Path of Exile 2 review

[Core]

I feel like your PoE 2 review lacks a lot of nuance or is somewhat outdated, in regard of the current state of PoE 1

- TENCENT!
100% true. Caveat, the decade long designer teams are still at the helm.

- NOT F2P!
Cosmetics are 100% cosmetic. You do get indirect advantage from spending money with the stash tab: Both how much stuff can your store, and how easy it is to sort using automatic stash affinity. It is also easier and faster to sell gear pieces when using paid tabs.
This is still in an entire different category from actual P2W games where spending money gives you immediate character power and is required to get the intended game experience.

I would call PoE 10/20% non-F2P (in term of how much your experience is degraded if you don't spend any money), with the very important mention that spending ~20 bucks on stash tabs is enough to get nearly everything worthwhile, spending more would get you barely any noticeable advantage or quality of life.

- horrid performance,
Overall game performance has its up and down. They keep working at it and making the game prettier. And once in a while an engine change will degrade performance and cause issue with uber juice content.

But unless you try to push the game to its maximum or you try to play on a decade old computer or a Microsoft Word machine it's a non-issue in most cases. Feels like an un-fair remark.

- servers,
If memory serve it's been several years since we've had any widespread server issue (league launch). There are recurring ping issues and instability for some players, but it comes network routing issues with some ISP (especially german ones?) and not from GGG [PoE devs] themselves. Feels like an outdated mention, where 5 years ago half of league launches would have some issue.

- balancing,
You can rant and complain about PoE balancing, but you'd have to do so in a nuanced and argumented way for your opinion to make any sense. Saying 'balance' without any else is meaningless.
PoE is the single game with the most player agency in the variety of build and way you can come up with to clear the content the game has to offer.
The top 'meta' builds (what is the most popular to do everything well and quickly) has its shifts and nerf over the leagues, and some of those nerf are heavy handed and times, but if you see PoE as a game that lets you come up with new builds to play there is very little wrong with it.
Also big mention: melee in general got a big pass over last summer and got big buffs across the board.

- new player experience
I find it ironic that you complain about that on the PoE 2 review when PoE 2 goes out of its way to massively improve the new player experience and learning curve. While yes Path of Exile is still massively complex games that requires years of knowledge to fully wrap your head around.

- clunky paywalled trading.
We've had Fautus for a couple leagues it will be present at launch in PoE 2. It's an in-game npc that lets you instantly and asynchronously trade all "currency" items in the game. And it's 100% free.
Only equipeable gear and non-generic maps still have to be traded using the old out-of-game trading website. FYI you've always been able to list your items for sale while only using free stash tab by manually posting your listing on the trading forum (it gets indexed on the trade website), or by using a tool to automate for you. Yes paid stash tab make that process easier and faster.

[Coe⁧⁧✔️[Quality Control]]

EDIT: The game is now released and there's a full-sized review available:

https://steamcommunity.com/id/Coeco/recommended/2694490/

Originally posted by Core:

I feel like your PoE 2 review lacks a lot of nuance or is somewhat outdated, in regard of the current state of PoE 1

- NOT F2P!
Cosmetics are 100% cosmetic. You do get indirect advantage from spending money with the stash tab: Both how much stuff can your store, and how easy it is to sort using automatic stash affinity. It is also easier and faster to sell gear pieces when using paid tabs.

You're talking about the curation and not the game review. The "Not Free To Play" part is referring to how they are going to gate-keep everyone from playing it for an entire year behind "supporter packs" despite the game currently being listed, tagged and categorized as a Free-To-Play, not because it has cosmetic microtransactions.

Originally posted by Core:

- horrid performance,
Overall game performance has its up and down. They keep working at it and making the game prettier. And once in a while an engine change will degrade performance and cause issue with uber juice content.

But unless you try to push the game to its maximum or you try to play on a decade old computer or a Microsoft Word machine it's a non-issue in most cases. Feels like an un-fair remark.

GGG has had every chance in the world to actually get down to the gritty shit parts of their code and optimize the game. They have voluntarily decided NOT to do this. Everything from general performance to the netcoding to framerate tanking & visually cluttering effects to server stability has been grotesquely mishandled for literally over 10 years in a row, arguably getting even worse over time due to them self admittedly cramming the game so fucking full with microtransactions and cosmetics, they literally can't handle porting them all to the sequel... Which they've made in Unreal Engine 5, of which we've seen a total of 0 games run well on so far.

