Still sane exile?

because i am not..

with the general direction the game is heading , i have lost faith in the quality of work that GGG can deliver. They are continuously speading themselves too thin and not returning to fix glaring issues with the game.

Overall they seem to just push out less and less innovative mtx , and the core mechanics being introduced are usually quite buggy in nature. They are catering to the type of player who will play 12 hours a day and quite frankly that isnt me.

I miss the days where GGG cared about quality over quantity and have no hope for poe2 to be any different then the current state of affairs.

If you feel like me , there is some light at the end of this dark tunnel. I have recently been playing a new game of the genre. While still in beta it has many interesting mechanics already to ensure the game remains fun and enjoyable for people.

Firstly , defences in the game actually matter. while the numbers remain relatively low, you can easily see a difference between some resistances /armor or regen having an immediate effect. There is none of this one shot mess that poe has devoled into. Most importantly , there is a death recap screen to indicate what type of damage killed you.

What is most refreshing are the ways they approach deaths, primarily in the end game. Deaths during the story mode are inconsequential - as you simply spawn back in the area a bit. Deaths in the endgame do not result in loss of experience , but rather a loss of loot/potential.

Currently the end game has two systems. An endless wave - with breaks every 5 waves to sort loot, and a mapping system - which requires no consumables.
Upon dying in either , you simply need to restart. In the mapping system this means a reset of all accumulated mods - as their system revolve around you picking A or B which last for X runs, cummulatively increasing difficulty.
The level of the areas always scale to your level.
It is refreshing to simply click and go , and have control over what you will encounter.

Crafting is the best part of this game , as all drops are relavent in a way.
Crafting works by breaking down found items , and then being able to improve other items. The cost being that each craft you add makes the item more likely to become bricked - in the sense that you can no longer improve it - or that one mod will be reduced to the lowest tier. It provides both the excitement of gambling on improving it a little bit and fixes the lull that sets in from finding less then stellar items at times.

overall , i am actually enjoying the arpg genre again. AS i can play for an hour and feel i accomplished something.

What is this game to look out for?
Last Epoch.

Hmm... LE has potential but is in beta and cheapest supporter pack is $35 USD (though I've sunk much more into PoE over the years). It needs to mature more (get closer to v1.0) and I'll need to do a lot more research, watch videos of play and discussions of the skills, build mechanics, passives, etc. before maybe giving it a try.

Same for Wolcen. Just as a quick look to see where they are at currently I found this video:

Final release date for Wolcen - Character Customization Preview

At 33 seconds into the video they show the main dev. team hard at work polishing and testing for their February 13th release date. Nothing unusual and probably not too dissimilar to GGG in their open beta days of PoE. Then at 40 seconds I got a huge LOL from what one of the devs. had on his desk. 2 books, "Tour of C++" and "Competitive Programming 3". I wonder if in GGG's beginnings in 2006 how expert of a C++ coder Jonathan was?

Competitive Programming

The things that we can find through the Internet is amazing. I learned computer programming way back in BI (Before Internet) time, cut my programming teeth on HP Advanced Basic (first desktop computer I got to use), then absorbed everything on my first Apple II+ computer (6502 assembly language is really old school coding), then moved on to Pascal, C and C+ on DOS and early Windows before shifting to computer tech. Now as a partner in a very small WISP where I wear many hats from Linux server operations to customer support to Cisco IOS to hardware installation/repair (that's why after 2 Win 7 to 10 upgrades last week that were perfect and easy I finally ditched my Windows 7 and was presently surprised and pleased to find out that PoE runs so much better on Win 10), etc. See my other thread post on upgrading to Windows 10.

You're remembering the game that had two acts and maybe a couple dozen skills and how much fun you had with it. It's old now, and you're not getting as much fun out of it. It's not GGG. It's you. You're just tired of the game. Take a break.

Last Epoch looks like a knock-off. We'll see how it turns out for them. I don't buy into a game until I know it's monetization. If they start trying to sell "expansions", I'm out.

I agree, it does look like the OP is either burned out or just unable to find new things to do in PoE. As a filthy casual PoE player I'll never get to the end and say "game over". That won't ever happen. However, if I don't like the huge shift from links on gear to links on gems come PoE 2 (aka patch 4.0.0) I may be in search of other ways to get my arpg fix satisfied.

A knock-off of PoE that actually addresses the massive QoL problems GGG refuses to acknowledge and is more stable and properly optimized would already be a strong competitor, even with a mediocre story and less depth of gameplay.

I'm all for more competition.

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nadakuu wrote:

They are catering to the type of player who will play 12 hours a day and quite frankly that isnt me.

I mean, if thats who is buying 80% of MTX... then how can you blame them.

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trixxar wrote:

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nadakuu wrote:

They are catering to the type of player who will play 12 hours a day and quite frankly that isnt me.

I mean, if thats who is buying 80% of MTX... then how can you blame them.

To be fair, if that's the direction they keep heading, they'll shoot themselves in the foot with inverse logic.

The more they cater to those people, the less everyone else will spend, and the higher the percentage of people in that group will be their income.

Obviously, you were just making up an example, but companies have killed games by doing this. Try something new that caters to X group, X group throws money at it, company believes that it's working because a large portion of their income is coming from X group, everyone else stops playing, and by the time they realize their overall income is dropping, X group is all that's left...and it's usually not enough.

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Redthorne82 wrote:

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trixxar wrote:

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nadakuu wrote:

They are catering to the type of player who will play 12 hours a day and quite frankly that isnt me.

I mean, if thats who is buying 80% of MTX... then how can you blame them.

To be fair, if that's the direction they keep heading, they'll shoot themselves in the foot with inverse logic.

The more they cater to those people, the less everyone else will spend, and the higher the percentage of people in that group will be their income.

Obviously, you were just making up an example, but companies have killed games by doing this. Try something new that caters to X group, X group throws money at it, company believes that it's working because a large portion of their income is coming from X group, everyone else stops playing, and by the time they realize their overall income is dropping, X group is all that's left...and it's usually not enough.

thats alredy done ggg killed main player base hope trust and game fun.numbers also showing to us game dying hard and there is no some popular rpg game atm but soon they will see what they did to player base

I will be honest. All those "PoE clones" like Last Epoch, Wolcen and other that will come out "soonTM" won't be even comparable to PoE in at least next 5 years.

They haven't killed the game yet, but player numbers did take a BIG hit this league relative to other comparable leagues.