The Goodbye Thread (Scourge League)

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Cuberth wrote:

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Sarno wrote:

Usually if I get into a game much at all I’ll check out it’s forum.

Every time I do, I see some of Those™. You know the type, you’ve seen them yourself. They’ve posted hundreds of times. You can count on one hand the number of positive things they’ve said. They’re convinced there’s a silent majority which feels exactly how they do.

I always wonder… why? When it’s inescapably obvious they don’t care for the game in question, why do they frequent its forum? I’ve found games I wasn’t into, or used to enjoy but lost interest in. I didn’t write a goodbye post (much less several), I didn’t visit the game’s forum several times a week, I didn’t keep track of what the developers were up to. I left. I went elsewhere.

I’ve repeatedly seen this phenomenon and I really am curious. Is it out of habit? Are they struggling to accept the game just isn’t for them anymore? Have they not realised they don’t enjoy it, and haven’t for a long time? What inexorably leads them back on a near daily basis?

Some Path of Exile players believe it’s a trait uniquely found in this community, but that isn’t true. It plays out on games’ forums all over the web. I’ve never seen it on forums unrelated to gaming, but I suppose I can’t say authoritatively that it doesn’t occur in other types of community, too.

It's really simple, people used to love the game and the love faded. They come back for basic reasons a) have their love return, which is unlikely to happen. or b) to validate their leaving c) try to get others to feel how they feel (which really could just be another form of validation). I'm sure there are other outlier reasons not covered, but I would wager that covers most of it.

Doesn't seem that complicated of a phenomenon.

I guess what some people don't get is that others feel so strongly for a game - you called it love - as if it were a human or dear pet and not just that... a piece of software to kill some time. And actually, it baffles me as well.

Reasons why:

1. Well scourge league isn't worth playing at all I've just been playing standard because like what's the point of playing scourge when I don't use the mechanic.

2. Once again we have meta skills and 90% of the other gems are unusable. Also every ascendancy other than champion dies instantly so it's kinda boring for me. (Also kinda funny they added a toxic rain mtx huh?)

I'm not actually quitting but it's more like motivation to play. On a scale of 0-10 I'd say I'm about 2 or 3, where 0 is where I don't want to play at all.

So how many have left comparing to last league?

Strong lack of truly viable endgame builds/ascendancies most of which are builds I don't enjoy playing (traps, dots.)

Tree changes and masteries are interesting but a large amount of the masteries are gimmicky or niche, overall a decent change on paper but underwhelmingly executed and not filling in the gaps from the prior recent nerfs to clusters/tree/ascendancies/gems

I didn't play the last league so this was my first experience with the flask changes, I really do not like the added extra need to get high ilvl flask bases and sink alts + new orbs to get decent flasks. Like there isn't enough plates to spin already with building a character at league start. Was it really necessary to complicate normal flasks? I think the heavy handed nerfs to unique flasks were more than enough.

League mechanic was underwhelming to me. It fails at adding meaningful density to maps, the corruption system has too much variance to be anything except cheap bricked items for new players or more reddit karma farming "lol look at my 1/10000000 outcome/50 exalt sink gg item." Lack of desire to interact with the corruption system among most players makes the corrupted currencies worth basically nothing as drops. And above all even in non juiced low maps the encounters themselves are too dangerous for builds that don't have established and invested defensive layers (which is another massive problem in the current game, although I will say the changes to evasion and es are a step in the right direction to help break the armor and block stacking meta)

If the seasonal mechanic isn't enjoyable to me and there are no functional builds I like then I just don't see a reason to play.

So is this league performing better then last league?? Or do we see the same number of players at this stage?

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AT2105 wrote:

So is this league performing better then last league?? Or do we see the same number of players at this stage?

Stats time again? OK, so looking at the most recently completed day, being day 14 of the league and reviewing the previous 12 leagues (inclusive of Scourge), Scourge ranks as the 8th lowest in player volume at 64,571 while Ritual comes in at number one at 96,657. Last place was Blight at 38,957 which is an absolute stand out stinker at this point in the analysis.

Graphing the player volume data you can group Synthesis, Blight and Expedition in the lower group, Legion, Harvest, Heist, and Scourge in the middle group and Betrayal, Metamorph, Delirium, Ritual and Ultimatum in the upper group.

Now looking at the percentage decrease by day 14 from the launch point of the league and the performance varies somewhat. Scourge comes in at 11th worst performance with 57.09% loss of players and only just pipped at the post by Expedition with 57.12%. Metamorph was our best performer here for retention with 30.01% player loss and Betrayal not far off the mark at 32.11%.

