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Ironically I think that by listening to the players GGG is doing the wrong thing with PoE 2.
PoE 1 is the ultra zoomies, and based on development choices for various leagues atleast some part of GGG doesn't like that. They want the game to be slower and more methodical.
PoE 1 and 2 existing concurrently made sense when their design philosophies are different. The fast zoomy PoE 1 and the slow methodical PoE 2. But then the loud portion of the player started complaining and now PoE 2 is just a failed version of PoE 1, hobbled by having been created from an entirely different design philosophy.
If they are going to keep up this direction I think they would be better of starting over on the gameplay of PoE 2 from scratch rather then frankenstein something together.
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On November 20 2025 23:29 Gescom wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2025 22:33 abuse wrote:
gotcha, thanks all!
I don't have any real experience with PoE1 - I only played it for a few hours and it was too complicated for me to want to log in a second day.
I have been playing each PoE2 league though for hundreds of hours and I have very mixed feelings about it too, with my opinion going from "amazing" in the first league to me probably skipping the next league.
I don't enjoy the campaign, I do kind of enjoy lategame but I get burned out very quickly because it seems like nothing ever drops for me, and with the latest league my game crashes in every 2nd map..
I think it will become much better once the devs actually just start giving players what they want, instead of always adding a "BUT" to it. Sprint making you basically insta-die when you get hit once is a great example of a feature that was very much requested but got given to us with an absolutely stupid, unneeded and unfun feature on top of it. It feels like most things in the game get passed through this shit filter and I wish it would stop.
"Giving players what they want" is a slippery slope to making Diablo 4. Players are short sighted idiots. I can sprint all I want and never die. You have it to earn it.
This to be honest. "Giving players what they want" is also impossible because there is no homogenous "what the players want". I never wanted sprinting. I never wanted clearing to be faster and thus mobs feeling irrelevant again. I never wanted more loot explosions, covering the whole screen in pointless garbage, essentially creating the need for an item filter. I have all this in PoE and I love that game. I want something different from PoE2. And other people want other stuff. Maybe I get what I want eventually, maybe not. Right now they are trying to cater to multiple crowds at the same and thereby possibly pleasing less players than they could if they just tried to cater to one group.
If they decide to make the game the way you like, great! But this assumption that everyone wants the game to turn out the same way needs to stop. Same with the content creator bubble that just circle-jerks around the same issues. The consensus around 0.1 from them was "PoE2 can only become better from here", ignoring the fact that "better" can be quite subjective and that things can develop to be worse, which happened to the same people in their beloved PoE1.
Sorry, I had to vent a little bit. The whole "give the players what they want" narrative over the past years just drives me nuts. It has nothing to do with you, abuse. 
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On November 21 2025 01:20 Miragee wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2025 23:29 Gescom wrote:On November 20 2025 22:33 abuse wrote:
gotcha, thanks all!
I don't have any real experience with PoE1 - I only played it for a few hours and it was too complicated for me to want to log in a second day.
I have been playing each PoE2 league though for hundreds of hours and I have very mixed feelings about it too, with my opinion going from "amazing" in the first league to me probably skipping the next league.
I don't enjoy the campaign, I do kind of enjoy lategame but I get burned out very quickly because it seems like nothing ever drops for me, and with the latest league my game crashes in every 2nd map..
I think it will become much better once the devs actually just start giving players what they want, instead of always adding a "BUT" to it. Sprint making you basically insta-die when you get hit once is a great example of a feature that was very much requested but got given to us with an absolutely stupid, unneeded and unfun feature on top of it. It feels like most things in the game get passed through this shit filter and I wish it would stop.
