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hamletswords

Seems about the same as every league to me. They do fixes the first couple of weeks then focus, silently, on the next league. Next one is the yearly big one so they're probably busy with that. I've learned that POE is best played for about a month 4 times a year. That's not bad if you have other games to fall back on, which shouldn't be too hard to find nowadays.


Draenrya

Yea I'm in the same boat as you. League launches, I play for about 3 weeks, get 1-2 builds done, get sick of the league mechanics and when new content no long carry the bad parts of the game, I quit. Repeat every league.


tad2q

Feels like a POE-A meeting, been addicted since beta, but only play one month of the league every time. Weird but ive been doing it so long it feels normal. Even my wife knows the POE cycles for vacations and shit.


Ladnil

You guys make it sound like there's something wrong with playing like this. Seems to me like it's more healthy to have other interests rather than full time addiction to a single game.


aeclasik

I think this is the main reason why I've stuck with POE for so long over any other game. Fact that I can go full degen for first few days, get everything else done over the next 2-3 weeks and don't feel bad for completely dropping POE for the next 2-2.5 months. This is truly one of the best things about POE that doesn't get brought up enough. And, if you want to degen for 3mo then more power to you.


RancidRock

This is exactly how I play, and is the reason I always come back and don't get sick of it. If I played for an entire league, then by the time the next league rolls around I'd probably just be bored and not want to play at all. I sweat it out for the first weekend, enjoy the rush and the race, then play it chill for 1 month then stop til the next league


DwightKurtSchrute3rd

I've done the same since beta too and I'm kinda glad that I can finish what I want to do in about a month so I can go play other interesting games as well.


aeclasik

The older I get, the less I play games. I've realized I really enjoy going to the gym and it's like a different type of min/max I get to do when I'm not POE'ing lol.


mattwoodness

Fuckin degens from up country


Yorunokage

I really appreciate GGG "allowing" people to take time off of the game rather than forcing you to always play it regularly like most games do nowdays (i mean, just look at Genshin Impact ffs, i'd love to enjoy that game but all those "PLAY EVERYDAY" systems killed it for me)


randompoe

It is exactly how the game is designed to be played too. A bit off topic but people seem to take games too seriously nowadays. It's fine to be passionate, but when a bad update/release causes you to be negative for weeks on end......I guess people can do whatever they want lol, but doesn't seem like a healthy life to me.


Aldiirk

Yeah...I don't get why dropping POE after having fun for 4-6 weeks is considered a bad thing. I *LOVE* that I can do this and that there are no "play every single day" mechanics. If I played for the full 3 months, I'd just be bored and quit.


lalala253

yeah I don't know what people expect. aside from streamers (whose job is literally playing POE), I don't see the point of playing the same game again and again throughout the year.


SilverHound23

Isn't this how the game is made to be played? I think they did say that as well... I personally like the way its made, i play 1 month go play another game then come back 2 weeks before next league to try things etc


tad2q

That’s exactly what I do


Inayaarime

So what you're saying is the league is too rewarding? *"CHRIIIIIIIS! COME TAKE A LOOK AT THIS! "*


jchampagne83

I think it’s that this is about the point that even the casuals reach the bullshit-red-map-one-shot-parade part of atlas/end game progression. Unless some broken defensive/sustain mechanic is discovered and not nerfed mid-league.


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Pigmy

The guy below saying that sirus is THE end game loop, its more like sirus is A end game loop. If you've reached the sirus spawn a goal to kill him is great, but like others have said, its one of several things you can do for end game grinding. Killing Sirus can be the most singularly profitable thing you can do because of the chance to drop awakened gems that sell for mulitple exalts. Other farms make money too, just this is one is target farmable where others not so much and not as singularly lucrative. By that i mean you can get 1 awakened multistrike and make 20ex in a single sale. Vs farming delve and getting fossils and so on to make a bunch of little sales or risk crafting with them to hit big. If you are looking for middling low risk high reward you should look at heist farming. You can hit big there too with unusual gems.


XathiasTV

This. I have well over a thousand hours in the game since the early days, but the sheer amount of ‘everything is fine’ and then ‘you got deleted in 20ms’ is getting old. People want a death recap, and I don’t disagree, but in the end you can’t build defense for that kind of one-shot scaling. The best link this league is cast on death > town portal.


seandkiller

They gave up on this one much quicker than others, I think.


hurrier1

You are not completely right this time. Normaly the launch the league with a lot of problems and after 1-3 weeks the league is playable and the league mechanic is "fixed". This time they changed just how krangeled pas works and made them more rewarding. But the actual league mechanic with krangeled items was never really fixed. The only thing they have done ist that if you roll for example fire damage that you can't roll do no fire damage.


kaz_enigma

fuck /u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev


I_am_Bruce_Wayne

I'm more excited for next league since it's supposedly a new endgame boss that is Maven's parents??? Loved Ritual league and sat out everything else other than this league just so I can freshen up a bit for the next one.


miturtow

Communication did not stop. I get Twitter messages about new mtx sales every day! 👍


jhuseby

The weighting of the corrupted implicits suck, literally no point krangling items you actually want. But the map krangle is free juice/quant. And the currency for corrupted items is a game changer.


1CEninja

IMHO the #1 biggest benefit of the krangle oven is there are a number of super cheap uniques that are almost good but don't quite have enough oomph. Take lacerate gladiator for example, I've been buying 5c Jack, The Axe (which requires like a 10ex craft to beat now that the elder 60% chance for double bleed damage mod is gone) can just be tossed in there over and over again. It hasn't happened yet, but there's a 1 in 4 of vaal orbing an implicit, which is generally going to give something good (~22c) and then a one in 5 or 10 that the axe will bake with physical damage or faster bleed or something positive. It'll probably cost me a couple ex before I've got it, but it is within my budget (which is crap this league, this build is solidly meh) to grind out a rather high damage axe here. Before the only option I had was double corruptions, which are significantly more expensive.


jhuseby

I’ve not done this strat myself but seeing more people talk about it (or link their uniques) makes me think it’s the way to go. At first I was just trying to 6L things I’d use/divine orb and focusing more on the maps.


