Comprehensive feedback from a long term player.

I will preface this saying I have been playing poe off and on since 2014 and have always reached pinnacle content when I decide to play. I am not the best, but I am, what I would consider, a try hard in every game I play. These observations are coming from that point of view.

1. Trade

Cheeks! No other way to put it, from the indexing of items to the lack of being able to search properly for several end game items it is just so bad and open to exploitation. You allow mass amounts of price fixing and scamming and there are simple solutions that you could put in place to mitigate these issues. One to stop price fixing is to just put a check in place on market averages. Assign values to items much in the form of weighted stats and then compare to market average SELLING PRICE. We don't have poeninja here so it is hard to tell on many items what the actual market value is. Just give a player a warning they are underlisting and leave it at that. You could also delist items after they have been up for a week. Sure it would be a mild inconvenience for a lot of players, but it would help with price fixing a lot.

As far as buying items go, if you can highlight it in our stash you can highlight it in the trade window. Some items are easy to swap out and yes players should read carefully, but they don't always. Your place isn't to point and laugh it is to help make the experience better. If a player whispers directly from the trade site generate a hash, then put a little lock in the corner and highlight the item in blue. When the item is put into the trade window compare the hash. If any values have changed then take away the lock and blue highlight. Done, no AH, no market npc's and no big changes to the current system. It would be organic and take one of your smarter guys a month to put in a table and define its parameters. There is a really good write up on digitalocean about exactly that in c++.

2. Mapping

Not good, not bad but also good and bad. My issue is you say you want build diversity but then keep the super rippy gameplay from a game that gave you six chances and slap it on a game that gives you one chance. I have 600 divs worth of gear and am 8/8 on all the things I want, I know it is doable. That said, it isn't approachable at all for many newer players and if they want to farm end game content a lot of them feel like they have to run a cookie cutter meta build which totally destroys a lot of the games fun in the first place. On top of that a lot of the maps are just horrible in design, even some of the better maps can be incredibly annoying like blooming fields or rustbowl. Those maps could be so much better, but for some reason a vine becomes a wall and it just makes the experience super annoying because you are constantly having to stare at the map since the impassible terrain is so small. Then there are levels like crypt, mire, mineshaft and factory. These maps could be decent but they are going to take a little bit of man hours because the procedural generation doesn't account for the fact that after the fifth forced back track due to dead ends players want to stick there hand through the monitor rather than keep playing those layouts. Just... stop man. There is no way your analytics don't show that people absolutely HATE those maps. Work on them or remove them, because the game would be better without.

3. Pinnacle Bosses

Personally I like most of it even if it is unapproachable for the majority of the player base. Especially in the higher tiers like +4 delirium. The encounters scale so high the only people beating them are people running absolutely broken builds or people using builds that fill the screen with attacks like spark. I am people so I know this. I just think some tuning should be done to help a lot of other builds scale better rather than nerfing the bosses/encounters. That brings me to my fourth point.

4. Build Balance

Atrocious. I don't know which one of your devs wives left them for a mace wielding barbarian with lots of armor and hp, but we get it dude, you hate them. Armor(armour) vs evasion is laughably bad, and es scaling vs hp scaling is even worse. You said it felt mandatory for people to take the red life nodes in poe1 so instead of doing that you forced people to take blue life nodes in poe2... GJ I guess? Also the scaling of armor is unnecessarily convoluted, just make it work like resistances and then allow people to "overcap" in order to scale it to end game. It really isn't that crazy of a solution and when half of your melee players are wearing a cloak of flame you messed up. Oh, and wtf is with Kaom's? No spirit?? C'mon man.

5. Performance

I think one of my personal gripes is performance. An 11700k, 3090 on an m.2 shouldnt be struggling every time it has the audacity to think about savannah. I know there is work to be done there, and work is being done but man it is so bad sometimes. I go from an average of 70 fps to hitting 19 fps if I open a breach. Guess ima buy the hype card and start generating frames if I want to not play a slideshow.


I don't know everything and I probably even missed a few of my own gripes but these are the ones that popped in my head while I was writing this. Only saying it because I have always loved the games, if I didn't like it I wouldn't waste time on writing this.