Except, it’s not (they’re Kiwis, not Chinese).
"Tencent has Invested in Grinding Gear Games
Our Chinese publisher, Tencent, has acquired a majority stake in Grinding Gear Games. We will remain an independent company and there won’t be any big changes to how we operate. We want to reassure the community that this will not affect the development and operations of Path of Exile, so we have prepared answers to some questions you may have about this investment."
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Out of curiosity, can you name one major development path Tencent has dictated for GGG since they have invested into the company? From my understand Tencent hasn’t done anything to GGG since they bought into it. It’s OK to be little worried if there is reason to be right?
The chinese PoE and original PoE client are pretty much totally independent from each other.
I think there was never a “defended” them.
I really don’t bother much with politics and from a consumer side i haven’t seen anything that changed to the worse, since they bought in.
If you personally don’t want to support certain parties that’s totally fine.
But from a consuemr perspective i don’t see any reason to neglect PoE, just because Tencent is affiliated with them somehow.
That’s one way for someone to earn a vacation…
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For me dosen’t matter who hold or not old a Company. I’m a consumer not a member of GGG or EHG.
I’ve played most of league of PoE (around 3k hours) from beta to Heist, and i’ve loved all my play time.
But the worst things is the absolutly fast pacing of gameplay and the massive economic orb depedance. Is great game and massive amount of content, but is more like a job if u want done all the content of current league than a game.
I think i’ve totally burnout that game, i’ve see today they release new expansion of atlas and zero hype for it.
But PoE still strong ad actually with Grim Dawn is atop of Arpgs.
LE is new, fresh and very promising but can’t compare at moment with other two.
Like @m.beghin I’m quite burnt out on PoE but I’m having a punt at the new league to see what it’s like.
One of the significant issues I have with PoE is that it feels like it actively discourages playing with friends in a party. In the current league, you click on a thing, kill some mobs & then the instance owner gets the “big” loot, which sucks. Why can’t both me & my friend get the Ritual loot? We were both in the fight & could have died, we both took the same risks, so why can’t we both get the league mechanic loot?
MP in PoE is for economy trading and make 95-100. For all other thing is totally useless and don’t have any advantages.
Yeah, this is ridiculous! Why is this stuff so poorly implemented? This is mechanic is straight ignoring the multiplayer part if the game. It works if you play with friends. But playing with strangers is not an option. This is nothing I’d expect from a AAA company that GGG is now. Seems they are in no way taking criticism regarding MP serious.
It wouldn’t have hurt anybody if they made the ritual rewards instanced.
Ritual isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, MP unfriendly league mechanics GGG comes up with.
I love POE and the game is perfect for me in many aspects. But I’ve conceded MP won’t be one of them.
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I will not stand here and pretend PoE MP it great, but the new mechanic, both expansion and league are actually quiet enjoyable COOP with friends you know and trust.
There is no overarching goal in ritual, you only need to “split” items in the ritual (and from my experience, the items in the ritual are much better in a party)
Also the expansion mechanic does count boss kill progress towards maven fights, only the maven fights themseles need to be done from each member individually(you cna still help each other)
It’s surely not perfect, but it’s not undoable.
There were league mechanics that hat overarching progress (like betryal) and you literally needed to rotate the instances owners to somewhat give all party members progress and even that was bad at the end.
New mechanic is no WOW FINALLY mechanic, but it’s is indeed enjoyable and doable in a party.
Personaly I prefer the build tree of Last Epoch.
PoE passive tree feel like it is so huge cuz 95% of the nodes are minor improvement and are not fun to spend point into. You just pick them up to reach your true goal with consiste of 2-3 overpowered ones.
LE have claiss WoW like passive tree and a nice spell/abilitie modifer tree also.
One thing to point out here is that LE has a huge advantage regarding QoL. I missed that part in my post and was only referring to content.
But theres so much stuff that makes life easier in LE compared to PoE. The PoE vendor menu alone brings me to the edge of rage quitting.
There are the little details you may notice when playing LE that really make people happy. After a while this is all normal. But playing another game make you realize these things.
