So 3.17 is now the league with the highest peak and worst retention in the history of POE

It's easy to blame new releases for "stealing" away players

https://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All

But the truth is that none is having fun and puts a game down, to go play something else

People stopped playing because they just weren't having fun

It's that simple

Now let's actually look at why

#1 - No new skills

For the biggest expansion of the year, absolutely zero new skills is a gigantic mistake

Even though GGG did buff many old or underused skills, it wasn't enough to bring many of them to usefulness and it was just the same builds with stronger numbers

New Skills = New Builds

New Builds = Main purpose of rerolling characters if you play SC

If the game doesn't encourage players to try new builds and reroll by introducing new things

There will be a massive drop off on retention

I was able to predict this the sec I saw no new skills in the patch notes


#2 - No content added

Let's see what did we actually get

Watch stones became a passive tree

Okay but that's not actually content

That's just changing a delivery system of modifying maps

What was the actual content?

2 New mini bosses and 2 "End game" bosses

All 4 of which introduced some new unique items, and a new influence type

However, these influence types don't blend with the old

Some builds found it usable, most did not

Most builds actually still strive for items with dual influence over the new eldritch/exarch implicits

New crafting orbs, but they only work on these new influenced items

So it didn't really introduce a new peak in terms of gearing, it actually took a step back

So these new influences are like a step in-between regular rares and going for double influenced items

I'm sure SOME builds found em more useful, but most endgame and high investment ones would gain more from old influence modifiers

Okay so what was the actual content again?

There wasn't any

#3 - League Mechanic

Arch Nemesis is further proof that GGG is still not learning from past mistakes

We needed spreadsheets and it was like metamorph and talisman mixed

The execution felt horrible

The amount of tediousness this league had was/is ridiculous

In the end most people got sick and tired of trying to farm up specific recipes and just began ignoring the league mechanic entirely

Which just made it feel like standard

-----------------------------------


So on the biggest launch of the year we got zero skills, no actual content, and the league mechanic was awful and tedious

Im seriously running out of HOPIUM for GGG to deliver

All this POE2 COPIUM is running dry

Years of poor releases now and all attributed to the fact that GGG is focusing on POE2

It seems we will continue to endure these small expansions and lame leagues until POE2

Which is obviously more than just a new campaign

Clearly GGG can draw hype and grab the attention of a ton of people to play day 1

But keeping people interested for longer than 2 weeks seems to be something GGG is getting WORSE at

I actually have been playing lost ark for most of this league as have most of my friends who play PoE though i've still made my way back to derp around in PoE as have some of the people in my group playing lostark, it has some pretty good skill variety for its classes and for a more casual player its probably an easy sell over PoE, It plays like league of legends and gives you a native movement skill.

League mechanics are expected to be a bit shallow when paired with core expansions or overhauls, it would be nice if they could leave the atlas alone and start building content around it instead... JUST LEAVE IT LIKE THIS PLEASE.

At this point you may have experienced LA, or seen some skill showcase videos.

PoE has so many abilities that....well....many turn out to be almost identical like Reave and Lacerate. Also, you FEEL about the same when trying out "different" skills, as most follow the same principle which is: Attack too fast and walk too fast and attack too fast again.
This is even more evident when using an HH, even Slam builds that should have a "slow" playstyle, become a wild rocket.

In LA (and even Diablo) you really notice the difference between the skills, not just visually, you feel this difference in your fingers and gameplay. PoE is extremely generic, most skills are "soulless" and uninspired.

No amount of tweaks and improvements is going to pull people away from the hype that came from Lost Ark and Elden Ring releasing one after the other.

We often tend to forget that GGG does absolutely nothing for marketing, meanwhile you have mega rich corporations like Amazon investing tons of money into their game and FromSoftware having a very loyal fanbase due to consistency in making (difficult) games that are overall stable and provide lasting entertainment.

This isn't the first time a league fell to the wayside because a more hyped game came out. Remember what happened to Harvest league? Last of Us 2 and Ghost of Tsushima owned that shit. Cyberpunk2077 still had peoples' attention during Ritual.

Does this game have issues? Sure, absolutely, but there's so much more going on outside of GGG's control that is affecting retention for PoE.

We see this exact same hysteria every league about OMG THE PLAYER NUMBERS ARE DROPPING, but it's never mattered to anyone who matters.

Why would GGG care about their least devoted players leaving? They never set out to make a casual-friendly game "for everyone." And as I've probably said over 100 times at this point, Path of Exile was specifically created to NOT be a casual-friendly game for everyone.

