Few thoughts after the poe 1 announcement --- ggg and players

Not an organized essay but free flowing. Bit of a rabble rabble rabble so feel free to disagree. I'll start off with a quote I heard recently:

You find out what your culture looks like when your family, your business, or your team is at its low point. When you're winning you're happy (more or less) to go to work, to be at home, etc. When you get knocked around what is your response, and what does your resiliency look like.

Is Armageddon coming? No, because that is absurd.

Every month some people come, and some people leave. Happens in every entertainment business whether its a professional sports team, or a music band, most definitely in the video game industry. An influx of people joining Dota 2 at some given rate while also a rate of people leaving.

I'm not sure what I myself will do a year from now, with regards to PoE 1 and PoE 2. There are other things I can do with life. I think I'll give it a year and see what happens, see what GGG does in a year.

Seeing the forum here + PoE 1 subreddit yesterday and parts of today, and relating it to the quote I italicized above, what conclusion(s) is to be made from this. The obvious point is PoE 1 is loved by thousands of people across the world. And they don't like the uncertainty that some day it may be gone. These people would welcome another version of PoE 1 in the form of PoE 2. But, how much of this community's input will be allowed into PoE 2 remains to be answered. Particularly after 3.15 expedition league, after 3.19 Lake of Kalandra league, and after the introduction of Ruthless mode.

Some PoE 1 players might still be playing PoE 2 EA. For many at a low point yesterday and today due to the recent announcement, what are they going to do next? Abandonment, memes, hyper-analyzing, I am loosely thinking about doing something else for a bit, retaliation maybe. If I think of something more to say I'll come back on this topic.

As for GGG, I'm on the other side of the world so I can only assume your position. Thus I'll only present some questions instead.

Artistically speaking, are we doing the right thing? Could ask this economically too since you're in the entertainment business, some of you want to make money. Depending on your staff the kind of culture there may change the answer.

Should a video game company be permitted to create whatever game they want to make? Well ... maybe its a bad time to ask this one. But I think it is an important question because some customers to certain companies only want them to do a certain set of things. One example would be Metallica in 1990 --- after releasing Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, then ...and Justice for All ... they go on to write and publish their Black album. A stark contrast which I'm sure irritated some fans. Is your culture ready for this?

I'll finish off my rambling with this:

For everyone I think its tough to forecast the future. Sometimes for me it feels like things are within razor-thin margins: one second things are ok and the next second its not. My hope is that we'll be able to make mistakes and not allow one "stupid" mistake to end it for all of us. Not managing a nuclear power plant here.


Pain is a natural part of life. Some people accept it, others spend enormous amount of time trying to fix it or get rid of it