Long time no see. State of PoE in 2023.

Hi guys, it's been a while. Y'all having fun? Is anyone even still here who remembers me, or have all the old-timers quit by now?

I'm doing pretty well: Getting old, but learning to embrace my new gray hair, accept an expanding waistline, and enjoy a new career path in full-time Japanese translation and technical writing. I'll be jumping to a new larger company in July, and am looking forward to new challenges.

Anyhow, I was going to post and ask about the latest state of the game, but this time around I decided to actually reinstall it and see for myself. I had the following impressions, but feel free to tell me where I am wrong. :P I'll address this to GGG as well, though I imagine they've heard all of this already, from other players. Note that this was after only a few hours of play in Standard, on a high-level character, so you might want to take some of my observations with a grain of salt. Also, I haven't played the game in several years, so all of my impressions are colored by that as well:

1. When I (finally) stopped playing a few years ago, the state of QA was one of the fundamental reasons for doing so. Spending time in other games, where QA is given a higher priority, was a breath of fresh air as a result. As for PoE, in the first 30 minutes of play this time around, I encountered multiple basic and easily reproducible UI bugs, some of which had clearly been around for some time. I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to assign someone to fix some of them. They won't be hard to find or reproduce, I assure you.

2. Enemies hit very hard, but they also die very fast. I recall this being a common complaint three or four years ago, but it seems to be an even more prominent element of gameplay now. For me personally, this kind of "glass cannon vs glass cannon" gameplay is very uninteresting: Building your character remains as strategically important as ever, but the tactical gameplay becomes extraordinarily shallow. I don't know; maybe players for whom this appeals is your new bread and better. Or maybe I just chose the wrong build to play around with.

3. I didn't play long enough to really explore this issue in depth, but based on what I've read it appears that so-called noobtraps (a.k.a. false affordances) still abound. Useless gems, build-defining decisions that make your character < 1/10 the strength of other characters, that sort of thing. Some people call this a failure to balance the game, but I see it as a much more fundamental failure to pay attention to the different pieces of your own game and how they fit together. I also see it as neglecting your responsibility as designers to guide players appropriately and offloading that role to outside parties, to the detriment of the game and its players.

Monetization strategies and the potential need to funnel people toward certain builds with accompanying profitable MTXs aside, how about buffing some of the least powerful gems, so that players who prefer playing your game organically over slavishly copying an already-discovered meta aren't quite as fundamentally crippled? I'm sure there are other measures you can take as well.

On a related note, are you still trying to generate new "metas?" Because that kind of (misguided, in my opinion) design philosophy will cripple your ability to address this issue for sure.

4. Loot remains a veritable flood of—forgive me—garbage. The game is outright broken without a filter, perhaps even more so than before. Do you consider this worth addressing?

5. New league mechanics have no accompanying organic unfolding explanations, justifications for their existence in dialogue, or even basic tutorials. Wh-what? Why would you not spend time on this?


@Chris, the management team, and the hard-working devs on the ground: Congratulations on empowering this game to survive as long as it has. I can't speak to exact player numbers, retention, etc., but the fact that this 2012 game is still going strong in 2023 is truly an achievement. The percentage of live-service games that manage to remain relevant for more than 10 years is not a high one.

@Chris and whomever else is in a management position high enough to set priorities for devs: I can't help but wonder if addressing one or more of the above issues would help you to attract and retain new gamers, and/or make existing gamers engage with your content for longer periods of time each league. Is there any space in your development schedule to consider doing so?

Good luck with it all. I'll be uninstallling PoE shortly, but hopefully I'll see you again in another three or so years.

@Everyone else: Have fun, and don't forget to add other games to your gaming time. Life is short, variety gives it spice, and perspective makes everything that is good taste just that little bit sweeter. Peace!

(If a mod wants to move this to Feedback after it's been in GD for a little bit for people to see, please feel free. :) )

Hoho interesting read. Good luck with the larger company exile.

"

xPiranha wrote:

Hoho interesting read. Good luck with the larger company exile.

Thanks.

Looks like most of the old-timers have quit.

And this post will quietly be buried in the Feedback and Suggestions subforum, now that it's been moved here.

Oh well.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. A lot of people were quitting even when I was still active.

"

gibbousmoon wrote:

"

xPiranha wrote:

Hoho interesting read. Good luck with the larger company exile.

Thanks.

Looks like most of the old-timers have quit.