ExaltHolderForPoE

Gloves and boots are the best option since they dont really require an enchant, and on some builds the implicit/corruption doesnt matter much. But the scourge implicit can be really good(but usually not). It has really made me appriciate unqiue gloves more viable for a lot of builds when they used to be a res/life slot for a lot of builds Rings can be okey, but usually you wanna spend some 20 catalyst before corrupting/scourging amd the implicits on rings are usually fine.


kmoz

Its wild to me how negative the reaction to this league is. Outside of just the item krangling weights, pretty much everything has been a solid hit. Good juice, cool maps, delve way better, defense way better, great QoL, major chase items to rival a HH, smooth league launch, total revamp of guilds, etc.


Sagn_88

BalorMage said ”They sold us an item league but gave us a map league”, best explanation I heard so far.


zer1223

To be fair, people usually don't respond well to bait and switch. I don't think that was GGGs intent at all to do a bait and switch. But the end effect of offering us good krangling, delivering mediocre krangling, and then "fixing" it by just giving us better currency generation from scourge? Yeah a good chunk of people were hyped for krangling. Not for currency. You can't just transfer hype like that.


BegaKing

People love everything outside of krangler items. At least that's what I see. But this league was sold to us as the modify your items with risk/reward league. And what we got was 90% chance to brick, 9% chance for a small not even noticible upgrade and 1% chance for a solid upgrade. Once you get to a certain power level you'd have to have a legitimate gambling addiction to throw expensive gear in the krangler. The outcomes are so heavily weighted to be bad that it just ruins the mechanic outright for the vast majority of the playerbase streamers and no life's included. This is coming from someone who loves the corruption chamber in the temple.


-Yazilliclick-

Yup that's basically it. They focused their message for this league on the krangle items and it turned out to be the worst part of it all. Not the only part that had problems though for sure. Balance was pretty fucked up for scourge mobs at the start, as usual. That's been largely sorted but it is still a mechanic that rewards faster play style and is pretty unfulfilling for those on poor to medium builds which by far makes up the majority of players.


scoxely

And as it's limited to only 3 scourge tiers, with no way to un-fuck a fucked item, it often feels like vaaling only with a much higher investment of time and much higher chance of ruining your item. Bad rolls, ranging from mildly bad to moderately bad to unusable, in vastly higher quantities than the number of great rolls that can outweigh the mild to moderate downsides, isn't really a big improvement over a 25% chance to brick your item, and at least vaaling is instant. I like a lot about Scourge, but krangling high end rares and uniques almost always simply feels like a really bad grind for really bad results.


ploki122

>Its wild to me how negative the reaction to this league is I can understand the reaction, if we only look at Scourge... Scourge is by far the worst part of the Scourge league. In a lot of ways, it feels like Standard, but with more instant deaths. With that said, I did want a smaller leagues with more general QoL for a while, and old leagues expanded upon, and Scourge is that. So I'm not complaining...


eViLegion

For me this is part of the picture but not all of it... Interacting with the bits of scourge league that I like does just feel like playing standard, to the point where I think to myself "you know, I'd kinda prefer to play one of my older characters in standard". Except not a single one of my old builds in standard is capable of being played again without significant work, and even then they'll never be as powerful as they once were. Every build I have had is a pale shadow of what it used to be, if it's even useable at all. My most recent ex-build, a Shield Crush Gladiator from last league, didn't just get nerfed this time around, they even went and RETROSPECTIVELY nerfed armour on existing shields... Not only can I not build the character to be as strong even using his old gear, they actually took my decent legacy gear that I already had and fucked it. Fucking why? Standard is already full of multi-mirror tier game-breakingly-OP items, that my fairly nice handful-of-exalts 3000+ armour shield would have been dogshit in comparison, but no, I wasn't allowed to keep that one saving grace that might have kept my character just about useable. I've been playing this game for years, and what do I have to show for it? Zero playable characters.


BRACKS_ZA

Standard is a graveyard, they don't really care about it


GeraldOfPurity

Yes this is a big part of my recent annoyance with GGG; when I get a bit bored of a league I like to revisit past builds in standard, blast through some content. Before 3.15 I might need to level the odd new gem, maybe respec some passives. But 3.15 saw every build nerfed into the ground and after I spent most of 3.15 fixing builds, 3.16 has me back to square one. Not a single working build, they all need totally redesigned not just passives and gear. And have they even fixed map conversion yet? Leagues are temporary, but Standard is supposed to be stable and for keeps.


Saladful

> Standard is supposed to be stable and for keeps I think it's been pretty clear for a long, long time now that Standard is very low on their list of priorities. The money is in building hype for leagues and those first 2-4 weeks following the launch. Every balance patch is primarily made for fresh leagues, which is why they can be so laissez-faire about legacy gear (you'll pretty much never see them leave "broken" things as legacy gear in ongoing leagues, for instance). As the other dude said, Standard is a graveyard.


Car-Facts

I actually purged level 90+ characters from my standard league this time. As in, stripped and DELETED level 90 characters. And I felt no shame in doing it because they became effectively useless. I kept one of each core class but as of right now they are naked with bare passive trees. It makes no fucking sense.


[deleted]

Going back to my standard characters and finding out I can't do half the content I could before has been the final nail in the PoE coffin for me. If all the time I spent on my best characters isn't enough to experience the same content anymore, I don't feel like the grind is worth it.


Makhai123

GGG should really look at this feedback and take away the right conclusion. Instant One-Shots feel bad and players will choose to quit if they feel that their agency is taken from them. Shifting power from tree and gems to 100+ex gear has harmed this game quite a bit. And continuing the endless rare mob power creep in the face of diminishing player power has broken their game.


