The 'rant' above echoes my feelings. I want to like and enjoy this game too. But I've come to the same conclusions that this game is far from ready.

Last night, after rage-quitting a horribly buggy session of Wolcen, my friend and I logged into Grim Dawn and immediately felt the vast difference between a well made game and this horribly constructed one. And just for old-time sake, I logged into Diablo 3 this morning and remarked to myself how enjoyable it would be if Wolcen could be as smooth and polished as the Diablo gameplay.

Although I've put in 170 hours of playing since launch, most of those hours have been sheer frustration. One of the most serious issues, in my opinion, is the inability to see any friends online while in a game. Only when you are in the menu screen can you see which friends are on. The notification icon does not work. Nor does multiplayer in general. I created many open multiplayer games but only 1 person ever joined at a time. Where is the group experience?

In game, the problems are too numerous to mention but some of the more serious ones are falling off the world, games terminating for no reason, not enough mobs to finish an expedition, etc, etc... The minor problems number in the hundreds with new issues cropping up daily.

The entire money system is permanently broken. Even though the gem exploit was 'fixed' the cheaters get to keep all their ill-gotten Town buildings that they bought with gold they should never haver had. How do legit players fare? They get to make 21000 gold per floor (avg 700 gold per item sold and 30 inventory slots filled) in an expedition. So how long will it take to finish the town that takes many millions of gold? The answer is NEVER. The legit players have no hope of ever completing their town. Especially as they got punished by Wolcen's ill considered blanket rollback on the gold.

I don't hold out much hope for this game. It has beautiful graphics but this release was rushed to market, likely because of financial decisions.

Good-bye Wolcen. I wish you all the best and hope you get your affairs in order. I'll be back later in the year to see if things have improved. Though I think Wolcen's ship has sailed and they've committed gaming suicide by releasing this too early, I would love to be proved wrong.

Yup, I think this holds true for me as well. I'll keep watch but for now, I'm done. Too much focus on nerfing the fun, and too little on highly needed fixes and features. Which tells me the leadership is not very solid in the company. This will only get worse over time.

(facepalm)

Every game goes through constant balancing. Seriously, how is it that you don't realize this? Path of Exile has been out for years, and yet they still tweak skills and abilities in nearly every patch. So does almost every online game. It's the nature of the beast, and yet here you guys are, simply shocked, shocked I say, that Wolcen is tweaking numbers. I swear, there is no bigger cancer upon the gaming industry than gamers themselves. You guys have been trained by YouTube and Reddit to think that you need to throw tantrums and start attacking developers personally whenever you experience the slightest disappointment.

Regarding the stats changing: Are you really claiming that you can't play the game until you have the final stats for every skill written in stone and delivered to you by the hand of God? Funny thing- Diablo and Path of Exile run leagues every few months where everyone starts over again from scratch, usually with literally dozens of changes to skills and items. You're acting like you're planning on building one character and playing it exactly as-is until the heat death of the universe. The truth is that you can easily reset your skills based on new information, or even create entirely new characters and start over. That's kind of the point of these sort of games.

As for your comments regarding the devs "randomly changing numbers": that's just a juvenile, snotty thing to say. If you have extensive experience writing software, be sure to tell us, because otherwise it's just asinine for you to assume you know anything at all about how their trait engine functions and interacts with the rest of the code. There's really nothing I find so personally offensive as armchair quarterbacks who, despite having accomplished nothing in their lives, are free with their insults and condemnations towards those who have.

Hello everybody!

First of all I ask for consideration, English is not my mother tongue.

I do not understand these high expectations for new releases! (D3's appearance was terrible in so many ways)
Why are games that have been around for years compared to new releases? Oh yes, so that you can cry and wail again.

Wolcen is an indie studio, so you should be considerate (no, I'm not happy with the current version, but hope for the best).

Furthermore, it is the fault of you all, yes you as consumers are to blame for unfinished game releases, you alone!

Why? Because you have pre-ordered every shit in the past few years because the advertising, the youtuber, streamer or friends have accordingly hipped you.
If you see advertising and see it as 100 percent reality without questioning what you have seen, you deserve to be fooled!
If you want to support a game / developer, I understand that. However, do not give in to the illusion of advertising.
Horny and with a boner you shouldn't pre-order! Switch on your brain first!

Give Wolcen time to develop and don't stamp it in the ground.
Character development, items etc. should not all be served on the silver platter. Deserve it!

I personally don't remember a single game in the past 10 years that deserves full version status when released.

If you only play according to guides and hardly think independently, research the game, experiment yourself with the given, just switch on God mode and endlessly something, have fun with it. Play offline and just imitate other players, but please do so in silence. - Thank you!

Have a great day!

Greetings from Rijaal

Let me quote the parts of nunstrike's replies.

