GGG it's time to release a statement about what happened this league.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Bestiary = Pokemon catch em all

You kill monsters, you get their loot - and you get more crafting options. Hell, Bestiary even added you the ability to deterministically kill monsters to progress towards your goal. Do not see what's not ARPG about this.

"

Synthesis = Table Top Game

You kill monsters, you loot - and you craft. And it even gave you the option to build your own areas to kill your monsters and loot your loot.

"

Blight = Tower Defense

You kill monsters, you loot them (and their chests), and you get help from towers, yes.

"

Harvest = Stardew Valley

You kill monsters, you loot, you craft, you progress.

"

Heist = Metal Gear Light stealth-like

You kill monsters, you loot, you progress and even get additional character interactions, beautifully voice acted.

The ARPG genre is vast. And it doesn't confine itself to one person's narrow views. The genre was used long before Diablo 1, and can be traced back to the 70's. To use the genre as an argument, because "An ARPG IS X, that's why Y doesn't belong here" just looks stupid. ALL genres evolve, and PoE needs to evolve too to keep itself relevant.

I understand people not liking certain systems, certain leagues and certain additions. It's just a matter of subjectivity. No developer can reach everyone, even within a genre. But using "ARPG" as some sort of ruleset to what PoE "SHOULD" be, based on YOUR subjective experiences in this genre, is flawed.

Critique the game. Critique the developers, but please stop using the genre as an argument, because the genre is vast, huge, big and evolving. Always.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

why are you messing with what made the game great?

Going to stop you right there, made the game great according to who? You? Because I can tell you right now, a lot of people on PoE have different opinions about what "made the game great" and not every answer is the same. If the devs themselves actually believed in what you were saying, you wouldn't be seeing these leagues that you don't seem fond that are "deviating" apparently from the game because it's not some oversimplified Diablo 2 clone that you want it to be.

Also, you don't seem to understand the core concept of what I am arguing. Killing things is fun for a while, but it does get boring and repetitive after some time. That is why hideout decorating is popular among the community because it gives the player an interesting side activity to do in the game when the player is burned out on just killing constantly. This is also why when players get bored of only killing in PoE, they turn to other games that offer more than just this and PoE loses players. The devs themselves know this and are trying to implement more things into the game that involve more than just killing things.

When you limit the game to doing only one activity over and over, the game does get stale after a while and players turn to other games that offer more. You sow shallow gameplay as the best way to get reward and you end up with a shallow playerbase that shreds your hard work on reddit before they've even played a minute of it.

You keep leaving the slightly complicated league mechanics out of the core game, and putting the clear speed leagues into core. You reap what you sow when you do that."

This is very true and being shown more and more apparent by the players who cannot adapt to change and want PoE to just be some over simplified Diablo 2 clone with no complexity.

Bottom line, if you don't like the new content, don't play it, because there is more simplified content in the game you can partake in that can achieve the same result for you, but don't go on here and tell other players that the new content they enjoy is not good, because other players have different tastes and different expectations from what they want in the game.

This was, in fact, the buggiest and most disjointed league start that I can remember (been playing since 2014). Totally possible I’m forgetting others.

This wasn’t reddit hysteria; things were actually breaking all over the place unrelated to Heist. There were other threads listing the crazy bugs people experienced, so I won’t go through them here. But I will definitely remember my crafting bench straight up being nonfunctional (no crafts were listed and the categories were grayed out) every other time I used it.

I’ve already forgotten the (many) other bugs I experienced, so clearly they weren’t as memorable, but I do remember having to be quite patient with GGG to make the game work again. Days of fixes post-launch may be inevitable to a certain extent with any complex software, but the issues were so big and so widespread that the league reeked of a lack of QA testing.

Then there’s Heist, and the fact that GGG finished basic design regarding how it was supposed to work 3 weeks in. This was unacceptable. Companions still exhibit odd behavior and don’t open doors when you tell them to, or get interrupted indefinitely through closed doors.

Yes, I do think GGG needs to release some sort of statement acknowledging that this wasn’t a smooth launch. Yes, even simple statements like this matter to customers - any PR person will tell you it makes a big difference when customers feel heard.

But beyond that, they need to actually do better next time. Changes to their release schedule need to be seriously considered.

Sadly, I’m not optimistic this will happen - if revenue is good enough for their Tencent overlords, game quality will quickly become irrelevant..

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Entitlement much?

Would a Chris apology statement actually make you feel better, or would you just post a rant in a post after that and then off to reddit to post some dank memes?

Listen I'm no GGG apologist by any means, and I hate these rando non-arpg leagues, but I'm under no illusion that GGG owes me explanations, or will change their development philosophy.

But keep up the good fight. I'm sure support will message you soon to confirm your address so that Chris's apology letter gets to you ASAP.

Yeah that's what I said...I really want a Chris Wilson apology delivered by him personally. Sad that the point of my post went straight over your head.

The whole post is about questionable design decisions, rushed mechanics and a bucket full of bugs and crashes. It would be nice to have some communication about what happened. Also can we in the community help in any way? Can test servers be done? Cause even five minutes of a contract and several people on a test server could've told GGG months ago that introducing door mechanics and also punishing the players for killing mobs in an arpg is a bad idea.

