PoE for average players?
" I don't know whether it's naivete, or just a lack of effort you're putting in here, but every one of those actions is server-authoritative. Working in tech, I can say that if I were GGG I would record every single one of those things, both to data mine to understand my players better and to help catch/correct exploits, etc. During the GGG Live Q&A they talked about instances that produced 150k uniques being an unforeseen consequence, and the number of players that were able to achieve that undesired result, so they certainly do record some of this data. I mostly think all this concern about player retention is a manufactured non-problem. GGG's financials are rock solid, and they're making two of the best ARPGs on the market at a time when ARPGs are seeing a ton of market popularity. I'll reiterate my stance here: it's fine. Go play and have fun. For some anecdata on your specific concerns, my wife and a friend of mine are these sort of "average player" you're talking about - they don't want to understand how defenses layer or how to roll the best T16 maps, They'll either follow a guide blind or just wing it until they get bored. But, they're both super excited about the new league and can't wait to go play. There's a good chance my wife will buy yet another $30 supporter pack, again, and buy some stupid cosmetic space cat, and everyone wins. It's _okay_ that she doesn't stay to week 5 or beat Uber Maven, that was never going to be something she was interested in. Last edited by askreet#4736 on Jul 19, 2024, 8:02:16 AM
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" I've tried builds like that and the problem is still the same. It's the gear wall. The gear wall is lower if the skill is high but I'm talking about average players, not good players. To put things into perspective. Once you finish the campaign and you want to start mapping, I expect no less than 1 divine investment needed just for basic map starting gear. That is gear that covers your resistances, gives you a decent amount of HP, 30% movement speed boots, covers attribute requirements for leveling gems, and a cheap 6L (possibly a cheap weapon if you didn't find anything good enough during the leveling). @FluffyFractalshard That won't solve the issue. How many average players do you think are going to learn crafting with PoE actual state of crafting to make that work and even then how much time investment do you think they need? In fact how many average players do you even think can go from the campaign, straight into mapping without buying any gear? Harvest craft won't work. I played harvest league. I crafted a total of 0 items. Crating is not a solution until GGG says that we can multicraft 6 affixes into a base with no restrictions and even then the restrictions on some things like how much life or movement speed you can impart by crafting still make it not exactly viable. Crafting needs to be extremely simple to understand and it must be able to cheaply produce gear able to take players to T15/16 maps and clear those for that to be realistic and GGG doesn't seems inclined to do that. @askreet No it didn't! It set a record for RECENT player retention, not for player retention overall. You can't beat prior to delve player retention where like i said, 50% player base loss was something you saw after a month of playing, not after a week. in fact 1 week had no higher than 20% player loss. And why do I care? Because it affects me and many players like me. Players who are average at the game, who like the game but because of changes to the game saw themselves unable to play it and have fun with it. Because players like me invested a lot of time and money into the game and it's now basically in the trash. That's why I care. As for that Q&A test, do you know how they got to that? Either because they saw a vid of someone doing it and were like, welp, that is not intended or they were looking at data and saw spikes where the value of drops on a map was hundreds of times higher than normal which set off alarms and they started investigating, leading them to said vids or even to internally duplicate a character to test and see what was happening live. If you work in tech you understand that parsing data is important and that having every little bit of different data discriminated makes things unreadable. What you need is to look at certain parameters and then only look at more detailed information if the needs call for it. However if you are looking at spikes, you can look all the data cause it's a spike so there isn't too much information to read, but when we're talking about seeing how average players play, that is looking at hundreds of thousands of players data, you need it to always be fairly limited to a few parameters, you can't go into the nitty gritty or you will never be able top parse it. Player retention isn't a manufactured problem. You can debate whether it is a problem or not, but the fact that every league in the last 3 years has had 40 to 60% player loss in the first week alone is a fact and this never happened prior to delve. I have no doubt that GGG finances are in a good spot and I don't say this for their finances but rather for the health of the game. By virtue of being a game that heavily rellies on trading, the more players there are the better the health of the game is as there is more availabillity of everything. Granted flippers ruin the trade scene significantly for any average player. I don't know the skill level of your friends. Maybe they don't care to learn the deeper systems and maybe they have fun with the game as is but I'll tell you this much, if they can reach and play red maps no problem, they are not average players. If they are not hitting the gear wall at the yellow maps then they are definitely no average players. Lastly your stance to go play and have fun. I wish I could. That's the whole point of me making my original post to call Mark's attention that saying that they did this or that for average players is not real. Average players are being filtered by the gear wall far too early in the game and leaving the game before they have a chance to have fun with it. That gear wall needs to disapear. The gear wall should exist for harder side content that is more valuable, it should exist for pinnacle content but it should not exist for mapping and map related activties like for example expeditions or abyss. "The heavens burned