You trying to categorize this as a "non-issue in most cases" is complete and utter bullshit. Stop using (what i can only assume is) anecdotal garbage and start googling because from spending a total of 3 seconds looking in their technical support forum responding to you, these threads are the most prominent:

https://i.imgur.com/F3bhAqa.png

Originally posted by Core:

- servers,
If memory serve it's been several years since we've had any widespread server issue (league launch). There are recurring ping issues and instability for some players, but it comes network routing issues with some ISP (especially german ones?) and not from GGG [PoE devs] themselves. Feels like an outdated mention, where 5 years ago half of league launches would have some issue.

Uh yeah no. Tons of people literally wait weeks and months following a league launch to wait for the servers to stabilize (AKA have less users playing) because every single time, they turn borderline unplayable with insane rubber-banding &/ delay and disconnects (depending on the network settings), including on the latest league. Any attempt to try to pin this on specific ISP's is concentrated gaslighting at best and misinformation at worst.

Go ahead and look up literally any streamer playing at a league start and let me know how hard they're experiencing rubber-banding and/or input delays & disconnects.

Originally posted by Core:

- balancing,
You can rant and complain about PoE balancing, but you'd have to do so in a nuanced and argumented way for your opinion to make any sense. Saying 'balance' without any else is meaningless.

"Balance" is the only mention because curations have a character limit of 200.

Originally posted by Core:

PoE is the single game with the most player agency in the variety of build and way you can come up with to clear the content the game has to offer.
The top 'meta' builds (what is the most popular to do everything well and quickly) has its shifts and nerf over the leagues, and some of those nerf are heavy handed and times, but if you see PoE as a game that lets you come up with new builds to play there is very little wrong with it.
Also big mention: melee in general got a big pass over last summer and got big buffs across the board.

There is a LOT wrong with it because the developers only balance the game around the top builds, leaving all other non-meta alternatives completely unviable for anything even resembling end-game. Having well over half the player base play a handful of builds is NOT what you call good balancing:

https://poe.ninja/builds/settlers

One example is the current situation where you need to invest like 30-100+ divines to have anything resembling semi-reliable survivability for any build not abusing the living shit out of energy shield & chaos inoculation. It's fucking pathetic.

Originally posted by Core:

- new player experience
I find it ironic that you complain about that on the PoE 2 review when PoE 2 goes out of its way to massively improve the new player experience and learning curve. While yes Path of Exile is still massively complex games that requires years of knowledge to fully wrap your head around.

Your sources & proof of this "massively improved new player experience and learning curve" is where?

Originally posted by Core:

- clunky paywalled trading.
We've had Fautus for a couple leagues it will be present at launch in PoE 2. It's an in-game npc that lets you instantly and asynchronously trade all "currency" items in the game. And it's 100% free.
Only equipeable gear and non-generic maps still have to be traded using the old out-of-game trading website. FYI you've always been able to list your items for sale while only using free stash tab by manually posting your listing on the trading forum (it gets indexed on the trade website), or by using a tool to automate for you. Yes paid stash tab make that process easier and faster.

"I know the trading is paywalled but i'm going to try and argue about it anyways". What the fuck are you smoking at this point?

Compared to any other game, the trading in this game is the clunkiest, tedious, slowest, most unintuitive bag of flaming horse shit in the world. People have been BEGGING for an actual auction house or something similar and instead we get a currency-only mobile-UI equivalent of a stock exchange that actively tries to give you the least information possible.

98% of people don't respond to trade requests for listing they made because they want to play the fucking game instead of standing AFK in their hideout, jerking off and waiting for people to whisper and maybe join them for a potential trade instead of having an UI do this for them autonomously. Not only is it making the average player experience insufferable for no reason, but it's also HEAVILY encouraging trade-bots which the game is infested with.

[Core]

Originally posted by Coe⁧⁧✔️Quality Control:

The "Not Free To Play" part is referring to how they are going to gate-keep everyone from playing it for an entire year behind "supporter packs" despite the game currently being listed, tagged and categorized as a Free-To-Play

Oh, right, that's a good point. I believe the current expectation for EA duration is 6 months.

Originally posted by Coe⁧⁧✔️Quality Control:

There is a LOT wrong with it because the developers only balance the game around the top builds, leaving all other non-meta alternatives completely unviable for anything even resembling end-game. Having well over half the player base play a handful of builds is NOT what you call good balancing:

https://poe.ninja/builds/settlers

One example is the current situation where you need to invest like 30-100+ divines to have anything resembling semi-reliable survivability for any build not abusing the living shit out of energy shield & chaos inoculation. It's fucking pathetic.

Okay, thanks for giving arguments. I somewhat disagree in that you're mixing up 'viable' and 'popular', and most of the price tag of a build comes from popularity. But yea ~30d is about right for clearing T17, and the balance changes are over focused on the most popular build archetypes.

