Nobody Cares That I'm Leaving. But They Might Care Why.

There’s no “rage quitting” for me, and if there was I wouldn’t waste your time with an accompanying rage thread. Instead, this is a calm explanation as to why I stopped playing PoE a few months ago, and will now stop haunting the forums. I hope it will be useful feedback for GGG or interesting for the community and whatnot, but mostly I just want to express myself.

The simple TLDR answer to why I’m leaving is that PoE took way too much of my time for very little fun or payoff, and instead began to feel like a tedious job. For a long time it was a significant source of stress in my life, rather than relaxation. And when I got over myself, the game just became boring. While I realize that reaction is partially on me, there are many qualities of PoE that contributed to those feelings.

Here's a longer and more convoluted explanation, in three parts:

On PoE's Niche

It took me about a year of playing to realize how niche PoE really is. The following complaints aren't necessarily "flaws" in the game, but simply areas where PoE diverges from what I was looking for in playing it.

After several confusing balance changes and continuous release of power-creep new skills (which would then be nerfed the following league) culminating in the mess that was 2.0, I finally realized the game is fundamentally not designed for permanent characters.

First, let me explain why it is that I primarily played in Standard league. I like being in control of when I progress in games, rather than working on someone else’s calendar. I like keeping a permanent record of my progress, and I feel that my time is valuable enough that I expect to preserve what my work has yielded. And I also enjoy being able to play as old characters, come back to them and continue to work on them after many months, and slowly build up a team of diverse builds that I can pick and choose from each time I start up the game.

Despite the huge time sinks that character building and wealth building are - and much of that time is spent trading rather than playing – the ideal PoE player is expected to restart every few months and throw his or her build ideas out the window. Builds are not remotely balanced, especially in 2.0, and so we're also expected to just follow what's popular until GGG decides it's finally reached the breaking point and changes it up again.

To expand on balance: there isn't much. At least not during any given snapshot of the game during its lifetime. Instead, PoE pursues a kind of balance that plays out over time - certain builds and playstyles have the advantage during one league, then others take over in the next. This seems to be a conscious strategy to keep us playing from league to league. We can only experience a variety of gameplay (while remaining competitive) if we hang on through the course of several leagues, as the metagame shifts. Replayability and build experimentation occur on GGG's terms, as they control what's "good" and what's not, rather than on the player's.

Sadly, that's not what I felt was advertised when I first did research into PoE, which was sold as an endlessly diverse ARPG. Perhaps I got the wrong impression because, like when figuring everything else out about this game, truly useful information is only present buried in forum posts and nowhere easily accessible (thus the game retains its consciously esoteric tone, its elite and exclusive community, and its wild swings in metagame which much of that community feels obligated to put up with). Or perhaps it’s because the way balance works now is not what GGG initially intended, which was a model closer to a “conventional” ARPG in which the different options a player can choose ultimately have comparable efficacy.

PoE is fundamentally designed for people who can play 40 hours a week permanently - many of GGG's comments and reactions to streamers suggest that they balance and shift the game around those people. I did play 40 hours a week for a long time (and neglected my life) and made quite a bit of progress. But I actually do have a life, despite appearances, and so I felt that my progress started to drop off when I began giving it the attention it deserves as my top priority.

And so in order to keep up with the game, a player has to continuously invest a significant portion of their time. Long breaks are difficult. Due to PoE's competitive nature I somewhat understand that, I just felt I was being treated like I was obligated to go along with whatever choices the developers made. Instead, I chose to stop playing entirely.

I guess the niche players PoE is designed for enjoy the thrill of new empty leagues, have no attachment to characters they put hundreds of hours of work into, and willingly throw out any semblance of build creativity if they want to be competitive. I'm not bashing that mentality or gameplay, I'm just saying it's not me - and I have a hunch there are a lot of PoE players who feel similarly and are often frustrated by the direction the game is going.

PoE is indeed a great game, despite all my complaints above, but it's not a game that I can get emotionally invested in any longer because I feel that players are incentivized to play as forward-looking as possible: no nostalgia, no regrets, no complaints, just go with the flow of every new league.

When I realized that PoE wasn't a long-term ARPG where I could build up wealth and power over a period of years and instead was a series of short races, I decided it was best for me to leave rather than continue to be frustrated. If GGG honestly does not intend PoE to be what I just described, then they are making mistakes and their choices need to be reevaluated.