The stars cried out And under the ashes of infinity Hope, scarred and bleeding breathed it's last." |
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" Seriously, play SRS guardian. Your perception of this game will be completely transformed when you see how easy it can be. One divine to start maps? Try 5c to buy a pair of rings which will cover your resistances and that will get you deep into yellow maps on a four link. There is no gear wall because all of it is handled by your ascendancy. Sentinel of Radiance can clear map bosses by itself, and the holy relics you get in your cruel lab give you anger, wrath, and hatred for free which leaves you to reserve your mana on whatever you want (I recommend determination, tempest shield, and haste, but you do you. It genuinely doesn't matter). Time of Need from your merciless lab gives you the equivalent of twenty five percent life regen which is ridiculous, and it auto cleanses ailments from you every four seconds so you can't even be chain frozen. Oh, and did I mention that your sentinel of radiance automatically taunts everything that comes within a half screen of it, and while it's alive you take twenty eight percent less damage? It's a better version of Fortitude, which just got nerfed for being too strong. I genuinely do not know why nobody is playing guardian right now, ESPECIALLY if they self- identify as casual/average gamers. |
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I don't know, man, these curves all look pretty same-y to me.
 I'm seeing some of the more recent leagues starting with and retaining slightly more players, but only slightly. Could just be because ARPGs are in the zeitgeist these days, could be because they've been pretty fun (imo). I hear you about the gear wall - but I don't understand the proposed solution. Should T16 be easier? Should items drop better getting you to T16 faster? Then what, there's a wall for T17, is that the new complaint? I personally find it alright that the game is tough and you have to learn and adapt. It's not a game for everybody, and I personally believe that any game that tries to be for everybody ends up being for nobody. I think they are tackling some of the issue by making more builds generally viable, looking forward to building a melee character that doesn't have to try so hard to get to end of the atlas. |
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" I'll look into it. I know Ghazzy has a build for it. That being said just buying rings? Nah, When I reach maps I don't usually have the luck to find good gear, I really need to replace nearly every piece, there is no way around this. Bare minimum 80+ life and triple res on the 30% for each res is necessary (in some cases double res + a stat at 50+). But it certainly can't hurt to look at the build and see what I can do. @askreet The curves look the same but they are definitely not the same at all. 2 years ago I took the time to look into detail in steamDB and check every single league one by one, I looked at the number of players day 1, looked at the number of players day 8 and then day 30. Afte that I did the math to see the percentage of players lost and as I said, you had about 50% player loss after a month prior to delve. A few years later (since delve is where GGG started to remove player power aggressively) you had a ~50% player loss after 1 week. Also don't look at absolute numbers, those don't matter, we are looking at what is the percentage of players retained. As for how they could solve the gear wall. There are hundreds of ideas to tackle this that have been proposed over the years by players and I'm sure that GGG are more than capable of coming up with ways to allow players to overcome that. My issue with the current content difficulty is the bait and switch. When PoE originally launched, it was very hard and I was fine with that, it's a niche game for a niche audience. But GGG wanted to grow and they made the game easier so average players could also play it and have fun, Then they baited and switched back to the niche it originally was once a lot of people had already spent money which isn't right. This is even worse when Mark comes out during the presentation of the league saying things that they did for average players when he knows quite well that average players stand no chance whatsoever with the current difficulty PoE has due to the gear wall. "The heavens burned
The stars cried out And under the ashes of infinity Hope, scarred and bleeding breathed it's last." |
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I'm not convinced percentage is as useful as you think. Consider for a moment that each successive league is attracting more people simply because of rising popularity of similar games - people don't stick around, but that doesn't mean anything for your actual complaint. What you were worried about is the game not keeping "enough" people around throughout the league, yeah? Well, absolute numbers seem to convey a different experience.
