Dear GGG: You NEED to watch this video! I cannot emphasize this enough! WATCH THIS!

This dude is plain wrong. That's not at all what GGG wants. He's just making a bunch of baseless assumptions.

Devs already said a balance patch will come much later.

The game IS completely BROKEN right now, you should not make any assumptions on balance.

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kamiknx#1162 wrote:

This dude is plain wrong. That's not at all what GGG wants. He's just making a bunch of baseless assumptions.

Devs already said a balance patch will come much later.

The game IS completely BROKEN right now, you should not make any assumptions on balance.

He doesn't make assumptions based on current balance, he's taking their own words. Did you even watch it? Also no amount of balance will change the fact that Breach loot scales exponentially with clear speed for example. No amount of balance will fix ritual problems.

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kamiknx#1162 wrote:

This dude is plain wrong. That's not at all what GGG wants. He's just making a bunch of baseless assumptions.

Devs already said a balance patch will come much later.

The game IS completely BROKEN right now, you should not make any assumptions on balance.

You're wrong. GGG made it quite clear in the interview that what we're playing is basically what they want POE2 to be. Balance patches won't change the basic principle.
He made that very clear with several repetitions, yet you didn't get the point. You probably didn't even watch it.

You're wrong.

PoE 1 Is just a rotting carcass. PoE 2 just a bastard child of this rotting carcass.
Which is sad.

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DemonikPath#1311 wrote:

Most of these 200k are in campaign... Steam numbers won't show that because Steam integration was absolutely terrible, so most people who stayed would switch to standalone. But after game started to become what it is now leagues started to feel like a ghost town after a month.

Fair enough we dont have the numbers for non-steam players back in 2016. However, we also dont have numbers for how many of the concurrent players in POE 2 are brand new players (not rerolling alts) playing campaign for the first time. This is also an assumption.

I could also argue that the reason people stopped playing leagues for their duration is that leagues only add so much. When the game is novel you can easily play for months on end, especially if you are rolling alts. Fast forward another 5 years and youve literally done everything. Played every type of build. Done every mechanic hundreds of times. So what happens? Players log in to new season, play for a few weeks to reach whatever their end game goal is for that season/season mechanic, and quit, because outside of the new mechanic theyve already seen and done everything. Im not sure this phenomena explains anything in terms of whether or not POE 1 has gone downhill or is a bad game or is in a worse state than it was 5 years ago in terms of overall player perception. It could just as easily indicate that people love POE and thats why they come back every season but also that they are just there for the new stuff then get bored and wait for next season.

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Waitn4D4#0477 wrote:

...

Well there is one point of evidence that people tend to keep playing longer when game is slow I can give, although I won't find where it's from directly, but that's from Chris talking about retention. There was one league, Bestiary, which was anti clear speed (it was actually punishing you for clearing too fast, until much later in the league you had to get enemies to low health and then throw nets on them to capture, the mechanics of both league and crafting were completely different from what it is now). Despite people bitching about this league more than I ever remembered and that's what caused me to hate PoE community - Chris said that it had by far the best player retention, while leagues that players praised them for - had the worst retention.

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DemonikPath#1311 wrote:

Despite people bitching about this league more than I ever remembered and that's what caused me to hate PoE community - Chris said that it had by far the best player retention, while leagues that players praised them for - had the worst retention.

POE has a very loud minority with apparently way too much power. It's those RMT traders who want to profit early in the league by AOE deleting the whole screen.
It's also the same kind of people who throw a tantrum when a super lategame OP build that no casual would ever see gets nerfed.

retention is not the goal, they also say that.

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DemonikPath#1311 wrote:

"

Waitn4D4#0477 wrote:

...

Well there is one point of evidence that people tend to keep playing longer when game is slow I can give, although I won't find where it's from directly, but that's from Chris talking about retention. There was one league, Bestiary, which was anti clear speed (it was actually punishing you for clearing too fast, until much later in the league you had to get enemies to low health and then throw nets on them to capture, the mechanics of both league and crafting were completely different from what it is now). Despite people bitching about this league more than I ever remembered and that's what caused me to hate PoE community - Chris said that it had by far the best player retention, while leagues that players praised them for - had the worst retention.

Im not really advocating for zoom or trivialization of content. Quite the opposite I was hoping this patch would nerf the absolute hell out of a lot of broken things. I think POE 2 progression is better than POE 1 in that it stays meaningful for longer. For example I still find meaning in IDing certain rare bases off the ground even 400+ hours into POE 2. I still pick up and craft on white bases. I would never do that 400 hours into a POE 1 league. By this point in POE 1 Id hide almost everything that drops.

I also am still getting upgrades every so often, still have a lot of gear that needs work or upgrading on my character, and am currently pushing for level 98 for another sweet point of character power.

I actually want pinnacle bossing (map bosses are whatever) to be meaningful by force. What I mean is I hope GGG rethinks how they make and scale bosses. I hope they figure out a way to force people to do pinnacle boss mechanics and scale the bosses HP/damage so that you have to do them, no one shots no matter what. Even if you have a 8 mirror build, when you go into that pinnacle boss its at least a minute or two vs. a second or two.

Theres ways to do it, if they want. They can scale HP/damage based on average player defenses and DPS, they can scale down player power to match boss power by force, they can enforce phases of bosses so some mechanics cannot be avoided, or they can take the Lost Ark approach to PVP where everyone gets to choose a certain setup and your main progression gear doesnt matter at all, everyone on a level playing field and its all about player skill and knowledge.

Or they wont, and bossing will be trivial like it is in POE 1. I kind of dont care because mapping is my thing, but If they made bossing difficult Id probably get into it.

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drallcom3#6603 wrote:

POE has a very loud minority with apparently way too much power. It's those RMT traders who want to profit early in the league by AOE deleting the whole screen.
It's also the same kind of people who throw a tantrum when a super lategame OP build that no casual would ever see gets nerfed.

People wanting to profit early league are people who understand what trade is and how it works, thats it. They are not RMT traders (some no doubt are, but most are not). Profit in trade league means speed, period, full stop. This is because supply/demand has a sharp curve and you have about 2 weeks to get your base currency for the league, week 3 there is a steep decline and after week 4 good luck selling anything worth less than 1 divine. People no longer need leveling gear, twink gear, mid tier rares, or build enabling but cheap uniques unless they have the best corruption on them. For example, Pillar of the Caged God was worth a decent amount of ex week 1-2 of the league. Now you will only really sell one if you corrupt attack speed on it, anything else its worthless.