Path of Exile [Download]

Path of exile could have been a better game that is for certain. I liked the game a lot initially but over time it becomes repetitive. The game is one of those games that turns into a pay to play game. Lot of cheats and cheaters with bots and dupes and other hacks have advantages that other players simply cannot compete with. GGG has been severely lax in protecting against them. GGG made a promise to it's players that it would never nerf an item that dropped but only future drops of the same item if they felt it was over powered. They lied as they've since gone and nerfed several items over a few months span. This of course angered many people and lots of people left the game because they're character builds revolving around those item's which took hundreds of gaming hours to acquire legitimately (maybe thousands!) were nerfed making their characters half as good. They also nerf builds every few months by altering the skill layout system which destroys many builds. That is less of an offense IMO than the nerfing of items specifically. The biggest issue players have and have been asking for a solution for is the desync issue which gets people killed over and over again. GGG has simply refused to do anthing about it saying it's too hard to fix right now and they're working on new content instead... I got a lot of fun out of the game but I feel I've gotten just as much frustration and anger resulting in my two star vote. If they'd have simply fixed the desync issue and left already dropped items alone they'd have improved the game experience vastly. There are many other areas of improvement but keeping their word and dealing with the desync are definitely my biggest issues by far ( and most peoples). The trade system is an issue but IMO not nearly as dire. IMO they should scrap POE and start fresh taking in mind the mistakes they made this time. Make a new game with better graphics, no deysnc or by comparison almost none and a built in trading system and ANTI cheating built in that works along with people hired to monitor message boards and run searches through the database to look for suspicious activity. Focus on rich players and figure out how they got so wealthy and if it doesn't add up dig deeper and ban if required and hunt down whatever damaging items they added to the game and delete those as well but compensate the innocent buyer with a refund. Yep takes work but will build good graces with the player base that will love and be loyal to them for it. Take a lesson from Amazon.com...GGG literally hooked people initially with the promise that unlike other games they would not play take back with items by nerfing them. They held true to that end for a while (over a year at least) before they fell back on that promise. They then proceeded to make blatant sophist excuses and then did it again brazenly so that no one could excuse the behavior anymore and only say if they agreed that it was necessary and too bad. So in the end they agreed that they lied and tough if you don't like it quit. So if your for playing a game with liars who will stab it's player base in the back have fun.P.S. I'd be considered a pro at this game with over... hours and lvl 100 character/s and having supported the game with a LOT of $$$ and being nearly top on server... I'm a little bitter at how things turned in the game in the last five months. I quit about four months ago. Too many things kept destroying my character builds so that I would have to grind over and over to rebuild to a level that was at best 2/3 of where I was at. Turned from an enjoyable accomplishment into unnecessary drudgery that was foisted upon players who already beat the game and would have liked to build new characters but kept having they're farming build's destroyed. The amount of time it takes to get their and have things backtrack requiring hundreds of hours to fix is way to frustrating to stomach. GGG IMO deserves praise for what they did accomplish but they also deserve the villainy award for becoming just like all the other greedy corporate sleazy lying gamer crushing parasites.P.S.S. I don't want anyone to think I've written for any reason other that what I typed above. I've not been banned. I can still logon and play anytime I want to. I'm a legit player. I hurt my back and played for over six months straight for probably an average of 10 hours a day; maybe 12 or more. I played before that but only casually in comparison. So it allowed me to take my mind off the pain somewhat. I'm glad for that but to me breaking that item nerf promise was devastating as I put in so much time to save up and trade for them. I was force as many are to play on softcore servers because of desync. Every time I tried to play on the hardcore servers I died from desysnc sooner or later (careful doesn't help). Recently it was revealed ( just read this on reddit; it's already a few weeks old as I don't check up on the game much) that dupers were massively ruining the game. It's simply no longer a fair game for anyone playing. When are these companies going to be able to live up to the promise of a cheat free and nerf free game? Seems Never. Diablo 3 had dupes before (beta) and day ONE of the game going live which wasn't revealed for months and still is going on as far as I know. They made lots of promises which all fell flat.Games like these if they could be kept honest would make MASSIVE profits compared to the want to be cheat fests we can't seem to overcome.

Initially I heard of this game on forums of displeased Diablo 3 players who referred to Path of Exile as "the unofficial sequel to Diablo 2". While I sympathized with a lot of the player's complaints about Diablo 3 at launch, I personally think that the expansion pack which has been released for it since then has solved the majority (certainly not all...) of those problems and because of that I do not think Path of Exile can even hold a candle to Diablo 3 these days.The Good:-A skill tree so large that it is mind boggling. Way bigger than any other skill tree I have ever seen.-It's free to play.-The way you learn new abilities by looting them off of mobs and getting them from quests then equipping them in gear sockets like a gem and leveling them up by using them is very unique and pretty interesting.-Unlike the game it is trying so hard to be a clone of, the majority of your power does not come from the items you equip it seems. Not sure if this keeps up all the way through the end game. Also not 100% sure if I like this more than the gear-based power source method in the long run since I haven't played as much of this game. But it is a pretty fresh take on things, so credit where credit is due.The Bad:-Graphically, the game is already well over a decade out of date.-As far as armor/weapon visuals go, almost everything I encountered was bland and uninspiring. I assume this was intentionally made this way to encourage players to buy the micro transaction vanity items to give themselves wings, armor, glowing effects etc. But to be honest, even a lot of what they expected you to buy with real money was pretty dull. Couple cool things, mostly boring though.-Micro transactions in this game are the worst in any game I have EVER played. And I have played Star Wars: The Old Republic. Yeah, not micro at all. Some perspective, $20 for 200 points for the in game store, 1 pair of vanity gear (in this case a pair of wings for a single character) is 350 points. So $35 for 1 piece of vanity gear that is not even an account wide unlock for multiple characters at a time. Not a chance. I have no problem with micro transactions, and would have bought a full set if each piece would have been around $5 because, hey, I like to glow and stuff too but 7x that for a single piece? No money for you, greedy company.-The AI in this game leaves much to be desired. I don't really know how to elaborate on that much more but, if you are familiar with this genre of game and have played other titles like this one, you will pretty quickly get a feel for the inconsistency in this game's mob and minion AI.Final Thoughts:At the end of the day, one of the most important features in this genre is how cool you can make your character look. In Path of Exile, that feature is hidden behind fees so steep that you will very quickly find yourself spending more than enough money to buy Diablo 3 and it's expansion pack at which point you will be done with micro transaction barriers from then on out. Looking cool is the ONLY part to these games other than killing monsters efficiently. So, I just don't understand why you would pay such outrageous prices for the B list visuals of Path of Exile when you could pay once and have unlimited access to the ever-growing pool of far better looking items and gear shared across all the characters you make in Diablo 3.