PoE really having a shiny future or is it just switching player bases?

Gameplay still not polished enough for me to get past level 70 on any character/ want to play longer then 2 hours

"

if only said players actually left though. The thing is I think dont players like yourself ever did like the game. You played it because it was popular, and because you played it you felt like you could shape it to exactly what you wanted (basically for it to just let you know you are very good and special and that you can have all the shiny things). You have decided that because PoE is not being catered directly to you that the devs dont care about the game. The thing is the devs just dont care about you in particular, they care about the game, and thus make it not reward you individually for being oh so special.

Poor provocation attempt.

I liked and played the game in CB because you didn't have to trade(I never had over 20 chaos orbs aside from pre 9.12 from currencyrewards), you could get past content much faster, there were far better drops aside from uniques, there was next to no RMT aside some players still being here active in RMT and they got insulted which is why some got an obsession with me.

Your second phrase is just an insult that I am a casual game with no ego.
In CB I didn't have a single rare unique aside Koams Chopper, Midnights Bargain (which was donated to me in 1 week Turbo) and Prism Guardian I chanced the last weeks in legacy.
I had equipment you would craft and find over time. Some stuff with ES+Life some resist focused stuff. Only 1 really good topaz ring but that was it. 2-3 good attributes.
And for shaping like I wanted to I had hope for private leagues there were some things I disagreed with so I could change them back/in another way. Basically the idea of a summoner and those mananerfs. The game had huge potential.

Then came OB. First some MMORPG players joined GGG then some MMORPG alphas(the least active of the 3 whiteknights) convinced the devs the game had to become grindier.
I also believe the nolife X-Max and pre OB race also had heavy influence because all prior 1 weekers had 2-3 games max playtime but those had 4-5+!

So what happened first the Randomchests got stealth nerfed into oblivion, rares/uniques dropped whites, mod rolling didn'tn have an equal chance anymore, mods got stealth removed and higher mods introduced basically the same content 10 levels higher.
Merciless mapdrops barely dropped(5 maps total running out in OB vs 100+ maps in CB)
I suspected devs wanted to make 66 maps rare as 66 maps in CB(meaning they killed endgame content)
Then have a look at act 3 in OB huge maze areas being horribly unoptimized with a questdesign players of ARPGs just hate because of endless sidetracking.
The result was you were more running through big areas than actually Hack'n Slashing and the game time to reach endgame content heavily increased.
Look at the threads I 6 days after OB.
After more casual players reached the same content exactly the same feedback got posted:
"Act 3 is terrible" "Drops are bad"
And to top that even crafting got destroyed by changing alchs to chances and chaos orbs requiring level 60+ items.
RMT got a high, despite the non RMT rule.

So I went to racing. Season 2 was actually great. Good rewards, many different modes. I still had hope that it would improve.

Then came 1.06 which introduced 1 shot gearchecks. While the game itself had a player retention and fundamentally nothing changed I stayed at racing.
Till there was 1 one week turbo and I got one shot by dunes hillock at 77 suddenly appearing next to me.
There was nothing wrong with my playstyle I had a solid idea good damage and the skilltree was fine. So where was the issue. Right the Gearcheck mechanics. The only thing I could have improved was gear. Armor nodes wouldn't have made a difference. I could confirm over some short 1 week races during last(s5?) seasons that it wasn't some chaos damage or something else involved. The balance devs just added totally unrealistic damage values to tables which will one shot you. So basically deal damage, don't get hit or grind your brain out.

The grind issue got even worse with A3x. So instead of being able to play through in one turn you were now forced to make even more grindstops such as Act3 Cruel Dominus.
Sure Act3 got smaller but Solaris/Lunaris 2, gardens are still my most hated areas.

So in short what was my issue here: Mainly grinding and a wannabe hardcore design(aside from hardcore nolifing, trading and RMTing but I get to that point) which contradicts the principles of a HnS ARPG.

