Current State of PoE - Summary

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Sa_Re wrote:

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Sa_Re wrote:

I don't post. I don't care to. The majority of players aren't happy. The majority just don't care enough to even post about the problems they experience because the majority know that the problems that really matter will never change.

Who's the majority you both speak of?

Probably those on our friendlists, I've seen more people on a beach in Irkutsk last winter.

Great Summary +1

I have to say, I don't think its fair to label everyone who makes a complaint as whiners. I have seen a lot of posts with good constructive criticism (like yours) and I have to admit, a couple of things such as the making of some items legacy without mentioning it in the patch... well I would be a bit pissed too. So, I can understand why some people have posted what they did. Still, there is a difference between constructive criticism and being an ass. GGG employees have feelings too, so thank for working so hard on the game for us fellas! Hardly a week goes by without a patch with new gems or fixes or whatnot. Pretty impressive for such a small team.

Imho, this is one of the best games ever made. Wish they had D3's budget so they could fix desync though!

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raics wrote:

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Sa_Re wrote:

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Sa_Re wrote:

I don't post. I don't care to. The majority of players aren't happy. The majority just don't care enough to even post about the problems they experience because the majority know that the problems that really matter will never change.

Who's the majority you both speak of?

Probably those on our friendlists, I've seen more people on a beach in Irkutsk last winter.

My friends-list looks very healthy but then again I'm a very positive person. BTW one thing to add increase the numbers of friends you can have. Mine has been full for 6months

[Post Edited by Support]

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Boem wrote:

Opinions are opinions, they are neither wrong nor good. They are formed independently from one another and are perceived in light of past experiences, this gives them a connotation of either being positive/negative while in reality they are neither.

I think that the Earth rotates around the sun.
How could that be equal to thinking something different(false)...............

Build of the week was why i started playing this game. I saw that on youtube and my mind blew.

Why would you deliberately leave out the game's biggest problem?

Awesome post.

Agree on the forum quality, we need more moderation tools (I heard a report button is coming). Post quality is naturally declining because people don't care to post quality in an ocean of piss. Until then we need to rely on community tools like on many other aspects of the game, which is really unfortunate.

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dspair wrote:

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Dynuel wrote:

- Steam to standalone client users ratio is changing for the advantage of the standalone client, therefore steam charts are more dramatic than the reality.

[citation needed]

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If you want these charts to be a meaningful representation of use / decline of use, you need to weight them with the steam global achievement ratios.

As of right now, 37.5% of the playerbase that these charts are based on has killed merveil, and 13.5% has finished the game on normal difficulty on a non-hardcore league. Less than half have the achievement for killing brutus.

The charts by themselves look dramatic, but are not representative of trends in people actually playing the game on their own, and seeing them presumed to be such is getting tiring.

Edit: http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&appid=238960q72850 is much more useful as far as steam graphs go.

You can change the graph timeline and still see a rather slow regression of active playerbase influenced by other game releases and main patch releases.

Edit: Sorry for double post.

I don't get it. Yes, steam charts do show that player base is decreasing. What achievements have to do with anything? >85% of players quit the game before beating the normal difficulty, how that proves that people use standalone client more and more instead of steam?

Again, how convenient that GGG removed the "/online" command, now GGG defence force™ can sleep at night, dreaming about increasing player base on standalone client.

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dspair wrote:

I don't get it. Yes, steam charts do show that player base is decreasing. What achievements have to do with anything? >85% of players quit the game before beating the normal difficulty, how that proves that people use standalone client more and more instead of steam?

Again, how convenient that GGG removed the "/online" command, now GGG defence force™ can sleep at night, dreaming about increasing player base on standalone client.

Blizzard Drone™ much? :P

It is explained in the quote. We want to see the actual stable playerbase instead of the jumpy steam population, trying out every new patch in any advertised F2P game. Steam Achievements are a measure of time investment and therefore can reflect the loyal customers. Once there we can guess that Native Client data looks similar, although they do not include Russian or Asian numbers (which might be a big piece of the cake).

We can also better see active playerbase retention without colliding with simple marketing effects like a huge new player flush due to expansion advertisements and the natural loss of said new players due to disinterest. As you see there are good reasons to weight the variables using steam achievements.

At the end the active playerbase pays the maintenance bills whereas the flush of new players including stash tab sales might boost short time profit and development. The weighted sample looks not as frightening as the unweighted but it still shows retention. However as a business man, I would only consider stable customer bases as present numbers on finances for future development. Probably fault on me, I know. ;-)

We know that the stable customer base is at most about 3000 at a time without valuing in time zones/concurrency and the native client user base, which is naturally higher than the steam client user base (daily/weekly average way higher). As this is a F2P game, we also know that only a small percentage of this user base is finally a paying customer, however skewed towards the big whale kinda guys paying way higher amounts than the small fish. Natural purchase justification processes will keep it this way. We also know that GGG currently is holding a 30+ employee office in this situation.

The high amount of content GGG is delivering fast in this situation is astonishing and I can see people being fascinated about it. However as pointed out, daily/weekly concurrency is way higher (steam shows at least 7000 users) not including native client numbers which will be higher because of the east asian/russian playerbase. The working system is not a miracle and it reflects the solid polish of this product compared to alternative products.

Does all this look depressing/dangerous to you? If yes, then you are probably conservative about purchase models and I kinda understand this. However it is a working model and you'd be surprised about the amount of F2P games out there with a way lower active player base being able to maintain their game.


I hope this post made you understand my relaxed position a bit. <3