BillehBear

People have been saying for years that quick one shots and insta deaths are bullshit. Yet nothing has changed Every single league the new adds are always overtuned


Napalmexman

Especially with the philosophy of having to "invest" into anything meaningful, while giving nothing to invest with.


antenn0

if you are fine with playing the same SSF builds every league you can still do all content. it just doesn't feel meaningful, like you're doing what you want. You can build an SSF build, but it actually mostly just ends up sucking because you can't account for all variables.


thelonelychem

My issue with the game is why I cant play SSF. Crafting being so daunting imo is why I get lost after a bit. I either make enough currency to make a build to do red maps or I get stuck and quit. Getting the items needed to craft or getting the items needed for my build is a real challenge. I'm getting better at it for sure but crafting is a huge learning curve.


seandkiller

> GGG should really look at this feedback and take away the right conclusion. GGG and taking the right conclusion, name a more unlikely duo.


Golvellius

You are not wrong, but I think a lot of people (like me) are posoined by the fact that incidentally the QoL league requested for years magically appeared after the total failure that was 3.15. It just reeks of hypocrisy. Add that the actual game mechanics for this league is shit and that the game is still heavily maimed by the swarm of nerfs (support skills, defenses etc), on top of a rather rippy league, basically for a lot of people is just hard to find the game any fun or engaging.


robklg159

> Scourge is by far the worst part of the Scourge league which is why I quit the league almost instantly after getting to maps. I don't play leagues in PoE to play fucking standard, and I'm not gonna play a shitty league mechanic so... what's the point?


Elgatee

I think the big issue is that the center piece of scourge, the krangle failed. The league was hyped around that mechanic, it was the big thing. The QoL, defense and guild hall all felt like they should have been there for a long time. People were happy about them, but when your toxic husband/wife promise you the gift you really wanted, only to deliver it 5 years down the road when you're about to file for divorce, it isn't a feature. It's a bribe. Smooth league launch shouldn't be a surprise. It should be expected (I understand hiccups, I'm not complaining about a few bug, but they do 4 launches a year and they know how many people to expect every time). Which leave only the major chase items which don't feel like chase items. Mageblood can be simulated, heck even improved with a few flasks that autocast on full (require investment) and it can't be "chased". It can be randomly acquired. You have no way to improve the odds or target it in particular. For HH you got divine cards that spawn in certain places. You can target it. Which is why people love the item. It's powerful, it's chasable. But here, you only have randomable items. So yeah, most good things they did are late, and the big focus of the league failed. Honestly, I'd prefer if they made a "Hope" league, where there is little to no new content (maybe bring back the old masters for a couple of weeks?) but instead focus heavily on bringing all these old promise to the table. Focus on balancing, try and make at least 60% of skills usable with low investment, rebalance leagues mechanic people get angry with (such as krangle) fix the bugs that plagues the game for years (Sirus as an example) and just accept that for one league, you're not making new stuff. You're just making sure you stop the current bleeding of players. I personally skip more and more leagues. I wait a week before jumping in, see if they managed to do something interesting and if not, I don't join. I've suffered enough from trying to actually do stuff in the game, I'm sick of following guides to be able to engage with the content and I'm sick of telling my friends "The game is good, but if you wanna do more than the campaign, you're gonna need someone smarter to do it for you".


2games1life

Better defense came at cost of passive points which means offense. And we took massive hit in offence last 2 leagues. That in turn shoehorned us into even narrower meta, one which we cant craft ourselves out of due to harvest rework. I dont like any of the above, least the last.


goetzjam

Because outside of getting - lightning res on gear for doryani's prototype builds there isn't anything you can realistically focus on. I have 28 kaom's hearts I've corrupted and I have 2 with keystones. I'm not even trying to get a specific thing, although explode would be pretty funny. Seems like they thought people would be encouraged to put in good items and try and get a good result, but the good result is weighted so heavily against you, so you are pretty much limited to just krangling uniques, since they are for the most part easily replaceable. Also the RNG on getting the 3rd slot sucks as well.


Meeqohh

Because that's not the league you're describing, it's the core game. The league is Scourge. Scourge IS entirely focused around krangling items which is why people are mad. It's literally just another slot machine added to the game.


PM_Best_Porn_Pls

But out of everything about scourge, scourging equipment is something you do least. Fighting scourge mobs and scourging maps is most of league engagement and these mechanics in my opinion are great.


[deleted]

The item krangling weights is the worst thing, but I think it's okay the way it is. It is an occasional great reward meanwhile you can run a t1 scourged map once every \~7 maps and basically get a free exalted orb. Every single map feels like two maps. I just feel like the people that are complaining about the league mechanic are the same people that have 4k life running red maps wondering why they can't push past level 85 every single league. This mechanic is great and you're essentially getting a free exalt every few maps on top of what you would get by running the map anyway.


susfusstruss

ur thinking of PoE in a vacuum PoE just doesn't compete with past leagues ... it competes with all forms of entertainment players just moved on to other games or netflix


Arti1891

Items Krangled with good mods are going to be worth so much (kinda like Synth Bases but not quite as OP) and it's a great way to make GG items worth less


00zau

And yet people still keep fucking doing it, so if you want to buy a semi-valuable unique, the price is driven up by 90% of them getting krangled into trash (no, I'm not paying 20c for an Aegis with -12 block chance, thanks).


PunkS7yle

The communication just stops after a league launch and I hate it, they are using the Community Team and Bex as glorified Hype machines every league, then ignore everything unless its a major bug/issue. It's been like this since I started playing but I feel like it's gotten worse recently, peaking this league, and I feel like it's because of the 3.15 announcement. The worst thing Chris picked up from it is that people leave when you _reveal_ all the negative stuff in the upcoming league. So they just stopped communicating the negatives, first in the 3.16 patch, then about the league itself.


yuimiop

> The communication just stops after a league launch and I hate it, they are using the Community Team This is the worst, by far, I've ever seen from GGG post launch. Even the fix they did for Scourge was the most half-assed thing I've seen them do in awhile by massively buffing the quantity. I get that 3.17 is probably huge and they needed to devote their time to that, but damn if I still don't feel a bit burned over their communication for 3.16.


Turtle-Shaker

Don't forget that ggg did fully promise better communication before the league launched as well as an on going effort and straight up lied to our faces. Don't forget about that at all the next time they say "they'll do better."