On the Tapestry's Frayed Edges

While some of PoE's qualities simply don't mesh with my personal desires, others can more accurately be described as flaws. Balance is probably the most important virtue I look for in any videogame, but I will avoid talking about it at great length here due to my comments in the previous section. I will mention, however, that I'm not totally confident GGG is fully in control over its own vision of balance. Which leads me to a description of the other clumsy and unintended holes in PoE's mechanics. These are pretty obvious and have been whined about before, but I'll still list a few.

First, drops and droprates. There is so much vendor trash in this game, people. One forum post (unfortunately, I forget where) described players as junk dealers, running back and forth with cartloads of garbage to a junkyard to be sold for tiny amounts of cash. I see this as an apt metaphor. On the one hand, crappy drops maintain economic balance over thousands of players in a given league. On the other hand, there are other ways of accomplishing controlled scarcity of powerful gear.

I have a radical proposal (I'm sure this has been suggested before): perhaps GGG should consider increasing the quality of drops but drastically decreasing the quantity. Rare items could have their mods scale up with item level so that there's a floor for how crappy they can be, but in exchange they drop far less. That way we can find more mid-tier items, still have limited high-tier drops, and get to sort through way less junk. And when something yellow drops, we have a sense of excitement because it could actually be good - at least as a leveling item.

In the same vein, there are far too many useless unique items. If I correctly understand how uniques are designed to work, they are not supposed to be BiS but are instead intended to be build-enabling or solid leveling items. However, many don't fit either of these roles or have fundamental flaws that counteract their supposed utility for even a niche build. Many of the rarer uniques sell for only a few chaos, which to me exposes a clear demand problem that's not just economic in nature: there's no demand because there's no utility.

I’ll revisit the uniques issue in the next section.

Next, the lack of trade system. I know, I know, everyone and their mother has talked about this. But one of PoE's fundamental pillars is trade - especially in the temp leagues that the game is designed for, as I described in the first section of this post - and the game neglects to provide us with an intuitive way of doing it. Relying on a third-party site is, objectively, an oversight and a flaw. How can any product or piece of technology be designed with the assumption that someone else will pick up a significant amount of slack? What if poe.trade goes down or disappears for any reason? We'll have to keep migrating from one external trade site to the next, with no assurances of their permanency or quality control.

We don't need a potentially disastrous auction house, and trade should indeed require some personal interaction. But there are many systems that fit these criteria but would be a huge improvement on the void we have right now - many that have been proposed by smarter players than me in the numerous trade-related threads. Asynchronous trading that still requires player messaging and interaction, and allows for haggling, for instance. But I won't go into all those details here. Instead I'll complain that GGG doesn't even seem to be considering these alternatives and is banking their game's economy - a feature they do seem to care about quite a bit - on third-party sites who shoulder no accountability.

Finally, silly game updates. This entire post was partially inspired by one of these: the cosmetic change from displaying map levels to map tiers. This strikes me as a poorly designed band-aid for a problem that didn't really exist, while being a slap in the face to those of us who wanted game content to be gated by difficulty instead of RNG (I_NO's catchphrase at this point).

Changes like these make me wonder whether GGG has any idea what it's doing, or whether the developers honestly believe we are stupid. Obfuscating a piece of information - adding another step of math that veterans will continue to do anyway - does not solve a problem. Instead, it leads me to puzzle over GGG’s display of either incompetence or contempt (or both). And many of the other supposedly "works as intended" quirks become more suspicious as well.

On Content We Avoid

From bad skill gems to inefficient skill tree paths, there is a plethora of excess content in PoE that is underutilized. Now, every game populated by hardcore players who obsess over efficiency is going to have superior and inferior alternatives. But GGG should be in the business of pursuing balance (sorry to take us back to that concept over and over) and doing what they can to shore up content that players avoid.

I’d like to start by revisiting the concept of time-wasting gear. Pointless uniques cannot be a feature; I'm convinced they constitute a glaring oversight. Why crowd a game with items nobody uses? Just to screw with us? One explanation is that these items exist just for new, poorer players, and are not intended to have any endgame purpose. That’s absolutely true of most uniques. Except that the sheer quantity of items that fit into that category overwhelms the number of useful ones. These uniques are so cheap that even new players can easily choose among them if they trade, so there’s no incentive to use the majority of them.

This is compounded by the fact that GGG seems uninterested in releasing new powerful uniques (these need not be overpowered or cause power creep, just enable more build diversity). The developers are more intent on pushing out untested content than they are on making sure the content already out there has a purpose.

