Best. Stream. Title. Ever.

I'm beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that Path of Exile's "Delirium Everywhere" event isn't actually very much fun.

"Empty shell of a man searches for colour and meaning in a dull, grey & painful world"

And I've been getting this same vibe from half of PoE's December events. Endless Delve was well-received, but everybody seems to have hated Endless Heist; Atlas Invasion seemed to be pretty solid, but Delirium Everywhere hasn't seemed enjoyable at all, and the overall verdict seems to be that having 80% player delirium  (i.e. a zone in which monsters take 77% less damage from players, while dealing 24% more damage to them) the early-game Prison area was just unfun.

So... what went wrong here?

It could be that scheduling four ten-day events to run over thirty days was just too much; the three-day overlap between one event and the next meant that even players who were enjoying all the mechanics of the events were pushed into spending far more hours in the game than they would normally, with zero downtime.

It could also be that some of the event formats were just poor choices. An event in which players have nothing to do but, for example, Heist doesn't necessarily give players ten days of fun, engaging with an activity that they love; if those players don't love Heist, then this is just ten days of, essentially, weak-sauce maps, but with less variety, of the sort that had some of those streamers complaining of boredom by the end of day two... of a ten-day event. And Delirium Everywhere was just cruel; an event for masochists only.

It's not that the idea here was bad; the basic concept here is fine. But GGG need to stop trying to force-feed content to their player base for which those players have already clearly indicated distaste, as if calling it an "event" makes it special. I understand that they put a bunch of time and money into developing Heists, but the same could have been said for Synthesis, and that hasn't reappeared since its run concluded. What makes Heist special, beyond its development cost? If GGG can't answer that, then it may be time for them to let it go.

Events should be composed of content which you know your customers enjoy, and want more of, not stuff which they dislike and want less of. It doesn't matter if you, as a developer, personally like whatever it is; if your players don't like it, then don't try to force them to play more of it. They won't "come around" on the thing they already dislike; they'll just dislike it even more.

Also, if you were hoping that inflicting the painfully slow play of a 90% (or more) delirium zone on players' low-level characters was going to bring them around on the concept of slower game play, generally, then it's backfired; people who already hated the idea of a slower game are now even more opposed to it, which means that it's probably off the table. It's a real shame that slower game play seems to have been the plan for PoE 2...

This hurts to say, because I want GGG to slow down the game; I want them to stick to their guns on their vision of what PoE 2 should be. But you only get one chance to make a first impression; once people have decided that a thing is bad, it's really tough to change their minds about it, and force-feeding them more of the thing is generally not going to help your cause. Just saying, GGG.