For me, the reason I tried and stopped this league was to see if they really walked back the 3.15/.16 nerfs and the terrible mapping game loop.

When I saw how badly my leaguestart did in t11 maps, I just bounced. I wasn't going to farm like 50 regrets to respec and level up my gems just to go through the atlas better, to see red maps and then respec again once my clusters rolled the correct mods, and then respec again because I was a scion, and needed to rotate my ascendancy. Sure I did that to myself, but the build was fun until the number wang became too burdensome.

That being said I enjoyed the random Atlas notables that aren't super meta, like the super hard vaal side area or duplicating rare monsters. I really like changes that don't just add monsters or monster damage to enemies, but makes them more challenging in fun and interesting ways.

POE is just too tedious for me to really get into because I understand what the game designers want players to do, the number grind just becomes pointless and upgrades just don't drop in any meaningful sense. The game wants players to experiment with their system, but doesn't really allow massive changes to a character to be done on the fly, and it should. Players really should be able to craft respec all points books, gem experience transfers, and other meaningful systems that have already existed in the past. Coloring gear shouldn't be a monumental task that just sucks, it is so arbitrary, especially ever since the defenses became more aura based than stat and tree based.

Sure trade balances that out, but most of the time the only people that answer small trade requests are the army of bots that keep the economy rolling. Even worse, a lot of builds have trouble finding the specific mods, items, corruptions that they need to be playable.

If they really wanted player retention they would make drops better, which would make trading more fun and profitable. Who wants to do 300 5 chaos trades when they could do like 5 300 chaos trades. Crafting just sucks and takes way to many clicks, but lets people play the game without trading.

the support nerfs in previous patches really hurt people who map on 4 and 5 links. 6 link items exist, but man are they super annoying to find naturally, or craft. To be perfectly honest, I didn't want to sit down and try and craft for like 4 hours the items I need to make to begin the endgame. Just spam clicking currency feels really bad to me. The support nerfs and other changes really gear more important and annoying to make, the margin of error is becoming to tight for how random the crafting system is.

At some point they really need to overhaul every old system that just doesn't work with the modern design of poe, and they are going to bleed players who might play for a weekend to see what is new until then. The game can be made more streamlined without adjusting the difficulty.

"

roundishcap wrote:

POE is just too tedious for me to really get into because I understand what the game designers want players to do, the number grind just becomes pointless and upgrades just don't drop in any meaningful sense.

If they really wanted player retention they would make drops better, which would make trading more fun and profitable.

the support nerfs in previous patches really hurt people who map on 4 and 5 links. 6 link items exist, but man are they super annoying to find naturally, or craft. To be perfectly honest, I didn't want to sit down and try and craft for like 4 hours the items I need to make to begin the endgame. Just spam clicking currency feels really bad to me. .

At some point they really need to overhaul every old system that just doesn't work with the modern design of poe, and they are going to bleed players who might play for a weekend to see what is new until then. The game can be made more streamlined without adjusting the difficulty.

What your describing is the effect an auction house has on games with fixed probabilities. GGG didn't want an AH but the players built one anyway forcing a change in drop rates.

I hope POE 2 will address a lot of these issues. GGG doesn't want to destroy what they have with POE.

as i see it, the downside of this league is, that it encourages you to invest massive game time to build up an event, do alot of planning to reap the rewards, and leaving the option for you to fail at that event.

like: people who played a week to be able to spawn some archnemesis monster and fail to kill it will quit the league if they see no reasonable/easy way to improve their char to beat that challenge.

...

also, poe got pretty annoying, you kill some boss or rare, then you have to get a beer cause the deadly ground effects are still there waiting to kill you and after the third boss you can't see your minions anymore.

or some flying shit follows and kills you, you get a beer out of frustration and just alt+f4 to bed :)

challenging game, you either like it or you don't

I've played more this league than all of last year. Haven't had this much fun in a long time. The Atlas rework and the Atlas passive tree was enough to make the endgame feel fresh and exciting. Changing the Atlas tree passives around every week or so let me set many goals like for example crafting all my gear in Harvest for the first time ever. Now I'm doing various mapping strategies and changing them as I feel. I'm your average player with not that much time to play. It's crazy to me how anyone who likes the game can have such negative feelings about this expansion and league. Maybe that's the problem, you're just not that much into the game anymore. It happens. I've moved on from various things in my life.

for me this is one of the best content and leaque patches in the last years.

just my 5 cent.