"What we're working on"
" Well, looking at the timeline: 3.15 - Expedition - went core 3.16 - Scourge - went core 3.17 - atlas tree is introduced, and no mechanic has gone core since What a coincidence :) | |
" Surely, because I believe their main focus has been PoE 2 this whole time. I'm not using it as excuse for bad leagues of saying that PoE 2 will fix all the problems and be some kind of savior - if anything I'm starting to have concerns that it will go Ruthless path. I'm just saying that it's pretty obvious that for quite some time now temporary leagues have absolutely not been their main focus, so I'm pretty surprised that they are trying to patch something at all. |
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"record numbers of players" is this really true? we just know this just from steam? i dont see how this league can be so popular.
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" Because of the D4 beta - a lot of ppl got hyped for D4,but that's not out yet, and PoE is a good fix for that | |
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Just a few random thoughts on this topic.
I'm not willing to cut GGG any slack when it comes to "but they are so busy with PoE 2.0". The reality is that this game is flush with cash so they can afford to put on extra staff to work on both products at once. They are not a tiny little garage Dev and haven't been for a very long time. The stats are very clear: highest launch day number of players ever, by a good margin. So the marketing dept is doing a bang up job. League proportion abandonment rate is on par with all the recent leagues since Expedition. Objectively this means that nothing has fundamentally changed with the problems inherent in the game. It's still incredibly hostile to new and casual players, and not necessarily because it's planned that way, but more because the balance of the game is just plain awful. For reference, Expedition launched almost 2 years ago. The game has had major problems for almost 2 years and this gives us a good piece of data to review. Nothing to do with the recent state of the game is accidental. This is absolutely deliberate and is very clearly where PoE 2.0 is going to be on launch day. The last five leagues at least are simply beta tests for what is going into 2.0, which is primarily why GGG don't care about current quality and why there is no "What we're working on". Effectively there is no PoE 1.0 anymore, you're just in an unannounced beta test. It's something I've now reconciled, the game I previously loved is long dead and is not coming back. Personally I find this very disappointing, particularly as a company with a more grand vision could have managed both at the same time and pleased twice the amount of players. So in summary, GGG do not care one iota that a significant proportion of players are not enjoying the game, they are making enough money and PoE 2.0 is where they are heading regardless of anyone or anything. |
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" The population has already dropped by more than half since launch. Just promotional buzzwords is all. The nerfs will continue until morale improves.
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" We got some helpful data from the league launch. GGG announced the highest number of concurrent players on launch day at 321,180. Steam recorded 211,637 so therefore approximately 65.9% of players are playing the game through the Steam client. (I'm excluding console players as I haven't seen any stats on that, but from comments it seems likely that the population is incredibly low). Now, it's possible that Steam and non-Steam players might behave slightly differently after day 1, perhaps one is a little more casual and might therefore abandon at a higher rate, but in the absence of any other data it is reasonable enough to assume that proportions remain relatively aligned. At the end of day 14, 51.1% of players that started the game are no longer playing. That's still 103,461 players on Steam which is more than any other league's day 14 total. Interestingly Ritual came close with 96,657 players at day 14. Quite a disparity in the state of the game between Crucible and Ritual I would say. So, either there is a very significant proportion of bots currently playing the game, or the marketing dept have hit their brief and attracted a larger proportion of the hardcore addictive player that can't let go of a game that psychologically abuses them. |
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" This pretty accurately explains how I've been feeling since Expedition. Still love PoE, but not as much as during the Ritual and Ultimatum times. But I've accepted that we are basically testing for the 'greater good' of the game, namely PoE 2. I just hope that the end result will be worth it. |
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