What Happened with Items

Giant nothingburger from Chris as usual.

What will you give us back instead .. while you took 90% of loot?
and I do not accept an apology...

GGG PLEASE STOP THIS MADNESS. YOUR KILLING THE GAME WE ALL LOVE. PLEASE!
speaking as someone with over 20K hours played, you are DESTROYING THE GAME.

Can you address the Harvest crafts please?

QUOTE :
"We didn't patch note the item rarity/quantity rebalance for league monsters. This was an oversight due to human error, but that's why I proofread the patch notes. Unfortunately, due to the next point, this wasn't caught during my proofread.

I… didn't actually understand the impact of the change. It was mentioned to me in passing (that we were removing the league monster bonuses and replacing with just quantity), and I didn't ask any more questions. I was busy, distracted, and should have sought more information. Had I understood the consequences, we likely would have still gone ahead with the change, but hopefully with better communication and maybe some pre- rather than post-release counterbalance elsewhere. This is a massive internal communication fuckup and I take full responsibility for it.

There was not sufficient time to playtest the change properly for feeling. It is unacceptable that I allowed a change like that to make it into the patch without a big chunk of time allocated to making sure the game still feels great afterwards."

First off : This is the worst bad excuse I heard _ever_.

Second : You do not have time for your main Product, Wilson ? You are too "distracted" to take care of a product that is getting a lot of backlash not only from the beginning of this league? Not willing to fix the many issues instead you think all of that is ok ?
Maybe you should not be the CEO of this (or any other) company and let someone younger with better ideas lead the company ?! Just step down please.

The direction all of this is going to is horrible and an insult to every loyal player of this game. This game was getting harder, harder and harder over the years. Enough monsters in this game just oneshot you no matter what. You get chased around by stupid blue lightning man, green orbs ob shit fall from the sky and kill you character (again) while you cannot even see it coming because of all the crazy effects going on on the screen turning it into a colourfull blurry mess - lazy developement! You are resting on your laurels now. Enough people spend money on this and you started to become bigheaded. Now the crafting and lootdrop system has been patched to shit and as if this weren´t bad enough you are tripling down on it saying you would have acknowledged that system anyway ? What is wrong with you ? This is just another company that never ever plays their own game otherwise they would know that the current state is shit and they would change it asap.
The amount of pressure you put on us just to find all that useless stuff is insulting.
It is like the devs are telling us :"Oh, no! You are not going anywhere!"

I playtested yesterday after the patch. Result : Almost no changes. Some rares are a bit easier now (life/defensive-wise). Lakes drop a little more stuff (I didn´t say better). Ok, found a divine - yay...

Still got oneshotted a lot of times. Gamestate : Worst ever.

I am steaming mad seeing one of my favorite game beeing patched to shit by some lazy, unwilling, stubborn and obvious incompetent developers.

I will never understand how you can, with a sane mind (if there is any) make this game too hard to play for the mayority of players. The lot of us will never see the endgame. What leads to this ? :

Uncomprehensive gamemechanics. Most of it is not explained through the game itself. You need to start a University study kind of thing to get into late game. If you actually do that and get better at it the dev team just kills the mechanic that is actually working et voilá , done. We get punished for it and you will end the fun immediately either by resticting skills/supports and items or just take away the mechanic that lead to your progress.
You already need to play this for 8 days a week, 30 hours a day to get somewhere. Making all the content harder to beat is _not_ the answer. It just leads to and overly frustrating gameplay that makes people drop from the league and from the game in the long run. I am about to give up on this already and I was playing from 2012 (Joined: May 31, 2012 ).

It is, by no means, fun anymore.

I kinda said it already but just to underline one of my main critic I will say it again :
Monsters and mechanics are way to overpowered to be fun. You get oneshotted (I know, I KNOW! Technically it´s not a oneshot in some cases...but I do not care about technicallities, it is the outcome that counts).
Stupid mechanics that chases you around - what is this nonsense ??? Right! Lazy gamedevelopement.

Here are the mechanics I can never play even though I love them :

Incursions : Time counter never goes up - just enough that the counter stands still but you get no extra time in yellow maps. From red maps the boss is just immortal. The outcome never feels rewarding.

Heist : Cool mechanic but you get swarmed by monsters with roomfilling effects that kill you in no time. Rewarding but not doable above level 75 or so.

Abyss : Halfway doable but completely unrewarding besides the one jewel from the coffer maybe.

Blight : Getting swarmed by monsters from all directions at once is ...fun ? While you have to click on stuff, wich leads you to stands still, wich will be punished immediately...sucks. Rewards : BIG YAWN!

I will stop here explaining the rest. In general all of it is overly frustating and pointless.

Now you are coming up with more stupid ideas like tuning down the loot drops, literally bringing in the Diablo 3 clown you can chase for loot, kind of. Just why ?
I am speechless watching this game destroyed. I don´t give a single f*** for a rare monster I have to find to get whatever it might mass drop. I am just not interested. The game was in a perfect state before (loot wise) and just needed some carefully thought of balance tweaks. Instead you are now destroying the lootsystem together with crafting.
All of what have been fun is now gone.
Surely I am a fan of the idea of having less cluttered floors and better items.
But that also is never gonna happend. Less items will drop that will not benefit my gameplay.

