Its time to have a separate team working exclusively on POE1

I think we need to have a discussion on the current state of development of POE1 (or lack thereof).

The latest league has brought yet another nerf to ground loot and map juicing, practically eliminating all decently lucrative/challenging endgame farms from the previous league. Once again, we are left with no viable endgame farms outside of strongbox, nemesis rare monsters, or blight (if you wish to play at 2 fps and damage both your eyes and your computer hardware). These farms are not only the same exact farms we have been doing since before Settlers league, but these are farms that do not offer any aspirational difficulty or reward to players (IMO these strats are also extremely boring and uninteractive). I am easily able to complete these strategies in less than one week into an SSF league start, I can imagine how easy it is to build a trade league character to do the same. I am struggling to find a reason to continue playing after killing the uber bosses, whereas that was never the case in older versions of the game.

And this state of the endgame is not an anomaly. Since the scarab and sextant rework, the game has struggled to find a healthy state of endgame balance. Mercenary league was the best state the endgame has been in since this rework, and GGG subsequently eviscerated nearly all worthwhile endgame activities outside of uber bosses. At some point, farming loot tiles in alch and go maps (or with a few cheap scarabs) is not a compelling endgame, especially compared to what we have had in older versions of the game. At some point, GGG needs to accept that this game and genre are fundamentally about killing progressively harder monsters and finding progressively more/better loot. The current state of the game does not provide loot or reward for killing monsters. Loot and rewards are received from fixed-reward loot tiles or (even worse) sending boats, which encourages time-gated mobile-game-esque style FOMO gameplay. For reference, I have received well over half of my raw divines from sending ships despite running highly-juiced (by current league standards) t17 maps.

It is quite clear that POE1 is not receiving the proper attention it needs to continue to grow and develop. Balance changes have stagnated. The league mechanics as well as atlas expansion from last league are low effort. The POE1 endgame (formerly a crown jewel of the genre) is a shadow of its former self. It is increasingly clear that the GGG leadership is out of touch with what players want from POE1, or are just spread too thin from POE2.

If POE2 were a viable replacement for POE1, this would not warrant a discussion. But unfortunately, they have intentionally designed POE2 to be a different game than POE1 fundamentally, and thus appeal to a different crowd (although there is overlap of course). What does this mean for the POE1 community that has stuck with this game and company for over a decade at this point? Despite the downward trend of the state of the game, each league still manages to bring in quite a large playerbase on Steam alone, not even counting players who play on the stand-alone client. Surely it is financially worthwhile for GGG to invest in the success of the game that made their name.

I think the time has come for GGG to have a team working exclusively on POE1. Current leadership has lost touch with the game and the quality of the game is suffering. They have become too wrapped up in the ever-growing scope creep of POE2. We need people who understand the design principles that made this game such a wild success in the first place and who are invested in its continued growth and development. It would be a massive loss for the gaming community to let such an incredibly revolutionary, influential, and beautiful game such as POE1 to be left to die like this.


Edit: I would also like to add on that I think the decision to mainly reward scarabs from ground loot was a massive mistake. I think scarabs are probably the best example of an item that should mainly come from loot tiles. In previous versions of the game, scarabs mostly came from delirium reward bars, and it gave a wide range of player power levels the ability to farm scarabs that they could use to juice their maps or sell to other players. Since the scarab change, the scarabs from delirium were nerfed to almost nothing, and thus delirium today is not useful for much more than cluster jewels or the uniques simus provide.

This design choice has lead to a massive problem with the state of the endgame: When ground loot is in a good state, scarabs are in massive abundance which further multiplies the ability to farm ground loot cheaply. When ground loot is in a bad state, players cannot effectively farm scarabs in the first place, which further reduces the amount of ground loot and farming strategies available. Also this is not to mention that it is frustrating to need to spend atlas points just to block worthless scarabs or buff the chance of finding the valuable ones.

"

The current state of the game does not provide loot or reward for killing monsters

The bigger issue here is that virtually all wearable loot dropped ON THE GROUND in endgame is automatically worthless to wear and cannot be salvaged through any combination of "crafting" methods short of scouring it down to a normal or magic (for fractured) base.

The same goes for unique item drops except for a few handful, and don't mention mageblood or headhunter. How many people get excited for a unique WEAPON drop?

