Path Of Exile and GGG's development and management Review

Hello there Exiles,

In this post i'm going to be Brutallyy Honest and absolutely transparent with my impressions about GGG as a company and compare it to the general VideoGame industry, Also i'll be reviewing PoE as i belive i now have the requiered "experience" to judge the game...

Dear GGG and Tencent:
I'm truly thanked that are you guys "GGG" are the ones who are running Path Of Exile:

The memebers of the staff i came across so far were Kind, Fast, Efficient and Always dispossed to help.
I'm in all Honesty happy that i'm treated as any customer should be treated in the game industry, Unfortunally, and this is the reason i'm mostly thanked with GGG Customer Support Staff... Not all game companies treat their customers like you guys do. And i think it is necessary to voice the recognition you guys deserve (Atleast from my part.)

-Store:
I have some mixed feelings with the Store and Monetization of the Micro transactions...
I'm a big fan of supporting the games and buying skins that i like and keep helping to mantain and make the business profitable for the companies i belive they deserve the "recognition" and support.
I personally dislike and disagree a lot on having Wings and most of pets because they feel a bit disjointed to the game and the aesthetic in general of the game.

I also feel like Most of armors / weapon skins in the game designs are not appealing enough and only very specific packs really caught up my attention (So far the Aesir Support pack was the one that i truly LOVED the most, i think it is an absolute beast of skin and it is by far one of the MTX that i like the most, i hope you guys produce more similar quality MTX as the aesir one to keep supporting the game).
Popular items / Unique skins should also be able to be purchased directly on the store, i think it is a great idea and i absolutely love to have alternate versions of some iconic items or Utility flasks.
I also would like to see Other Custom UIs as purchaseable MTX, i think that will give a fresh air to the general game UI and will be a great product to have.

Finally, i really like the idea of allowing players who are frecuent clients of the game to also collaborate on expanding the game content by creating divination cards, unique items or adding uniques to the "foil" loots. I think it is a pretty commendable desition and makes us feel more engaged with the game and makes us feel like we are also building the game alongside the devs... Really thank you for this GGG.

I also wanna voice myself regarding PoE and PoE 2 (in case of PoE 2 based on what i could have seen so far of the game videos.)

PoE:

-Game Performance : I'm stunned by how much the game have improved since i play this game in a serious manner from Harvest league, DX12 implementation, Vulkan, And other adjustments that were implemented really changed my game.
I always had a top of the Line PC with one of the latest processors, with the flagship Latest Nvidia graphic card and Honestly in some content the PC felt like it was "Under fire", with some builds and in some specific content my performance dropped dramatically from a stable 210 Fps to 40 / 35 fps.
I remembered playing 80% Delirium maps with a COC Icespear build or Spark Aurastacker and it was just loosing FPS like crazy. So... huge thumbs up to you guys for the Performance improvements, today i'm playing juiced maps with absolutely 0 issue, performance just drops to stable 140 fps so... my monitor and PC are way happier than before.

-Gameplay :
The main problem i have with the game is the ammount of complexity the game has, understanding not only how the things work on the surface but also how everything calculates and stacks up adds multiple layers of complexity that up to date still confuses me in some specific cases. I have tried out to build my own characters with my own original concepts and interactions, But i might admit it is not as good as what others can produce specially when you compare the relationship between power / investment they requiere sometimes.
Still, i think this is one of the main appealings of the game, the creativity that knows no bounds that the game focuses on, BUT the game is mostly based on 1 maybe or 2 skills w/ the maximum supports as possible for that particular skill (i belive poe2 corrected this, it's just time to wait and see if it will really reward diversity).
I belive being limited to build your entire character to 1 / 2 skills is kinda like Bottlenecking the possibilities of the build, since you had a wide range of passives, items, gems, etc to pick up from But all resumes down into 1 single action skill and 1 or 2 movement / utility skills.

I also like the fact that in PoE 2 they admitted that Melee was on a bad spot, specially due to it's clunkiness and lack of mobility and they took action to try to fix this issue (I sincerelly hope PoE 2 brings the magic solution to this issue as it was shown on the videos.)
To be fair, most of the time when playing you feel discouraged to try out certain builds / use certain builds just because of this fact...
Also why playing a melee charater as a league starter when you had ED Contagion Trickster right ? (I know it's been nerfed) But it is not only the ammount of effectiveness but also the quality of life of doing anything spell / range related instead of just building Melee, And even Flicker strike which in my personal opinion is the most QoL melee skill has a ton of cons on it.

