Originally Posted by
Vespian
@Slozon;
Connection issues: Shit ye, I don't care. Why? Because it's an Indie corp. that had to deal with a massive increase in players over the weekend. Blizzard can easily invest money in weekend support by their server hosting, an Indie corp can't just buy in such expensive support. They have done great! And regardless, a queue is still a 100 times better than error 37, error 14001 or whatever and all those other connection failure errors that popped up. Blizzard flunked, GGG responded. Rift had the same issues, at launch, Trion communicated, Trion fixed it, Trion is still my nr.1 in terms of how things are meant to be fixed. GGG closing in on them.
Graphics not on par? What are you smoking? The graphics are sublime. It's iconic, if that's what you want to hear. It's just as iconic as World of Warcraft. PoE manages to perfectly capture the spirit of D2 and tranform that into D3.5. I would have said D2.5 before the release of D3, but it has become clear to me that it requires a lack of pressure from predecessors to come to greatness, which is what GGG had and Blizzard didn't have. And Blizzard failed to capture me with their Gold > items system.
Always online is not a DRM. In contrary to what people apparently want to think, being online is what this game is about. Having a single player modus would have been fine, but the ARPG genre is first and foremost meant to be enjoyed with other people.
How is the game designed for hardcore players? I'm a casual player. You know what casual means? I don't have the time to play more than 3 hours a day. I have work, I need to clean my house, I need to buy groceries and I need to entertain friends and family. Casual is not the same thing as being bad. PoE does not cater to bad players. And I'm happy for it.
The loot system is perfect. Everything has RNG, but nothing is underpowered without perfect rolls. You're not selling everything you find. Most things are valuable to alts or your current character in some way. Gold is the one thing that Blizzard did wrong. D2 was about item trading. D3 became about real money and gold exchange and item drop rates were balanced around the AH. In PoE, item drops are balanced around the thrill of finding items, which is the essential CORE of the ARPG genre.
D3 did most things wrong. PoE does most things right.