Feedback on New Microtransactions

Mtx feedback:

General note:
I love the new mtx direction where you're exploring new kinds of mtx. A lot of these things (like mtx for charges and on-kill effects) I was already wondering for quite a bit why these mtx's didn't exist.
So huge thumbs up for adding new styles.

Kirac's vault pass:
Please remove the icon that shows that a new mtx is available for collecting (or at least move it to some less in-your-face-place).
Last league I bought the pass when I already had everything unlocked so I didn't notice this, but the icon is really annoying.
It's in a place normally reserved for notification that signal "hey! you're missing something important!"
Now suddenly every x maps I have to stop my progression, teleport to the vault, run to the next door. Open it.
Receive a new mtx of an item I'm not using at the moment, go back to my hideout. Not a good experience for me.

Flare character effects (I'm using the divine one but I assume this might go for all of them):
Once again loving the concept and the look. Only thing for me is that with all the screen-clutter going on I can't see the level up animation (and therefor I missed the notification that I leveled up).
I had to turn on the ring of the black star mtx just to be able to see my lvl-ups again (and the delay in that mtx feels very weird to me so I'm not a fan of using that one).

Treasure hunter weapon effect:
I 100% love the on-death mtx. This might be my favorite thing in the game by far (Imo PoE became a work of art when I saw Mathil playing a build with the Sunprism herald effect on herald of ash, since that day I've been hoping for on death effect mtx). However why connect this to a weapon effect!?
The only one I got from the mystery boxes (more on that later) was the ghostflame effect. Now I love minion builds, however for mtx atm I love an angelic/starfall kind of style. Sadly there are not really minion mtx's in this style so I run a 2 style setup.
My character is in the angelic/holy style while my minions have the oblivion skill. The ghostflame treasure hunter fits perfectly with the oblivion minions (and therefor the on-death effect part fits as well), however why did you make this a weapon effect!? :-(
I clashes 100% with the mtx I'm wearing on my character. Lucky I was able to equip it on my shield slot and change that effect to the sunrise shield effect (so I now have a holy/flamy setup) which blocks any weapon effect from appearing.
So please please please make future on-death mtx-es their own category and don't force players to equip a possibly clashing weapon effect (and/or limiting the use of another weapon effect) to get the on-kill effect they want.

Mystery boxes:
Please be a decent company and stop with these (or at least also release the seperate mtx's for direct purchases right away). The interview where Chris touched on this was possibly my most cringe moment. Basically saying "you we know it's not right, but others do it much worse and the money is so good!".
Now I do agree that in general the business model of ggg is, in my opinion, one of the best in the industry. However please don't do shit like this, it feeds on abusing human psychology. When you sell something you should be proud of what you make and being able to make money on it because people want it.
Mystery boxes are nothing more then "yeah we made a lot of stuff people possibly don't want so we have to trick them and bait them to suck their money from them". Imo a healthy long lasting business model is kind of like a symbiosis between game-developers and players. You make cool stuff, we give you money.
Gambling and mystery boxes distorts that balance. It's like an unhealthy relationship where one of the partners uses psychological tricks to get their significant other to do what they want. Works great for a while, but it's not a long lasting thing. Everytime I buy and open mystery boxes, I will experience disappointment somewhere during the opening.
This is not an emotion I think you want to have players associate with purchases in your game, because it ties into my next point:

Mtx-burnout:
So after a while I found a nice balance in my spending in PoE. Every new league I would buy the 2 supporter packs and during the league use the points on interesting skills/skins etc. If there were a lot of cool mtx's I wanted I would possibly buy some more points to get those, and I was very happy.
So I would spend ~120-150 euro's every league and be 100% happy about it. Now you've raised the price of the supporter packs to 90 euro's and you've added a kirac's vault pass for 30 euro's. Resulting in my spending out of the gate being 210 euro's each league (an increase of 75%!!!).
Then with the insanly cool new mtx's you bait me into buying a lot of mystery boxes again (basically spending all my points on those instead of using them during the league on targeted things) including all the disappointing opens.
My 100% happyness with any and all spending has now changed, I slowly feel a veil of unease and unhappyness sliding over my purchasing experience. It's like asking your employees to suddenly start working 75% more. Sure this would have great results for a little while, but in the long term you'll start loosing them.
My personal experience is starting to go in the same direction, and I feel that if this continues there might come a point where the only way I can mentally "free" myself of this negative veil is to make the decision to stop spending on PoE all together. Please honor the symbiosis and make sure that PoE will be a great game for years and years to come!

Mtx-wishes:
More on-death effects please (sunprism herald of ash effect style!<3)
One of the most beautiful things in the game for me is Bastion of Elements, I would love to have more mtx in that style (there is the force field aura effect I like, but it only goes well with specific mtx setups).
Skill effects that scale with dmg and/or kills. I would love for example summon zombies to grow a little in size and more intensity of what ever mtx they have (blood, light whatever) as they mow through enemies. Or chain lightning that gets more intense the more enemies you've killed the past x seconds.
Not really an mtx but I would love to be able to store presets so before league launch I can spend a lot of time building my mtx load-out and as soon as league launch hits apply that loadout to my character.

General mtx feedback:
Invisible buff effect. I own 7 of these by now to be able to hide multiple aura's on multiple characters but managing these is a huge pain in the ass. If I change an aura and want to move the invisible buff from the old one to the new I can't see which of those was applied to the old one.
So I'm forced to blindly start applying them in the hopes that I some how hit the right ones. Also make more aura's that work together (that's usually the reason I have to hide so many as it quickly becomes some wild growth of clashing things if I don't)

I've heared that the more mtx you have (even if it's unequiped) the slower your game loads, this concerns me a bit tbh. If this is really a thing I would very much ask ggg to put some good effort into removing that because technically PoE is now pay to loose lol;-P

Well I think that's enough for now, I need to go back to farming city square^^

In it's current state, I would never buy the Kirac Pass.

