Path of Exile - ProjectPT Was Right Expansion

Hello,

Today we'll have a very long talk about how Path of Exile has turned into a game that's design is lazy, poorly managed, rushed and by concept absolutely boring. The game has lost it's fun and magic which has been replaced with methods that indoctrinate you to become a mindless player who plays the game just because you're used to it, not because you're having fun.

Lets start off with the philosophy & mindset that has changed.

PHILOSOPHY AND MINDSET

The core goal of GGG now is to force everyone to play as RNG gated game as possible to condition players into mindlessly playing more and more, hoping for a reward in future. People who are able to avoid being conditioned into this state have their tools removed until they are in the same box with others. RNG is mostly a small part of every game but GGG has made this as their whole base of the game, there is no skill involved, close to no strategy and you can't play much smarter than others anymore simply because it doesn't provide the results that you seek.
Another part is the excessive monetization and priority changes. You see it from the unnecessary fragment tab, ludicrous amount of MTX releases DAILY and making league mechanics heavily related to trading. Increased trading = increased amount of premium stash tabs that people have to buy.
The concept of fun is long forgotten and everything is heavily focused on squeezing money out of every player. While I understand that businesses have to make money, the hunger for money has completely made them lose priority on what's important.
This happens with a lot of games and businesses. New practices are constantly being tested to squeeze out more and more money without considering in factors that can't be monitored short term via numbers. I've seen the same story over and over everywhere.

Now to explain myself a little bit further on what practices are being used right now

1) LAZINESS AND/OR EXCESSIVE GREED - This is the nowadays norm of video games, push out unfinished content and fix it midway just to keep up with the release dates or expectations of players / publishers. I am 100% sure that GGG released Bestiary fully knowing that the content was poor, unfinished and untested. Instead of finding ways to delay it, they put their bets on a loyal fan base that was forced into playing a half assed project in a hope that it'll get better.
We also see laziness from them outsourcing ideas to people outside of the studio, completely unaware of what the game is about.
We also see laziness for releasing a new type of content that is very risky but putting very little polish into it because people will still play it. Think to yourself, if you do something completely new, do you rush it or do you take your time to make sure you get it right? And no, video game companies are not faceless corporations but people too.
We also see laziness from their poor response time. If you have forums AND Reddit that mostly hate eachother screeching about currency nerfs that is gigantic for such a currency based game and there is no response for weeks, then obviously they don't care enough and have become desensitized of the noise from the community.
We also see laziness from excessively packing old content as new one and even going as far as deceiving you into thinking that you're getting something new. You have cool Bestiary advertisement with a crab armor, making you think that all sets have a unique appearance but that's not the case. You also have MTXes that seem to be 3D arts for normal equipment.
We also see laziness from making more and more content gated behind truly ridiculous levels RNG instead of using other tools to bring excitement or make us addicted - see Uber Elder and legendary beasts. Uber Elder isn't about how skilled you are, it's about how little life you have. Legendary beasts aren't about how dangerous maps or how good you are at killing mobs, it's about how many maps can you run mindlessly before giving up.
We also see laziness from Chris posting on Reddit that he wrote patch notes regarding what he saw on Reddit, not on what he or the development team actually investigated / should have investigated.

2) CURRENCY NERFS - First off, currency nerfs are a real thing and anyone who has excessively mapped in Standard and leagues knows what to expect. There have been endless runs done by players to prove this, including myself. While many think that progress nerfs( currency and mapping) have been unintentional, they couldn't be more wrong. GGG isn't ran by monkeys who "forgot the core of the game". I strongly believe that GGG intentionally nerfed and/or let nets disrupt other currency drops so players wouldn't be overwhelmed with rares / uniques / currency. While the idea can be good, there is no opportunity cost considered in the formula. Using nets and crafting also robs your time and the rewards STILL after 3 weeks aren't rewarding enough. What currency nerfs also have produced is having tools limited to even higher tier maps. You can start using prophecies / map mods / chisels / vaals / fragments / monstrous / sextants a lot later for them to be profitable or useful. Also you can't craft as much as you could before since the currency is more rare which forces people to pick up more rares, lowering the value of all items. Items that cost 30C last league are now 5C. Everything regarding currency is very heavily limited for you to not progress "too fast", at least in their books.

