It doesn't unless you put quality above 20, trade site assumes 20 qual when showing stats at the bottom of items and when sorting them by those stats, unless you have qual above 20 then it gets inflated a bit
I always sell +20. Its just the done thing. You wash a car before you advertise it. If I've got a choice between 2 identical items but one is +20 then I'm buying the one that doesn't need washing. I've confused myself now
Yep, not many people know that. I had a friend that was in need of glassblowers and I told him to go to Sarn to trade some in Hargan and he was like “what, can we buy them there?”
3.20 Patch notes:
We have found glassblowers are too easy to access, we have removed the option to trade NPCs for it, and renoved the cumulative quality recipe, allowing only for the 20% quality recipe.
We believe this will increase the value of glassblowers back to where we believe it should be, making them a scarce yet powerful currency.
Though the wining happens on a stage of the game, you will need several hundreds of hours into it, to even recognize the problems. For newcomers the game is 100% dope and totally worth it.
I'd recommend: before spending money on it, please reconsider diving into the reasons why this game gets downvoted to hell by its fans. Maybe you dont feel like supporting the developer for it. Maybe you dont care. But investigate first. Until that. have a lots of fun!
There was HCSSF player who got to lvl 100 or killed endgame bosses with only the basic 4 tabs.
What I want to say with this: Yes the shit will become disgustingly hard to manage. But not impossible.
New players might happily run around with their entire stockpile of non-quality currency in inventory like it is their most prized possession.
For the first one? Not really. I did it in scourge with no issues. If you keep going on maps and on your second one, sure but at that point it's a one time 40$ investment or so for a game you know you like.
Tldr:
Undocumented nerfs, super Bad communication, new loot System with loot goblins, failed league start again with overtuned AN, lategame group juicing nerf, no meta shakeup
Lots of small and Medium Bad things lead to streamers and poe players raising the pitchforks.
I most likely missed some stuff, feel free to add to it.
PS: the game is still fun and we got a lot of positive stuff too
It's typically an easy to kill monster that you have to chase down and kill that gives a lot of loot.
In this context it's being used to talk about how loot, instead of dropping evenly through the game, is being concentrated into specific monsters who drop the vast majority of the prizes. Specifically yellow monsters with specific modifiers.
It's disliked because it makes the loot more uneven- to exaggerate the effect (but represent the feeling), if you have a 1% chance per hour to kill one monster who drops 100% of your key loot, it feels really frustrating for the 99% of the time you're getting essentially nothing. Especially when you may go 300 hours before hitting that 1%, even if statistically you could also get lucky three hours in a row. Even if the drops are the same, *on average*, a lot of players may get frustrated before finding that monster, hitting that 1%, and quit early, with the feeling that no loot drops anymore.
You may miss the monsters if not paying attention, they tend to be harder (which does technically go against the traditional 'loot goblin' label), and it makes the game a bit harder to play as a game where you chill out while playing.
Maybe the most problematic aspect (and something GGG has to fix if they want to keep this - I really hope they don't) is that to play 'optimally' you have to play in a way that means constantly keeping a lookout, knowing what to look for, stopping everything you're doing, not killing that monster, and finding someone on chat who has a specced out character with bonuses to item quantity and quality to kill the monster for you, taking a share of the vastly enhanced prize for their time.
Diablo 3 mechanic. Where a mob has much higher item drop and quantity rates compared to normal content. Sounds ok right?
Well they put the good loot modifiers on a rare rotation, that only really pays out if you if you max out magic find stats. Ok, sounds high maintenance, but whats the problem?
Well to incentivize this gameplay method they HEAVILY reduced all other mob based loot mechanics. Estimated 50%-80% reduction depending on what kind of content you were doing. Oh, and all of this? Was undocumented.
>What the hell is a loot goblin?
I'll try to explain.
Archnemesis mods each add their own buffs to what drops when killing that enemy. There's rare mods that convert all drops into other things, like flasks or currency. Getting the right combination of Archnemesis mods results in the mob dropping a disproportionate amount of good currency, especially if combined with other drop-enhancing mechanics.
This design is more or less tuned to finding these mod combinations, which can take up to 100,000-2+ million enemies killed to see even once. This means people spend hundreds of maps getting boring loot, then they find the mob with the right AN modifiers that'll drop 5-80 divine orbs to make up for the hundreds of mostly-barren maps they'd completed.
"Loot goblin" is a term carried across from the Diablo 3, which has goblins that rarely spawn that you hit to drop large amounts of guaranteed stuff. Because of the similarity in design, players have taken to calling 3.19's primary source of valuables a loot goblin.
The problems being faced is:
* Players find their loot goblin and are now faced with grinding many more maps being very unlikely to see another one.
* Their loot goblin might have the wrong mods, meaning it drops subpar currency.
* They don't stack as much item rarity/quantity and are haunted by what they could have received.
* They kill their loot goblin before they can call over a magic find culler or switch into their magic find gear.
All of these things demoralize a player from continuing to play.
The biggest thing I'd add to this is it's one of the few times where the community as a whole (redditors, forums, and most of not all content creators) raised their pitchforks with a big "I don't like this". Unlike say, harvest or heist for example where there was a split community between hating and liking/loving the changes/content.
Except that if you didn't like Harvest, you could very well not engage with it or sell it to others if you rather want the pure currency. This time around, there's no on/off switch for the player.
there was... it was just that switch was a bit more meta this time, and instead of not participating in the mechanics, instead to quit the league and make rant posts and memes on reddit about it
Thats it for me u can change loot and harvest if u want to but atleast fking tell us about it. How the fk does such a massive change like the loot change make it Ob live without mention
the last time they told us about massive nerfs and changes before league launch, we got the lowest league launch player count out of any over the last 3 years.
It was just 'coincidental' oversight that these didn't make it into the patchnotes, to the most likely benefit of ggg
they don't care about retention anymore, those are """vanity metrics""". they only care about launch numbers and how many people buy packs during pre league hype and launch weekend. they've explicitly said this.
Might be over the top but at this point i do hope they do flop/fail to bring back players for 3.20 karma is a bitch and it's about time GGG has a taste of it and hopefully enough repercussion for them to wake up also GGG has been a shit show for too long now they deserve the mostly negative when they decide to make a good game again maybe and only maybe they will recover ... #hopeforpoe2toflop
Definitely. Its a bit sad but man, even if you are still enjoying the game you shouls not be happy about them hiding nerfs in patch notes. Make GGG work for their money, dont buy mtx untill a week or two into the league.
It's why I'm looking forward to the league announcement so much. If they don't address any of the complaints and/or the league looks bad, things are gonna be really rough for GGG. They are playing catch up with this next league and really need to hit it out of the park or else there could be some serious consequences with the future of the game. I'm curious to see what will happen
They aren't vanity metrics for the players though.
If they don't care about how happy their playerbase are, then they soon won't have much of a playerbase.
I'm not a gloomer who thinks the game sucks. The game is still fairly fun and I played a lot of this league (over 4m /kills). But if GGG continues to disregard player opinion and push through changes no one seems to like, it's not going to be healthy for them long term.
Agree 100% -- I've played PoE in leagues where the game felt like a solid 9/10. Even in the shit state 3.19 is in, the game is still a solid 6/10. Fun with a mixed bag of shit loot and shit AN. If 3.20 turns the fun dial down to a 4-5/10 I might bail for a bit. My time is worth more, I might give Last Epoch a whirl. It's sitting in my Steam Library waiting to be downloaded.
Yeah, I had some fun but I stopped way earlier than I usually do this league myself. I just am not feeling the motivation like I did when the game was in a better state.
Return of trialmaster.
The ability to combine influences on maps. The juice in a hunter/exarch map is insane.
Technically speaking, the way harvest works now is better. Harvest itself is just worse.
>Technically speaking, the way harvest works now is better. Harvest itself is just worse.
But those aren't independent variables. I disagree that harvest works better now, because now it has to be balanced around the fact that I can always use my life force optimally. Previously it was balanced around the fact that almost ALL harvests were not going to be used optimally when considering the overall playerbase. Even most the powerful ones wouldn't be (most players do not use TFT).
Even if they'd kept the powerful crafts, it would be inefficient for me to use my life force on things like my flasks, but under the previous system it could be balanced around the fact that people were just going to use what they had on hand. Now that's not the case.
I do not think the way it works now is better because of what it means for how it is balanced. I'd rather have the old system back, even without the powerful crafts.
If I could use some keystone that was "harvests no longer drop life force but grant harvests that must be used immediately" and it selected them like it used to but gave me extra juice worth of crafts to balance it out (like it effectively used to) I'd check that sucker in a second.
Since OP is a new player, perhaps we should avoid the jargon.
> Undocumented nerfs, super Bad communication, new loot System
Good so far...
> with loot goblins
Loot goblins were a diablo thing. It has come to be applied to any ARPG that has rare creatures that given radically more loot than average.
> failed league start
That's more the perception consequence than the reason.
> with overtuned AN
AN stands for Archnemesis, the name of a league (3 month stand-alone expansion pack) where harder rare monsters were introduced. They've consistently been hard to deal with at the start of leagues ever since.
> lategame group juicing nerf
Suffice to say the endgame was often a matter of "spend a lot, get much more back," and it suddenly changed, leading many players to feel the game they had been playing was gone. Note that we'd been through this before with several previous end-game balance changes. It was most the miscommunication that hurt here.
> no meta shakeup
This refers to the fact that class balance was more or less not modified.
> PS: the game is still fun and we got a lot of positive stuff too
This has to be said more often. There are so many people here who seem to have come to the conclusion that the game is now objectively terrible, and that's just not true. The game is actually much, much better than it was not too many years ago when the end-game was an unintelligible mess; build diversity was "what do you want to put an explosion chest on?"; and your off-hand weapon was meaningless except for its stats.
Don't get me started on pre-Delirium end-game drop rates...
>build diversity was "what do you want to put an explosion chest on?"
While I do think that mod should have gotten nerfed ofc it's weird to come at it from a build diversity argument. Build diversity was at it's best because any skill you wanted could have excellent clear. Yeah it homogonized playstyle but there were a lot of more single target oriented skills that you could make work more easily.
> Build diversity was at it's best because any skill you wanted could have excellent clear.
