom zoom, people that don't care about that will play their way.

People in this game take offense to playing how you want. Idk if you were around for this, but there was a good 4-5 years of "Necro tears" in which people rejoiced and laughed at minion players... because they don't want minion players having a strong build.


POE is based on being envious of your neighbors it seems.

Skill gems NEED to drop often so you can try every skill according to what you are playing and swap between build variants as you level. WTF are you complaining about? You wanna be stuck in act 1 or what?

At launch worked well because of the hype the game created for years! I think you are confusing the success of a hype train with the success of the product itself. If the launch version would've been successful then 0.2 wouldn't have had dropped players. Which it did. By around 50%.

And please give me the trick or whatever you are using to ''always roll good'' items, because I have spent the divines I've been able to collect to try to craft a good bow and I haven't been able to. Also tutorials for good items go for around 7 divines each try.

Really, WTF are you talking about?

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Rakie1337#5746 a écrit :

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AintCare#6513 a écrit :

as long as they don't balance the game around perfect loot the game will be fine. people that want to have GG loot will have it and will zoom zoom, people that don't care about that will play their way.

People in this game take offense to playing how you want. Idk if you were around for this, but there was a good 4-5 years of "Necro tears" in which people rejoiced and laughed at minion players... because they don't want minion players having a strong build.


POE is based on being envious of your neighbors it seems.

i'm not talking about people and their opinions tho, quite the opposite actually

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ThreeBelowZero#2968 a écrit :

Skill gems NEED to drop often so you can try every skill according to what you are playing and swap between build variants as you level. WTF are you complaining about? You wanna be stuck in act 1 or what?

At launch worked well because of the hype the game created for years! I think you are confusing the success of a hype train with the success of the product itself. If the launch version would've been successful then 0.2 wouldn't have had dropped players. Which it did. By around 50%.

And please give me the trick or whatever you are using to ''always roll good'' items, because I have spent the divines I've been able to collect to try to craft a good bow and I haven't been able to. Also tutorials for good items go for around 7 divines each try.

Really, WTF are you talking about?

I agree with you. OP doesnt know what he is talking about.
And "the game is too fast"... PLEASE
He prolly plays deadeye only in a guild that gives him the good stuff he cant afford and never craft anything anyway

Did you even play D4 when it first dropped? We are talking about season 0. What gear was dropping that was so good? Who the hell was dropping uber bosses on day one when they didn't even exist until 2 seasons later? You job was to find yellow gear and upgrade it. Orange hear hardly ever dropped and was a big deal that it wasn't dropping. Then they had too many affixes/suffixes and resistances didn't even work for, what, like a year? There were youtube videos all over about the loot problems. They lost lots of players just because of this. I was one of them. I didn't go back until a year later when they finally fixed the loot issues. They literally called the patch loot reborn. The whole first year D4 was out they were getting clowned on for looking at excel sheets and changing numbers and accused of not ever playing their own game and just moving sliders based off of said excel sheet. I even made plenty of comments that they game was made my AI. It was so out of touch of it's own player base it wasn't even funny.

GGG is clearly not listening to the player base. This is clearly evident with each patch since dropping. The game has actually gotten worse in my opinion, which is why I play Last Epoch. There are so many things wrong with POE2. I mean look through this forum and take a look at all the people complaining about the same exact thing. There are many things in this game that you can tell are in it to slow you down but for what reasons? To have numbers at the end of the month that says people have played for "X" amount of time? So yea let GGG do what the want and they will continue to lose players. December isn't that far off and this game is in the worse stat it has been in and GGG doesn't seem to know what direction they are going nor want to go.

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Ragestorm26#0930 a écrit :

We all saw what happened with Diablo 4: within 24 hours of launch, players were one-shotting uber bosses. The game turned into a loot piñata – gear handed out so easily that players hit near-max within a day, with certain builds deleting endgame bosses instantly. The entire campaign – this long, carefully built stretch of content – became meaningless because loot was so easy to get.

I understand where you're coming from in general with your post but this part about D4 is not quite right. Uber boss farming was not implemented until season 1 and 2 with varshan, durial and lord zir. Also loot was pretty terrible until season 4 when they reworked everything.

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Darosius#3984 a écrit :

Too much text, here short version:

The user’s point in short:
POE2 is becoming too easy — loot is inflated, items roll too well, movement is too fast. This kills tension and long-term motivation. He warns that GGG is listening too much to loud community voices (like what ruined Diablo 4) and risks destroying POE’s core. Instead, he calls for more challenge, rewards that must be earned, and adding Ruthless mode as a compromise for both challenge-seekers and “shinies” players.

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I thoroughly disagree. Almost all ground loot is low quality trash, unless you're one of those lazy players sporting a meta build.
If you're P.C. vs console you really have it on easy street as you actually fire where you intend. For us console players the lag cheese is real with massive performance and memory leaks.
I do agree that a nerf is in order, but a nerf of the Meta builds like deadeye.
Other build options should get buffs and actual balance.
At this point the only way to properly construct a build is to play the market like a massive stock market sim. Of course kids and Asian hack bots have completely wrecked the economy, the latter using VPN to illegally access the servers against GGG's own policy and Chinese law.

It doesn't help that 90% of unique weapons are completely worthless with unscaled stats killing their value in late game.
Even with great improvements to crafting the entire process is still too "gambly."

Balance. The game has none.

So at this time it's a stock market and rectangular Tetris sim with a dungeon mini game.
Pick up trash, upgrade, sell, play stock market, repeat because almost NOTHING from the ground is beneficial end game. And, one must already BE strong enough, or invincible enough to get improved gear and level in order to kill and progress to get to those "amazing" drops.
If you want it harder, play a more challenging build.
No, the game does not need a global nerf, it needs a meta nerf.