Not really, you are coming onto the forums nearing the end of a league, most people are taking a breather some just didn't bother with the league at all.

1.What UI bugs?

2.Enemies hit hard, and they have more health now....not that it matters much balance will be shifting as always.

3. they are not going to dumb the game down for people and remove any meaningful choices (if you have good and bad results it is meaningful...if all choices are good then they mean nothing)

4. they have talked about the loot and tested some stuff BUT we have no idea if GGG thought it was good or bad or even when they'll be doing anything with it (see PoE2)

5. decently explained but ultimately pointless because at the end of the day the playerbase at large don't care about the why, they care about the phat lootz, they also have a 3 month cycle...hard to put extensive explanations and story surrounding a league mechanic.

^I would add to Lagwin's post: what specifically did you notice? It's hard to read the post without any specific bugs/skills/noob traps that you noticed?

What about the loot is garbage?
Many players have differing ideas on this

What tutorials are missing?
Again, many differing opinions here...Most past league mechanics have an NPC that tell the ENTIRE story of the league if you choose to read it. Also, the mechanics have a pseudo-tutorial when you first encounter them in the story (which I think you probably skipped?)

Noobtraps? Is this because of a mechanic, an understanding issues, a bad skill, a bad support? This could almost literally be ANYTHING that results in one player being underpowered vs. someone else.


I'd like to note that I'm not totally disagreeing with everything, just that it is incredibly difficult to figure out how you came to your conclusions without the specific details...the only thing I do actually disagree with is the noob trap thing because I'm not sure there are actual "traps" but rather complicated mechanics that take time to learn in order to effectively use. This isn't a trap, this is just a symptom of a complicated and deep game. For example, players can pump physical damage all the way and end up with one number, but the player that understands how conversion works (fairly complicated...) can end up with 5-10x the power in half the cost on almost any skill that COULD have an elemental component.

One of the WORST things about the current game that you missed out on playing a high level character only: the BEGINNING of the game is complete and utter trash for new players. It is so unbelievably scaled so terribly, that every minimal mistake made by a new player is heavily punished by death or just a huge lack of fun. The days of actual build experimentation and creativity are completely and irreversibly gone.

"

2. Enemies hit very hard, but they also die very fast. I recall this being a common complaint three or four years ago, but it seems to be an even more prominent element of gameplay now. For me personally, this kind of "glass cannon vs glass cannon" gameplay is very uninteresting: Building your character remains as strategically important as ever, but the tactical gameplay becomes extraordinarily shallow. I don't know; maybe players for whom this appeals is your new bread and better. Or maybe I just chose the wrong build to play around with.

Yeah. Speed creep is a massive issue. Has gotten exponentially worse since harbinger.


GGG needs to grow some balls and just deliver _QUALITY COMBAT_. They can heckin' do it, check out the uber fights, or some story boss fights. They're awesome.
As long as speed creep is an issue, they can't introduce this kind of combat. That's why AN was so dog water. I love the idea of dangerous rares. But the combat is so devolved in its visual and auditory communication in general gameplay (again, due to having to balance around the decade of speed creep) that they just can't do it.

And, unlike the very loud portion of players, I quite liked spending 1-2 mins on a rare or AN on a slow/tanky build, dodging their abilities by knowing what they are. It's just not optimal to do so because you can be so much faster and get so much more loot (serious, like divs/ex per hour...) by zooming.

Furthermore, class identity in parties heckin' BLOWS. I know most people who play this like.. don't really have friends. so they are solo most of the time.

Ever since Legacy, I have pretty much always had people to play with. Group dynamics are soooo dull because I feel there arent strong enough identities there.

"

lagwin1980 wrote:

3. they are not going to dumb the game down for people and remove any meaningful choices (if you have good and bad results it is meaningful...if all choices are good then they mean nothing)

I really don't want to get drawn into discussions of minutiae, since nothing I said is particularly controversial or disputable, but OK. More than one person challenged the very notion of noob traps. They certainly don't exist, for experienced players. Oh wait a minute. Weren't we talking about noobs?

https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Chance_to_Flee_Support

Is this valuable? Was it ever valuable? I remember it being useless even back in 2013. That was 10 years ago. Is 10 years ago long enough to assess whether this support gem is pertinent to Path of Exile? If not, then why not?

