Path of Exile: Corona…Erg…Delirium League

So I decided not to check out Delirium league and wait for feedback to see how bad it was going to turn out. Right now, as I read feedback from angry hardcore fans both on Twitch and reddit, I’ve come to the conclusion that my decision was right. The general assessment in my own words is that this league is basically Corona on top of AIDS.

First of all, when I heard about certain nerfs to builds, etc. I realized that this league was in for some shit stains. The nerfs were uncalled for but this is GGG we’re talking about. Rather than put these resources on something useful like, I don’t know, FIXING FUCKING PERFORMANCE AND UI/UX ISSUES, they decide to continue fucking around with working builds and stats without having any justification. You know a game is in terrible hands when you’re constantly trying to “balance” a game that has no inherent design for balance.

But that said you would think at least the basic league mechanic would be fun. The video at least implies what amounts to empowering all mobs to provide a higher challenge with some cool visuals and better loot drops. Uh uh. Guess again.

Instead, it’s just more bullshit, unjustifiable difficult garbage. But so far I can pinpoint one name clearly to blame for this: Neon.

So I knew when I spotted this morbidly obese fat fuck that he was the same pro-wrestler I saw in ECW. Check this video out if you don’t know Neon in his former existence as a pro-wrestler:

Okay, let’s not insult the pro-wrestler because he’s actually dead and seemed like a good guy….unlike this Neon fat fuck who apparently is trying his best to kill players.

I get it. The job of a game designer is to figure out the balance of challenging content to put players at the edge of their seat. That’s not what I see when I look at a Neon encounter. Instead, I see pizza with triple bypass BBQ sauce cheese burgers with bacon as toppings over a crust of tacos and jalapeno nacho sauce drowning sour cream, guacamole and cinnamon flavored iced frosting. No wonder the system can’t handle this shit. The internal arteries of every CPU and network are clogged up by this jabronnie’s hair brain designs.

I figure this idiot must hate himself for whatever Chris Wilson is underpaying him because there is absolutely no reason to logically try to frustrate your player base into quitting. But given what’s going on, you’re better off getting into Dodger’s Stadium right now and watching a baseball game in the next two days than seeing the quality of this game improve with these people in charge.

The truth is that the features that players actually want we will not see. It’s apparent that GGG’s current mandate is to continually push out content at the expense of fixing core issues with the game play that have been brought up over the years. As this game engine continues to have more shit cobbled together like poop being used as a adhesive tool for getting their crappy code from falling apart, the game undergoes even more pressure at various levels because the design apparently is quite terrible under the hood.

GGG can easily do a single league where the main feature is to do their end game leagues where they just add various older league mechanics to buff each area while fixing performance issues, bad boss mechanics, terrible UI/UX decisions, etc. And they might even be able to sell old MTX that are no longer available. Without a doubt in my mind, the general player base probably would be very forgiving in this scenario.

Yet rather than having a polished game, we have a game that’s in an alpha stage if you can even call it that. The game has substandard testing apparently with all the crashes, performance issues and terrible color combinations. These are all fixable issues but there’s not much of a focus on them.

The sad thing to me is that the potential is there. The basic game idea is good and there’s a lot of cool things that the game is capable of. But if you have poor design principles because of a hard headed management then the game is going to do exceedingly bad.

And that’s what I see. Bad or conflicting design principles. Let me give you a few examples:

• The game is designed to be played forever. Well, why do we have three month leagues where the emphasis clearly is on the league aspect almost exclusively?
• We want trading to be hard to make it tough to hit end game goals. You already are overtuning boss fights, nerfing builds, make league content rewards dogshit and allow for scamming because the trading ideology is effectively a direct copy of Diablo 2.
• We are good at boss fights. Who told you this? Where did you get this idea from? Most boss fights in this game are visual clutter nonsense. Once more you are attempting to outdo Blizzard at what they do best. But the key difference is that Blizzard has a team to work on these things to fine tune the fights. These fights in PoE are just filler wannabe raid nonsense. People want to get in and out because that’s what the core of an ARPG is about
• We rotate skills via nerfing so players can buy MTX with whatever we’re concentrating on. This makes absolutely no sense. If you didn’t want the player base to use a certain skill, disable it and only enable those that you want used within a league.

I really wish GGG had some outside company come in with real game designers, UI and UX people to teach people how to do their job. Or at least allow certain people to focus on certain aspects of the game rather than do multiple things at once that may be out of their boundaries. Because it feels that the way resources are managed internally at GGG is almost like a greek tragedy.

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