Finished my first league pass, my thoughts

Imo the truth is somewhere between those extremes.

Balance in it's pure form is an unchanging state of equilibrium. Certainly, that's not desireable for a long lasting game, but it's unattainable anyway so i consider that a mood point to begin with.

The goal should be to try to get close to it as possible while handling changes (which are neccessary i agree on that) with a scalpel, not with a chainsaw.
And that's imo the problem with GGGs approach, they use a chainsaw all the time.

If all you are looking for is change, no matter what kind of change, then they might as well replace the "balance team" with an RNG generator that gets started every league and assigns random values to all items and gems within a specified range.
Would lead to pretty much the same results as what GGG is doing right now. If you really think that's "genius" design ... well i do not. It achieves the goal of changing stuff sure, but that's not difficult to achieve to begin with. How you do it is the crutch there.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

The goal should be to try to get close to it as possible while handling changes (which are neccessary i agree on that) with a scalpel, not with a chainsaw.
And that's imo the problem with GGGs approach, they use a chainsaw all the time.

Id agree, if I thought adjusting skillgems, gear, skilltree, atlastree, mechanics and all that jazz while introducing new stuff including the insane amounts of combinations in between all those things was doable with a surgical precision, rather than with a chainsaw. And all that within 11 weeks per development circle.

I dont think it is doable. Not even close to.


Again: If that was the goal then GGG would have to slow down their development big time. Less leagues, less new stuff, less changes etc etc.

This is where we leave the fascinating world of endless theoretical possibilities and enter the mean realm of financial necessities as well as other constraining factors like time and manpower.


In other words: The scope of the game is way too huge to achieve what you want them to achieve.
They would either have to spend money they almost guaranteed wont ever recoup in order to do it or reduce the scope significantly, which means this game would be like all the others out there.

You cant have your cake and eat it too.

That might be true if they had to do everything at once and solve all the problems at the same time, but they don't.
They could take a few gems/items each league and adjust them to whatever level they think is good for the game, then take the next bunch a league later. Meanwhile adding a few new things here and there when they have time left. The new stuff they add is usually just old stuff with a new look anyway. Just reworking old things would make the introduction of new stuff mostly obsolete.

But they don't do that. If they "rework" something it's quantity over quality like with that "we reworked 100 uniques" that ended up doing almost nothing.
If they nerf something they always do so from at least 3 angles to make sure it's dead and stays dead with as much collateral damage as possible. And if they introduce powercreep they do so in the most blant and obvious way possible like with Crucible which is literally just "more stats" gated behind even more RNG. Instead of introducing new stats and new avenues of scaling to increase the available choices they just slap extra stats on what's already there, pretty much what D3 did all those years.

I don't expect perfection or anything close to it. But GGG makes it apparent that they don't even try, they don't care. They think "it works out somehow as long as we just change stuff occassionaly, why bother" and it shows. The game has it's perks and some things are well done but there is just as much that's in a horrid state and most of it has been there for years.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

They could take a few gems/items each league and adjust them to whatever level they think is good for the game, then take the next bunch a league later.

...

But they don't do that. If they "rework" something it's quantity over quality like with that "we reworked 100 uniques" that ended up doing almost nothing.

Isnt reworking ignite, poison, curses, flasks and other "themes" exactly what you suggested?

It might not produce the results you are looking for, thats fair but they are still doing just that.


With regards to fixing existing stuff would be better than introducing new stuff: Chris said that this isnt as good from a marketing perspective. It wouldnt draw in as many players as the good old "Look! Shiny new toys! Please support us" does.

Whether you trust him on that or not is up to you. Ill just give him the benefit of the doubt. His often mocked vision elevated this game from garage passion project to genre king.
He knows what he´s doing and it works. Which is why I generally trust him and his decision making - despite some decisions I personally disliked.

I find it quite laughable to insinuate that a company with achievements like that under their belt and living off one singular game for an entire decade wouldnt know what they are doing or didnt care.

Its their livelihood on the line after all, for us its just a hobby. I think its pretty clear who cares more by default.

