r/PathOfExile2

500 hours played, never a character over lvl 96.

Each season I spend profit crafting until I can min-max my character that never leaves my little hideout. I spend hundreds of hours crafting my own gear and profting crafting. Everything just to corrupt a 2.72 atk speed spear down to 2.5 just hoping to hit the mirror lottery.

The only time I place a waystone anymore is to get more gold, to buy more bases, to spam more augment, to spam more chaos, to double spam perfect exalts, omen to omen to omen of light. I haven't seen my family in days, I've been staying up hours past normal refreshing the store, trying to snipe cheap bases. I go to work and refresh my store just to see the sweet sweet divine trickle in.

I can't do it anymore, I'm not even playing the game, I'm just trying to get more dps/ehp than the next guy. I play solo, no one will see my accomplishments, no one will know my gambling degeneracy. As reddit as my witness, I will only be playing SSF from now on and hopefully I can get back to enjoying this game.

I apologize if this is mildly off topic but i wanted to share a recent experience as it made me think about something you guys mention a lot whenever GGG nerfs something. The dreaded "GGG Triple Tap".

I've been hobby designing a card game for myself and friends for about 8 years (Not plugging anything here, I'm a hobbyist). I've borrowed many ideas from poe2 recently (it's a dungeon crawler) and I've paid close attention to what GGG has been doing with each patch. Often I see problem interactions as something that can be resolved with small tweaks/nerfs and i rarely understand why GGG goes as hard as they do. Why they go so scorched earth.

Then it happened to me. Recently one of my friends found an unusual interaction between cards I had never considered. Without breaking any rules in gameplay, she was able to completely negate any costs on her ability to play and replay multiple cards multiple times a turn. And amazingly, not even on her own turn! I was blown away. One card with an obscure interaction allowed her to even beat a deck which is meant to be the scissors to her paper.

I went through my spread sheets and searched for the cards she used. I needed to change how a whole category of cards function (1 tap). I needed to add a limit to how that class could interact with those cards (2 taps) and finally I needed to go back to the one card she was using and raise its costs (3 taps). I needed to murder this monster in the womb because now that she showed me how this one thing could loop, i instantly could think of how a dozen other cards and classes that could also loop in similar ways. It could destroy the game.

After i was done my thoughts went back to GGG. Although I know the parts and pieces of my game, i don't know all the combinations of things all these components can do (its 28 classes x 320 unique cards) but as soon as I see something, i can extrapolate out. I imagine it must be exactly the same for GGG. Players find some weird interaction that puts two mechanics together that normally never interact and suddenly things break. Like weapon swapping from a league or two back creating infinite damage with infinite minions dying due to weapon swap. I'm now positive that something when like that is brought to GGG's designers attention they see a dozen other possible interactions that also needed to be fixed before players can find them. It's like players are phenomenal at finding cracks in a bridge, but the moment they do the designers will know exactly all the parts that are creating those cracks and are able to identify where other cracks would be in relation.

The "GGG Triple Tap" makes sense. I get it now.