Zoom is not fun. It's loot FOMO

1) most people want shorter grind. and more self found gear. trade is still nice cause it allows for multiple mechanics that you dont have to engage with if you hate them.
2) a lot of people want harder bosses.
3) a lot of people want just go forward so dead easy bosses.
4) most people want to play archetypes. they dont want to solve the spreadsheet and use the best op skill possible until they have enough currency to play a build template where you can fit any skills.


1) what ruthless did was INCREASE the grind to an absurd level.
2) same boss difficulty ( unless hardcore with is 10% of the player base) but way more grindy. cant remember if you can tp out of a boss fight to refill flasks in town or in another zone. that would make it slightly more interesting.
3) people that want dead easy bosses dont want to increase the grind
4) ruthless reduced the gem and gem supports availble so it drastically reduced the archetypes until you finally get enouh support gems (wich i understand requires sometimes to reroll quite late into the game). and POE 1 does already a bad job of balancing archetypes.


so ruthless was a predictible disaster and it was.
dont tell me it s the fault of the player.
ruthless was a pet project because that s what the devs enjoys. super grindy, super spredasheetty.

NOW if you actually did INTELLIGENT difficulty mods, then it would work. but it has not happened and it s not happening at least in the next 3 years.

under pressure you do what you know how to do, so poe 2 turning into poe 1.


edit : the worrying part ofc is that diablo 4 dont care about any of this, bosses are easy and it s still very popular. so there are economic factor not in the favor of any decent balance.

a game did it correctly btw. diablo 2. why. cause you did drop good items. uniques in particular were strong. in poe 1 , you ll almost never drop anything good unless you target it and zoom. and the cheap uniques that are strong needs you to spend 50 hours in pob. but most are trash and you will hate yourself for even identifying them.

you could use diablo 2 philosophy in the campaign and do poe 1 in end game.