115. Short Update on Path of Exile 2

Now that POE 2 is playing out as I predicted, I feel it's time to explain why all the work that GGG is doing to fix the game is pointless.

Back in January I played Path of Exile 2 and did a game economy review. I don’t normally do game economy reviews publicly because I get paid a lot of money for that service. I did with POE2 and with Guild Wars 2 because I liked the teams, I liked the games, and I didn’t see them recovering without my intervention.

As I pointed out in January, I didn’t consider that economy review a prediction paper. I considered the paper I wrote in 2011 about Diablo 3 to be the prediction paper for POE 2 since it had the same problem that Diablo 3 did. Well that prediction seemed to be accurate (again) as the review scores are plunging on POE 2 and people are starting to notice something is wrong. All of GGG’s efforts to fix the problems with POE 2 just seem to be making it worse.

This YouTube vid from Bellular was pretty scathing. It’s painful for me to watch my prediction papers come true as I’m passionate about gaming and don’t like to see great studios make catastrophic errors. I was harsh myself back in January because I’ve talked to the head of GGG since I wrote the 2011 paper. I assumed he had read it and that’s why he called me. I have less compassion if a studio has received my warnings (especially my free warnings) and does the wrong thing anyways. Now I’m grappling with the possibility that maybe somehow they didn’t read either paper.

That would be bad, because that would mean they have 0% chance of recovering this situation. Sunk cost fallacy and ego will prevent them from considering that they need a complete redo. As I pointed out previously, the problem with POE 2 isn’t the game, it’s the business model. So trying to repair the game will just tank the game harder.

Which is exactly what is happening now.

The 2011 paper goes into great detail about what their problem is, so I won’t repeat it in any detail here. This is essentially “Smedley’s Dream Part 3” and is going to have the same trajectory as Smedley’s Dream 1 (Sony Marketplace) and Smedley’s Dream 2 (Diablo 3). I’m probably the only person still talking about John Smedley, but his contributions to gaming have important historical significance. Maybe not for the reasons he’d prefer, but I found a lot of value in his verifying various economic models of mine with his/investor’s money.

In the case of GGG and POE 2, I don’t need any more data. Smedley was generous enough to have provided that more than 20 years ago. GGG needs to do what Blizzard ultimately had to do with Diablo 3 after spending a couple years deleting my prediction paper from Battle.net as that community kept reposting my paper and asking Blizzard why they were not responding to it. Again, the reason was sunk cost fallacy and ego. I don’t have an ego (or most human emotions), I just identify problems and fix them. It’s not my fault I was born this way. Alas, I’m aware these characteristics exist and I try very hard to be compassionate.

The fix for the bad business model (the real money auction house) is to rip out the RMAH. That’s going to be a very painful, expensive, and time consuming process. Kind of like ripping the internal combustion engine out of a car and replacing it with an electric motor and batteries. That’s not going to look or drive well with the skill sets that GGG has, if it drives at all. I would understand if they ignore this third paper also and keep hoping their excel spreadsheet efforts will pan out.

That would be great if it could work. But the hard truth is that any change they make to their excel spreadsheet will fix one part of the game and break another part. I can see no quantitative solution that will recover the game. Every time they do change the excel spreadsheet, players and influencers will just complain more that GGG doesn’t seem to know what they are doing. I think they are a smart team and do know what they are doing, but they have misidentified their problem and thus are just throwing pills at the patient and hoping one of them works.

This all goes back to the previous paper where I explained that GGG leadership accepted a false premise (we need a RMAH) and built the entire game around that premise. That was a catastrophic Design Day 1 choice. I know this happened because Johnathon Rogers has talked about it a lot in his dev talks. In this IGN video, at 15 min, and at 25 min he claims a RMAH is essential to an ARPG. Rogers even says that complaints about the RMAH in POE 1 was proof they needed “a better RMAH”. He even brags about it being “secret sauce”. From 31:00 he seems to equate monetisation with microtransactions, which explains a lot his design philosophy.

Rogers says some really shocking things at the end of that video. He seems to understand that “Pay to Win” is bad, but doesn’t understand how having a RMAH and having Elon Musk running around with a L97 hero he doesn’t know how to play might be seen as P2W by the community. Charging for a game they claimed was “F2P” was also something of a “Dark Pattern” move, but that’s not killing the game. It just was a foreshadowing of the types of business model choices (and employees) they had hitched their horse to.

I highly recommend you watch that IGN video to the end, as Rogers explains why his game is going to suffer without even seeming to be conscious of what he is saying. It had 19M views last I checked.