In some games, making enemies flee is a tactically advantageous outcome, so it is not unreasonable to assume that someone who is brand-new to Path of Exile would assume, based on the fact that this gem is presented to them as an option, that this is a legitimate choice.

It is not a choice. It is not a meaningful choice. It was never a meaningful choice. It is a non-choice.

Non-choices are not choices. They are noob-traps.

I mean, this is a silly and obvious example, but if you are going to challenge the very premise that they exist in the first place...

Let me be explicit:

Leaving such support gems in place, as is, is not the opposite of "dumbing the game down," and it never was. Rather, it represents a demand that players retrieve their information from outside the game. A passing of the buck, as it were.

This, by definition, is a meta. But in the worst sense of the word. It means that players do not make decisions based on accurate information that is presented to them, but rather that they make decisions based on experiments others have already done, as a compensation for the absence of pertinent information within the game itself.

"

gibbousmoon wrote:

https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Chance_to_Flee_Support

I know you didn't want to get into the nitty gritty and I apologize for going down the rabbit hole...but you chose the ONE support in the game that has no use. The ONLY ONE. That's not a trap, just like using a bad unique item for a while is not a "trap". It's bad, VERY bad, you figure it out...you move on. A player that chooses to use "chance to flee support" is also going to be the same player who notices "monsters aren't fleeing...". Give them more credit!

There isn't a single other example of a skill or support gem that would support the same argument. People may argue "waaah heavy strike", but really...it's just a bad choice and the "noob" player will figure that out just by playing it. If they aren't enjoying themselves, they WILL choose another skill. No one is going to rage quit the game because they only play ONE skill that sucks in a game of thousands of different combinations. And if they do...then this game was never for them in the first place. Hell, if they are enjoying themselves playing a Heavy Strike build...then what does it even matter if the numbers aren't the same as another build? They are HAVING FUN with it! And if not, then they aren't playing it anymore!

Part of playing the game is deciding what works and what doesn't. You can run phantasm support on a non-minion build but if those phantasms are literally doing nothing...you can SEE that and so you remove the support gem and try something else. Or maybe you just straight up like seeing the ghosts, even if they aren't really contributing anything to your damage.

If every choice was "equal", we would have no game. It would be a total linear progression with everything being the same same same across the board. Choices can be bad, mediocre, good, or the "best" but it is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that all these levels of choice exist.


Sure, "chance to flee" should be removed...but its presence in the game at the moment has exactly ZERO effect on any level of player.


We could even expand on this much further: all bleed nodes are "noob traps" for an elemental spellcaster. Nearly every single keystone mod on the tree is a "noob trap" for players who aren't correctly specced to take advantage of them. Certain ascendancy choices are "noob traps" for builds that don't actually benefit from them or would otherwise be suited to a better choice. None of these are traps at all, it is quintessential PoE, it has been a staple of the game since 1.0. Your choices matter, and the more experience and learning you get, the better choices you will make.

A noob might stay with a bad choice for a long time...but eventually the GAME will tell them something needs to change. The character might be dying all the time, or the clear speed is abysmal, or its taking forever for enemies to die. And that's where true PoE happens: you try different things and attempt to get over the next hurdle. You learn that maybe your passive tree needs to be revamped. You learn that maybe a certain support or even a certain whole skill just isn't doing what you want it to do. And you make changes.

Sorry, long post and I keep thinking of more things.

I agree with lagwin's #3: removing bad choices IS equivalent to "dumbing down" the game. The original post assumes that a noob can't possibly ever improve if they fall into a poor choice. But that just isn't the case. We've all been through that at some point in EVERY game there is. And TBH there aren't THAT many outright bad choices you can make, "chance to flee" being one of the very few totally negative examples.

Players, even new players, CAN learn new things and improve!

Sorry gonna chip in 2 cents.

Passive tree is full of noob traps. These nodes just be buffed. Ui need improvement. Tooltips are inaccurate


So many support gems just don't really work. The good ones are just They more damage. God help you if you want to build crit by stacking crit on the tree instead of the stupid way to "properly" do it.

The Game seems to be balanced around like 10 meta builds, and like 20 viable ones. Sure there are hundreds of skills but most of the player base gravitated towards the same solutions because the number wang sucks in this game.

If you don't know what skills are good, and don't have pob, and don't read guides. Good luck, they ain't finding the broken stuff that is "fun" intuitively. Especially since they might be starting with heavy or double strike and think every melee skill is just that.