They’ve started working on PoE 2 back when Bestiary came out, which was 2018, at least as much as we know, and revealed it shortly before Metamorph came out of I remember right… and massively postponed several times after that.
And yes, it is incompetence, because that word means ‘a lack of competence’ which you can only get from having the knowledge to provide something properly as well as the ability to put that knowledge into reality, the lack of either is automatically ‘incompetence’ because it lacks the ‘competence’ to do it.
Also I called GGG out on it starting with Archnemesis, which was still around the time when GGG seemed to decide to detach PoE 1 and PoE 2 finally because they weren’t compatible with the provided mindset they had for releasing it.
Sentinel was a ‘double-down’ on Archnemesis and extremely poorly received, much as Archnemesis itself, and after that I imagine the decision happened finally, which is why the ‘normative’ league-times of either 12,5 or 13,5 weeks (for delayed ones) increased accordingly, with the norm having turned into 15,5 since then. An acceptable range still though (4 months).
Starting with Kalandra the focus shifted from keeping the game ‘as is’ towards providing more QoL gradually, they started the already near the end of 2020 with stash tab affinities but went on with itemizing more and more content rather then enforcing third-party methods for group-sharing and hence keeping it open for scamming easily.
I imagine with the focus on getting PoE 2 as a standalone version hence the manpower to provide reliable league-times like before wasn’t feasable anymore, with the release being supposed to end that. Actually, with 0.2 of PoE 2 it’ll likely be the start of the return towards the ‘original’ timeframes, though they now got leeway given they have 2 products which are extremely similar but stylistically different enough to allow a ‘fresh experience’ for both.
Also the longest leagues were those which had been received the worst, like… crucible, the most broken and annoying mechanic they ever introduced, followed by necropolis, which was a ‘quad tab’ league like Synthesis all over again, repeating the same old mistake. And yes, I called GGG out on those things back at the respective leagues as well, because it’s laughable to repeat old mistakes that are very clear-cut simply in new flavors.
In comparison the best received leagues went on the shortes actually, Kalandra overturned the major issues of Archnemesis, making it a celebrated league, Sanctum was ‘ok’, not awful. Ancestor the same, ‘ok’ but not awful, Affliction as well since it increased base-game loot in a rather massive way simply.
It’s good they ‘stopped’ with Settlers as the league which takes the longest, given the sheer scale of QoL introductions there (which they won’t be able to take back, like the currency exchange, unless they wanna kill their game off) as well as the option to let NPCs run your worthless maps for some extra loot which counteracts overabundance of ‘useless’ and basically unsellable maps it turned into the most liked league of all time mechanically. Still got weakpoints but fantastic place to stay longer.
The issue in comparison with LE and EHG is… we don’t have any sort of ‘comfortable point’ yet. Since the release the game hadn’t been in a ‘good’ state yet. The last state which was good was right before release when drop rate and progression rate aligned decently well still, with a roughly 60% increase in overall ‘quality’ loot though (for CoF, and the number if I remember it right.) as well as the community sharing method for gear through MG overturned this status completely on the other hand. Their lack of providing top-end content with 1.0 which aligned with the new state is what causes the game to fall short and feel majorly ‘unbalanced’ no matter which position you take as it caters currently to ‘nobody’ as I’ve mentioned before, they need to re-evaluate who they’re making their game for, because it doesn’t work if you try to provide content for ‘sweaty bois’ as well as ‘casuals’ during different stages in the progression. To make that work the core aspects of the game needs to be casual friendly while there’s content aside from the core experience which caters to the more invested people and is simply not interesting for the casuals, not taking away from their experience though.
What we have now is a campaign which is piss-easy leading to mechanical mandatory bossfights during monoliths which lock your progression, especially given to move towards empowered monoliths (and without prior knowledge) you got a 33% chance to screw yourself over with the last boss and hence the first harbinger (Ruins timeline with the lasers is a heavy mechanical one after all). Not to speak providing a boss which is the culmination of the core progression line at the end (Aberroth) which is clearly catered to the top-end of players, hence casuals will never kill him and be frustrated that they can’t ‘finish the game’ hence.