"Giving players what they want" is a slippery slope to making Diablo 4. Players are short sighted idiots. I can sprint all I want and never die. You have it to earn it. This to be honest. "Giving players what they want" is also impossible because there is no homogenous "what the players want". I never wanted sprinting. I never wanted clearing to be faster and thus mobs feeling irrelevant again. I never wanted more loot explosions, covering the whole screen in pointless garbage, essentially creating the need for an item filter. I have all this in PoE and I love that game. I want something different from PoE2. And other people want other stuff. Maybe I get what I want eventually, maybe not. Right now they are trying to cater to multiple crowds at the same and thereby possibly pleasing less players than they could if they just tried to cater to one group. If they decide to make the game the way you like, great! But this assumption that everyone wants the game to turn out the same way needs to stop. Same with the content creator bubble that just circle-jerks around the same issues. The consensus around 0.1 from them was "PoE2 can only become better from here", ignoring the fact that "better" can be quite subjective and that things can develop to be worse, which happened to the same people in their beloved PoE1. Sorry, I had to vent a little bit. The whole "give the players what they want" narrative over the past years just drives me nuts. It has nothing to do with you, abuse.
Preach, brother.
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It sounds weird, but it helped me to consider POE 2 as an entirely new game in the broader genre that just happened to be made by the same studio and with similar ARPG QoL features. I like and liked their previous game better, but they have an unfinished new game that was based on a different concept, and maybe they (or others) will release or return to the old gameplay in a subsequent game.
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POE2 is just in this really awkward state where it's far too similar to POE1 because of all the reused content/mechanics/skills/etc. The only thing that really sets the two games apart is the scarcity of loot and slowness of gameplay, so if they keep changing that then they end up with two of the same game.
On the other hand, there's vociferous complaints about the Ruthless style of the game. I don't know how you'd go about determining how much of the playerbase actually prefers that style and how much wants more of the POE1 style, but at the end of the day why have two POE1's?
I dunno. I think POE2 was a mistake. I just don't think there's enough differentiating the two games to warrant their long term coexistance.
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On November 21 2025 01:20 Miragee wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2025 23:29 Gescom wrote:On November 20 2025 22:33 abuse wrote:
gotcha, thanks all!
I don't have any real experience with PoE1 - I only played it for a few hours and it was too complicated for me to want to log in a second day.
I have been playing each PoE2 league though for hundreds of hours and I have very mixed feelings about it too, with my opinion going from "amazing" in the first league to me probably skipping the next league.
I don't enjoy the campaign, I do kind of enjoy lategame but I get burned out very quickly because it seems like nothing ever drops for me, and with the latest league my game crashes in every 2nd map..
I think it will become much better once the devs actually just start giving players what they want, instead of always adding a "BUT" to it. Sprint making you basically insta-die when you get hit once is a great example of a feature that was very much requested but got given to us with an absolutely stupid, unneeded and unfun feature on top of it. It feels like most things in the game get passed through this shit filter and I wish it would stop.
"Giving players what they want" is a slippery slope to making Diablo 4. Players are short sighted idiots. I can sprint all I want and never die. You have it to earn it. This to be honest. "Giving players what they want" is also impossible because there is no homogenous "what the players want". I never wanted sprinting. I never wanted clearing to be faster and thus mobs feeling irrelevant again. I never wanted more loot explosions, covering the whole screen in pointless garbage, essentially creating the need for an item filter. I have all this in PoE and I love that game. I want something different from PoE2. And other people want other stuff. Maybe I get what I want eventually, maybe not. Right now they are trying to cater to multiple crowds at the same and thereby possibly pleasing less players than they could if they just tried to cater to one group. If they decide to make the game the way you like, great! But this assumption that everyone wants the game to turn out the same way needs to stop. Same with the content creator bubble that just circle-jerks around the same issues. The consensus around 0.1 from them was "PoE2 can only become better from here", ignoring the fact that "better" can be quite subjective and that things can develop to be worse, which happened to the same people in their beloved PoE1. Sorry, I had to vent a little bit. The whole "give the players what they want" narrative over the past years just drives me nuts. It has nothing to do with you, abuse.
nah, I can definitely understand that POV as well.
It makes a lot of sense that many people want different things from Poe2, and a huge part of it (though definitely not all of it) is the fact that Poe1 exists and has existed for a long time and it is not dead by any means, and there are a lot of people who are happy to go back to it for the experience it provides if they don't find a subjective improvement in Poe2, and it also makes sense that people wouldn't be very happy if Poe2 ends up being just Poe1 again..
And I'm guessing there's a sizable amount of people who want poe2 to fail so it doesn't take dev time away from poe1.
