POE2's Broken Team Looting: 46x Rewards, and GGG Risks Following Amazon Games' Fate

I can no longer tolerate the absurd team looting mechanism in POE2—it blatantly undermines game balance and pushes solo players to the brink. More importantly, POE2’s official season is approaching, which will be the game’s true life-or-death test. It’s crucial to note that the official version will adopt a free-to-play model, with profits entirely relying on cosmetic items such as skins and supporter packs. Yet this distorted team looting mechanism is personally destroying GGG’s only profit foundation and may even lead to the complete collapse of GGG’s reputation, following in the footsteps of Amazon Games.
First, let’s debunk a lie: team play is not harder at all—in fact, it’s absurdly easy.
Monsters in team play only have increased health; their damage remains completely unchanged, posing no substantial survival pressure. Additionally, team members have clear divisions of labor: damage-boosting buffs, resistance-reducing curses, and defensive support are all maxed out, with one player as the main damage dealer and the rest as pure support. Solo players have to balance damage, survival, and mechanics on their own, spending a fortune on gear yet still being prone to sudden death. In contrast, team play has a much lower threshold for completion and extremely high fault tolerance, making the actual gameplay difficulty far lower than solo play. This inverted difficulty is in itself a great injustice to solo players.
What’s most outrageous is that the reward gap is absurdly excessive: the overall rewards of multi-player team play are directly 46 times those of solo play.
There’s no need to dwell on how the data is derived—this is an acknowledged fact among veteran players. With loot bonuses, rarity stacking, and shared map costs, teams enjoy 46 times the rewards while being easier than solo play. The loot a solo player grinds for an entire day can be easily surpassed by a team in just one hour, resulting in a complete disconnect between effort and reward. This overwhelming reward gap is no longer a difference in gameplay; it’s systemic class oppression that pushes solo players to despair.
All of this is laying the groundwork for the official season’s failure—GGG seems to have forgotten that after the official version goes free-to-play, their only source of income will be cosmetic items like skins and supporter packs, and this team looting mechanism is personally cutting off their own revenue stream.
Team players are indulged in massive loot, with currency and gear easily accessible. They are fully focused on farming, grinding, and competing, leaving no time or desire to purchase "non-essential" cosmetic items like skins. As for botters and multi-account studios, they profit from mass farming and will never spend money on skins—they won’t even dare to recharge easily for fear of being banned. The only ones willing to pay for skins and supporter packs are precisely the solo players who value the game experience and are willing to support the games they love. They have no temptation of massive loot and are more likely to express their support by purchasing cosmetics to showcase their individuality.
But the current situation is that this 46x reward team mechanism is frantically driving away solo players.
Solo players are either crushed by the 46x reward gap, unable to farm enough loot or keep up with progress, and eventually quit in despair; or they are forced to abandon solo play, join the exhausting team grind, and become mere farming tools, losing the true joy of the game. It’s important to remember that solo players have always been the core existing group of the POE series. Even if solo players don’t account for the majority in POE1, they are still a key force supporting the game’s ecosystem and profits. If a large number of solo players leave in the first official season, no one will be willing to pay for skins and supporter packs, GGG’s profit model will collapse completely, and the game will be unsustainable.
What’s even more terrifying is that if POE2’s first official season fails miserably, GGG’s reputation will plummet, following in the footsteps of Amazon Games.
The lesson from Amazon Games is right in front of us: they invested heavily, poached top talents, and ambitiously entered the gaming industry. However, due to misplaced management cognition and neglect of core player needs, game after game was rushed to launch and quickly failed—from "Crucible" to "King of Meat", all ended in failure. In the end, they became a joke of "investing ten billion but failing to create a single hit", with their reputation completely ruined and no longer able to gain players’ trust. Now, GGG is repeating this mistake—ignoring the demands of solo players, allowing the team mechanism to become abnormally imbalanced, focusing only on short-term traffic and popularity, while ignoring the game’s long-term survival and profit fundamentals.
POE2 could have become a new benchmark for action RPGs, and the free-to-play model of the official version could have been an opportunity to attract more players. But this 46x reward team looting mechanism is personally destroying all of this. It not only ruins the game’s fairness and ecosystem, drives away core solo players, but also cuts off GGG’s profit foundation. Once the official season fails, GGG’s years of accumulated reputation will be lost, and it will completely become the second "Amazon Games".
Team play should have been a supplementary gameplay for social leveling, tackling bosses, not a privileged model favored by the developers. The current reality is: team play is simple and mindless, with rewards 46 times that of solo play; solo play is tedious and difficult, with rewards crushed into the ground.
We beg GGG to face up to the problem and wake up! Severely balance the rewards of team farming, eliminate the absurd 46x reward gap, restore the game’s fairness, and retain solo players—this is not only saving solo players, but also saving POE2 and GGG itself. Don’t wait until the official season collapses and your reputation is ruined to regret not rectifying in time; by then, it will be truly too late to recover everything.

