What really Grinds your Gears about PoE?

Besides desync which tbh didnt had any major trouble with in the past, but now playing a Tshot crit build its a very common thing that the mobs themselves are desyncing.

Anyway what grind my gears is finding crap uniques every time it drops. There is no excitement anymore for the next drop cuz you know 100% its going to be one of the crap uniques.

My problem with GGG is that they do not communicating at all on the forums regarding major issues. Except some little posts like "some posts in this thread were deleted because..." or "keep this civilised" or [removed by support].

- Well I want to know when the desynch issue is going to be fixed. If they cant do that well just say it out loud so everyone can be quiet forever. You won the game of the year 2013 so I doubt that you have amateur programmers. And dont tell me that in the modern days of 2014 with all the technology things like this cannot be fixed. I dont have this issue in any otehr game. You promised more than 2 years ago that this is going to be fixed soon, but here we are more than 2 years later with a new expansion and it just get worse.

- My game runs smoothly in a 60-90 fps range when I press F1 I see the statistics. 30ms ping, but when I visit my hideout it skyrockets everytime to 400 - 500 ( 958ms todays record ) and everything I do is done with a 2 sec. delay. The moment I leave my HD my ping is going back to normal. I hate my hideout because of this. What is worng with this ? Is my hideout in another server or what ? :D I am pretty sure I play on the EU gateway.

- I bought a supporter pack with a portal effect and nobody told me that these portal effects would not work in the maps. What do you think I am going to do lategame ? There are maps only, nothing more. So what use I have from this portal effect ?

- I wanted to upgrade to Master Supporter pack because I wanted to support GGG and I wanted to own something physical not only virtual from GGG. The signed Art concept was something I wanted. I asked a photo or a picture of it and the response was "we cant show you until you buy the pack" and in addition they said "there are more types of the concept art and it is a random pick, we dont know whcih one will you get". This approach and the technical problems are holding me back to upgrade further. I was considering even the Grandmaster pack.

- The MTX are way too expensive for a little company like GGG. In League of Legends you can get the best skins. with top notch details, new aniamtion and visuals with complete new voiceover for 20 euros or less. The tentacle wings cost 35 $. And there is scorpio pet aswell for 110 $.

- Alt + F4 should be not the way Hardcore is supposed to be played, every regular gamer with common sense would say that except poe hc elitist fanboys, but whatever. I dont blame these ppl at all for doing that, because they do that because of the game's technical issues. But instead of fixing this, GGG's response on reddit encourages players to do so. Like this is the way how they want their players to play their game lol. No comment on this.

I am really having a blast playing Forsaken Masters, I love the new expansion. But the technical issues gone too far and at some points I just cant even play the game with high end computer and a very good connection. The desynch the freezes, the lagg spikes and everything... it is just too much. I want to see an improvement and a lot of posts from GGG about how they work on it and the process, not just angry and mad players posts how they died in the Beyond league. The forum is full of posts about deaths like this.
I really dont care about pets in the hideouts, neither about the new bear pet and the portal effect ( which I would buy if it would work in maps ) As a player since august 2012 and a supporter I do care about technical improvements.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

That solo play is considered deviant and should be "corrected" or that those who enjoy it should somehow be coerced into playing with others.

Like they used to think that left-handedness was supposed to be corrected.

+1 on this. Inching towards more party play with things like generosity as well is a big pet peeve for me.

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Sayyid wrote:

I don't like that every new feature puts solo players further and further behind the pack. For all its flaws (stripped down complexity on everything, basically), that's one of the things that I like about D3. Viable (hell, nowadays basically mandatory) solo play.

I don't like wading into trade chat, global masters share, etc. But the game's rate of progression is stacked so literally everything is faster that way.

It would be nice if master reputation gains were tailored to how many are in the party. More total reputation given out in groups, of course, but not a strict "all that potential extra reputation is just plain gone unless you share them." The system at present just plain requires that you go into groups.

Completely agree. It's a depressing fact that you won't be anywhere near the master levels of somebody in a guild or full party.

I'll pitch in with five topics:

1) As most have stated, desync. I'm currently playing a RF/Cyclone curse on hit Marauder and everything is great except for the CONSTANT desync from Cyclone. I'm always hesitant to use movement skills such as Cyclone or Leap Slam because of the high probability of teleporting back into a large pack of devourers or something. I just want to spin.

2) Invading...anything. I'm getting pretty tired of seeing beetles everywhere. Beyond has been okay but it's not too far attached from Invasion. If I didn't have 204% life from the tree right now, I would have been dead a long time ago. Melee just can't happen with these hard hitting, tanky ass mobs that pop out of the sky. Luckily, I'm to a point at level 74 where not much can kill me but it was a rough road to get where I'm at now. I digress.

3) I kind of touched on it in number two but mob imbalance is a mild problem. I love getting first hit crit by all the rare mobs that have the powerful crit affix. Especially by those big ass skeletons that already crush your armour with their basic attack. Unless you use one of the few efficient leveling builds, your leveling efficiency is typically far worse than it was before Beyond league. Rampage is suppose to clear faster while Beyond has to clear slower? Seems silly to me.

4) Performance in general. If you don't have PoE on an SSD, I feel bad for you guy. My quality of life went up tremendously when I installed the game on my SSD. Friends of mine have ungodly loading times with their regular hard drives and have gotten them killed in the past in some cases. Frame drops are constant with certain skills such as Ice Shot, Firestorm and Discharge

5) The trading system that we keep hearing about. At this point, I'd take an auction house. If you want to compare it to D3, most do, you can make the case that you will be spending more time looking for items than playing game. While this was a problem in D3, is it not a similar problem in PoE with poe markets and poe.xyz? The problem with D3, in its auction house days, was that playing the game was too inefficient for finding the items you needed for your build. In PoE, you can actually play self-found and still do pretty good...Even if you only have a handful of builds to choose from, you can still pull it off. An auction house of sorts would grease my grinding gears.

