A Message to Path of Exile 1 Players

Dear GGG,
I'm having fun playing PoE2. It's a good base to be developed in my opinion. But it shouldn't have come at the cost of PoE. You promised otherwise, you broke an insane release-cycle that made me completely astonished every quarter of a year and lead to me telling any gaming buddy, that other developers needn't say they lack time for the tiniest features because you guys do absolutely insane work in a breathtaking tempo.

But now we're at a point where you've broken promises, there is no schedule for either a PoE1 oder 2 update and for the first time in forever we as fans are absolutely clueless what is going to happen and when. I want to stress I'm not mad because there is no new content in this very moment, it's about trust and reliability.

No matter what I say, it won't accelerate what happens behind GGG's doors but please remember what kind of communication and trust your success and the retention are built on and try to get back to that point.

PoE2 opinion: Change things you want to change and ignore if anybody just finished campaign. Do not wait an insane amount because people might not like an economy reset. It's early access but you're not treating it like that.

Didnt you make the promise this was not going to hapen at the time of what you just mentioned was the time that you knew you made a mistake ....???

RED FLAGS!

i have a few of my friends already saying that they would not have bought early acces to poe2 if they knew this was the case .

and i think this was the exact reason why it was never disclosed to the public.

why would you promise something that you clearly knew you couldnt deliver at that time?

but i gues you raked in enough normies to the point where u can make these type of decisions .

I feel sad(

as a member of another gamedev team - please, please, please don't rush! it's very unfortunate situation but please don't hurry so people don't burn out in the process (especially qa team haha) :pray: You do a lot and enough, there is always a way, like some legendary leagues rerun etc :hug:

Every EA pack purchased was a knife in PoE 1's back, now we know.

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AngryGekko#0233 wrote:

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vio#1992 wrote:

chris chose a safe salary for his employees for the years to come and some safety for the company when those idiots on reddit pitchforked his companies' suppport down to a minimum again

There have been multiple riots against Chris' ruthless vision, which STILL is not what customers want. I never think it's a good idea to blame customers for voting with their wallets. It's the only vote they have.

Second, his decision to sell the brand worsened the situation for both employees and the games as we all can witness now. He took the money and escaped. The whole mess was a management issue from the beginning, but people have always been blind on that eye and kept glorifying him.

it`s two things which you can`t mix up: chris` vision for poe1 and the tencent deal.

the vision of successful game developers and the vocal part of the gaming community rarely match. game developers want players to engage as long as possible with their game and the vocal part of the community wants quick success, as much gratifications (permanently increasing over time of course) as possible to be off soon playing other games on the market.

the vocal part of the community also hates challenges cause they don`t want their skills tested. reddit has ever been like: "it`s not fun if i lose".

the problem is that chris` vision never really got a strong foothold in poe1, sure we have ruthless mode but this was destined to fail right from it`s announcement cause players always play where the majority of other players are if there is a better alternative and instead of increasing the appeal of ruthless with unique features they just stripped off the rewarding parts of the main game.

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when it comes to the tencent deal, players always just focus on the personal gains of ggg`s leadership but it also gave ggg much more freedom in it`s design decisions cause failing 2 leagues in a row didn`t ruin the company.
before the tencent engagement, ggg had to alternate between leagues that ruined themselves and leagues that ruined the game with power creep. it`s been a steady way down the path to destruction.

free games suffer the most from bad publicity, ggg`s decision to engage on the hate pool called reddit was a bad move cause they opened themselves to mass blackmail from very influential people there who were justr disappointed that they didn`t get what they demanded (more power creep) and didn`t appreciate that they couldn`t play the same overpowered builds over and over again.

i always voted with my wallet to appreciate all the risks ggg took to give us a unique game experience and all the stuff they did made alot of sense if you look at their work from a game developers side of view. which is the only view if you want the game to be successful

That just sucks. Very surprised of the huge scale of mismanagement here. Having to wait 7 months for any news about PoE1 was already shitty, but you telling us that you wont even START working on anything PoE1 related till weeks after the 0.2 patch for PoE2?

Thats ridiculous.

I absolutly disagree with the reasoning to why not even a few PoE1 devs can start work on PoE1 now. If swapping even just a handful of devs back to PoE1 seems so impossible, I dont see any future where GGG can manage to support both games with content.

You know when we were saying new patch next month, every month for 3 months? Actually we did nothing, we had no one working on poe1 and I should of predicted no one working on poe1 for 6 months will lead to no one working on poe1..
Well any how as soon as we done with our new toy what needs 10bugilion fixes we will hard commit at least 3 devs to poe1.
...Stupid poe1 fans.. what.. ? you still recording ?

i know they can do it. just give them time.

PoE1 has an old engine.

Its not normal to keep the old game alive.

I was already mad when they changed the wording on the pre-requisites for getting a key from past purchases, and I had to spend another 51 NZD to play PoE2 when I'd already got a Kitava pack for like 700 bucks...then PoE2 kinda sucks and there's no new content for PoE1.

I don't regret the Kitava pack, you make the decision to buy those things based on what the game already is WHEN you purchase them, and I was happy to help support GGG with another pack because I didn't expect this kind of thing from them.

But overall, as a customer at this point, here's some feedback.

Hire a PR manager and get Johnathan away from the camera. I don't even understand the angle you guys are trying to play, it's a PATTERN of 'sorry' and it just feels like you're lying to us all the time, or giving us as tiny a piece of information as you can to keep up interested until your next YouTube apology video. Imagine you just released 3.26 in Oct and told us PoE2 was coming in May? and they both launched smoothly? Even your 3 week delay was too delayed and I wasted my leave for the launch. I do want to preface this next statement and say that I do genuinely appreciate the dev team and all the work they do, and I think you're all great people of course - but in a general sense, a customer doesn't care about the company, or the people, or their struggles...they care about the game and the content, but all the customer is getting from you guys is 'oh boohoo, its so hard for us' and 'you guys deserve better and we're trying so hard *sniffle sniffle*'. Respectfully, shut up and do your job (or manage expectations better so we expect less and we aren't constantly disappointed in you).

I liked PoE1 and still want to play it. I wouldn't have even cared if PoE2 wasn't even announced to this day. I'd be happy trucking along in PoE1 without a care in the world. Instead, I feel robbed of 51 bucks you said I wouldn't have to spend to play a new, worse game that's making the old game get worse (or at the very least, neglected).