What did POE learn from Lost Ark?

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Powertrip wrote:

I don't think they need to learn anything. GGG's success is already achievement unlocked. Went from couch programming to being bought by the larget game company in the world. What's there to learn anymore ?

Now it's just the bonus round, keep it going for as long as they can. Some (like me) may think their design principles are garbage, but clearly, enough people like it and play it to keep it successful.

I'd just like for them to go from 60k to 80k players to 1 million players.

Then POE gets expansions sooner, with 1 million players more.

Does GGG's mega business want that too? Theirs no mmorpg that retains good pop without my ideas, I know more than Blizzard & GW2 devs about mmorpg player retention.

Someday this week 1 mill more players. How many Lost Ark players never tried POE to begin with. Or have they? POE's with the big leagues now.

Then you say so what, they stay a niche game. Um niche? Their isn't a mmorpg to play right now for how many mmorpg'ers who don't play wow retail or final fantasy or gw2? Like what? 20 million mmorpg hobbiest not playing a mmorpg or 40 million not playing a mmorpg? How many? Probably 10 top tier trendy games have failed past few years or past 10 years. I don't really understand why they'd want to title poe as a niche arpg only anyways. If the market was booming with succesful new mmorpg's than okay. Yet it's not, theirs literally not a single good mmo. Heck even final fantasy plays like a watered down WoW with no skill tree. Lost Ark Failed. New World Failed.

Why is POE a niche game? Why? When getting the best praise by all pc gamers of YT. How is that niche? Literally top 10 pc game exposure for youtube. Or easily is, for ever trailer people review as well.

Planetside 2 devs would dream all day to get the exposure POE has gotten from Lazy Peon or Asmongold. 400k views here about POE, 400k another vid. Exposure left & right from mmorpg reviewers. Yet this isn't a mmorpg game, kinda rediculous at this time of the year. To say this has to stay arpg. Meanwhile have you seen the D4 feature list? A game not even releasing for 1.5 years, what is the poe team gonna add to poe, for the next 1.5 years?

Its funny how many people have said some statements like " POE is only a ARPG " & then many of these same people are going to go test D4 when it arrives & d4 is a arpg styled mmo. So many exiles are hypocrite's.

These same POE'ers who will play test D4, aren't going to see both games as entirely diff genre's. Maybe to a small degree yes, tho ultimately no. For sure new players won't see these 2 games as diff genre. Both games will play out with similar hero views. With nearly the same lvl battle gameplay. Wait to find out if the d4 skills are better or worst.

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Powertrip wrote:

I don't think they need to learn anything. GGG's success is already achievement unlocked. Went from couch programming to being bought by the larget game company in the world. What's there to learn anymore ?

Now it's just the bonus round, keep it going for as long as they can. Some (like me) may think their design principles are garbage, but clearly, enough people like it and play it to keep it successful.

"What's there to learn anymore ?", Asking your community before doing certain changes maybe?

We are not talking about a change that you say "I don't like it, but I can go with it", we are talking about something that literally changed the entire game, to the point of in some cases, making some melee builds completely useless to mobs due to the combination of modifiers, something as heavy as adding the mods of ArchNemesis to the rest of the monsters should be asked first, because a good league like Sentinel ended up not being as good as it should be due to this unique change.

If you want to make a change that has huge impact on the gameplay and it's not something new (like the Sentinels, that literally are the reason of being of the new league), you only have to create a custom league for 2-3 weeks and ask the community how they feel the changes rather than going full yolo, if good, go for it, if not, the rest of the game remains the same.

GGG only had to ask if the community liked the idea.

I've been playing Lost Arc for a month or two now.

What I like best about LA that needs to be added to PoE is the red ground effect telegraphing warning about the area being covered in the upcoming big monster attack. A wise gamer on this forum that plays a much greater variety of games than me says that this is common and expected now days.

What I like least about LA is the MMOG aspect. Now it is slightly fun when someone else is trying to kill the same trash monsters as me. It happens rarely and as I said they are only trash monsters. The tough fights are not in the MMOG arena. What is bad is that sometimes the game generates the trash monsters close to an area that the character is supposed to interact with something. So while doing the interacting a new monster is generated and the character is attacked and the interaction is interrupted and has to start all over again. To make matters worse sometimes two trash monster generating points are placed next to the thing that has to be interacted with. It can be frustrating.