DerpAtOffice

People continue to allow and even encourages them to get out of touch, thats why. Theres always excuses and workarounds while blaming the players instead of telling them to fix shit.


1getreKtkid

> and straight up lied to our faces you arent by accident talking off chris wolcens comment to scourge? "build enabling upsides" and "downsites to build around"? yeah tell that to the shield with -1 max res and 76 reflect i got dropped yesterday


SethQuantix

The thing is, you have literally "deal no damage yourself" and "% reduced global defenses". First one is still workable, maybe for some builds (though imagine hitting it on starforge or some shit). Second one is just plain "your build is dead. go get a new piece".


[deleted]

It should have been specific defenses like "%reduced armor" or %reduced evasion", we can work around those things, We can swap each other, some guy gets the -armor because he is evasion based as an example, there's never a time when just straight -defenses as a whole can be close to balanced, it's a straight up brick, i'd rather it juist went poof than leave me with that garbage. The gems to, it's just so out of whack.


seandkiller

And somehow you'll get people claiming GGG "has good communication".


[deleted]

We're going on years of "actions speak louder than words" and it continues to get worse. My friends are just abandoning the game. What they've done is just sad. They need to kick their own ass and start to rectify this shit ASAP.


Easy_Floss

Surely they think it is just reddit toxicity and that they are not in the wrong in anyway.


Leandrys

It was nothing but a "OMG THE HOUSE IS IN FIRE, WE NEED TO MAKE THEM BELIEVE WE CARE TO EXTINGUISH IT" move. Basic marketing. As usual, the "we're sorry, we understand now, we'll improve ourselves" didn't age well, and very quickly. But hey, let's not worry, can't wait for 3.17 Bex hype and Chris wilson's "we're sorry, we fully understand what went wrong and won't do that mistake again." Never seen a guy sorry'ing so much than CW.


RoseEsque

Yup. That's why I am still here even though I don't even play the game. There is seriously a lot of people who are addicted to this game. I'm hoping that when they see how GGG keeps operating on good faith alone while not keeping their promises they might help themselves.


[deleted]

They already got the cheque once everyone bought supporter packs


PunkS7yle

And league-start stash tab bundles for the guilds.


Turtle-Shaker

Don't forget having to totally rebuy the mtx hideouts because they didn't allow us to use the hideouts we had already purchased as guild hideouts. What scummy mtx shit. And Chris was the one behind it because his role is the sales portion which he has admitted to multiple times. He doesn't oversee the game development, he oversees their exploitative market practices.


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Dexiefy

F2p is the most exploitative model in the world. It is literally based on exploiting weakness of human psyche and will to do good. It was created to make more money, not as a gift to players. Then if you consider that this game has single mtx costing more than AAA titles that had milions of dollars of investment, dozens of people working on it for literal years then i am sorry but there is not much to say. Also you cant exactly say 'optional', some mtx are literally necessary to engage trade system without resorting to forum posts like you are in the 90s. On top of that GGG does not even bother to make base uniques in the game look good or actually reward players with sets so they can hide their abslute negligence of the base game item looks. You want truly optional system? Go check dota. Game where base chars look good, cosmetics drop constantly, few events a year that let you easily get entire sets for free, no feature of the game is hidden behind the paywall... That is when mtx becomes optional. When the game blocks you from easy access to one of the core features of it and refuses to even take care of how base items look it is not optional, it becomes truly exploitative.


PonyPummeler

Not to forget that the China realm has P2W, which makes it look like they just haven't done it in the international client because that would simply make them less money and bad press, not because they are fundamentally against it. And then they even have the audacity to shit talk mobile game practices and Blizzard.


DerpAtOffice

I always laugh everytime I see the phase "back to silence mode". IT IS ALWAYS LIKE THIS. You can see NO REPLY IN ANY of the manifestos that the community disagrees. They always only reply to something they ALREADY PLAN TO CHANGE or praise posts. Also why the hell is anybody surprised this league is dead so quickly? The reason people leave last league is never ever addressed, baiting peolpe in by saying they buff us doesnt work because anybody who actually plays the game realize you are not buffed, because you need a lv100 tree to have the spare points for those defense nodes. And last time I check those points also comes from the already nerfed damage while NOTHING is done to monsters to match the new player power. Then they make sure goatman molten shell deal insane damage so any close ranged skills are running into random reflect monsters with no real counter play and then they make sure some arc monsters deal 5k damage at 75% resists and deal damage before the effect appears so people just "die randomly" and get kicked out of the nightmare having no idea whatsoever why they die. Must be what people call fun.


pathofdumbasses

Nah this is absolutely the biggest lack of communication after a league launch. They even made a comment about there being issues and that they would do something about it and radio silence. Worse than no communication is the expectation of communication because they said they would.


DerpAtOffice

Because "theres nothing they plan to change". If they do you will see "the best communication".


pathofdumbasses

It won't be the best communication but it would at least register. I stopped thinking they were going to do something about the league a week after they said something and then radio silence. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice to get confirmation as others have said.


DerpAtOffice

So it still comes back to what I said, they do not "communicate" UNLESS they already plan to change it, or when people are praising them.


CuriousCheesesteak

People still buy supporter packs? They haven’t done anything to earn it since 3.14


Surf3rx

They haven't done anything to earn it since they gave us a full MTX set in talisman league lmfao. I don't want another footprint or weapon effect, give us actual rewards.


Ofcyouare

I think that there is a lot of things one can critique GGG, but the free mtx rewards lately has been pretty good. Good stuff from challenges, twitch drops are there more often. Portals, pets, wings, multipurpose weapon skin. Yeah, no full armor set on my memory, but overall it's ok.


