General Feedback from SSF in 0.2

Wanted to provide some generalized feedback after playing trade in 0.1 and SSF in 0.2, from a casual player. Avoiding balance etc as GGG are very much aware of that already and understand way better than me :)

NPC Vendors
Introducing Gold in Settlers was another great design innovation. Having a resource that was not tradable, but was required to trade etc was great. And then that was immediately fumbled in PoE2 as now tradable items could be sold for gold - doh!

The Salvage Bench & the Disenchant window needs to be removed. Selling a piece of gear to any vendor needs to pay the player in all of the items shards. Ie a Rare weapon with +5% Quality needs to give a Regal Shard and a Blacksmiths Shard. No gold, just shards, at any vendor. White items could give scouring shards, for Scouring orbs (I sorely miss these!)

Running round a town for various 'selling' functions feels bad. And I know Jonathan said in one recent interview (might have been 02. Q&A live stream) that he wanted to maintain the worlds belive-ability, but this sort of change doesn't undermine that, and to be honest, I'm not playing any ARPG for deep world building. Which I realise this might upset Jonathan and the team as they have put a lot of effort into PoE2 on that front. But for 0.2, I've turned off all audio again, and skipped through all the cut scenes...

Maps
Maps. Please just revert to calling them that. No one, including yourselves in interviews, calls them Waystones - all you are doing is confusing new players. And it is nice to have consistency between PoE 1&2, even though they are different games (and rightly so).

Next, can we go back to White/Yellow/Red maps. And link that to the number of revives. I dont want to look up a wiki page to remind me how my revive count is going to change as I aug/regal/exalt/alch a map. Keep it Simple. White 4, Yellow 3, Red 2. I don't think there should ever be 1/0 revives for mapping - players can choose to play hardcore if they want that sort of experience.

Atlas Passives
Gaining Passive Points. Though the Corruption/Cleanse mechanic was an improvement, it still lacks that fundamental feel good of completing your first map and getting your first atlas passive point. Linking with my prior point on Maps, why not simplify it down to 1 point per White/Yellow/Red, for the first 50 of each, giving you 150 passive points. Its simple and easy to visualize for new players. 150 maps is lot of maps for causal players - even in poe1 - and in poe2, if you want the gameplay to feel slower, that can still be a big time investment.

Can we be allowed to allocate points to the 'constellations' (Ritual, Breach etc) with regular Atlas points please (hence the larger number above) - having the specialized content as those separate constellations is a nice design decision to allow newer players to easily identify all of the potential ways to improve the specific content, but locking it behind the bosses of those content feels really bad, as it takes forever to earn even the first couple of points. If not, then perhaps thats what the corrupted zones could be for - constellation points?

Towers
Running towers is still meh, but they have improved since launch. And i feel they do play an important part of the feel of PoE2 end game, exploring the world, giving us that huge scouting radius to see what lies beyond. But running them with a map, and with X number of mods opening up 1-3 slots for tablets still feels odd. I'd like to see that functionality removed entirely. Let them be there simply for scouting the terrain. We'd still want to path to them. Let us juice maps individually.

Crafting
For me, the crafting system in PoE1 was always its worse feature, and its just even worse in PoE2. One of the fundamental disagreements I have with Chris's design philosophy is his love of Magic the Gathering. And booster packs being a great feature of MtG (I dont know where Jonathan and Mark stand on MtG). Just no. I'm an adult, a father and work full time. I dont want an RnG crafting system. Even if its a long grind, I want to know I'm making incremental progress towards improving my gear. And I dont want to trade. I dont want the pressure of keeping up with the market prices - that is stress I dont need.

Give us the means to improve the Tier of a prefix/suffix on gear. Even if going from T4 to T5 requires 10x more currency than going from T2 to T3. Something.

Vaal orbs are your randomiser. Great. Players can choose to gamble on those.