-Crafting:
I'm going to be real honest with all of you, i suck at crafting. I'm a very braindead person (i Tag Tardzaned for a reason lol) And even when i understand the functionality of each orb and the crafting bench and fossiles and other crafting systems like Harvest... There is just Too many options to just produce the same result (Which is failing the craft lol).
Now... i know that one of the main appealings of the game and it is something that also passions me about is to get THAT perfect item you ever dreamed on, The main reason why Mirror of Kalandra is so desired and rare aswel.
I truly understand that, but for god sake... it is really next to impossible to know what the appropiate action would be with each crafting.
I wanna recommend 2 Quality of Life Features i had on my mind as a Suggestion to implement:

1- Implement a Crafting Stash tab, where you put the item there, and the stash tab shows 2 lists of possible mods it can roll Prefix List and Suffix List, then allow the player to select which specific mods they want and have a Craft buttom that consumes up to 2 of the orbs you place there automatically until the system automatically hits the mods the player indicated (This is a MAYOR QOL system in my opinion and it will sell like Water on a hot sunny day.)

2-Implement AI technology that gives you some sort of Guidance of how to proceed the crafting to hit certain mod on the item you currently have. The AI will analise the item and give guidance on what steps are the most effective and gives the best option for the player to take to craft the item and try their luck. It is also a good idea to tie this together with my first solution where you click a "?" help buttom and the tab helps you craft the item with proper advise.


-Trading:
Trading is one of the Hot Topics of PoE, the fact that it has no auction house by 2023 or possibility to automate trading it's kind of a pain and also allows players to abuse of this mechanic by Making small purchases and acumulating massive ammounts of a certain specific material / currency to Re-sell it with a small overprice (Flipping) Which actually creates a sort of Cheat-code of Progression and also demands players to STICK on their computers if they want to sell things.
I remember that i even kept my wireless headphones even when coocking or cleaning or doing whatever while away from keyboard just in case someone whisp me to purchase something.
And on a Game that the main appealing is trying out different builds and building your character, i feel like this is a mayor issue... Since you oftenly change entire builds from a momment to another and you actually need to sell those items you no longer use...

-RMT and Bots:
It's no secret that these practices exists, even more in a game where the main appealing of it is to build a strong character to fight even stronger creatures and get even more loot.
Throught the years i have seen multiple fighting messures taken but with only a certain degree of effectiveness, I feel like RMT and botting only exists because of the own Players fault that allows this practices to exist, if you have no customers you won't have any reason to bot or RMT in the game... Since you will gain nothing out of it, And this is more of a social factor instead of a devs/game fault even tho... They can reinforce the messures to avoid this kind of practices to exist and chase down RMT sites & customers.
Which i consider both are equally guilty both the Seller & the Customer.

Game Art and Aesthetic:
As an artist myself i sincerelly wish to know / chat with some of the artists the game has, i feel like they make an extremly good job in general. I like the designs and i'm oftenly pending on any new updates / posts on their artistic process and it is actually one of the strong points of the game IMO even when graphically the game has not aged precissely the best since there is a massive difference between PoE and PoE 2 BUT most of the actual artwork such as Divination cards, Loading Screens, Character portraits,etc are actually insanely good in my opinion.

Newcomer's welcome to Path of exile:

I'm going to tell a story, very summarized and short...
My first character in PoE was a Shadow and since i wasn't really familiar with this kind of games i thought that Shadows were more like Rogues / Assasins in other RPG games so... I said, cool he uses daggers... And i liked this teleportation Skill i saw on various videos, Flicker Strike.
So... i kinda Copied part of a build of Poison Flicker strike build i saw on youtube back in like 4 or 5 years ago (Not with this account since i had forget my older one login details) and it really sucked...
I was so horrible that i went CI when having like 600 Energy shield effectively killing my whole life pool and chances of survibility.
What was worst is that my character for whatever reason had a Cloak of Defiance on it, so it was even for worse because reciving damage would previously drain my mana prior to almost oneshotting my energy shield and playing a meele skill as flicker strike.
So... couldn't reach maps and was obliterated before act 10.

I think the new player experience is absolutely horrible and it is one of the things that made me obsessed with the game, I feel like the game has a very high difficulty curve until you gain a lot of knowledge about it. After many years of playing the game and getting to know how everyhing pricessely works out the game turns out to be way easier... In fact what used to be a 10 to 12 Hours 10 Act campain with arround 100 - 200 deaths turns out to be a 3 and a Half hour campain with maybe 0-5 deaths at most.
In fact i think that Rhoas and Brutus are a massive wall to new players, specially because of melee clunkiness and i belive that most of players don't actually find appealing to get oneshotted by the first boss of the game or getting absolutely violated by 7 charging rhoas at their face.
And i say this because i was a noob too and even up to today sometimes i have some silly bloopers where i try to rush the acts with a tabula / skin of the lords and suddenly 700 hundred rhoas come charging to me and oneshot me LOL.

