How to spot a downward trend... POE will struggle in the year ahead.

Oh, I'm not so sure that POE is on a downward trend in the somewhat near future. All it will take is a good league mechanic that is fun to play and most players will be happy.

If anything Harvest has taught all of us that there is a huge divide between the players who are somewhat traditional Diablo type players who prefer to kill monsters and experience the thrill of a great drop and others who probably like to do 5000 piece jigsaw puzzles.

Frankly I am somewhere in the middle as I suspect many long-term POE players are. We likely prefer loot explosions but are plenty open to a crafting league if it isn't completely tedious and undocumented (until the patch). GGG really dropped the ball on Harvest and the fix was so easy....eliminate the tedious building of the garden, have tags on everything and this league would have been epic.

Can you imagine if Metamorph had a fricking garden? I use that as what I consider the best example of a mechanic that was pretty simple but still with some strategy and the "boss fight" was very straight forward. But instead of the Metamorph we got, take away the Metamorph fights in maps and then add the garden instead of the Metamorph chamber - people would have been howling in the streets. But if GGG just followed the Metamorph example and replaced the "boss" rewards with crafts and you have a winner. So easy.

Anyway, if the next league is good all will be forgotten. That's what happens when you don't have much competition.

LUL are you serious as fun as Diablo2 is , yeah it's fun but LoL has much more depth and re-playability.

Jah Ith Ber it's so over used this many years later I still can't forget that combo...

Attempting to complete 300 map atlas every 3 months is enough to deter any gamer away. Add garbage rng map drops, and rng >9 t14+ maps to spawn and fight a conquer.... is a sinking ship before our eyes. Terrible game design.

Problem is PoE has never been a good game. ARPG;s are my fav. Diablo 2 has never been dethroned. I played original Diablo and D2 day 1.

I got into PoE this year after giving it a 3rd chance as I was bored and there are no good games to play.

I played the last 3 seasons. Harvest is so bad I have no idea how it could even be a thing. This game is not a 40hr a week job. Its 2x 40hr a week jobs.

pure torture waste of time playing a game. On PC game is ran by bots. On console you are playing with PC drop rates which take into account 75% of the population being bots. So unless you play 100hrs a week you will not be running end game.

And lets also add the most expensive MTX in any game. And if you go from PC to xbox, or to playstation you have to rebuy everything again.

I been gaming since the first Nintendo. I have done some amazing things in my gaming lifetime. Like be the #1 rated Madden player 2 years in a row. I have unlocked 2x jedis in Star Wars galaxies and sold them for $2k each. I was the first person in the world to learn to dupe Phantasy Star Blue Burst on Gamecube and I made 20k in one year duping items. I played Diablo 3 and made 10k on the real life auction house.

Free to play games are all bad. Its a scam system and any game that is free to play or cheap will be filled with hackers or bots.

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IdleRace wrote:

Problem is PoE has never been a good game. ARPG;s are my fav. Diablo 2 has never been dethroned. I played original Diablo and D2 day 1.

I got into PoE this year after giving it a 3rd chance as I was bored and there are no good games to play.

I played the last 3 seasons. Harvest is so bad I have no idea how it could even be a thing. This game is not a 40hr a week job. Its 2x 40hr a week jobs.

pure torture waste of time playing a game. On PC game is ran by bots. On console you are playing with PC drop rates which take into account 75% of the population being bots. So unless you play 100hrs a week you will not be running end game.

And lets also add the most expensive MTX in any game. And if you go from PC to xbox, or to playstation you have to rebuy everything again.

I been gaming since the first Nintendo. I have done some amazing things in my gaming lifetime. Like be the #1 rated Madden player 2 years in a row. I have unlocked 2x jedis in Star Wars galaxies and sold them for $2k each. I was the first person in the world to learn to dupe Phantasy Star Blue Burst on Gamecube and I made 20k in one year duping items. I played Diablo 3 and made 10k on the real life auction house.

Free to play games are all bad. Its a scam system and any game that is free to play or cheap will be filled with hackers or bots.

Funny when someone praise D2 and complain about botters in PoE. D2 is one of the most hacker filled games out there and been so for ages. Far worse then PoE.
No to mention it's filled with scammers to an greater extent then PoE.

Being free to play has its flaws yes. But also some strengths.
No ARPG game can come close to the level of content PoE has. Sure some might be a bit shit. (*cough* Blight *cough*)
Just look at how the passive tree, Asendancy classes and Unique items been improved over years. D2 is nowhere to be close in build diversity.
The massive mapping system with its atlas and huge amount of bosses.
Hideouts, master quests, crafting and plenty of league mechanics all have added to its longevity.

But noooo doing the same pindleskin or Bhaal runs in D2 is obviously so much better content. Pffft.

With that said PoE has some big flaws. The game has gotten too fast and swooshing across maps killing everything in less then a minute isn't fun gameplay.
Its also getting a bit too convaluted with currencies, splinters and loot explotions. It ends up feeling like a chore.

PvE has a shelf life. There's really no two ways about it.

For years GGG did well injecting new content into the old and making it reasonably fresh to run again and again.

Then came the time that the chores were too much to bear. I didn't care for Harvest but not because of the building. I disliked it because I had to run maps to get seeds.

So reason that out. Harvest is new. The Atlas is ancient. Yes I understand the Conquerors are new. The Atlas is not and nor are most of the maps.

They mix it up every league but really who cares? The challenge rewards were never worth to me to run this stuff over and over again.

What D2 had that PoE doesn't have to this day is compelling P2P gameplay. It's going down the wrong road with SSF. I get a lot of people want to play by themselves and that's fine.

What I'm saying is when you reach a point where your character is "good enuf" then what do you do? Reroll? Wouldn't you rather have PvP ladderboards, invasions and other neat integrated rewards for P2P gameplay?

Like Dark Souls shows us you can have seamless P2P that is really fun and integrated well into the environment.

So I say it's time for at the bare minimum a PvP league which starts to introduce some good P2P mechanics that inevitably get rolled into the core.

PvE cannot hope to keep up with the dynamism of P2P gameplay. Just look at all the P2P games on the market and how they stay relevant for years with very little developer input. GGG needs this.

with the recent direction poe is taking with bloom and postprocessing ; diablo4 has never looked so promising ! <3

PVP in POE? Simply impossible. The game is so far out of whack when it comes to balance concerning offense vs. defense.

It makes no sense to me that a L96 character playing on a L83 area with BiS gear can be one-shot from off screen. Yet, it happens fairly often in this game.

Since the designers have only focused on damage, how could you possible expect to have a decent PVP experience? Seems to me, first shooter always wins. How is that a challenge? How is that fun?

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Haverhill wrote:

PVP in POE? Simply impossible. The game is so far out of whack when it comes to balance concerning offense vs. defense.

It makes no sense to me that a L96 character playing on a L83 area with BiS gear can be one-shot from off screen. Yet, it happens fairly often in this game.

Since the designers have only focused on damage, how could you possible expect to have a decent PVP experience? Seems to me, first shooter always wins. How is that a challenge? How is that fun?

this thing rly bugs me, you just invest so much into offense that defense wont make any sense.
cap the usual, get enough life to survive the aoe stuff, dodge the telegraphed things and hope there is no off-screen shied nearby finishing you off when you took damage.

the rest is offense, dmg and more dmg

Sirus single handedly drags PoE down a notch. I hate Sirus so much, and how long it takes to spawn him back.