Now to RMT and Trading. At first the no RMT rule looked great. But because the game wasn't craftbased it became tradebased and the RMT issue rose. So no problem report them I automated scripts to check the RMT board and items being traded here while looking for keywords with good results. But what was the problem? GGG didn't ban RMTers after a short research I found out that GGG is only warning them, which results them taking more caution.
Basically a game where the RMT community is more active than the regular community.
I even took measures and reported players admitting on the forum to RMT including account back in CB(yes RMTers were that obvious back than and even named their account there) no change.
I took an example and shamed an obvious itemshop RMTer(come on can't RMT be more obvious having only level 1 characters and swapping even during the first week on high profile already?) with nothing but a 2 day probation+Standard blah.

What's more? There is a Diamond Supporter selling a bot for PoE.Basically it's as blatant if this game would be WoW and somebody created an account named wowglider.
On top of that some 300$+ donator got indirectly(no name but you could easily find him on PoE statistics with given info) shamed banned and unbanned 3 times.
So as long money is involved GGG doesn't care about their own rules.
Let's ban a nonsupport streamer cheating with 10 viewers but don't ban another with 300-400.

What next? Racing getting even worse rewards with almost the same boring shedule.

The core issue I don't like the game in its current state are the balance devs.
They are the reason for player retention.
Creating the grindiest setting possible-->Everybody hating extreme grindfests quits.
Creating a tradebased game-->Remember that most players joined because they hated AH and RMAH?
Constantly build destroying nerfs on a 1 character game--->Even more players quits.
MMORPG like changes like Auras--->MMORPG hating players quit.
A pseudo difficulty relying on gearchecks, highlighting the worst issues like stun followed by desync, destroying several parts of the tree, rendering several parts of the skill tree useless. As if the balance devs constantly listen to Daft Punk "Harder Faster Stronger Better", while I would say "harder" because hard games test players not gear.

And did you see any change there? Just look at invasion. Basically the same concept as Anarchy with the difference that damage is scaled on 90% reduce/resists.
Remember the threads "Path of ranged" that's how you play in invasion unless you abuse certain mechanics.
And the balance devs had free hand till the Vaal Skill Rogue exiles. But because they also had free hand at damage decreased the "incoming balance" could just scale like 5% max resist.
The core issue still exist. Even if Chris does some rebalance once the balance devs got free hand again they will screw up again just because they are too familiar with MMORPGs.
What balance needs is starting from scratch or a fundamental change, to make for example Evasion viable, so IR can finally be kicked.

And if support would hunt RMTers as effective the do Necromancermoderaation or probate for responses as "antagonistic comment" the pages would be full of offline players wearing a banned tag.
Oh well the randomly remove PoEstatistics links too when you link to a human player and tell you not to name and shame botters...

Also I stated the Devs don't communicate anymore not that they don't care.
The forum got the same activity as in CB.
And reddit is clustered with itemposts, or gameplay questions followed by elitist insults.


And ask yourself how many of the popular CB streamers are still playing PoE?
Or read the oldest posts about what PoE should be and compare to what it is now.

For myself PoE became more of a D3 clone than a D2 clone.

"

I do not believe these decisions were made by mistake or bad calls by Chris,but were intended design decisions to cater to the intended core players rather than the advertised players.

I highly doubt there is much communication at GGG.
The lead dev isn't up to date with patches. I also suspected similar when I had a chat with Chris.
There is a general plan/shedule that seems to be the case.
A dev giving faulty answers if it isn't his domain, such as minion scaling.
The balance devs having free hand to everything it seems. If Chris says make the game harder they just create mobs which require even more resists to survive.
The artistic direction being more than questionable. If the one of the next Pets is a Fairy/Pixie/Pony then I also believe the Artist have free hand.

"

Temper wrote:

Or maybe

They played the game because it wasn't a popular cool new toy and only averaged /online 200 - 300 players on a good night/day.

