Twitch should ban sponsored streaming and drops.

Path of Exile is a mediocre ARPG at best, and yes it's a sad reality to say that, but its core design and endgame why it struggles with retention every league. The multiplayer is also poorly designed, and it's also plagued with botting issues, and I'm not going to go into its competitive aspect.

It's come to an age where we have to be fortunate that we get one mediocre product every decade, when in around 2005 there were multiple AAA products coming every year, and back then the inflation was lower, far less had access to PC's, and internet through the globe. Today we also have pandemic to keep people indoor much longer that benefits this industry.

Look at the Gauntlet event, with the amount of interest and participants GGG could easily design a system where the total prize would exceed a million dollars, that's right, because $1,000,000 is not much when you have 100,000 participants, but since this thread is already getting too long, I'm not going to discuss how that can be achieved here.


We should be fortunate GGG is developing Path of Exile 2, but game designs is one thing that few could get it right, and I'll tell you one thing, after playing all type of games for extended period through my lifetime I dislike group based, NPC story driven, pay to win where only the company is the seller or some third party provider. I dislike group based because of rules that often make no sense unlike in reality where for example it was me against humanity I still could prevail, I don't have to depend on others who might be online or not available, because all rules are enforced by others like me. There's not some magical wall that there's no way I can pass, or that that's as much as I can do within the game during the day or week.

I dislike theme parks because sandbox they allows a much better and richer individual role playing experience. Developers prefer theme parks because they prefer to have control over their game and how it evolves, but that's why they also have to be the content creators, and that ends up far more costly through time, which is why since 2013 if you look at PoE all they've done is added more bosses, some league mechanics that end up useless, and just give out more loot.

I dislike games solely designed for the mainstream audience, and for a long time GGG only had one ladder that most cared about, and that ladder existed in the easy mode difficulty, which is the sole purpose why finally GGG listened to me the last time I made some argument, and it was since way back of 2014-2015 when I was talking about the need of elite league, yet they wanted to monetize that through "private" leagues, but private leagues are bad, because their ladders were irrelevant for most to care and compete within.

3.16 was the worst thing that happened, because you got a guy who completed the Gauntlet in over two days, and taking over 20% of the prize on top of some other bounties alongside. That one event that happens every three months to be completed in less than three days only because few individuals do their homework more than anyone and then are ready to kill themselves to win it, and the terrible format as well as prize for the total participants its why they're losing so much $.


2022 is the best year so far, because already in February the community is talking about multiple games competing with Path of Exile, but sadly none of them are worth migrating to. Elden Ring is a single player game, where you can set your own difficulty to experience the NPC story in some Skyrim type of world. Lost Ark I heard it's some casual WOW type of game only with ARPG combat, where you do your daily quest and weekly raids with a group/guild, and then much more P2W from what I heard. There's not even things like damage meters, and I was hyped for it when I saw the trailer around November 2014. By the time Lost Ark has taken to arrive to my region so many have already learned so much about it, and then they choose Russia before North America? Who in the right mind would want to support a game that doesn't release to most parts in the world at the same or similar time. You saw for example how those who already knew so much about PoE destroyed their competition in the China version.