POE just had it's 3rd biggest launch EVER! This forum be like "game is ded".

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brunowa wrote:

This forum is hilarious.

Literally, EVERY LEAGUE without fail this forum is swarmed with "game is ded", "GGG don't know what they're doing", "goodbye threads".

The reality is that POE just had it's 3rd largest league launch in its history... And that was WITHOUT any new end game content added.

The game continues to thrive.

Sure, have your opinion that you don't like how things get nerfed, but that's POE and it has happened every league without fail for 8 years.

The good news is, GGG won't listen to you AND they will continue to thrive and smash 200,000 concurrent players soon (steam alone).

So complain all you want, but you're missing reality and it won't make a difference.

This game is a BEAST that will only continue to thrive, regardless of what you might say or think.

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Aldora_the_Summoner wrote:

I think it's helpful to separate the hyperbole from the genuine well articulated concerns. If you only look at the extreme opinions (e.g. Game is Dead versus The best Game Ever) you will always find something to suit a particular narrative.

No, the game is not dead but I would contend that it has a worrying trend right now.

Let's establish some basic points to help paint the picture. PoE is free to play and generates revenue from players voluntarily purchasing MTX or some useful character attributes. It's reasonable to assume that most people will have played the game for a period of time before purchasing anything. Players who have a rewarding time are more likely to stay engaged, and therefore more likely to spend money.

So if you are GGG, your financial goals are aligned to player attraction and player engagement. Ultimately you want to attract more players of the demographic that are likely to convert to paying customers and you want to retain them in the game for as long as reasonable.

We have good historical information that clearly shows player numbers spike on the first weekend of a new league and then gradually decrease over the length of the league with minor upticks each weekend.

As the OP pointed out, 3.16 is the third highest player numbers on league launch behind Ritual and Ultimatum respectively. That's good news for GGG, particularly after the terrible (and arguably justified) press the game received for 3.15.

Now we get to the second part of the equation though, player retention. I've found that the 9 day period from launch to be a good review point as it provides two full weekends to compare and see how many players seem to be enjoying the game and are keen to come back for a successive weekend.

I think it likely that a lot of players will only buy MTX if they're going to play the game for at least more than a week. I suspect that payment behaviour might have changed recently too as a lot of regular players would stump up for a league pack before the league actually started, but there's been a lot of topics recently where players appear to be more wary about the quality before they engage with GGG.

So back to retention and this part is the trend that I find concerning. Comparing to the previous six leagues (Delirium, Harvest, Heist, Ritual, Ultimatum and Expedition), the abandonment percentage rate for Scourge is the second highest at 42.4%, right behind Expedition at 46.2% with Harvest running a close third at 37.2%.

The other listed leagues tended to lose players at around 20% - 25%. This would seem to indicate that players of the other leagues found the game to be generally engaging and encouraged them to come back and play. As we've already established, players that enjoy the game and are engaged are more likely to pay GGG.

Even though Scourge started with the third highest launch volumes, the abandonment rate is so high that as of the following weekend they had the third lowest player count (for the last seven leagues) at that comparative time point with a little under 87,000 players. Harvest had just under 80,000 and Expedition had under 63,000.

Comparatively Delirium, Heist, Ritual and Ultimatum had just under 100,000, 93,000, 125,000 and just over 116,000 respectively.

We know that GGG's revenues were not great last league. I doubt that we'll get any real insight into them this league but I suspect that while they might be better, they won't be at the levels of more recent leagues prior to the massive changes from 3.15.

There is more than enough information including data and anecdotal commentary to clearly demonstrate that the recent changes to the game by GGG are unpopular with a significant portion of the player base. This is not just launching a league that doesn't resonate with everyone, or the tweaking of a mechanic or build, there's been plenty of those over the years. I would contend there is sufficient information to establish that the change in direction that GGG are making has some significant risk in it.

I think it's worth pointing out too that people are voicing their disappointment not because they think PoE is awful, they're upset because something they previously enjoyed is now objectively in a less enjoyable state and they would like to see things improve.

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trixxar wrote:

Chris is wrong, and the numbers prove it. Harvest should have been tweaked (like you find better crafts in T16, not T11) and made things account bound, and his explanation against that makes zero sense.

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Aynix wrote:

Bounding items is the worst mechanic ever and if they will ever add it to the PoE, it will be day that I leave PoE for good.