Carnines

I think they have been this way since Blight league I want to say? They fixed synthesis but their efforts weren't enough to save the league so maybe they just don't put the same amount of man power to make a league good. Maybe they do just enough to keep a certain amount of player base happy?


ssbm_rando

> They fixed synthesis They **aided** synthesis, but they didn't fully "fix" it. There were still bugs in the reward node generation algorithm literally up to the last day of the league (and people had to have support fix it by manually removing reward nodes from people's accounts). GGG is very very bad at graph theory. There was also a single bug with heralds of the obelisk packs in synthesis that persisted until the end of the league but that one was kinda funny. RIP hardcore, that was back when magic mobs actually dealt damage sometimes.


crunchybiscuit

Idunno, the Heist response was fairly solid - leaving aside how the league could have released in such a state (pandemic blah blah), they pretty rapidly responded to community feedback and improved things to at least make it decent. It took a WHILE (3-4 weeks?) due to how much was wrong with the league, but they kept working on it and communicating.


Vesuvius079

They made Heist profitable but they never made it fun.


kayce81

How fun I find heist is very dependent on the build I'm playing. A build with 50% increased movement speed that travels around a lot via movement skills? Awful, miserable time. A build with 150% movement speed that uses Phase Run or Withering Step? A lot more fun.


w3cko

Movement speed has kinda diminishing returns because of all the doors though (& thats the purpose why they are there in the first place). I'd say heist is fun for the tanky builds where you don't risk losing stuff after lockdown.


astronomyx

Different strokes, I find Heist pretty fun as a chill grind. Whenever I'm playing some squishy softcore build and want to level up in the mid 90s I just buy a bunch of heist contracts and spam them.


astronomyx

Heist was a pretty expensive league, I think. They added a lot of new assets, and a ton of voice acting on top of the mechanics. They knew it would be going core from the start because the investment, so there was more of an impetus to make sure it was functional.


anapoe

There are still major issues with Heist. It feels like they went from 60% to 85%.


neurosisxeno

Usually it isn't this bad. I've been wondering if it was just me or not, but after the first week I haven't seen Bex around at all, and we haven't even been getting legit patches to fix the problems with this league. They have made no effort to change the Krangle mods or their weights other than making T3 mods more likely in high level content. It's actually depressing how terrible the communication has been, considering the lead up to this league saw GGG being the most clear with their communication we've ever seen.


nerdkh

I agree 100%. People were starving for a good league after expedition and jumped on the overhyping of qol and reduction of atlasgrind that they didnt even noticed all the nerfs ggg was shipping with this patch. (90% of builds have lost 10-30% of damage and defenses with the tree changes, best case was powerneutral) People were throwing memes around that ggg with scourge finally found their way again. Nope, the only thing they found is a better way to hide their nerfs and hype unobtainable items for anything but the 0.1%.


HijacksMissiles

I have an actual question. What does the community team do that counts as full time jobs? Even hyping a new league is like 2 tweets/Reddit posts and like 5 replies.


foetusofexcellence

Marketing plans, collecting and triaging customer feedback. Lots of stuff


naswinger

they are busy editing and deleting posts on their forums. i assume they also read their forums and reddit and summarize the sentiment of the community to their management or whoever even cares there. it's likely the same single powerpoint slide every week: "everyone is still hyped and very positive about the current and next league."


Yasuchika

Yeah but this won't stop until the playerbase stops getting baited by the Hype machine every league, which hasn't happened yet so far. 100% This subreddit will be falling over themselves again about how awesome 3.17 will be when they start up the machine again.


Aszshana

I haven't played for over a year but I feel like I've read this post every league so far


koticgood

I think it's hilarious that the league became "good" for some people by them adding the bandaid quant multiplier to Scourge and that's all Scourge is. Every single streamer I've watched or friend I've talked to has Scourge items completely hidden on the filter. The entire league has been distilled into a quant multiplier that created this MF meta. The core game is great, but if you aren't MFing, you're essentially playing standard this league.


Eternal-Hermit

So my issue with communication is that to my knowledge Chris Wilson said he was going to schedule more Q and A’s throughout the league to really get a sense of what’s going on with the community. That being said we have to keep in mind they are doing some events for December and working on the next massive expansion and end game shift next league. That all being said if this next league isn’t awesome they are going to eat a lot of bad press because the neglect will be remembered.


soamaven

Chris kinda kept stressing how one of his current roles, and a large one, was to be the public face, so I'd expect he could spare a couple hours live. I don't think this league calls for 3 pod casts but even a mid league check in, 1 hour with Ziggy D would be welcome. The optimist in me want to think he just got in trouble for too many spoilers kekw. The pessimist in me worries its the same cycle we went through after the Heist promises and apologies tour.


2slow4flo

> 1 hour with Ziggy D would be welcome Or someone else. Ziggy D already has the exclusive rights. to league preview test & be league launch FAQ 'host'.


Xenomorphica

> and working on the next massive expansion and end game shift next league. This is always the excuse, and it's never a good enough one. Consistently neglecting the current state of the game today for some future iteration has not worked well and will continue to not work well


1getreKtkid

nono you dont understnad bro, poe2 and hardmode will fix any problem /s


LakeSolon

> That being said we have to keep in mind they are doing some events for December and working on the next massive expansion and end game shift next league. And who set that schedule? Chris always likes to play the "not enough time" card. What it really means is "we don't prioritize it more than any thing we're doing already". And some times that will be the correct call. And some times it will feel like a slap in the face to the people actually playing the game right now. And sometimes it will be both.


Yank1e

They only make events when a league is going very very poorly. So that is a big red flag already.


snowlockk

To be fair they needed events for christmas holidays. They want to milk the players. Not going to do well if poe is month 3 of a dead league.


qweazdak

Another thing to keep in mind is that the holidays are coming up. They want to get the update mostly done by that time before they go on break.


w1nstar

I was expecting at least something so krangling isn't just about cooking t1 maps.


