From a purely business point of view, it is great that you were able to secure the funding needed on your terms and be able to maintain control of the product creatively. I also know that this company (TenCent) is one of the few companies out there that are able and willing to make such an investment happen on such conditions.
From a personal perspective, there are a lot of conflicting emotions, particularly where we are at in current world affairs and the such. I will not dive into that as I also know that doing business in China means doing things on their terms, all major publicly traded companies do this to some extent or the other. This is particularly true for tech companies in China as there has been a major crackdown on them to further bring them into the fold. Again, I will not discuss this on here as it’s not on-topic.
Ultimately, this will ensure that LE lives to reach 1.0 as well as maintain your creative control on your project. I think a lot of people don’t know how hard that is in that environment and to secure one is huge. I also appreciate the honesty and being transparent about the partnership knowing what the reaction most likely will be from your community.
Could have gotten more mileage from this announcement if you had waited a couple more weeks. Maybe like on April 1st . Looking forward to .8.5 and have been collecting arena keys as much as a semi casual can. Still don’t like some of the one shot mechanic/boss patterns and wish building good defenses wasn’t such a trade off, or was more intuitive. Otherwise thanks for the great game and Congrats!!
And I agree with this. Competition is good, always. But take in consideration that Judd said Tencent has no influence on the development of the game, so creativity and dev’s perspective on the game will not be affected. The same way I’m genuinely sure GGG devs weren’t affected and their vision for PoE remains the same.
Thank you! I appreciate your interest . I feel like I have to nerf myself damage wise or rebuild where and how much my resistance are in order to be able to get past basic empowered monoliths. I think maybe my expectation of how far a few hours per night 3-4 days and maybe a bit more on weekends can get me, is off. Am I just shooting for content a semi casual shouldn’t expect to reach?
I am not sure how much experience you have with the affix pools on certain items.
But if you want to “fix” your defenses (like resistances), you do not have to sacrifice damage.
There are basically no offensive suffixes on items. And only very few defensive prefixes.
So generally speaking you will never sacrifice damage for defense in LE, at least from regualr gear slots (outside of idols).
Don’t they own a majority stake in that though? Why would you rip off from your own stuff? If anything, they would steal from the ones they don’t have control over to put into things they do have control over.
I don’t even know what data they have access to. The idea that they might get access to player personal data rubs me the wrong way too.
Can you hire real mods now? Letting community members snake their way into power is going to be awful and the worst candidates will be attracted to these positions.
We can cover our eyes and ears and pretend like its not gonna grow to 50+% in 2-3 years.
Also saying low equity instead giving us exactly how much tencents own now is a red flag for me from the get go.
Bootlicking for mod status is on full display here so yeah, I hope they’ll drop that idea and have the budget / more room for actual mods.
Now on topic. This is the worst possible timing for an announcement like this.
I knew there was something fishy going on when they went so quiet on us for the past 3 months. Barely any news and I’ll be honest, it doesn’t look all that exciting to me compared to previous patches. Looks like development stagnated or atleast heavily slowed down so better accept that Tencent money I guess?
This is bad. I hope you all know that. It’s unacceptable. Just about any other “larger company” would have been fine, but this is not OK. I’m going to get in touch about what we can do regarding my player-designed content going forward, if you’ve stooped to this point. Low-equity or not, you’re better than this.
. Looking forward to .8.5 
and have been collecting arena keys as much as a semi casual can. Still don’t like some of the one shot mechanic/boss patterns and wish building good defenses wasn’t such a trade off, or was more intuitive. Otherwise thanks for the great game and Congrats!!