I have put a lot of time and money into this game. And, as a disclaimer, I don't regret that time. The whole of 3.13 was arguably the most blissful three months of gaming I've ever had.

The problem is that the developers had, outright had, a perfect game. For a fleeting moment in time, PoE was borderline flawless. There were almost no complaints, variety was at its peak, the playerbase was one of the strongest and well retained it had ever been, the balance was arguably way too player favored but screw it, with the amount of time and variety PoE offers, earning your way up to that power was immensely satisfying. The endgame had a wealth of variation and options to specialize in. 3.13 is considered by many to be the peak of PoE.

Because unlike other games, GGG does not do what other game as a service games do. They do not continually stack and improve on what works and iterate what doesn't. 3.13 was hardly intentional, more like a freak lab accident that briefly escaped before the devs angrily wrangled it into a cage and sedated the hell out of it. 3.14 rolls around and it was, in short, 3.13 but worse. There were no raw improvements, just nerfs for the most part. It was tolerable, but the peak was crested. We can only go downhill from here.

3.15 comes and brings with it what was some of the biggest nerfs the game had ever seen (until 3.19, at least). An immense reduction in player power, insane mana cost spikes, drastic reduction in survival, mobs became stronger, got more health, and players were in summation much weaker than ever before. The game was still playable. I was experienced enough to persevere, many were. But at that point I wasn't sure if it was because the game was still fun, or I wanted to succeed out of spite.

3.16 comes with more nerfs, and a meta change that persists today: an overwhelming focus on defense. Ironic, as it would be. Defenses were lauded as being kinda trash prior to this and this patch buffed them significantly, and simultaneously jacked up mob difficulty. The end result is the near entirety of your build feels almost hyper focused around shoving in every conceivable defense to increase your survival. This ends up putting a lot of pressure on your gear and it becomes frustration, tedious, and exhausting to numerically manage all sorts of difference defensive layers to max them all out. Feels great when you do, but the extra frustration on top of patch after patch of nerfs was taking its toll.

3.17 comes out and half of it was a massive improvement of a core feature lauded as being one of the best in the game from 3.13. But the nerfs are still present, and even more get piled on. Gear pressure continues. We have additional endgame bosses now, and more ways to maximize your gear. The level of additional tedium starts to become painful.

3.18 features more nerfs, surprise. The league mechanic from 3.17 goes core in an embarrassingly half-assed fashion leading to some of the most extreme player frustration I had ever seen to that point. Super mega difficult endgame bosses get added, making gearing take even longer as a result because the goalposts for sufficient gear to clear all content has been pushed back even further. You need even more time to finish your build, to optimize everything to a point where you can clear all content. I, to be blunt, was on the edge of quitting here. The league's mechanic, sentinels and recombinators, were so comically broken in the players' favor that they helped stave off what had become an unerringly arduous task of pushing your gear to the point where you could topple all endgame content.

And that leads us to 3.19. There's been a lot of player frustration leading up to this point from a bevvy of nerfs and very little to compensate for it. While most league content goes core in some fashion, naturally sentinels and recombinators--two things that greatly helped alleviate how elongated the gearing process had ballooned to--didn't go core. That in itself was a net nerf to the players, on top of archnemesis--the 3.17 core mechanic that was the root cause of a lot of player rage--was getting buffed to be even harder. Many skills and defenses were nerfed, with the promise that the devs would totally compensate for the nerfs in 3.20, but leave us screwed for 3.19. All of that, in isolation, were enough to extend the length of the loot grind to complete the endgame to such a tedious degree that the game felt barely worth bothering with.

But that wasn't the extent of the nerfs. The developers decided to conceal the full extent of their nerfs thinking players wouldn't notice long enough to sell a bunch of supporter packs. Those nerfs were in the form of the game's most notorious crafting system (Harvest) being gutted into borderline worthlessness, several former league mechanics (Beyond and subsequently tainted currency) equally gutted into feeling meaningless, and the most damning of all, obliterating the drop rates in the game. They didn't nerf loot in subtle fashion, they were neutered by anywhere from 60-90% depending on the content you're running. It was noticed within the first day of the patch, everyone thinking it was a comical but extreme bug. It, truly, cannot be understated just how massive this loot nerf is. It felt like virtually nothing was dropping doing the exact same gameplay that had worked for years.