To me 'only X builds can only approach something ressembling end-game' is meta-slave mentality, but I understand people can feel that way.

Originally posted by Coe⁧⁧✔️Quality Control:

Your sources & proof of this "massively improved new player experience and learning curve" is where?

That's my own assertion from looking at the way they're changing stuff. Gold respect, the skill tree early nodes are a lot 'narrower' with all the nodes being useful no matter your build, the crafting rework making early campaign currency-crafting a thing, etc.
I had the impression this is how things were going from the first Exile Con reveals, but I forgot most of details that made me think so from back then.

There's also the whole removal of all the historical league mechanics from POE 1, unless they get reworked and re-added in a fresh way in PoE2. A lot of the knowledge barrier-to-entry from PoE1 comes from the decade of accumulated league mechanics, some of them hidden in a corner of the game you can easely miss, or dismiss.

I'm not saying starting with PoE 2 for a new player will be smooth or easy, but it will be a lot easier and more manageable than PoE1. You can tell GGG is paying attention to that.

Originally posted by Coe⁧⁧✔️Quality Control:

"I know the trading is paywalled but i'm going to try and argue about it anyways". What the fuck are you smoking at this point?

Compared to any other game, the trading in this game is the clunkiest, tedious, slowest, most unintuitive bag of flaming horse shit in the world. People have been BEGGING for an actual auction house or something similar and instead we get a currency-only mobile-UI equivalent of a stock exchange that actively tries to give you the least information possible.

98% of people don't respond to trade requests for listing they made because they want to play the fucking game instead of standing AFK in their hideout, jerking off and waiting for people to whisper and maybe join them for a potential trade instead of having an UI do this for them autonomously. Not only is it making the average player experience insufferable for no reason, but it's also HEAVILY encouraging trade-bots which the game is infested with.

You're both shitting on the new system and being angry of the flaws of the old system that were solved in the new one. What?
My point was (1) the new system is 100% F2P, (2) the old system was available without paying anyway, in answer to you saying the trade itself was paywalled.

Trade as a whole is getting better, but I wouldn't call it good either yea.

Originally posted by Coe⁧⁧✔️Quality Control:

GGG has had every chance in the world to actually get down to the gritty shit parts of their code and optimize the game. [...] You trying to categorize this as a "non-issue in most cases" is complete and utter bullshit. Stop using (what i can only assume is) anecdotal garbage and start googling because from spending a total of 3 seconds looking in their technical support forum responding to you, these threads are the most prominent:

https://i.imgur.com/F3bhAqa.png

By 'most case' i'm excluding people running uber juiced content like 6-man 100% deli group play, 5-way, high-end Blight. I'm basing this on my own experience playing the game.
AMD Adrenalin recorded an average of 60FPS over the last 1000h of running the game https://i.imgur.com/LkhSTpv.png
This isn't good, I have a 144FPS monitor, but it's overall playable, and I do try to push the game close to its limit. Lot of 100% deli in group, and lately 100% juiced T17, with the occasional 5-way. Speaking of, the performance in 5-way have been shamefuly unplayable since the particule engine change pre-Crucible.
But I geniunely believe the "Average" PoE player getting to yellow/red map and making a second char before waiting the next league will have, overall, very playable performance levels. I attribute most of the bug-report complaints to people players on toasters, and being unaware their shader cache was cleared and needs to be redone. Altho yes GGG will fuck up perfs on occasion, and they could do better.

Originally posted by Coe⁧⁧✔️Quality Control:

Tons of people literally wait weeks and months following a league launch to wait for the servers to stabilize (AKA have less users playing) because every single time, they turn borderline unplayable with insane rubber-banding &/ delay and disconnects (depending on the network settings), including on the latest league. Any attempt to try to pin this on specific ISP's is concentrated gaslighting at best and misinformation at worst.

Okay, the generic 'servers' in the review felt like a dig at league start issues from years prior, something that famous back then. Now a day the league start downside it that at most you get disconnected a few times on loading a new instance for the first 2-6h of the league, and that's it usually.

Past league start, there are some smaller and sometimes not-so-small recurring issues of lag yea. In my experience it's not as dire as you paint it, but certainly not the exepected reliability of an always-online game.

Now that you make me think about it the overall PoE 1 experience isn't as flawless as I first remembered when making my post. Mhh... I'm still optimistic about PoE 2 but maybe I shouldn't have jumped on the supporter pack.

