The transition from CW to Mark & Jonathan is complete - This is a buff

I cannot tell you how shocked I was listening to Mark basically toss aside years of the "vision" in one damn livestream interview. I was very skeptical that Mark would take his gameplay experience and ultimately tie that to a more elite player. I was wrong... and I've never been so glad to be so wrong. It's clear to me now, that not only does Mark have real, practical, true gameplay experience with PoE, but he also knows what that means across a variety of player types.

I think the elimination of significant trade friction, and shifting power back to players, is just the start of a more palatable and accessible version of PoE. The move away from MF, and outrageous results that less than .005% of the player base was producing is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm actually looking forward, and am certainly more optimistic, about the future of both PoE1 and PoE2.

Adding Asynchronous trade on currency now, with items to come soon, along with timer based supplemental game progression really helps many players close the gap on the more "no-life" aspects of the game. It will be tremendous to get up for work, load up PoE for a bit, get my settlers going, send off a ship, and then come back later that evening to check on progress. Play a bit, maybe sell/buy some currency for crafting on the AH, and generally feel like I'm making meaningful progress. After nearly a decade, real, meaningful, thoughtful changes to trading in PoE. Basically a functional AH?! Again I can barely believe it.

That said, I'm skeptical still on melee (balance in general really), and Gladiator has been a meme for so long I will have to see it to believe it, but at least something is happening. I think there might be some issues with recombination fuel, and maybe it won't work fully, resulting in further iterations, but the risk taking from Mark is refreshing. More please. Just try, be flexible, be aware, prioritize accessibility, and a larger chunk of players will respect this. You don't have to make PoE1 "causal", but for fucks sake finally getting some QoL towards non-hardcore elite players is so damn good to see. Well done GGG. You have dragged me back from the PoE abyss...at least for the moment.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this new league, something I haven't said in a long, long, time.

- AH has been added to the game. This is a (loot) nerf.

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hasatt0 wrote:

- AH has been added to the game. This is a (loot) nerf.

It is not a loot AH and it is an experiment as Mark noted in the announcement.

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hasatt0 wrote:

- AH has been added to the game. This is a (loot) nerf.

Please explain how?

It only works with currency, it basically stops bots, and it will save 99% of the playerbase from having to wait for hours during the league just to get a simple trade for crafting. I guess if you're one of the market manipulators that list your currency for a price you'd actually never sell for just to trick new players into listing their own currency for below value pricing, I guess for you it's a currency nerf.

it will be interesting to see how this can be abused or if it can, it will definitely favour people that bot or streamers and no lifers because of the gold requirement.

While I don't disagree, I think most people miss the point that we've been beta testing POE2 systems and potential ones for a while now and this is the latest update to that.

It works as a good bridge to the change of directions and QOL that are presented within POE2 without changing the core gameplay loop of POE1.

This will probably be the second league in a row of bait and switch where it looks good in the video and then people quickly realize most of the changes were bad.

Your delight delights me.

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Poiuytr133 wrote:

This will probably be the second league in a row of bait and switch where it looks good in the video and then people quickly realize most of the changes were bad.

If this happens, pre-release supporter pack sales are going to take a hit. Most people will adopt a wait and see approach.

The way i see it, the "vision" is a dark souls-esque game. Rather slow and very brainy. I feel CW really want us to keep using our brains while we play, which i think is why we tend to have so many instances and leagues we have to stop and read stuff. He straight up mentioned he wanted yellow monsters to feel memorable when he forced AN on the base game. I think his end dream is every map being epic like Anor Londo

Its really at odds with how poe have developed over time. This has largely become a game about using the brain on the h/o and turning it off on general gameplay. CW is really fighting an uphill battle, combat both on games and in real life is only brainy if the oponent is stronger or same level as you, fighting lesser oponents, like how the whole of poe outside big bosses is, is always a rather braindead affair(even dark souls becomes heavily "feel, dont think" once you are used to the enemies, as does ubers here)

About this next league, the way i see it, it may be a way to try to reduce the gap between average and no lifers: A league focused on real time events might be a way to force no lifers to slow down with a mechanic that have a hard timer that cant be speed up beyond a certain point. They said optimizing workers can reduce the timer and risks of the mechanic, but it really depends on how hard getting a perfect or near perfect crew gonna be: if its something that can be done by a more average player, it might be an equalizer between average players and no lifers, at least on acquiring base currency with the current new mechanic

And the AH is they just admiting that the manifesto dont make sense anymore: The loot is already crazy and the bots and market-manipulation already are reality for a long while. Might as well try to experiment with something else because the points behind trade attrition are both defeated