My thoughts on this league...

Back in the early 2000's when I was young I learned something powerful that has been a cornerstone of my own critical thinking: true innovation always come from opposing thoughts and ideas discussed on an environment with respect for both sides. As such, this are my own thoughts, they represent in large my own worldview and experience.

This league for me has been the worst league on PoE2, at the same time it set the foundation for something that was much needed in path of exile, mainly on the technical field, Jonathan's SMP scheduler and true investment on performance.

1. Release Schedules: Makes no sense to make a release on a friday if there's no one on the office to address issues fast, specially when it wasnt tested properly and when a lot of low level changes have been made. If you have no one on the office to iron out critical bugs, dont release, wait until you do. This is by far something easy to address and mitigate a lot of grief for players.

2. Capability to Rollback: when a bug is found that if abused has the potential to nuke the economy at the start of league, a rollback should've been issued. This is why point 1 (see above) is so important. I will not call for bans, though they would've been deserved. As I see it, if greed takes people to find a bug and instead of report it and following a procedure like a TLP Amber classification, they go on youtube and make it explicit, KNOWING that it will trash the economy and affect tens of thousands of players to farm some engagement on social media... I personally would miss such persons if bans were addressed, and as I player I would rather have a rollback of 2 days (which could be prevented and be much shorter if 1. had been followed) than having the league trashed at day 4.

3. League Duration: it has become clear that 4 months alternating every 2 months between PoE1 and PoE2 has placed a lot of strain on GGG, specially with a lot of code bases to maintain, which I would assume it's mainly 2 for PoE2, the world release and chinese, and probably 3 for PoE1. Considering consoles are almost dead, and I am a console player because most games will not perform well on a 112 thread machine, I would vote for terminating PoE1 on consoles and move that effort to where it is needed, PoE2. In sum, due to lots of code bases, talent is spreaded to thin accross the battlefield and you are releasing half baked stuff, either content or engineering/technical solutions.

4. Timmies & Chads: I've seen a lot of people complaining about things that were allien to me... Yet I managed to brick my 1st character this league due to resource starvating, mainly gold. And this is why is became many post veracity I descarded in the past actually made sense now. To me, it seems that PoE2 is being balanced based on hyper performing builds, leaving the low/mid tier builds (that could be reliable) in a worst state. I feel the culprit here is the common feeling that things should not be nerfed. They should otherwise we enter the realm of power crip for some and unreliability for others. In other words, while I bricked my character and assume all the blame for that, it made me realize than Timmies had some valid perspective and in many cases are being dismissed in a elitist form without much reason.

5. Marketing: Aside for a handfull of streamers I consider that are actually fans of the game, a lot of trash has been circulating around. Many of this people arent here for the game, instead for the engagement farming. We even entered the space where full AI generated narration became content on PoE2. Its a cash cow, which will lead to some people taking the information at face value and then leaving the game. It's not something GGG can control directly, but they shouldn't promote blindly and they should stay out of corporate politics and piss contents with other games. The bottom line here is, and here goes a free marketing lesson: if SATISFACTION > EXPECTATION = POSITIVE || EXPECTATION > SATISFACTION = NEGATIVE. Too much hype is bad.

6. Engineering VS Content: It makes no sense to drop or build content at absurd rates like some streamers are defending while a lot of the technical aspects of the engine arent sorted out properly, this only lead to exarcebate problems. I understand streamers need their normal engagement farming, but this leads only to short term earnings for GGG as people will walk away. It is imperative that technical issues are solved and only then content should be dropped and expanded. This would make even more sense in the context of a early access/paywalled beta. Apparently, a lot of people are treating this as a finished product, and that is bad...

7. Performance: Excelent work, but a lot more needs to be done, specially on FSR (hardware agnostic) and spatial upscalers... This implies motion vectors, sorry for touching this... because most likely a fiber SMP scheduler sounds easier than this :) This should be main focus, not half baked content.


In sum... This season introduced good stuff on the performance field, a less than half baked content, that I personally find that isnt worth my time and showed huge flaws on release schedule, critical bug reporting (or in the case the absence), which lead to a league economy being trashed right on day 4 of the league.

Good luck on the next league, I will meet you there.

game is junk pretty much sums it up

This game is slowly turning into garbage.
The fact that bugs keep piling up and was going to be worse this league than all before was easily predicted due to the fact that they insist on maintaining POE 1 and clearly don't have the time to do both properly.
This has to be first EA game ever where development on it gets halted for half a year each year.
But even worse than the gargantuous pile of bugs is in fact what you mentioned about the game being balanced around the top tier builds. Whenever something works, it just gets nuked to the point where it's barely doable to finish the campaign with, disregarding the fact that these severe nerfs will destroy any and all non-meta builds that are always impacted as well.
Keep it up GGG. This league has the worst retention so far and i can only see it go downhill from here if this continues.
It has been said many times on these forums and becoming more and more true. Fun is not allowed in POE 2. Throttle back on the 'vision' ideas cause it's supposed to be fun, not slow, boring and aggravating.
Sorry, but the way this is being handled is pathetic.

I'm mostly just pissed off at having to do a boss each map.

Low tier gear scales incredibly bad into T15, and below that Maps don't drop shit at all. Bases worthless, currency crippled, no valuable skill and spirit gems.

Which means you must now struggle into high tier maps to stay market competitive, and while before you could actually do that by strategically avoiding boss maps-now every map is a boss map.

And those have all one shot mechanics.

Never before I have died so often with a ranged build focused around survival. Which ironically is probably hindering me even more because if there's shit I can't survive anyway, then I should probably go much more glass cannon to make fights generally as short as possible.

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staytuned2k#6008 a écrit :

I'm mostly just pissed off at having to do a boss each map.

Low tier gear scales incredibly bad into T15, and below that Maps don't drop shit at all. Bases worthless, currency crippled, no valuable skill and spirit gems.

Which means you must now struggle into high tier maps to stay market competitive, and while before you could actually do that by strategically avoiding boss maps-now every map is a boss map.

And those have all one shot mechanics.

Never before I have died so often with a ranged build focused around survival. Which ironically is probably hindering me even more because if there's shit I can't survive anyway, then I should probably go much more glass cannon to make fights generally as short as possible.

That's a common issue for low tier gear, now much more exarcebated by the insane ammount of high tier currency injected into the game due to the abyss bug. A rollback was so much needed... They could offer a MTX, most people would comprehend since it trashed the economy. They failed to act afraid people would leave, but they just postponed it because people will still leave in a week or two after they realize they are locked down and can't upgrade to medium tier gear because of hyper inflation.

The one shot mechanics aren't the problem per se, they only achieve high visibility due to the scalling on gear making non meta builds punishing players. There should be room for meta and less traditional builds.

The problem here is probably a mix of balancing against hyper performing builds ending up to punish the lower spectrum and the access to economy being voided now by a few (probably not so few) exploiters which made the unthinkable, they disclosed it publically for add revenue in social media.

GGG is in a tough spot this league... Now it's too late for rollback, which could be sugarcoated with a free MTX to all players, which is what a lot of studios do, and within 2/3 weeks for anyone not dumping 8 hours a day grind they will be cut off the trade league due to hyper inflation.

Which leads me to wonder if people which posted those strategies abusing a bug, really care for the community and game or their selfish interests only...