But that's the difference with people like me, I guess- I don't have any real Poe1 experience to fall back on, so what I want, is a faster (less important) and less stingy when it comes to meaningful drops(more important) game compared to what Poe2 is right now.
Maybe I should give Poe1 another shot 
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On November 21 2025 07:03 abuse wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2025 01:20 Miragee wrote:On November 20 2025 23:29 Gescom wrote:On November 20 2025 22:33 abuse wrote:
gotcha, thanks all!
I don't have any real experience with PoE1 - I only played it for a few hours and it was too complicated for me to want to log in a second day.
I have been playing each PoE2 league though for hundreds of hours and I have very mixed feelings about it too, with my opinion going from "amazing" in the first league to me probably skipping the next league.
I don't enjoy the campaign, I do kind of enjoy lategame but I get burned out very quickly because it seems like nothing ever drops for me, and with the latest league my game crashes in every 2nd map..
I think it will become much better once the devs actually just start giving players what they want, instead of always adding a "BUT" to it. Sprint making you basically insta-die when you get hit once is a great example of a feature that was very much requested but got given to us with an absolutely stupid, unneeded and unfun feature on top of it. It feels like most things in the game get passed through this shit filter and I wish it would stop.
"Giving players what they want" is a slippery slope to making Diablo 4. Players are short sighted idiots. I can sprint all I want and never die. You have it to earn it. This to be honest. "Giving players what they want" is also impossible because there is no homogenous "what the players want". I never wanted sprinting. I never wanted clearing to be faster and thus mobs feeling irrelevant again. I never wanted more loot explosions, covering the whole screen in pointless garbage, essentially creating the need for an item filter. I have all this in PoE and I love that game. I want something different from PoE2. And other people want other stuff. Maybe I get what I want eventually, maybe not. Right now they are trying to cater to multiple crowds at the same and thereby possibly pleasing less players than they could if they just tried to cater to one group. If they decide to make the game the way you like, great! But this assumption that everyone wants the game to turn out the same way needs to stop. Same with the content creator bubble that just circle-jerks around the same issues. The consensus around 0.1 from them was "PoE2 can only become better from here", ignoring the fact that "better" can be quite subjective and that things can develop to be worse, which happened to the same people in their beloved PoE1. Sorry, I had to vent a little bit. The whole "give the players what they want" narrative over the past years just drives me nuts. It has nothing to do with you, abuse. nah, I can definitely understand that POV as well. It makes a lot of sense that many people want different things from Poe2, and a huge part of it (though definitely not all of it) is the fact that Poe1 exists and has existed for a long time and it is not dead by any means, and there are a lot of people who are happy to go back to it for the experience it provides if they don't find a subjective improvement in Poe2, and it also makes sense that people wouldn't be very happy if Poe2 ends up being just Poe1 again.. And I'm guessing there's a sizable amount of people who want poe2 to fail so it doesn't take dev time away from poe1.But that's the difference with people like me, I guess- I don't have any real Poe1 experience to fall back on, so what I want, is a faster (less important) and less stingy when it comes to meaningful drops(more important) game compared to what Poe2 is right now. Maybe I should give Poe1 another shot If you go want to give PoE 1 another try my advise is look for a starters guide. New ones get put out every new league. You don't have to worry about the gigantic skill tree or the plethora of gems. Lets you just focus on the game itself
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ALLEYCAT BLUES50612 Posts
I'll give them this POE2 0.3 was great fun and a good step in the right direction, the end game is slowly turning into POE 1, which I don't agree with but the changes were better than what was there before.
I look forward to druid update.
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On November 21 2025 06:34 Craton wrote:
but at the end of the day why have two POE1's?
I dunno. I think POE2 was a mistake. I just don't think there's enough differentiating the two games to warrant their long term coexistance.
Make no mistake, PoE1 is going on full cryostasis maintenance mode in 2-3 years. It's old, outdated and crusty and has no business surviving in 2030+. GGG knows what they're doing and how to operate on the long-term scale. The only reason PoE1 is getting updated in 2025 is because: (a) they can re-use assets and backport content, (b) salty PoE1 streamers & players were throwing eggs at PoE2 because they perceived it as stealing resources from PoE1 while PoE2 was/is still wholly unfinished and it was impacting public perception of PoE2 & GGG.
