Why I'm quitting PoE and no longer recommending it to friends

Honest feedback to the devs.

I saved up over 360 fusings on this attempt alone, over 150 on a previous attempt. And could not 6-link my unique kauri maul.

You will say QQ and troll - take it elsewhere, this is not rage it is an honest problem with the game. I'm trying to be constructive as I leave. I really wanted this game to succeed and went silver to support it when I thought it could. I handed out many keys to friends and promoted it.

This game has a fundamental endgame problem, the same one that killed Diablo 3. Maps doesn't solve it. A 3rd act won't solve it. The problem here is that endgame is literally nothing but grinding with very, VERY little reward. In PoE it's for fusings. This is why people burnout and leave.

Merciless should be renamed "WTB Fusings." Absolutely nobody trades them, they are the crack of PoE. It takes an extremely long time to accumulate the over 500 fusings I attempted a single 6L with and I received no reward for all that effort. Well over month and a half of playing every night. Always on the trade channel, selling any item I could, helping everyone.

I have another 50 GCP in wealth, that would buy me another 300 fuses, but what's the point I can't turn that into fusings when your wealth is alchemy / chaos / gcp / divine / exalt orbs - a huge flaw. It is 10 times easier to accumulate 50 GCP than 50 GCP in fusings. There should be some way to turn your wealth into fusings besides spamming chat channels or mindnumbing alt orb runs with high rarity/quantity. Dull, boring, unrewarding, repetitive.

It was a fun ride, I played something like 5 builds to merciless and many more halfway there, but maps is not the end game it is fusing grinding. Admit it. Some of you haven't gotten far enough to see this yet, enjoy it until you do. I had a good run. I got my $ per hour entertainment value out of this game I just no longer find it fun when no reward can be had for that kind of effort I put in.

I respect what you've done here. I've started my own company and it's not easy. That's why I went silver and seriously considered diamond, but no more. If you want to continue to see your playerbase dwindle as more and more new games come out, then keep making it take 6 to 8 weeks of work to fail at getting a single top tier reward on an item. That is a very solid way to drive people away, or to botting and d2jsp.

Oh no, I couldn't make the strongest weapon in the game stronger by spending cheap currency.

It's RNG, I've got 6L in 90 Fusings, suck it up and keep farming, you'll be doing a lot of it.

I agree that this is a problem. The random nature, while supposedly fair, leads to stagnation. I hope that this is a game design flaw, and not a "try to make people play longer" flaw because one of those might be fixed while the other wont.

We all like to badmouth D3, well having each roll of a fusing have the exact same chance as the last is very much like the crazy anything goes random items D3 spits out. It sucks, and we all know it. Rather than allow the 300th fusing to have the same chance as the first I think each orb used should add overall quality to a piece instead of just being random.

I haven't even made it this far in the game yet, but its pretty obvious its gonna be a problem from Ive heard. As it is I'm too wary of wasting my orbs to even play with em, which sucks.

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Chris wrote:

If there was a vendor recipe to guarantee six linked sockets if you traded in 1500 fusings, would you use it?

Edit: I'm not saying it takes 1500 fusings to get six linked sockets :P

I think the vendor sell window would need to be a bit bigger to fit 1500 fusings lol.

I fully understand the fusings grind, except I have to disagree there is anything wrong with the way the system works. It really depends on what your goals are, if your goal is to make your character as OP as possible, you need that 6 link. You should work for it though, even a couple of months of play shouldn't definitely warrant the most powerful weapon in the game.

Once PVP and other things are in the game, there will be a lot more options than just trying to make everything perfect.

One day you might stumble across a mirror and just clone that perfect 2h maul, who knows. Either way, I'm holding my reservations until Open Beta and specifically not playing hardout until then.

awww... the strongest item attribute, 6link, is hard to get... how awful... so very very awful. Such a shame it takes a bit of effort to get. :(

I have a hard time seeing this as a problem.

3-4L seems to be viable in PoE through to endgame so anything beyond that is in pursuit of the "perfect item" which should take a great deal of time and resources.

6L must be extremely rare and hard to come by or they won't be all that cool to have. If your are leaving over not being able to get a 6L in so short a time, I think that perhaps the game itself isn't so good a fit for you as you may have thought.

What I expect to do as far as crafting is to take two items and always wear the best and mod the worst. That way you always have something decent/viable and something to work towards. If you don't enjoy running a map for the sake of running the map but instead only run it for a currency grind, then I can see how you would be disappointed but you would be setting yourself up for that disappointment.

The comparisons to D3 are really unfair. In D3, endgame-viable loot isn't easily obtainable (or at least not prior to 1.0.4 which I've no interest in going back to try out) without paying for it in the RMAH. In fact, you pretty much have to pay for the equivalent of decent 6Ls if you aren't patient enough to spend years playing. And don't forget that in D3 you have to throw away items that roll a single bad mod, whereas here you can finesse a single base item into perfection.

PoE itemization is amazing in my opinion but I'd love to hear of a game where you feel itemization has been done better.

That's why I will exclusively play cut-throat... to avoid those Min-Max-overpoweredness and to win their hard-earned booties from their dead carcass (if they have the balls to wear them)...

WIN-WIN situation.