It won't be toned down, because they're sharing purchases between PoE1 and PoE2 so people don't lose their purchases.
All of that MTX people wear will exist on Day 1 of PoE2.
Lately they've also been rewarding full armor sets for league challenges too which is nice. There has been 3 full sets in the last 4 leagues.
Trading will never be addressed in the way the community wants because what they want is not good game design.
Most players want some form of Auction House to automate trade completely, but that in conjunction with completely free trade like what exists in PoE completely undermines the actual gameplay of an ARPG.
Trade is highly highly efficient, and ARPG game developers are usually quite afraid of trade. PoE is one of the few games that has completely open and unrestricted trade.
The restriction in PoE comes from the idea of trade "friction" where it takes additional time and makes it inconvenient.
But this huge risk of trading is exactly the reason why Blizzard removed trade entirely from D3 and D4 has limited trade too, and even brand new ARPGs like Last Epoch also have restricted trade.
Trade has a huge risk of undermining the entire game and removing the reason to play it.
Many ARPG developers feel trade removes from the game, while Chris Wilson and GGG feel that trade adds value to items because they can be tradable, but once you add that AH it makes trade too powerful.
I heard a streamer describe it as while PoE2 looks harder combat-wise, there is a lot less hidden mandatory knowledge and building so it's more approachable.
PoE2 has more punishing mechanics, combat is more active and you need to dodge enemy attacks, and bosses reset HP if you die. But you don't have the same checklist of things you need to be viable, and there's less focus on knowing the mathed out optimal setups since support gems are now focused on changing skill behavior rather than providing multiplicative damage boosts.
Ultimately PoE won't change away from that because that's what their current playerbase wants. It's a huge risk as a developer to alienate their current fanbase to try to appeal to a new market.
I think in general people do. The concern is that the devs will be splitting their focus and their team between two games, and it potentially splits the playerbase and the economy.
There are some concerns that this means PoE1's issues won't be addressed as well. PoE2 was made to solve many of the problems that PoE1 has, and they continued to develop the game beyond that scope to the point it became it's own product and changed too much of PoE, and because PoE2 is such a significantly different game, it risks alienating their existing playerbase, so they are now preserving PoE1's gameplay, while making the changes they wanted to make for PoE2 which should attract more players.
But that now means that those solutions that were developed to fix PoE1's problems are now only in PoE2 and tied to an overall total rework of the game built around those solutions and how they change the game. Things like how the skill gem system works to be more simple, mana reservation no longer existing, etc.
Ultimately it's no different than having WoW and WoW classic. Just hopefully they'll have a large enough playerbase between both games to justify maintaining both. Their idea of staggering releases does mean that many players will likely swap between the two though and play both.
They did answer in a Q&A later on at Exilecon that the games run the same engine and things can be ported between the games, if there is content that's popular in PoE2 they may release it in PoE1 and vice-versa. The only real thing that cannot be ported is the character animations.
This does also mean that since purchases are shared, MTX have to be made multiple times for the 7 PoE1 character models and for the 12 PoE2 character models.
tl;dr If you like the existing PoE1 gameplay, PoE1 will continue to exist largely as it is now. If you like PoE2 more, then you will have that. And if you like both you can continue to play both and there will be more overall content to play between the two with the staggered releases.
Post-birth abortion is letting them grow up to experience a school shooting.
Sometimes it's good to do things that make the world a more livable place.
Like taking a shower even though our skin is always getting dirty and we can adapt to being dirty.
If it's anything like Path of Exile, around 60% of their playerbase uses Steam over their standalone launcher.
It'll be nice to at least track playtimes and have that data in 1 location.
World of Warcraft. I was on Windows XP with 512mb of RAM and who knows what graphics card but I was lagging so bad when WotLK came out.
With all the people standing at the entrance to Naxx I had to basically aim myself for the portal and lag my way in without being able to see where my character was walking due to the lag.
It depends on how it's enforced.
Where I live they ended cash bail for any non-felony offense and it's led to repeat offenders being picked up, released and they'd offend again, where they get picked up and then released again.
It's a complex issue, many of these people need mental health help, and putting them in jail isn't the solution, but allowing them to continue to walk free when they're known re-offenders isn't helping either.
Disgusting? It's a few slices of ham and cheese. It's basic, but you find ham and cheese to be disgusting?