R.I.P. A thank you to CW and Mark

All good things come to an end, happens with everything in life and with life itself. It's time to mourn and move on, it has been a great ride, this past 4 years feeling like a child again every 3 (or 4) months, even though I'm a mid age adult with kids. I've invested almost 5k hours of my life into this game, not counting money spent in a game like I never did in any other, and personally I don't regret it.

So for that, a special thank you to CW even if you are not around anymore and to Mark, you made me happy with your commitment as dev's and creators of this amazing game. To be sure, I'm talking about Path of Exile (or "PoE1"), not the replacer with a 2 at the end, driven to make money. And we know, we all want more money, be rich and live like kings.

Having that said, I will throw something else into the fire, at least, you were frontal finally, but not honest. And it's easy to see that John the new CW of Tencent GGG (similar to Activision Blizzard), and to be honest, since he showed up I was not able to trust that speeded speech, some things sounded fake and now I know I was right. You don't care about your main community/clients and that's ok, those you don't like it can just move on, like me.

As a curiosity, I've asked my wife as a specialist in Psychology and body language analysis (working broadly with kids, adult criminals, etc) to analyze some videos, this last 3 minute video, the last Tavern talk video with DM and Ghazzy and some older videos (2023/2024) and it was funny to hear her statements, summarizing it:
- John is the new boss around the block
- John doesn't allow Mark to speak that might reveal internal conflict
- In tavern talk, When Mark talks, there's always the need for John to gain control of the conversation, which might indicate clear development/ideas differences within the team
- Mark is not able to talk or answer about "PoE1"
- Mark has a complete change in how he behaves at the couch (2025) compared from other videos 2023/2024 - he clearly has no control even if he's body wants to do so
- Last video, Mark being the main lead of "PoE1" and he's not the one communicating with the community, indicating clearly that Tencent and John goal is only to drive PoE2 (their new easy/quick money making baby)
- John slow and paced speech talking about something he doesn't want to talk about and that probably, was obliged to do so, to handle community pressure

Never though I would uninstall this game, but that happened today, maybe I'll be back some day if things change direction, no one can ever say never.
To the one's that stay, I wish you all the best, enjoy this game running now in Standard mode, this community is one of the best out there.

Peace.

+1
Great insight. I can understand her assessment and couldn't agree more.
It actually feels like a breakup to me.

Path of Drama Queens

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SpaniardPuss#1549 wrote:

Path of Drama Queens

0.5/10

None of your interpretations add up. The camp fire talk after holiday was super relexaed, Mark was super relaxed and of course Jonathan is the boss...nothing out of the ordinary. Someone is the boss usually, big whoopdi.

Also, Jonathan making both bad news videos in the recent past instead of just a post by the community manager shows some responsibility. You don't actively want to make this videos. I don't see any advantage that Mark makes the recent video just because he is lead of poe1.

I found Johnathan's latest video repulsing. His fake crocodile tears about poe1 was another prong on the coffin, he has managed to put these games in.

My opinion for this person is so bad, I can imagine him 2 minutes after the video joking about how good he felt getting this out of the way and then continue with his day.

Johnathan, if you could silently vanish into the night and let Chris or Mark back handling communication and game development it would be great.

POE2 is so bad and whoever is really in charge of the vision for POE2 is a god-awful game dev.

Either re-make POE1 into POE2 and stick with what made you successful, or make a modern ARPG for a wider audience. Pick one.

But no, let's make a POE2 that most POE1 players hate and market it to a wider audience, but we expect our modern ARPG audience to accept POE2 without an auction house... ya... that'll work.

Jonathan's "apology" was fake and a bold faced lie. He knows POE2 is struggling and a new POE1 season would draw 200k+ players, and take attention/momentum away from POE2. So POE1 is be sacrificed on the altar of POE2, and the loyal POE1 playerbase that hate POE2 are just being hung out to dry.

This isn't how you have long-term success developing video games.

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SpaniardPuss#1549 wrote:

Path of Drama Queens

They will all be playing 3.26.

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Akorpz#7437 wrote:

And it's easy to see that John the new CW of Tencent GGG (similar to Activision Blizzard), and to be honest, since he showed up I was not able to trust that speeded speech...

- John is the new boss around the block

jonathan is one of the 3 founding members of GGG. he created poe1, hes the guy, he wrote the engine, he coded the game. eric was the art director, chris ran the company, jonathan made the game.



jonathan has always spoken fast when hes excited about something, the guys brain moves at crazy speeds. thats always been the case, we can go back to podcasts in 2014, 2015 where hes doing interviews and he talks way faster than he talks now.

the reason chris used to do all the talking is because jonathans time was too precious, while chris was doing the PR tour of podcasts jonathan was busy in the lab actually making poe.



if your wife was an expert i think theres something a bit more obvious she should have noticed that would explain a lot of things.

The only communities I've ever encountered that are more entitled than gamers are people who watch sports.