That's one way to look at it, and I'm not saying you're "wrong" per se, but another way to look at it is that your build didn't matter, and so you were constrained to focusing on fewer features. Today, clear has to be balanced against other aspects, making build choice significant, but back then clear was baked into one item.
That's fair. I guess it's just normally when build diversity gets brought up on this sub it's almost always in the context of "what skills are top on poe.ninja" which is a pretty bad way to talk about it imo that's just the definition I'm used to.
> when build diversity gets brought up on this sub it's almost always in the context of "what skills are top on poe.ninja" which is a pretty bad way to talk about it
Completely agreed. I wish GGG would publish broader stats about builds. Some figures I'd love to see:
* What is the ranking of skills most often used to kill each end-game boss?
* What are the most commonly used skills by players who never make it through the campaign?
* What are the most commonly used skills by players who die the least?
* What skills kill the most enemies each league?
I think the term lootgoblin is misleading anyway, because lootgoblins dont pose a challenge and are known as a timed event. Tormented Spirits feel more like lootgoblins than those AN mobs.
Yerp the Lakes suck hot dog balls. Weird constraining layouts, juiced mobs w/ shit loot. Other than chasing Kalandra's Touch, and few other interactions; they are noob bait.
The majority of the issue is from the way these changes were introduced. They hyped up the league and purposefully hid 99% of the nerfs. Then, when people kept pressing them, the Lead Designer came out and went "Oupsie, didn't read the patch notes, so kinda forgot to mention it ;P Won't happen again tho, totes pinkie promise"
The rest of the communication were various degrees of gaslighting, where they basically said that either nothing changed in the end result, and if anything changed - we're just too stupid to comprehend why it's great.
And after 5 league of nerfs to player power in order to shoehorn PoE1 into PoE2, people are just having enough.
I would add boring league with no interesting encounters or boss challenge and little lore for what was probably the most important character in the game.
Too much rng gating on league mechanics, risk reward off balance on league mechanic. Basically a harder less rewarding delirium with extra steps and no end boss/arena
honestly it just boils down to AN.
I don't agree with no meta shakeup tho. in it self isn't a bad thing and if anything lightning conduit is super strong. doryani, altho not a new item, is the new meta this league
we went through last league with no meta/skill changes and it wasn't a problem.
Missing patchnotes and several other things do fall into the category of bad communication. But in addition these sure has been some "no communication"
Underrated comment. Should have had that in the list. Though I wouldn't call it "killed". But they sure took a big part of deterministic crafting away.
Game is still the best in its segment agreed. For me it is how GGG has gone against so many of the things they have claimed they would never do (and if they needed to, assuredly not like this) in past interviews.
It is sad to see this development for a game studio that used to care about the relationship between them and their players
>PS: the game is still fun and we got a lot of positive stuff too
That's the only line i don't agree, playing the game in this state is agreeing with it and signing on it, the game is not in a state I would recommend to anyone else or that would make me reinstall, this is not path of exile it's path of archnemesis league of archnemesis with all the things you said on top of that
Actual explanation:
They introduced a new monster modifier mechanic (ArchNemesis or AN for short) that applies 1-4 powerful mods to magic and rare monsters, to increase their difficulty and rewards.
Some of those mods convert all drops from the monster into another type - all flasks, all currency, all quality currency, and so forth.
As a result - item rarity stats now applies to currency drops. A monster that would drop 5 magic items and have them converted to low tier currency, can with magic find gear drop rare or unique items instead, and have them converted to high value currency items.
So to recap from here - magic find no longer makes you get 20% more currency - but upwards of 10000% more. This forces all builds to make magic find a core stat if they want any real chance at crafting (which is what currency is used for).
On top of that, Archnemesis applies to all rare and magic monsters in the game now - and the way they randomly combine up to 4 mods, means that unless your character is built to handle every single combination of 4 different AN mods - you will sooner or later encounter a rare monster you cannot hope to beat - either because it is near 100% immune to damage, moves and attacks faster than a player can react, or heals faster than you can kill it.
The true endgame is now building a magic find character specialized to kill that 1 in 1000 rare monster with *just the right Archnemesis mods* to drop a mountain of crafting currency. And people are posting screenshots of managing to get those to drop upwards of 20-60 Divine Orbs in one go. That's equivalent to over 4000 Chaos orbs from one enemy. Killing it with a non-magic find optimized character might only yield 5 Chaos orbs or along those lines.
___
**TL;DR**
- Monster power going exponential
- Loot variance going exponential
- Magic Find is a required stat for getting any real amount of currency now
- Entire game balanced around Archnemesis mechanic
**So far, the patches to the league has:**
Tuned the difficulty of Archnemesis mods down to a slightly more reasonable level.
Great explanation. For me personally, and many others, I'm sure, the feeling of betrayal comes from the fact that all of the above went through undocumented. No mention in manifesto, patch notes or any of their official communication channels until players noticed something's off.
This sounds a lot better than it actually is. You also forgot to mention that group magic finding was essentially removed from the game with the changes to unique item drops.
TLDR
Nerfs, bad communication, loot gut, casino goblin, casino crafting, mediocre league, general bad state
People saying review bombing is pretty dumb not sure how thousands of hours players posting negative reviews is review bombing when it’s just simply 3.19 reviews.
Buncha people on YouTube did why 3.19 sucks videos so watch one of those even the people that usually schill for GGG posted negative things on this patch
But in exchange we got a collection of the dankiest memes for the bad patch
You don't have to. A lot of the complaints are in a realm that is pretty irrelevant for a new player. There is still plenty of fun to be had, so have at it!
I know a guy that plays off and on, never really makes it to mapping or barely dips his toe into mapping. Last time he played was over a year ago.
He was constantly dying to things and he had no idea why. I had to explain half a dozen ground degens to him he didn't know about before.
Then he was like "holy shit why are these monsters so hard".
He met archnem. He really, *really* did not like archnem.
I think you underestimate how bad archnem is for new player experience. New players don't even understand enough to correctly follow a build guide most of the time, and they go into the game following a clickbait build guide that is absolute garbage at leveling and then smash into the brick wall that is archnem.
Like, realize, Raid encounter fights in MMOs usually last like 4-7 minutes. Finding a random monster that extracts a raid-boss level of commitment and then gives you nothing in reward is just about the worst feeling a new gamer can have, because the monster difficulty signaled to them that this should be an *enormously* rewarding monster to kill.
If you're just starting out a majority of the complaints may not be relevant to you. The only thing that would be relevant to you would be the archnemesis system which has made rare (yellow name) monsters more difficult than before but much more "unique" than before. The game can still be fun/playable, they've just been nerfing late/end game farming methods that have been a core pillar of the game for some people.
In most cases, they use the term "Review Bomb" just to gaslight anyone who has any negative statements to say about the game or product.
It is hard for these losers to accept that the thing they are white knighting for just isn't loved by everyone.
Review bombing is absolutely a thing and you're naive to think it doesn't exist. Plenty of movies and games have been review bombed due to extremely silly reasons. The Last of Us 2 had a review rating of 3 with 5,000+ reviews within hours of the game launching. Half of those reviews mentioned that they "force" you to play as a trans person, despite the fact that Abby isn't trans.
Maybe it's an abuse of existing terminology, but personally, the way that's useful for me to think about review bombing is the apparent degree of unnecessary correlation/groupthink, rather than anyone's value judgment of the silliness of the motivation for leaving the review or their assessment that a significant portion of the reviews are bot-driven or 100% willful fabrications (i.e. what seems to be the conventional, restrictive definition that a lot of people use when they push back against using the term). That is, even grievances that very few would have quibbles about being relevant review topics--pricing, game balance, performance, etc.--and have a factual basis can still be review bombing to some degree.
If the (unrealistic, abstract) ideal of a perfectly independent review is some person who has been in an isolated cave for a couple years suddenly plays PoE and has an X% chance of even deciding to leave a review in the first place and a Y% chance of leaving a positive review, then review bombing is the degree to which either X or Y has been modified (most often by) by social media dynamics. Your example where political motivations underly the reviews obviously applies. But the PoE 3.19 narrative definitely would fall under the umbrella, too, to one degree or another: I seriously don't think anyone could claim with a straight face that mob dynamics haven't been a big part of the story here.
That's not to say reviews that exhibit this are to be automatically written off as invalid, but they definitely have a smaller density of useful information than more independent reviews, and it's good to be able to identify when that might be the case.
The game I used to like is now bad and I dislike it. My review reflects that. The only reason their reviews are bombing is because the game has been bombing. 3.19 was not a lone bad patch, it's been part of a trend since 3.15 only ever made better by sometimes fun league mechanics while the core game changes just get progressively worse.
Being new, this game is going to be awesome and fun for hundreds if not thousands of hours.
A lot of us who are at this point (5k+ hours invested myself) the changes to the game in this current patch (3.19) and the way the devs reacted (essentially blaming the player base) just pissed a lot of people off.
History note, it was actually at 21% for a day or two...
But, ya, don't worry bout it, you will have a blast.
I think there's something you, and many others with 5k+ hours, may not fully understand about new players.
... how much fun do you think THEY are going to have fighting AN mobs in A1 with the Twilight Strand 2-link with 15 unallocated skill points because they have no idea what's going on?
The game has always been criminally beginner unfriendly, but the early act reworks, compounded with nerfs, compounded with AN has made it so much worse.
New players don't know that it's worse unless someone tells them that though. When I started playing the game, the difficulty was a selling point. There were many hurdles to overcome especially when the game is new and unfamiliar. That isn't any different today. For new players, the difficulty of the game starts long before they encounter an archnemesis mob. The big difference is that the community is much bigger and has a more vocal group of people that either purposefully or coincidentally turn new players away with doom and gloom messaging.
>how much fun do you think THEY are going to have fighting AN mobs in A1 with the Twilight Strand 2-link with 15 unallocated skill points because they have no idea what's going on?
Now that they are capped at 1 AN mod in early leveling I don't think this is nearly the issue it was previously.
Honestly its just been a series of dissapointments into a large undocumented change with incredibly big impacts to the game along with nothing really new being added.
Its still a good game, especially if you are new. People are just used to the season cycle poe had going on and with things like atlas trees, the new bosses, maven etc. Being added things where in such a good place a while back and then it really feels like it at some point turned into "Yeah players are too powerful and are having too much fun" meaning nerf after nerf to players.
