What Happened with Items

The reason I started playing PoE the way I do is because I saw someone with a HH taller then the screen in 100% deli double beyond and it was raining drops.

I had never seen a game like that before, it was something special, unique, and as I played it I discovered an economy that just does not exist any where else in gaming.

The frustration and accomplishment I felt learning the game was also like nothing else I have ever experienced. Slowly going from being stuck in act 4 multiple characters, to getting to maps the first time, to cracking red maps, to learning about fragments and bosses, to getting the Eater and Exarch down in the first week they were in the game.

I fell like you had this thing that no other developer had and you've ruined it. I understand in concept why you would want to move things in the direction you are talking about, but don't kill the thing we fell in love with over the years.

lol

Thank you for the well thought out post, but I definitely disagree with your view and take on the loot situation. I hope you address every other single major problem that a lot of players are concerned with in another post as well.

Please listen to the players, no one is going to be happy with these loot changes.

It's 99999999999x more fun to pick a map, alch, go, play, and jam out with the possibility of something big dropping whenever.

It's 9999999999x less fun to just mindlessly go around maps looking for 4 AN modifiers that you might not even be able to beat because now how else are you going to beat %40000 or whatever + modifier.

Just stop ... I was so excited for this league and this change has been the biggest let down. I can't even imagine being a minion player right now, or buying a brand new screen just to play (so many actually have its a bummer), or being a crafter.

Just a bummer

PoE is going to be a gigga juiced farming yellow maps in rarity / quant gear game?

zzz

thanks for the hard work. keep getting better. mistakes happen move on. thank you!

So much nonsense and meaningless explanations, if you think that rewards is the only problem with the game, go and play the game for once.
Thanks but not thanks.

Sounds like you need people like ziz or steelmage to absolutely destroy the upcoming expansions via testing so this kind of mess doesn't happen again, it's cool that you have testers and all but it sounds like you need some testers that are closer to the player's side of things, unless this is already a thing.

The level of vitriol in the responses tho, this is why gamers should be opressed.

ARE YOU SERIOUS?! WE DON'T WANT YOUR EXCUSES WE WANT CHANGES OMFG!

"

rynotheshort wrote:

Ahh the good old Corporate Shit umbrella post... Saw this one coming.

Admirable that you stand up for the team and take the blame.


BUT!

Nothing is fixed:

You have a game in shambles and you tell the people that are mad no good news? You posted that you are sorry and change nothing?
You are what reddit is saying good Sir a disconnected lair.

You have no idea what your players want.
You are a F2P game. You need people to spend on your MTX.
And you need DAU to keep the player base large enough so the content creators can give you free marketing.

So stop telling people that "We think its fine" YOUR PLAYERS ARE TELLING YOU ITS NOT FINE! OPEN YOUR EYES...

Harvest is done for...
Average players can not sustain maps/bubblegum currency needed to roll maps they do have.
The trade economy is in shambles because you don't like Exalts being on top.


Doing a Great Job good Sir.

Keep its up. D3 league is this weekend Blizzard thanks you for the Free DAU this weekend for them.

So keep earning your downvotes on reddit, you piss poor steam reviews you have rightfully earned.

My only regret is I can not be a fly on the wall when you have to eat shit in the investor call and tell them you "Vision" for the game will all work out as you hemorrhage players.

Good Luck Good Sir. I wish you the best and hope you one day see that its the players that make the game great not you. And when you have lost sight of that and think you know more than what the people playing do then you might want to think about moving on to something else and let someone who knows how to make a game for 2022 take over.

Well said.
An apology without immediate action to rectify the original offense worsens the original offense.

As I posted previously, at this time, NO ONE CARES what your "intentions" were, because the outcome was TERRIBLE.
You can't light a dumpster on fire in my front yard and then have a conversation with me about "intentions" WHILE THE DUMPSTER IS STILL BURNING!
Perhaps if you put the dumpster fire out FIRST people would listen to you, but you have not done that.
* Loot is still broken (as of today)
* Harvest craft is dead/Useless
* The Divine/Exalt change (being overlooked due to the other disasters) has DESTROYED trade in Standard League and will destroy trade soon in Kalandra
* ArchNem is still awful and should be something we can OPT OUT OF, not be forced into.

