Streamers started quitting in 3.14 ... But GGG was like hold my beer for 3.15

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

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clf59 wrote:

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Toaru_Majutsu_no_Index wrote:

Am I right to assume this patch isn't too popular?

With the emotionally stunted, lunatic fringe on Steam? Yes

Its all because reddit posting a thread brigading steam forums for negative reviews.

Nearly 500 negative reviews not long after the post went up, its pretty childish.

IIRC, that chart and the reviews becoming mixed is what the OP of that reddit thread was about in the first place, so you're mixing up cause and effect there. It's true that thread made a lot of redditors join in on rolling the ball down the hill, but the ball was already rolling before the thread went up, which is why the thread was made in the first place.

A lot of those negative reviews are coming from players with 2000+ hours in the game. One person has 18,000+ hours!!!

Doesn't Steam have protections against review bombing?

I would think they are legitimate if they haven't acted on them, no?

I remember Wolcen suffering the same after release. But those were hardly unjustified bad reviews. People might feel compelled to do the same with PoE now...

EDIT:

Quote from PC Gamer - March 15, 2019

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-takes-steps-against-steam-review-bombs/

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A 'review bomb' is a sudden influx of a large number of negative user reviews of a game, usually regardless of its actual quality, intended to discredit or punish its developer or publisher.

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"Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review bomb, we'll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer," Valve wrote. "The reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score calculation."

Off-topic content will include obvious things such as storefront changes and exclusive publishing deals, and also complaints that are related to, but not actually about, games, including the presence of DRM and changes to EULAs. Valve said the "general" Steam user doesn't really care about that sort of thing and so for most users, review scores are more accurate if those complaints are excluded—and users who do get into it at that level are often more willing to "dig a little deeper" before making their purchases.

I think they are legitimate complaints.

It's too bad really.

I kind of feel like GGG made a pretty big strategic error here.

The first mistake they made is that they didn't properly recognize that their recent success and subsequent drop was fueled by a global pandemic. Many people that under normal circumstances can only play casually or even not at all ended up playing a lot more. They in my opinion incorrectly attributed the recent drop off in activity before 3.15 to the state of the game in 3.14. They decided to take a sharp turn away from the way the game was played before because they simply failed to consider that maybe numbers were down because all around the world public life has been restarting. 6 months ago I spent 6-7 days a week behind my pc. Nowadays I am lucky if I have 2. It isn't poe specifically but gaming in general. You see the same trend in other genres.

The second mistake they made was the direction they chose and how heavily they decided to swing that hammer. The game allready took a lot of time to get to the end game. I played maybe 150 hours last league and never saw Maven. I am sure it's doable in that time frame but not if you want a laid back experience where you aren't counting how many seconds you spend in your hide-out and you interact with all content. I am 1300 hours deep in to POE so it's not like this is new to me. At the rate I am playing now I am not expecting to reach most endgame content despite plenty of experience. A lot of players that were playing now have less time to play and need more of it to get to where they would have been getting. In short this means that a lot of your players aren't really experiencing anything new. The most the can achieve is what would previously be part of the grind to get to the end game bosses and content. Something you have done over and over is now basically the finishing line.. No wonder many players are no longer interested.

The third and biggest mistake is how they clearly missed the opportunity to cater to different players with the upcoming release of POE2. POE may have been to fast paced as compared to their design philosophy but it appealed to quite a lot of players. We know that POE2 will be a step away from the fast paced POE gameplay and that is an luxury position to be in. They kind of decided to throw that away. They had the chance to have two games up simultaniously that could cater to different players' tastes. One being a fast paced full screen explosions, the other being slower and more tactile. Now they pushed POE in the direction of POE2 which basically means that they will mainly end up cannibalising their own playerbase as both games will give a similar experience.

I feel like the boardroom got this one quite wrong ( and I am still enjoying 3.15 so far just for reference. I just think they got their decision making very, very wrong )

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clf59 wrote:

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zakalwe55 wrote:

A lot of those negative reviews are coming from players with 2000+ hours in the game. One person has 18,000+ hours!!!

Define "a lot" and then compare it to the total number of players with similar tenures. I'll wait here until you're done.

Seems like majority of bad reviews are by players who actually play/played the game. Doesn't seem to be actual review bombing:

I'll list the top 35 negative reviews here:



These are the 35 FIRST negative reviews on steam. An absolute majority of the reviews are written by people who have played the game alot. This is critic by actual players, not spam accounts.

Maybe defining a lot is unecessary. Lets just say that a huge majority of negative reviews are written by people who're very familiar or experienced with the game.