[Coe⁧⁧✔️[Quality Control]]

Originally posted by Core:

Okay, thanks for giving arguments. I somewhat disagree in that you're mixing up 'viable' and 'popular', and most of the price tag of a build comes from popularity. But yea ~30d is about right for clearing T17, and the balance changes are over focused on the most popular build archetypes.

To me 'only X builds can only approach something ressembling end-game' is meta-slave mentality, but I understand people can feel that way.

Due to the nature of the game having such extreme difficulty, if something is viable, AKA: Able to be used in end-game for a reasonable price &/ with reasonable survivability &/ with reasonable clear times, etc, it will inevitably become popular. If something is unviable shit, it will absolutely not become popular. This makes viable/popular intertwined. It's just the nature of modern gaming + the internet.

Now if they didn't do balancing around the top 0.01% (which they unfortunately do) with a heavy lean towards nerfing shit to the ground (as you mentioned), there would be a WAAAAAY more diverse build environment.

You can feel free to observe pretty much any casual gamer go through the campaign (tutorial) and perform admirably with solid-looking self made builds just to get their shit repeatedly kicked in by a steel-toed boot without warning the moment they start doing maps &/ end-game content.. Or try doing SSF without a pre-planned build just to see how few strategies are actually viable with what the game gives you.

Originally posted by Core:

That's my own assertion from looking at the way they're changing stuff.

So in summary, anecdotal speculation.

Originally posted by Core:

You're both shitting on the new system and being angry of the flaws of the old system that were solved in the new one. What?
My point was (1) the new system is 100% F2P, (2) the old system was available without paying anyway, in answer to you saying the trade itself was paywalled.

Trade as a whole is getting better, but I wouldn't call it good either yea.

A majority of drops are going to be items, not currencies. Taking into consideration just how hard they have nerfed said currency drops recently, the primary method of making money is selling items which is a function that is not supported by the currency exchange market.

If you are referring to the god-awful abominable BBcode forum selling method, that shit is literal cock and ball torture that also requires you to tab out of the game. Context-wise, i was talking about what you can do inside of it as a regular user, AKA premium tabs. May as well take a picture of your screen and try your luck on eBay over trying to teach newbies to use that shit.

Another thing i forgot to mention is because there's no enforcement, automation or deposit on trade listings, people are actively manipulating the shit out of the market because the things put on for sale can only be traded manually. Have a handful of accounts or friends make several trade postings WAAAY below the market rate, don't actually trade any of it when whispered and watch that price crash.

Originally posted by Core:

By 'most case' i'm excluding people running uber juiced content like 6-man 100% deli group play, 5-way, high-end Blight. I'm basing this on my own experience playing the game.

More anecdotal shit. Please go do some actual research like i asked you or alternatively, do some semi-juiced 5-16 tier maps with your loot filter turned off and enjoy the 5 FPS crawl & these visuals:

https://i.imgur.com/353qitq.jpeg

Path of Exile's end-game can literally not be played with features that every other game on the market would classify as modding.

Originally posted by Core:

Okay, the generic 'servers' in the review felt like a dig at league start issues from years prior, something that famous back then. Now a day the league start downside it that at most you get disconnected a few times on loading a new instance for the first 2-6h of the league, and that's it usually.

Past league start, there are some smaller and sometimes not-so-small recurring issues of lag yea. In my experience it's not as dire as you paint it, but certainly not the exepected reliability of an always-online game.

It's not just at a level of unexpected. The atrocious stability and lack of optimization that Path of Exile delivers is completely unheard of, even in the current swamp mire that is the gaming industry.. ESPECIALLY considering there's a hardcore mode. Every EU server looks like this half the time weeks/months after release:

https://i.imgur.com/NepU298.png

In addition to that, we can make a quick comparison of users mentioning lag in the forum with games that have roughly the same amount of players, Lost Ark and Black Desert:

https://i.imgur.com/nJzX31H.png

https://i.imgur.com/puy0YHh.png

https://i.imgur.com/Ilfh1IH.png

The game is such a technological shitshow to the point where fixing some of it's crippling performance issues involves turning off the sound by editing .ini files:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1e9wwvs/psa_disabling_sounds_can_gain_you_large_amounts/

I wouldn't trust GGG to not decapitate themselves if left alone for 3 minutes restrained inside a padded cell with a pair of safety scissors, much less recreate their barely functional game in one of the worst running game engines ever invented.

[☆ PheX]

Probably the biggest issues are that it has a HC mode yet it is extremely HC unfriendly game with so many monster 1 shots, SSF mode but drops are balanced for trading leagues, and trading leagues are overrun with massive item speculation from certain groups.

Also the gameplay so far looked like overhyped shit and a downgrade from the first game where a trash mob takes 3-4 hits to kill. And better for controller but way worse for PC kb + mouse because of the new movement.

