PoE for average players?

I am under no illusion that PoE is for average players. It has been many years ago but that ceased to be 5 years ago and to my surprise I hear Mark refer to average player multiple times during today's stream as if PoE was actively being developed with them in mind which of course isn't true, PoE is developed for the absolute top players. We are talking for the 1 in 100.000 players.

What GGG fails to understand or at least pretends not to understand is that the average players are out of the game in the first week of the game, at least the overwhelming majority anyway and are treating the players who are still playing after 1 month as the average but those are not the average, those are for the most part the extremely good players.

Now I will only leave a few notes for Mark (or anyone in GGG who wants to take a look at it anyway) so they have a little bit better understand of what an average player is and some very basic things that they need to hit in order to even cater to a minimal level to average players.

The average player does not have the skill to do pinnacle content, they would only ever try pinnacle content if it they had the kind of gear to over-compensate for it which would trivialise the fight. This is not to say that it should be easy for anyone to trivialise pinnacle content, just giving the idea of what would be needed for an average to engage with that kind of content which they will never because realistically speaking, an average player won't even farm 10 divines if they played for an entire month, let alone for the week they might play at best.

The average player doesn't gets to progress past yellow maps and in fact massively struggles with yellow maps because they don't have the gear to do better. This is a case where there is no skill to compensate for the difficulty the content presents and because the content is not valuable to run they can't get the gear they need.

The average players doesn't goes zoom zoom through the map, their flasks, even if automated won't be in effect the entire time because they are just not getting enough charges quickly enough as they have slow downs in which flasks are running but they are not gaining charges because they are not killing. That is to say they are not very efficient with their time and in fact their time per map is far, far higher than the good players.

This means average players are quiting for the simple reason that they cannot progress. A great deal of the problem is the flippers but GGG could have given alternative methods to have decent gear since crafting as is just doesn't works for the average player, it only works for the overwhelmingly rich players.

So I'll put here a few goals for GGG to try to archieve if they want to have average players actually play the game.

Average players should be able to aquire gear sufficiently good to run T16 maps back to back with very low investment because good drops are virutally inexistent prior to red maps and even then RNG plays a lot and juicing is not something average players can do because that once again increases difficulty and therefore increases gear requirements.

Improving the Atlas to run only T15/16 maps should not require difficulty boss fights because once again, there is a limit to their skill and there is a much bigger limitation to their gear.

Once these 2 things are taken care of, then average players can actually make some currency, that translates to improving gear which allows them to tackle stronger content but more importantly, with progression feeling possible, players will stay and play.

So good efforth Mark, but you are very off the mark (pun intended) as to where average players are at and what it takes to keep them playing. Once you archive making average players able to reliably get to T16 maps and clearing them so they can make currency, then you are in the correct path.

You should also consider making all playstyles viable. Melee is finally being significantly buffed but you know what has been dead for years? Spell totems. They can still work with archmage to some degree but playing with archmage is definitely not for average players. Maybe buff spell totems to the point where they are on the same level as other meta builds. Also give a pass to traps because with the exception we all know of, traps are kinda terrible too.

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Elhazzared wrote:

I am under no illusion that PoE is for average players. It has been many years ago but that ceased to be 5 years ago and to my surprise I hear Mark refer to average player multiple times during today's stream as if PoE was actively being developed with them in mind which of course isn't true, PoE is developed for the absolute top players. We are talking for the 1 in 100.000 players.

What GGG fails to understand or at least pretends not to understand is that the average players are out of the game in the first week of the game, at least the overwhelming majority anyway and are treating the players who are still playing after 1 month as the average but those are not the average, those are for the most part the extremely good players.

I don't disagree with your post in general but there's a lot more nuance to who quits when and who's done in the first week.

I'd wager the average player who likes POE and comes back is a lot like me they are more likely to be slow burn players or who simply have less free time or who are in less of a rush, they get some progress in week one and some in week 2 and might still be playing at the end of a league if its kept their attention and the phych out FOMO combo of the next league coming up hasn't demotivated them.

That week 1 spike that always falls off hard is almost all players who are just trying the league and finding it not for them.

Nice name btw lovecraft fan?

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alhazred70 wrote:

I don't disagree with your post in general but there's a lot more nuance to who quits when and who's done in the first week.

I'd wager the average player who likes POE and comes back is a lot like me they are more likely to be slow burn players or who simply have less free time or who are in less of a rush, they get some progress in week one and some in week 2 and might still be playing at the end of a league if its kept their attention and the phych out FOMO combo of the next league coming up hasn't demotivated them.

That week 1 spike that always falls off hard is almost all players who are just trying the league and finding it not for them.

Nice name btw lovecraft fan?

Has origins in HP Lovecraft yes, but that's is not where it comes directly no. I see yours is also after the same origin.

And it's true that there is more nuance but I am talking about it in general. most of the players that quit in the first week are the average player. They went to check it, see if the new league is any better and they have a chance to progress and when it just looks and feels the same, they quit.