In closed beta there was no need to feel like shaping anything,the game advertised for niche *hardcore* ARPG players and in most cases POE supplied the means to provide a *hardcore* environment/experience for those *hardcore* players.

What the game grew into,is far different than what was advertized,it caters to shop on demand market and trivializing gameplay,the design even goes so far as to reward it.

GGG obviously care about their game,less so the players they originally intended as the core player base,either that or they never were really looking for the niche *hardcore* ARPG players they advertised for and actually fostered hopes of catching the D2 trade bubble crowd and the shop on demand crowd of more recent online genres.

When I see a game advertised to my ideology,especially an ARPG,then yes I'd expect it to cater to and deliver on it's promise and reward me for support given by way of staying true to it's image.

Before open beta,POEs sales point image and GGGs vision for the game became cloudy for myself and the few I can knowingly speak for,it became apparent rather late where design decisions were heading and taking the game.

I do not believe these decisions were made by mistake or bad calls by Chris,but were intended design decisions to cater to the intended core players rather than the advertised players.

And you know what ? I'm completely fine with that.However for everyones sake,I think it appropriate GGG revisit their games marketing strategy,because it clearly is not designed presently for *hardcore* players expecting a hardcore game with a barter system.

So I guess what I'm saying is,I feel I don't deserve anything except an honest sales pitch,of which isn't supplied.


Again,I can't speak for others that I do not know personally,but for myself,close friends and game clan,of which I am familiar with their reasons to stop playing.


=)

Tell it how it clearly is, brother.

As clear as water. The only parts I'm still not clear on, is whether there was a change in plan or whether it was the plan from the beginning. Absolutely, though, what we have now is a far stretch from what was initially claimed as the vision. Contradictions too many to be accidental or simply poor work.

"

OllyDB wrote:

<snip>

Hi, Hilbert. Kappa

"

MrSmiley21 wrote:

Sounds to me like they don't want to face the music for the development choices THEY made for the game, and instead would choose to put their hands over their ears and act like they're not hearing it. The fact of the matter is the player base isn't getting larger, and people are showing up here and telling them what their issues are. This is the internet, and nobody should expect anyone else to pull any punches over a fierce criticism. They should be happy that people let them know their criticisms

I can agree that they do avoid their own community forums way too much, but I've heard the devs are just too busy to read through everything, so they just see what's trending on reddit once in a while. I don't know what is going to happen for the website's next update, but I predict some kind of karma voting system for the forums.

"

MrSmiley21 wrote:

even if they get a little butthurt over some of them, which is/was clearly the case, or they wouldn't have modified the rules last December. But its just the really easy and pussy way out to dismiss people as trolls. Maybe the trolls are people who saw potential in this game, but are severely disappointed in the direction they've taken since beta?

As someone who knows a few intimate details about the drafting of the forum rules, they were a long time coming. The Path of Exile forums are for civil, constructive discussion of the game. Hateful posts will be removed and the users who posted them may be probated. This rule was necessary, the forums were being overtaken by an extremely small amount of people posting a lot of nasty stuff. The rule hasn't been abused by support staff as far as I know, but I do know they aren't being as lenient as we were to the jerks who would constantly spew insults about other players. The community has largely gone unchanged, the trolls can still troll, and the fanboys will fan. If you think the rule change was to inflict censorship upon the unhappy players, you should look around more often, the posts are still here, though they are the same tired posts over and over again.

"

Alea wrote:

"PoE is it has really good updates"
=> invaders then exile one shotting ppl ?
=> atziri endgame and unique unereachable for most of players (especially in inva)

I freaking loved the invasion mobs, I nearly got oneshot a couple times from them. It was exciting. The expansion was a great update, I don't know how you can argue it wasn't, besides a few balance changes which were needed and then recently added.