In the end POE is an ARPG, so everything is about WEARABLE GEAR and said gear is either:

1) dropped directly by monsters

and/or

2) "crafted"

If the devs really don't like option #1 being viable AT ALL in POE endgame, then the currency for #2 needs to be abundant without 12+ hours playtime investment per day. Otherwise, full stop, the endgame is "broken".

Everything I just wrote is applicable to both current POE1 and POE2 design. How many POE2 streaming compilation videos do you see of people being excited for wearable drops OFF THE GROUND except a few items like headhunter?

You cannot call yourself "the greatest ARPG of all time" while simultaneously telling people with a straight face "ya you should filter out all wearable drops in endgame farming."

It's not so bad as you claim. It's literally numerical problem with some variables, they should remove gambling, breach tree, overall good rolled gear from ships/mappers so loot from the ground have some value and we are good.
No more men power needed. I think some shitty league from time to time is healthy so we can appreciate next more.

"

You cannot call yourself "the greatest ARPG of all time" while simultaneously telling people with a straight face "ya you should filter out all wearable drops in endgame farming."

I get what you are saying but I think the problem is bigger than that. There is more to loot than just wearable items. Currency, maps (guardian maps, 8 mod maps, t17s, etc), scarabs, league specific items (artifacts, harvest juice, tomes, etc) as well as wearable items and more are all valuable items you can find from killing monsters. The loot I am referring to in this post includes all of these different types of rewards. I also disagree that just because POE is an ARPG, that wearable items are the only things that matter. Materials that you can use to craft new items or to juice maps are very valuable even if you cannot wear them.

In regards to the crafted vs looted argument, personally I dont really mind how the dynamic currently plays out in game although I understand people who disagree. While I do think that rares off the ground are underwhelming in the endgame, all the way from level 1 to getting your first 4 voidstones is reasonably completed by relying only on gear from the ground, no crafting or trading needed. I think the issue is that most players play trade so it just easier to spend a couple chaos to massively increase your characters power instead of relying on ground loot alone. This is more of an issue with the power of trade than the balance of the game in my opinion, but I play SSF mainly so I may have a different opinion. The fact that trade league players clearly desire easier access to trading indicates that they enjoy this easy access to power more than searching for items on the ground.

I think that ultimately, the ceiling for how good an item can be in POE1 is so high (which is a good thing), that probabilistically speaking, once your character is at a certain point of progress, it seems inevitable that the odds of finding an upgrade off the ground vanishes. This also ignores mods that cannot drop naturally (essence mods, veiled mods, alva mods, etc.)

Also I disagree that HH and MB are the only goods uniques. There is a plethora of powerful items in all rarity tiers, especially when you consider the foulborne uniques which are by far the highlight of the league (if we had a reason to make characters that prioritize anything other than speed or MF due to lack of aspirational content)

"

Dxt44#4050 wrote:

It's not so bad as you claim. It's literally numerical problem with some variables, they should remove gambling, breach tree, overall good rolled gear from ships/mappers so loot from the ground have some value and we are good.
No more men power needed. I think some shitty league from time to time is healthy so we can appreciate next more.

In a vacuum, I agree with you. But the problem is that the game has had major problems with ground loot since the ground loot reworks in patch 3.19, and we are still feeling the negative effects of that patch to this day. If this was the only instance of them nerfing ground loot, I would be inclined to agree. But we've seen delirium nerfed, beyond nerfed, sextants removed, scarabs reworked, Titanic scarab nerfed multiple times, div scarabs nerfed multiple times, all the nerfs from this league, etc. I can go on but I think you see my point. Since the scarab rework, it seems that each new league is GGG playing whack-a-mole by destroying any decent farms from the league before. Ultimately this is not sustainable and eventually we end up in a world where the most valuable loot on a map comes from the barrels in a fortress map. I would also like to point out that they did a "numerical buff" to some of the more powerful scarabs that we currently have. However, this buff did practically nothing to how the game plays because of the way the game handles loot drops currently.

