An Open Letter to GGG RE: One Portal

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Silverpelt#6095 wrote:

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hboi#6131 wrote:

You play to have fun. You don't speak for everyone. I play good games that spark emotions in me anxiety, anger, happiness, sense of achievement, overcoming obstacles.

If this doesn't suit your play style that's fine. There are games more suited for you.

That's one load of bs and neither you speak for everyone. If you want to feel anxiety, anger and some happiness, I suggest you hire a mistress for a good old fashioned sp*nking.


Don't confuse real difficulty and fake difficulty. The loss of loot on death and the loss of map on death is fake difficulty. It doesn't contribute to anything and it's not healthy for the future of the game. Overcoming a worthy obstacle is fighting a rough boss that requires to learn its mechanics; not fearing to lose a map because the game is balanced like a drunken sailor with mobs throwing and stun locking you in corners, or one shooting you from off screen.

I experience lots of emotions from real world activities as well. Although I am not a degenerate in the bedroom such as yourself.

My hobbies include games. And why would I play a game that's pointless and meaningless. I don't want a second monitor game

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My hobbies include games. And why would I play a game that's pointless and meaningless. I don't want a second monitor game

It's absolutely fine if you consider PoE1 as a second monitor game. (I don't, and cant fathom it being so but so be it).

That does not change the fact that time is being wasted needlessly because SOFTCORE users are being forced into a psuedo-hardcore experience due to this 1 portal bullshit.

You don't have to agree on the portals, and I can't fathom you will. However you can agree when a user agrees to play SOFTCORE, they shouldn't be punished as if they're playing hardcore. I'm fine with a game kicking my ass, and justifiably so. It's engaging that way. I wouldn't of dumped hours into farming T17's on PoE1, doing div card boosting if I wasn't some kind of masochist.

However, when I am spending my precious time, and it leads to no reward, no achievement, no lesson besides "git gud or cheese boss". How the hell is that an engaging experience? As I said, if my character can't do it, so be it. However the hours it takes to get an attempt at some of these encounters for it to end in some bullshit way, or me not rolling PRECISELY at the right moment, is infuriating and absolutely a waste of time.

ARPG's at their core (D2 included) usually measure time and reward as a parallel scale. More time, more reward, more powerful character. PoE2 is prioritizing time more than reward. There is no sense of accomplishment getting bitch slapped in a fight and knowing "Welp, guess I gotta spend 20 hours hunting down Fragments again, yay".

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To the people, and design engineers at GGG continuing to defend this one portal idea. You're wrong. Listen, you're wrong. Swallow your pride, admit your mistake, and move on. To the white knight forum warriors that try and defend it, you're wrong, no matter how much get gud you try and spew.

I hope, for the sake of this game, you fix this as soon as possible. I love GGG, I think they're the best developers that exist, but they can make mistakes. It's okay, us PoE vets will forgive you. I promise you, the uninitiated will not, and move on.

Revert it back to the six portals before it's too late.

This is 100% correct. I have already stopped playing and started looking for a new game. This is after only three maps.

One portal best portal.
If you don't like it, build more tanky.

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CharAznable#7844 wrote:

One portal best portal.
If you don't like it, build more tanky.

People shouldn't be pidgeonholed into a specific playstyle/build when build diversity in this game is already near-0 with people only being able to play what the game allows with all the limiting systems like skills tied to weapon types and only 1 copy of each support gem. This is not the answer. The answer is to delete the pointless death penalty, because it is making people quit the game.

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kuciol#0426 wrote:

I got bored of PoE1 exactly because of how dull it became.

You will get bored of POE2 as well.

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CharAznable#7844 wrote:

One portal best portal.
If you don't like it, build more tanky.

No, you should learn how to dodge better. This isn't POE1!

+1 I'm done with this game for now because of this.

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Still dont understand why GGG cant simply replace 10% exp penalty with penalty that eats all your exp earned on exact map, so you leave the map with same exp as you entered it. There always will be random deaths from event/chain of events that manage to get through all defensive layers. Its an issue in poe1, and even worse issue here.

True.

Something else others in this thread have brought up that I wanted to elaborate on is that there are currently two games in PoE2: the campaign and mapping. Both games have completely different pacing and expectations.

The campaign is meant to be slow, brutal, and rewarding. Your average player will die over and over to bosses and certain maps, but they’ll learn something every time that will eventually push them to victory. It’s like learning a boss in a Souls or Ys game. This is the part of the game that’s getting praise from critics, as well as both new players and old players. This is also the mode that was clearly made for couch co-op. Jonathan and other GGG devs have hammered home that PoE2 is supposed to be a good co-op game. This is very important. Keep it in mind.

Maps, meanwhile, are cookie clicker loot farms like they were in PoE1 - except with the pacing and lethality of PoE2. The goal is not to learn how to run a specific map, but how to optimize your clear speed to gain currency. You’re asked not to overcome a specific challenge by running it over and over - which is essentially what the old portal system did, with limitations on how many times you could run a specific map. Instead, you’re asked to optimize your mapclear because the penalty for dying is losing the entire map and whatever you invested in it. You’re asked to hedge your bets on difficult maps, because running easy maps likely won’t get you any waystones at your level. Hell, even running juiced red maps hardly drops any t13-15. Your best bet to start a chain of maps is to trade for a few at your build’s level. This is fine for players who enjoy Ruthless. But like I said yesterday, this isn’t intuitive for new players. New players are asked to completely rethink how they approach the game once they hit maps, with few guidelines to help them other than "run this tier map x times."

Now recall what I said earlier about GGG pushing PoE2 as a fun couch co-op game. The campaign caters to co-op very well. Maps, however, do not suit co-op at all. The main culprit? The one-death limit. It’s pretty deflating having to abandon a map because one person got nuked by screen junk, or a Volatile Plants hiding under a pile of corpses. You can’t run the map again like you would in Campaign, using the knowledge you learned from your death to finish the map. Your chance at redemption is gone. That's the exact opposite of what the Campaign teaches you. We can sit here on the forums, smugly telling the plebs to git gud from our high horses. But PoE2 can’t be a good couch co-op game in its current state, at least past the campaign.

How do we fix this? I’m still in favor of my three-strikes system, where the map will close after dying but will let you re-attempt the same seed (maybe with fewer rewards each attempt). Making that work for multiplayer is trickier, though. Maybe players who die will be unable to re-enter the map until every other player has died, at which point the map owner can queue up the same map again? This poses the problem of players killing all but one mob pack, then suiciding so they can run the map again. That's the next wrinkle I have to work out with my suggestion.