I'm not going to pay money for specific unique skins if I don't plan on using all or most of them.

I would purchase it every league however if the pass contained items like store points, vouchers to pick a gem mtx that you will use, vouchers to pick a set of wings/armor ect. If you add new stash tabs that league also add them to the Kirac Pass. Add the special unique mtx as bonus rewards or something.

I had bought approx. 156 Midnight Pact Mystery Boxes and am currently 59/61 in the Sentinel boxes. As a result, I became an Altas Core supporter last year and am on track to reach Incinerator supporter.

I think the mystery boxes not having duplicates and the unlock functionality to buy specific post unlock is a great improvement. However, I would prefer if the rewards from the mystery boxes remain a well designed set rather than individual pieces.

There should be little doubt to say that MTX sets from mystery boxes are the most expensive sets out there, especially if one were to aim for full set.

Same for the highest tiers of Core Supporters, it should be well designed. Note: it does not need to be the best, but it should not look like it was done with little effort.

However, I am totally against the idea of Kirac which seems to target FOMO players, with its current buying price/options and set of rarely used gears.

On a final note, i wishi GGG do limit the maximum costs of getting all the mystery boxes rewards within 3000 points (USD 300) per league in the future.
This 3000 is based on a extreme player buying both supporters pack 1800 points + 1200 points (Amortised from core).

I have not bought a supporter pack since Harvest was removed, and I won't until the game is on an upward fun trajectory again.

Kirac's vault is very nice! Really love the different MTX changing flask effects or certain uniques..

I like the way you start thinking with immersive MTX skins for all kinds of things.

Though the price for the Kirac's Vault is a bit high, since it's only very specific, certain items it affects + you have to complete all maps to get them..

Imo it would be nice to have a set of free Kirac's vault rewards and then an exclusive set of rewards for people who pay to unlock them. So that everyone get's atleast 1, 2 or even 3 MTX for dedicated map farming and then you can pay to get even more MTX rewards...

I don't mind MTX in a free game, and since its purely cosmetic i've never bothered every seeing some "lootbox" form for just pure visual content.

The step you are doing in making them less "rng" for big spender is really a nice improvement, ppl can't ask you to just stop what makes you earn money for a free game.

Now about the MTX with ingame "effects", the new ones, i think its really a great change too.
I mean i still think that its nice to have pure armor sets or basic weapons, but having like 30/40% of them doing more special effects is really a nice addition.

I got for example the weapon effect making "gold" splatter on kill effect, its just amazing, the weapon is not shiny like older effect and killing mobs with gold explosion just feels amazing.

Stuff like Charges effects, flasks effect and such a really nice to have, a combination of old MTX and those new ones is really the way to go for me at least.

I don't mind the +35% price for lootboxe since you capped the amount of dupe and having color set is also a nice addition.
So its a great Yes for me, but still keeping the old ones, mixed with new ones with special effect should be the way to go ^^.

I think you can also iterate stuff like making more meaningfull aura effect (instead or hiding them for example, making the with other visual effects, les overstacking but with other ways to signal them, or like on death/kill effects for mobs affected by Curses or things, sounds variations, stuff like this).

You could even make MTX for enemies, like changing the visual of "rare/blue mobs", changing zombie mobs... stuff like this.



For the Kirac Vault, i'm tempted since you have introduced it but... its just too few things i "might" use in a league.
I would prefer the Vault to be stuff, or at least 50% of it being usable for every character. In its current state, i'm not gonna spend 30euros for maybe 1 or 2 of those effects i'm gonna use, maybe.

So i like the idea but its too "random", it would be better to have Specific uniques MTX sold separately and more "everybody usable MTX" in this pass.
Since you introduce specifically one pass per league now, wouldn't it be better to have a Pass focus on league stuff ? Like skins for new mobs introduce this league, or Uniques coming with this league, or Hideout decorations in the league theme.
You could even introduce Hideout Musics or thing like this in the pass.

I've never been a fan of the mystery box, though a legitimate 'no duplicates' would help. Look to how DoTA2 does it, seems to work for them and is one of the more ethical approaches I've seen.

Kiracs vault doesn't interest me. Paying for a maybe seems odd. If I get sick and can't play the league, it's burning money. The retro-active aspect helps, but meh.

Love the new adaptive MTX, so many possibilities flood the mind. Here's a few:

MTX that change based on your damage type; element colors, chaos purple, poison green, something for only phys. I don't know if this would involve creating individual MTX for each skill, but if you could program effects to apply to projectiles as a whole might be viable. Otherwise, just a character effect that changes based on your highest damage element.

"The Wise Oak" that changes based on the elements effecting it. Could apply a character effect while in use, that matches.

Footprint effects or a trail-like character effect, that grow/change based on your movement speed.

Life flask effect that changes based on how many mobs killed recently. Blood pool/sanguine type effect that changes based on recent kills, a vampire flask if you will.

Iam not convinced the price increase on the boxes was varented 30 points was fine With 50 you just look greedy...

Can you rename the "red warp rune hideout decoration" to somthing shorter plz. (fork "red warp rune")

I will stop buying any mtx. The visual clutter is just beyond acceptable due to all the ridiculous amount of archness mobs. This game has sadly evolved into Path of Archnem.

I like the more creative direction, but I still like traditional wings/armour offerings as well.