At some point, PoE2 will be better than PoE1 in every discernable way, at which point PoE1 will go into a close to D2-esque ladder reset but no content sort of mode. The players _will_ make that choice. PoE2 already has 3x the player count and we're comparing patch3 vs patch53 between the two games.
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I've heard a lot of copium over the years, but that might be the greatest huff of them all.
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On November 22 2025 01:54 Craton wrote:
I've heard a lot of copium over the years, but that might be the greatest huff of them all.
Which part is untrue/unrealistic?
You don't think GGG plans for PoE2 to be a better game than PoE1? Or that they're not capable of doing that on a multi-year time span?
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All of it.
Your fallacious argument that one will be objectively better then the other when it's completely subjective. The straight contradiction evident in earlier posts that POE2 players want the slower style not the POE1 style, but that somehow POE2 will be better all ways when the players don't even want the same things. These are in fundamental opposition.
The ridiculous idea of throwing away a wildly successful, established product. We don't have the full player numbers, but we do see that peak recent POE1 leagues are still 40% of the numbers of recent POE2 peaks and continually rising. This is doubly meaningful when you compare the novelty of POE2 against the stalwart success of POE1, plus the well-established heavy supporters from POE1 who dump significant money into the game. POE1 is their cash cow. If POE1 were killed off, a huge percentage of those players leave and never come back. Bye bye money.
And finally, that GGG's actions up to this point contradict all of what you're saying. GGG has a long reputation of actually following through with what they tell their community. They've been spending considerable resources porting all the MTX and they continue to make the new stuff work on both games. They've continually talked about their long-term plans for the game.
It's such an absurd claim to make.
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PoE1 is a 15 year old game started by 3 guys in a garage, PoE2 is a game made by the same, established team with more technology, more resources, and all the lessons learned. PoE2 certainly has a leg up. I'm chuckling to myself realizing that TeamLiquid is definitely the wrong place to suggest that sequels are automatically 'better' than originals, but if you handed Brood War and SC2 today to a 13 year old, a non-RTS fan, or an investor, I'm betting SC2 wins 99% of the time. I digress.
>PoE1 leagues have 40% as many players as PoE2 leagues and rising.
Well, I see a few problems there. https://poedb.tw/us/League#ConcurrentPlayers. Player numbers, retention numbers, they're all flat or falling. So, the old game having 40% as many players as the new game is not a positive to me. Anecdotally, some of the PoE1 players are those 2.5x as many PoE2 guys checking out the older, most established game. Anywho, I don't think the PoE1 player numbers are super great. I think they will continue to decline, and that PoE2's will continue to increase, in particular when they hit v1.0.
>POE1 is their cash cow. If POE1 were killed off, a huge percentage of those players leave and never come back. Bye bye money.
Is it? Do you have proof? Do you think with 2.5x the player count in PoE2 that for some reason PoE1 players are outspending them? Every single PoE2 player paid $30 minimum. We already had a year of low PoE1 investment. The annual core packs are both going to be aligned with PoE2 releases during that premium Christmas timeslot.
>GGG has a long reputation of actually following through with what they tell their community. They've been spending considerable resources porting all the MTX and they continue to make the new stuff work on both games. They've continually talked about their long-term plans for the game.
They literally didn't follow through on their PoE1 promise last year. Everyone was up in arms. They had to do their 'emergency' Phrecia event to calm down the dissent. Making stuff work for both games is a minimal investment. The current PoE1 league is recycled PoE2 content. We know what their medium term plans are. I didn't suggest that 3.28 wasn't going to happen.
PoE1 is in decline, PoE2 is the future. This is all obvious. It's just a matter of how slowly they turn the taps off so as to not enrage the community as they did in 2024.
I mean, you answered your own question. "Why have two PoE1s? .. Surely they can't co-exist." They won't. And the game with the 15 year old graphics and lesser investment will die.
