Feedback from a casual player

First of all i want to be clear that i am speaking with respect towards the game developers and whoever is in charge of this truly huge project and with the hope to create a dialog not a bashing session.

I am a very normal person. I have full time job. I have a family. I am well in my late thirties - so maybe NOT the intended player base.

I've been playing games all my life. Diablo 2 was one of my favorites, having it installed on my PC in this very moment. Even my wife ( non gamer ) decided to give it a shot seeing how passionate i am about it. And guess what? She loves it.

My experience with GGG starts wit POE1.

I always have tried to find something better than Diablo 2 - unsuccessfully.
So naturally i tried POE1.
Not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but not for me. I found it over complicated, unnecessarily too deep in skill and build development and i have (let me check) - yes - 19.7 hours on record in which i beat the game couple of times.

It just didn't had anything that could pull me up personally.

Fast forward to POE2.

I saw one game play trailer accidentally. And there it was. I new exactly what i was looking at and it was exactly what i have been searching since Diablo 2.

I bought the game immediately - booted it and 450 hours later i was excited for the new patch.

LO AND BEHOLD.

As i already stated i have a busy life and i do not read patch notes, news, watch trailers or youtube videos or streamers speculating what will be the new patch.

For me it was a complete surprise when i booted the game after a hard day of work and nothing worked like before. Not even remotely.

My two characters were absolutely broken beyond repair. A deadeye and a bloodmage.

And there i was watching videos and reading patch notes in desperate hope to repair what i have been building for 400 hours.

My time investments was utterly gone.

So i started rolling in the rabbit hole, deeper and deeper.

And this is what i think:

The game is absurdly hard. Somebody in GGG has mixed the genres in their head. This is ARPG - the point is at some point to feel like a god. A power fantasy. It is not a souls like - which i actually love in any shape and form.

The huge distinction between those two genres is that one is loot dependent and single player focused and the other is not.

When i spent 7 hours of killing bosses and i have nothing to show for it in an ARPG it is tedious - like a second job.

When i do it in a souls like - i am done with the game and i have an adventure behind me with multiple visited places and stories and characters.

Destroying the already established builds is such a shot in the foot.

You didn't nerf them a tad. You deleted them. They are not possible anymore. I understand it is an ALPHA or an Early Access (im sorry i do not know the correct terminology ) but you build up not grind down. Even if its a nice pun with your company name.

You introduce more content, new characters, new bosses, new maps MORE. Just more. And it is not like you don't have the resources for that. You are a successful company with an extremely outspoken and strong player base. A dream in the game developing world which you have build yourself.

So the question is - what gives? Why do you want to make your player base suffer?

A regular day for me in this game was 2-3 hours game time - on weekends and vacations more. I would do some maps, some bosses. Meet new players that needed help or items which i would just gift.

It was fun! It was comfy. And it seems your philosophy has changed GGG.

It is like you are trying to create a toxic game which keeps players stronger and for longer due to frustration. Why?

Even if you revert this patch i don't think i care. I still have the hope that in a year time you would build the best ARPG ever made. But now there is a doubt i previously didn't knew.

I hope those words move someone, somewhere to the right direction because i see i am completely not alone in this.

P.S.

Since the new patch i also experienced huge performance issues. Constant lagging cutting etc. Almost unplayable. Before on minimum settings was quite a good experience with constant 60fps.

Im running an Nvidia 2080 8gb 32 gb Ram Win10 700W Power Unit. and I7 intel.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

+1 ABSOLUTELY

I think the fundamental mistake GGG made was not making a new separate league and letting us, the players like OP to keep having fun in the existing league with existing characters.

I get it, it's EA, they need to experiment with different designs to make a good game. But such fundamental changes require a new league.

I supported this EA with a lot of money (it is by far the most I have ever spent on a single game and I've been gaming 30 years). I did it cause I thought I got a good amount of value and fun out of this and I want to support devs that make good games.

What really annoys me is that the changes are so profound to existing league that it effectively made it unplayable for me - I just do not have fun, to the degree that I feel I got rugged... I "spent" the money and I don't have the game.

Some people like the new patch, some don't. That's life. But the issue I have is that they have taken away the choice to skip the league and keep playing existing one if the new one is not to your taste.

They honestly probably shouldn't have given standard builds access to the new content, and kept the items, skills, and passives the same in standard. When a character is ported into standard, it shouldn't be deleted unless the player wants it to be.

The problem with doing it this way is nobody in standard is going to be giving the type of feedback they need, and EVERYONE in standard is going to be a new player or a player that doesn't want things to change.

