How do you like the direction POE took since the investment of Tencent?

in all honesty, i cant help but find anyone who viewed GGG's partnership with tencent in a negative manner as highly biased individuals.

i get it that tencent heavily monetized games and some games became "less popular" for it. i get that players are very afraid that tencent would steer the company's direction into doom.

but no. back during day one from the tencent reveal, GGG already announced that tencent has NO SAY with the core/international game's direction.

i would say tencent has kept their word on this. i dont see anything blatantly p2w.

i would point out that tencent gains a lot with this partnership. if you didnt know, games cant simply be brought into china. tencent is the bridge between poe and china so theyre already making big bucks with poe china client.

they DONT NEED to influence POE's direction. they have full say of monetization of POE china client.

in fact i would say tencent's money EMBOLDENED GGG. GGG was always catering to it's "market" and was being very delicate with their decisions.

similar to how a scrub naive young man tries to woo a girl. he would try and raise issues that he finds and try to fix em while trying his best to keep the girl happy.

NOW?

GGGigachad. we're gonna nerf all support gems and you're gonna take it like a man. we made early game harder again and players get stunlocked AF. dont like it? too bad. league mechanics? we've already let players test it and decided we're gonna make it CORE AND REPLACE CORE monster mods.

also, thanks to tencent we're getting a possibly better POE 2. tencent's money is good and the deal they did with GGG is quite fair.

i have confidence that tencent is not influencing POE international in any major way.

i do however feel mixed on how GGG's direction of POE has become.

last league is the best league, Atlas passives tree is great. this league is very near a great league.

I feel GGG has had ups and downs since then but Tencent has had little to do with it, and overall the game is in a somewhat better state (largely due to endgame changes).

Tencent aside, I really hate the direction the game is taking. And the reason is because the players take the game in the wrong direction. GGG are not allowed to develop their own game anymore. It's the streamers that decide. And personally, I hate that.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

I think people fail to remember that part of the buyout agreement was to allow Tencent and the China realm to basically do whatever they want.

And vice versa with GGG's 'version'.

But to me that's not even the really important part: add 'with Path of Exile' to the end of your post. There are some fairly sharp lines between which one can read there. The big one for me is '...and ONLY Path of Exile'.

Tencent bought GGG for POE. They didn't buy the studio for its creative potential, its future as a multi-game designer or continuing innovator. They saw the hard facts: Path of Exile makes a lot of money as a free to play game IN THE WEST, where gamers are notoriously less forgiving of so-called 'pay to win' than other markets. PoE was sort of like a missing puzzle piece for Tencent since every other f2p ARPG in the Chinese/Asian market (particularly on mobile) is super p2w. And since Chris really wanted to penetrate that market, he learned the best way to do so was not to fight it but to let it call the shots. GGG learned the hard way that publishing deals in unknown markets can be devastating (one word: Garena). So instead of working 'with' Tencent to slowly worm PoE into the domestic Chinese market (during which time fuck knows how many rip-offs would appear, with Tencent themselves quite likely to be the first to do it given their history of IP plundering), they took the golden handshake and switched the table: you don't need to penetrate a market that your parent company already dominates. Tencent can't steal your ideas if they own them. And bonus, they'll give you lots of money to use them! WOOT!

And that put the whole thing into a stasis. Any hopes for a real PoE successor from GGG died the moment Tencent put $100m into Path of Exile, for two reasons. One, GGG is now golden handcuffed to keep their one and only game profitable and updated, i.e. attracting and retaining paying supporters, and two, no matter how much money Path of Exile makes, Tencent would never allow enough of it to go developing a big ????? project like a completely new game that might lose all of those hard-won supporters by cutting them off from their precious mtxes and their long-term addiction to a known service. Path of Exile 4.0 becoming 'Path of Exile 2' was a pretty overt confirmation of this to me.

Yet again, I hope I'm wrong and someday the brilliant folks at GGG go indie once more make a new game unfettered by the demands of Tencent's tired old bones. I don't think Path of Exile is the best they can do. Not by a long shot. But it's certainly the best anyone would expect, especially if they haven't been here from the early days when PoE's future as a cash cow laboriously milked on the reg as GGG's only game ten years later was far from confirmed.

