Direction we're heading in

Hi all, been thinking about this for a while now, and I'm not sure what exactly the devs are doing with this game.

One path to take would be to go the single player timeless game of excellence, such as Grim Dawn or Titan Quest, where the game can be enjoyed slowly at one's own pace with no fomo mechanics or constant changes to keep up with, just every once in a while a big patch full of goodies.

The other way to go is to keep trying to walk the middle complexity path between D4 and PoE, and act a lot more like a live service game that attracts players every few months for a few weeks to see what's new in the league, then die off until the next iteration. The problem with this is not only the way the game is monetized, but also the abysmal update pace.

While I think it's clear which way I would personally like to see the game going. Major performance issues, the newly introduced anti-fun bar (boss ward) and the fact that most builds are just combinations of "this skill procs that skill/uses that skill's enhancements to win" (thus it's very difficult to get a self built going over 200 corruption, let alone the intended 500) all require some attention, and I think are behind the sharp decline in player count and sentiment. Oh, and the random one-shots causing the loss of map rewards are quite frustrating. Also the fact that getting a 4LP unique is astronomical, and even then it's almost never for one's class/build.

It is so painful to see this, because the game is not fundamentally flawed, it has such a good combat system, the crafting and monolith systems are fantastic, and the legendary slams keep it interesting. Very hard to justify playing the game in the current state though, PoE is a much more feature complete and snappy live service experience and Grim Dawn is such a masterpiece of a game.

Please please devs don't turn this game into the next Wolcen, it deserves better.