Didn't realize I was going to make a wall of text about these but I do also realize it sounds all negative. It mostly is but these are actually problems that should and need to be fixed asap. I do enjoy this game quite a lot even with its problems. However, when you hit the game mechanic or game code wall that is desync or getting one shot with max resists, high armour and 4.5k+ life, it just makes me sad inside. I in no way regret my purchases with support packs and such because I love this game and do want to see it grow and prosper. GGG just need to shift their priorities to pressing issues such as the ones I aforementioned.

Well, it really grinds my gears that, in the loading screen, the gears don't grind.
I mean the various content trailers have the grinding gears for Grinding Gear Games grind, but the gears we grind more often than other gears don't grind.

Grinding Gear Games, please gear up for the grind and make the gears that don't grind grind. Do this, and we can at least watch the time grind by while waiting for the gears to finish grinding, so we can get to grinding for some gear after watching gears grind.

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kmach1ne wrote:

5) The trading system that we keep hearing about. At this point, I'd take an auction house. If you want to compare it to D3, most do, you can make the case that you will be spending more time looking for items than playing game. While this was a problem in D3, is it not a similar problem in PoE with poe markets and poe.xyz? The problem with D3, in its auction house days, was that playing the game was too inefficient for finding the items you needed for your build. In PoE, you can actually play self-found and still do pretty good...Even if you only have a handful of builds to choose from, you can still pull it off. An auction house of sorts would grease my grinding gears.

The only difference between poe.xyz and an in-game AH is that you spend even longer when it's on poe.xyz than if you could just search an AH. I would fully support adding an AH.

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Sayyid wrote:

The only difference between poe.xyz and an in-game AH is that you spend even longer when it's on poe.xyz than if you could just search an AH. I would fully support adding an AH.

I agree that there is no difference between the D3 AH and poezyx. But adding an AH here would take away the feeling from trading. I actually love gettings pm's, set up places for the trade and I also like to send pm's regarding offers to dudes who didnt set their b/o prices. I love to negotiate :-)

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Sayyid wrote:

The only difference between poe.xyz and an in-game AH is that you spend even longer when it's on poe.xyz than if you could just search an AH. I would fully support adding an AH.

I agree that there is no difference between the D3 AH and poezyx. But adding an AH here would take away the feeling from trading. I actually love gettings pm's, set up places for the trade and I also like to send pm's regarding offers to dudes who didnt set their b/o prices. I love to negotiate :-)

If they implemented an AH exactly like D3's, then yes, it would take away from the gameplay experience. However, I trust GGG would make something that would be quick and effective while not taking away from actually playing the game. Shame it has taken this long though.

What grinds my gears about PoE?

It's that, all too often, it feels like I enjoy the game in spite of the developers, rather than because of them.

Yes, I realize that without the developers there would be no PoE... but if a startup were to announce the creation of Journey of Expulsion, with the mission statement of "we feel PoE is just a little too spiky", I'd be signing up for closed beta faster than you can say "supporter pack". Especially if they were talking about a home edition.

What do I like about PoE? The skill tree/skill gem mechanics and interaction, the classes (although the lack of customization without ponying up for microtransactions is a bit galling), the nontraditional dark fantasy setting and storyline (no trolls, no elves, no dragons, etc.), the rather clever selection of weapons and armor, and a nonpermanent death form of hardcore, to name just a few.

What I don't like about PoE -- or, rather, what seems to be the developers' attitude toward PoE -- is that the solution for just about any issue seems to be geared toward making it harder for the players. I realize a significant chunk of the playerbase likes it that way, but I'm not cut from that fabric. This is more of a mismatch between my gaming tastes and the developers' gaming tastes, and I acknowledge that wholeheartedly. Doesn't change the fact that many of the things they do to the game -- making the Hailrake, Brutus and Merveil fights harder, nerfing skills when they make the game too easy in their opinion, flooding instances with monsters that normally wouldn't be there, to name a few -- are things I find wholly unappetizing. (Just having died twice in a row to Merciless Brutus hasn't helped my mindset on this topic. Old Brutus wouldn't have been nearly so difficult for me.)

Additionally, the uneven moderation of their own forums is really irritating. That the forums are crawling with counter-shouters doesn't help. "I've never had any problem with the portion of the game you're complaining about, so there's obviously no problem and you should quit your bitching." Uh, no. It's called feedback. Not everyone's experience or play ability is going to be the same, so some people will have difficulty where you do not. Your lack of difficulty in a part of the game does not invalidate the concerns other players have about that part of the game.

All of which is why some people, myself included, prefer to get their information from the PoE subreddit. Fewer counter-shouters and apologists muddying the waters.

Finally, I intensely dislike their apparent reliance upon the "ignore it and it'll go away" approach, along with a stubborn insistence on a particular technological model that leaves the door open for character death through no fault of the player. Apologists can quibble all they want over whether to call it lag, desync, or a loose nut behind the operator panel, but the fact remains that "we will not do this" leads to some painful gaming moments.

EDITED TO ADD:
One thing I really dislike is the breaking of the skill tree every four to six months. I understand the need/desire to rebalance the game periodically, but if you have to do it that frequently, then maybe there's something wrong with your basic approach.

Oh, and I detest rogue exiles. To me, they feel like nothing less than griefing by the developers.