so lost ark was the poe killer

I get it. You're an Exile. You're used to dying quite suddenly with no real indication of how, which is understandably very frustrating, but that doesn't mean you have to impose cause and effect with every convenient coincidence.

And speaking as one of the very few Wolcen players left on the planet, 82k concurrent players is still a very impressive launch weekend for an ARPG league. In fact, HAVING leagues to launch that attract tens of thousands of players is very impressive for any ARPG these days.

Lost Ark is an MMO. It is not 'competition' for the ARPG PoE any more than any other Lifestyle game to which fed-up Exiles might flock given their dissatisfaction with PoE's direction.

And if it is, if a pretty, hot Korean MMO playacting as an ARPG can genuinely kill the most complicated, most hardcore ARPG, then all that tells us is that Exiles wanted a pretty, hot MMO all along -- just one they could pretend was still a complicated, hardcore ARPG. Which does make some sense to me: MMOs are MUCH better GAAS/Lifestyle games than ARPGs. There's a reason pretty much every element of the GAAS model has been cribbed from the MMO template.

Don't get me wrong. I very much do want PoE to die, and I don't want it to be due to self-inflicted wounds. I think a GAAS ARPG is an abomination, and have since day 1. I just thought that, well, if it had to exist, it might as well do so in the hands of these ridiculously intelligent, creative, passionate Kiwis (and one American, and one Swede).

We all know PoE's no longer in those hands (try as they might to make it seem otherwise -- 'we totally meant for 3.18 to deploy that hard, you didn't git gud Exiles, DISAPPOINTED.'). So it becomes that much easier to move on and play/support a game that might be more blatantly corporate/greedy/unethical BUT also delivers a much better product. A more enjoyable experience overall.

So while I also deeply dislike the models of Lost Ark and Genshin Impact and FFXIV and WoW and all those, as a player I can't deny they're all made and deployed with the player's needs and desires much more honestly than what PoE has become. They WANT you to keep playing and make no fucking attempt to hide that. Incentivising merely logging on and doing some daily tasks is built into the post-Western MMO (so no EQ, not UO, not DAoC) DNA. And that incentive has spread to all sorts of genres, triggering the gameplay loop itself in some cases (The Division 2, for example).

But PoE is stuck in the past in this regard: it doesn't incentivise regular play as pretty much every other GAAS/Lifestyle game does these days. It only punishes any sort of cessation of it, be it in the form of mechanics you need to keep up with or time limited support pack exclusives. That's kind of abusive when you think about it. It's kind of abusive even when you don't. Other GAAS also have that punitive angle, but it's tempered by the incentivising. Unhealthy as the GAAS model is, in that there is at least some form of balance.

And PoE's lack of incentivising was fine when the game was actually fun to play. We all have different ideas of that, different needs and desires as players, but I have to conclude IF Lost Ark or any other game can draw away enough Exiles for it to be noticeable, it has to be because those other games are more fun. Rewarding. Satisfying. Whatever adjective you choose to use for 'this is why I play this game over all others at this moment'.

BUT the moment GGG do start to lean towards the industry trend of actively incentivising logins and being more overtly interested in making the game 'fun', they'll get castigated for not being PoE anymore. Talk about a rock and a hard place...(a very comfortable niche, for the time being, but long-term PoE isn't looking too great right now).

What was GGG's strongest charm in their inception -- 'we don't want to be like other devs' -- has, I think, become one of their biggest weaknesses in their triumph -- 'we don't need to be like other devs'. What once seemed like ambition and hunger now seems to me much closer to self-satisfaction and smugness.

Other games don't need to 'kill' that. They can just do their own thing and let players decide if they want their particular flavour of GAAS, and to LA's credit, to all the games I mentioned credit, that's exactly what they do.

life was my poe killer.
i choose to no longer play because the game isn't condusive to my lifestyle. so, i don't. i play other games which i can enjoy on my own terms.

i could still play poe, maybe, like on standard and such, but the way the game is set up i would feel like it would take me weeks to feel any type of progression. much like how escape from tarkov went down the tubes for me. when i couldn't spend enough time on the game to feel progess or satisfaction, i stop playing.

doesn't mean the game is dead, nor does it matter, nor do i wish for the death of the game. but the game is dead for me because i don't and won't play it.

...Man, I'm genuinely glad for you. For all our differences and clashes, I'm always happy to see an Exile find peace and contentment in their gaming. Congrats on escaping Samsara.

x

LA is on a slow burn to zero too imo, or low numbers :p also not really much wrong with that if you love the game in a way its better.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

LA is on a slow burn to zero too imo, or low numbers :p also not really much wrong with that if you love the game in a way its better.

It has better tits. At the very least.

Thats what happend when you make your game even a little challenging. All the casual players just bail, and those are always majority.

More like POE is its own killer because this League is basically Expedition 2.0 in terms of balance, and Expedition also had noticeable player drops.

The games aren't even comparable.
The interest in LA is due to it's novelty. No matter how good it might be ir become, it's still an MMO, so unless the average POE player is also an MMO fan, I can't see LA killing POE.

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Networm13 wrote:

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Draegnarrr wrote:

LA is on a slow burn to zero too imo, or low numbers :p also not really much wrong with that if you love the game in a way its better.

It has better tits. At the very least.

Absolutely!