The decline of Path of Exile

Will it die? Probably not, it will most likely fade.

The burden ggg and poe carry is that they cant have a true clean slate.
The framework of temp leagues allows breathing room, but its still a restrictive cage that has to obey the core laws of the game and dev time required to implement/test/iterate within their $+time limits.

The more the game ages and adds more things (items, designs, rules), the more difficult it becomes for any game.

'Creative Temporal Chains' as a game grows and ages is a thing.

Everyone has a clock ticking down.
Only have so much time left.
The uncomfortable recurring question you must answer as time passes is:
"is being involved with this game" as a developer, or a gamer, or even just as a fan, is this game worth my dwindling amount of time and energy anymore?

I think I would eventually start to pity the developer for becoming too comfortable with just working on this game and not being brave enough to start from a clean slate and design something much more bold and original.

Some people seem to have a hard time reading a graph. This is the searches for PoE on google from 2012-present and the interest has gone down substantially. Here is a steam graph for some more info, although since a lot of people don't use the steam client it is not the most accurate, would be interesting to get all the official numbers.


This doesn't indicate a healthy game, here are some examples of actually popular games that are succesful:

League of Legends

DotA 2

Counter-Strike Go

And so on. It's only going up because GGG are spending money on marketing through reddit and ZiggyD's videos. I foresee a lot of complaints from people when they realise this expansion is the same old shit we've had since 2.0 came out. People doing uber with 1 life or a white bow, every ability being viable not because of brilliant design but because players are 5x stronger than they should be.

We've been promised a new map system which looks to not change a lot, you still put in a map and do it the same as always. The leagues offer nothing to the general gameplay, just new ambush boxes and fancy alchemy orbs that probably won't do shit.

Unless the balance changes patch notes offer some fantastic changes I don't see this update making the game any better.

Only chart that matters is the GGG income chart. Post that and we'll talk.

clicking through that stuff have brought me here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaal_River
didn't think Vaal could be some real world shit :O

I dare you - I double dare you, [Removed by Support] - find ONE indie game in constant development that doesn't show a "rapid decay" over time in a graph like this. Heck, find a PvE-game in general that has a steady increase in players retention years after launch.

Some people act like this is unique to PoE. Some people act like this is irregular - like it's not normal. It's beyond me...

"

Phrazz wrote:

indie game

"

Phrazz wrote:

PoE

"

111derivi wrote:

"

Phrazz wrote:

indie game

"

Phrazz wrote:

PoE

Was there a point in there somewhere?

Ok, this is Google stats from their search engine. As previously stated more people know what PoE is and probably have everything bookmarked so no more need to google. Of more relevance is the PoE Steam Charts that track daily player counts. Since many of us don't play through Steam these numbers need to be multiplied by 4 or 5 to get closer to real total daily players but the total numbers are not as important as being able to compare the peek players at the start of a new league from the past and seeing how low it goes by the end of the league.

GGG should have noted that Perandus challenge league had the all time peak of over 37000 at its start. GGG should equate that with more and more players playing SSF as the time and aggravation of Trade Chat is not worth using it so solo playing is becoming more and more prevalent.

GGG is high on trading and makes PoE a starvation arpg on many levels to push us into trading for items yet then does a 180 and fails to give us a usable trade function. The 3rd party search sites just aren't cutting it for whether a player is on-line or not and even when a player is on-line we read posts time and time again about how a player won't stop playing for a few minutes to make a sale. Pohx explained it perfectly in the State of Exile podcast #57 in that if he's playing a build that must keep going to keep his charges and minions at max to keep his map clearing speed up then stopping to conduct a sale is not worth the time for him to get back up to full offence/defense again.

facepalmed so hard even the Shaper shivered.

Thants

"The decline of google searching Path of Exile."

I compared the search results "path of exile" vs. "poe" and it doesn't seem to follow a similar trend.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=2012-12-26%202016-08-26&q=path%20of%20exile,poe

Maybe people start googling poe instead of path of exile once they learn of the game?