(facepalm) Every game goes through constant balancing. Seriously, how is it that you don't realize this? Path of Exile has been out for years, and yet they still tweak skills and abilities in nearly every patch. So does almost every online game. It's the nature of the beast, and yet here you guys are, simply shocked, shocked I say, that Wolcen is tweaking numbers.

That's true. And I'm not criticising the fact that the game is being balanced. Just drawing conclusions from the way it's being balanced.

I haven't followed every aRPG there is. But none of the major ones I know contained numbers so broken and so untested that they had to be adjusted by the order of HUNDRED. Like that shield passive that used to be x50 and now is x0.5.

In the world of modern aRPG such oversights are indeed shocking.

*Regarding the stats changing: Are you really claiming that you can't play the game until you have the final stats for every skill written in stone and delivered to you by the hand of God? *

It seems you misunderstood. You're talking about balancing. I'm talking about buggy mechanics that cannot take place in aRPG. For example, when leveling my char, I found a chest with cdr. Next day, I ran the game, and my cooldowns were actually higher than before. Should be impossible bit it happened. Or the already famous health miscalculation blunder. Or the passives not working or doing something else or doing it but on a completely different scale than described.

In general, the feeling that the numbers and descriptions you see on screen don't really represent the mechanics and the way a build works. How am I supposed to make a build - decide which passives and skills work best if half of them are bugged, and some are even complete duds as in they don't do anything (example above). This should be unforgivable in modern aRPG, especially on a scale evident in Wolcen.
​
​ * As for your comments regarding the devs "randomly changing numbers": that's just a juvenile, snotty thing to say. If you have extensive experience writing software, be sure to tell us, because otherwise it's just asinine for you to assume you know anything at all about how their trait engine functions and interacts with the rest of the code.*

I'm not sure what "devs randomly changing numbers" you're referring to. As for the other part, I don't have to be a programmer to know that when an avatar falls through the floor and disappears in a cloud of pixels then it's not a good thing.

There's really nothing I find so personally offensive as armchair quarterbacks who, despite having accomplished nothing in their lives, are free with their insults and condemnations towards those who have.

If this was free you would have a right to say that - offensive shit, condemnation, insult, etc. But it so happens I'm a paying customer who gave WC money for a full release of a game that by modern standards wouldn't even qualify as beta. To say you're selling something and sell something else - such practices must die. So they must be condemned

The apologists have arrived to lecture us to accept faulty, flawed, defective products. They believe it's okay to sell you something that might work in the future but not right now. They believe it's okay to waste your money. Of course they do! Because it's not their money! They can afford to be foolish with someone else's purse.

I'm no saint. I paid full price, not 50% or some fraction based on what works in that game. I paid good money for a product that is so defective that it causes mostly anxiety and frustration for me and my friends. I play for enjoyment, not to beta test an obviously poorly made game. And as a customer, I have every right to criticize or comment on the product I paid for. I will not be silenced by some twit with no understanding of, or respect for money.

@ the 2 apologists posting above:
I would like to see how forgiving they are when the surgeon removes some other organ instead of their kidney. Or when the shiny new car they buy comes with only 3 wheels and no windshield or seats. I'd like to see their attitude then.

Summing up, it's the acceptance of rushed work, unfinished products and an unwillingness to call out those at fault that promotes the mediocrity we find in todays products and in this case, Wolcen.

Lowering expectations does not promote quality. It does exactly the opposite.

Yes, you're right! I did not pre-order "with a boner" - as you put it - but I can only blame myself for getting the hype get the best of me.

However, this other part confuses me. Why do you assume that everyone who criticizes Wolcen must be an off-line player and a noob who 1) cheats and 2) only follows other people's builds? As a matter of fact, I did play Wolcen off-line because on-line Wolcen is too frustratingly inconsistent. But I did not cheat. I did consult other builds for theory (if you don't do that it means you suck as an aRPG player) but ultimately I came up with my own build that turned out to be one of the top hybrid concepts that ever seen the light of day (15 mil crits just before the nerfs). I have spent years playing aRPGs, theorycrafting and discussing builds for days, and made builds that beat all-time world records in Grim Dawn. And it is BECAUSE of this background that I can see beyond Wolcen's graphics and see how bad this game really is.

And it's a shame because it looks - and if you ignore everything - actually plays nice. But the devs need a solid punch in the face to realize that what they've been doing so far is wrong. And it's not even about the bugs and the alpha version status... Uniques don't exist in meta. All items are random stat shticks. Endgame content is poverty (brilliant town idea but wtf you can't even farm main game with difficulty twists!!!). Drop rates are all messed up (doing 180 10 times and see not a single legendary? black market gear modification so expensive, and now productivity nerfed?). Balance changes so far prove that they got no idea how work a good aRPG. A punch in the face is needed so that they see a light bulb of new ideas. This is why I'm writing this. I sincerely wanna see Wolcen to grow this year.