POE2 disrespecting our time (Post-0.4.0)

GGG is still confused... they can't decide, if they want to build the game "vision", or a game for a more diverse and bigger auidence. The goal was - as far as i know - to build a PoE, with easy to understand mechanics to attract a bigger player base, but keep some game depth in the same time.
This goal is a complate failure so far. Just look at the temple.
You need to watch YouTube tutorials, guides, you need external sites to understand. You need to grind a LOT and it's full RNG. Even if you do everything how you should, the RNG can still delete hours of progress.
It's one of the most discriminating mechanic in the game. You have to do this as a full job if you want to build a basic temple.
I managed to build the first side of a snake... i got unlucky, with no lock for 3 temple. I lost 4 rooms. So i was grinding HOURS just to LOOSE progress. And i could not do anything about it..
Its terrible design.
GGG should calculate the time is needed to do something for the players.

Stick to trade if you don't want to craft or actually use your divs please. Don't ruin SSF for the rest of us. I heard Last Epoch has the SSF mode you want. Boosted drop rates and a pity system wouldn't make it SSF. It'd make it Developer-Assisted. WoW Classic takes 4-6 days of in-game time to reach level cap, then you have endgame grinds. Who is taking more than 144 hours of in-game time to kill Ubers in SSF? Then, you have minmaxing grind for the lols

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avastcosmicarena#5899 wrote:

I think the temple is the worst offender. I play the game A LOT, and I mean A LOT, for someone who is an adult with a full-time salaried job as a programmer, and I find the temple is just exhausting. It takes way too fucking long to setup. It's got me way more burnt out on the league way faster than I have been in previous leagues, because I honestly just don't feel like dedicating so much time to setup a temple, but it almost feels mandatory because of how bad the balance is and how messed up the economy is. IMO, the temple is WAY too aimed at streamers and no-lifers. Gathering enough crystals + dealing with the sometimes very painful RNG while trying to setup your rooms just takes way, way too long.

tbh sofar to me everything in poe2 feels exhausting.
just keep in mind that act 5 and 6 isn't in the game yet, average playthrough of campaign is 30-40hrs (for now), this game needs some severe changes for average players to even consider coming back every 3/4 months

game has potential but everything feels slow (which to me makes it exhausting).

poe1 however.... i can fly through

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Albundy_84#7604 wrote:

GGG is still confused... they can't decide, if they want to build the game "vision", or a game for a more diverse and bigger auidence. The goal was - as far as i know - to build a PoE, with easy to understand mechanics to attract a bigger player base, but keep some game depth in the same time.
This goal is a complate failure so far. Just look at the temple.
You need to watch YouTube tutorials, guides, you need external sites to understand. You need to grind a LOT and it's full RNG. Even if you do everything how you should, the RNG can still delete hours of progress.
It's one of the most discriminating mechanic in the game. You have to do this as a full job if you want to build a basic temple.
I managed to build the first side of a snake... i got unlucky, with no lock for 3 temple. I lost 4 rooms. So i was grinding HOURS just to LOOSE progress. And i could not do anything about it..
Its terrible design.
GGG should calculate the time is needed to do something for the players.

That story about losing the snake rooms just hurts to read. My condolences on your lost hours.

But you are absolutely right about the "Identity Crisis" at GGG. It feels like they have schizophrenia in their design philosophy:

Marketing Team: "We want PoE 2 to be accessible and huge!"

Design Team: "Let's make a mechanic (Temple) that requires a PhD, external wikis, and deletes your progress if you get bad RNG."

You can't have both. "RNG deleting progress" is the cardinal sin of modern game design. It’s not "challenging," it’s disrespectful. If I grind for 4 hours, I should have 4 hours worth of progress to show for it. I shouldn't be at the mercy of a dice roll that says "Oops, you wasted your evening, try again."

Like you said, they need to actually calculate the Time Investment vs. Risk. Right now, the risk is "total waste of time," and for a working adult, that risk is too high to take.

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SoFaux#7759 wrote:

Stick to trade if you don't want to craft or actually use your divs please. Don't ruin SSF for the rest of us. I heard Last Epoch has the SSF mode you want. Boosted drop rates and a pity system wouldn't make it SSF. It'd make it Developer-Assisted. WoW Classic takes 4-6 days of in-game time to reach level cap, then you have endgame grinds. Who is taking more than 144 hours of in-game time to kill Ubers in SSF? Then, you have minmaxing grind for the lols

"Developer-Assisted"? That’s a funny way to look at it. So, playing Trade League where 50,000 other players farm materials for you so you can buy them instantly isn't "Assisted"? That’s "Economy-Assisted." I’d argue that buying your power from a trade site is way more "assisted" than wanting reasonable drop rates to find it yourself.

And regarding your "144 hours" comment... You just proved my point. Let's do the math for a working adult with a family:

If I play 2 hours a day (which is generous for many), 144 hours takes 72 Days.

That is 2.5 Months.

So your argument is: "It's fine, you just need to play for 2.5 months straight to reach the endgame goal." By the time I hit that 144-hour mark, the League is dead, the economy is gone, and the next season is being announced.

WoW Classic is a persistent MMO. PoE is a Seasonal ARPG. Comparing them is apples to oranges. If a seasonal game requires 2.5 months of daily grinding just to start bossing efficiently in SSF, the pacing is broken for anyone who isn't a full-time gamer.

Gatekeeping the mode doesn't save it; it just empties it.

