First off, I'm someone who has been on the leaderboards for the majority of the seasons for the first few weeks. Then I usually get bored by the stale meta and the RMTing streamers and lack of community interest and quit. Before that, I was a co-leader of two of the top raiding and PvP guilds in WoW. Keep in mind, my leaderboard runs usually involved playing half the hours of the other people at the same rank as myself, which I attribute to knowing nuanced meta strategies that I usually don't reveal to anyone, not even my discord or currency farming groups.
What that means for regular gamers, is that when I'm giving advice here, it's not something I'm thinking about. It's something I'm teaching because I know. And honestly this type of community seems to have a 'stick up its ___' when a pro like me gives advice, since it's an ARPG.
Why are all the top pros like myself leaving? Well, the game is COMPLETELY stale. It's overbloated with far too many currencies, too many masters, too many events, etc. Yes, I'm a pro so I enjoy different mechanics, but there's simply too many. I understand this is intentional to get the average player to chuck $30-50 to buy some tabs and hopefully they get addicted and buy some cosmetics. That's a slap in the face to the real pros like me, though. And of course I see right through it, as should you. This game literally gives players wrist and eye issues worse than professional Starcraft players, because they are squinting their eyes to click on a random orb drop for 40% of their gametime. Except Starcraft (a game I'm also Grandmaster top 200 in), actually has mental and physical benefits from being a thinking and speed based game against another person.
Furthermore, despite the millions and millions of profit GGG have made off this game, has there ever been a real graphics overhaul? Has there ever been a change to make leveling new characters simpler and faster for those who have already level to their 90's? No. They refuse to accommodate, which sets them back. Even Diablo 3 knew the value of allowing many characters to be leveled. And guess what, Diablo 3 was the #1 selling game of its time.
Where are the pros like me going? Some pros dabbled in the game Last Epoch, which ended up being dumpster trash. We are choosing Diablo 4. We will not be returning for PoE 2. Your vision is the same vision a blind man has, none at all. As bad as D4 is, it's heavily profitable for streamers and tip top players like myself who always hold a leaderboard spot. They've actually decided to take a leg up on PoE with their skill mechanics and have gotten the 'checkmate' so to speak vs PoE by disallowing RMT. It's widely known that a large amount of PoE streamers sell Divs and other orbs on 3rd party sites.
You have two choices here. You can heed a pros words and move on to another game. Or, you can stay here and realize the leaderboards mean nothing without players like me on them, in addition to a stale meta that will not be influenced by the elite tier players. Your choice. This isn't talking to the people playing through the campaign and experiencing PoE for the first 40 hours, this is talking to the grinders. Deep down you know this game has been bad for a while. The ironic part is when a race leader tells of the experiences he knows, people on the forums choose to not learn the lesson but to get hurt and angry.
So when you see those leaderboards missing a huge amount of names you know would usually be there at the top, realize I left. Realize they left. We won't be coming back no matter what little patch changes are made.
