World of Tanks. Came for the fun FPS/TPS hybrid gameplay, left for Wargaming's unforgivably greedy and short-sighted monetization practices. But not before siphoning away a lot more of my time than they deserved before I caught on.
This one hits close to home. My best friend and I used to love this one game as kids but it gradually became less fun as every meta shift further pushed passive play. We discovered innovative strategy after innovative strategy and yet were losing multiple times per hour in a game with a queue time of ~15-30 minutes, which is bonkers. Anyway, I just lost the game and so have you.
Remember how good it was without the silver store or season passes. When the new content was a DLC that dropped once a year and you just played it. You could go for a stroll on Mars. Talk to Osiris at the lighthouse. And DLC content you paid for didn't just get stolen. Yeah.
Path of Exile is a very different game today and appeals to a completely different subset of players since it started. The people that are still playing a very happy with it, but the people who started with its release/beta perceived it as decidedly "worse every patch".
The best it ever was was 3.0 when the story felt complete and the campaign still mattered. It's a glorified slot machine now, and anything that encourages players to actively play the game is perceived as a barricade to more serotonin hits. Just see how the community reacted to the PoE2 footage. "Why do enemies take time to die? What do you mean I'm expected to dodge attacks?"
Haven't kept up with the game changes for like the league after Sentinel but they really introduced some anti-fun changes, made the game grindier and killed off proper crafting so its "play this slot machine to unlock another slot machine, if you fuck up start all over" all over again.
Best state of the game was Ritual league anyway, after that the game slowly got enshittificated tbh.
Shame about the 5k+ hours I put into it and not even being able to play the game in it's best state but oh well.
Was getting bored of playing Seismic trap for the 100th time in a row because they don't give a fuck about PoE1 anymore anyway so good riddance
Nah. I played before DPS/speed-clear meta and all the powercreep. When you actually fought the enemies, took damage, and didn't die to one-shots. I enjoyed that, and the game has always been downhill. After 1,400 hours of playtime, I realized I was only playing hoping for it to feel like it used to, but it never came.
What I really want is for enough people to move to minetest that it gets the modders it really needs to be a serious competitor, but considering youtube and the fact that you can still mod older versions that would take a miracle (or Microsoft messing up in spectacular fashion)