Btw: Comparing LE to PoE or D3 is “unfair” because if the difference in development time and comparing indi to AAA. But it already sais a lot about the potential of LE. People could also ask for a comparison between LE and other actual ARPGs like Chaosbane, Inquisitor Martyr or Wolcen. But those titles LE already has left behind.
I’m playing the new PoE league currently. As a relative PoE noob I can see the polishing of PoE defenitely ahead of LE (no sh1t 
). And the complexity and opportunities of different builds and endgame activities is insane. But everytime I start my pc I ask myself “PoE or some LE”? Currently its PoE because its fresh and new. But I swear, as soon as theres some new LE stuff I’m back in a blink of an eye.
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I have played PoE since alpha (I think it was, before Act 3 was added), but I’ve played less and less as time goes on.
I should say I am maybe not a typical player, since I prefer starting anew a lot to experiment with different builds, and I’m pretty much SSF only so I don’t participate in the economy, which doesn’t seem at all fun to me (although I like economic systems in other games). So I’m commenting mostly on the campaign.
The reason I lost interest is that in my opinion the game has become an incoherent mess thematically due to constantly adding league mechanics into the base game. A few of these (mainly the early ones, like shrines and corrupted areas) integrated OK into the main gameplay, but more and more of them require figuring out a system which takes you out of the game world, interrupts the gameplay flow and requires a completely different approach than the main game (Delve, Harvest, Bestiary for instance). These are basically distracting minigames which IMO subtract from the experience rather than adding to it. And as time goes on and all the obvious ideas for additions had been taken, the new mechanics seem to get more and more complex for the sheer sake of complexity. In its current state PoE is like a lovely painting which has been plastered over with fragments of mismatched postcards taped to it 
In case it’s not obvious, this is an aesthetic criticism, btw: games are (or should be) art, and while PoE started out as a pleasing, engaging and unified journey, it has devolved into a mishmash of unrelated pieces. Since it’s an aesthetic criticism, though, I expect some people to disagree; we all have different tastes!
I’m looking forward to a fresh start with PoE2 (just assuming the old leagues don’t inject themselves into that as well ), but in the meantime, Last Epoch in its current state is delightfully intact and coherent, and I hope it stays that way. Grim Dawn, after all (which I have also played since only Act I existed) has grown immensely without losing its integrity. While LE will certainly grow and expand over time, I’m hoping that in doing so it can remain whole.
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I just got burned out on PoE. I love the complexity of the game. It took so much from the classics like Final Fantasy 3 and 7 and 10. Starting a new character in a league feels like going to a job though. It isn’t fun to just grind through the story for the 500th time. It isn’t fun not being able to play the skills you want until you are level 38. It isn’t fun wanting to build around an item that is near impossible to find and too expensive to buy.
I think the REAL damage that PoE suffers from is actually the trade market. The market forces items to be absurdly rare so there is a demand. If nothing was rare, there would be no real value for anything due to market saturation. The trade market would then be almost pointless but to gear new toons. Right now in LE, nothing is so absurdly rare that a SSF player couldn’t find it on their own with a bit of grinding. I prefer the gambler for gambling uniques to the trade system.
I fear that once the trade system is implemented, the game will change for the worse. Items will require to be much much more rare to balance the trade system. This forces people from grinding for items into grinding for currency to just buy the item on the trade house. Items that are actually good and super rare will end up getting into hundreds of millions of gold to buy due to gold being a terrible monetary system in aRPGs. (Currency needs a use other than being money for it to hold any real value). This will lock out new players from being able to obtain the item in any reasonable time frame and due to much increased rarity to find any particular item. This is much more new player unfriendly than a simple learning curve. I don’t want the loot system in LE to get to PowerBall Lottery level odds. Trade systems when not implemented well almost always make the game suffer from wealth disparity. Middle class goes away and it ends up being poor newbs and rich veteran players.
The one benefit PoE has with its trade system is the currency. Their currency is also the crafting mats and thus they have a use other than just being coins. This makes them hold value and allows there to be a middle class in the game. Chaos Orbs and even Exalted Orbs are not that hard to find really. Other than that, as above, I don’t like what trade systems force on item rarity in aRPGs.
I totally agree that, if EHG want to make gold as the only “currency”, we need more avenues to spend it. Be it for crafting (maybe more advanced crafting stuff that on top of using runes/glyphs also consumes gold), new systems or what ever.