"

Alea wrote:

"they constantly refresh their competitive ladders with unique features and prizes"
=> the guy over abusing snapshotting to kill first atziri and got some new skin
=> new uniques and old legacy list : http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/907672

If you quit your school and job to be the first to kill atziri, I'm sure you would have used every trick you knew in the game to get ahead. Dedication like that deserves a reward. Are you just comparing the new ladder to the legacy items? I get the feeling you only play HC-ladder.

"

Alea wrote:

"The economy is structured well, and can easily recover if it shows signs of weakening"
=> this one i would like some facts as proof; chaos orbs are constantly decreasing in value invasion.

The facts are in the design, if GGG feels like chaos are becoming too easy to get, they make recipe changes or maybe do a thing with droprates. The lead project designer is an economist.

"

Alea wrote:

"but there will be a huge boom when the website trading and phone app is released"
=> amazing, and needed; http://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All

Fixing trade will make it way easier for people to play in their spare time and solo. Those steam numbers are what I would expect, since I've been hearing all my PoE friends talk about Dark Souls 2 and other new trends.

"

Alea wrote:

"There will soon be engine improvements"
=> are you talking about the "hard coded" part of engine ?

I'm talking about this: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/893012

"

I can agree that they do avoid their own community forums way too much, but I've heard the devs are just too busy to read through everything, so they just see what's trending on reddit once in a while. I don't know what is going to happen for the website's next update, but I predict some kind of karma voting system for the forums.

Active enough to name "What devourers bodies look like" in the news and not busy enough to find bugs you would usually find within 5 minutes of testing.

It's not like it's more to read than in CB also FYI the reddit responses don't always go in upvoted threads, some of them are in Page 2 on "new". It's rather they are avoiding certain answers.

Remember the ask "Chris thread?"
I read most questions and can tell you till the point I stopped reading there were several questions left unanswered.
Instead we got a dev manifesto.

Oh yeah Karma exactly what PoE needs.... *irony*
Itemshowcases getting upvoted, gameplay questions.
Enjoy spambots upvoting advertisement threads.
Reddit put a lot of effort to prevent vote manipulation yet you can find several exploits and bugs for example you could easily abuse the automated vote add to get into the controversial section.
And now imagine how the voting system of a company looks like which does something else and can't put so much effort into abuse prevention.
If it was that easy we already would have got trading without client.
Sorry but reddit is a shithole look at the new submissions the majority of threads receives downvotes for no apparent reason. On some days some reddits are a collections for insults.

"

As someone who knows a few intimate details about the drafting of the forum rules, they were a long time coming.

Do I smell elitism?


[Removed by Support]

Copypasta support that refuses to say they made mistakes so lead support always must jump in.
Necromancer moderation + probations. Instead of deleting the necroposting.
Then somebody decides to look in the stickied thread and feels like a post left unedited for weeks should be censored.
Some mods even destroy complete postings.
Threads getting moved without plan. GD->Suggestion->Feedback

Call it whatever you like but imo the moderation is poor.

And if you think that offensive postings are the reason the devs don't interact with the community anymore. The reason is that feedback is filled with criticism.
In CB the main negative feedback was Desync but that changed after OB.
If the devs want less negative feedback on their balance/design choices they should finally create private leagues with full control over tables even they are empty(not just some buttons)
Then the private leagues receive feedback.

"

I freaking loved the invasion mobs, I nearly got oneshot a couple times from them. It was exciting. The expansion was a great update, I don't know how you can argue it wasn't, besides a few balance changes which were needed and then recently added.

If you try to change opinions you shouldn't hide your characters and also the changes haven't been added yet.....

"

If you quit your school and job to be the first to kill atziri, I'm sure you would have used every trick you knew in the game to get ahead. Dedication like that deserves a reward.

What kind of priorities. Throw away your life for a game.

"

I'm talking about this: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/893012

This post only talks about possibly different looking MTX and a text rendering which should work differently in the first place.

"

Temper wrote:

"

LostForm wrote:

"

Hilbert wrote:

I forgot to respond with my opinion on the thread topic.