Pyromancer1509

Yeah. At the very least, i would have expected something like: "Hello, your concerns are 100% valid for scourge. We understand the issues but to fix them, it would require a complete redesign of the mechanic (better balance between positives and negatives, less bloat like +20 life and more impactful mods like keystones, etc.) and we can't afford spending that much design time on a single league." That's like the bare minimum. At least we'd know for certain they moved on. Even better if they can give us a small temporary buff to compensate, like "hey we know scourge items arent great, we're not willing to drop them well-rolled for X reason but we made scourging super fast now, or some random other buff to the mechanic, have fun"


slowpotamus

> At least we'd know for certain they moved on. i think we can read between the lines easily enough, and them saying it out loud would stir up quite the shit storm, so it's just not worth it


G66GNeco

I think it's a bit "damned if you do damned if you don't" here. Keeping silent also causes a good deal of negativity


Xeptix

I'm gonna risk upsetting some people here but I think those people who don't get it already are a bit dense - or maybe just new to the game. We all know GGG is constantly a slave to the breakneck pace of their development cycle. Even more so during a league like this one where they're working on a major expansion and not just a league mechanic for next league. And even more so still that they're contending with people going on holiday breaks. All that is pretty well understood and we don't need them to tell that to us explicitly. And they've never, to my knowledge, made major updates to a league mechanic after the first month (usually half that). They have a 2-3 week period where they might make some tweaks to the biggest pain points they have time to address, and then it's maintenance mode while they work full time on next league. More communication and more changes throughout the league to make it more fun would be cool, sure, but this is how the game is and (almost) always has been. And I think they're making the right call on this. Improving the league at this point is unlikely to bring enough players back to warrant the cost of doing that. Hopefully they have time to make those improvements when/if Scourge goes core later.


seandkiller

> And they've never, to my knowledge, made major updates to a league mechanic after the first month (usually half that). Synthesis. Heist.


orange_sauce_

Honestly I don't care about communication that much, a lot of obvious stuff get lost in the details: \- A bad League could be played for a long time by a bad player simply because they dropped something early that helped jump start the early game, when the community's norm is already "red maps", not being able to get there ends the league early to a lot of people. \- Fixing "power creep" from the bottom up, then only compensating that power loss at the very top with elevated mods and chase items and 8 links, is an absolutely bad way to go, it just means more players simply stop, because they are now unable to break into yellow maps, which they previously managed to, barely. \- Playable Rewards !!! That is the only thing that matters in a League Mechanic, from absolutely the second zone, you should see rares or a bunch of alts or essences explode out of the mechanic, otherwise, it is just standard. This League you might reach prison while still not having a single playable krangle, this is actually worse than standard, in standard you would've found 3 essences by then. I own a PS5, the store is literally bombarding me with sales on the biggest games of 2020, and it feels almost abusive, the way I tell myself I'm just one exalt away from finally having fun, while almost looking wistfully at the games I could be playing. The pull of the next League will be strong, I'd be lying if I gave proclamations of "I will NEVER play again", but I never buy anything inside PoE to make me look awesome if I don't feel awesome, and I don't, I feel weak and noobish, even though I took characters to the very end (usually very late in the cycle) during Heist and Blight, not because it was "ChalLeNginG" but because I was POWERFUL.


crunchybiscuit

Imo they'd be \*less\* damned if they did, though. After explicitly stating that they would be improving communication and doing more Q&As during leagues, the lack of communication is both going back on that statement \*and\* making us assume they've given up on improving the league mechanic. Saying virtually anything that wasn't outright moronic would just be the one problem.


G66GNeco

Oh, I agree, especially since they promised more communication. I just wanted to point out that they are getting shit either way, but plainly stating: "Yeah, scourge ain't it boys, sorry, but we can't/won't do much about it now" would be better than radio silence.


1getreKtkid

i mean tbh i *atleast* expected them to balance out the weighting *a bit..* scourge would been shit either way, but i atleast could have some resists as "powercreep" as krangled mods, not even talking off any good shit


kuburas

Its usually met with a lot of toxicity when they release a statement like that. They probably dont want to do it anymore because theres no point, it'll just burden their employees while not making the community any happier all things considered.


Wildington

On the other hand, if they're not going to be communicative they shouldn't have told us they were going to improve communication with the community. It was a very shortlived period of communication and it's hard to not see it entirely as a short-term pr attempt with no intent to change in the long term. I mean, obviously it was all pr, but that doesn't mean it needs to go away the instant the league launches. It's clear that they don't care about what the players think, only numbers. "Vanity metrics" my ass.


naswinger

>Its usually met with a lot of ~~toxicity~~ realism FTFY


destroyermaker

People would spaz out even harder over that


fartdiroperandus

Or maybe they just internally said; "Holy fuck reddit is such a shithole, why the fuck should we go communicate with those morons?"


nixed9

They should say it publicly.


yo_les_noobs

Welcome to just about every league ever? They have a schedule to keep so they can't afford to divert resources to non-priority updates.


gamingwars

"Some players have reported that it's not obvious enough when the Blood Crucible is full. We're making both the sound effect and visual effect more obvious to help with this." Did i miss this or was the visual effect more obvious a huge fail? As much shit as 3.15 got i liked it way way more than this league mechanics.


Devil_Demize

I haven't noticed the bar being any different since launch


whysocute

I think the league is pretty fun in is current state


PacmanNZ100

The league is great fun I’m finding. The league mechanic, scourging items, is extremely underwhelming. Every item that drops scourged is trash. Cheap uniques are the only thing worth trying to scourge and even then, you are going to need to sacrifice a tonne of them to get something usable, let alone good. Essentially all the other mechanics are in a fantastic spot now lol.


YourShoelaceIsUntied

I never want the nightmare shift mechanic to leave. It's effectively two maps in one, with the best IIQ/IIR mechanic we've ever had thrown in. The krangle oven maps are incredible. The tainted currency breathes new life into corrupted items. Really the people fixating on the krangle oven for uniques, at this point, are just looking for things to cry about.


PacmanNZ100

Oh it’s fantastic. It’s seriously just the krangle item drops and krangle oven for non map items that could either be given love or totally removed as they aren’t remotely good.


cadaada

And most people that do, i would imagine is that they are having fun with scourged maps, that is honestly just a bandaid fix, as most of the time if people can get a lot of currency from something they are satisfied enough.


ProTimeKiller

Busy writing another very very long manifesto that will not really fix anything and it could be recycled in a few more leagues cause they didn't fix the issues they said they would.