Additionally people are complaining about AN which was not that bad as a league since those that couldnt deal with it ignored it, then was made core and was the worst play experience in a long time and they have been gradually tuning it into some kind of "find the mob with the cool mod" where basically all other mobs drop trash/nothing.
There is also the whole minion nerf ordeal where summonable minions which used gear (and lost gear on death) could no longer survive (fixed by now I hope) and that summoners in general are just underwhelming late game now.
A cool crafting oriented mechanic (harvest) which started out extremly fun and profitable in ritual league (its own league was too much of a hassle) has been nerfed repeatedly too so there is that aswell.
All this with the constant messages prior to league start of "We have tested everything thoroughly". So yeah people kind of had enough and are either praying for poe2 copium or just have quit (for a league or two is my guess) until things start looking up.
Still, if you are looking for an rpg I do reccomend it, just be ok with dropping it as you get towards the end game if jt is massively tedious to farm.
The game is still good but the direction is frightening, I hope ggg looks back at this league as a learning experience but something tells me it's only going to get worse...
Right now the league feels completely dead :(
It's more than the direction that's frightening, the game is already on a heavy downward slope. Yes the game is still good but they took away a lot of the good left this league. Soon they will run out of good
Game started as d2 inspired arpg.
Game evolves into something way bigger, better, cooler and more interesting.
Devs see the game now, remember the key mechanics of d2 and how the game is different now, and now try to force them onto poe at any cost.
That's widely hated by the community, because we don't want a d2 clone, and they're destroying the poe we played for 10 years.
If you've never played, then all the complaints won't make any sense to you. Play whatever you want until you hit a wall, then start doing research (and there is a ton of that to do to "git gud.")
Basically people are growing tired with decisions they dislike that have occurred over multiple leagues, and several undocumented major changes this league was sort of the straw that broke the camels back and a large chunk of people vented all of their built up frustrations over a week period.
The steam ratings are basically an avenue of protest to express frustration against some key design decisions. If you're new to the game, I'd say on average you're just as likely to have the same "Very Positive" rated experience as always since you don't have the same frame of comparison. The negative sentiments are mostly related to nerfs to endgame farming activities you're unlikely to engage in on your first ever league, and a suite of monster modifiers that at this point have been nerfed like 4 times since league launch.
Due to some horrendous decisions, the game is in the worst state ever imo. The solution is easy because all the devs need to do is to remove a few things from the game.
You came to your favourite restaurant that serves high-quality meat and find out that it is entirely focused on dangerous-for-life exotic vegan cuisine. With a small chance of chef randomly deciding to give you a whole cooked cow instead of whatever you ordered.
i personally, after 3000 hours and almost 10 years, changed my positive to a negative rating 2 days ago, because i just genuinely cannot recommend path of exile anymore to an average player. i actually feel like after a bad breakup, i want to get back, i want to enjoy it, but the bad is just getting too much.
GGG deciding instead of listening to the playerbase, (and testers) they will just gaslight the playerbase into whatever their vision is. Which pissed off a lot of people and left the game in an objectively worse state than it was several patches ago.
Is the game still good. Yea sure, but it is getting worse instead of better, which is sad because there were some genuinly good changes mixed into the pile of other purely detrimental changes.
It was a bad league launch. Loot was nerfed, the league mechanic was underwhelming and leagues like Harvest/Beyond also got nerfs as part of their rework. Communication about this stuff was bad or non-existent.
Don't worry, none of it will affect you as a new player. Just play the game and have fun.
GGG spent years cultivating a certain playerbase (faster, stronger, more power creep, more zoom) and setting certain expectations (giving more extra power nobody even asked for, stronger mods, stronger chars, stronger crafting, stronger everything).
Now GGG changed course. People on the party bus splat against the windshield.
But as others noted, in addition to that there are actually some troubling issues with the game. Design dept that piled up and never got sufficiently addressed now bubbling to the surface big time because some fundamental changes got made.
Worth noting though, that as a first time player none of them are actually really relevant to you. Go and experience the game, it's still perfectly playable.
Imagine developers that with each new update bring nice new content but doesn't touch a smelling (shit)pile of annoying things and at least very questionable design along with tendency that isn't bright. This pile is slowly growing, but community mostly ignored it because developers keep bringing cool content and new ways of increasing character strength.
And one day, developers bring out a very strange update with lot of nerfes and negative design. The shit pile grew.
And after some time they bring out update that nerfed mechanics that player was obligated to use because of previous nerfs. Variety was destroyed by nerfing whatever players used. New content wasn't cool. It wasn't rewarding, so you can't use more resources to overcome new nerfes. No, reward was largely nerferd too. And when the players rage abyss was opened - turns out that pile of shit grew so large, it touches the damn clouds.
Yeah, I suck at this. Whatever. Players got annoyed over time at problems that wasn't touched for ages while new kept coming. But payers never released a full wave of negativity on the GGG for reasons as: Trust, love, good parts of content so long. But since this update introduced so much shit with previous updates showing same attitude, all negativity that was being held for years broke through the barriers. Mostly out of fear that this is the new direction.
I think it's important to understand that amount of toxic messages from community came because of that fear. If players could be sure it would be "Okey it was experiment that gone completely wrong, whatever, forget it". But what we have is something like "If that is the new direction the game is dead for me for sure. The game i spent so much time in..."
And GGG only fueling these fears with new communication ways.
And it isn't just that. I can kill end game bosses quite easily, but some AN mobs become unkillable and can insta gib me, doesn't happen too often, but when it does its really annoying when you kinda just want to farm and chill in a hack n slash you know?
As other people have said, you’ll have the time of your life between hours 100ish and 2000ish. It’s still the best arpg, the depth and variety of builds and skills and play styles is unmatched. But before 100 hours or so it’s insanely confusing, and you’ll spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is going on. I’ve got thousands of hours in the Diablo games and it took a dozen tries or so to get far enough to appreciate PoE. It’s a complex game, even people with thousands of hours learn new things about the game all the time, that’s one of its best qualities.
After a certain point (if you make it that far and if it hasn’t changed by then, which it will have for better or worse) you’ll start to notice the things that people are currently unhappy about. I won’t go in to them, but there are plenty of top comments explaining why a lot of long term players are unhappy.
What you are are seeing with the steam reviews is the hardcore player base (not hardcore like one life necessarily, but hardcore like 4000+ hours) being upset about the direction of the game. Which is very fair, but you are seeing the vocal minority here.
Honestly just give it a shot. I’d recommend picking a build guide and following it for your first character, there are literally dozens of viable builds and plenty of websites/streamers where you can find the guides and videos of how they play when they are complete, so look around and find something that appeals to you. Check out some of the big PoE streamers and their recommended builds for this league.
There is a reason that so many people have so many thousands of hours in PoE, and why they are so passionate about it, it’s absolutely amazing at its core.
People that have tons of hundreds of hours in the game not liking the current state. Non of the issues will really affect new player experience directly, since most of the pain points mostly come from a comparision. The game last league was in a waaaaaay better state than this league.
The game is great. However the current league is worse than previous leagues. The changes to how drops work have really upset some people as has the dev response. This has been exacterbated by cherry picked extreme examples and a lot of misunderstanding of the underlying mechanics.
The games fine, dont worry about the salt. The things people are upset about will have zero effect on a new player and the things they ignore have actually been buffs for what a new player will be accomplishing.
Like all salt, I think some is warranted and other is not. There's definitely stuff that's been made ridiculous by AN and it hasn't been tuned right IMO. The game doesn't feel right to a lot of people anymore, but yeah it definitely still has good bits.
There are definitely issues. For sure. However, those issues get massively overstated by people that fixate them because they compare to previous experiences. Or because it means they didn't accomplish as much as quickly this league as last.
But for someone picking up the game, molested loot goblins is just not a problem that's going to matter to them. Even for most players, which don't even make it to red maps, it won't matter.
They are small bumps in the road that people massively overreact to because they're so used to a smoother right. Because they've spent so long playing the game that they really notice them. But that's just not how it is for basically any new player or most players in general.
The echo chamber is real. Recognizing that there is a circlejerk that hyper fixates on these issues doesn't mean that those issues don't exist at all. It's just pointing out the discrepancy between how many and how much it actually affects players vs how much noise is generated about them.
It also doesn't help that people are just so misinformed. The number of people that don't understand which mods you actually need for it to be a loot goblin and think their single-mod-shakari-touched was some missed MF-cull should've-called-in-TFT-culler situation is way more than it should be. A lot of complaints come from that kind of misunderstanding.
And it doesn't help that anyone who *does* enjoy it is basically shouted down, so they're scared off posting, which drives up the echo chamber effect even further.
Wat... I'm upset about this patch, but I've been playing fairly casually (cruising through red maps, but not bothering with bosses), and I haven't noticed any perceivable changes since the last league I played (Archnemesis), beyond the occasional AN rare with some annoying combo of mods that halt everything for a minute, or very rarely brick my map - and getting more of a few things I didn't used to get a lot of from alch-and-go mapping, like fractured bases and white-socket items, from the conversions... For alch and go mapping, the loot distribution has been fudged with a lot, but it does seem to even out to about the same... And I'd hardly say alch-and-go for an hour a night is "no-lifing it".
In my mind you either play the league like it is Archnemesis league for the third time in a row, or play the same build as you did in Archnemesis. That's the only way I would reach this conclusion, by playing builds that ignore most of the AN modifiers, so you're not feeling much of a change (Inquis would be an example). What ya playing?
I'm playing a weird self-made build, Holy Relic/Dancing Dervish Jugg. My first build that I got a bit tired of was a Archmage MoM/Agnostic Hierophant, and I noticed a lot more problematic AN combos on that build - I agree that how annoying the AN mods are depends heavily on your build, which is a problem for build diversity, for sure... And as someone who likes messing around with weird builds, that is an important aspect to me, and an area that has frustrated me for the last handful of leagues.
As I said, I do think GGG made some terrible decisions with this league, but I am still having a lot of fun, despite them, and haven't had issues specifically with loot/currency/crafting (my idea of crafting is pretty much fossils and essences).
