PoE: The big picture. Something for everyone (to complain about?)

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鬼殺し wrote:

Lucky you.

I felt blessed before reading your post, i wonder how i should feel now?

Somewhere between bliss and satori?

For all your high and might you sure did take the long route though. Which might have been entertaining if you weren't you.

Peace,

-Boem-

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鬼殺し wrote:

Satori? Try Sunyata.

And be careful that it doesn't cross over into simple weltschmerz.

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鬼殺し wrote:

So your post was a bit apologist for my likes. And that's coming from me. The timmyspikejohnny paradigm is at best outdated and at worst detrimental to certain basic design choices. I spent fucking years trying to figure out if I fit into one of the boxes because I truly believed if I could accept that label, I'd find the game I want to play within the mess PoE was fast becoming. It didn't work. By telling myself I was a johnny and making really weird but "playable" characters, I limited the hell out of what I could do. And like or not, there's no place in what PoE has become for true Johnny style play.

Gotta say, once I did the same as you and it felt really, really bad, turns out that to play any archetype in PoE there's a minimum level to which you have to conform or you won't do anything. You know, you might not agree with the politics, you might try to ignore some of the more distasteful implications and shirk your duties as much as you can, but to be a productive national socialist, you kinda had to salute Heil Hitler.

Anyway, once I did the required minimum a whole new world of possibilities opened up and I count myself a fairly satisfied Johnny right now. Gotta eat some shit before you get to the cake, eh? That's how things normally work at least, with one exception, with the kind of support you have shown the project you could realistically expect to keep the taste of crap off your lips. However that didn't happen, if you expected it to happen as a result of your support, it was misplaced, and if you expected only to catalyze the apparent natural course of events it was misguided. A mis in any case I suppose.

Now, if that means PoE is essentially a dictatorship, of course it is, what else could it function as?

@Charan:

The goal of my post was to provide a tool for distinguishing between pointless and doomed complaints about the game and valid ones. The pointless ones are complaints about GGG's general vision of their game. For example, the Spikes complaining that most uniques are 'useless' (from their point of view). Or the Johnnies complaining that some uniques are overpowered (i.e. the only uniques Timmy would think of using). Or someone complaining that trade is an important part of the game, or that the game is grindy. Or that legacy uniques keep appearing and 'fucking up' standard's economy. The list is long, no need to go all over it.

This doesn't mean there are no valid complaints or criticisms, far from it. For example the power creep you're mentioning. Although I tend to disagree there's nothing for Johnny to do in the game. I happen to know Raics, one of the biggest Johnnies out there, and he still finds fun things to do each league. [edit: oh look, he posted while I was typing this^^] The situation in SC is still tolerable and there are many builds which can deal with all of the content, it just might be more difficult or slower - but it's possible. The situation in HC is rather fucked up, however. This should be talked about, but this is in the realm of numerical mistakes I talked about. It's a mistake of calculation and numbers, not of general game design strategy. As such, I believe it can - and probably will be - remedied at some point.

IMO your problem is you thought GGG had a certain vision of the game but it turned out it was completely different. You went into a vicious circle of emotional and financial investment and spent a long time pretending not to notice the harsh reality. In this case, the reality being that GGG's long-term and general vision for the game are quite different from yours. Although I understand your frustration, I can't really sympathize. GGG didn't force you to give them a lot of money. They (naturally) provided stimuli for their whales and you fell for it. It might be an unpleasant psychological trap from your point of view but it's a viable and completely understandable business practice from theirs. They are a business, not a non-profit organisation.

The last of my two cents - if I were you, I would try to move on and let go of all this resentment because it's doing no good to anyone.

Excellent read charan. Precisely accurate in your assessments.

But I'm curious though, do your sentiments mean you feel like the actual people making those decisions, the lead designers for this game, should be fired and replaced?

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鬼殺し wrote:

And sure, you can say this is just me being unhappy with where the game went, Bars, and that I was under false impressions but those expectations and impressions came from somewhere. And it's surely not just me from the beta days to express dislike for the current state of PoE.

And please don't mistake acceptance for resentment, Bars. Like I said, I'm not really here. You just made a post I felt worth my time to plus one and comment on. Or at least something that triggered my latent love of ranting about things at least semi-obfuscated to most here. After this I'll be back to everything else, neither missing PoE nor thinking about this community. Which is a pretty big thing, given what I've given.

It's been fun though. Keep fighting. For what it's worth.

All right, perhaps I misinterpreted. I should actually feel special, I got a longish Charan post - a rare commodity nowadays :)

About the fighting part - I'm not really fighting. I just find it interesting and enjoyable to write a long post from time to time. I mostly do it because I like the sight of my own text. It also helps me gather my own thoughts a little, but I suppose you're familiar with that. I'm quite low on the emotional attachment scale. It might not look like it because I'm prone to short-term temperamental bursts but it's very much true in the long term.

Cheers and good luck with all future endeavors :)

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Bars wrote:

I like the sight of my own text.

That's sort of cute, I guess.

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Phrazz wrote:

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Bars wrote:

I like the sight of my own text.

That's sort of cute, I guess.

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Bars wrote:

Spoiler

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Phrazz wrote:

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Bars wrote:

I like the sight of my own text.

That's sort of cute, I guess.

Not many hits googling "Trump cute". Strange.