The lead developer announced that it was intentional. Not just that, but in an offhand sentence while discussing intentional nerfs to other content. This went far beyond 3.15's nerfs and was the most extreme destruction of loot acquisition in the history of the game, and its very first developer acknowledgement was an offhand comment. Since then, they've held their ground. This is the state PoE is going to be in for now, and by and large it can only go even further down from here.

And after a year of nerfs, of putting up with the gear grind become insufferably long, I've had enough. I can't deal with this game anymore. The timesink has become too extreme and GGG seems determined to strip everything fun out of the game bit by bit until the game is naught but a husk of what it once was.

They are, to put it in different terms, trying to bend the game back to a state reminiscent of patch 1.5, the state of the game 8 years ago. A state where the game was slow, loot was poor, and gear acquisition even slower. At the same time, we had no endgame then. The hardest content was like, lv79 maps. That's T11 maps in the current game. What was once the maximum difficulty in the game is now an irrelevant footnote in your character's progression. The gameplay "sped up" to compensate for the enormous wealth of endgame content, the extreme complication of gear progression, and the sheer difficulty the hardest content demands. Slowing the game back to that point doesn't change the gear requirements for the endgame. All it does is demand you spend more, and more, and more, and more time in the same, escalating in tedium grind to reach the same point.

It doesn't work. GGG bent the game too far and it doesn't work at this point. If you have any respect for your time, avoid PoE. It will not respect you any longer. And I say this as someone that's hit 40/40 challenges in six different leagues and put far more time into this game than any other I've played. And I bought a div card submission, too. I don't regret any of that, I can only lament the lackluster and lost future of the game.