I'd rather kill some of the mystery of a new league by having test servers than to have league starts such as this one where 1 month in there are still newly introduced aspects of the league that doesn't work as intended. I'm sure there are others that would agree.


So TLDR I don't care about a Chris Wilson apology letter, but it would be nice if GGG communicated with the player base about what has happened and how we might help the game down the line.

"

LowBudget780 wrote:

League is such a disaster yet you still leveled a character to 90 and completed 16 challenges. I bet you're still playing it too.

Oh no, the horrendous crime that I have commited here! Me posting in a desire for a better game and also for leveling a character to 90+!!! How dare I complete 16 challenges by just playing the game?! Arrest me now for playing my favorite game and wanting it to be better!

"

Phrazz wrote:

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Bestiary = Pokemon catch em all

You kill monsters, you get their loot - and you get more crafting options. Hell, Bestiary even added you the ability to deterministically kill monsters to progress towards your goal. Do not see what's not ARPG about this.

"

Synthesis = Table Top Game

You kill monsters, you loot - and you craft. And it even gave you the option to build your own areas to kill your monsters and loot your loot.

"

Blight = Tower Defense

You kill monsters, you loot them (and their chests), and you get help from towers, yes.

"

Harvest = Stardew Valley

You kill monsters, you loot, you craft, you progress.

"

Heist = Metal Gear Light stealth-like

You kill monsters, you loot, you progress and even get additional character interactions, beautifully voice acted.

The ARPG genre is vast. And it doesn't confine itself to one person's narrow views. The genre was used long before Diablo 1, and can be traced back to the 70's. To use the genre as an argument, because "An ARPG IS X, that's why Y doesn't belong here" just looks stupid. ALL genres evolve, and PoE needs to evolve too to keep itself relevant.

I understand people not liking certain systems, certain leagues and certain additions. It's just a matter of subjectivity. No developer can reach everyone, even within a genre. But using "ARPG" as some sort of ruleset to what PoE "SHOULD" be, based on YOUR subjective experiences in this genre, is flawed.

Critique the game. Critique the developers, but please stop using the genre as an argument, because the genre is vast, huge, big and evolving. Always.

Well that is certainly one way to look at things. I think it's pretty poor tbh. By generalizing genre and league mechanics you are essentially saying that all leagues are the same and cant be measured in terms of success or failure because they involve mobs and loot. I guess we agree to disagree.

It's my opinion that some of the leagues that really struggled (in comparison to each other) involved straying from core arpg concepts, and the ones that were more sucessful focused on expanding on those core elements.

So sure, you can say every league involves killing monsters that drop loot, but I think that's an obtuse oversimplified version of data analysis, and doesnt provide GGG good feedback.

Can you imagine a developer meeting where: "I dont know why players didnt like the league, there were mobs to kill that dropped loot wasnt there?"

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Can you imagine a developer meeting where: "I dont know why players didnt like the league, there were mobs to kill that dropped loot wasnt there?"

Well, THIS is also over-simplifying it, don't you think? You'll find A LOT of players liking ALL the leagues YOU deem as "bad".

Threads like this, this discussion between you and me, just shows that people value different things. Should GGG funnel their development to always reach their masses, discard their own views and visions? Or should they maybe try to variate, trying to reach everyone?

I could name a pretty long list of games that went to shit the moment the developers started to 'only' cater to the masses, blindly following numbers.

Anyhow, using "ARPG" as an argument, just because a league doesn't build upon what you want it to build upon, still looks stupid in my eyes. The main ingredients will always be there: Kill, loot, craft, gear, progress.

In all seriousness, what is unclear yet supported by official intelligence is if PoE has become a sandbox for the advancement of PoE2 development. This is a key point in which GGG should officially announce, settling player expectations and address the influx of "rage", "WTF", and "worst league" threads since v3.11 Harvest league.

Alternatively, a confirmation that the public servers have dual purpose as testing grounds for PoE2 with the community as 3rd party testing resources would suffice, however no less, require official clarification with the utmost priority.

"

Gulch wrote:

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Hell I watched Cutedog print money last night from splitting and running grand heists, barely killing anything at all. It's a fucking chest opening simulator now.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy watching his stream,but comparing yourself to a streamer that gets a shit ton of currency by his viewers just giving it to him is ridiculous. (for lack of a better term)

Don't forget that a few of these streamers have a team of people doing side stuff for them like trading. Whereas most of us are solo and doing the best we can.

Besides, he had the roughest start to any league in Heist. He was struggling big time and was acting a little....strange for the first few days. My tinfoil hat says it had something to do with that big bot banwave at league start.
Nobody can convince me that there aren't teams of people paying others to botfarm for them.

That wasn't the point at all, it just highlighted the problem, regardless of how efficient he was.

You immediately make a profit splitting the map (17 currency rooms or more), and then continue to do it over and over. Trade is full of them. Anyone can do it, and to say that this is only being done by streamer (and Cutedog isnt a massive stream), is blindly naive.

Many people are making massive currency profits by doing nothing but opening a grand heist, running to predetermined chest locations, collecting drops, and rinse/repeat.

Hell they are buying markers, beasts, and spilt contracts with the profits so they dont even have to do anything else.

Again the streamer just highlighted what is going on. Its extremely easy, and profitable.

Anyways whatever. It will likely be patched soon (beast splitting)