The first half of what you are saying is true, but the second half isn't.

The game isn't moving towards "more no-life/streamer" in fact it's the opposite, statistically speaking there are more players now reaching level 100 than ever before with more ways to achieve this once impossible feat.

The average player/casual total value of bank stashes is up over 30% and on average compared to previous leagues and players are making it further into the game than ever before. This has increased player power significantly which in turn has allowed players to push further in less time.

There are more guides and resources and tools than ever before to help players make currency faster and remove "complexity" from the game.

In fact if you were ever interested in playing POE now is really the best league to jump and and try it out. I've been playing since beta and can pretty much say this as a fact, I would love to see someone debate me on this.

And as far as Ruthless is concerned, now that's worthy of a "Rofl", head over to Twitch or Youtube and show me more than two streamers actually playing Ruthless at the moment. You wont because Kripp is the only person still playing the mode and streaming that mode of play currently.

Why, well I can't say with 100% certainty, but it's probably because it is a boring way to play the game and the majority of viewers on Twitch clearly aren't as interested in watching someone grind on white maps for a month in the hopes of a single drop that is common in POE live or I would have to assume more than 1 streamer would be playing the mode.

Just about every top streamer played Ruthless for the first week or a couple days and quickly abandoned it except for Kripp whom is really an outlier, he has always held the title of the person that played the game on harder difficulties for example he primarily plays Hard Core and really was the only popular streamer to do so during early POE, now probably thanks to him there are a lot of HC players and even SSF HC players. But can he do the same for Ruthless and bring over players? doubtful.

Now personally I think Ruthless is a complete waste of development time and the resources should be put towards POE 2 or fixing long standing issues and QOL with POE 1. There is no way you would have me believe out of the possible 500k players that POE brings in every cycle that more than 10k of those players on spending time in Ruthless. The technical debt doesn't seem worth it from an engineering point of view to support this mode long term which is another way of saying financially.

In fact the only thing you ever hear about Ruthless is from Krip or some random nobody that posts on Reddit showing they did something that is really simple in POE Live, that is boringly time consuming in Ruthless. All of which is anecdotal but if we are basing this popularity on Twitch, Youtube, and Reddit the mode isn't popular.

I'm willing to gamble money that Ruthless will be gone by the release of POE 2 or within 4 league cycles and if it's not gone it will be in maintenance mode until they can figure out what to do with the dead mode. If you want that bet go ahead and PM me and we will head over to Draft Kings, I would love to take that money and get some more POE MTX.

Bring it on Chris Wilson.

Couldn't you do that anyway, on any game, any time?
I mean just use the first weapon that drops for the whole game.
Doesn't make sense to force all players to do it but whatever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I played PoE for about a month when it was first released but I'm just not into isometrics anymore.

I dunno...I kind of liked Ruthless. It gave me an excuse for not having all the primo meta gear and to just play to the strength of my drops.

Even lower drop rates than regular PoE, and less crafting? Rofl. This game just keeps moving more and more to the no-lifer/streamer side of gaming with every update.

Masochism in games is way out of hand, in my opinion.