And about trading leagues if you don't want to be a peasant that is economically abused by 3-4 guilds that literally control the entire market for the relevant items (99.5% else is trash) with automated tools i recommend to just not play at all.

And lastly in the past it was discovered that some of the shareholders where involved in the RMT (real money transactions) websites that sell PoE currency/items/boosts for actual real money. In fact some of the websites that have guides and stats for this game also run ads from these RMT sites.

Overhyped.

Oh and ofc there is MASSIVE item clutter so your stash get inevitably full and have to buy a stash tab for each type of item.

[Fritzpud]

I don't think $30 to buy into early access / development period for a free to play game is unreasonable, a lot of other games have done it, but there should probably be a path to get it that doesn't require money.

One thing that might be worth mentioning are macrotransactions. E.g., single cosmetics (pets, a weapon skin, an armor skin for a single slot, etc.) that cost 20+ dollars, as well as the fact that there's cosmetic lootboxes.

[Coe⁧⁧✔️[Quality Control]]

Originally posted by Fritzpud:

I don't think $30 to buy into early access / development period for a free to play game is unreasonable, a lot of other games have done it, but there should probably be a path to get it that doesn't require money.

Argumentum Ad Populum.

Demanding that people pay you in order to test their unfinished product (in this case, also in a limited capacity) is the very definition of unreasonable purely from a logical perspective. Just because others do it doesn't make it any less retarded.

The primary reason as to why it's mentioned is because it's currently listed as a F2P & tagged as such & advertised as such which is blatantly not the case currently.

[Fritzpud]

Originally posted by Coe⁧⁧✔️Quality Control:

Originally posted by Fritzpud:

I don't think $30 to buy into early access / development period for a free to play game is unreasonable, a lot of other games have done it, but there should probably be a path to get it that doesn't require money.

Argumentum Ad Populum.

Demanding that people pay you in order to test their unfinished product (in this case, also in a limited capacity) is the very definition of unreasonable purely from a logical perspective. Just because others do it doesn't make it any less retarded.

The primary reason as to why it's mentioned is because it's currently listed as a F2P & tagged as such & advertised as such which is blatantly not the case currently.

I see what you're saying but still think it's reasonable, especially compared to if early access were open to everyone, you'd see people with no investment jumping in and then judging the game in it's entirety based on the early access state (potentially buggy, etc.).

I do think it would be worth elaborating on what you're referring to regarding not being free to play in the review, mainly because most people would probably assume you're talking about stash tabs / merching issues while f2p, not the early access free to play specifically, like the op of this thread.

[Coe⁧⁧✔️[Quality Control]]

Originally posted by Fritzpud:

I see what you're saying but still think it's reasonable, especially compared to if early access were open to everyone, you'd see people with no investment jumping in and then judging the game in it's entirety based on the early access state (potentially buggy, etc.).

If the game is so horribly buggy to the point where they think there'd be a massive backlash, it needs to stay the fuck away from Early Access. It is NOT the place to upload proof of concepts/tech demos/pre-alpha products.

Furthermore, that justification is dumb as shit. "Only let people with a financial and/or emotional investment in the game judge it." Those are the people whose feedback means the absolute LEAST due to conflict of interest &/ bias.

It's the equivalent of saying "Only let people who got a $10000 check in the mail review our products."

Originally posted by Fritzpud:

I do think it would be worth elaborating on what you're referring to regarding not being free to play in the review, mainly because most people would probably assume you're talking about stash tabs / merching issues while f2p, not the early access free to play specifically, like the op of this thread.

Curations have a 200 character limit and it already brings up the trading aspect separately. It will be updated whenever they decide to actually release it as a F2P.

[Gorem]

They took out stuff that people enjoyed in the first game, didn't listen to feedback, did what they wanted to do, are charging people to play a game that is supposed to be free while also charging for things that you require to play (believe me, you CAN NOT play poe/2 without buying many stash tabs, you just can't) and the bosses have been made massively tedious by making the campaign bosses regen health on a fail - so even if you spend 40 minutes to beat one one misstep one shot means you have to do all the perfect dodging all over again.

The bosses, just like the first game, are badly designed all over again only now they are worse.

Its going to fall into the same trap as the game will be balanced around only the top 1% just like poe1but even those builds right now take forever. It is still Early Access but after hyping this up for so many years it definitely feels like its failed. In fact the only reason the game is selling, at all, is because people waited for this as when it was announced they avoided poe1 to wait. If this was any other game, the bugs alone would have made it DOA.

The not recommended is 100% on point and correct.