I would rather say GGG is hoping for a "shiny future" but their actions result in players leaving the game and less new players join the game but some leave again.



/online was removed in late CB already I think. If not then early OB.

if only said players actually left though. The thing is I think dont players like yourself ever did like the game. You played it because it was popular, and because you played it you felt like you could shape it to exactly what you wanted (basically for it to just let you know you are very good and special and that you can have all the shiny things). You have decided that because PoE is not being catered directly to you that the devs dont care about the game. The thing is the devs just dont care about you in particular, they care about the game, and thus make it not reward you individually for being oh so special.

Or maybe

They played the game because it wasn't a popular cool new toy and only averaged /online 200 - 300 players on a good night/day.

In closed beta there was no need to feel like shaping anything,the game advertised for niche *hardcore* ARPG players and in most cases POE supplied the means to provide a *hardcore* environment/experience for those *hardcore* players.

What the game grew into,is far different than what was advertized,it caters to shop on demand market and trivializing gameplay,the design even goes so far as to reward it.

GGG obviously care about their game,less so the players they originally intended as the core player base,either that or they never were really looking for the niche *hardcore* ARPG players they advertised for and actually fostered hopes of catching the D2 trade bubble crowd and the shop on demand crowd of more recent online genres.

When I see a game advertised to my ideology,especially an ARPG,then yes I'd expect it to cater to and deliver on it's promise and reward me for support given by way of staying true to it's image.

Before open beta,POEs sales point image and GGGs vision for the game became cloudy for myself and the few I can knowingly speak for,it became apparent rather late where design decisions were heading and taking the game.

I do not believe these decisions were made by mistake or bad calls by Chris,but were intended design decisions to cater to the intended core players rather than the advertised players.

And you know what ? I'm completely fine with that.However for everyones sake,I think it appropriate GGG revisit their games marketing strategy,because it clearly is not designed presently for *hardcore* players expecting a hardcore game with a barter system.

So I guess what I'm saying is,I feel I don't deserve anything except an honest sales pitch,of which isn't supplied.


Again,I can't speak for others that I do not know personally,but for myself,close friends and game clan,of which I am familiar with their reasons to stop playing.


=)

The thing is though, you could trade in closed beta (and people did trade in closed beta). There were far less people farming up orbs and contributing to the pool of orbs, so GCP was the 'default' currency as other orbs were being eaten at a high rate or too rare to actually be used as the price guage, but they have always pooled into the hands of people actively seeking to gather large amounts of orbs. People have middle manned sales for profit since closed beta. The game has always been scarce on drops, or do you think everyone was running around with self found magliaro's and kaoms heart? They traded for those things....by flipping trades for profit.... and using currency recipes and upgrading currency. All these things existed on closed beta, when open beta and launch came around, there was just way more people adding to the pools and chaos recipe became the default farm, switching 'top' currency from gcp to exalt with the ability to break exalts into chaos as currency. These economy changes were due to more players adding to the currency market than any changes made to the game. The players came in and set up tools to facilitate trade and make it main stream, the game still has almost no dedicated support for trade outside of a trade window and trade chat.

The problems you are describing is almost entirely community made situations. The game never gave out loot and currency like candy, but players found a way to 'economize' the orbs and the common practice became to hoard all your orbs. Rather than slow down the mega traders, players were eagerly pooling their orbs in the hands of the few. Players could have stopped this along time ago by not trading everything they farm up. If the player base would have chosen to play largely self found and sink the majority of orbs into the crafting lottery, the meta-game might be vastly different.

Because people were looking for the sure fire way to have the absolute best loot inside of a few weeks of playing, they instead empowered the few and set the precedent for how the game is played. If the player base is lifting players up to god mode inside a month, you cant begrudge GGG for reacting to the trends of the community and balancing around god mode, as it is balanced for hard core players, and those players are playing at god mode level.