Again, graphing the data allows us to visually identify three major groups with Expedition and Scourge being in the lowest retention group in the 57% range, Synthesis, Blight and Harvest in the middle group in the 48%-52% and Betrayal, Legion, Metamorph, Delirium, Heist, Ritual and Ultimatum being the higher group in the 30%-43%.

So there's two aspects at work here being:

1. how successful GGG were in attracting players to the new league to start with as obviously a higher starting point means you have a better chance of keeping player volumes high as the league progresses, and

2. how successful GGG were in retaining those players in the new league. That is, are players enjoying the game play?

So Scourge was a pretty good performer in attracting players to engage with the new league, but a large proportion of players have again not enjoyed the experience and have already abandoned the game.

There's probably not much point in looking any further into the stats now as the situation appears quite clear given the data and commentary. Once again a proportion of the player base are happy with the changes to the game and the League mechanism but again we have some significant polarisation with another large proportion of the player base not being engaged by the direction that GGG are taking the game.

As I said last league, there are ways for GGG to broaden the appeal of their game to keep both groups more engaged, but there appears to be some problems with either the desire or the capability of GGG to refine their strategy.

Edited to add the data table as I know some people will ask for it and it does make it easier to review things for yourself.

Player volumes
Betrayal 79730
Synthesis 53663
Legion 71957
Blight 38957
Metamorph 81156
Delirium 81643
Harvest 61863
Heist 72136
Ritual 96657
Ultimatum 88282
Expedition 49849
Scourge 64571

Player loss
Betrayal -32.11%
Synthesis -52.30%
Legion -37.07%
Blight -48.01%
Metamorph -30.01%
Delirium -38.78%
Harvest -51.17%
Heist -40.92%
Ritual -38.48%
Ultimatum -43.01%
Expedition -57.12%
Scourge -57.09%

Seems like CW's vision is surprisingly consistent when it comes to player retention.

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Sarno wrote:

Spoiler

Usually if I get into a game much at all I’ll check out it’s forum.

Every time I do, I see some of Those™. You know the type, you’ve seen them yourself. They’ve posted hundreds of times. You can count on one hand the number of positive things they’ve said. They’re convinced there’s a silent majority which feels exactly how they do.

I always wonder… why? When it’s inescapably obvious they don’t care for the game in question

Spoiler

, why do they frequent its forum? I’ve found games I wasn’t into, or used to enjoy but lost interest in. I didn’t write a goodbye post (much less several), I didn’t visit the game’s forum several times a week, I didn’t keep track of what the developers were up to. I left. I went elsewhere.

I’ve repeatedly seen this phenomenon and I really am curious. Is it out of habit? Are they struggling to accept the game just isn’t for them anymore? Have they not realised they don’t enjoy it, and haven’t for a long time? What inexorably leads them back on a near daily basis?

Some Path of Exile players believe it’s a trait uniquely found in this community, but that isn’t true. It plays out on games’ forums all over the web. I’ve never seen it on forums unrelated to gaming, but I suppose I can’t say authoritatively that it doesn’t occur in other types of community, too.

That, I am not so sure of. Probably, some of them are just trolling. But I belive most do care about the game (or rather, can't stop caring).

This game has the capacity to make players addicted to it.

Anechdotal as it is, I've had games that I enjoyed and, once I was done with them, I totally forgot about they existed. But there are other games, like in my case WoW, that had such a grip on me that stop playing it became a struggle. I can totally see the same thing happening with PoE.

I'm no psychologist, mind you. But I find proclamations like what TheIronBankofBraavos mentions in his "I'm going to quit smoking" example, pretty relatable with what you mention in gaming. I think it's more done for oneself ("See? I wrote it and said it out loud! Now I won't be able to back down"), than something directed towards other players or even devs (who we know, never read these forums).

Either way, my thoughts about why that happens is that while some could be trolls and others do say good bye and leave, most that do these things just can't break the (toxic) relation.

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QuiquePoE wrote:

This game has the capacity to make players addicted to it.

If they removed the downsides to league drops, I'd be all over it. It's difficult enough to get mods that synthesize with the item drops and throw in the harsh downside mods it makes the items useless 99% of the time.

Just remove the downsides and I think many players would jump back in. But we all know that's not gonna happen lol. They'll probably nerf drops even further rofl.

Are people still playing this league??