3) MAPPING NERFS - The smoother your experience is, the faster you "finish" the game so this process is made as tedious as possible. The rarity and cost of mapping is not related to how cheap or irrelevant they will be, it's about how fast you finish the content or level. Leveling is another reason why Encroaching Darkness was nerfed so hard - too many Poorjoys being ran to powerlevel. The same reason is why Harbinger orbs are made EXTREMELY rare, so players wouldn't powerlevel themselves to level 90 because that's where the "FUN" and wrapping up begins. The aim is to have players mapping and playing for the whole 3 months but almost nobody sane goes to such levels to play this game.

4) THE ORDER OF WHITE KNIGHTS - The game community has reached a level where you will always have white knights protecting everything. You see these people everywhere and no matter what GGG does, it's always perfect and doesn't deserve criticism. This is a product of GGG previously running a lot of decisions correctly, people being conditioned to play the game and/or forced to like the game since it mostly works by leagues. What this means is that people allocate free time for Path of Exile and even if they hate everything regarding it, they have nothing else to do meanwhile. There is also nothing that Chris can be criticized for and everything that is being said is being sucked up to idiotic levels. Other games put as much if not more effort in their community but the only difference is that their lead developer doesn't post on their subreddit.
I have a feeling that this endless praise is one of the reasons why GGG has become more lazy and borderline unethical with all aspects of the game. There is still little hope as I see more and more posts from people claiming that they're doing their best to like the league but simply can't take it anymore. Hopefully we'll one day see a day where rationality and balance beats blind whiteknighting.

5) ULTRA SJW & MOD TACTICS - This might be something that a lot of people are not aware about because they barely use popular communication channels or global chat.
Closing forum threads is also an easy way for GGG to avoid any major criticism. GGG are grabbing the oldest tricks in the moderation book - "Thank you for your feedback, we'll contact you regarding" < the last part of the sentence never happens. You also have "This thread has an overwhelming amount of personal attacks so we're closing this topic". Another cool method is to ban active forum thread makers so their threads will not get bumped.

We have as an example D3izhistory and I_NO banned currently/recently who previously didn't have any issues with moderators but now once the league is bad they suddenly started attacking individuals? Yeah no.

If you're interested in more, here's a thread that I posted regarding SJWing in Path of Exile that also got closed for no reason and obviously nobody contacted me neither.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2117905




BONUS ROUND

Numbers

http://steamcharts.com/app/238960#3m

50% of the players have already left within 3 weeks of the league being out, being the new record! Congratulations! We did it Reddit! This can't be argued and the claims that standalone client exists is irrelevant since Steam shows us a large enough steady graph on how players behave.
Not to mention if we consider that standalone client players are more likely hardcore and veteran players, then we can see that the drop of players during lowest population count has also dropped drastically, showing that players who played a lot before don't play as much anymore.


Idiotic arguments

1. Bestiary has so much work and art put into it, it has to go to the base game!

What work and art? Are we talking about menagerie that is 1 day of working with hideout editor or is it the 5 new voice lines or is it the one weekend of scribbling by the artist to create those barely detailed mob images? There is nothing done worth more than 2 weeks of work for multiple artists which obviously were used. I work with artists daily.

2. Why are you complaining? It's a free game!

Just because something is free, it doesn't mean it's free from criticism. This game isn't even remotely as free as you think. Because trading is such an important part of the game, you are forced to buy stash tabs and no, you cannot use forum, I tried in the beginning and it was unbearably painful. Not to mention soon 100% there will be extra inventory slots which makes it even less "free". The game is made more and more trade focused so you would take part of it and buy those premium tabs.

3. In patch 2.X things were like THIS!

The old game was garbage and had 20K peak players. No matter what your argument is, there were less players, less activity, less supporters, less everything. If you want to compare a less successful game with a more successful one then you're asking for a worse and less populated version of Path of Exile.

4. Bestiary added so many OP recipes that we can use!

Sure you can even have a 10x mirror recipe but you need mobs for it! As an example you need 4 Albino Rhoas to make 3 white sockets which is absolutely retarded.


--------

I will probably add some more points / clarifications that I've missed as I wrote it all in one go.

To wrap it up, I gotta say that I used to praise GGG a lot and invite all my friends to this game but the new direction that they have taken with this game has almost completely made me lose hope towards this game. I highly doubt that there will be changes and the next league might be better but the core game will still be as poor as it right now is.
Now I'm waiting for my refund and got all my Path of Exile friends playing Overwatch again.

Here's my friends list at the peak hour today while having over 75% of them online during the start of the league. 1 player in Hardcore and 1 in Standard while I play BSC. Never, not even at late night during the end of a league has it been this dead.

