PoE 2 feels like a very anti-player game.

I have been excited for PoE 2 for a long time. I started up immediately on Dec 6th and immediately fell in love with the gameplay cadence and fluidity of combat. The memey zoom combat from PoE1 was always the worst part of that game, but the depth of customization and player expression through crafting and the passive system made up for that.

PoE2 has (IMO) done a great job improving the combat, but it seems to have completely forgotten or misunderstood how beloved those other parts were. I know it's early access, but as I progressed through the (far too long) campaign, I started to feel more and more that I had little/no agency in my character progression, very few choices to make, and no reliable path to progression beyond grinding levels.

The worst part, so far, has been the itemization and gear progression and crafting. I won't talk much about that here because others have gone over it at length, but I'll summarize what I read someone else post in that crafting in PoE2 is basically just identifying items with extra steps. It's awful. It's pure gambling. More currency is not the solution, because it's just forcing people to waste more time with a system that's fundamentally hostile to the player. Without any sort of determinism (alts/scours/useful essences), this is a dead-on-arrival system that I suspect the vast majority of the player base will abandon and not engage with.

Another large problem is the current state of the gem system. The system itself is okay in theory, but like the crafting system, very hostile to the player. Limiting support gems to one per character might make sense, but not when we already have HARSH spirit reservation requirements, a very limited suite of options that often don't stack effects or (even worse) actively undermine your build.

Having finished the campaign, I have absolutely no desire to engage with mapping and further progression, because I don't have any agency or interesting path forward. I'm already stifled on support gems with a handful of 4-links, and the crafting system is horrendous. What do I have to look forward to now? Not much, from what I can see.

It's just not fun to play for me. I never, ever post on the forums. And yet here I am because it's more fun than playing PoE2 right now. I really, really wish that weren't the case.

I had some fun, but the further I went the less fun it became. I'm getting very similar vibes with POE 2 with what went on with the whole Archnemesis fiasco, and the loot update from the Kalandra league. They were parts of the "Vision" that GGG wanted to force on to players, but that players wanted absolutely nothing to do with and they had to walk back on. I suspect there will be a LOT of things GGG will have to walk back on and ideas they're going to have to abandon over the coming weeks/months.