The absolute state of Path of Exile and gaming in general.

Sorry to say it but Gamers long ago accepted paying games companies/developers to test their games for them. Back when even some of these developers started playing games themselves this would have been laughed out of the building. Even the idea of paying a subscription and paying more than the box price of a game was enough to put off large amounts of consumers, let alone paying for a game/s that simply do not work.

No doubt it is in the fine print, somewhere, that they are under no obligation whatsoever to give refunds for an 'early access', or whatever semantic nonsense the industry want to peddle, that gets them off the legal hook. Disdain is what the paying customers get over and again mingled with talk of loving 'the commmunity,' your feedback and most importantly your money is really appreciated.

At this point, most of the threads on here and other forums are about lack of loot drops and, to me, QoL issues, build diversity and the like. Personally I've had nothing but trouble with all sorts of crashes/disconnects since I finished the campaign in standard a few weeks after the game was released. At this point I would settle for a game that just runs without crashing every 10-15 minutes for any of among the now myriad of 'reasons'.

My crashes for the past couple of months:
DX12 shader error and crash, switch to Vulkan and wait for fences, another crash. These at an alarming rate for any game I've played in 30 years. More recently and while also when the game is crashing my GPU I've been getting server disconnects. The response - ah that's just DDOS and we can do nothing about it - now we've told you so it is all ok. Mess around with every setting in the Graphics tab, re-install the game, turn things on/off in windows, change CPU settings on your machine. Rollback windows and driver updates. There's probably more that I've missed. Lots of other people have had the audacity to complain and I've read alot of them too.

Games companies have been doing this for years too by the way. Have you checked your drivers, restarted your router, made sure the temperature in your room on a Tuesday is not above 19 degrees? Can you file a ticket with support? And they know how it will play out, as long as they get your money and can submit a healthy earnings report the show stays on the road. Games companies, no matter what they try to tell you, report to shareholders now, not to their customers. Release a new 'class' with a cinematic, pay some 'content creators' to play it and everyone comes piling back only to experience all the same issues again. Sometimes new issues too.

On top of this, it is not just your money and by no small measure most precious of all it is our time. The hour or two you get in between caring for children or family members/friends, the hour or two after work/school before you've to go to bed to get up and get back to it in the morning. If we seem angry it is because we are. We enjoy having hobbies and interests to relax and unwind - GGG this isn't it.

You chose to donate for early access. You didn't have to.

Yes and I am registering my displeasure for a product that I chose to pay for. Are customers not allowed to give feedback anymore for products they have purchased?

Yes but now you're just ranting.

Early access means the game is supposed to get better. Not lose half the playerbase in one patch.

Steam reviews went from Mostly positive to mostly negative in ONE patch. ONE. That's no review bombing or coincidence.

Keep that in mind.

Guys... it's early access. You don't have to play it right now. Development isn't going to be linear. There will be regressions because that's how software development works when you're building something new.

I think the reviews say more about the Gamers than the game.

Pays to test a game. Complains that companies let them pay to test a game. What?

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ImMobile2010#0431 wrote:

That's no review bombing

I mean, it unquestionably was exactly that. A full 2/3rds of the reviews in the first week came from people with 0 hours played.

PoE1 players were upset by GGG's decision to reallocate resources to PoE2, so they collectively decided to retaliate with Steam reviews except they didn't think to leave their clients idle for a couple days first so it was incredibly obvious when you clicked through every profile with 0.0 hours played in the patch.

The even funnier part is how many of their reviews look like this now:



Anyway, as for testing games for developers - yeah guy we're on board. It's called crowdsourcing and it's very efficient.

This was a valid complaint when developers would release finished games that turned out to be buggy, but now they're fully being transparent with you dude. They're asking you to participate in the design & development process by playing an unfinished version of the game. You don't have to do that if you don't want to. It's entirely voluntary.

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We enjoy having hobbies and interests to relax and unwind - GGG this isn't it.

Cripes I wish people would stop trying to speak on behalf of people they don't know. Just share your opinion about the game and stop acting like you're an activist. I love PoE2. I'm having a blast. My kids might be feeling neglected by that's nothing new for them.

Just to clarify and I’ll keep it short to avoid being accused of giving a considered opinion.

My problem presently is that I cannot play the game due to all of the bugs. I have in effect handed over money to not play the game. That to me seems not a fair deal. If I could play the game and did not like it that, I think, would be different. I do like the game, I just cannot play it.

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WhoollyFaada#3811 wrote:

Games companies have been doing this for years too by the way. Have you checked your drivers, restarted your router, made sure the temperature in your room on a Tuesday is not above 19 degrees?

Have you checked?

A PC isn't a console, its like a fast car that you have to actually care about if you want the most out of it.

Microsoft/AMD/Nvidia have to account for many different variants of hardware, so to solely put the blame on GGG or most decent game companies is very criminal.
The game engine works great (not perfect, still fps drops on Ice Wall shatterings with no enemies etc) and I'm using near 7 year old hardware but I am a fairly determined when it comes to PC problem solving and figuring out even niche problems on my system I enjoy because literally this machine is my number 1 hobby and supreme internet browser.

Just be part of the "PC master-race" gang, you really can't say that you are if you're venting about some simple issues like driver installs, which really barely need to happen if you've already got the ideal drivers, just don't overly trust Microsoft on updates and if everythings working great don't ever go for auto updates unless you are keen to problem solve any issues afterwards!