100% agree with OP you articulated my and many others frustrations perfectly.

Ehh.

Should i be offensive and help moderate this...

Hate train is nothing new to further SOME arguments.

Purpose of Bestiary league was and will be to make CRAFTING more accessible.

Crafting is already so bad and so gated with even worst rng for time you spend on one character.
Current obs are used as currency, there is so little sense to craft with them instead of using them as you would use gold and such to bay items.

This system is just that, and we just can hope it be less tedious then current pointless grinding and rng. Currently time needed to make a item to enable some end game and build diversity is indefinite or better say more then one league will last, for that time you better of playing couple new build.
Having diversity is weary mach dependent on items accessibility, in other words crafting is important for end game options.

Well i just wanted to point some annoyance i have regarding how people are blind to reality, intentions are subtle and should not be disregarded because you have twisted image or lack of one.

People usually forget that what they wish and the road you need to walking to archiving it is one and same thing with flip of the coin. Reach people dont think about living of the labor of loots of poor people but they like their shiny.

I got my own annoyance for sure but its relay not fair to drop bombs, so even if im mad on GGG for some things im also mad on people pushing game from decent concepts, may not look it but i got good feelings on this one. Whats next, well hope they go small steps or there be many more of posts like yours.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

Hello,

omigoodness.

it's the "waaa i'm quitting"-thread guy (who sometimes liked to acerbically comment on my threads before rage-quitting and posting about it).

hi.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

Today we'll have a very long talk about how Path of Exile has turned into a game that's design is lazy, poorly managed, rushed and by concept absolutely boring. The game has lost it's fun and magic which has been replaced with methods that indoctrinate you to become a mindless player who plays the game just because you're used to it, not because you're having fun.[/b]

*sips tea*

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

Lets start off with the philosophy & mindset that has changed.

PHILOSOPHY AND MINDSET

The core goal of GGG now is to force everyone to play as RNG gated game as possible to condition players into mindlessly playing more and more, hoping for a reward in future.

An assertion! Let us see the argument.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

People who are able to avoid being conditioned into this state have their tools removed until they are in the same box with others.

... Another assertion, and kind of deranged-sounding. :{

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

RNG is mostly a small part of every game but GGG has made this as their whole base of the game, there is no skill involved, close to no strategy and you can't play much smarter than others anymore simply because it doesn't provide the results that you seek.

a little gem (shared with me on this very subforum, once) i thought appropriate to pass along here.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

Another part is the excessive monetization and priority changes. You see it from the unnecessary fragment tab, ludicrous amount of MTX releases DAILY and making league mechanics heavily related to trading. Increased trading = increased amount of premium stash tabs that people have to buy.

This assertion deserves to be supported with some sort of logical argument, bc I disagree.

But you just throw around assertions like they're confetti & you're some deranged person at Hillary Clinton's election-night ball room... sabered champagne bottle in one hand, handfuls of confetti in the other... tossing confetti at things just bc u=mad/deranged... muttering to yourself, spitting out utterances... Making a spectacle of yourself but not really recognizing it or caring.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

The concept of fun is long forgotten and everything is heavily focused on squeezing money out of every player."

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

While I understand that businesses have to make money, the hunger for money has completely made them lose priority on what's important.
This happens with a lot of games and businesses. New practices are constantly being tested to squeeze out more and more money without considering in factors that can't be monitored short term via numbers. I've seen the same story over and over everywhere.

Now to explain myself a little bit further on what practices are being used right now

OK let's c.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

1) LAZINESS AND/OR EXCESSIVE GREED - This is the nowadays norm of video games, push out unfinished content and fix it midway just to keep up with the release dates or expectations of players / publishers. I am 100% sure that GGG released Bestiary fully knowing that the content was poor, unfinished and untested. Instead of finding ways to delay it, they put their bets on a loyal fan base that was forced into playing a half assed project in a hope that it'll get better.

OK, in other words, "GGG released Bestiary in subpar form to make money (by meeting deadlines, thereby establishing regularity in publishing content)."

I feel like that's a charitable interpretation of what you said, would you agree?

They do make money from Supporter Packs... but their for-profit business model has always been forthrightly portrayed. And you're casting them in a money-obsessed light, as if they cared less about their product. Which is far from being the case.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

We also see laziness from them outsourcing ideas to people outside of the studio, completely unaware of what the game is about.

Substantiate.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

We also see laziness for releasing a new type of content that is very risky but putting very little polish into it because people will still play it. Think to yourself, if you do something completely new, do you rush it or do you take your time to make sure you get it right? And no, video game companies are not faceless corporations but people too.