It is not due to some guy screaming that the game is too easy or moping around spitting vitriol all over the boards. IT was due to the trends of the community. If nobody beat aztiri yet, you could bet it would get toned down some, but instead the fight was done inside of a few weeks of a new ladder, due to players lifting up a few players by pouring everything into trade.

"

OllyDB wrote:

"

As someone who knows a few intimate details about the drafting of the forum rules, they were a long time coming.

Do I smell elitism?

I was just a mod who had access to early drafts. I know they were working on new forum rules for a long time, but I won't get deep into that.

"

OllyDB wrote:

What kind of white knighting is that? Charan and others did a far better job keeping the forums clean. I can write scripts that can do the same as support here.

Thank you. :)

I disagree about the scripts with spam filtering, GGG has much faster support response and automation these days, sorting suggestions to their forum, deleting "name and shame" threads etc. There is a MUCH higher volume of posts than when we were moderating it, and there are a lot more people to handle them.

"

OllyDB wrote:

I saw several postings getting removed for "hate speech" because they contained the f-word
as an example.

Fucking scamming jerks >:( is not acceptable, while You bet your fucking ass this build is delicious! is fine. I don't know the context, so I couldn't say whether they should have given a fuck... We are adults here, and in moderation the expletives can be frank and nonthreatening speech, but we know language can become personally offensive when used differently. If they made a mistake, they can be asked to undo their edits, perhaps the tone was misunderstood.

"

OllyDB wrote:

... Does support even read the context or do they edit postings on guesses:"Hmm link in a botter threads better remove it"

If there's a reported player in the public forums, they have to remove the names. They certainly have people who handle the botter reports though, most of these reports are handled more easily through their email.

"

OllyDB wrote:

Copypasta support that refuses to say they made mistakes so lead support always must jump in.
Necromancer moderation + probations. Instead of deleting the necroposting.
Then somebody decides to look in the stickied thread and feels like a post left unedited for weeks should be censored.
Some mods even destroy complete postings.
Threads getting moved without plan. GD->Suggestion->Feedback

Call it whatever you like but imo the moderation is poor.

And if you think that offensive postings are the reason the devs don't interact with the community anymore. The reason is that feedback is filled with criticism.
In CB the main negative feedback was Desync but that changed after OB.
If the devs want less negative feedback on their balance/design choices they should finally create private leagues with full control over tables even they are empty(not just some buttons)
Then the private leagues receive feedback.

I see.

They try not to delete posts as much as they can, instead they give warnings to particularly strong thread-necros and trolls.

No, I think the devs don't interact with these forums because we are too cluttered, and because they've got a good idea of what they want to do anyway. I don't understand their obsession with reddit's little community, but it's there. They have answered every criticism I've seen, but I've seen a lot of dev posts. One of the grievances was the dev manifesto was missing and needed to be rewritten. A lot of the developer responses I've seen throughout the cycles of development have been actual working code. Maybe a line in the changelog. They implement fixes quickly and without much fanfare, so I guess what I'm saying is, perhaps they have been working on a lot of these things which they had mentioned they wanted to and just haven't figured it all out yet, so they aren't announcing the changes. I really don't know how you think these are trivial game engine fixes when you haven't seen the code base. I personally like that GD is no longer just a dump for miscellaneous suggestions and gameplay feedback. The other forums need to be seen more though.

You should make a distinction between the devs and the support staff, they are two separate departments which do two different things. Devs play games all day, and support staff eats candy and reads emails all day. The devs can't actually be reading or responding to everything, that's why they hired customer support staff. The support staff can't know everything devs do, because devs are in there playing games all day and have no time to share candy with the support staff. I guess what I'm saying is, everyone is doing their jobs, and probably better than a few spam scripts.

well in reddit the posts that agree with the dev's decisions and all that poe is perfect bullcrap is upvoted to the top.. of course they would flock to there

while on here everything in front and center and they don't like the criticism.

yeah game is gonna die whatever GGG is stubborn as hell and the numbers show. let the game die

game is stale and bad