A Message to Path of Exile 1 Players

Thanks for the vid, i hope the next season of poe 1 or 2 will be a craft season

I understand, but you also created the problems for PoE2 that now need solving.

PoE1 had a perfect endgame, idk why you had to reinvent it :/

well it was a good run, time to move to some other games. Good luck with PoE2 GGG

sadge just sadge

ok, I'll do only think players can do. Stop playing PoE 2 until you give me decent patch on PoE 1.

At least an event like endless delve for like a month would be appreciated, want to play poe2 too, but with the current state of endgame I don't feel like logging in on it.

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Besovskii#1866 wrote:

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"An aspirant can afford to be promising. An emperor must keep those promises."

+1

This is horrible news and what I feared - even worse.

It's bad when you have to put your eggs in one basket and have only one case in which this works out well for everyone. Sadly this case didn't happen and now we have a half dead poe1 that needs to be resurrected and a poe2 that (my guess) isn't the money horse yet that poe1 was with mtx.

This is my exact guess of what happened. Poe2 wasn't going fast enough to you pull resources from the core poe1 team - after all they are the guys that know how its done. Then you end up with a case where you cannot pull them out from poe2 again because they are so specialized now that it would take unreasonably long to train new help on the poe 2 job and it would be almost impossible to train them on the insanity that poe 1 is at this point.
So you gutted poe1.

And there was only one case where this would work out - if all went to plan and poe2 early access released on time long before the holidays.

I am playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time this week because D3 got delayed for a week, poe2 is boring to me, poe1 is dead atm and it was on sale.
Spoiler alert for this game:
It's about a criminal that manages their team in a way where the next coup will put it all right. He only plans for the best case scenario. It never goes his way.
Because life just happens.

Now this didn't just happen, it was a decision that was made and maybe it even was clear at the time that gutting the poe1 team would be the best contingency. After all, poe 2 is the future and GGG would be right to put their money on that horse going forward. So there is a world in which Poe2 was always going to be the successor that hopefully brings in the money now and poe 2 was a Diablo 3 like season run sideproject. So this choice was the smart choice for poe2 and with limited resources (mainly developers) it was the right one to sacrifice poe1.
However, this is a change in player trust. This is the same situation every company gets themselves into when they get big. It's the Diablo 2 stage of things, the Half Life 2 stage of things. "We are still a good company that values their customers as players and we want to deliver the best game possible". After this comes the Diablo 3 and Half Life 3 stage - developing a money making game that is going to hit it big because investment was spent the wrong way to make it a good game. And now you have to throw good player trust after bad money and eventually the market will force you to make money making bad games.

My guess is that poe1 will now receive a new league end of Q2 2025. Which is almost a year after the last league and this trend will only continue. Because the devs moved to poe2 cannot be taken out again, so you have to retrain people for poe1 - which means poe1 has to be dumbed down in a way to be manageable. This is a huge speculation on my part - but I can't imagine poe1 being incredibly well documented - and even if it is, the complexity it has now is just too big. I think there is so much knowledge in these developers that isn't documented and cannot be documented that poe1 lacks experienced devs now.

Poe2 on the other hand needs to financially carry GGG now - and soon at that. The constant 11 week trickle of leagues from poe1 isn't there any more (oh yeah, chris wilson talked about a sustainable 11 week cycle at a game dev conference at one point...). So what will happen to poe2 now is probably that developers are doing less gameplay relevant content and more mtx content. In a game that in my opinion already has too much loadscreens and too fancy graphics to support even more graphical fidelity.
And now you can see how companies end up developing a game like diablo 4, which is essentially an item shop that has gameplay elements to it.
There are still lots of decisions that have to be made bad to end up there -but it's not impossible to end up in a case where you have 2 games that are not what players or ggg wanted in 2024.

I know that a lot of this is just "normal" business practice and by being open and public about this it "doesn't look good". Which is true - but it doesn't look good and it also isn't good. And I think GGG still sort of knows that. It's when you start making rainbow levels in your game that you lost scope of what "doesn't look good" and what actually isn't good.

PoE1 3.26 will be released along with Winds of Winter, jeez just chill guys its right around the corner

Big ooof :( sadge