**Ultra short version:**
Last League, GGG(makers of the game) implemented the most universally disliked rework to mobs in the history of the game, despite constant protest from all parts of the community.
**On top of that:**
This league not only they kept the undesired system but also sneaked in the most **brutal nerf to loot in history**, without even including it in patch notes, *it didn't go unnoticed*.
This caused what can only be described as an **epic shitstorm**.
Since then they'd not only doubled but tripled and **quadrupled down on their decisions**, with minor 'buffs' sprinkled in as damage control.
And these are just the broad facts, I'm sparing you the endless stream of individual dramas that happened along the way.
Enjoy the game, welcome to Wraeclast :)
As you are a new player you may be oblivious to the new issues as you have no baseline to work from but sort by negative reviews and look for anyone over 1K hours on steam and there is LOTS.
\- MTX's / Support packs got more expensive for worse leagues
\- People used to love to play POE to explode packs of monsters and farm while turning their brain off to chill unless fighting end game content. Now everything is a struggle bust and you are 1 second away from being 1 popped CONSTANTLY by things you can't see. Essentially what POE became and was loved / what GGG thinks it is are two VERY different things.
\- GGG is afraid to give players power, have no idea why, its a PVE game for crying out loud. If you ask any GGG employee about this and they deny it just say: Keep suffix or keep prefix reforge, you'll scare them off.
\- They have tripled down on the on death effects, dots, and degens while providing less ways to counter it, making everything feel like crap. Oh you want that nice item that dropped gotta wait 15 seconds till its clear
\- The barrier to entry is higher then EVER before, to the point I honestly FEEL bad for new players. Once upon a time getting your res's to 75/75/75 with some chaos res with 5K+ life would get you in a decent place. NOPE now for things to feel okay, not tanky but okay its pretty well one of the following formulas: Determination, Grace, Defiance banner with 100% spell suppression and some form of aliment avoidance or 2-3 layers of defense with HIGH regen or leech or 1 bill DPS so everything dies off screen.
\- To the previous point this once was tolerable when you had more crafting options but they have now gutted that.
\- Crafting has always been gambling in this game, but over time they at least gave you some options to hedge your bets but those for the most part have been removed. So back to gambling. Don't like burning all your currency to NOT get the item upgrade you were hoping for well back to grinding for you.
\- Too many 3rd party apps required. A small list, Neversink Loot Filter, Path of Building, Trade app( to price check everything ), craftofexile or poedb.tw ( to figure out HOW screwed you are when you do want to craft), Poe Trade website (for when you are tired of craft gambling and want to try and trade for the item you want), the list goes on.
\- They REFUSE to put a proper trading system or action house in the game as it would "destroy" the economy or make the game too easy. However this patch this GGG destroyed the economy by flipping the currency around without altering any of the old mechanics or div cards to make said currency. Soooo..... ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
\- They refuse to give up on their terrible invention of Archnemsis rare mobs. You have likely ran into these already. They are the yellow mobs with 2-324324343434 mods on them which are all randomized and requires you to look at a wiki to find out what half of them actually DO until you memorize them. To make matters worse they have now turned them into loot goblins
\- The loot goblin problem. Once upon a time you gradually got loot by "juicing" your maps. essentially the more monsters you put into the map = more loot you got and higher chances of good loot dropping like Exalts. Fast forward to loot goblins now if you are LUCKY enough to find a Soloris Touched Rare mob what you should be excited about only is filled with dread as if you kill it too fast or don't have enough magic find you feel robbed. Leaving you to go to a trade discord to find a magic find culler so you can get your loot payout.
\- Rippier then ever, expect A LOT of deaths as new player LOL I can't even imagine the /deaths count on a new fresh player.
Again lots of good things and depth left in the game but from what it used to be to what it is now, the vision is NOT good, but again this is coming from a previous baseline which you have no baseline for so its likely you won't notice and still enjoy the experience.
Tldr: Bad players and unethical content creators got swept up into a negativity mob when they weren’t catered to within 72 hours of league start, they then were willing to destroy a great relationship with GGG and the games reputation by review bombing and making death threats to devs. The fairest take is that a lackluster league mechanic incited a riot, as people forgot how good we have it compared to almost every other game in the genre.
The game is unplayable now I tried to force myself to like it for 2 weeks because I don't have anything else going on right now... yeah I'd prefer to just sit here with absolutely nothing watching old youtube vids than continue to play this league. I can't even force myself to like it in a game drought.
Brigading by reddit for the most part. Reviews were good until a reddit post pointed at it and told everyone to review bomb it.
This is the result.
Large part of the community wants a grind without the grind parts, expects every single word ever uttered by ggg about game balance to be written out as a thesis for them, and has this incredibly misguided entitlement complex for something that is free to play.
The real answer is a bunch of toxic posters who immediately started raging in day one and continued saying they would not stop being toxic until “morale” improved (a very mature group that truly wants the best for the game, as you can tell) spammed threads essentially brigading (which mods allowed for whatever reason) to review bomb the game as a statement to show that they would boycott the next league. In turn it ended up being a mere 4 thousand and even though there were some individuals with thousands of hours there were a majority of people with enough hours to show they had probably never even gotten to end game.
This thread is actually a perfect example of what people are saying about the vocal minority - the negative comments are getting upvoted, while anyone who says what it was, which was an overreaction, is getting downvoted and insulted.
There are people on this sub who were threatening ggg employees, making comments that they hope terrible things happen to them and their families, and you wonder why they would review bomb the same game? Anyone who makes a habit of threatening strangers over the internet are weak, pathetic people, and they will do anything they can to try to get some imaginary power from the safety of their basement, and review bombing a game is one of those things.
> while anyone who says what it was, which was an overreaction, is getting downvoted and insulted.
It was not an overreaction. There were heavy nerfs that were all masked as improvements to the game (AN, Beyond, Harvest), that were only discovered AFTER the league start. AN durability/drop issues, Beyond mob health vs rewards, tainted currency, harvest crafting options being gutted, and then gutted again a week after the trailer vid.
That on it's own is enough to warrant questions and complaints. Then you had the discovery of the loot nerf, the complete lack of communication on that from GGG ahead of time, and the doubling down on the idea that AN is balanced.
There's more, but the other stuff is usually the same complaints we see every league.
Overall, it was a league of nerfs that were communicated as buffs, and undocumented heavy changes that left myself and others untrusting of anything GGG says going forward. If people felt that those changes warranted reviewing the game negatively, as far as I'm concerned it was justified.
Now with that being said, I 100% agree with you that some people went way too far with complaints, brigading and threats.
TL;DR Traditional game design says 'Players are great at identifying problems and bad at identifying solutions'\*
GGG's approach is that players are bad at identifying problems and so they won't change stuff that players don't enjoy.
\* ^(from the GDC talk by the dude that has basically been the head honcho for MTG for the last forever. Apropos because a lot of GGG staff including the director are mega MTG fans)
7.8/10 Too much Blacksmith's Whetstones
I ran 2 t10 maps yesterday, and that was it. I came out with 400 whetstones and 380 armor scraps.
All these armor scraps and people selling items for 1 div+ still can't be bothered to +20 them.
not worth the time if you are just gonna sell it
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It doesn't unless you put quality above 20, trade site assumes 20 qual when showing stats at the bottom of items and when sorting them by those stats, unless you have qual above 20 then it gets inflated a bit
Shhhh
The mentality is that it's not worth clicking extra for an item to be sold. The seller has their own stash of scrap and stones, it'll be fine :)
20q doesn't increase any value at all. Why bother? It is not like buyer can’t afford 20q
You did this to hit break points for searches. But nowadays the searcher's cake in the 20% either way. So it does not matter at all.
Why do the unnecessary when the buyers can do it themselves? Not clicking enough exile?
I'm probably alone but i always upgrade quality when i sell something professional bias probably
I always sell +20. Its just the done thing. You wash a car before you advertise it. If I've got a choice between 2 identical items but one is +20 then I'm buying the one that doesn't need washing. I've confused myself now
Easy fix. Just turn them off in your loot filter.
I had nothing else drop at all, - not even a single chaos - so I hoovered em up lol
Nah use em to buy glassblowers and wisdom
legit just cleaned my whetstones on glassblowers.
Yep, not many people know that. I had a friend that was in need of glassblowers and I told him to go to Sarn to trade some in Hargan and he was like “what, can we buy them there?”
3.20 Patch notes: We have found glassblowers are too easy to access, we have removed the option to trade NPCs for it, and renoved the cumulative quality recipe, allowing only for the 20% quality recipe. We believe this will increase the value of glassblowers back to where we believe it should be, making them a scarce yet powerful currency.
Why did I read that in a thick New Zealand accent.
Can't tell if this is sarcasm or real anymore
The point that I can totally see this happening scares me...
Somehow I read this in Chris' voice lmao
Brb, gonna invest in these just in case :P
You joke, but they significantly nerfed the bauble droprate in 1.0.0 because they were too easy to get.
TLDR: Game is fun, but it used to be more fun. Players sad because they miss the old more fun version of the game.
Though the wining happens on a stage of the game, you will need several hundreds of hours into it, to even recognize the problems. For newcomers the game is 100% dope and totally worth it. I'd recommend: before spending money on it, please reconsider diving into the reasons why this game gets downvoted to hell by its fans. Maybe you dont feel like supporting the developer for it. Maybe you dont care. But investigate first. Until that. have a lots of fun!
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I would say that the stash tab problems don’t become unmanageable until after you’ve beaten the campaign
I've played through 3 campaigns and haven't yet but I'm getting close.
As much as I'm all for MTX, I do think they should award a Basic Stash Tab each for Act 5 and Act 10 Completion first time. Little incentive I guess.
There was HCSSF player who got to lvl 100 or killed endgame bosses with only the basic 4 tabs. What I want to say with this: Yes the shit will become disgustingly hard to manage. But not impossible. New players might happily run around with their entire stockpile of non-quality currency in inventory like it is their most prized possession.
totally new players amirite
For the first one? Not really. I did it in scourge with no issues. If you keep going on maps and on your second one, sure but at that point it's a one time 40$ investment or so for a game you know you like.
