Hey everyone, founder here. I backed The Bazaar in its earliest days - Indiegogo backer, paid into every experiment and phase, including every monthly premium pass that let me hoard tickets and diamonds. We were told those would matter - unlocking heroes, building decks, advancing the game. Zoom in to now - I had 100 tickets and almost 30k diamonds in my account. Tickets? Turned to diamonds. Diamonds? Sorry, no heroes.

Back then, Reynad and his team specifically assured us the game wouldn’t be pay-to-win. He said classes would start balanced, new ones unlockable via in-game currency or cash, and most revenue would come from cosmetics, not power. It sounded like a fair, player-first vision.

Now, fast forward: they’ve moved to Steam, charging 45 bucks for the base game, and 20 bucks for each new hero. My accumulated tickets and diamonds - resources I earned and paid for based on dev's statements - are now reduced to almost zero value in terms of unlocking meaningful content. That feels like a bait-and-switch. Additionally, this is the third change to the monetization model, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some new ones down the line.

I’m not here to troll. I just want early supporters to get something meaningful. Recognition that we helped launch this whole thing, if nothing else.

I feel like we supported them when the game was still just a promise, but now the doors are slamming shut on us. It’s not entitlement - that’s faithful early support. And right now, it feels like that support was for nothing.

Additionally, any meaningful discussion about the above topics is being removed from the Bazaar sub-reddit without any explanation. Even posts discussing the amounts of skin duplicates you're getting by opening chests. I had two posts removed within several days span, one of them with more than 90 replies, mostly debating how can Bazaar make it right with the people who supported it from Day 1.

Game itself is one of the better ones in recent times, if you're not one of the founders and haven't invested your money in subscriptions on Tempo launcher, this is the easiest purchase you can make. However, executed U-turns on monetization turn a no-brainer decision into a giant red flag, as we don't know how much value our investments will hold in the future, not to mention the possibility of new changes in monetization (e.g. premium reward path for bonus items, off the top of my head). Good luck to Bazaar and us all.

I've played PoE 1 for 1,600+ hours and while it has it's challenges, it was never slow and devoid of fun as the latest patch is. Not gonna repeat what others are saying, I just hope that the fact that they acknowledged community feedback will bring considerable improvement soon. I really want to love PoE 2, but I just can't atm.

Logging on a workday, 2pm into 12,000 queue, Sunday had it at 23,500 (managed to log in 7 hours later into a game crash that reset the queue to where it was, no grace period to relog... So far I have "11 hours played", all of them spent in queue. No idea how the game plays or what are the upsides or downsides. If you're in EU, good luck and Godspeed.