The Chris Wilson vision was to turn PoE1 into Ruthless (see 3.15); everyone went nuts and said they hated it. So they forked the two projects. *Everyone tried Ruthless PoE2 v0.1; everyone went nuts and said they hated it. Chris Wilson don't work there no more. PoE is a zoom-zoom game, it got faster in both v0.2 and v0.3, I really doubt you'll seem them toning down speed in the upcoming patch. PoE2 will supercede PoE1 more or less in full in 2-3 years. It's not an absurd claim at all, it'd be naive to think that PoE1 is getting full leagues years from now. Hell, Keepers is barely a full league right now and the retention numbers show it. I think when they reveal v0.4 in two weeks, it'll be fairly obvious that they've got 140 staff working on PoE2 and 10 staff working on PoE1.
I don't have a horse in the race necessarily. I love both games. I have ~9000 hours in PoE1 over the last decade+. Wait and see how many players are logged into PoE1 after December 12th and we'll all have our answer about what GGG will do in the future -- it will be very interesting. I suspect that those who enjoy PoE1 but dislike PoE2 will be disappointed, but that GGG will win them over in 2026, 2027... if not already in v0.4.
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Even if more players play PoE2 that doesn't mean PoE cannot be profitable. It is very profitable and will continue to be so if they care about it. They said they would so I think there is no reason to believe why they wouldn't want to keep it alive. Getting new players into the game also works differently if you already have a classic. Like, if WoW came out today, I doubt it would have nearly the same success. But it was a success. A ton of players play WoW, even classic. And people will try it out, even younger players, because of hear-say. Same with League of Legends. And to a lesser extent, this is also true for PoE. It reached classic status for a decently sized niche of players. There is little reason to take it away and don't make money off of it, even if you only watch it through a monetary lens. Aside from that, I actually think GGG cares about the game, the players and their company name. It would be stupid for them to switch PoE to maintenance mode in a couple of years after everything they have said and done these past years. Now, PoE might be switched to maintenance mode sometime down the line but it's unlikely that happens unless PoE stops being profitable on its own. I think people like to jump to the conclusion that devs want to kill their game when they make a mistep and its fair to be jaded in the current state of gaming, with all the shit that has happened with Blizzard games among others. But in GGGs case I firmly believe it was a mistep because of leadership incompetence (sorry Jonathan) and not malicious.
I also took a look at player numbers. Retention for the current PoE league seems fine. It's three weeks in and concurrent players is still >60k, which is not bad compared to the most popular leagues. Also, if you compare relative retention to that of PoE2, PoE holds players for longer, which makes sense because people seem to largely not like the late game of PoE2 that much. 2 month into a league, which is when 0.4 will drop, the player numbers are usually lower already. Mercenaries didn't take a significant dip when 0.3 released so I would be surprised if Keepers suddenly drops from 30k to 10k when 0.4 releases instead of continuing to dwindeling in a similar pace as the weeks before. Furthermore, if you look at the downtime (last weeks of a league) both PoE and PoE2 have had similar levels of concurrent players this year.
https://poedb.tw/us/League#ConcurrentPlayers
https://poe2db.tw/League#ConcurrentPlayers
//edit: Btw. multiple tens of thousands of people playing the game at the same time is extremely healthy. You can run a live service game on far few players than that.
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Alright, I don't want to get into a protracted argument because arguing on the Internet is a waste of time. This is the last I have to say on the matter.
PoE1 is a 15 year old game started by 3 guys in a garage, PoE2 is a game made by the same, established team with more technology, more resources, and all the lessons learned
PoE1 is a game made by the same, established team with more technology, more resources, and all the lessons learned. This isn't a case of one vs the other. POE1 has been incrementally improved and enhanced over all that time and is so far removed from what the garage trio did that you can't even recognize it. This is a false dichotomy.
Player numbers, retention numbers, they're all flat or falling.
No, you're completely misinterpreting the data. PoE1 numbers have gone up, not down, for years with the exception being Settlers -> Mercenaries due to the protracted gap. Settlers had POE1's biggest player numbers ever. Numbers went up again from Mercenaries to Keepers.
You are looking at the player numbers for each league from their start to their finish. If you look at POE2, you see the same trends. More people play at the start of the league and fewer and fewer as the league goes on. Retention percentages from league to league are largely the same with a few outliers like Affliction being higher and Kalandra being lower. These correspond to the league's general popularity.