As long as those things exist, your words are meaningless, in fact, they are LESS than meaningless, they look like gaslighting, which doesn't make you look apologetic, it makes you look manipulative.

If in fact you REALLY believe that the "loot" was accidentally "juiced" for multiple leagues and needs to be "scaled back" you COULD do that in a different way, and SAVE your player base (which is now googling: "POE Alternatives" on a regular basis, I know I have been...).
I would recommend the following:
1) be HONEST with the player base. Let them know that the Loot was juiced in error and by how much (give #s, let people run the math, it's how you build back trust).
2) Outline a "scale back" plan that scales back loot NO MORE than 5-10% PER LEAGUE (again, with #s, so people can run the math, and build back the trust you lost with the stealth-nerf).
3) Select a few SERIOUS MF Content Creators and have them PLAYTEST the League 7-10 days before launch and provide INTERNAL feedback. Listen to them.
4) BE HONEST and UP FRONT in every way at EVERY scale-back and STICK to the schedule.

That would scale back the "excess" loot over time and reduce the pain point.

Of course, an alternative, would be to LEAVE juiced-Loot as is...perhaps people liked it that way, and it was FUN for them.
I'm not suggesting you remove the loot, I'm just providing a way you COULD have done it, and not infuriated every content creator and nearly every player.

I don't think anyone there at GGG is trying to create friction or drama or "hates the players", but I do think you are misunderstanding your player base in a big way, and if you don't get this figured out, some other upstart is going to eat your lunch...you have made your entire product RIPE for the picking.
You've lost HALF of your player base in 7 days! That's a serious problem...and words are NOT going to get those people back. Some may NEVER come back.

If I were you, I would put ALL the loot back AND MORE and fix Harvest, and every other item I mentioned above, say you are sorry.
Let the Content Creators put out MASSIVE videos showing MASSIVE loot drops and encourage people to RETURN to the Lake of Kalandra.
Then re-address the "loot issue" you think exists at a later time, with a BIT more planning, and a lot less CHAOS...We get it that you dislike "deterministic crafting" but no one should run a BUSINESS by Chaos-Slamming decisions...and that's what this looks like.

You have changed progression ingame from consistent drops by doing consistent mechanics to pray to Jesus rng on both gearing and mapping.

In mapping, you've forced the need for players to play optimized build to be able to kill the walking treasure chests that are rare maps. It's not even guaranteed that the rare mob you kill will have the right modifiers to give your loot explosion fantasy.

While this may seem like a good thing, you coupled this with build-disabling rares and a very stale meta for the past year. Your balance changes to skills have made no significant impact on the play rate of skills except for "killing" certain meta builds. I have played some horrible builds in the past patches, but I have never been punished this hard before.

In gearing, by removing keep prefix/suffix, changing harvest augs, and severely limiting the amount of reforges we have access to, access to good gear is just as rng-gated as access to good loot. If your item messes up by filling suffix or prefixes in a step, it's a random annul to fix it. If I want to awakener orb something onto an item, I need to pray for an open/suffix prefix If i want to progress any further.

While itemizing harvest lifeforce is good, you've severely limited the amount of reforges we have access to, removed lots of "filler" crafts (read as the most useful crafts in the game), and placed on opportunity cost on rolling gear. Now half-usable rares are harder to make, more expensive to make, and more expensive to buy (less supply of usable gear on the market, just take a look urself at sc trade). If gearing should be harder (debatable), then why make content you can not opt out of more difficult?

I personally dont' like the exalt/divine swap (less div cards, no shards, no target farming through a mechanic like harbinger), but I don't have access to the economy data like you do.

The game is in a horrible and you are trying to fix it -- that is commendable. But none of these problems would have existed if you didn't insist on them much to the disappointment of your community.