Depends how you look at it.

Since tencent invested, there hasnt really been any good leagues except for 3.17. Most of the leagues are lazy done, small adjustments (like 3.18 league mechanic).

Yet, they announce Poe 2 and changed alot of things for the better in the core game. But the leagues itself has been garbage.

The real threat to a good poe game in the future in my eyes is Chris "vision" of a very hard PoE. Thats why this league is garbage.

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lupasvasile wrote:

Tencent aside, I really hate the direction the game is taking. And the reason is because the players take the game in the wrong direction. GGG are not allowed to develop their own game anymore. It's the streamers that decide. And personally, I hate that.

It's a serious dilemma I think. Apparently Chris vision about the game is not what the game has turned into. But on the other hand it brought masses to the game. But if Chris is willing to sacrifice half the players and probably half the earnings I'd say go for it and make the game as you imagined it to be.

If money is only a secondary factor then go for what makes you happy and turn POE into a niche game for a smaller number of absolutely hardcore ARPG fans who like immense difficulties like you always dreamed. Ultimately it is his game and he has the right to decide what direction it should take. But he shouldn't expect to hit two birds with one stone - make his vision true and retain the players and profits because his vision is quite contrary to how the game was played for years and what the players are used to and what ultimately made it so popular in the first place.

P.S. I personally find it a bit disrespectful and dishonest to players. It's like luring someone into something with fake promises and then when they are finally hooked you hit them with a hard reality. But again, ultimately it is his game, and if he wants to sheit on players so be it.

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esostaks wrote:

If money is only a secondary factor then go for what makes you happy and turn POE into a niche game for a smaller number of absolutely hardcore ARPG fans who like immense difficulties like you always dreamed. Ultimately it is his game and he has the right to decide what direction it should take. But he shouldn't expect to hit two birds with one stone - make his vision true and retain the players and profits because his vision is quite contrary to how the game was played for years and what the players are used to and what ultimately made it so popular in the first place.

Legally GGG belong to Tencent. Chris is the appointed steward for someone else's property. Tencent can step in to intervene. Whether they would or should is another matter.

Tencent owns almost 80% of video games played in America. They have no influence on the developers. They merely purchased games which are profitable.

I don't think Tencent has that much input really, not just because Chris said so, but because the clearspeed vs difficulty topic has seesawed back and forth in that time without them interfering with it.

I like the direction that they want to go with the game in terms of difficulty, but it's leading to friction because the way they've chosen to do it is to test things live during leagues, a lot of the time.

And I can appreciate that it will be good for the poe2 launch overall (especially from a review standpoint), and it will be good for the game going past that.

But there's some areas that are not being paid enough attention, difficulty has a large audience, but un-aproachability has a much narrower appeal. And they need to address that before PoE2, both in terms of the game as a whole, but also from how they release challenge leagues.

3.15 Expedition, as much as people like to use it as a whipping boy for the biggest mistake GGG ever made, was entirely present and largely unchanged (barring a second round of flask iteration after the first) in 3.17. The changes that went in were still present, and the league that "everyone hated" had become the most popular league with minimal changes.

What made 3.17 great was that they addressed the approachability of the game. The atlas tree cut away a bunch of needless layers of obscurity, obfuscation and inaccessibility.

And the issues with archnemesis are the same: it's one thing to have difficult content, it's another to have unapproachable, obscure and obfuscated difficulty that is so difficult to read and perceive.

And there are systems in game that are like that, from crafting to trade to quest rewards - that are all still needlessly difficult to approach.

And that's the change I want to see: more challenging combat is fine, bring it on.

But make sure the user experience of that challenge is smooth and polished.

The ability for people to tolerate beta testing content is going to drop substantially once PoE2 comes out, and they need to get the process working smoother, before that happens.

The UX/UI aspects need to be given far more attention, and the basic systems like trade and crafting fall under that umbrella as well.