League Feedback: Disappointed in the Direction

Hey, I doubt it'll happen, but it'd be great if I could get some feedback to GGG. I haven't played since Crucible, but I wanted to give this one a shot. To put my thoughts having come back into a concise statement: I feel that the game has gotten really streamlined and lost depth in a big way.

The league mechanic is a great representation of this. It offers the illusion of a lot of depth. There are a bunch of facilities to upgrade, there are a bunch of different resources, there are a bunch of workers who all have unique stats, and there are several different towns to send goods to. Doesn't this seem like it is going to create a lot of depth and choices?

However, when you really think about the engagement process that everyone has with it, things are far more linear and simple.

The facilities are all upgraded into the same generic bonuses eventually. There is some variance in how you get there, and there are better paths to take in getting to that point. However, in the end it is all the same for everyone after a bit of play time. Workers are the same. They have random stats, but that randomness is not interesting or adding any choices. It's a simple matter of one is always better than the other. The entire town is filled with meaningless "choices" like this where the end result is either meaningless or a binary choice between one worse outcome and a better one. Here is a list of all these pointless choices that pretend to add depth while adding nothing just to put things in perspective:
* town upgrades
* worker stats
* crop choice (all are currency, the optimal solution of having 2 main plots in the middle growing what you need for a favored resource and use the other 4 to proc 5% per different crop bonus)
* which ore to mine
* which ore to smelt
* where to send crops
* favored resources of ports

Each one of these poses questions that are either mostly meaningless or have an objectively correct and pretty easily reached answer. They add nothing meaningful.

Perhaps it'd make things easiest to understand by considering an alternative system. What if as we upgraded the town we had to choose between different competing upgrades that offered actual interesting mechanics. One player's smelter might be upgraded to convert some ore into bars of different types at a loss in quantity, but another might instead upgrade it to maximize the quantity of all ores without that targeted nature. One player might have their mines upgraded so that workers discover ore on their own to mine over time, and the other might choose to upgrade it so that they find more from mapping. Ships could have upgrades around finding pirates to fight, faster journies, and bargaining for more for each resource at the destination. These choices would all offer cascading effects across the rest of the town, and we could have a lot of incentive to experiment, theorize, and optimize.

This is what has always made PoE great, its ability to offer many choices that aggregate together in interesting ways. This past greatness just isn't making its way into the league mechanic despite the illusion that it has. Further, I think the game has moved away from this in the core game too (the atlas tree and the current scarab system seem to pose the same problem), but I think a post on all that would go on way too long.

I understand why this style of game play is being pushed. It is hard to balance. A bunch of 5% increases in productivity stack up to thousands of times increased productivity for some players very quickly. We've for sure had loot disparity problems and such in the past, and GGG seems to have moved towards a more curated and streamlined experience to avoid that. However, I think this mind set has gone too far, and I am not a fan of where we are at here.