With all of this being said, I sincerelly hope i have not bore you with all this massive walltext, I think that GGG is actually on the right direction as a company and i absolutely love how they treat and respect their customers, Even tho they are not perfect, i must say and recognize they are actually one of the best game companies i ever have the plessure to play their game/s so far.
I think PoE is a great game and i'm absolutely anxious to try out PoE 2 And have a good time chatting with some members of the staff since i belive they make their games with passion and i personally belive that most companies have lost the passion in pursue of generating more money, so... it is one of the reasons that GGG in general owns my respect as a player and a customer.

Cheers!!

"

1- Implement a Crafting Stash tab, where you put the item there, and the stash tab shows 2 lists of possible mods it can roll Prefix List and Suffix List, then allow the player to select which specific mods they want and have a Craft buttom that consumes up to 2 of the orbs you place there automatically until the system automatically hits the mods the player indicated (This is a MAYOR QOL system in my opinion and it will sell like Water on a hot sunny day.)

Nope, bad idea for a simple reason.
1. The whole idea behind crafting is that perfect items are next to impossible, so you don´t want to ONLY see specific mods, you want to see every permutation in order to decide if you actually hit something worthwhile, and maybe not for yourself then for others to resell it.

"

2-Implement AI technology that gives you some sort of Guidance of how to proceed the crafting to hit certain mod on the item you currently have. The AI will analise the item and give guidance on what steps are the most effective and gives the best option for the player to take to craft the item and try their luck. It is also a good idea to tie this together with my first solution where you click a "?" help buttom and the tab helps you craft the item with proper advise.

This is one way, and a good suggestion. A probably better one would be far more in-depth ingame tutorials to all options. Like, there is already a delve-tutorial for how to move the wagon, why not include also crafting items with fossils? Maybe because it still will not fix the difficulty level of it, since u need other, external ressources again to check out what the best fossil-combinations for certain crafts are. But as well as all those other tools, I don´t see them introducing that sort of AI into the game.

"

I think the new player experience is absolutely horrible and it is one of the things that made me obsessed with the game, I feel like the game has a very high difficulty curve until you gain a lot of knowledge about it.

This comes back to the age-old question how to improve new-player experience WHILE MAINTAINING that huge level of complexity, that I also don´t want to see diminished. Like, I have personally never experienced a game where knowledge means so much as in PoE. It doesn´t matter if I get lucky drops, or If I don´t really have time on league-start weekend and can only play later in week 2, or whatever the game or life throws at me. I can literally guarantee having a mirror-tier- or, when I play long enough, Multimirror-tier build at the end of the league, simply because I am able to turn all that knowledge into currency.

Generally speaking, the skill level in other games has a pretty low ceiling. In PoE, it is basically endless: Starting from knowing a few league mechanics very in-depths, over adjusting how to use them to make currency, over being able to identify builds that perform in those scenarios well, slowly establishing a broader base of different mechanics to finally reaching a point where u actually build them on your own while also being able to make adjustments to builds you copy or even make your own builds... all of those skills were acquired by brutally dying 450 times a league while learning, or by reading pages and pages of in-depth analysis of how certain skills work (honestly, Toxic Rain you are still a pain in my buttocks with those new AoE threshholds). No other game ever required that much knowledge, yet no other game rewards that amount of knowledge in such a huge margin. PoE is literally the chess of ARPGs and therefore the king

"

Nope, bad idea for a simple reason.
1. The whole idea behind crafting is that perfect items are next to impossible, so you don´t want to ONLY see specific mods, you want to see every permutation in order to decide if you actually hit something worthwhile, and maybe not for yourself then for others to resell it.

With the Craft Stash tab i felt more like... a Tab that Alt spams for you until you hit, lets say... Tailwind. It is really painful to alt spam the item 1200 times and when you finally hit the mod, you are so automated, so burned out of doing 1200 clicks than when the item "lights up" you alt again and loose the mod, this will still burn the same ammount of currency, and won't guarantee any perfect item it is just a way to kind of Automate the painful part of looking for a mod...
Or for example: I want a gem with Introspection mod, so i tell the tab to Alch + Scour the gem until one of them hits Introspection on it.

That was my suggestion, i'm sorry if i wasnt really clear with my initial intention...

Thanks for Reading and Replying ! cheers!