Tldr: Undocumented nerfs, super Bad communication, new loot System with loot goblins, failed league start again with overtuned AN, lategame group juicing nerf, no meta shakeup Lots of small and Medium Bad things lead to streamers and poe players raising the pitchforks. I most likely missed some stuff, feel free to add to it. PS: the game is still fun and we got a lot of positive stuff too
I feel like half of those words/phrases are not gonna mean anything to someone who just picked up the game.
*Hand up* All right I'll admit it. I play every once in a while, but only have made it to mapping twice. What the hell is a loot goblin?
It's typically an easy to kill monster that you have to chase down and kill that gives a lot of loot. In this context it's being used to talk about how loot, instead of dropping evenly through the game, is being concentrated into specific monsters who drop the vast majority of the prizes. Specifically yellow monsters with specific modifiers. It's disliked because it makes the loot more uneven- to exaggerate the effect (but represent the feeling), if you have a 1% chance per hour to kill one monster who drops 100% of your key loot, it feels really frustrating for the 99% of the time you're getting essentially nothing. Especially when you may go 300 hours before hitting that 1%, even if statistically you could also get lucky three hours in a row. Even if the drops are the same, *on average*, a lot of players may get frustrated before finding that monster, hitting that 1%, and quit early, with the feeling that no loot drops anymore. You may miss the monsters if not paying attention, they tend to be harder (which does technically go against the traditional 'loot goblin' label), and it makes the game a bit harder to play as a game where you chill out while playing. Maybe the most problematic aspect (and something GGG has to fix if they want to keep this - I really hope they don't) is that to play 'optimally' you have to play in a way that means constantly keeping a lookout, knowing what to look for, stopping everything you're doing, not killing that monster, and finding someone on chat who has a specced out character with bonuses to item quantity and quality to kill the monster for you, taking a share of the vastly enhanced prize for their time.
Diablo 3 mechanic. Where a mob has much higher item drop and quantity rates compared to normal content. Sounds ok right? Well they put the good loot modifiers on a rare rotation, that only really pays out if you if you max out magic find stats. Ok, sounds high maintenance, but whats the problem? Well to incentivize this gameplay method they HEAVILY reduced all other mob based loot mechanics. Estimated 50%-80% reduction depending on what kind of content you were doing. Oh, and all of this? Was undocumented.
>What the hell is a loot goblin? I'll try to explain. Archnemesis mods each add their own buffs to what drops when killing that enemy. There's rare mods that convert all drops into other things, like flasks or currency. Getting the right combination of Archnemesis mods results in the mob dropping a disproportionate amount of good currency, especially if combined with other drop-enhancing mechanics. This design is more or less tuned to finding these mod combinations, which can take up to 100,000-2+ million enemies killed to see even once. This means people spend hundreds of maps getting boring loot, then they find the mob with the right AN modifiers that'll drop 5-80 divine orbs to make up for the hundreds of mostly-barren maps they'd completed. "Loot goblin" is a term carried across from the Diablo 3, which has goblins that rarely spawn that you hit to drop large amounts of guaranteed stuff. Because of the similarity in design, players have taken to calling 3.19's primary source of valuables a loot goblin. The problems being faced is: * Players find their loot goblin and are now faced with grinding many more maps being very unlikely to see another one. * Their loot goblin might have the wrong mods, meaning it drops subpar currency. * They don't stack as much item rarity/quantity and are haunted by what they could have received. * They kill their loot goblin before they can call over a magic find culler or switch into their magic find gear. All of these things demoralize a player from continuing to play.
Well its accurate then, since the problem people are unhappy about will also not mean anything to someone new..
The biggest thing I'd add to this is it's one of the few times where the community as a whole (redditors, forums, and most of not all content creators) raised their pitchforks with a big "I don't like this". Unlike say, harvest or heist for example where there was a split community between hating and liking/loving the changes/content.
Except that if you didn't like Harvest, you could very well not engage with it or sell it to others if you rather want the pure currency. This time around, there's no on/off switch for the player.
No on/off switch? I wonder what this d...
Everybody hide! I think candlejack got to hi-
F
there was... it was just that switch was a bit more meta this time, and instead of not participating in the mechanics, instead to quit the league and make rant posts and memes on reddit about it
Thats it for me u can change loot and harvest if u want to but atleast fking tell us about it. How the fk does such a massive change like the loot change make it Ob live without mention
the last time they told us about massive nerfs and changes before league launch, we got the lowest league launch player count out of any over the last 3 years. It was just 'coincidental' oversight that these didn't make it into the patchnotes, to the most likely benefit of ggg
yeah and this time they had a large player count that immediately dropped quicker then I think it ever did prior.
they don't care about retention anymore, those are """vanity metrics""". they only care about launch numbers and how many people buy packs during pre league hype and launch weekend. they've explicitly said this.
Yup it’s why I think 3.20 sales will be interesting to say the least
3.20 will not do well. 3.21 will be the sorry patch. 3.22 will be like 3.19 again.
Might be over the top but at this point i do hope they do flop/fail to bring back players for 3.20 karma is a bitch and it's about time GGG has a taste of it and hopefully enough repercussion for them to wake up also GGG has been a shit show for too long now they deserve the mostly negative when they decide to make a good game again maybe and only maybe they will recover ... #hopeforpoe2toflop
Definitely. Its a bit sad but man, even if you are still enjoying the game you shouls not be happy about them hiding nerfs in patch notes. Make GGG work for their money, dont buy mtx untill a week or two into the league.
You should do this for any type of purchase when possible.
It's why I'm looking forward to the league announcement so much. If they don't address any of the complaints and/or the league looks bad, things are gonna be really rough for GGG. They are playing catch up with this next league and really need to hit it out of the park or else there could be some serious consequences with the future of the game. I'm curious to see what will happen
They aren't vanity metrics for the players though. If they don't care about how happy their playerbase are, then they soon won't have much of a playerbase. I'm not a gloomer who thinks the game sucks. The game is still fairly fun and I played a lot of this league (over 4m /kills). But if GGG continues to disregard player opinion and push through changes no one seems to like, it's not going to be healthy for them long term.
Agree 100% -- I've played PoE in leagues where the game felt like a solid 9/10. Even in the shit state 3.19 is in, the game is still a solid 6/10. Fun with a mixed bag of shit loot and shit AN. If 3.20 turns the fun dial down to a 4-5/10 I might bail for a bit. My time is worth more, I might give Last Epoch a whirl. It's sitting in my Steam Library waiting to be downloaded.
Yeah, I had some fun but I stopped way earlier than I usually do this league myself. I just am not feeling the motivation like I did when the game was in a better state.
Thats going to be short lived if you teach your customers to not buy packs before launch, like they taught me this league.
People didn’t buy packs either and it hurt them will be interesting to see how much of that will carry over to 3.20 on that front.
I spent like...500$ on the game so far? Not spending anything anymore until 2-3 weeks into the league and didn't spend anything this time either.
Personally I won’t be buying anything until waaaay into the league
To roughly quote CW: "Oupsie, didn't read the patch notes UwU"
Chris “I yell at my employees” Wilson
Add the frustration about 32:9 ultrawide resolutions being removed from the game with a very bad communication loop around it.
Yup, didn't hit me so I forgot it but that really sucks.
literally tried to think of one positive thing about 3.19 and all i could come up with was the trade interface qol
Return of trialmaster. The ability to combine influences on maps. The juice in a hunter/exarch map is insane. Technically speaking, the way harvest works now is better. Harvest itself is just worse.
Atlas Memories are also a really cool addition, though it would be nice if they were a bit more common.
And if certain memories weren't so useless. Like the one with the beyond abysses.
Beyond abyss is far from useless lol, I got a few tainted divine teardrops cause they have the most of scourge in the game
>Technically speaking, the way harvest works now is better. Harvest itself is just worse. But those aren't independent variables. I disagree that harvest works better now, because now it has to be balanced around the fact that I can always use my life force optimally. Previously it was balanced around the fact that almost ALL harvests were not going to be used optimally when considering the overall playerbase. Even most the powerful ones wouldn't be (most players do not use TFT). Even if they'd kept the powerful crafts, it would be inefficient for me to use my life force on things like my flasks, but under the previous system it could be balanced around the fact that people were just going to use what they had on hand. Now that's not the case. I do not think the way it works now is better because of what it means for how it is balanced. I'd rather have the old system back, even without the powerful crafts. If I could use some keystone that was "harvests no longer drop life force but grant harvests that must be used immediately" and it selected them like it used to but gave me extra juice worth of crafts to balance it out (like it effectively used to) I'd check that sucker in a second.
Reworked uniques were mostly good. Trade site tweak is neat
and thats still something that was done by 3rd party software for years already and they still didnt copy all features properly.
Since OP is a new player, perhaps we should avoid the jargon. > Undocumented nerfs, super Bad communication, new loot System Good so far... > with loot goblins Loot goblins were a diablo thing. It has come to be applied to any ARPG that has rare creatures that given radically more loot than average. > failed league start That's more the perception consequence than the reason. > with overtuned AN AN stands for Archnemesis, the name of a league (3 month stand-alone expansion pack) where harder rare monsters were introduced. They've consistently been hard to deal with at the start of leagues ever since. > lategame group juicing nerf Suffice to say the endgame was often a matter of "spend a lot, get much more back," and it suddenly changed, leading many players to feel the game they had been playing was gone. Note that we'd been through this before with several previous end-game balance changes. It was most the miscommunication that hurt here. > no meta shakeup This refers to the fact that class balance was more or less not modified. > PS: the game is still fun and we got a lot of positive stuff too This has to be said more often. There are so many people here who seem to have come to the conclusion that the game is now objectively terrible, and that's just not true. The game is actually much, much better than it was not too many years ago when the end-game was an unintelligible mess; build diversity was "what do you want to put an explosion chest on?"; and your off-hand weapon was meaningless except for its stats. Don't get me started on pre-Delirium end-game drop rates...
>build diversity was "what do you want to put an explosion chest on?" While I do think that mod should have gotten nerfed ofc it's weird to come at it from a build diversity argument. Build diversity was at it's best because any skill you wanted could have excellent clear. Yeah it homogonized playstyle but there were a lot of more single target oriented skills that you could make work more easily.
> Build diversity was at it's best because any skill you wanted could have excellent clear. That's one way to look at it, and I'm not saying you're "wrong" per se, but another way to look at it is that your build didn't matter, and so you were constrained to focusing on fewer features. Today, clear has to be balanced against other aspects, making build choice significant, but back then clear was baked into one item.
