What Happened with Items

Why I started playing POE:
1) Fast paced game with tons of monsters.
2) Massive game with multitude of mechanics.
3) Incredible possibilities for builds.

What I do not like in current POE:
1) What used to be zoom zoom game becomes slow game.
I do not want to have to stop to kill mobs in maps. Not really even for map
bosses. I want to stop for the top bosses like Sirus, Maven and so on.
Game has many top bosses, so there is absolutely no need to slow down in
maps for anything apart from picking up loot. Wish I did not even have to
stop for that. Drop all the loot in hideout when I am finished with a map
would be ideal. After all, maps are just the way to get the loot, so I can
craft/buy gear, so then I can go and kill the top bosses.

2) The game become just a terribly hard. At least with my possibilities to
gather currency, craft, gear up a build. I really struggle nowadays to kill
the top bosses. Which is shit, because in my opinion every player should be
able to do it every league with any build. The variety of builds is so
big, but so what, if you need to use only meta to be able to kill top
bosses?
Might just as well delete 98% of skill gems and you have the same result.

So I am leaving POE, with great sadness, but I do not want to play another diablo 2 game, where I need to grind 2 months to get a mediocre character. There is d2 for that.
I do not want to die 3 times every map and never be able to level up due to lost exp. It pisses me off.
So I am going. I know no one cares, the only reason why I write all this is a hope that maybe GGG will read this and wake up.
Have a good time.

"

LizzyInATizzy wrote:

"I… didn't actually understand the impact of the change. It was mentioned to me in passing (that we were removing the league monster bonuses and replacing with just quantity), and I didn't ask any more questions. I was busy, distracted, and should have sought more information. Had I understood the consequences, we likely would have still gone ahead with the change, but hopefully with better communication and maybe some pre- rather than post-release counterbalance elsewhere. This is a massive internal communication fuckup and I take full responsibility for it."

Thank you for taking accountability and your honesty in this statement. I appreciate it.

"honesty" LMAO you think that was all real? haha

oh god now the drop is more RNG than ever ..... when GGG / tencent will decide to fire this old Chris Wilson... he did such great work many years ago now its totally shit ... hopefully some new real h&S comming soon

I feel the majority of the changes made were to affect a very small percentage of players. Instead of changing party aspects to stop them, it feels like GGG ruined it for all of us.

I've been running maps non-stop since release, but have yet to find anything worth of value including divines. It's quite hard to put more time into the game when you're not rewarded for it.

Also, minions are near unplayable & gutted heavily without any mention of looking into it or making tweaks. It feels like the entire community who enjoyed minion builds has to play something else instead.

just leaving my mark in this legendary thread

I work full time and go to school full time while raising two kids. I played PoE with what little free time I had. Learned about how to be efficient in my time by juicing maps and doing certain league content.

I am not going to be ugly, but the game philosophy you are pushing is not compatible with my time management situation or just general philosophy of how I enjoy ARPGs. Let’s agree to disagree. Couple that with the massive minion nerfs from patch to patch. I will no longer be spending my normal 100 to 200 dollars per league.

Hopefully blizzard Diablo devs are closely watching this as a business case of what not to do to your game.

We've play tested hard mode for you now, can we start the league now please.

Thank you Chris. This is more than we could ever ask of you; 'the creator'. Long live GGGG (and Chris)

I have actually been enjoying this league very much, and in general, your communication and honesty with the community is leagues better than most other game development studios. I certainly appreciate that very much.

Regarding the recent changes, the initial item/currency scarcity was intense, and it's good that the drop rate is getting buffed.

There's one aspect of the statement that I find genuinely confusing, though:

"

It gives you an opportunity to employ counterplay and for your playskill to actually matter (rather than relying on pure character power).

I genuinely believe that this will never work due to the fact that PoE is an online game. There's lag, packet loss, and other forms of jitter... PoE simply cannot rely on players' mechanical skills and ms-level reaction times to this extent and ignore this reality.

Thank you for the explanations. Owning the issues is a good thing, and I can appreciate your taking that ownership. I agree that the QA team(s) cannot be blamed for any of this as well. There job is to test and verify that everything is working as expected, according to the changes desired. In that, they did and everything was working as designed.

The communication break downs are very frustrating to the community because we have had these issues several times. It seems that the communication lessons learned stay for a league or two and then are repeated. I appreciate that you want to continue to improve in this area, but perhaps it is time to focus your attentions on the Game Director responsibilities and hire a person whose job is specifically to do the communications. I know you enjoy speaking with the community, and I'm not suggesting that you lock yourself away. Just focus on the game when you need to, and speak with the community during times when not so much focus is required on game direction.

One thing that I did not see you mention in your post is the current state of crafting. I, myself, have never done much crafting in the game. That being said, I do buy things other players have crafted to help my builds. The removal of powerful Harvest crafts, and other changes to crafting seem to have had a dramatic impact on the economy in the game, and the equipment that filters down to be available to players like me.

I know that you said you wanted to have the equipment that drops be more consequential and that the "prefect" items that were being crafted made the drops feel worse. The problem with that is that players like me, who never have crafted very much, can't find good equipment. The stuff that drops on the ground is not good, and generally speaking doesn't apply to the skills that I like to play. In some cases it can be directly detrimental to the skills I like to play.

I know the vision is less deterministic crafting in the game, but there has to be some middle ground in this area. The current state seems to not be that middle ground. Do you have any plans to address the community concerns around crafting?