Are you kidding me? Because you just admitted that your wild, rude, and untrue allegations directed at GGG are directed at people.

If you're really aware of what you wrote, then get out of here: You're being rude to people whom players on this forum enjoy and respect.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

We also see laziness from their poor response time. If you have forums AND Reddit that mostly hate eachother screeching about currency nerfs that is gigantic for such a currency based game and there is no response for weeks, then obviously they don't care enough and have become desensitized of the noise from the community.

(...wait for it...)

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

We also see laziness from excessively packing old content as new one and even going as far as deceiving you into thinking that you're getting something new. You have cool Bestiary advertisement with a crab armor, making you think that all sets have a unique appearance but that's not the case. You also have MTXes that seem to be 3D arts for normal equipment.

(...wait for it...)

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

We also see laziness from making more and more content gated behind truly ridiculous levels RNG instead of using other tools to bring excitement or make us addicted - see Uber Elder and legendary beasts. Uber Elder isn't about how skilled you are, it's about how little life you have. Legendary beasts aren't about how dangerous maps or how good you are at killing mobs, it's about how many maps can you run mindlessly before giving up.

(...wait for it!!...)

"

Kiss_me_Quick wrote:

We also see laziness from Chris posting on Reddit that he wrote patch notes regarding what he saw on Reddit, not on what he or the development team actually investigated / should have investigated.

-->

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

2) CURRENCY NERFS - First off, currency nerfs are a real thing and anyone who has excessively mapped in Standard and leagues knows what to expect. There have been endless runs done by players to prove this, including myself. While many think that progress nerfs( currency and mapping) have been unintentional, they couldn't be more wrong. GGG isn't ran by monkeys who "forgot the core of the game". I strongly believe that GGG intentionally nerfed and/or let nets disrupt other currency drops so players wouldn't be overwhelmed with rares / uniques / currency. While the idea can be good, there is no opportunity cost considered in the formula. Using nets and crafting also robs your time and the rewards STILL after 3 weeks aren't rewarding enough. What currency nerfs also have produced is having tools limited to even higher tier maps. You can start using prophecies / map mods / chisels / vaals / fragments / monstrous / sextants a lot later for them to be profitable or useful. Also you can't craft as much as you could before since the currency is more rare which forces people to pick up more rares, lowering the value of all items. Items that cost 30C last league are now 5C. Everything regarding currency is very heavily limited for you to not progress "too fast", at least in their books.

SMH.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

3) MAPPING NERFS - The smoother your experience is, the faster you "finish" the game so this process is made as tedious as possible. The rarity and cost of mapping is not related to how cheap or irrelevant they will be, it's about how fast you finish the content or level. Leveling is another reason why Encroaching Darkness was nerfed so hard - too many Poorjoys being ran to powerlevel. The same reason is why Harbinger orbs are made EXTREMELY rare, so players wouldn't powerlevel themselves to level 90 because that's where the "FUN" and wrapping up begins. The aim is to have players mapping and playing for the whole 3 months but almost nobody sane goes to such levels to play this game.

4u

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

4) THE ORDER OF WHITE KNIGHTS - The game community has reached a level where you will always have white knights protecting everything. You see these people everywhere and no matter what GGG does, it's always perfect and doesn't deserve criticism. This is a product of GGG previously running a lot of decisions correctly, people being conditioned to play the game and/or forced to like the game since it mostly works by leagues. What this means is that people allocate free time for Path of Exile and even if they hate everything regarding it, they have nothing else to do meanwhile. There is also nothing that Chris can be criticized for and everything that is being said is being sucked up to idiotic levels. Other games put as much if not more effort in their community but the only difference is that their lead developer doesn't post on their subreddit.
I have a feeling that this endless praise is one of the reasons why GGG has become more lazy and borderline unethical with all aspects of the game. There is still little hope as I see more and more posts from people claiming that they're doing their best to like the league but simply can't take it anymore. Hopefully we'll one day see a day where rationality and balance beats blind whiteknighting.

^

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

5) ULTRA SJW & MOD TACTICS - This might be something that a lot of people are not aware about because they barely use popular communication channels or global chat.
Closing forum threads is also an easy way for GGG to avoid any major criticism. GGG are grabbing the oldest tricks in the moderation book - "Thank you for your feedback, we'll contact you regarding" < the last part of the sentence never happens. You also have "This thread has an overwhelming amount of personal attacks so we're closing this topic". Another cool method is to ban active forum thread makers so their threads will not get bumped.