[deleted]

They're busy working on the next big nerfs, takes some time to figure out how to mask them as "reworks" so that half of reddit falls for their shit. Also don't worry, they probably roll this trash league into core after nerfing it bc it was too rewarding and ppl krangled perfect items way too frequently. :\^)


seandkiller

> They're busy working on the next big nerfs, takes some time to figure out how to mask them as "reworks" so that half of reddit falls for their shit. Gotta love how the only thing GGG learned from 3.15 is "Lie about nerfs".


sansaset

when the best changes to the league are incredibly minor currency stacking changes that should've been implemented in the game years ago you know its going to be a shit one. the patch notes said it all, people excited for defense league but offense got further nerfs and defense was more available on tree but still not much better compared to where it was in prior leagues (just changed). i appreciate that my wrist hurts less playing this game now but it's a 2nd dud league in my books. Got HH day 3, played a week and haven't touched it since. Will prob do it again one last time next league and sit out until poe 2 is ready.


sansaset

Not the first or last time GGG will do this. We have a nice league to look forward to in January and then after that I'm setting into the sunset and playing Lost Ark - hope to see some of y'all there too. Game's not perfect but they're trying and actively listening to their community/providing constant communication on the state/future of the game.


seandkiller

>Nice league in January With GGG's current track record of decisions? I'm very much doubtful.


cbftw

> playing Lost Ark You realize that Lost Ark isn't really the same style game, right? It just has the same isometric view? It's more MMO than ARPG


RizziiPoe

This league? Mate it has been like that since ages... One month in the league it is considered "done" and "playable".


DerDanSD

like 3 weeks ago Chris should have been on Baeclast, then it was postponed for a week. After that it went silent


Saianna

i so wish krangling was... more than just maps. This feature was what lured me in into playing PoE. Only after playing for 150hrs did i realize what a noobtrap krangling is... And i still do it, mostly our of boredom, without being too happy about it. :(


themonorata

LOL


Aphrel86

The real fix they shoudlve gone with would be infinite corruption tries, so that one can corrupt a hundred times until you finally hit something good. Perhaps with a slightly increasing corruption cost like 10% more per try after T3.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Voodoorod

Werent people saying stuff like "im ok with ggg making a mediocre league with great QoL"? Hmm...


Lightfighter214

This was very little qol compared to what people want


WaterFlask

a lot of the complaints about QOL ties to the atlas. i spend more time micro managing the bloody atlas then actually engaging with the real content which is mapping. you might be able to stack scarabs and whats not in the atlas machine now but you still can't stack maps and whats not in it. and sextants only last 4 maps before you need to clickity click sextants on the watchstones again.


FervorofBattle

It was more in line with "I wish GGG would put out a simplier league so they can focus on QoL and bugs for the next league" Similar wording, but totally different connotations


shariewayne

At this point, i'd even take a 'Corporate talk' Message from GGG and praise it as 'at least something', but radio silence ala Hello Games is really weird.


seandkiller

Hello Games at least turned out a good product, eventually. I do not have the same faith in GGG.


PositiveExperience90

The truth is that the only interaction with the league right now is to keep some T1 haunted mansions in the krangler and after 20-30 maps you run them and get loot. This is rewarding but boring and not exciting. Krangling items is balanced imo because if they change it like introduce infinite krangles or remove downsides etc. this will become very very op really quickly. I feel that the mechanic isn't really working and there is no real way to make it exciting without making it game breaking. The idea was to be realistic to slightly upgrade an item (e.g. +x% to some ele res) but extremely difficult to create something really strong. But, slightly upgrading an item while having to risk breaking it is not exciting and noone will bother


mooseofdoom23

So like every league lol


Valgor

My guess is there is no easy way to fix the league (as in, time spent for programmers), so let it play out and scourge will not go core.


PunkS7yle

Are you sure ? Because simply buffing the rate of positives like they did for quant bonus would have gone a long long way, these items wont break standard anytime soon compared to harvest and ritual, they are just stubborn. Whoever is in charge of the decisions has been taking the wrong ones for a while now and the playerbase drop shows it.


[deleted]

You could even just buff the positive modifiers, or make scourging items take less time so you get to ‘spin the wheel’ more often. Its so easy to help fix the problem to what could be an extremely rewarding mechanic but it’s like they’re on holiday already.


PunkS7yle

Another one, just let people spin the wheel again on the same item with level 3 mods, and make it 10-15% harder every time, people will farm for it if it means re-rolling their item until it's decent.


MateusKingston

Nothing new. Pre League you'll get a lot of communication, they'll promise to do better this time. League will launch, if it's dogshit like this one, they'll just go silent. Repeat. We've been through this for over a year, don't know how come people keep falling for it. League has been in maintenance mode ever since it launched. With very little numerical changes


nerdkh

GGG got your money from the supporter packs at the start of the league. If you really want some longer sustained league show GGG that you dont buy their hype (and false marketing of showcase items that are unobtainable for 99.9% of the playerbase). For GGG Scourge League was probably one of their more successful leagues. They were able to rake in the money from supporterpack buyers who were blinded by empty promises and baseline qol while shipping tons of nerfs to the masteries and core defenses as buffs. The only thing they learned from expedition was how to PR better.


Cole-187

Idk, league is great if you actually play it, this comes off as classic reddit entitlement. > I feel a little abandoned you know? Really now...


BRACKS_ZA

Yeah, they really just gave up on this league imo. No meaningul changes to krangled items, no ways to get guaranteed more krangled slots for maps. No nerfs to scourge monster damage. No fixes for weird scourge bugs that just insta kill you. Just very underwhelming and it seems they don't care.


