Let's talk about PvP

so far disappointed with how PvP Only Characters have been executed in Path of Exile.

I think a lot of lessons would be learned by taking a look at how Guild wars 1 PvP Only Characters were setup. that system was pretty much perfect.

I'm only saying this to you because I'm confident you guys can take this criticism and turn it into improvement.

If I was Chris I would just make a post with:

Shut up you entitled whiners cry babies. Deal with it.

this has been said before......its hilarious how much this needs to be reiterated for people to pay the fuck attention. They have said multiple times its free time which they dont have anything else to do with for part of the team and will work on pvp a small amount as they finish act 4. Its tragic that pvp is being trashed so much because people "think its taking resources away from pve".

I hope the devs dont get too discouraged to work on pvp more. It has so much potential but the current meta is largely flawed.

I still haven't tried PVP in PoE. To me PVP is spontaneous, like it was in Diablo 2. I would be minding my business, questing or farming and someone would randomly join the instance and mark themselves 'hostile' towards me...

They would still have to find me, so i had the options:

1) to keep farming and hope to not be found.
2) to prepare for battle, having hope that i could win
3) TP back to town, tail between the legs, and create a private instance
4) Tp back to town and mark not hostile, and proceed with my business (I don't recall if this was really an option, but it sounds good).

The above things are what I like... I don't care to have special PvP characters, join PvP matches, etc... I wanted PvP to be PART of the normal game. If you want PvP, make it less optional.

Also it was awesome in Diablo 2 to collect "ears" with the name and level of the opponent that dropped them on death.

The Chris Wilson ear would be worth many exalts I'm sure, just as a collectors piece :-)

Those who are responding to the naysayers with flames seem to be missing some of the simple point. I recently got invited to PvP against a lowlife 330k dps 9k ES reaver with a character that has 4.1k life and 40k dps.

Yeah right! (don't get me wrong, perhaps I might have won by pure luck or better skill, but unlikely I think)

I'm sure it's not going to be easy designing a purely skill-based system, and perhaps GGG won't try, but I haven't been excited to try LLD, because money, and HLD is surely out of bounds for me at least until I get a few more thousand exalts. Perhaps 10,000.

If it's fine with GGG that me and my ilk don't play PvP, then no probs, and I'd echo that it was nice to hear the views of the devs on this.

all the effort on PvP is appreciated but the balance just making people bitch about it.

I think the issue is we used to look forward to things like build of the week etc because they dealt with things we cared about and gave insight on some things we may use to perform better. Now you are taking these things away and replacing them with something a lot of us don't care about. You can say it isn't infringing on PVE but things like this prove otherwise. We don't want it thrown down our throat, keep it as an option, like when you gave us the option to turn off those annoying pvp event notices you spammed us with (that was good), be less invasive and let us ignore it like it deserves, thanks.

To people that think pvp and pve can be balanced separately that is true but it takes time and resources. Telling us it doesn't is just lying to our faces. When your playerbase tells you it would rather you spend that time fixing and balancing one portion of the game you have every right to tell them to screw, just don't be surprised when they aren't there anymore.

And yes I am sure you have more players than ever with your expansion into one of the largest gaming regions in the world, but they jump to every new game that comes out and you might want to listen to the voices of longstanding players as well.

I think the ultimate reason for the negative feedback is that people are shy about their pvpness.

I can't believe GGG have had to release a post about this.

However, again this an example of how connected GGG are to their player-base. They've taken their valuable time to provide a detailed response to hopefully ease the fears of some in the community.

Within 18 months of POE officially being released, GGG would have followed it up by releasing: 1 Expansion, 2 Major PvE patches (Sacrifice of the Vaal and Forsaken Masters), 1 PvP patch and numerous minor content updates. All of this for free.

Comparatively it took one of the world's most resourced developer's nearly 2 years to release their ARPG expansion, which players had to purchase for ~$50... and still no signs of a PvP scene in their title.

Thanks GGG for your work and communications.

I feel like I've heard this exact same explanation verbatim from other game developers when they also injected a PvP module into their game to "attract a PvP crowd".

It's always followed by the "these resources are coming from a different area" or "this doesn't affect the PvE development budget" disclaimer, and it always seems like a PR statement of damage control that cannot possibly be based in reality.

For me, the introduction of more PvP elements into PoE is disappointing. It's a totally unnecessary, forced directive for the game and I find myself unsettled about the future of PoE and my interest in it.