We need a real solution to this problem. I felt that last league had a wide variety of farming strategies that all provided different levels of difficulty, cost, and quantity/variety of loot. Abyssal hordes for scarabs and raw currency, Titanic exiles for uniques, alva shrines for a wide variety of generic loot, all sorts of risk-scarab-enabled strats, etc. Were some of these strategies too powerful? I think it could be argued that something like abyssal hordes gave too much reward for the required difficulty and cost. But instead of balancing these strategies and building upon the best state the endgame has been in since the scarab rework, instead nearly all of these strategies were nuked from orbit and are simply not worth doing anymore.

"

Crookie#5727 wrote:

In a vacuum, I agree with you. But the problem is that the game has had major problems with ground loot since the ground loot reworks in patch 3.19, and we are still feeling the negative effects of that patch to this day. If this was the only instance of them nerfing ground loot, I would be inclined to agree. But we've seen delirium nerfed, beyond nerfed, sextants removed, scarabs reworked, Titanic scarab nerfed multiple times, div scarabs nerfed multiple times, all the nerfs from this league, etc. I can go on but I think you see my point. Since the scarab rework, it seems that each new league is GGG playing whack-a-mole by destroying any decent farms from the league before. Ultimately this is not sustainable and eventually we end up in a world where the most valuable loot on a map comes from the barrels in a fortress map.

We need a real solution to this problem. I felt that last league had a wide variety of farming strategies that all provided different levels of difficulty, cost, and quantity/variety of loot. Abyssal hordes for scarabs and raw currency, Titanic exiles for uniques, alva shrines for a wide variety of generic loot, all sorts of risk-scarab-enabled strats, etc. Were some of these strategies too powerful? I think it could be argued that something like abyssal hordes gave too much reward for the required difficulty and cost. But instead of balancing these strategies and building upon the best state the endgame has been in since the scarab rework, instead nearly all of these strategies were nuked from orbit and simply not worth doing anymore.

I mean, obviously you are right about all of that. I was just talking about you know, men power. Let's take into account last patch and What We’re Working On post. It doesn't make any sense to be honest. They say that they will buff under performed strategies, then we have this patch xD It looks like two different approaches, two different people on directive position fight each other xD

99.99% of the items you pick up are pure junk. It's incredibly demotivating to spend hours on map after map just to occasionally collect some currency like Divines and zero items that could actually be useful for your build or to sell. I have approximately 1,100,000 kills in this league and I haven't even seen The Apothecary card drop, despite playing hundreds of maps specifically for farming it. I hadn't touched Poe in over two years and only played Poe 2 since its release, but even in Poe 2, far more items drop that are actually good or that improve your endgame than here, which is supposed to be a loot explosion—but it's all garbage loot.

but forum pros has made 220divs in week one...

"

99.99% of the items you pick up are pure junk.

That's my point. Rounding up from your estimate, one can say that 100% of all wearable endgame ground loot is useless beyond the extreme early mapping stage. It is so incredibly bad that no crafting bench or exalted orb or harvest bench will save it into something useful.

There's plenty of such "loot" in the game, and why does it exist? Go kill a tier 16 map boss with 20% map quality, it dies, and you get 5-7 rares that are automatically ignored. Now go juice that same boss with titanic scarabs and possibly 1-2 torment ghosts, take much longer to kill it, and instead be rewarded with 12-18 rares that are automatically ignored. That's your improved "loot"? What's the point?

And I'm not even talking about influenced rares or anything near the "high end". For example, just try finding a higher end melee weapon base (e.g. midnight blade) that rolls at least +150% increased physical damage with an open prefix for flat physical damage bench craft.

Currency is not loot. I cannot wear it. It doesn't evoke some awesome nostalgic old school dungeon crawler treasure finding feeling, including from games like D2 from which POE is supposedly inspired.

If both POE1 and POE2 are really just currency simulators masquerading as ARPGs, then just drop the pretense and delete wearable item drops from both games in endgame. Make everything currency based with vendors that will sell you whatever item base or unique you want with enough "investment". The resulting game would value your time way more than whatever POE1 and POE2 have morphed into.

D4 exists at one super extreme end relative to BOTH POE1 and POE2. Where's the middle ground for endgame ARPG players who want to reasonably find an endgame upgrade OFF THE GROUND in a 2-3 hour play session?

One might think that a successful company could afford two teams for two different properties. =9[.]9=