The same can be said about item and map mods. Besides the fact that some base items have no point (coral amulets, to be precise, and potentially iron rings) there are also item mods that we avoid like the plague – regen and damage reflect, for instance. In combination with the ever-expanding list of map mods, some of which characters can’t run and others of which have disproportionate risk-vs-reward, much of the currency rolling that PoE relies on consists of avoiding the majority of options.

The average player avoids rolling certain mods on gear and maps, avoids inexplicably overtuned bosses placed in low-level maps, ignores divination cards with poor drops and insignificant payoff, avoids many unique maps due to difficulty and risk-reward issues, and of course avoids inferior skills and builds. The content that we’re left with is much more meager than one would think after a first glance at PoE’s bloated lists of gear, skills, builds, challenges, leagues, etc.

To add insult to injury, much of the new content that keeps coming out is stuff that veteran players instantly dismiss. Hundreds of new uniques I will instantly vend, new map mods I will roll past, new bosses that are appropriately difficult but placed in the wrong maps, etc. I no longer have faith that I will actually make use of the new content GGG develops.

And then there’s the issue of RNG-gated content like high-level maps (and even certain builds). I’m glad GGG increased the droprates for build-enabling uniques, as this will broaden the base of players who have access to good builds without making the game easier for the already rich and powerful (this is an important game design philosophy thing for me, but I don’t want to get sidetracked into a huge rant about it right now). It’s one thing for the highest-level content to be so tough it will kill most players, but yet another thing entirely for players who are ready to never have a shot at it in the first place.

When GGG releases even tougher content in the future, will it be even rarer still than 80+ maps and attempts at uber-atziri? Will we get to the point of mirror-rarity maps, that then just offer an empty and unsatisfying run with crappy drops like every other map?

What is the point of scarcity without inherent value?

Conclusion

There’s so much more I’d like to say about the direction I’d like to see Path of Exile go in, including the economy, accessibility, and a broadening of the upper middle-class playerbase. But this has become a long essay already, so I’ll leave those questions in the community’s (mostly) capable hands.

I’ve put much more time and thought into Path of Exile than any other game in my life, and this is the first online multiplayer game that has inspired me to engage with the community and make friends. But the unfortunate conclusion I’ve come to after all of that analysis, conversation, and experience is that this game is not for me. And that the group it seems to be for is shrinking. I was a devotee, but I feel driven away.

As I mentioned in my introduction, many of PoE’s qualities became stressors for me rather than fun challenges. These included worrying about rebuilding my characters after each major update, worrying about grabbing up a desired item that was for sale because of the lack of similar alternatives, feeling empty because my original character builds could never stack up against cookie-cutter monstrosities, and feeling like the game was getting more and more complex to the point of breaking apart.

Once I coached myself out of feeling such negative emotions for what amounts to just a videogame (and being distracted by friends and work and things), my attitude turned from stress to frustration to boredom. The endgame in PoE is sorely lacking, and veteran players reach maps quickly enough even in new leagues that the mapping system is losing the ability to stand on its own.

At a certain point, I started giving stuff away for free to weak players and receiving a kind of satisfaction from that. But that’s nonsensical – I’d rather be using my time volunteering for a charitable organization in real life once I’ve hit that level. (Sorry, readers, you can’t have my stuff.)

Some of you have noticed that I’ve been haunting the forums ever since I stopped playing several months ago, looking for a reason to return to the game. But none of the poor balance choices implemented in 2.0 (overnerfed life leech, evasion, CI, etc) have been corrected. I’m glad map drops have been addressed, and it’s likely more balance changes will come in future leagues, but I have lost faith that each new league won’t have its own blindingly obvious problems that we need to wait a few months to see fixed.

I could have been a reliable supporter for GGG, but watching the negative reactions to each new update makes me happier I left. So I’m not going to be hanging around here any longer, although I confess I will probably take a look at any responses to this thread.

The community has its share of bullies (and I think the culture could benefit from more female players), but for the most part it consists of thoughtful, intelligent, and articulate people. So I want to thank everyone who read my posts and took them semi-seriously.

I might be back someday, but until then keep having fun! I wish GGG the best of luck figuring out whom it is they’ve created this game for, because I am not confident that they know right now.

All the best,
demon9675

TLDR I left too. Have fun.

Best of luck with your next adventure in gaming, thanks for posting feedback - it all helps, even if its not in the way you might hope.

Minor edits, including the title (thanks Charan!) and some clumsily written sentences.

Great feedback, good read. Agreed with most of the points

"

demon9675 wrote:

The simple TLDR answer to why I’m leaving is that PoE took way too much of my time for very little fun or payoff, and instead began to feel like a tedious job.

