What We're Working On

I have a wild theory, maybe they are trying to lower the value of the game so that they can try buying it back from the masters. If it's not the cause of such a horrible patch then they are out of their mind if they believe they have a good product anymore.

I am not expert on numbers under the hood, but from I gathered from this post, it sounds like nerfs in 3 multiplicative areas:

1. Reduced availability of deterministic crafting
2. Reduced amount of resources and items dropped that need to be spent on crafting which is pure RNG now.
3. Increased difficulty of mobs.

Now, I get the general idea of "less loot, but better loot", but that does not work with so broad RNG. In ARPG with strictly defined classes you can use "smart loot" to drop something that is very likely an upgrade and that works, but not here. Quantity is what allows this huge RNG pool to still be fun.

Anyway, my point is that to "[would be removed by support] up" this bad, with the amount of experience and feedback you get over years... I do not believe this was not intentional.

Now, I am not sure what is GGG's motivation to nuke the game, but this cannot be attributed to poor testing, or random incompetence. This is horrible by design.

Either the Pay 2 win is coming, which needs insufferable grind to be profitable.
OR the philosophy of game design changed. (I don't know much about "hardmode" that is planned, and I would expect it to be possibly something like this, but why would anyone push it on established live game?)

The motivation behind this is a mystery to me, but what is clear to me is the game is not fun in this state. At least not for me.

This is really disappointing.
When you love a game and just want to have fun getting loot and gear and instead you get f*cked by the game. You have to have high armor, high evasion, high spell suppression, ailment immunity, stun immunity, corrupting blood imunity, and then fit dmg in to kill rares and progress without using all portals in high maps, and then at the end you get zero rewards.

What am I playing this game for?

In USA PoE, mobs farm YOU!

Honestly, this is not okay. I dont know how to respond. But i do not have fun. I get oneshotted, i do not have enough dmg to kill stuff. i do not find loot, or can do league mechanics to farm currency to get improvements. Playing since breach and earlier and this is frustrating.
its the first time i feel like wasting time on this game after work forever.
I dont know.. i am praising GGG as a game studio. One of the last "good ones". but your decission making regarding difficulty is questionable. Please improve. Please.

Hey guys, we actually hate our community! In doing so, we're going to just test our league so it works mechanically, but knowingly hide the fact that we've absolutely gutted any reason to continue playing this game.

But, we have loot boxes! <3

I dont know. I love this game, but now it seems that i should stop playing it. Im just not having fun. Struggling to find a chance orbs on white maps isnt fun at all.

Pretty damn sad... What a shame you guys are ruining PoE. Pretty insulting the way GGG is handling/changing this game we all love and have supported for so long.

Looks like you guys have really kicked a bee hive with this one though. Hope its a wake up call

archnemesis doesn't really work in delve.

very rarely happening but archnem's are dropping a screen worth of fractured items and other things. inventory is so small i cant pick them up. and I'm in the dark so I cant stand there and identify them all - nor do i want to. Its very frustrating. Drops from archnemesis are terrible as well. found a few with 100 whetstones and armour scraps. haven't really found much else.

I can't sustain currencies unless i run around in the dark in low level delve looking for currency/resonator/fossil chests because their drop rate hasn't been nerfed. its one of the most rewarding things I've found this league.

harvest... well i only kill the mobs if it has a glowing blue mob. wont even bother doing anything else because they dont drop lifeforce and i'm only keeping it to craft cluster jewels and when i have the ones i want i will remove it immediately. removing socket colour craft was a bad idea and crafting a random white socket is ridiculously expensive and i wouldn't even try farming it.

i understand that i can use the crafting bench for socket colours but you need ALOT of chromatics for this... the good thing about harvest was early maps and having socket colour problems could solve this issue.

one of the worst feelings in the game is getting a good item and cant use it because the sockets are wrong colours and then you spam chromatics on it because you need two/three blue and 2/3 red sockets on an eva/armour base and you use all your chromatics and still don't get what you need for the item. and sure, why not use a different base - its because the item dropped that way and the mods are a good upgrade.

harvest was good for this. which is why poe 2's socketing system is very very much necessary.


I think archnemesis has a place in the game, probably only in the core game. so many league mechanics are just absolutely broken and doesn't make any sense.

What's better? Being so iron-locked into focusing on maintaining some arbitrary "vision" of a game that has no respect for a player's time? Or tailoring the game have a reasonable challenge and appealing rewards to the supporting players that have poured thousands of hours and hundreds or thousands of dollars into supporting the game?

While I know PoE infamously doesn't balance to SSF playstyles, but SSF is literally unplayable and feels like it disrespects my time. Harvest I feel like is what kept SSF fun and viable, it's a powerful crafting tool for early maps/gearing. There is nothing in the game that replaces that void. Currency split 3 ways, getting 10 chaos rolls of something appealing to me takes running multiple harvests where a single harvest provided the opportunity to do it several times.

Would love to have the old system back, and maybe harvest the juice out of the rolls we don't care for if we want to trade it away-- Probably a fraction of the cost, but at least it's something for players that care less about using harvest mechanics while those loving the harvest system to still be viable.

How can we even think this is POE? We play this for loot. We play this for challenge. What the hell is the point of making maps harder without incentive? geezus. Go back. Just go back.