Data can be twisted in many ways. I could just as easily say that POE2 has already lost 40% of its player base by comparing the initial launch to the peak of all subsequent leagues and therefore it's a dying game that should be abandoned; POE1 certainly has never seen that kind of player abandonment.
Do you think with 2.5x the player count in PoE2 that for some reason PoE1 players are outspending them?
These numbers are not accurate. Moreover, PoE1 spending is already proven and established over a decade. PoE2 spending remains uncertain. Regardless of if PoE1 and PoE2 per player spending is the same, it still represents a significant portion of their income and is, more importantly, reliable. This is a profit-driven business at the end of the day. They do not have financial incentives to simply cut off a large portion of their income.
They literally didn't follow through on their PoE1 promise last year.
Missing deadlines is not the same as being untruthful. They've so far taken their fuckups on the chin and worked to get back to a regular schedule. So far they've been successfully delivering on that.
It's not an absurd claim at all, it'd be naive to think that PoE1 is getting full leagues years from now.
Disregarding your moving of the posts, yes, it actually is. Without substantial enough content updates, players simply won't come back. You seem to just keep ignoring that GGG is a for-profit company whose primary goal is making money. The financial incentive simply isn't there. They're actively hiring and trying to beef up the staff to continually do more and more, rather than coast with what they have and kill off PoE1 to free up resources. Your timetable is really the main absurdity. I don't think you realize just how short three years of time is to a business. It's already been six years since POE2 was first announced and they've still got a long ways to go to reach even 1.0. If you argue that PoE1 is gone in 7-10 years that's far more likely, but at that point they might already be starting to break ground on PoE3.
Wait and see how many players are logged into PoE1 after December 12th
6 weeks into a league? I expect it to be around 20% plus or minus 5%, like every other league that's happened for years.
At 42 days into 0.1 the retention was 39%.
At 42 days into 0.2 the retention was 17%.
At 42 days into 0.3 the retention was 17%
Mercenaries 24%
Settlers 22%
Necropolis 16%
Affliction 35%
Ancestor 27%
Crucible 21%
Sanctum 35%
POE1s worst league in years had almost the same retention as both 0.2 and 0.3. I don't really know what you're going for here.
I'm going to keep hammering this point until it sticks. GGG is a company out to make money. POE1 is making them significant, reliable money. POE2 is, so far, also making them money. A significant number of POE1 and POE2 players do not want the same thing out of the game. Unhappy players become former players. It simply does not make sense for GGG, the business, to kill off such a big revenue stream, especially on a timescale as short as three years.
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Great reply. I'm warming up to this point of view. They certainly have enough of my money to fund both games! =D Lot of datapoints coming up where we'll see. How successful with v0.4 be? How much effort are they gonna invest in 3.28? Either way, I'm excited about the future.
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just tried for the first time "forbidden right of soul sacrifice" build and its pretty good so far.
Doing the CoC version as I like it, pretty tanky.
Hopefully it stay like that in T17, just need to get another lvl up before I go there !
and for the whole poe1 vs poe2 going on... personally, i wont play poe2 again until it's released. I tried again last season but it's just not there yet. I'll let other ppl beta test in and go back in when it's in better shape.
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It should, FROSS was one of the strongest last league and didn't really see any changes in the patch.
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I made as a second character a Blade Vortex elementalist focused on big explosions with the double foulborn line Berek (both ignite and shocked foes explode on kill) with 6 heralds (New ring with the new Herald of the hive) and stacking herald buff effect, and also some golem buff effect.
It is fun to explode whole screens with chain reactions of explosions. It reminds me of old leagues when we had the broken explode chests back then (I think I had a similar character in Ritual league years ago)
Altought I've been wanting to try the FRoSS too, maybe I try it later if I have time.
Poe2 is nice but right now is too limited in endgame and build creation potential, It is impossible I play it as much as Poe1 on new leagues. But it is still early, we will see in the future.
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My current second build is a Jiquani's Potential Spark of the Nova Inquisitor. It's still in the early stages, though. I need to basically make new gear for every slot. I accidentally made a 35% effect/10 life/3% cast/5% chaos res 12 passive cluster when I was trying to roll ES/Int, so I probably need to sell that and make a new one of those, too.
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EPT
