I've had several discussions on these forums where I disagreed with people on loot scarcity and campaign boss difficulty on several occasions.
I've been swimming in good stuff for the campaign consistently and on multiple characters, and I was wondering why others claim they don't.
I pick up all the items I find (white, blue, yellow), I disenchant all I can, I craft with blue orbs to fish for good affixes and then commit with regals, I craft or sell all the whites I find (loot monkeying has become even easier with the free infinite portal scrolls), I spend gold on item gamba at Finn / Alva.
When I enter a boss fight, I might die once or twice to a mechanic, and then experiment and try to figure it out.
When it clicks, it's so satisfying, and I don't die to it anymore. I thought others were the same.
I've helped others on the forums, and I've also released a build guide.
And then it clicked for me.
In this guides, I have a detailed explanation for gear, desirable affixes, gems, support gems, passive tree path.
Yet, I am consistently asked the exact same things that are answered in my post already, or ask me if "X is useful for build", when used skills in the build say they don't X.
I noticed that a lot of people simply don't read, even when you literally give them step by step instructions, or don't bother to understand what they're doing and lack even the slightest bit of inquisitiveness.
I assume this also applies to many of the complaints.
That people just don't read tooltips or ingame descriptions, or bother to understand or engage with game mechanics such as disenchanting or crafting, that people's response to dying to a boss attack isn't "What happened / what can I do differently".
I personally blame the "PoE 1 culture" for this.
I enter games blind, because the beauty in playing games is coming up with stuff on my own, and figuring out stuff on my own.
As a new fan to the franchise, to me it looks like it has become the norm in PoE 1 to not bother to understand anything and just copy someone elses step by step instructions and execute them.
In fact, when I was livestreaming my PoE 1 first playthrough, my chat was full of people desperate to convince me that I NEED to copy a build to succeed, that it's IMPOSSIBLE to come up with something on your own, that you are SUPPOSED to just mindlessly execute someone elses step by steps.
My chat was also full of people trying to "help" me with the most obvious things possible (literally explaining tooltips that I was reading at that moment).
And global chat also reflects that whenever someone mentions they're new to the game.
It feels infantilising.
I find this deeply concerning.
And even more concerning is that I am seeing this mindset migrate over to PoE 2, and we could see live that the moment people were left to come up with things on their own for 3 days until builds were being posted, the forums were on fire about how unplayably difficult the campaign is.
To me personally it's a mindset I can't comprehend or put myself into, because I instinctively try to understand what's going on, collect and disenchant everything "just in case", experiment, etc.
Why this post?
Because I don't think that's the mindset GGG should change the game to please.
I think it's okay that a game expects you to read what it tells you, play decently well, use your mind, and actually use and engage with mechanics such offered by the game in order to succeed.
The quadrupling of certain drops is concerning to me, I'm already swimming in loot during the campaign as is.
