Social Screen, Marketplace, Game Options, Balancing, Visibility, Communication, Monetization, etc.

This text is just something I wrote quickly when I had issues with my Router and waited in the Hotline a couple days ago.
It is not meant to be for discussion with the community, since you can just write feedback on your own instead of using other peoples words, and is purely written to those working for GGG and claim to care about feedback.
I was thinking about not even posting it, since I feel it doesn't matters what anyone is saying to you guys, but after having seen the update, which only confirms the theory yet again that you create issues on purpose to get praised for fixing them later on... well here it is.


the social screen is as bad as it is in path of exile 1
what always was needed:
-regional settings (it is bad to join a group with terrible ping and die to it just because it was not stated in the title, the same it is bad for having others join, die or leave and waste the entry just because of high ping from the other side of the world)... yes, i want at least a chance to avoid specifically YOU (new zeland developer that most likely doesn't even play the game, but i also don't want to play with anyone else from new zealand, since as someone that sits in the middle of europe it's a terrible experience for both of us, so why even bother putting us together in the first place) give us as players the choice and don't just be selfish to choose to be open for all for us just because it shows more multiplayer lobbies so you can brag about the game having so much lobbies open at all times
-description length is way too short (with all the missing features it's not possible to write a full description of everything, even in shortened form)
-level limitations (level needs to be limited! if you ever had opened a group and wrote a level range in the title, you know the player base is incapable of having basic reading skills and/or ignores all rules, so you end up constantly needing to kick players)
-build limitations (some builds break important things for other builds, so it needs to made sure that people with those specific builds aren't able to join in the first place. some builds are also blocking ways, trigger epilepsy, are blinding bright, crash other peoples games, create massive lag and frame drops)
-simple content configuration (why is it not possible to simply have specific content like mapping, bossing, trading separated)
-content limitation (if i'm not able to do a specific content because i don't have the specific requirements, i shouldn't even be able to see those groups in the first place nor should i be able to join)
-always being able to see groups no matter where (it is a bad decision that i'm only able to see content when i'm in the area and see nothing when i'm in my hideout, which means i won't ever go into my hideout when i'm doing group content)
-report function for group names and people in groups without joining them
-clearly show the group leader before joining (what's even the point in having the ui changed between seeing public groups and being in said group)
-6. slot issues (you know about it, it's annoying, it shouldn't be needed to ask a random person to give you an invite, and then not have the group not show up anymore once someone leaves... just put it higher on the priority list, and actually work on fixing it if you care about the game being played as non single player game at all)

marketplace
-i disagree completely with all of the people that have anything to say in your company
-the entire system is bad, wastes time and makes your game frustrating and you very well know it, but decide to be anti consumer to please yourself
-if you want to have that overcomplicated system in place, just limit people so they have to sell for the prices they set, can't take out their items and can't intentionally waste other peoples time
-create strict rules and punish those that aren't following them while also giving us a publicly visible reputation system (those that counterargue with "what is when i don't react because i'm afk" i can only tell, turn off trading while being gone! this could also be implemented by the devs to simply turn off trading tabs while your game is paused)

moderation
your game is currently undermoderated and you know it
you don't have enough people working at support which is why you currently try to hire more people, but with your lack of proper and strict rules, this will not fix the experience of players having a bad time engaging with your chats (ingame and out of game), trying to trade for hours and getting ghosted every single time, scamming, botting, cheating, etc.
and the botting as well as the cheating leads to inflation, while you have done little to fight it since path of exile 1, and the same goes for the scamming that's going on

game options
you are working with unreal engine 5, yet you don't give us as many options as other unreal 5 games give to players and there is no excuse for it
by not giving us enough options to limit the game in certain ways we will always experience crashes from certain builds, certain errors and the game will always look terrible on certain hardware
just one out of many examples of what's wrong: bloom is a nice example of something that doesn't need to be limited to 25-100%
you as a company choose looks over visibility, which is a choice we should have to make and not you for us
another would be that the ui is hard limited, which is okay for console, but on pc we should be able to put the minimap somewhere that isn't the top right and with specific builds we don't have the need for certain ui elements so they are a waste of screen space