So many issues to fix besides still not having an auction house where you can sell while beeing offline because stubborn, ignorant devs won´t listen. Again you are not playing your own game otherwise you would know how annoying and frustrating it is to buy a single item. (items still listed while it has already gone long time ago, people not answering on tells, scams etc etc etc., besides beeing forced to be online to sell).

Your word, Wilson, becomes less and less meaningful to me everytime you tell us just half of the truth. Last league for example :"We didn´t nerf anything!" (fingers crossed behind the back and in brackets : "What I do not tell you freaks is that we beefed up the monsters to the point where this is no fun anymore. Pinky Promise!".

The communication between company and customers are a catastrophe.

Whatever, do what you want, you are doing it anyway and it seems that not the loudest community backlash can stop you from ending the fun. You are not listening and you still think you can "fix" this by backpaddeling a bit and do it even worse with the next release like you always did.

I come more and more to the conclusion that this is just a terrible waste of time.
So long.

I want a post telling me you did a horrible thing and going to change things reverting to 3.18, enough of bullshit

There was nothing wrong with this league at release. Do not beat yourself up for an overblown reaction by people that want to make your game something it's not anyway.

I appreciate everything you guys are doing for the game. I'm enjoying the league despite not agreeing with all of the changes. Hopefully the devs realize that most people appreciate what they do even though they aren't explicitly posting about it. Excited for whatever is next :D.

I really need to get this out of my system.

I have been casualy playing PoE since the Essence league back in 2016 and I fell in love with the game back then. It was »THE SHIT« and I was super hyped by everything! I was selling it to all of my friends on how diverse, entertaining, fun and very rewarding the game was, how the mapping was fun and even accessible even to casual players and how awesome the whole art concept was. I really appreciated the game and the whole team behind it. You set new standards for ARPG and I admire that.

I never considered even doing Uber anything, because that was not the appeal of the game for me, so it was not my longterm goal. I loved mapping, crafting and just trying different builds, new skills and different classes. Some players said that, until 3.13, the game was easy. We can't deny it,.. It was easier and that's was beauty of it! Games such as Minecraft are extremely popular because you are free to mine and craft what you WANT. Due to PoE's "easyness" the game prior to 3.13. was accessible to a larger base of casual players, who didn't have hours of time to play, but still had the freedom to craft amazing gear, try different mods, try multiple amazing builds throughout a single league. I was one fo those players. I and probably many other players had fun and enjoyed the game and consequnetly devoted more time and resources into it. BUT! If you take the freedom of crafting, build and skills away, what is purpose of all the main attributes of the game if they render them unusable or unplayable? What is the point of main attributes of the game, which is diversity of weapons and gear, diversity of mods, the whole goddamn passive skill tree which is amazing and most of all, what is the point of sooo many skill gems if the skills are not usable? Maybe I'm just not seeing it the right way, but to me, these WERE the main attributes of Path of Exile.

The core game attributes mentioned above have been seriously torn to pieces in the last year and a half. I'm serious and sad when I say that since the 3.13 the game has been getting harder and harder, the skill and build pool is getting narrower, monsters are getting buffs but players are just beaten down with new difficulty nerfs and in general this means that my kind of gameplay I stated above just needs much more investment that it did before and for far less rewards. That is just not fun and it just gets me frustrated. I never lost the thrill to start a new league even after 3.13 (obviously), but playing the last few new leagues just killed my mood, slowly. I was soaring on the thrill of the good content from my earlier days (3.13 and earlier) and how that made me feel like. That slowly began to fade with every new league.

And so we arrive to 3.19. At this point I don't know who your target player base is, but it most certainly isn't the "casual players". You made that very clear and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I'm not in the illusion that you will revert back to the playing style that was in the 3.13. That's naive to think.. but I really wish that you would at least fix the current bad mechanics for new players, to at least experience a portion of awesomeness that PoE CAN have but LOST due to.. I don't know what or why.

As for me? Well, I'm sorry to say this, but at this point I will probably just abandon the whole PoE league thing. It's just not profitable enough for me to invest my time in. I may run a few standards, when I really miss the old PoE, but the way things stand now, I will probably close the game after 30 minutes. And when I say »not profitable« I don't mean in terms of currency, far from it, but in terms of fun, entertainment, enjoyment and achievement, when you see your build and character grow and kick some mob ass.

I wish the whole GGG all the best. It was really nice playing PoE at it's peak.

"

As described above, various valuable Archnemesis modifiers convert drops in a way that directly benefits from item rarity and item quantity bonuses. When we were balancing and testing this, we wondered why certain league monsters were dropping significantly more items than regular monsters. It turned out that this was due to item rarity or quantity bonuses that were historically applied to monsters to make leagues feel rewarding.

HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW HOW YOUR GAME WORKS.

holy crap.