Trendspotting: POE Playerbase almost halved on Steam alone since the release of Awakening

Not a surprise. That game has a good feel when you first start, but once you hit that end-game wall of endless trading and RNG Map drops, you sort of get turned off after awhile. I imagine people who hit the wall and have already been scammed out of their orbs/gear or just never really got going up and quit.

The game is a blast until you hit the point where you are playing a 3rd party website more than the actual game, spend untold amounts of time spamming in 50 different trade chat channels just to convert your currency to buy or use, and are at the mercy of the RNG Map drops limiting your progression. It gets pretty frustrating fighting a never ending trade chat battle just so you can even buy the currency to fuse without getting wrecked by scammers and resellers.

Its no surprise that people probably call it quits once they get to "end-game."

Personally, I enjoy the game when I'm playing it, but I can see the shortcomings and the reasons why it has poor player retention. The dedicated fans stick around, but your average person will just call it quits after that new feeling wears off, and that trading endgame sets in.

world of warcraft lost 50% of its playerbase within 6 months. according to their fanboys on the forums its perfectly fine and normal, no reason to worry. for every sane person its highly alarming. go figure. RNG gated endgame is a huge problem and it drives people away in masses.

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Koksii wrote:

world of warcraft lost 50% of its playerbase within 6 months. according to their fanboys on the forums its perfectly fine and normal, no reason to worry. for every sane person its highly alarming. go figure. RNG gated endgame is a huge problem and it drives people away in masses.

diablo 2 is one of the greatest games ever but the player base is 99.9% less when it was released.

For some reason people get upset when a product that has a low life span slowly dies.

With perfect "end game" PoE still would had lost most of it's extra playerbase after everyday, the question is how you update the game to keep higher retention rates. PoE dropped down to average the same amount of players as before. (around 10k), last month or two it was somewhat bad with 5k players averaging on steam (before the expansion, I assume people playing less to get ready for it)

I'm telling you some sort of trading system would boost this game enormously, because for an average player like me, who doesn't know every detail of the game and can't evaluate item values properly, a trade system would allow players to more precisely evaluate items and sell them eventually. A lot of people probably quit when they fill their stash with in-their-opinion-good-items that they don't bother selling them in the trade chat or even on external websites (I don't even want to talk about that).

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diablo 2 is one of the greatest games ever but the player base is 99.9% less when it was released.

Have to repeat it but even if d2 was a great game ( 8k hours or more on it ) it's still an hack & slash and this has never been the most popular kind of games ( comparing with other genre ).

Survability of these games is reliable to passionate players mostly on the long run but not many players enjoy doing always the same boring combination of click click boom trought same kind of content to waste more and more and more time expecting " a drop ".

Cause that's what we are talking about: Kill stuff => drop items => deal with what you find to survive and then deal with game content.

This is a limited gameplay and it has always been it's not proper to PoE.

What i'm saying here is i don't see how you would get more players by not evolving this game type and still scaling on old mechanics like now.

2015. New attempts.

So now time to improve trades ( don't start the flame wars about AH etc .. ) / Improve endgame in an enjoyable way ( forgot the low map drops. Make the endgame harder but make it rewarding. ) / Create real challenges and not trading challenges like now ( Sorry i know the intention was good but you failed hard ) / Time to add some group only challenges aswell where players have to prepare and think while hours how to deal with them / Also time to allow solo play a bit more rewarding / Time to add some additional goals in endgame aside of maps rolls ... / And more than all time to be creative and not sticking at the play 5k hours Free to play politic this is too late most of players HATE THAT novadays.

This is really hard cause dev time vs attempt changing years after years is hard to scale adding on top of that it's costly ( and not only money in reference to first vacation of Chris in 5 years i'm talking also here about work investement / keeping motivation etc ... ).

This is really necessary. I can't talk for all players but i can talk for the one i'm talking with all days and the main subject still trading ( It was already the case before larger part of players noticed there were desync in PoE ).

Why wouldn't you work with some poll for some subjects ? You could have a better idea of what players want and not only regular forum serial threader. This is not forcing you in any way to do anything resulting in poll it can just give you some better result.

Or at least just a simple poll players could answer after few hours of game like after reaching merciless this way you could get fresh comment from new players and what they think here ( they are the first to leave the game it's important to know why isn't it ? ).

End of the 5th wall of text of the week ;)

Peace

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Koksii wrote:

world of warcraft lost 50% of its playerbase within 6 months. according to their fanboys on the forums its perfectly fine and normal, no reason to worry. for every sane person its highly alarming. go figure. RNG gated endgame is a huge problem and it drives people away in masses.

What if I told you that most people don't even reach the endgame wall? The reason player numbers drop over time is because in the end PoE (and actually all Diablo-style ARPGs) are pretty dull games. I can't play this game forever, when a new league starts I play a lot and then my hours played per day/week slowly but surely decline because shit is getting boring. That's exactly what we're seeing on steamcharts. Does this mean I quit the game forever? Does this mean I'm not supporting the game financially? Certainly not. So not sure what's alarming about that.

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Heli0nix wrote:

What i'm saying here is i don't see how you would get more players by not evolving this game type and still scaling on old mechanics like now.

2015. New attempts.


Peace

I'll put forward a suggestion for you to think about.

Perhaps all the "evolution,innovation and revolutionary" changes to the ARPG genre,is in fact,the very thing making current ARPGs lesser ARPGs than their predecessor's.

Perhaps the old saying "less is more" is applicable to the genre in many ways.We've gotten so caught up with "If we can" that we haven't thought about "If we should" or that even doing something with the "best of intentions in mind" may do more damage than good.

=P

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Perhaps all the "evolution,innovation and revolutionary" changes to the ARPG genre,is in fact,the very thing making current ARPGs lesser ARPGs than their predecessor's.

Eh i'm not saying every evolution will be better.
Just sayin keep targeting 30yo userbase won't really work forever ..

This game is to closed for newcomers ( new in arpg genre ) even with few improvement made recently ( highlighted beginners build in news etc ... ).

And well who care if it's doesn't follow the direct line of old ARPG ? No one expected the choices made concerning d2 and they were all risky in these good old times but it worked for it.
Why GGG couldn't do the same thing ? they have enough balls for that.

There are a lot of potential the game is rich and have a depth no other ARPG have.
There are a lot of doors open to some kind of evolution here.

You know only game who get remembered ten years later are the one who took all risks for the reward. Not the one who pasted content from other game or scaled to a small demand. That concept isn't proper to games it's proper to anything.

Many people I know were excited to check out the new content and give the game another go now that desync is a thing of the past. Most of them didn't stick around. I don't even think the atrocious endgame is to blame; most people don't even get that far.

I suppose the average gamer these days just don't play through a game three times, let alone continue to grind maps. They play it once and move on to the next F2P title or another game from their steam sales backlog. Only the rare few get hooked enough to invest serious time in a game like this.

The steam graph shows two interesting things.

First is, that after the expansion release, there where around same number of people playing it as on release day. This is very rare, as most expansion for other games will always have less players than on release.

The other thing is that the rate of people leaving is a lot faster now, than it was after the release. Maybe this is normal, as this is a expansion so the game is more or less same to people that dont play it non stop.

We know that on release GGG posted that ration between steam and PoE client is around 50:50, and we also know that the max number of players at one time in the game was 60 000 back than, and for steam was 35 000, so that 50/50 looks pretty accurate.

Now with two additional separate realms on garena its hard to know the numbers of the player base as a whole