balancing
it is the same as in path of exile 1, so you have learned zero from mistakes
a build should feel tanky for melee characters when certain thresholds of resitances are met, yet the game is balanced around everyone having the requirement to play a tank build, so you can make content that is anti tank
what this creates is that with regular enemies you can end up dying in under a second
besides the resistance issue, there are also issues where people simply can ignore mechanics entirely by having so much damage that it oneshots everything and if you aren't at that point you will struggle, since the game is balanced more around those broken builds as it is balanced around creative custom builds that people came up with
by creating those giant gaps in builds it creates hyperinflation, since one smaller part of the community is able to farm an extreme ammount in a short time, while for others life in your game becomes a painfull struggle where it's impossible to buy gear anymore since even if you grind more and more, the prices increase faster which is depressing and makes playing meaningless since the actual majority of players is unable to improve because of that
you as developers think uniques should be absolute garbage that's only worth using for leveling in >95% of the cases, even when it's perfectly rolled, or just be destroyed for a chance orb after 5-10 destroyed items which have an extreme chance of failure to create another garbage unique item and have a tiny unrealistic chance of getting an item that's actually okay to use in very specific builds
meanwhile most players would think an unique item should be at least as good as a rare item, have something actually unique about it and could be even more rare as it already is to reflect that
this does not mean that the best builds should be having uniques in every single slot, but at least that uniques should be viable in endgame as well and not be something that is a throwaway garbage item that could be itemfiltered since it's worth not even an exalted orb while those items are still rare for no reason at all
on top of that comes that you have no clue how to designe loot tables, which is clearly shown by people creating statistics that over and over again show that the best loot chances aren't in the hardest content and there is no logical reason behind it, so you either know or you waste your time and the game itself will not tell you
classes should give an important identity, while it is nice to have the freedom of doing everything with every class, the classes itself feel little impactful even for what they are designed for and i would say there should be less boring effects without any real impact (i'm talking about those completely passive effects, which could as well be given by a random item as well) and way more stronger effects that can make a build actually viable
currently not being able to change the ascention class also feels very bad and forces us to either replay the entire game till late or endgame to experience the other class or stick with a class we don't like playing
the reason why i put that point under balancing is because, as developers you guys claimed that there are more "high risk, high reward" classes, yet in reality it is higher risk as other classes by giving the class downsides, while not having any more reward over another class that has not the access to the downside
this bad design philosophy has lead me to not play certain classes, which i have tried at the beginning, till i came to a point where i was stuck and unable to make progress
to say it how the game told me, i died over and over again to suicide
that issue could only have been fixed by way better gear
yet when i see other people actually invest into that, and not choose to pivit like i did, their outcome is not better in any way compared to my outcome from replaying the game multiple times with different classes that don't have any downside at all to them
the only real impact of having said high risks put on a character is that those characters are way less versitile in the choice of how they need to be played to not be completely useless to the point where it's worth to not even have an ascention class

visibility
the game is what some gamers would call a clusterf**k
why would you choose to have skill effects stack over enemy ground and skill effects
this only leads to death
the same goes for having no indicators on enemies that have certain buffs, so this creates instances where you die for no proper reason, have to check during the death screen what even could have killed you only to see a long list of effects on an enemie which may have killed you
so besides having the indicators at the top where you need to have an enemie in your target to even read it put actual indicators on enemies
with knowing what killed you, simply give players a message on screen so they know what killed them
i want to bring up epilepsy triggers again, since why would you allow that kind of thing in your game, especially when those people can join public lobbies
i don't even understand what's wrong with people playing those builds in the first place, besides them being completely overpowered and killing everything when it's on and even outside of the screen (this is again a balancing issue of the game as well), but no matter what their reason is, they experience the game in it's worst looking form and are unable to see anything since all that's on screen are overlapping effects on top of each other

communication
the communication with the community has been bad
you try to act transparent, but what you really do is announce something multiple times to hype it up, talk for hours and then just don't deliver what you have been talking about
instead of going for large patch with low ammounts of actual added content, simply try to update content the same ammount you hotfix your game
that way you aren't ghosting the community for a month and follow up with a dissappointing patch that lacks important things
simple numbers changes don't need to be the main content in a large patch

monetization
there is a small amount of people working on them, which is very clear by how little got added after a long period of time
if this incredible slow tempo is kept up, just to add all the old things from path of exile 1 to 2 it would take you way past the 1.0 release
currently it has been shown that you don't value people paying you at all, since not even the extremely overpriced bundles got added by now, nor the newest path of exile 1 content
what you in fact do love is creating fomo, by not giving us what we already paid for in the pay2win cathegory which is stash space (to those saying it's not pay2win, try to make enough currency now to buy proper gear with only using the low amount of basic stash, which means as well not being able to sell things on the market)
how are you not able to have it done by now?
you already have delayed it, only to have it yet delayed once again with the patch that was announced 4 times on steam alone, and still you have not done what you promised 10 days later

focus on issues
i think here is specifically a large issue in your teams where you show being clueless in the sense of direction.
above all other issues, you should focus on having someone work on constantly fixing issues that prevent the game being played.
those involve the game having issues starting, game freezing regularly (the highest one of all should be the issue that requires a pc restart since the game locks the entire pc, which is the case as well for windows 10 users and not just a windows 11 update issue as you claim it to be) and constant game crashes.
for some of those issues the reasons are known, have been reported, yet there hasn't been a fix for it.
peoples builds for example should not be able to join a lobby and make others peoples game crash, so even if you are unable to fix the issue properly, at least look into a temporary solution.
all we can see is those issues not being on your priority list high enough from the start, as well as you telling us that if an issue isn't on the list it doesn't mean that it's not being worked on.
this is also another issue with your general communication which is lacking in actual quality over quantity.

at the end i just want to say that this all is not what i want you to implement into the game
it is what should have been implemented from the start, since it has been feedback given to you for path of exile 1, where you already ignored it and now you ignore it again.
if you do any improvement on anything that i pointed out, i would just say that you have created issues intentionally so you could solve them and get credit for doing changes and listening to community requests.
this is not a pessimisitic view, but rather a realistic view considering the past on how you handled the game.
i also wanted to point out that i thought path of exile 1 was bad in so many ways, inconsitent, clueless as to where to go with the game, boring and only really became interesting with your newest season, which was actually nice and is also the reason i paid you money and also bought the access to path of exile 2, but at the end it is just worse as current season of path of exile 1 and lacks direction the same way.
so overall i now have as little expectations as i have from a random indie developer team on a small budget doing early access on steam (in most cases they either abandon their games after a bit or they stall for years and end up not delivering their promises either way).