I don’t agree on the item rarity, and how “hard it will be to obtain certain items”.
Of course they might be some build-enabeling items that you might can’t count on getting reasonable fast, when starting in a new cycle (what LE’s Leagues will be).
But respeccing and switching from build A to build B is so much easier in LE, that this will not be an issue.
Having rare items and chase items is why i play these types of games, i don’t want to get all items i want within a few days/weeks.
On top of all that, we don’t even know if uniques/set items (and maybe even legendaries, even though we don’t know what they will be yet) are even tradeable.
It’s always tough to balance a game that has 2 different modes (Solo vs. Trade). And you will never ever 100% please both types of players. But i think currently LE is in a pretty good spot, to be very enjoyable for both players. We really don’t know the details for trading and we should really wait until we get more details though.
Trade coming in will require a rebalance of drop rates. I just prefer being able to reasonably farm for an item rather than be forced to buy in on the trade house.
Specific item rarity was such a problem in PoE that they put in the card system as an alternate way to farm specific items. Even with that, though, it seems the only ones people really farm are the currency cards.
As I said, I foresee a problem with trade being introduced specifically because it will require things change from how they are right now in LE. Everyone says they like the way items and rarity are handled, for the most part, right now. Some people don’t like the gambler because they feel it makes it too easy, but the Trade House will be much worse for those players because it will be even easier and cheaper to get the same item.
As you said though, nobody really knows what will and will not be tradable. People will complain infinitely if only rare items, affix shards and idols can be traded though.
I am VERY pessimistic on the Trade House. The only iteration that I have ever seen them work in is MMO’s like GW2 where crafting professions and crafting materials have much more impact. Maybe LE can pull it off if they seriously rework and expand the crafting and affix system.
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I can imagine that, but it would have alot of advantages and would change alot.
There is so much EHG can do with trading. I am pretty sure they want to somehow put their own twist on it.
One thing i repeatedly heard from the devs, is that they always want to go out and kill monsters be the best way of acquiring gear. This improved by alot since 0.8. Some might argue that the gambler is still to powerfull, i would agree. But generally going out and kill monsters does feel very good IMO, especially in very high MoF.
There are so many cool things they can do with the trading system to make it stand out.
With restriction like “Bind on trade” or “Bind on equip” or limited slots for selling items for example, they could basically eliminated playing a “trading simulator”, since you would only buy stuff that you directly need.
Even as a seller you would think about what you actually want to sell and not just throw in everything you found and don’t need.
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I’ve been an avid fan of PoE for quite a long time now, I think I have something like 500+ hours in it, probably quite a bit more since I started beta before it was on Steam. But these last two seasons, I’ve really started to lose the magical feel. Is it a coincidence that they coincide with the rise of LE? I find myself checking daily for even the hint of a new patch or feature for LE, even before checking on actual new features for PoE, so I guess that probably answers which game I am presently more excited for.
But back to the original question, I think the main advantage LE has right now is that it isn’t officially released and seems to have plenty of time and resources to become the game the developers really want it to be. It can learn from PoE’s mistakes and negative aspects. For me the biggest negative of PoE is it really feels stagnant. Obviously it’s an older game, so that’s not too surprising, but for one that has regular patches and new features/seasons, it feels like they’ve latched onto a single thing and just made perturbations of it. Of course loot is extremely important, but do they really need 100 different methods of rolling/crafting for items? I felt like the last really exciting add to gameplay was the one that featured those tower defense things, that really changed things up and gave players a reason to group together. The garden sim felt like just another variation on the creature taming one. The new Rituals system feels like a streamlined version of some of the other mods. The heist thing was interesting but was it really much different from the time travel one? Everything seems to be about killing things as fast as possible. I’m sure if you were a fan of one of these you’d tell me how much more special one of them was but what I’m looking for is more of something that really adds fresh gameplay elements. And then on top of that they still stick most of the past mods in the “new” season, it’s kind of just too much. I’d honestly prefer if they wanted to feature something special they make that the only one available to make the “season” feel unique.
Anyway, the short version is PoE feels really bloated now with complexities that don’t seem necessary. Sometimes more is not necessarily better.