As someone who has played POE since the start of closed beta in august 2011, congratulations. You guys have taken something fairly good and turned it into utter garbage in record time. Long before beta started, i once saw an online presentation where Chris said most ideas for POE 2 came from Jonathan. Had i only known at that time what that would mean for the game. I'm sorry Jonathan & Mark, but this isn't it. Not at all. I remember being very impressed back in 2011 with the company's technical know-how, it's game's stability and it's open and free communication with it's playerbase when Bex & Natalia (iirc) and others where still personally responding to posts and even making people laugh on occasion, as well as the many many videos & presentations done by Chris. And i witnessed the game's potential grow with every single league they released. The only negative that stood out back then was the desync issue that persisted for quite some time because solving it required infrastructural changes and those things obviously take time. When that was ultimately solved as well, POE was set to shine for many more years.
The story so far for POE 2 is sadly quite different. I actually have a hard time remembering wether ANY decision made since the start of beta has not made the game worse, even though some surely haven't. Clearly, there is the glaring issue with bugs piling up over time due to their self-imposed time constraints, souring the experience for everyone little by not so little, which IS a huge problem, even if you are dead set on ignoring the root cause of it for now. But even putting that aside, it is just an unbelievable mess.
For starters, there remains the issue of the whole different vision for POE 2.
Most feedback from the player base in relation to this has been conveniently ignored and it's long term effects are getting clearer to me with each new release. All 'freebies' (like the old quantity) have been removed and replaced by challenge/rewards mechanisms. Every gain has been coupled to some sort of difficulty increase but meanwhile, the tools for players to overcome all this additional challenge have been taken away bit by bit by decimating player power wherever it was detected because you, understandably, didn't want it to become a game where players can become so OP they erase all challenge. Any builds that are still doing well now will most likely follow. But this is slowly disadvantaging players that want to play off-meta and experiment, and people who play occasionally. The game becomes frustrating and tiresome and they tend to leave it behind.
Most changes to evasion were terrible as well, with the sole exceptions of integrating the old acrobatics node by default and making the displayed evasion calculation based on level 82 monsters.
Also, visual clarity is ABYSMAL. Like at least TEN times worse compared to POE 1 when it was also 1 year old. Even in single player, there are many times where the screen is SO cluttered with all kinds of effects that it literally becomes impossible to see what's going on. And this is without any sort of MTX's added that could possibly still make it worse... I mean, what happened ? You once all said that visual clarity was going to be one of the design pillars for POE 2 ? This issue is also slowly being exacerbated by this incessent focus on this whole risk/reward strategy because the more monsters get thrown at you, or the more modifiers they have, the worse it obviously gets.
Perfectly working systems from POE 1 were either refused to be reused right from the start or were tinkered with to the point where either issues got introduced that weren't there before, or where the whole mechanic became less interesting or balanced. Removing the possibility to instill maps with emotions was a horrible idea for instance and made delirium a lot less interesting, which is something that will seemingly never be adressed again. Removing the reward counter and replacing it by making emotions a random drop from the mobs was awful and made emotions so much harder to come by.
Changes made to the King in the Mists fight where he stopped teleporting to the totems, which was a nice and visible indicator to take action, suck and should be undone.
Ritual tablets are still not dropping as often as they should and since Fate of the Vaal, delirium tablets appear to be even rarer than that. I found a single one since the start of this league with hundreds or hours invested.
Omens of light, which are fine in and by itself, and which are at this time, one of the most powerful crafting tools available with the recent removal of homogenising exaltation, were implemented in such a way that they became somewhat target farmable, which (together with the whole temple debacle) should be showing you that this is not a good idea if you want to have an economy in which more casual players can also participate. Why was this even done in this way ? Just make it a random abyss drop already and get it over with. Leaving it as it is now will only ensure any future leagues will share this inflated economy to some extent and that scores of players will again be bending over backwards to streamline their map playthroughs in unintended ways, just to see these drop all the time. Factions are also needless complexity and just introduce more information that should be looked up online when you already stated you were against that. Just bin them.
As for the temple, some people will undoubtedly like it so i won't advocate for it's removal here (which would be pointless anyway since i'm sure, in your current predicament, that no time is wasted developing content NOT intended to be brought into core), but to me personally, it gets old really, really fast. I did Atziri a few times and that was more than enough for me of running the same bloody environment over and over again. Content that is seamlessly integrated into maps works better than these side areas that have to be loaded in and can't be portalled out to to once's hideout. As a side-note, why is Atziri such a pushover ?
Anyway, i could go on and on, and on. So many new issues have been introduced and things are getting worse every time. Despite being there with GGG for as long as anyone can, i can feel my interest for Path slowly slipping away, and it doesn't feel good. Jonathan, Mark, please get a grip. Here's the gist of it for you both, almost every single one of your ideas for this game or how to 'fix' it, suck. I'm sorry, but they do. While i understand and to some extent support that you'd like POE 2 not to share the same problems of POE 1, this shouldn't be done at the cost of fun. Just let go of your egos already and turn this thing into something fun again, because right now, it often isn't. It's currently a convoluted, overly complex & restrictive, unfun mess that is becoming more and more infested with bugs, while i would assume that your playerbase is devolving into RMTers and elitists.
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