Recent reviews by Taco

Its bean fun

I love this game and have played this game for years. I have about 1.1k hours in the Steam client, and at least 3k hours outside of Steam. I've not spent considerable time in many other games since I discovered PoE 4-5 years ago. There are plenty of other reviews which go over the positive and negative aspects of the gameplay pretty well though, so if that's what you're looking for there's nothing to see here.

So, why the negative review? Well, that's because of the business-side of Grinding Gear Games.

See, I currently live in Taiwan, and I cannot use the Steam client for PoE without connecting through a VPN (which would then violate Steam's ToS and such). My guess is that it has at least something to do with their ongoing business relationship with Garena in Taiwan, despite having ditched Garena in every other region. Yes, I can play on the standalone client just fine and will continue to do so, but this does have drawbacks. No Steam achievements, no overlay (and no, it doesn't work when launched from Steam as a non-Steam game), no tracking of game time, etc.

Some of Grinding Gear Games' business relationships have long been questionable. One of their biggest investors was long rumored to be the operator of a vast bot farming/RMT enterprise. But the biggest issue for me in this regard is the fact that it is now officially majority owned by dirty Chinese money (Tencent). Given the nature of China's relationship with Taiwan, I haven't made a single purchase to support this game since Tencent's aqcuisition of it, and I never will.

Basically, PoE is a great game made by a company that (like so many others are doing) has sold itself out to the long arms of the Communist Party of China. I was a long-time supporter of this wonderful free-to-play game, but I can no longer do that in good faith regardless of how much I enjoy the game itself.