I think they expected A drop (“vanity metrics”), but not of this magnitude. Else they wouldn’t have reverted so much of the nerfs and spent a month on the damage control world tour

Prism guardian, saqawals, all sources of rmr, all aura nodes on tree and clusters

Also 1/6 the cost per person per map, and isn’t a coincidence that all the day 2 feared kills are carry plus aurabot…

If it were just harvest this backlash would have happened in 3.14, it’s harvest AND the support gem nerf AND where they want to take the game from here

They never said “all” btw

Moder loves you though

No

Other nerf patches actually grew the game because they came along with significant added content.

I think GGG was just controlling the messaging/hedging their bets for a Slight player decrease, and didn’t expect how bad this league was going to be numbers wise

I posted timestamped links in another reply here, if those don’t convince you then we will have to agree to disagree

Just in case you should define endgame, for some people it means Sirus, some Maven, some all Forgotten Realms invitations

It's pretty pathetic that you feel the need to make a personal attack on my hearing rather than just respond to the content of my message, but ok. Here are timestamped sources.

here's Chris on baeclast talking about hard mode allowing them to not have to design PoE for two separate kinds of players https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88N4s2qxRIM&t=2752s

and here's Chris in the most recent interview mentioning that they might opportunistically use hard mode as a PTR for certain things: https://youtu.be/JUqziLdWkKY?t=250

The phrase I suspect we'll disagree on from the new interview with respect to this interpretation is, "for specific features if we feel that those could be equally applicable to the main game". My gripe with this is, how are we supposed to actually know? So now every time some new thing comes to hard mode, people that just like POE the way it was are going to have to worry about whether it's going to eventually infect core POE as well. Is flask refill on-vendor a trial for main game? or confined to hard mode forever?

It makes hard mode seem more like a Trojan Horse for core game nerfs rather than a masochism quarantine so people can continue to enjoy mainline PoE.

Rewarding how? Raw currency? I think that’s only valuable if there’s something new and exciting to DO with it.

This isn’t even about harvest - Even back before Harvest in Delirium league you could build up a Herald stacker, in Ultimatum post-Harvest (yes it’s still here but it’s nerfed) you could build around Hateforge.

Contrast to now, we have a very “vanilla” meta driven by comparatively plain items with fewer zany interactions. And no new endgame content to throw those builds at

This was overall pretty disappointing.

Hard mode was initially positioned as a way for the devs to have their Vision Sandbox without it fucking up mainline PoE, but now if it’s being used as a PTR we have to worry about every dumb thing they try there coming over to the main game

No, actually making the monsters go boom in interesting ways is fun

SSF, aspirational content like 5 orb delirium, delving deep, crafting PERFECT items (harvest by itself was FAR from guaranteeing this), challenge runs, playing something that was gasp not favored in the meta. There were lots of ways for grinders to grind in 3.13

Just want to make sure I’m not missing the joke here - Memeing aside, you’re aware this wasn’t actually fully the case right? That there were untagged mods, multiple options within a desired tag, awakener orbs you couldn’t control, there were lots of fail states even in 3.13 crafting

You attempt to draw a very black and white line on this in your posting, but 3.15 was the patch they “wanted to make” and yet they were reverting pieces of it within days and doing damage control for the next few weeks.

In reality investors generally want to see growth so it will likely be a balance between their wishes and their customers.

A possible counterpoint would be if catering to the Original Masochists were somehow more profitable but I believe they’ve acknowledged a revenue hit on Baeclast so in the absence of updated data I’ll assume this is still the case

By diverging from most of the core tenets of The Vision

You’re hearing 1.3 but they’re saying 3.13

You’re overthinking it my dude or dudeette

we are going through MOUNTAINS of red tape trying to adopt, and are very tempted to look for a breeder. So no, it's not universally that easy. if it's the case near you, then great.

It’s not even 2.5m dps lol, I’m not sure what your point is

It doesn’t

They never were, that was GGG trying to get ahead of what they suspected would be lower numbers, then it was worse than they thought hence the damage control world tour

Lol with this move on and see you next league shit, we’re in this position because a lot of people DID move on and it turns out GGG didn’t actually like that as much as their white knights fantasized about