This got my attention regarding the new league.

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Mythkiller wrote:

I totally think GGG should make delve as a core game inclusion to give players something to do once they are done with the map 'endgame'. Once your build can farm uber elders comfortably, that 0.1% of the playerbase has nothing to do. Delve addresses that and does it (for once) without completely screwing over the casual players. There is now an actual reason to play the league past 36/40.~Myth

Hm but why should they care about 0.1% player base. It doesn´t make any sense in the current business model.

I would rather see more royal gameplay, competitive pvp and better balance overall.

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Rakiii wrote:

Hm but why should they care about 0.1% player base. It doesn´t make any sense in the current business model.

I would rather see more royal gameplay, competitive pvp and better balance overall.

Because there is no reason to cater to the 99.9% (to be clear here, i am talking in terms of available challenging content, not in terms of balance etc). The 99.9% have plenty of content to try and beat.

The people who have gotten their 40/40, beaten uber elder a dozen times, shaper a dozen times are the ONLY people in the game right now who have no content-driven goals left and thus quit.

From a content point of view, it makes sense to provide something for these guys to go after.

In addition, whether you like streamers personally or not, there is no denying that streamers bring the game exposure and thus money. Streamers mostly fall in the 0.1%. Giving them challenging content (which to be clear has 0 impact on the 99.9% gameplay. All of them also get content that is challenging for them) is very, very necessary.

~Myth

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dunaskmey wrote:

we r heading towards the same death path of "d3".

Only a few meta builds can push the furthest > everyone changes to the meta coz only metas allows u to push furthest for better loot > No more build diversity.

This means the only differentiating factor between players would be mirror gear which is the same for d3.

Will we see primal gears for poe soon?

This will never happen, because of GGG's vision of "risk and reward". Im looking at you, Abaxoth and Im looking at you, T3 Burial Chamber.

Well if this is excactly how it works. I am very interested.

I think this content is for more than the 0.1%.

When it comes to providing endgame content for dedicated players who are getting bored and quitting leagues 2-5 weeks in etc, those people probably represent a large portion of the people who spend a lot of money supporting this game too.

Ive donated over $1k to this game, if you look at people who barely make it to endgame, how much are they donating? How many of them donate nothing? Im probably worth 100, maybe even 200 of them in business terms.

Mythkiller is right too, if were talking about people who are far from playing enough to explore the content already in the game why would u make more content for them? Its a waste of time. Its the same with new leagues, they are for long term players not new players. Everything is new and exciting for a new player, you could run a new league where nothing is new and they wouldnt even notice cause they have no concept of whats old. When theyre making new content its to cater to long term players, esp journeymen who get to endgame and potentially play for weeks or even months into a league, and thats fine because those are the people paying the bills.

I always compare going deeper and deeper (harder and harder) to a tractor pull contest. The tractor is pulling a sled that has a huge weight on the end. At the beginning the pull is easy but the weight is being moved from the back end to the front end, making it more and more difficult to pull. At some point the weight is impossible to pull anymore and the tractor stops moving. So going deeper and deeper gets harder and harder until all builds will get killed out of progressing any further. Since Chris stated that the dungeon code allows for > 10K levels down it is a racer and elite challenge for leader board ranking and never to be completed. Players will push their build until it stops (dies out) or the player burns out.

We will have to play it to know how much harder each level down is to get an understanding of how deep the best builds can go.

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dunaskmey wrote:

we r heading towards the same death path of "d3".

Only a few meta builds can push the furthest > everyone changes to the meta coz only metas allows u to push furthest for better loot > No more build diversity.

This means the only differentiating factor between players would be mirror gear which is the same for d3.

Will we see primal gears for poe soon?

Except that the D3 design team gave set bonuses astronomical damage and damage reduction values compared to everything else - some of which only apply to certain skills - which further restricted an already bland set of options/builds to choose from. When you can toil away to collect 13 ancients for 1300% damage, or slap on a 6-piece set and get 5400% damage there isn't really a question of what you're going to do to progress.

PoE has some offending skills that for whatever reason GGG chooses to leave in states far and away better than others, but there's no reason they have to leave them that way. Big difference is that GGG is always actively working on their game while Blizz seems to have a temp or janitor checking in on theirs every 6-12 months.

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Mythkiller wrote:

Well the problem is, like Chris said, player retention.

Anyone who has played any league in the past knows that they are all ghost towns by month 2. There are basically 2 kinds of players (to overgeneralize)

1) Casual players who take their time through content and will probably not make it to the very endgame
2) Much more committed players (in terms of time) who will get their 40/40 or 36/0 or w/e league goal, beat the end game bosses and then quit

~Myth

I fit firmly in the first category and I'd possibly move into the second group if unlocking stuff on the atlas wasn't so tedious. But doing so will upset the people in group 2.

I'm really curious to see who sticks it out with Delve leaderboards. Will people that choose to spend their time racing to 100 be at a big disadvantage compared to those farming wealth during that time? Will popular streamers get gifted godly items by viewers? I guess it will be another reason for SSF leagues being the elite leaderboards.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

I think this content is for more than the 0.1%.

When it comes to providing endgame content for dedicated players who are getting bored and quitting leagues 2-5 weeks in etc, those people probably represent a large portion of the people who spend a lot of money supporting this game too.

Ive donated over $1k to this game, if you look at people who barely make it to endgame, how much are they donating? How many of them donate nothing? Im probably worth 100, maybe even 200 of them in business terms.

Mythkiller is right too, if were talking about people who are far from playing enough to explore the content already in the game why would u make more content for them? Its a waste of time. Its the same with new leagues, they are for long term players not new players. Everything is new and exciting for a new player, you could run a new league where nothing is new and they wouldnt even notice cause they have no concept of whats old. When theyre making new content its to cater to long term players, esp journeymen who get to endgame and potentially play for weeks or even months into a league, and thats fine because those are the people paying the bills.

In that quagmire of logic though, there's a premise that the reason you are "worth 100 of those people" is because all this content is made for people like yourself.

If the content was made to engage the people who aren't normally targeted by this content ..then they become more likely to spend money ..and then become like yourself. In that case, it makes more sense to cater to acquiring long time costumers, rather than to the long time customers you already have. As you so put it, there's already years of content made for folks like yourself that will immediately become available to new players once they reach that milestone ..which is essentially free content on GGG's viewpoint.

It works both ways ...but in a metric of play volume and potential for profit ...trying to get even a fraction of 99% of players to switch over is more value than making sure 100% of the 1% stick around. Even if GGG could only make 1% of each 99% group stick around with each new league mechanic ...that's a multiplicative increase in players each league ..rather than retaining the already stagnant 1% you've had for years.

You don't need all the money ...even some of it is better in the long run. And the sad truth is that as much as we giggle on the forums about how it's "fine" for not everyone to get their way, or for them to just disappear form the game ...the "1%" group could disappear as well ..and the game wouldn't lose a hitch so long as it was still bringing in new players into that bracket ( or lesser ones ).

In real world economics and practices ... companies don't fight to keep loyal consumers, they're already in the bag, they work to get new people into the fold.

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The question is, is GGG trying to get new players to stay in the game? Or are they happy with just the "whales" portion of the income? I'm sure someone like Chris is perfectly happy with only having 1% of the population he could have ...if those players have the same spending and expectations as he does; like being in a private golf club.

GGG obviously needs new players to feed currency and improperly priced items into the economy for the 1% of players to feed on, that's a given. But I don't see them caring about it more than that personally. Not for economic reasons ...but because that's the kind of "Men's Club" Chris wants to have.