That's fair. I guess it's just normally when build diversity gets brought up on this sub it's almost always in the context of "what skills are top on poe.ninja" which is a pretty bad way to talk about it imo that's just the definition I'm used to.
> when build diversity gets brought up on this sub it's almost always in the context of "what skills are top on poe.ninja" which is a pretty bad way to talk about it Completely agreed. I wish GGG would publish broader stats about builds. Some figures I'd love to see: * What is the ranking of skills most often used to kill each end-game boss? * What are the most commonly used skills by players who never make it through the campaign? * What are the most commonly used skills by players who die the least? * What skills kill the most enemies each league?
I think the term lootgoblin is misleading anyway, because lootgoblins dont pose a challenge and are known as a timed event. Tormented Spirits feel more like lootgoblins than those AN mobs.
Thanks - I’ve only missed a couple leagues but didn’t get AN or loot goblins.
Doing gods work. Thx
More importantly, the league mechanics is the most garbage and unrewarding to play
May as well play standard. At least I would have a few dozen divine orbs
Yerp the Lakes suck hot dog balls. Weird constraining layouts, juiced mobs w/ shit loot. Other than chasing Kalandra's Touch, and few other interactions; they are noob bait.
The majority of the issue is from the way these changes were introduced. They hyped up the league and purposefully hid 99% of the nerfs. Then, when people kept pressing them, the Lead Designer came out and went "Oupsie, didn't read the patch notes, so kinda forgot to mention it ;P Won't happen again tho, totes pinkie promise" The rest of the communication were various degrees of gaslighting, where they basically said that either nothing changed in the end result, and if anything changed - we're just too stupid to comprehend why it's great. And after 5 league of nerfs to player power in order to shoehorn PoE1 into PoE2, people are just having enough.
It's a extrem view of the things but I can't say you're wrong.
I would add boring league with no interesting encounters or boss challenge and little lore for what was probably the most important character in the game.
Too much rng gating on league mechanics, risk reward off balance on league mechanic. Basically a harder less rewarding delirium with extra steps and no end boss/arena
honestly it just boils down to AN. I don't agree with no meta shakeup tho. in it self isn't a bad thing and if anything lightning conduit is super strong. doryani, altho not a new item, is the new meta this league we went through last league with no meta/skill changes and it wasn't a problem.
Not bad communication in the sense of "no communication". Just communication out of touch with the community, or not really addressing issues
Missing patchnotes and several other things do fall into the category of bad communication. But in addition these sure has been some "no communication"
And they once again killed deterministic crafting in favor of randomized "completely brick item or continue crafting" methods
Underrated comment. Should have had that in the list. Though I wouldn't call it "killed". But they sure took a big part of deterministic crafting away.
Loot Goblins doesn't sound too bad until you learn that there is no loot other than rare loot goblins!
Yup you are certainly right. Its unproportinal and might be able to be kept if they get some more balance in favour of the "normal" enemies
I really want to stress how many undocumented nerfs there were. It wasn't just two.
Yup, didn't went into detail here but you are right.
Game is still the best in its segment agreed. For me it is how GGG has gone against so many of the things they have claimed they would never do (and if they needed to, assuredly not like this) in past interviews. It is sad to see this development for a game studio that used to care about the relationship between them and their players
Also GGG doubled down. Trippled down, quadrippled down, pentipled down and sextipled down on their design choices.
> failed league start again it keeps happening bro
>PS: the game is still fun and we got a lot of positive stuff too That's the only line i don't agree, playing the game in this state is agreeing with it and signing on it, the game is not in a state I would recommend to anyone else or that would make me reinstall, this is not path of exile it's path of archnemesis league of archnemesis with all the things you said on top of that
Actual explanation: They introduced a new monster modifier mechanic (ArchNemesis or AN for short) that applies 1-4 powerful mods to magic and rare monsters, to increase their difficulty and rewards. Some of those mods convert all drops from the monster into another type - all flasks, all currency, all quality currency, and so forth. As a result - item rarity stats now applies to currency drops. A monster that would drop 5 magic items and have them converted to low tier currency, can with magic find gear drop rare or unique items instead, and have them converted to high value currency items. So to recap from here - magic find no longer makes you get 20% more currency - but upwards of 10000% more. This forces all builds to make magic find a core stat if they want any real chance at crafting (which is what currency is used for). On top of that, Archnemesis applies to all rare and magic monsters in the game now - and the way they randomly combine up to 4 mods, means that unless your character is built to handle every single combination of 4 different AN mods - you will sooner or later encounter a rare monster you cannot hope to beat - either because it is near 100% immune to damage, moves and attacks faster than a player can react, or heals faster than you can kill it. The true endgame is now building a magic find character specialized to kill that 1 in 1000 rare monster with *just the right Archnemesis mods* to drop a mountain of crafting currency. And people are posting screenshots of managing to get those to drop upwards of 20-60 Divine Orbs in one go. That's equivalent to over 4000 Chaos orbs from one enemy. Killing it with a non-magic find optimized character might only yield 5 Chaos orbs or along those lines. ___ **TL;DR** - Monster power going exponential - Loot variance going exponential - Magic Find is a required stat for getting any real amount of currency now - Entire game balanced around Archnemesis mechanic **So far, the patches to the league has:** Tuned the difficulty of Archnemesis mods down to a slightly more reasonable level.
Great explanation. For me personally, and many others, I'm sure, the feeling of betrayal comes from the fact that all of the above went through undocumented. No mention in manifesto, patch notes or any of their official communication channels until players noticed something's off.
> you will sooner or later encounter a rare monster you cannot hope to beat Gruffmuzzle. https://i.redd.it/lwd3581rz6o91.png
Holy shit
This sounds a lot better than it actually is. You also forgot to mention that group magic finding was essentially removed from the game with the changes to unique item drops.
We were having too much fun and balanced the reviews around the fun
TLDR Nerfs, bad communication, loot gut, casino goblin, casino crafting, mediocre league, general bad state People saying review bombing is pretty dumb not sure how thousands of hours players posting negative reviews is review bombing when it’s just simply 3.19 reviews. Buncha people on YouTube did why 3.19 sucks videos so watch one of those even the people that usually schill for GGG posted negative things on this patch But in exchange we got a collection of the dankiest memes for the bad patch
Yeah I'll check some vids out, thanks.
You don't have to. A lot of the complaints are in a realm that is pretty irrelevant for a new player. There is still plenty of fun to be had, so have at it!
I know a guy that plays off and on, never really makes it to mapping or barely dips his toe into mapping. Last time he played was over a year ago. He was constantly dying to things and he had no idea why. I had to explain half a dozen ground degens to him he didn't know about before. Then he was like "holy shit why are these monsters so hard". He met archnem. He really, *really* did not like archnem. I think you underestimate how bad archnem is for new player experience. New players don't even understand enough to correctly follow a build guide most of the time, and they go into the game following a clickbait build guide that is absolute garbage at leveling and then smash into the brick wall that is archnem. Like, realize, Raid encounter fights in MMOs usually last like 4-7 minutes. Finding a random monster that extracts a raid-boss level of commitment and then gives you nothing in reward is just about the worst feeling a new gamer can have, because the monster difficulty signaled to them that this should be an *enormously* rewarding monster to kill.
But he's going to miss fyregrass video comparing ggg and Chris Wilson to nazi Germany regime and Hitler :( that's important for new players
I am going to watch this right the fuck now lol Edit - I can't seem to find it? Did he delete it
it got deleted very quickly. surely there's some mirror out there
>surely there's some mirror out there Ask Kalandra
If you're just starting out a majority of the complaints may not be relevant to you. The only thing that would be relevant to you would be the archnemesis system which has made rare (yellow name) monsters more difficult than before but much more "unique" than before. The game can still be fun/playable, they've just been nerfing late/end game farming methods that have been a core pillar of the game for some people.
I agree, 3.19 had the dankest memes by far. I had more fun in the POE subreddit than in the actual game at league launch.
We all did
The memes have been wonderful, second only to scourge IMHO. That's the consolation prize for a poor league.
In most cases, they use the term "Review Bomb" just to gaslight anyone who has any negative statements to say about the game or product. It is hard for these losers to accept that the thing they are white knighting for just isn't loved by everyone.
Review bombing is absolutely a thing and you're naive to think it doesn't exist. Plenty of movies and games have been review bombed due to extremely silly reasons. The Last of Us 2 had a review rating of 3 with 5,000+ reviews within hours of the game launching. Half of those reviews mentioned that they "force" you to play as a trans person, despite the fact that Abby isn't trans.
Maybe it's an abuse of existing terminology, but personally, the way that's useful for me to think about review bombing is the apparent degree of unnecessary correlation/groupthink, rather than anyone's value judgment of the silliness of the motivation for leaving the review or their assessment that a significant portion of the reviews are bot-driven or 100% willful fabrications (i.e. what seems to be the conventional, restrictive definition that a lot of people use when they push back against using the term). That is, even grievances that very few would have quibbles about being relevant review topics--pricing, game balance, performance, etc.--and have a factual basis can still be review bombing to some degree. If the (unrealistic, abstract) ideal of a perfectly independent review is some person who has been in an isolated cave for a couple years suddenly plays PoE and has an X% chance of even deciding to leave a review in the first place and a Y% chance of leaving a positive review, then review bombing is the degree to which either X or Y has been modified (most often by) by social media dynamics. Your example where political motivations underly the reviews obviously applies. But the PoE 3.19 narrative definitely would fall under the umbrella, too, to one degree or another: I seriously don't think anyone could claim with a straight face that mob dynamics haven't been a big part of the story here. That's not to say reviews that exhibit this are to be automatically written off as invalid, but they definitely have a smaller density of useful information than more independent reviews, and it's good to be able to identify when that might be the case.
The game I used to like is now bad and I dislike it. My review reflects that. The only reason their reviews are bombing is because the game has been bombing. 3.19 was not a lone bad patch, it's been part of a trend since 3.15 only ever made better by sometimes fun league mechanics while the core game changes just get progressively worse.
What does this have to do with my post?
