How did GGG lose touch with the silent majority?

Perhaps they listened to much to the vocal minority...

I started playing this game back in February of 2013, and I have spent a stupid amount of money in this game. And to me every dollar has been well worth it. But that's not what this post is about.



Back in 2013 i fell in love with PoE, it was an exciting new take on action RPG. It made me feel what I felt when i discovered Diablo I in my teens. I was hooked and played more or less every opportunity I could get. My friends and I spent many late nights trying to progress in this new marviolers world we had discovered (the story was crap but the game was fun and for us that is all it takes). As we aproached the end game we encountered a new problem, one that eventuelly would make all my friends leave the game, making me the soul survivor of the Public Enemies. Now some of you current PoE players will think it was because the game was to hard or something along those lines but that was not at all the case. We would farm low or mid tier maps for days untill we had 3-4 high tier maps that we could play together... back then high tier maps was worth more than anything else. So left alone in this world of PoE i found likeminded people, people who did not mind grinding for days to be able to play 3-4 maps together. After a very long time and many people complaining about this issue with map scarcity even I and the most presistant players started to give up.



So i took a brake from the game...



Shortly after that GGG resolved the Map issue and I returned to the game and so did the friends I had started playing with back in 2013. We were loving it, and now GGG was introducing new things on a quarterly basis and this game became the glue that every league brought us together. We would hang out on Ventrilo, wich turned in to Mumble and now in the past few years on discord, every league start would be the start of us all hanging out together for weeks playing PoE... Some leagues would be awesome like Betrayal and in those cases we would play for most of the league while other leagues would be less interesting like Synthesis. But regardless if the league was good or bad I could always count on the start of next league beeing the point we would all gather up and play together for at least a few weeks.



Sometimes the builds we love would be nerfed and we would try new builds, we did not mind experimenting with new stuff, failing horribly most of the time and having a laugh about it. Over the years the game changed from difficult to zoom zoom but we did not mind we had fun and we loved GGG for bringing us together.

This last patch was different, it was not a bad league certainly nothing like Synthesis... but everyone of my friends left the game within 2 weeks. So what was so diferent with this patch?



I do not think it has anything to do with the league mechanics, but having a look at my standard characters may give a partial answer, the only one of them that still work is the Carrion Golem, every other build i made over the past 8 years is broken to the point that it can not be played. All the Cast on Crit builds are sadly gone, all the spellslinger builds are gone, all the midrange builds we made because we could are now so week they can not manage T16 maps.



Don't get me wrong, we still played for a bit...





But giving up at lvl 89 after 1.5 weeks was a short adventure for people who used to do lvl 100 in almost every league. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that to much changed at the same time and that we felt like the fun of the game was lost for us...

I don't think how all of this was presented with a nervous Chris saying he belived in the path they had taken helped but even if it has been communicated in another manner the outcome for us would not have changed much. Players play games because it is fun, it is not a job it is entertainment and to me it looks like GGG has lost the sight of just that.



So now we play Last Epoch or Tarkov... It's not what we had expected but then again neither is this latest version of PoE...

Here we go again. Same topic, different order of words. Wonder when all variants of adressing this happened at least once. Can´t take much longer I guess.

I spent the past year playing a fair amount of ssf. I have now accumulated quite a bit of wealth and gear there lots of rare unique items, 6l shavs, replicas, Alt Qual gems etc. I have many high level well geared chars that I spent a lot of time on and thoroughly enjoyed.

3.15 basically broke all of them.
lacerate bleed glad, it's now too weak to play.
archmage cremation necro Lost 70% of dps.( almost unplayable)
Bladeblast chieftain lost 70% of dps (not worth playing)
Low life coc ice nova assin (after a lengthy respec crafting new rings and putting on replica conq efficiency it plays but the dmg is awful and it feels bad.
Ground slam champ (dead)

Makes me feel like ggg just said "fuck your time bro"

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Makes me feel like ggg just said "fuck your time bro"

I thought that the point of leagues was to introduce new metas and break stuff that worked in the past. That's why we agree to reset every 3 months and start again.

If you're playing in standard, can't you do a full respec and just play something else? Isn't that part of the fun?

I mean, I get that it clearly isn't for you, and I don't mean any disrespect, but that is the game that we are playing, right?

GGG's metrics told them that the streamers lead the majority of whales, and the streamers demanded a more punishing game so they could make more hours of content for their viewers and thus make more $$$. One would assume the whales themselves would be unaffected by difficulty changes because they rarely, if ever, play beyond campaign. They prefer to experience the game through streamers instead. So GGG felt safe power crunching players by 90% to make room for future power creep, believing that whales would still buy everything GGG released without question.

What we ended up seeing is that whales still require at least a PARTIALLY working game to part with their money. You can't just make PoE an unfun, streamer-only game like it is now and keep the insane profits rolling.

It doesn't look like 3.16 will bring any meaningful positive changes to the game given Chris' recent comments, but by 3.17 they will add fun back to the game and things should be back to normal.

I wonder if anyone has ever invoked the term "Silent Majority" and was actually correct in using that term. I feel like the group that invokes that term is rarely silent and rarely the majority.

I hope you find what you're looking for in LE or Tarkov.

id be willing to bet virtually every build you have on standard still works if you look a couple of minutes to make some minor changes. all your cast on crit builds work you just need mana on hit or mana leech from the attack that spawns them. i went and tried a bunch of coc builds to see what the deal was and basically one 0.4% attack mana leech node made every one of them work fine.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

id be willing to bet virtually every build you have on standard still works if you look a couple of minutes to make some minor changes.

I dont even agree everything is terrible, because there are builds that work, but Snorkle you are dead wrong on this.

Many builds lost up to 91% of overall dps with multiple layers of nerfs. Replica Alberon Wander or Claw cobra? Boots nerfed, assassin nerfed, supports nerfed, does 1/10th the damage from before. Tell me how its playable?

Almost any weapon based bleed - lost 50% of damage off the top with Elder mod nerf, if slam based lost another 30% of remaining dps from warcry nerf, then support nerf mod is another nerf so about 85% weaker.



Its not a single nerf, its not the supports, its multilayered nerfs reducing damage by 80 to 90 percent.

Can you still totem forbidden rite or shield something? Sure. But dont play ignorant and pretends a lot of these builds are still viable.

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yoritomo_aleta wrote:

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Makes me feel like ggg just said "fuck your time bro"

I thought that the point of leagues was to introduce new metas and break stuff that worked in the past. That's why we agree to reset every 3 months and start again.

If you're playing in standard, can't you do a full respec and just play something else? Isn't that part of the fun?

I mean, I get that it clearly isn't for you, and I don't mean any disrespect, but that is the game that we are playing, right?

just becasue you "agreed" on this doesnt mean everyone does it, around 20%+ of playerbase plays standard only for exactly this reason, that builds dont get fucked...

all my builds still kind of work in standard, but in the past more than one build got destroyed for one or another reason... not everyone likes to replay campaign over and over again, or do this shitty altas or redo delve or redo all the shitty crafting to get to the point where you already been :)

if you like it good for you, that doesnt mean everyone likes the way you play

Did they? I'm not aware of anyone who KNOWS what the silent majority thinks. Plenty of people seem to THINK they do however. Best to keep silent about the silent majority if you don't want to come off as overconfident and vain.