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TechnicallBrains#4648 wrote:

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avastcosmicarena#5899 wrote:

I think the temple is the worst offender. I play the game A LOT, and I mean A LOT, for someone who is an adult with a full-time salaried job as a programmer, and I find the temple is just exhausting. It takes way too fucking long to setup. It's got me way more burnt out on the league way faster than I have been in previous leagues, because I honestly just don't feel like dedicating so much time to setup a temple, but it almost feels mandatory because of how bad the balance is and how messed up the economy is. IMO, the temple is WAY too aimed at streamers and no-lifers. Gathering enough crystals + dealing with the sometimes very painful RNG while trying to setup your rooms just takes way, way too long.

tbh sofar to me everything in poe2 feels exhausting.
just keep in mind that act 5 and 6 isn't in the game yet, average playthrough of campaign is 30-40hrs (for now), this game needs some severe changes for average players to even consider coming back every 3/4 months

game has potential but everything feels slow (which to me makes it exhausting).

poe1 however.... i can fly through

That part about Act 5 & 6 is actually a nightmare scenario I hadn't fully processed yet.

If we are already clocking 30-40 hours for a "half-finished" campaign... what happens on full release? Are we looking at a 60-hour campaign every single season? That is absolute retention suicide. No average player is going to commit to a 60-hour tutorial every 3 months just to start playing the actual game.

And the PoE 1 comparison is spot on.

PoE 1: You feel like a god zooming through content.

PoE 2: You feel like you're walking through mud with ankle weights.

"Tactical combat" shouldn't mean "everything happens in slow motion." They need to speed up the progression, or nobody is going to have the patience to stick around for Act 6.

Trade is way too overpowered, and since asynchronous trade was announced, leagues have been dying much faster.

Currently, in trade leagues, about 95% of character upgrades are expected to come from trading, and I hate that.

SSF is much better than Trade for PoE 2. However, if GGG added a Solo Currency Trade Only league type, it would be perfect for me.

Currency trading would be done with NPCs only. No boosts, no item purchases. No mirrored items. You could only swap currency for league mechanics you don’t want to do. Perfect Hybrid.

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Japonbu#0742 wrote:

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llindvior#2871 wrote:

What you want is "SSF Noob" or "SSF Pretend", ask them to add that.

Call it "SSF Employed", "SSF Adult", or "SSF I-Touch-Grass"—I don't care what the label is.

Last Epoch calls it Circle of Fortune, and it’s widely praised because it respects the player's time without removing the difficulty of the content.

You seem to be confusing Time Sink with Skill. Running the same map 500 times hoping for RNG to bless you isn't "skill". It's just tolerance for repetition. I want to test my mechanics against bosses, not test my patience against a slot machine.

If wanting a game loop that fits into a healthy lifestyle makes me a "noob" in your eyes, I’ll wear that badge happily.

SSF was created by PLAYERS to be a CHALLENGE. GGG later added it as an official mode, RESPECTING THE PLAYERS. If you don't like the challenge, then don't do it.

Point to a DEAD game as examples of what is good... not really the best idea. LE was brain dead easy, because of things like CoF dropping stupid amounts of "useable" loot. LE is dead, not in any small part because all of the "quality of life" and "respect our time" features makes for a game that offers no challenge and no reason to keep playing it.

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Alzucard#2422 wrote:

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Sakanabi#6664 wrote:

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Japonbu#0742 wrote:

3. SSF isn't about Knowledge, it's about Math. "Knowledge" doesn't change drop tables. The game's drop rates are balanced around thousands of players filtering items into a Trade Economy. When you apply those same rates to a Solo player, the math simply doesn't work without a massive time sink. I know how to craft and farm. The problem is that farming a specific Unique in SSF can take 100 hours of RNG, whereas in Trade, I could farm currency for 5 hours and buy it. Buffing SSF drops doesn't "trivialize" the game; it simply adjusts the math to account for the lack of trading.

That's a good thing about SSF imo - you don't play builds based on specific uniques unless you already dropped them. You play self-sufficient builds, you play with what you get not with what you want to get. Biggest part of the challenge is make a build which is powerful enough even without optimized gear or build-enabling unique.

I mean thats your opinion. I can say i see it different. In SSF you should be able to achieve stuff without a huge time investment. The time difference you need to invest compared to Trade is very steep.

And i dont think people see SSF as a challange they see Hardcore as a challenge, but not SSF. People play SSF because they dont want to bother with trade, but they want to achieve the same stuff. Just slower, but not this slow.

And yes SSF is not a challenge imo

And that's your opinion. I don't see a single reason why SSF cannot be a challenge mode. If devs decide it should be then it will be and I'm 100% for that decision. I don't play HC in any online game because dying to lag is not my vision of fun but getting things slowly on my own is.

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Majesthion#2427 wrote:

Trade is way too overpowered, and since asynchronous trade was announced, leagues have been dying much faster.

Currently, in trade leagues, about 95% of character upgrades are expected to come from trading, and I hate that.

SSF is much better than Trade for PoE 2. However, if GGG added a Solo Currency Trade Only league type, it would be perfect for me.

Currency trading would be done with NPCs only. No boosts, no item purchases. No mirrored items. You could only swap currency for league mechanics you don’t want to do. Perfect Hybrid.

I totally agree with your first point. Trade League essentially turns the game into "Gold Farming Simulator." Instead of getting excited about a loot drop, you just calculate: "How much gold is this worth?" -> "Okay, I can buy my upgrade now." It bypasses the actual gameplay loop and kills the sense of progression way too fast. That's why leagues die in 3 weeks.

But regarding your "Currency Only League" idea... I think that's overcomplicating the solution. The solution is already there in other games (LE): Buff the loot in SSF.

If SSF had decent drop rates and a way to target-farm items (like Divination Cards but actually usable solo), we wouldn't need a currency exchange. The only reason you want to swap currency is because the RNG is so bad that you can't find what you need on your own. Fix the loot tables for Solo play, and the need for "Currency Trading" disappears. I want to find my gear from a boss, not from an NPC exchange window.