This is the best summary of my impressions of the game after knowing it for almost a year and playing it most of the time.

"

demon9675 wrote:

The average player avoids rolling certain mods on gear and maps, avoids inexplicably overtuned bosses placed in low-level maps, ignores divination cards with poor drops and insignificant payoff, avoids many unique maps due to difficulty and risk-reward issues, and of course avoids inferior skills and builds. The content that we’re left with is much more meager than one would think after a first glance at PoE’s bloated lists of gear, skills, builds, challenges, leagues, etc.

This is also my realization: the so called "diversity" and "richness" of PoE is only superficial, so that it may impress only relatively new players. Once you start investing your time in the game, you become more and more aware of actual value of each aspect (item, affix, passive tree, mechanics, etc.) contributing to it, or of availablity of some options. Let's take crafting: theoretically, it one of the ways to have fun in this game, but reality is that hardly anyone can afford it, which makes it feel like another superficial layer of interesting complexity.

Great post OP, +1 to most of your points. Especially on what you said about trash uniques and trash mods on gear. Some of them are so hilariously bad that you can't help to think that someone from GGG is outright trolling you.

Not to mention the big question mark that is a trade-centric game without an in-game trading facility (auction house, ad hoc stash tabs, or even a freaking mail system).

Or that every change to the game seems to benefit only the rich players, while leaving everyone else out in the cold, like the fail SotV xpac. FM was a worthy attempt at something else, but the course set by GGG on Awakening is (sadly, since Awakening is beautiful from an artistic point of view) more of the same old crap: silly drops, (mostly) worthless divination cards, brutally overtuned mobs/bosses and heavily RNG-gated endgame and high-end gear.

+100 to demon9675

You have stated many points of contention that I have with PoE in general and especially with PoE 2.0. I too gave PoE a good run from December 2012 until September of 2015. But as you stated in your farewell to PoE tomb (of which I read entirely and agree with... and didn't think was too long at all... I guess the younger players do have attention deficit disorder) the changes in The Awakening caused me to actively stop playing after 2 months. GGG has placed far too much emphasis on the end game map grind to 100 and in the process has made this arpg mostly an unplayable mess. I too also have a dozen Standard League builds that I have not had any desire to respec, including my level 88 Scion that has the great Wings of Entropy Sundering Axe that I was STing and DSing happily playing in PoE 1.3.x but haven't played a single build in Standard League since then. I only came in today for an hour to sort out and consolidate my couple dozen more remove-only tabs in standard (one of many annoying inconveniences as there is no efficient way to sort the tabs... hey GGG why can't the vertical tab list be used to sort faster, that stash tab horizontal scrolling takes forever with over 100 tabs) and then exited.

The OP hit on many key flaws with the devs thinking and direction they are taking PoE. You have stated the same as one of my recent posts, that since GGG places such a high priority on the game economy it is a clear and obvious flaw for PoE not to have some form of in-game marketplace to efficiently buy and sell in. My analogy can be read here: GGG... Where is the central marketplace?.

demon9675 has also correctly observed that GGG is more obsessed with pushing out new and mostly untested content than on balancing existing content. I see GGG as afraid that the only reason they can get players to continue to play and buy is to push new content on them continuously. New content is great if it follows content that has proven it works. The Awakening content and changes are proof (by this quitting player and many others) that the separate dev team GGG assembled to solve the huge desync problem that was plaguing us all did not understand that throwing a whole boatload of other changes on us all at once was a very bad idea. We are (and will forever be) grateful for the server/client technical fix called Deterministic Lockstep, but the raft of other changes and some very questionable nerfs (ie. leech mechanics were already working well) have really poisoned the playing environment for this OP (and me too). The final straw was when Chris stated that the top time-unlimited players were racing to 100 too fast so rather than give them a harder challenge GGG just doubled the amount of xp required to go from level 99 to 100. To add insult to that injury of a change GGG has the audacity to expect the rest of us to stop playing a build somewhere in the 80s, consider that build done, and start over on a new build. What kind of nonsense and mixed signals is that? GGG is saying "we made PoE with a top level of 100. Now we have no intention of ever wanting you to play a build all the way to 100. To that end we will keep increasing the xp grind forever until no one can get to level 100 in a 3 month league." Never mind that only a few hundred top of the PoE pyramid players were ever getting to 100, GGG wants to crush them and boredom/frustrate the other 99% of players out of PoE too.

All in all it is very strange that GGG wants to push us away from playing PoE rather than empowering us with better skills and gear to make the high grind more enjoyable. I guess Joshua was right, "A strange game, the only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"