They are trying to make everyone happy, what it has achieved is, giving players like yourself the wrong impression, giving league players a bad taste in their mouth, and missing a golden opportunity to onboard tens of thousands of players into the PoE league system.

All of this because "it is early access" doesn't really make a lot of sense. You want all of the valuable feedback you can gather, and to do that you have to at least give the baseline experience of what players should expect in the future.

Having access to new content without playing a new league on a fresh start, having the passive tree change, skills nerfed, it's not what veterans of PoE leagues want, and it's not what new players or standard players want. It's pleasing no-one.

There is no real choice, your standard characters are deleted by changes, the league doesn't have enough players for healthy trade and your currency has far less value. The exclusivity of new content being behind a new grind is something special in itself.

It only makes sense to separate the two, and onboard new players. Unless you actually really care for standard and have a team do it properly, you should probably let people know it's basically an interactable graveyard, and treat it as such.

+1

I agree 100% with everything you said.

The dark souls and aRPG comparison was perfect, that style of combat doesnt work in an arpg, you want to feel powerful in an arpg but also for it to have difficult encounters in the sense where you can die if you mess up or arent strong enough.

The game was fun in 0.1, all it needed was to nerf the super op stuff a bit and add content.

The thing about 'slow and thoughtful combat' in an arpg is that only means pressing more buttons, which becomes more tedious than 'engaging'. To counteract this, you would have to lower both monster movement speed and pack sice, and at that point how much fun does the game even become as an arpg? Killing 2-3 slow plodding monsters at a time with your 7 button presses?

I understand that maybe 1 shotting highest tier pinnacle bosses is too much, maybe teleporting across maps in 1 second killing anything on screen and OFF screen is too much, but screen wide killing and fast gameplay, destroying everything in your path (including bosses if you've built your character good enough.. tier 4 pinnacle bosses excluced) IS what makes games like these fun.

"

AverBeg7#1689 wrote:

They honestly probably shouldn't have given standard builds access to the new content

The real problem is not the standard, it is the blanket nerf of all skills.
Many of that was unwarranted and unnecessary.

For example, they removed the Hellhound 20% damage reduction.

Why?

They just could decrease the percentage to 10 or 5.

But they choose to remove it completely. Infernalist were not at the top of oneshot boss killer builds, removing it really was unnecessary.

I couldn't get past the combination of you saying you had respect and were "completely normal" and yet your Handle is that??? are you 12?

The rationale behind "slow and meaningful" game design philosophy doesn't withstand reality when the very moment a player puts on +30 boots the game instantly feels ten times better or how good it feels to get a better weapon and suddenly be able to clean some mobs with ease.
Not hating on it per se. I think there is room for it in boss battles and against rares. But if it's your idea of how players should spent their whole hundreds of hours each season then it's gonna backfire in term of the games popularity.

"

Flowneppets#0528 wrote:

The rationale behind "slow and meaningful" game design philosophy doesn't withstand reality when the very moment a player puts on +30 boots the game instantly feels ten times better or how good it feels to get a better weapon and suddenly be able to clean some mobs with ease.
Not hating on it per se. I think there is room for it in boss battles and against rares. But if it's your idea of how players should spent their whole hundreds of hours each season then it's gonna backfire in term of the games popularity.

I honestly think the time and place for it is uniques. I shouldn't struggle more against a rare with nasty mods, than I do a boss. Their minions are also usually way stronger than white or magic mods, sometimes surviving even after the rare is dead in swarms of AoE. It doesn't make sense to get clapped by raw numbers and then go into a boss fight and one shot it.

I'm a try hard no-lifer in this game and have around 1078 hours of game play in it and I agree with 100% of what you wrote in this thread. +1

I share the same sentiments. I liked the term "deleted", because thats pretty much what it is. These were not nerfs, they were untought brutal decimation of a beautiful game.

The last game I loved that much was Diablo 2 and for the first time I felt this love for POE 2. I didn't like POE 1 as much as this.

I enjoyed the legendary itemization of pinnacle drops a lot and this also got pretty much wrecked. I'm convinced a lot of the programmers inside the building are also heart shattered by some of the decisions that were recently made. As a programmer myself, I absolutely would.

Same situation here.

I played more than 300 hours 0.1 and after 10 hours of 0.2 I'm going to unistall.

I think more than 80% of people is not even going to finish the campaign, I dump one player in act 1 and the second in act 3, I hope for next patch the game is playable.