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His often mocked vision elevated this game from garage passion project to genre king.

That's exactly where you are wrong.

The success POE had until now wasn't because of his vision. It was because up until 3.15 GGG mostly did what the players wanted them to do Chris said so himself in the Baeclast back then.
From the niche hardcore game they wanted to make at first, they moved on to make the game more appealling to a wider audience and drew in lot's of players that way. They have like 90% of their current success because they went AGAINST their vision.
Then in 3.15 they decided to make a 180° and i think the results speak for themselves. Completely lost all the trust from large parts of the playerbase, retention going down league by league and nothing but non stop complaints from pretty much everywhere.
If they had stayed with their vision from the beginning then POE would have never gotten as big as it is and they'd still be an indie studio with a few 1000 players each league because a game that's intentionally designed to be frustrating and inconvinent isn't going to get much popularity.

This kind of thing isn't new either, having big success with something, getting arrogant and thinking they know better than their customers and then ruining everything they built up because of it. The gaming industry is full with stories like that, GGG is just one more.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Then in 3.15 they decided to make a 180°

You conveniently forgot to mention why they did their 180 and thats key to his vision.
Which btw isnt to make the game as painful as possible, thats what Ruthless is for. The vision was and is to create a game that can be played for decades. He explained it quite thoroughly during the 3.15 reveal.

In order to do that, they HAD to nerf everything across the board to lower the average powerlevel, making room for new toys to be introduced down the road and thus create the game that can be played for decades.


If they hadnt done that and instead kept introducing new toys, then the game would be a joke by now and you know that. They had to double and even quadruple the hp pools of endgame bosses multiple times and those bosses still didnt pose any sort of challenge.
It would have been way worse by now, if they had lacked the balls to deliberately destroy the average playerpower.

This circle is likely going to continue for as long as PoE exists.
Every now and then GGG will have to nuke the playerpower from Orbit, which is going to piss off players but also make room for new toys.
Because this is going to piss off and drive away players, they cant do it all the time and will need some sort of quality marketing material to bring back those players - you know stuff like PoE2 and eventually PoE3 and so on.

Thats the vision right there.

His vision IS ruthless. It's literally the version of the game Chris thinks is ideal. Maybe he still knows somewhere in the back of his head that he is mostly alone with that thought but i am not confident it will stop him from making the core game more and more like ruthless step by step, there are plenty of cases of them doing that already and i am really looking forward to POE 2.0 or what i expect, ruthless 2.0 in that regard.

As for his "reason", it's just not very reasonable. "Hey we had great success with what we did so far, let's do the opposite from here on out to make sure we keep having success going forward". Feels kinda stupid to me.
Obviously powercreep is an issue that needs to be addressed but again, the way how you do it is important. Butchering flasks everyone could have while introducing Mageblood which is limited to the top 0,0000001? Great idea. The gap between rich and poor wasn't big enough already. Cutting power at the top while leaving the floor untouched as much as possible would be the way to go, not the other way around.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

i am really looking forward to POE 2.0 or what i expect, ruthless 2.0 in that regard.

I think thats nonsense. Your explanation as to why this is happening is basically a "madman at the helm enforcing nothing less than [Removed by Support], just because he can".
I mean cmon now dude. Thats a bit far fetched dont you think?

Time will tell tho but at least this explains why you´ve been this negative about the game for... I dont even know... months, years? A long time.

My faith in GGG has been on a constant decline since 3.15 along with my enjoyment of the game so yeah i guess it's years at this point. If it had been just 3.15 it wouldn't have been a big deal, the things that came afterwards are way worse.
I can still squeeze fun out of it for now by interacting as little as possible with all the bad stuff i.e loot, crafting and trade, which means shooting myself in the foot big time obviously, but at least it leaves the game somewhat enjoyable.

Yeah sounds a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Focus on negative stuff and you´ll find a lot of negative stuff, reinforcing the initial negative perspective.

Im guilty of that too, just the other way around. I simply ignore the stuff I dislike and focus instead on the good stuff.


Each his own I guess ^^