I have put a lot of time and money into this game. And, as a disclaimer, I don't regret that time. The whole of 3.13 was arguably the most blissful three months of gaming I've ever had. The problem is that the developers had, outright had, a perfect game. For a fleeting moment in time, PoE was borderline flawless. There were almost no complaints, variety was at its peak, the playerbase was one of the strongest and well retained it had ever been, the balance was arguably way too player favored but screw it, with the amount of time and variety PoE offers, earning your way up to that power was immensely satisfying. The endgame had a wealth of variation and options to specialize in. 3.13 is considered by many to be the peak of PoE. Because unlike other games, GGG does not do what other game as a service games do. They do not continually stack and improve on what works and iterate what doesn't. 3.13 was hardly intentional, more like a freak lab accident that briefly escaped before the devs angrily wrangled it into a cage and sedated the hell out of it. 3.14 rolls around and it was, in short, 3.13 but worse. There were no raw improvements, just nerfs for the most part. It was tolerable, but the peak was crested. We can only go downhill from here. 3.15 comes and brings with it what was some of the biggest nerfs the game had ever seen (until 3.19, at least). An immense reduction in player power, insane mana cost spikes, drastic reduction in survival, mobs became stronger, got more health, and players were in summation much weaker than ever before. The game was still playable. I was experienced enough to persevere, many were. But at that point I wasn't sure if it was because the game was still fun, or I wanted to succeed out of spite. 3.16 comes with more nerfs, and a meta change that persists today: an overwhelming focus on defense. Ironic, as it would be. Defenses were lauded as being kinda trash prior to this and this patch buffed them significantly, and simultaneously jacked up mob difficulty. The end result is the near entirety of your build feels almost hyper focused around shoving in every conceivable defense to increase your survival. This ends up putting a lot of pressure on your gear and it becomes frustration, tedious, and exhausting to numerically manage all sorts of difference defensive layers to max them all out. Feels great when you do, but the extra frustration on top of patch after patch of nerfs was taking its toll. 3.17 comes out and half of it was a massive improvement of a core feature lauded as being one of the best in the game from 3.13. But the nerfs are still present, and even more get piled on. Gear pressure continues. We have additional endgame bosses now, and more ways to maximize your gear. The level of additional tedium starts to become painful. 3.18 features more nerfs, surprise. The league mechanic from 3.17 goes core in an embarrassingly half-assed fashion leading to some of the most extreme player frustration I had ever seen to that point. Super mega difficult endgame bosses get added, making gearing take even longer as a result because the goalposts for sufficient gear to clear all content has been pushed back even further. You need even more time to finish your build, to optimize everything to a point where you can clear all content. I, to be blunt, was on the edge of quitting here. The league's mechanic, sentinels and recombinators, were so comically broken in the players' favor that they helped stave off what had become an unerringly arduous task of pushing your gear to the point where you could topple all endgame content. And that leads us to 3.19. There's been a lot of player frustration leading up to this point from a bevvy of nerfs and very little to compensate for it. While most league content goes core in some fashion, naturally sentinels and recombinators--two things that greatly helped alleviate how elongated the gearing process had ballooned to--didn't go core. That in itself was a net nerf to the players, on top of archnemesis--the 3.17 core mechanic that was the root cause of a lot of player rage--was getting buffed to be even harder. Many skills and defenses were nerfed, with the promise that the devs would totally compensate for the nerfs in 3.20, but leave us screwed for 3.19. All of that, in isolation, were enough to extend the length of the loot grind to complete the endgame to such a tedious degree that the game felt barely worth bothering with. But that wasn't the extent of the nerfs. The developers decided to conceal the full extent of their nerfs thinking players wouldn't notice long enough to sell a bunch of supporter packs. Those nerfs were in the form of the game's most notorious crafting system (Harvest) being gutted into borderline worthlessness, several former league mechanics (Beyond and subsequently tainted currency) equally gutted into feeling meaningless, and the most damning of all, obliterating the drop rates in the game. They didn't nerf loot in subtle fashion, they were neutered by anywhere from 60-90% depending on the content you're running. It was noticed within the first day of the patch, everyone thinking it was a comical but extreme bug. It, truly, cannot be understated just how massive this loot nerf is. It felt like virtually nothing was dropping doing the exact same gameplay that had worked for years. The lead developer announced that it was intentional. Not just that, but in an offhand sentence while discussing intentional nerfs to other content. This went far beyond 3.15's nerfs and was the most extreme destruction of loot acquisition in the history of the game, and its very first developer acknowledgement was an offhand comment. Since then, they've held their ground. This is the state PoE is going to be in for now, and by and large it can only go even further down from here. And after a year of nerfs, of putting up with the gear grind become insufferably long, I've had enough. I can't deal with this game anymore. The timesink has become too extreme and GGG seems determined to strip everything fun out of the game bit by bit until the game is naught but a husk of what it once was. They are, to put it in different terms, trying to bend the game back to a state reminiscent of patch 1.5, the state of the game 8 years ago. A state where the game was slow, loot was poor, and gear acquisition even slower. At the same time, we had no endgame then. The hardest content was like, lv79 maps. That's T11 maps in the current game. What was once the maximum difficulty in the game is now an irrelevant footnote in your character's progression. The gameplay "sped up" to compensate for the enormous wealth of endgame content, the extreme complication of gear progression, and the sheer difficulty the hardest content demands. Slowing the game back to that point doesn't change the gear requirements for the endgame. All it does is demand you spend more, and more, and more, and more time in the same, escalating in tedium grind to reach the same point. It doesn't work. GGG bent the game too far and it doesn't work at this point. If you have any respect for your time, avoid PoE. It will not respect you any longer. And I say this as someone that's hit 40/40 challenges in six different leagues and put far more time into this game than any other I've played. And I bought a div card submission, too. I don't regret any of that, I can only lament the lackluster and lost future of the game.