I agree with most of this, which is why I began playing HCSSF/SSF and never went back. You should do the same.

Thanks for the suggestion! But if none of these balance changes get implemented for the official release, I’ll probably start looking for alternative games instead. HCSSF/SSF is just way too hardcore for me.

Dont compare your gameplay to others and youll be fine bud. You can easily craft high end gear to do all content yourself. All the content at this point is easy. .4 was a dumpster fire economy wise but I highly doubt it will ever be this bad again.

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suowap#3783 wrote:

Dont compare your gameplay to others and youll be fine bud. You can easily craft high end gear to do all content yourself. All the content at this point is easy. .4 was a dumpster fire economy wise but I highly doubt it will ever be this bad again.

what is this argument, dont tell others what they should do bud

op is whining that party play gets more loot. my point is that is irrelevant to everything other than the tiny bit it effects eco. whats the point of your response bud?

100% agree, they need to fix this before 1.0, if not for 0.5.

Maybe it helps to be reminded that it is possible to make a conscious choice to not to be upset or bothered by the fact that other people and their friends can get more shiny video game orbs than you can, through the magic of teamwork.

Not sure where your 46 multiplier comes from either but you sure hinged a lot of that AI-slop output on number we're all supposed to blatantly trust.

Claims 46x difference with absolutely no proof, just "trust me bro, everyone agrees." Invalidates your entire premise imo.

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karsey#2995 wrote:

Maybe it helps to be reminded that it is possible to make a conscious choice to not to be upset or bothered by the fact that other people and their friends can get more shiny video game orbs than you can, through the magic of teamwork.

Not sure where your 46 multiplier comes from either but you sure hinged a lot of that AI-slop output on number we're all supposed to blatantly trust.

I'm not sure about the 46x loot multiplier, but here are a few scenarios, all involving farming Temple or Abyss "no-way-out" maps:

1. **Six-man group, each player using a build that can solo clear 6-mod maps**, with around 150% rarity. The loot is split evenly among the six, roughly the same as solo. But builds that can consistently clear 6-mod maps aren't cheap, are they?

2. **Six-man group with clear role division**: one carry, four aura bots (providing resistances, damage auras, and debuffing mobs), and one dedicated rarity culler (stacking 300–500 rarity). In this setup, total loot is definitely more than 6x a solo player's. Even after splitting, each player's share is *far* higher than in Scenario 1. As for cost—thanks to the aura bots, the carry can drop defensive mods on their gear, easily surpassing the DPS of any solo build (since solo players have to dedicate mod slots to defense). Aura bots and the culler are much cheaper to gear.

3. **One person running six accounts simultaneously** (multi-boxing), pocketing all the loot from Scenario 2. The only cost? Buying six copies of the game.

**Analysis**:
Scenario 1 and 2 are reasonable. Real players grouping up for magic find like this won't last long—six human beings coordinating for 4–5 hours a day is exhausting. Across the whole server, how many such teams can there really be?

But Scenario 3? That's using automation/third-party tools. One person reaps all the group loot. How many hours of solo farming would that equate to in a single day? And where does all that currency go? Not back into the market—it gets sold for real money. Mass selling currency lets buyers acquire huge amounts cheaply, which directly fuels in-game inflation. The Temple map in patch 0.4.0 only made this worse.

**Conclusion**:
I think group MF should be made harder. But more importantly, **GGG needs to crack down on multi-boxing with automation**. Honestly, Tencent's servers handle this better than GGG does. GGG's enforcement against this kind of cheating just doesn't feel strong enough. I hope both GGG and Tencent take serious action against this kind of abuse.