We have as an example D3izhistory and I_NO banned currently/recently who previously didn't have any issues with moderators but now once the league is bad they suddenly started attacking individuals? Yeah no.

If you're interested in more, here's a thread that I posted regarding SJWing in Path of Exile that also got closed for no reason and obviously nobody contacted me neither.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2117905

You've... degenerated to gossip?

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

BONUS ROUND

Numbers

http://steamcharts.com/app/238960#3m

50% of the players have already left within 3 weeks of the league being out, being the new record! Congratulations! We did it Reddit! This can't be argued and the claims that standalone client exists is irrelevant since Steam shows us a large enough steady graph on how players behave.
Not to mention if we consider that standalone client players are more likely hardcore and veteran players, then we can see that the drop of players during lowest population count has also dropped drastically, showing that players who played a lot before don't play as much anymore.

u = 8008. there's a number for you.
confused?

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

Idiotic arguments

--And I'm just gonna stop you there.
Felt appropriate.

"

bwam wrote:

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

Hello,

omigoodness.

it's the "waaa i'm quitting"-thread guy (who sometimes liked to acerbically comment on my threads before rage-quitting and posting about it).

Beware!
White knight in his full glory!

Well, I totally agree with Kiss_Me_Quick.
The game is loosing its charm and uniqueness. Its just all about RNG and INSANE farm.
Sure there are still people who really enjoy it but numbres speak for themself.
More an more players are getting sick and tired of this bull shit and leaving the game.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

We also see laziness from Chris posting on Reddit that he wrote patch notes regarding what he saw on Reddit, not on what he or the development team actually investigated / should have investigated.

Yea that was pretty funny OP. I saw it too. haha

For the rest i disagree with some and i am indifferent to some others but rest assured that GGG has seen the numbers too. From what i heard they are planning to create a PTR server (or w/e it's called) to test leagues before releasing them, just like D3. This game is yours, don't worry. The D3 players dictate how this game develops for a long time now.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

2) CURRENCY NERFS

3) MAPPING NERFS

This is maybe the biggest part of the challenge POE has to offer: Manage income, invest, take risks. I'd hate to see these things dumbed down. High-tier mapping, the "RNG gated content", rewards highly players with knowledge and skill how to make the best of it. Of course "grinding", also known as playing the game, helps a lot.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

4) THE ORDER OF WHITE KNIGHTS

You accuse GGG being lazy and here you complain opinions that differ from yours are white knighting. It's very clear your trying to be sensational here and stir up the discussion. You can't be so naive to think that everyone should resent the current league, because you don't like it.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

1) LAZINESS AND/OR EXCESSIVE GREED

Although cosmetic MTX together with stash tabs are the reason GGG can pull this new content out every few months they really should put some time to revamp old character models, animations and skill effects. That's been long overdue.

"

Pyrokar wrote:

. From what i heard they are planning to create a PTR server (or w/e it's called) to test leagues before releasing them, just like D3. This game is yours, don't worry. The D3 players dictate how this game develops for a long time now.

I think you heard wrong. I think all they said was that they would add league mechanics to the alpha realm so alpha testers can test it before release.

"

breakingthrough wrote:

This is maybe the biggest part of the challenge POE has to offer: Manage income, invest, take risks. I'd hate to see these things dumbed down. High-tier mapping, the "RNG gated content", rewards highly players with knowledge and skill how to make the best of it. Of course "grinding", also known as playing the game, helps a lot.

I played this game only because I like brainstorming and coming up with new and unique ideas of playing this game and being able to get rewarded for it. This is all gone now. You can still make profit with flipping currency and items but there's nothing to do with the currency except using it as a currency, not a tool.

"

breakingthrough wrote:

You accuse GGG being lazy and here you complain opinions that differ from yours are white knighting. It's very clear your trying to be sensational here and stir up the discussion. You can't be so naive to think that everyone should resent the current league, because you don't like it.

No, white knighting is clearly visible for everyone who uses the forum. You see players that have no challenges or below 5, excessively protecting the league without even having reached maps or played the content properly. We also see it from the praise posts without any explanation we had on Reddit a few days into league when Bestiary was at a completely unacceptable state.
Exactly how white knighting is used for people who protect the opposite gender just because it's the opposite gender, we have players protecting GGG from criticism just because it's GGG.

few weeks ago Op was making fun of people complaining about poe.