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

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Heli0nix wrote:

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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 ... ).

I have to chime in here though, because it has very little to do with it not being newcomer friendly. It has everything to do with how 'modern day' gaming works. I am a newbie, the game is obscure, it triggers you to think about it, which is a rarity in the mass of holding hands games that are currently released. People rather play 'simple' games, in the broadest sense of the word.

I am the complete opposite and love games that punish me, like the Dark Souls franchise. That franchise suffers almost the same problems as PoE does. Being newcomer friendly has very little to do with it, it's all about what the majority of gamers want to invest their time in, and that's not investing hours on end improving on either gameplay mechanics (dark souls) or farming your ass of for decent setups (PoE) - just to name two examples.

Basically it has to do with the new generation of gamers and what they want, rather than PoE being unfriendly to newcomers.

IMO they are screwing up not having a difficulty levels. I mean for experienced ppls 2.0 was hard, noobs are prolly like WTF OVER? im outta here. I like game as is just saying.

My problems with game (endgame/maps) are unrelated to the drop off you see which is too hard and too confusing (tree, hundreds of gems etc) Not sure they can fix the later but former is easily fixed like D3 did with Monster power/torment and every other game in this sector.

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Xavderion wrote:

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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.

Good point, after all it took Blizzard like 12 years to make another one. If it was such a hot commodity there would be tons out there too like FPSs.

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RestInPieces wrote:

Tbh in my opinion, the only good thing in the Awakening besides the not-so-large new act, was the loot filter. Already missing many 1.3 builds and it's the first time this happens to me after a patch.

^This. I joined at the end of open beta and all patches prior to 2.0 were good. Even the block-nerfing one was ok. But now I just quit because fk it.

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Ragnar119 wrote:

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

Pretty sure the concurrency record was over 150,000 not 60,000, which makes steam's 35,000 peak about 1/4th representation at that time and if I had to guess I would say the % is lower now. Still even the steam numbers are pretty strong given how niche the game is. Just look at some of the big name online games on that top 99 list that were heavily distributed through steam.

I went from steam to a normal account with the beta. I'm pretty sure many more did. With steam there was an issue that you had to redownload the whole game when you wanted to go back to the game from beta, and the other way around.

I was never able to play Path of Exile via Steam. Since Valve blocks it from the Store from ever appearing in Asia since the whole deal with Garena. I only ever found out about Path of Exile when I was googling for RPGs which had Playstyles which were similar to the Necromancer in Diablo 2.

I've been playing for over 3 years. This is one of the most unsatisfying content updates ever. The only fantastic things they introduced was to the engine of the game, such as the lockstep changes, and the loot filter.

New skills are terribly boring.
Questing system is extremely unrewarding.
Balance of skill tree and unique item drop rate is bad.
With the addition of jewels, and divination cards, there are now more things we have to trade for. The trade system is just as bad as ever.
Map changes are trash.
General monster balance is bad.

It really feels like the game is being pulled into 2 directions. One direction is a "hardcore" grind fest (lowered unique drop rate, lowered map drop rate, so many things you have to sink currency into). The other one is somewhat casual with a lot of short cuts (gem vendor, condensed acts)

I quit playing two weeks into the league. Overall this release feels like a beta, but i'll check back next leagues

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Hackusations wrote:

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Ragnar119 wrote:

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

Pretty sure the concurrency record was over 150,000 not 60,000, which makes steam's 35,000 peak about 1/4th representation at that time and if I had to guess I would say the % is lower now. Still even the steam numbers are pretty strong given how niche the game is. Just look at some of the big name online games on that top 99 list that were heavily distributed through steam.

I didnt talk about concurrency record , but the record when the game was released on steam, as that is the only way we can see the ratio between POE english client and steam one (as they share the same player base). The new record was after they released separated realms on russian and taiwan servers on garena as I said in my post, and they are totally separate player base and game/servers.

WIth new expansion you come to try new stuff out, see the changes but you get used to it fast. After some time the carrot is just too small and too far away to keep chasing it. Rest is just grind.