Another bad thing about MMOG is that it makes it less immersive to have to just keep running past monsters and ignoring them. That is poor role playing. So MMOG mode is less fun, IMHO.

They learned they could be making 100 times more money if they turned this game into P2W crap like Lost Ark.
They just dont want to.

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Aynix wrote:

They learned they could be making 100 times more money if they turned this game into P2W crap like Lost Ark.
They just dont want to.

This.

For all what's wrong, POE devs actually still have some integrity. LA is a joke swipe environment.

This is why the niche, loyal followers who buys some stuff every league to chip in is what's important.

Even if you don't want to, POE you pretty much just fork out $30+ one time and you are set forever gameplay wise.

POE could have sold it's soul to go for the masses with quick pump and dump playership but they stuck to their guns and acknowledge the fanbase that's supporting them.

Honestly, there are not that many devs that are this transparent and close to their core ideals anymore. It's just so easy to make a game with a limited life cycle and do everything possible to milk players before you pump out another.

No-ones flawless, I've skipped quite a few POE seasons due to many reason but the devs are definitely worth supporting. You just can hear it in the interviews, there's enough honesty and integrity with little pandering.

Path of Exile is a Chris Wilson sandbox, it's his game therefore he only puts in what he wants, and what he wants seems to be trapped in 1998.

Anyone who doesn't develop Poe can see it's on it's final legs, still fun yes, but about to die.

So, to answer your question, nothing.

What they did learn is that you can make shallow, casual, cashgrab game and you will still have a lot of players as long as its pretty and well advertised.

I like how LA having a 264k concurrent player peak yesterday makes it a dead failure of a game while PoE is rocking 14k peaks.

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Aynix wrote:

They learned they could be making 100 times more money if they turned this game into P2W crap like Lost Ark.
They just dont want to.

I doubt it - PoE's entire gameplay model centers around temporary progression, which gets wiped every 3 months. That really doesn't combine with P2W, not to mention PoE core audience is heavily anti-P2W to begin with and the gameplay itself also spins around that.

If PoE introduced P2W stuff, it would enrage a large part of its current playerbase, making it stop spending the money it does now, and gain about zero new players because the game is heavily anti-casual to begin with.



Now, to the topic, what LA has shown is that sticking to one's core audience works even in the face of bad press. LA has been getting a metric shitton of slander and trashtalk, and now, five and half months after release, it's still among the most played games in its genre.

You mean the game where at least half of the in-game players are bots and the other half spams Steam forums daily about how the game is p2w cash-grab with time-gated content where you have to create 10 alts to progress faster than at a snail's speed?

I don't know. Maybe that the Westerners are not really fond of grindy Asian mobile like p2w cashgrabs like Koreans? That would be an excellent lesson for any game dev who's target market is outside Asia.

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esostaks wrote:

You mean the game where at least half of the in-game players are bots and the other half spams Steam forums daily about how the game is p2w cash-grab with time-gated content where you have to create 10 alts to progress faster than at a snail's speed?

I don't know. Maybe that the Westerners are not really fond of grindy Asian mobile like p2w cashgrabs like Koreans? That would be an excellent lesson for any game dev who's target market is outside Asia.

Just like this forum is full of people whining about PoE.

The thing about the bots is that you don't know how many there are. Might be half, might 5 %, might be 80 % - there really isn't a direct way to tell. And it's not like there aren't bots in all the other games, as visible in PoE sc trading.

But it's safe to assume that bots don't post on reddit or watch youtube videos, so going by that, reddit comments per day:
LA 2782 https://subredditstats.com/r/lostarkgame
FFXIV 2699 https://subredditstats.com/r/ffxiv
WoW 2617 https://subredditstats.com/r/wow
PoE 954 https://subredditstats.com/r/pathofexile

Youtube - views per last week + comments
LA 961k views 3882 comments https://steamspy.com/app/1599340
PoE 434k views 2975 comments https://steamspy.com/app/238960
FFXIV 30k views 241 comments https://steamspy.com/app/39210
No data for WoW because it's not on steam, hence steamspy doesn't aggregate the stats.

I know that haters need to keep hating because that's what they do, but LA's western release has been an absolutely massive success by every metric.