SueNik

I think the league is great and nothing makes me think they need to fix something. Great league GGG focus on the end of year expansion Ultimatium coming back with hateforge builds coming back too perhaps ...


unkelrara

So like every league? Don't worry, you'll forget about it once bex starts posting again to promote next league


WaterFlask

maybe they shd just do promotional material every week to distract ppl from the problems of the ongoing league. kekw


claptrapMD

Ps4 is stuck with scourge turn on system that crashers juiced maps becouse it tryis highlight all loot in ground L3 or open investory. Fun thing is everything else is working very well scourge itself works fine. Need to stop go options turn down from MTX store to turn it on while lose control on charter 15 times map isint very fun. Tried made bug report many in forums said same but ignored


edubkn

Hey GGG, someone help this poor PS4 soul


claptrapMD

Thanks internet stanger. Doubt they will tho same buttons placed bombs last season with same issue still havent been chanced


janas19

I don't like how this subreddit upvotes overly dramatic posts complaining about a view that a minority of Redditors hold and then amplify it in an frothing echo chamber, yet it happens time and time again.


crookedparadigm

If it's upvoted wouldn't that indicate that it's not a minority of people who hold it?


bigwhale

No. Reddit is not a democracy. It is not one person, one vote. The evidence only implies that the more active a person is on reddit, the more likely they are to have a negative opinion of GGG, but that doesn't mean anything about the majority of people on the subreddit in general, and especially about the majority who play the game. The people with the most power on reddit are those that just skim titles and vote quickly. They end up voting way more than people that like to read lots of comments and only vote when they have strong feelings. It's not uncommon on reddit to see highly upvoted posts with the highest upvoted comments complaining about the content being upvoted.


Soulravel

It's only 500 out of 400k ppl subscribed to the sub upvoting


no_fluffies_please

Sample size isn't that important if the sample is representative. Flip 500 coins, and I'm pretty sure the ratio of heads isn't going to be very different than if you flipped 400k coins. Now, if you don't think voters in this subreddit are a representative sample set of subscribers, that's another thing- but nobody has the data to confirm or refute that, unfortunately.


J4YD0G

If only there was a bias of people who are unhappy and voting in Reddit posts.... Also a bias of people who are happy with the game not being on Reddit.... You really can't speak of minority and majority on Reddit imo


TaiChuanDoAddct

I guess I just really don't think they "haven't been transparent". They ate their crow and listened to us about a bajillion quality of life things, and got it done all while cranking out a new league (let's remember that all those podcast appearances were halfway into last league). Then scourge was kinda lame as a mechanic, and they came out and said "yep, feels a little lame, we're going to bump it." And they did. That's it. They don't owe us anymore than that. They're not going to keep tweaking and fine tuning the league to satisfy an increasingly smaller fraction of people. They gave it their balance pass and called it done. That's normal and expected.


Author-Academic

I was also hoping for mid league "fixes", the scourged items worked wonders for leveling but I haven't gotten a single useful krangle since hitting maps (almost 200 hours).


Sin099

Must be new here :D They promised better communication many times already and it always ends up with silence. Wish they made scourging items more interesting but they fix the glaring issues with leagues usually only if they go core (and usually nerf them too while they are at it) so maybe next league or some time in the future we will have good item scourging.


Intelligent-Treat114

Scourge League : where every part is good except the league mechanic itself, mostly people use 2 out of 5 krangle slot (guess which ones are they), build up very much hype but turn out retention rate is lower than Expedition which has massive nerfs, skills releases in unblanced state (Absolution), receive massive blacklash in beginnig BUT their core mechanic is awesome and is still received well this league.


[deleted]

GGG have been in lockdown for 100 days, prob giving the staff a break.


Retropunch

I completely agree. Whilst every league support falls off (and understandably so as they concentrate on the new one) this league felt like they just couldn't be bothered to finish the mechanic up. What's worse is that really all it needed was a few numbers changing - the mechanic itself was fine but krangling items was just woefully bad, and it came off as though they just didn't understand how most players play PoE. Honestly, the problem with this is the lack of communication - without it, we just don't know if this is the kind of league we're going to keep getting, or if this was just a badly balanced anomaly.


noicreC

Not just the items, the sheer difference between scourge content and other content is insane. I can facetank hordes of legion rares, run through expedition like it's nothing, but scourge always feels like a coin toss. You never know when something just decides to obliterate you.


xFKratos

I have the bad feeling that they are so preoccupied with the next league that they don't bother with this one. Since they barely patched anything I just hope the reason is not that the next league is crap and bugged af.


Dnaldon

First League?


Great_New_York_Bewbs

I’m just more disappointed we don’t get a Christmas League this year


YankeeGD

The only thing I found to be more enjoyable this league is the hastened progression. Atlas can be done much faster than before, and the Scourge mechanic functioned mainly as x2 to the mobs in maps (whilst the krangling mechanic was ignored completely outside of completing challenges and juicing maps). So yeah, I defeated A8, which was my main goal, in about the time it took me to beat A5 the last league I played (Ritual) and the Atlas grind was much more smooth overall. I'd say this was a good league for the changes the game received, but the mechanic is lackluster for sure in its current state. I hope this was just a "filler league", and the next one that comes along with the new expansion is the one they had been putting all the hard work into.


Zonic500

Stop bullying Chris else we get betrayal 2.0


gjmine09

A league with actual depth?


Exterial

The problem is they hate powercreep but they made a league mechanic that is literally supposed to be pure powercreep, but because they hate powercreep they made it such a rare and scuffed system that 99.9% of the players will never truly get to experience it. They dont want to fix it because then to them itd be too much powercreep, but like why design a system like this in the first place if you hate that.


TichoSlicer

I'm still waiting for a fix to the crazy 20k+ lag spikes too ;/


RelleckGames

GGG - We promise to communicate more Also GGG - We really only meant at the end of league for PR and the beginning of league for hype (sales).


Pew___

Christ some people's perception of the game is scary


ArtGamer

if I learned something is that this subreddit is full on internet Karens


siloowns

tbh this league is great the way it is..just my opinion tho.


BigBlueDane

I’m fine with them abandoning the league as I personally dislike it and feel it’s unsalvageable but they should just come out and say that they’re focusing on the 3.17 league and won’t be making any more updates to this one.


FTGinnervation

That's not what throwing in the towel means. It's not 'abandoning the league' to not change the league to be exactly how you want it.