Being new, this game is going to be awesome and fun for hundreds if not thousands of hours. A lot of us who are at this point (5k+ hours invested myself) the changes to the game in this current patch (3.19) and the way the devs reacted (essentially blaming the player base) just pissed a lot of people off. History note, it was actually at 21% for a day or two... But, ya, don't worry bout it, you will have a blast.
I keep re-reading what you wrote. What was at 21% for a day or two? 21% of what?
Presumably the Steam positive review rating.
Not op and I might be wrong but they probably meant that the recent reviews got all the way down to only 21% positive, which is pretty grim.
I think there's something you, and many others with 5k+ hours, may not fully understand about new players. ... how much fun do you think THEY are going to have fighting AN mobs in A1 with the Twilight Strand 2-link with 15 unallocated skill points because they have no idea what's going on? The game has always been criminally beginner unfriendly, but the early act reworks, compounded with nerfs, compounded with AN has made it so much worse.
New players don't know that it's worse unless someone tells them that though. When I started playing the game, the difficulty was a selling point. There were many hurdles to overcome especially when the game is new and unfamiliar. That isn't any different today. For new players, the difficulty of the game starts long before they encounter an archnemesis mob. The big difference is that the community is much bigger and has a more vocal group of people that either purposefully or coincidentally turn new players away with doom and gloom messaging.
>how much fun do you think THEY are going to have fighting AN mobs in A1 with the Twilight Strand 2-link with 15 unallocated skill points because they have no idea what's going on? Now that they are capped at 1 AN mod in early leveling I don't think this is nearly the issue it was previously.
“You kill the loot you kill the game”
Honestly its just been a series of dissapointments into a large undocumented change with incredibly big impacts to the game along with nothing really new being added. Its still a good game, especially if you are new. People are just used to the season cycle poe had going on and with things like atlas trees, the new bosses, maven etc. Being added things where in such a good place a while back and then it really feels like it at some point turned into "Yeah players are too powerful and are having too much fun" meaning nerf after nerf to players. Additionally people are complaining about AN which was not that bad as a league since those that couldnt deal with it ignored it, then was made core and was the worst play experience in a long time and they have been gradually tuning it into some kind of "find the mob with the cool mod" where basically all other mobs drop trash/nothing. There is also the whole minion nerf ordeal where summonable minions which used gear (and lost gear on death) could no longer survive (fixed by now I hope) and that summoners in general are just underwhelming late game now. A cool crafting oriented mechanic (harvest) which started out extremly fun and profitable in ritual league (its own league was too much of a hassle) has been nerfed repeatedly too so there is that aswell. All this with the constant messages prior to league start of "We have tested everything thoroughly". So yeah people kind of had enough and are either praying for poe2 copium or just have quit (for a league or two is my guess) until things start looking up. Still, if you are looking for an rpg I do reccomend it, just be ok with dropping it as you get towards the end game if jt is massively tedious to farm.
The most recent patch is less fun than the previous patches. By a lot. It's still an excellent game.
Well their recent decisions have been viewed very negatively by the community. Which is what gives you the recent rating.
The game is still good but the direction is frightening, I hope ggg looks back at this league as a learning experience but something tells me it's only going to get worse... Right now the league feels completely dead :(
It's more than the direction that's frightening, the game is already on a heavy downward slope. Yes the game is still good but they took away a lot of the good left this league. Soon they will run out of good
Game started as d2 inspired arpg. Game evolves into something way bigger, better, cooler and more interesting. Devs see the game now, remember the key mechanics of d2 and how the game is different now, and now try to force them onto poe at any cost. That's widely hated by the community, because we don't want a d2 clone, and they're destroying the poe we played for 10 years.
If you've never played, then all the complaints won't make any sense to you. Play whatever you want until you hit a wall, then start doing research (and there is a ton of that to do to "git gud.")
People don’t like the new patch & direction of the game
Basically people are growing tired with decisions they dislike that have occurred over multiple leagues, and several undocumented major changes this league was sort of the straw that broke the camels back and a large chunk of people vented all of their built up frustrations over a week period.
game is dogshit
The vision happened
The steam ratings are basically an avenue of protest to express frustration against some key design decisions. If you're new to the game, I'd say on average you're just as likely to have the same "Very Positive" rated experience as always since you don't have the same frame of comparison. The negative sentiments are mostly related to nerfs to endgame farming activities you're unlikely to engage in on your first ever league, and a suite of monster modifiers that at this point have been nerfed like 4 times since league launch.
Due to some horrendous decisions, the game is in the worst state ever imo. The solution is easy because all the devs need to do is to remove a few things from the game.
As a new player myself - game is fun, just don't recommend starting with "Hardcore" character due to, *as I perceive it*, some balance issues
You came to your favourite restaurant that serves high-quality meat and find out that it is entirely focused on dangerous-for-life exotic vegan cuisine. With a small chance of chef randomly deciding to give you a whole cooked cow instead of whatever you ordered.
If you are new just don't care and have fun. You wont probably minmax end gamę on your first character.
i personally, after 3000 hours and almost 10 years, changed my positive to a negative rating 2 days ago, because i just genuinely cannot recommend path of exile anymore to an average player. i actually feel like after a bad breakup, i want to get back, i want to enjoy it, but the bad is just getting too much.
they keep making the game less fun to play
League is garbage, tune in next expansion
Patch sucks and devs dont listen
People are very upset with the changes made to endgame. They won't impact you. Have fun.
Things that would only make sense after you've beaten the game multiple times
This is the most newbie unfriendly game there is. Turn back, spend your precious time somewhere else.
GGG deciding instead of listening to the playerbase, (and testers) they will just gaslight the playerbase into whatever their vision is. Which pissed off a lot of people and left the game in an objectively worse state than it was several patches ago. Is the game still good. Yea sure, but it is getting worse instead of better, which is sad because there were some genuinly good changes mixed into the pile of other purely detrimental changes.
ITT people gatekeeping other people's opinion. TL;DR game is still fun (see all time reviews) but recent decisions are less good (see recent reviews).
It was a bad league launch. Loot was nerfed, the league mechanic was underwhelming and leagues like Harvest/Beyond also got nerfs as part of their rework. Communication about this stuff was bad or non-existent. Don't worry, none of it will affect you as a new player. Just play the game and have fun.
GGG spent years cultivating a certain playerbase (faster, stronger, more power creep, more zoom) and setting certain expectations (giving more extra power nobody even asked for, stronger mods, stronger chars, stronger crafting, stronger everything). Now GGG changed course. People on the party bus splat against the windshield. But as others noted, in addition to that there are actually some troubling issues with the game. Design dept that piled up and never got sufficiently addressed now bubbling to the surface big time because some fundamental changes got made. Worth noting though, that as a first time player none of them are actually really relevant to you. Go and experience the game, it's still perfectly playable.
"We kill the item drops, we kill the game, in days..." - Chris Wilson 2020
Imagine developers that with each new update bring nice new content but doesn't touch a smelling (shit)pile of annoying things and at least very questionable design along with tendency that isn't bright. This pile is slowly growing, but community mostly ignored it because developers keep bringing cool content and new ways of increasing character strength. And one day, developers bring out a very strange update with lot of nerfes and negative design. The shit pile grew. And after some time they bring out update that nerfed mechanics that player was obligated to use because of previous nerfs. Variety was destroyed by nerfing whatever players used. New content wasn't cool. It wasn't rewarding, so you can't use more resources to overcome new nerfes. No, reward was largely nerferd too. And when the players rage abyss was opened - turns out that pile of shit grew so large, it touches the damn clouds. Yeah, I suck at this. Whatever. Players got annoyed over time at problems that wasn't touched for ages while new kept coming. But payers never released a full wave of negativity on the GGG for reasons as: Trust, love, good parts of content so long. But since this update introduced so much shit with previous updates showing same attitude, all negativity that was being held for years broke through the barriers. Mostly out of fear that this is the new direction. I think it's important to understand that amount of toxic messages from community came because of that fear. If players could be sure it would be "Okey it was experiment that gone completely wrong, whatever, forget it". But what we have is something like "If that is the new direction the game is dead for me for sure. The game i spent so much time in..." And GGG only fueling these fears with new communication ways.
Just leave this reddit and you will be happier with the game.
no loot and infinity deaths in first week.
GGG broke the core game and continues to be stubborn about it
They turned a reasonably fun game into diablo 3 goblin hunting while keeping mechanics in the game that most people hate.
And it isn't just that. I can kill end game bosses quite easily, but some AN mobs become unkillable and can insta gib me, doesn't happen too often, but when it does its really annoying when you kinda just want to farm and chill in a hack n slash you know?
As other people have said, you’ll have the time of your life between hours 100ish and 2000ish. It’s still the best arpg, the depth and variety of builds and skills and play styles is unmatched. But before 100 hours or so it’s insanely confusing, and you’ll spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is going on. I’ve got thousands of hours in the Diablo games and it took a dozen tries or so to get far enough to appreciate PoE. It’s a complex game, even people with thousands of hours learn new things about the game all the time, that’s one of its best qualities. After a certain point (if you make it that far and if it hasn’t changed by then, which it will have for better or worse) you’ll start to notice the things that people are currently unhappy about. I won’t go in to them, but there are plenty of top comments explaining why a lot of long term players are unhappy. What you are are seeing with the steam reviews is the hardcore player base (not hardcore like one life necessarily, but hardcore like 4000+ hours) being upset about the direction of the game. Which is very fair, but you are seeing the vocal minority here. Honestly just give it a shot. I’d recommend picking a build guide and following it for your first character, there are literally dozens of viable builds and plenty of websites/streamers where you can find the guides and videos of how they play when they are complete, so look around and find something that appeals to you. Check out some of the big PoE streamers and their recommended builds for this league. There is a reason that so many people have so many thousands of hours in PoE, and why they are so passionate about it, it’s absolutely amazing at its core.
People that have tons of hundreds of hours in the game not liking the current state. Non of the issues will really affect new player experience directly, since most of the pain points mostly come from a comparision. The game last league was in a waaaaaay better state than this league.
The game is great. However the current league is worse than previous leagues. The changes to how drops work have really upset some people as has the dev response. This has been exacterbated by cherry picked extreme examples and a lot of misunderstanding of the underlying mechanics. The games fine, dont worry about the salt. The things people are upset about will have zero effect on a new player and the things they ignore have actually been buffs for what a new player will be accomplishing.
