This is also the case for D3. . .
. . .PoE has been growing
PoE concurrent player count has declined steadily. Unlike D3 it's not a boxed product and it's F2P. For F2P the tendency is a explosion to a peak then a unstoppable decline which PoE shows. Counting Accounts isn't meaningful as there is no barrier to make a new one. Since there is a character limit per account; like D2 it encourages more accounts. D2 has dramatically more accounts than active Cd-keys. Just like PoE has more accounts than unique players that ever logged on.
D3 is a monetary cost per account. According to blizz it's about 15m unique players and RoS sold 5m units.
If PoE Act 4 doesn't see a large boost in numbers likely the game won't be economically viable to sustain. Only a portion of the 9k daily peak players are spending money and if it doesn't pick up. future content won't be plausible.
D3 did well enough that another xpac is coming and a sequel will come eventually.
all of them have a system in which you put points into things to unlock them instead of having everything unlocked automatically.
They are all not hard, very casual games. Most of those games allow you to fix mistakes in build or are preventative by making all mistakes meaningless with a very gentle difficulty curve. They don't opt for 'Hardcore' mechanics like PoE and even D2 has reroll mechanics.
D2 was grim and dark and the textures were sharp enough to cut yourself on.
I disagree with that. D2 isn't as pitch black you remember and D3 is pretty grim. Gerald Brom was one of the key artists for both. Most of the character designs in both are derived from his design aesthetic.
The key distinction is D2 is a fairly stylized sprite based game, and D3 is a polygon grim watercolor.
The colored lights and player highlighting is game design. You need to distinguish threats, the background ,the player, and enemies. Both D2 and D4 have rainbows of lighting effects.
PoE is a very polished game in the same way, excluding... desync.
It's janky, at the corner of every system. The only thing it has going for it is it has a skill system which appeals to people like you, it's F2P and it has a trade system some people really like. Other than that it's pretty messy on the edge of every system.
I remember when people made the same argument that you are making about league of legends when I played it in season 1
LoL was janky? Never heard that. I played from the beta. It has a massively larger player base; concurrent and accounts. It has grown in concurrent player base whilst PoE has steadily declined. LoL is also much more accessible than PoE.
