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

I am not a veteran who played since the beginnings (started playing in Ultimatum) but I am just glad that we have this game as it is now. Ever since I play this game I see it's evolution goes ahaed. I love it's complexity wich keeps my mind entertained. The current atlas talent tree is awesome. Personally my favorite 3.1.8 so far with this sentinel empowerment feature.

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Barbarianos wrote:

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.

Amen, 3.17 was peak since 3.15 to now, everything feels less enjoyable than 3.17

They’ve done things I’ve liked and things I haven’t liked both before and after the acquisition. From my perspective it hasn’t had a great impact on the degree to which I agree with GGG’s choices or like their designs.

The biggest things I don’t like about the game have been baked into it since very early on, nothing to do with any Tencent-related change in direction (if, for argument’s sake such a change even exists).

Definitely one of the less-uncertain ifs out there.

I balance all of my personal, subjective dislikes of post-Tencent GGG/POE with an odd sort of faith that it was, in fact, the best move available to them at the time. As a business, as a company, as a product. Chris wanted in with China, pretty much from Release. Global expansion was incredibly important to him, as we saw with the Garena...situation. And the Chinese market was full of terrible F2P ARPGs on mobile, but virtually none on PC. So Tencent sort of got to set the pace there, and of course they started fairly high: paid respecs, loot pets, rezzes, the usual Asian F2P baselines for 'fair' F2P if we consider outright buying powerful items or gacha boxes with said items 'not unusual'. As horrified as international Exiles are anytime they're reminded what the Domestic version of PoE has, I see nothing in there that would be outright unacceptable in the West -- Black Desert Online is faaaar worse in its monetisation and it's not even free.

So there was a best-of-both-worlds scenario: Tencent didn't have to license PoE for China and could thus have their own market-specific build on tap with the original devs around to work on it (if need be), and GGG didn't have to struggle with the infamously difficult to penetrate Chinese market to get PoE going over there. With the withdrawal of Blizzard from China (sans DI because that's essentially a NetEase game with Blizzard-level polish and now we've proof of it), PoE is even more entrenched as a 'Chinese' ARPG mainlanders can play and know won't be leaving their PCs anytime soon (assuming they don't tunnel out and play the International version, which I suspect some serious mainland Exiles certainly do).

In the perfect scenario Chris would have been able to negotiate his way out of working on POE any further and used his fat pay to fund a new game, but eh, that was never going to happen. Golden handcuffs were likely a sine qua non. Tencent know not to fire the farmers when they buy a farm.

So I try to imagine where the company would be now had it remained truly independent and not allowed Tencent's investment/takeover. For a start, I think Tencent would have frozen them out (pun intended) and just made a PoE clone for China, and by clone I mean 'better game to the average gamer'. Even though I don't believe GGG 'receive' money/funding from Tencent directly (that sort of goes against the whole point of an investment), they almost certainly benefit from the domestic market's intake. So that'd be a loss. The original investors in GGG wouldn't have gotten their disgustingly great return on investment, and possibly gotten more antsy over the years as PoE stagnated (ARPGs are not, by any measure, very popular as a gaming genre anymore). We know GGG themselves held the majority, but pressure from investors is not insignificant.

Then Covid would have hit and God knows what would have happened then. The company would have had far less security and stability in the following couple of years. It is incredible that they didn't once miss a league, where entire multi-million dollar movies, games, tv shows...all went into stasis. There was a delay or two, but no outright cancellations. GGG weathered Covid very well -- combination of NZ's approach to the situation and, I think, that Tencent umbrella.

People, gamers, are not very forgiving or understanding. I don't think many of them would prefer an independent GGG that doesn't make deadlines or puts out lower-effort league gimmicks over one owned by someone else that continues to get the job done. Outside of this community, reddit, a few others...I don't think that many Exiles even know what Tencent is. You can still find news article from mid to late 2022 talking about how the West doesn't know what or who Tencent is. At first I'm like WTF how can they NOT know!?...but then I think, eh, your average consumer doesn't know much at all about who owns the companies that make the products they consume. I sure as fuck couldn't tell you who owns most of the companies I recognise, not without googling specifically. It's just not that important to me. And the only reason it's important here is I care more about Path of Exile as a product than I do as a personal experience. At no point in my life did I enjoy playing it more than any other game.

So to answer the OP as directly as possible? It was the right direction to go in for GGG. I'm not sure any other answer matters all that much. I do think most of their mistakes since were not directly Tencent-related, such as streamer queue priority. The tone I got from GGG's response to being caught out there was less 'we had to do this to pay the rent' and more 'wouldn't you have tried to deceive your players too, for that much money?' Which...wow, no. No I wouldn't have. Not unless I *absolutely* needed it.

Worst case scenario, there wouldn't even BE a PoE in 2023 if not for the investment of Tencent. It is possible. Not likely, but possible.

To me harvest was peak poe.

Clunk, aggravating, server crashing nonsense to slowly improve items.

But....

Items and builds were made, experimented, and ultimately weird science was done.

Failing crafts in harvest still yielded some bonkers stuff. Not op per se, just wildly unplanned.

Sanctum and kalandra are like. Did you get lucky, no. No loot for you. No character progress to be had.

I guess too much of modern poe is about the deterministic good unique drop, and not about what cool stuff exists. Like I haven't heard anyone really like frozen legion or vaal cleave over the noise of sanctum being oddly challenging to some popular archetypes, or challenges being too grindy.

Really what I am saying is that poe is less about playing the game and more about playing stuff efficiently. Follow this Altas guide to make divines quick.

Ritual, which was a cool mechanic with Harvest at peak without having to mess with the dumb garden, was peak PoE.

Thats just facts based on players, not opinion.



Everything since then is down. Ego is controlling PoE, not Tencent. Chris thinks he knows more than players.

Tencent never influenced the direction of content, I think.

If only Tencent would step in and tell GGG they have to implement all external tools needed to play PoE inside the game.

Alas, Tencent leaves GGG its freedom.


Such a shame. Perhaps we can still ask Tencent to help GGG a bit in this direction?

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trixxar wrote:

Ritual, which was a cool mechanic with Harvest at peak without having to mess with the dumb garden, was peak PoE.

Thats just facts based on players, not opinion.



Everything since then is down. Ego is controlling PoE, not Tencent. Chris thinks he knows more than players.

The game would be shit tier if GGG did everything the players demand.
No nerfs ever bcs HOW DARE YOU
All the end game bosses would just die by you entering the arena
and so on

Also all the complaints that this build can't do content X, change it.

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imanubcake wrote:

The game would be shit tier if GGG did everything the players demand.
No nerfs ever bcs HOW DARE YOU
All the end game bosses would just die by you entering the arena
and so on

Also all the complaints that this build can't do content X, change it.

Can you re-write this in English please?

I don't see a 'direction' tbh.

All additions / balance / leagues have been sporadic and uneven in what they achieve/aim to achieve.

To me it's pretty obvious they've left POE to run on fumes until POE2 comes.