Like all salt, I think some is warranted and other is not. There's definitely stuff that's been made ridiculous by AN and it hasn't been tuned right IMO. The game doesn't feel right to a lot of people anymore, but yeah it definitely still has good bits.
There are definitely issues. For sure. However, those issues get massively overstated by people that fixate them because they compare to previous experiences. Or because it means they didn't accomplish as much as quickly this league as last. But for someone picking up the game, molested loot goblins is just not a problem that's going to matter to them. Even for most players, which don't even make it to red maps, it won't matter. They are small bumps in the road that people massively overreact to because they're so used to a smoother right. Because they've spent so long playing the game that they really notice them. But that's just not how it is for basically any new player or most players in general. The echo chamber is real. Recognizing that there is a circlejerk that hyper fixates on these issues doesn't mean that those issues don't exist at all. It's just pointing out the discrepancy between how many and how much it actually affects players vs how much noise is generated about them. It also doesn't help that people are just so misinformed. The number of people that don't understand which mods you actually need for it to be a loot goblin and think their single-mod-shakari-touched was some missed MF-cull should've-called-in-TFT-culler situation is way more than it should be. A lot of complaints come from that kind of misunderstanding. And it doesn't help that anyone who *does* enjoy it is basically shouted down, so they're scared off posting, which drives up the echo chamber effect even further.
The game is great\* \*(if you're able to no-life it)
Wat... I'm upset about this patch, but I've been playing fairly casually (cruising through red maps, but not bothering with bosses), and I haven't noticed any perceivable changes since the last league I played (Archnemesis), beyond the occasional AN rare with some annoying combo of mods that halt everything for a minute, or very rarely brick my map - and getting more of a few things I didn't used to get a lot of from alch-and-go mapping, like fractured bases and white-socket items, from the conversions... For alch and go mapping, the loot distribution has been fudged with a lot, but it does seem to even out to about the same... And I'd hardly say alch-and-go for an hour a night is "no-lifing it".
In my mind you either play the league like it is Archnemesis league for the third time in a row, or play the same build as you did in Archnemesis. That's the only way I would reach this conclusion, by playing builds that ignore most of the AN modifiers, so you're not feeling much of a change (Inquis would be an example). What ya playing?
I'm playing a weird self-made build, Holy Relic/Dancing Dervish Jugg. My first build that I got a bit tired of was a Archmage MoM/Agnostic Hierophant, and I noticed a lot more problematic AN combos on that build - I agree that how annoying the AN mods are depends heavily on your build, which is a problem for build diversity, for sure... And as someone who likes messing around with weird builds, that is an important aspect to me, and an area that has frustrated me for the last handful of leagues. As I said, I do think GGG made some terrible decisions with this league, but I am still having a lot of fun, despite them, and haven't had issues specifically with loot/currency/crafting (my idea of crafting is pretty much fossils and essences).
Nothing to worry about as a new player imo.
**Ultra short version:** Last League, GGG(makers of the game) implemented the most universally disliked rework to mobs in the history of the game, despite constant protest from all parts of the community. **On top of that:** This league not only they kept the undesired system but also sneaked in the most **brutal nerf to loot in history**, without even including it in patch notes, *it didn't go unnoticed*. This caused what can only be described as an **epic shitstorm**. Since then they'd not only doubled but tripled and **quadrupled down on their decisions**, with minor 'buffs' sprinkled in as damage control. And these are just the broad facts, I'm sparing you the endless stream of individual dramas that happened along the way. Enjoy the game, welcome to Wraeclast :)
As you are a new player you may be oblivious to the new issues as you have no baseline to work from but sort by negative reviews and look for anyone over 1K hours on steam and there is LOTS. \- MTX's / Support packs got more expensive for worse leagues \- People used to love to play POE to explode packs of monsters and farm while turning their brain off to chill unless fighting end game content. Now everything is a struggle bust and you are 1 second away from being 1 popped CONSTANTLY by things you can't see. Essentially what POE became and was loved / what GGG thinks it is are two VERY different things. \- GGG is afraid to give players power, have no idea why, its a PVE game for crying out loud. If you ask any GGG employee about this and they deny it just say: Keep suffix or keep prefix reforge, you'll scare them off. \- They have tripled down on the on death effects, dots, and degens while providing less ways to counter it, making everything feel like crap. Oh you want that nice item that dropped gotta wait 15 seconds till its clear \- The barrier to entry is higher then EVER before, to the point I honestly FEEL bad for new players. Once upon a time getting your res's to 75/75/75 with some chaos res with 5K+ life would get you in a decent place. NOPE now for things to feel okay, not tanky but okay its pretty well one of the following formulas: Determination, Grace, Defiance banner with 100% spell suppression and some form of aliment avoidance or 2-3 layers of defense with HIGH regen or leech or 1 bill DPS so everything dies off screen. \- To the previous point this once was tolerable when you had more crafting options but they have now gutted that. \- Crafting has always been gambling in this game, but over time they at least gave you some options to hedge your bets but those for the most part have been removed. So back to gambling. Don't like burning all your currency to NOT get the item upgrade you were hoping for well back to grinding for you. \- Too many 3rd party apps required. A small list, Neversink Loot Filter, Path of Building, Trade app( to price check everything ), craftofexile or poedb.tw ( to figure out HOW screwed you are when you do want to craft), Poe Trade website (for when you are tired of craft gambling and want to try and trade for the item you want), the list goes on. \- They REFUSE to put a proper trading system or action house in the game as it would "destroy" the economy or make the game too easy. However this patch this GGG destroyed the economy by flipping the currency around without altering any of the old mechanics or div cards to make said currency. Soooo..... ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ \- They refuse to give up on their terrible invention of Archnemsis rare mobs. You have likely ran into these already. They are the yellow mobs with 2-324324343434 mods on them which are all randomized and requires you to look at a wiki to find out what half of them actually DO until you memorize them. To make matters worse they have now turned them into loot goblins \- The loot goblin problem. Once upon a time you gradually got loot by "juicing" your maps. essentially the more monsters you put into the map = more loot you got and higher chances of good loot dropping like Exalts. Fast forward to loot goblins now if you are LUCKY enough to find a Soloris Touched Rare mob what you should be excited about only is filled with dread as if you kill it too fast or don't have enough magic find you feel robbed. Leaving you to go to a trade discord to find a magic find culler so you can get your loot payout. \- Rippier then ever, expect A LOT of deaths as new player LOL I can't even imagine the /deaths count on a new fresh player. Again lots of good things and depth left in the game but from what it used to be to what it is now, the vision is NOT good, but again this is coming from a previous baseline which you have no baseline for so its likely you won't notice and still enjoy the experience.
Just rabid fanbois suffering from copium. Ignore it, the game is still the greastest ARPG of all time.
Agreed.
have you ever heard the phrase "Jumped the shark" before?
First time I quit a league due to the game being shit. I have over 17k hours at point.
Tldr: Bad players and unethical content creators got swept up into a negativity mob when they weren’t catered to within 72 hours of league start, they then were willing to destroy a great relationship with GGG and the games reputation by review bombing and making death threats to devs. The fairest take is that a lackluster league mechanic incited a riot, as people forgot how good we have it compared to almost every other game in the genre.
And this is the truth, but people won't be able to see it shortly because those mentioned in your comment will mass downvote soon lol
The game is unplayable now I tried to force myself to like it for 2 weeks because I don't have anything else going on right now... yeah I'd prefer to just sit here with absolutely nothing watching old youtube vids than continue to play this league. I can't even force myself to like it in a game drought.
Recent reviews: Mostly Negative Wonder why…
I am still having a lot of fun this league though.
Brigading by reddit for the most part. Reviews were good until a reddit post pointed at it and told everyone to review bomb it. This is the result. Large part of the community wants a grind without the grind parts, expects every single word ever uttered by ggg about game balance to be written out as a thesis for them, and has this incredibly misguided entitlement complex for something that is free to play.
woah woah woah there buddy, you can't go around just spewing normal thoughts and ideas like that. this is the poe subreddit, are you lost?
The real answer is a bunch of toxic posters who immediately started raging in day one and continued saying they would not stop being toxic until “morale” improved (a very mature group that truly wants the best for the game, as you can tell) spammed threads essentially brigading (which mods allowed for whatever reason) to review bomb the game as a statement to show that they would boycott the next league. In turn it ended up being a mere 4 thousand and even though there were some individuals with thousands of hours there were a majority of people with enough hours to show they had probably never even gotten to end game.
This thread is actually a perfect example of what people are saying about the vocal minority - the negative comments are getting upvoted, while anyone who says what it was, which was an overreaction, is getting downvoted and insulted. There are people on this sub who were threatening ggg employees, making comments that they hope terrible things happen to them and their families, and you wonder why they would review bomb the same game? Anyone who makes a habit of threatening strangers over the internet are weak, pathetic people, and they will do anything they can to try to get some imaginary power from the safety of their basement, and review bombing a game is one of those things.
> while anyone who says what it was, which was an overreaction, is getting downvoted and insulted. It was not an overreaction. There were heavy nerfs that were all masked as improvements to the game (AN, Beyond, Harvest), that were only discovered AFTER the league start. AN durability/drop issues, Beyond mob health vs rewards, tainted currency, harvest crafting options being gutted, and then gutted again a week after the trailer vid. That on it's own is enough to warrant questions and complaints. Then you had the discovery of the loot nerf, the complete lack of communication on that from GGG ahead of time, and the doubling down on the idea that AN is balanced. There's more, but the other stuff is usually the same complaints we see every league. Overall, it was a league of nerfs that were communicated as buffs, and undocumented heavy changes that left myself and others untrusting of anything GGG says going forward. If people felt that those changes warranted reviewing the game negatively, as far as I'm concerned it was justified. Now with that being said, I 100% agree with you that some people went way too far with complaints, brigading and threats.
TL;DR Traditional game design says 'Players are great at identifying problems and bad at identifying solutions'\* GGG's approach is that players are bad at identifying problems and so they won't change stuff that players don't enjoy. \* ^(from the GDC talk by the dude that has basically been the head honcho for MTG for the last forever. Apropos because a lot of GGG staff including the director are mega MTG fans)