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

Its funny because this is factually false and anyone can see that by going to twitch. LOL

whats hilarious is that YOU are actually wrong, OP is right. anecdotally, several of the streamers I usually watch around league starts arent even playing poe. factually, the hours watched in July for PoE on Twitch suffered the biggest percentage drop dating back to 2016. not only are people watching it less, fewer people are streaming it and whats worse, fewer people are playing it in general

https://twitchtracker.com/games/29307



literally nothing supports what you are arguing

Do Streamer alway right ? No , they are not god , they are human so they can make mistake too.
Do Streamer important to Games ? YES . Evenwhen streamer have't play the game but say the game is good , there will be toon of viewer listen and try the game .
Player base very important for PoE , low player base will make ex/chaos rate crazy ,items rarer>build weaker>game slower>item rarer>more player quit.

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gnarjay wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

Its funny because this is factually false and anyone can see that by going to twitch. LOL

whats hilarious is that YOU are actually wrong, OP is right. anecdotally, several of the streamers I usually watch around league starts arent even playing poe. factually, the hours watched in July for PoE on Twitch suffered the biggest percentage drop dating back to 2016. not only are people watching it less, fewer people are streaming it and whats worse, fewer people are playing it in general

https://twitchtracker.com/games/29307



literally nothing supports what you are arguing

Imagine not understanding numbers and using the same link i used.

Average viewer count is higher if not on par with all leagues. Viewer count goes up when people stream build creation and testing at the end of the league in the off time between league which accounts for the jump, viewer count goes back down as people begin playing the game themselves again.

Way to look at one number and come to a bullshit baseless conclusion. You can literally see that exact trend across the board every time for every league with a big jump pre-league followed by massive fall offs in watch time, yet VIEWER COUNT VIA CONCURRENT VIEWERS STAYS THE SAME WHICH IS WHAT MATTERS.

But please enlighten me to all the streamers who quit, just like reddit, making shit up saying people like ty ty and kirrp quit when tyty literally came back and is streaming the game regularly and the reason why kripp isnt is because he literally said hes spending the first week of release on path of exile then going to decide a schedule of potentially streaming path and hearthstone in rotation.

Every single streamer who has any impact whatsoever has not quit at all, quit making shit up.

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Deadandlivin wrote:

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clf59 wrote:

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zakalwe55 wrote:

A lot of those negative reviews are coming from players with 2000+ hours in the game. One person has 18,000+ hours!!!

Define "a lot" and then compare it to the total number of players with similar tenures. I'll wait here until you're done.

Seems like majority of bad reviews are by players who actually play/played the game. Doesn't seem to be actual review bombing:

I'll list the top 35 negative reviews here:

Spoiler

1. 2576 hours
2. 815 hours
3. 1245 hours
4. 10 680 hours
5. 727 hours
6. 1223 hours
7 3705 hours
8. 3149 hours
9. 803 hours
10. 3897 hours
11. 862 hours
12. 0.5 hours
13. 88.2 hours
14. 2215 hours
15. 3078 hours
16. 18 hours
17. 4363 hours
18. 41 hours
19. 1096 hours
20. 1908 hours
21. 3462 hours
22. 4.8 hours (PoEs own client)
23. 5506 hours
24. 211 hours
25. 551 hours
26. 4121 hours
27. 8.1 hours
28. 0.3 hours (PoEs own client)
29. 2728 hours
30. 1410 hours
31. 3578 hours
32. 1171 hours
33. 76 hours
34. 4188 hours
35. 5427 hours

These are the 35 FIRST negative reviews on steam. An absolute majority of the reviews are written by people who have played the game alot. This is critic by actual players, not spam accounts.

Maybe defining a lot is unecessary. Lets just say that a huge majority of negative reviews are written by people who're very familiar or experienced with the game.

I just eyeballed the review page and thought about 50% of the negative reviews were coming from players with thousands of hours in the game. 50% is "a lot" to me. Of course, there are players who think that 50% nerfs were a "slight" change. Also, those nerfs feels like 100%+ more grind to me. I don't think a 100% increase is "slight". I think it is "a lot".

The damage nerf isn't too bad if you are playing meta builds. A lot of my friends though are playing ssfhc, and well, all of them rerolled to sst or shield crush at some point.

Because getting life and defensive layers in hc did hurt those who were playing off meta skills enough to have only about 300-500k dps left, which generally speaking is playable albeit slow.
Until drox shows up and spawns flags faster than you can kill them.