3.14 Retention Rates

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Arrowneous wrote:

The only way to sell anything is by being logged in

"

Arrowneous wrote:

For me the problems of PoE came down to the fact that GGG only has a "one trick pony" game. I quit in the spring of 2019 after I had completed my only major quest of this game, to farm 27 Oni-Goroshi swords to match the 27 cards needed for getting an OG. I completed that grind and then lost all interest in this game. Here are my reasons.

1. As a very average player I have never liked the endgame super massive map grind past level 90. GGG scaled up the mountain climb to reach level 100 many times over the years as the "super racers" would reach level 100 in < 1 week (top fanatic players did this in 3 days by non-stop playing at league start).

2. As the new league mechanics added up over the years the complexity of this game exceeded my desire to learn them and leverage the ones that made it into the core game. That and GGG always made a league mechanic be at about 10% viability when it was added to the core game. Thus (for me) a fun league mechanic was only available (encountered) at about 10% of what it was during that league. This meant that in the hours played I could expect to only engage a specific mechanic from a previous league 1/10th as often. Thus, whatever the reward that I would receive took 10 times longer to achieve, another time grind extension to the already tiresome endgame grind.

3. A total failure of the ability to trade for all players! The only way to sell anything is by being logged in to receive and respond to a WTB message? Come on GGG, that's like using a homing pigeon to send messages to communicate in the 21st century! GGG's total failure to implement a real time buy/sell messaging system that didn't require being logged into PoE 24/7 to access is a total failure of trading. Trading was and is only for the no-lifer PoE junkies for the most part. Years back I posted suggesting that GGG code a smart phone app that would alert you of a WTB so you could have a real life and still be able to sell items without the need to be chained to your gaming rig logged into PoE to receive a WTB. That never happened so I never sold a single item and only bought very few items (spamming trade chat is super boring/frustrating).

4. "One trick pony" - GGG has coded PoE such that the level of difficulty is fixed and is not adjustable like other RPG games of this type like Diablo. This means that over time as more and more players raced to level 100 in the first week of league start the difficulty bar was raised, and raised, and raised some more until Chris and company got the quantity of level 100 builds to a low enough number in the first week of a new league. That is all fine and well for the top elite players who ask for "more harder please" all the time. But what of the +98% rest of the players. We were all killed off on the "trail of tears" (the ever increasing map grind to level up). GGG has no solution to this problem and never will.

5. 3 months from league to league = super buggy code. On the surface getting a new league every 3 months sounds fantastic as a player. But the cost of this is the reality that the new league is in a beta code state of development all the time, or worse (a few leagues I'd label the code as alpha). With so many flaws to deal with all the time this put a huge damper on the fun.

6. Similar to the bug problems of PoE were the constant performance problems. With such a short development cycle and the fact that GGG was a garage startup, PoE never had a proper game engine from the start. This "learn as you code" method of programming for PoE has created a fuggly mess of code that will never ever have any good performance on average computer hardware. I finally achieved acceptable frame rates when I upgraded to an 8 core HT Intel processor at 3.4 GHz and a Nvidia 1060 graphics card on Windows 10 Pro. Anything less and my frame rates plummeted at every turn. I had to skip Breach League entirely as getting near any breach caused my ATI video card to die (2 to 3 fps). Only shelling out for faster hardware would solve performance problems like this. Yet Diablo III and my other games played smoothly and well on that same hardware. Starting a game company on a shoe string budget has severe drawbacks, and it definitely showed with PoE's poor to bad performance.

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Revnaut wrote:

Just a PSA for the people using steamcharts as their data source.

Steamcharts does 2 things to make their charts very misleading.
1) They have daily data points for the past 3 months, and monthly data points for the rest.
2) They smooth their graph curves.

"

Arrowneous wrote:

For me the problems of PoE came down to the fact that GGG only has a "one trick pony" game. I quit in the spring of 2019 after I had completed my only major quest of this game, to farm 27 Oni-Goroshi swords to match the 27 cards needed for getting an OG. I completed that grind and then lost all interest in this game. Here are my reasons.

1. As a very average player I have never liked the endgame super massive map grind past level 90. GGG scaled up the mountain climb to reach level 100 many times over the years as the "super racers" would reach level 100 in < 1 week (top fanatic players did this in 3 days by non-stop playing at league start).

2. As the new league mechanics added up over the years the complexity of this game exceeded my desire to learn them and leverage the ones that made it into the core game. That and GGG always made a league mechanic be at about 10% viability when it was added to the core game. Thus (for me) a fun league mechanic was only available (encountered) at about 10% of what it was during that league. This meant that in the hours played I could expect to only engage a specific mechanic from a previous league 1/10th as often. Thus, whatever the reward that I would receive took 10 times longer to achieve, another time grind extension to the already tiresome endgame grind.

3. A total failure of the ability to trade for all players! The only way to sell anything is by being logged in to receive and respond to a WTB message? Come on GGG, that's like using a homing pigeon to send messages to communicate in the 21st century! GGG's total failure to implement a real time buy/sell messaging system that didn't require being logged into PoE 24/7 to access is a total failure of trading. Trading was and is only for the no-lifer PoE junkies for the most part. Years back I posted suggesting that GGG code a smart phone app that would alert you of a WTB so you could have a real life and still be able to sell items without the need to be chained to your gaming rig logged into PoE to receive a WTB. That never happened so I never sold a single item and only bought very few items (spamming trade chat is super boring/frustrating).

4. "One trick pony" - GGG has coded PoE such that the level of difficulty is fixed and is not adjustable like other RPG games of this type like Diablo. This means that over time as more and more players raced to level 100 in the first week of league start the difficulty bar was raised, and raised, and raised some more until Chris and company got the quantity of level 100 builds to a low enough number in the first week of a new league. That is all fine and well for the top elite players who ask for "more harder please" all the time. But what of the +98% rest of the players. We were all killed off on the "trail of tears" (the ever increasing map grind to level up). GGG has no solution to this problem and never will.

5. 3 months from league to league = super buggy code. On the surface getting a new league every 3 months sounds fantastic as a player. But the cost of this is the reality that the new league is in a beta code state of development all the time, or worse (a few leagues I'd label the code as alpha). With so many flaws to deal with all the time this put a huge damper on the fun.

6. Similar to the bug problems of PoE were the constant performance problems. With such a short development cycle and the fact that GGG was a garage startup, PoE never had a proper game engine from the start. This "learn as you code" method of programming for PoE has created a fuggly mess of code that will never ever have any good performance on average computer hardware. I finally achieved acceptable frame rates when I upgraded to an 8 core HT Intel processor at 3.4 GHz and a Nvidia 1060 graphics card on Windows 10 Pro. Anything less and my frame rates plummeted at every turn. I had to skip Breach League entirely as getting near any breach caused my ATI video card to die (2 to 3 fps). Only shelling out for faster hardware would solve performance problems like this. Yet Diablo III and my other games played smoothly and well on that same hardware. Starting a game company on a shoe string budget has severe drawbacks, and it definitely showed with PoE's poor to bad performance.

"

Xandharba wrote:

I even found less than 200 chaos in 100 maps (AL9, 160+/160)... In 1k maps I only found one time an uniq amulet worth 2.5 ex ...

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Xandharba wrote:

Most of the time I even finished all waves , rewards were craps.

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Xandharba wrote:

T15-16... 5 chaos ?! Rarely !