Of course there are average players who play for much longer but the majory fall off in that first week and it's because they can't progress. They can't do higher tier maps cause the content is too hard for the build (no matter what build they play), they can't compensate with skill and because they are not making currency and all items are so absurdly expensive they have no chance to improve their gear. In a game where improving your gear is an extremely large part of the motivation to play, that is an issue.

Let me compare to the time prior to Delve. You get to mapping, you spend 10c on a tabula and around 10c in the rest of the build spending an average of 1 to 2c per item and you had what was called the starting mapping gear but the funny thing is that this gear was enough to do nearly all content except for pinnacle content (and you could even do pinnacle content with it if you were skilled enough but we're talking about average players. To give you a better idea, a pair of boots with 30% movement speed, 80+ life and triple res of at least 30% on each resistance (or double resistance and 50+ stat) would cost you 2 to 3c on day 3 of a league.

Back then you had about 50% player loss after a month because players could actually progress and get to a point where they farm red maps in which case they make currency.

Coming back to the present, you have 40 to 50% player loss in the first week alone and it's all down to average players being unable to progress.

I used to play every league, now I barely play half of the leagues myself and like most average players, I rarely even get to the 1 week of playing. In fact the last league I played I quit as soon as I hit maps. I had to look up items in the market, as usual they were overpriced to the point that it was impossible to even get the gear to start mapping and on top of that, the market is in such a bad spot that after looking up a couple items I lost all motivation to even keep searching broadning search paramenters and so on. It just became mentally exausting to even try because I already know the result and I'd rather quit.

This is what GGG needs to be looking at!

I suppose it depends on what you mean by average. I'm sure they have plenty of data to data mine and understand what average (mean) players are doing/experiencing.

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askreet wrote:

I suppose it depends on what you mean by average. I'm sure they have plenty of data to data mine and understand what average (mean) players are doing/experiencing.

I mean players of average skill. I also did frame a bit of what average like not using flasks and even with automation not really being able to keep them up permanently and so on.

Also the reason I posted this is because Mark talked about average players quite a bit or at least how this or that feature is good for the average player but he seemed to either not have a grasp on what is the average player or purposefully chose to pretend not to because the average player in the current state of PoE has no chance whatsoever to go anywhere.

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Elhazzared wrote:

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the average player in the current state of PoE has no chance whatsoever to go anywhere.

What do you have to support this statement beyond feeling? I spoke with a number of people in global chat today for whom 3.24 was their first league, asking questions about Maven fights. That's a fairly good turnout for your first league, I'd say.

Baselessly stating that Mark is choosing to ignore something you _feel_ to be the case isn't particularly constructive. Like I said, they have all the data to know who's making it how far - you have speculation.

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askreet wrote:

What do you have to support this statement beyond feeling? I spoke with a number of people in global chat today for whom 3.24 was their first league, asking questions about Maven fights. That's a fairly good turnout for your first league, I'd say.

Baselessly stating that Mark is choosing to ignore something you _feel_ to be the case isn't particularly constructive. Like I said, they have all the data to know who's making it how far - you have speculation.

New =/= average. A player can be new to a game but be rather good at it. As an example, I introduced a friend to PoE some years back and his first time playing he was significantly better than me in terms of skill. I had a better build than him back then so I generally did better but he played far, far better than me who had already been playing PoE for years.

While I can't say I saw every player that quit the league early play to know their skill level, I can say the same for GGG. They don't have data on that level and the reason they don't is because in order to have skill level data you need extensive records of how much they are dying per map, how long they take per maps and many other statistics, some of which I'm sure are not recorded like how often flasks are being used or how often temporary buffs are being activated. At best they'd have an idea of how much currency they make averagely per map as well as time, deaths and portals used. However that doesn't says everything because like I said, you need extensive data, not data from a day or two and most average players are quitting in the first week, they are being filtered out by the game's difficulty and the reason why it happens so quickly too is because most of these players are returning players, they come to try the new league and see it's the same as before and quit again.

This is also true for me although of course.

Also most people I know who have quit PoE permanently have done so for the same reasons. There is no chance to progress and the market is terrible both in how it makes prices innaccessible by the average player as well as by how bad it is to navigate with the whole direct trade (part of which is now changing for currency and stackable items).

I think it's also a great indicator how when starting map gear that cost you 10c (20c with tabula) and that was enough to actually do almost all content had so much better player retention. We're talking 50% loss in the first month vs now which is 50% in the first week. It would be unlikely that how expensive gear has become due to flippers and how hard content has become doesn't relates to players abandoning earlier.

If there are any " Average" Players here who are doubting their ability to reach endgame without tremendous time investment, I suggest you check out SRS Guardian. I was genuinely shocked raging spirits didn't get nerfed this patch and guardian is sort of a fire and forget, cruise control to pinnacle bosses ascendancy right now.

I just made a post suggesting exactly what we, the average players need:

A non-migratable SSF mode with good harvest fully in tact: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3531791

This would literally make PoE 100% more attractive and replayable for gamers with less time on hand and who dont want to compete in the early leage-craze.

Affliction set a record for player retention, so I'm not sure where this fear you have comes from. Besides, why do you even care about player retention? They keep setting peak player count records just about every league and 110k people watched GGG Live on twitch. Like, it's going swimmingly for GGG they'll be alright.