Why POE2 is dying

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

Yes. It is dying. Can it come back? Sure!

Does that mean GGG shouldn't deeply care why hundreds of thousands of players that paid for access are quitting?
Of course not.

Disclaimer:

I already know a few elite GGG bootlickers will spam this comment section telling me I don't understand charts or numbers, that its "normal", or "everything is fine", or "play something else -stop whining".
Let them. It's all they do, all the time, and we can't stop it.


Firstly I'd like to say there are lots of positives about POE2, and it could have a decent foundation for a great game in the future. I'm not here to talk about those, however.

Problems:
1. Ascendancies are bottlenecked behind bad mechanics and RNG
2. Crafting is meaningless and random
3. Magic find ruined the economy completely, you are now either rich or poor
4. Maps and areas are way too big
5. Melee is dead, it feels clonky, bad, slow, and punishing
6. T1-T10 maps feels pointless and has little or no rewards
7. Endgame is a one-shot fest unless you run a meta 15k energy shield build
8. Armor is effectively pointless when it comes to mitigate dying
9. Building life builds are punished heavily, ES builds rewarded heavily
10. Build diversity bricked due to all the problems above
11. Campaign too long to incentivize multiple runs/leagues for most people
12. Death penalties makes no sense in normal game mode
13. Bosses too scarce in endgame

My conclusion? The game was dropped at least 6 months prematurely. A closed beta until mid 2025 should have been done. But that ship sailed.

Fast fixes:
Release ascendancy points throughout the campaign for now. Incentivize most players possible to engage with and try the content for EA purposes, and work towards a FAIR and non-RNG based trial with the full release.

Make exalted orbs the most common currency. It will still make crafting pure chance, but until the whole system is reworked, at least people will have a chance of trying to craft items. It is dead as of now.

Armor scaling have to flatly mitigate damage -but cap the total max mitigation. At least until you can fine-tune the balance. As of now armor builds are dead.

Increase animation time and attack speed of most warrior skills by a lot. At least until armor and life builds are fixed to become ACTUALLY tanky.

The passive tree have about 50 energy shield nodes and 3 life nodes. Considering life builds are the common melee characters, this is literally opposite of what would seem normal. I'm not even sure there is an easy fix here.

Remove XP penalty on death. This is a no brainer. Getting to 100 is hard enough as is. At least until all content is balanced. Stop the 1 death map bricking too. It makes no sense for a normal game mode.

Make teleportation map markers in maps too, until you can scale them better.
All maps should have a boss -bosses are among the best features of POE2, don't remove them from players.

Remove all magic find on gear, and boost MF with 50% as base.

Reward players for doing T1-T10 maps much better. Increase drop rates, increase waystones. Make it much easier to get 4 and 5 linked skills, at least in EA where you would think GGG want to playtest as much as possible.

You could do all this fairly easily and the overall experience for 90% of the player base would be better.
YES, I know there are some elite get good gamers that don't wont anyone but them to enjoy the game, but give them ruthless mode, and we can stop having to argue with them all the time.

What I would do?
Announce a rollback and restart servers 1. February. Until then, remove death penalties, give out ascendancy points in campaign, and increase drops by at least 100%.Let players go bananas for a month, really trying out builds and the full extent of the game.
GGG buys themselves a full month to dig deeper into fixing more problems, while making the game accessible until then.

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DatonKallandor#0939 wrote:

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Unrayy#5939 wrote:

Campaign Maps in PoE1 weren't as big and we also had quicksilver flasks to help "zoom" thru them.

Speed boost outside of combat would help and wouldn't require any itemization changes.

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Fhrek#4437 wrote:

It would be a bandaid. Speed boost outside combat would help a little, but combat is almost a permanent situation, we just ignore the mobs after learn the routes.

Give players more speed isn't equal to reduce the map sizes. Reducing the map sizes would help a lot in mob density, making the maps feel alive and packed without be tiring/boresom.

The Towers maps for example - instead of having seven or eight plateaus, they would have 1 central plateau and 5 minor plateus around with one of them at random have the ladders to claim the Tower.


Downsizing the maps are much better/long term healthy for replaybility than give players generic speed boosts.

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DatonKallandor#0939 wrote:

Also, running past the mobs might have been the norm in PoE 1, but why should that be the intended way to play. That just means those mobs are pointless anyway. If there's enemies on the map, they should be there for a reason.

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Nyon#6673 wrote:

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R3Funded#5006 wrote:

I disagree on removing xp on death, Like the majority of players could care less on hitting 100 lol, Diablo 2 had that, That's more for people being competitive on ladders.

The only people who care about that are people who need some excuse for why they cant finish the campaign

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

Disclaimer:

I already know a few elite GGG bootlickers will spam this comment section telling me I don't understand charts or numbers, that its "normal", or "everything is fine", or "play something else -stop whining".
Let them. It's all they do, all the time, and we can't stop it.

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Cocofang#3395 wrote:

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

Disclaimer:

I already know a few elite GGG bootlickers will spam this comment section telling me I don't understand charts or numbers, that its "normal", or "everything is fine", or "play something else -stop whining".
Let them. It's all they do, all the time, and we can't stop it.

You don't realize it of course but typing out this disclaimer doesn't make your point any less stupid. It just means that you have a modicum of self awareness but fail to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.

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Cocofang#3395 wrote:

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

Disclaimer:

I already know a few elite GGG bootlickers will spam this comment section telling me I don't understand charts or numbers, that its "normal", or "everything is fine", or "play something else -stop whining".
Let them. It's all they do, all the time, and we can't stop it.

You don't realize it of course but typing out this disclaimer doesn't make your point any less stupid. It just means that you have a modicum of self awareness but fail to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.