I'm glad you went and looked at steam charts (which, while likely the majority of players, are having less impact over time with the rise of alternative stores), but when I brought another source of data, you've dismissed it pretty much out of hand. Did you happen to tabulate/graph any of your previous research for comparison - I'd be really interested to know if poedb is unreliable versus other sources. |
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" You may want to read up on some crafting, that's one way around this. I generally SSF my way through most of yellows before I get serious about trade, if I ever do. I don't know, overall, what your expectations are still. Should better gear have dropped, or should worse gear get you further into red maps on average builds? |
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" Percentage is by far the most useful statistic. It shows out of the people that started playing how many are sticking and how many are leaving. In absolute terms you have similar numbers, maybe a tiny growth but this is only apparent because it is not taking into account the people who played and left and you have to tabulate who is in vs who is out, not just who is in. As for why I used steamdb, it's not about reliability, it is just a place where I can easily go and fetch accurate data as well as sort easily sort it into the time periods I want to check. Of course steamdb is reliable, I wouldn't want to use an unreliable source but within what is reliable, it's is simple and convinient to use, that is all. I don't have screenshots of it but I'm sure you can easily go into delve or prior leagues and do the math. In fact you don't even need to do much math in order to see that there is magnitudes of difference in player retention. You can of course disagree that percentage is the correct metric to go by and prefer to stick to absolute numbers, that is a disagreement we're not really going to be able to come to a consensus. However it is a fact that more and more players are abandoning the league earlier, in fact so early that they hardly get to do much of the content and in my opinion it is because of the gear wall. As for crafting. I could read up but that is besides the point. Learning to craft alone is something that takes hundreds of hours in PoE because of how convoluted the system is and it is purposefully so. On top of that in order to know what to craft so you can profit from crafting it will take you similarly hundreds upon hundreds of hours until you start to understand each league in advance what will sell and what won't. I bring profit crafting up for a reason. If you want to craft for yourself and crafting is very expensive, you need to start by first making some bank and then start crafting relatively easy to craft stuff that sells well. Then you use that profit to make better items and sell and eventually you have your own stuff while still making a profit. Also what is profitable changes as the league goes along which also means that in order to take full advantage of profit crafting you need to be a good player so you get your starting working currency fast which again, is not really for average players. Crafting in PoE just isn't viable, not for average players. My expectations are simple. Early mapping gear should be extremely easy to obtain, whether it is by crafting, or buying from the market or by finding. It doesn't matters how, it should be so easy to obtain that realistically speaking, as soon as someone finishes the campaign they can instantly get the gear they need to start mapping and that gear should be good enough to do T15/16 maps by an averagely skilled player. Also said averagely skilled player shouldn't be having to do overly difficulty boss fights in order to turn the entire map into T15/16, that should be something that is taken for granted because this is the absolute bare minimum necessary to play and to progress. "The heavens burned
The stars cried out And under the ashes of infinity Hope, scarred and bleeding breathed it's last." |
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Not gonna comment on the player retention/league presence/time when players quit the league because that's a very vast topic that's way more complex than you're currently picturing it. The only thing I will point out on the matter is that you are overlooking the fact that most POE players have been playing for years. New leagues are fresh and fun (some more than others) but in the end you still go back to doing the exact same things you've been doing for the past 2-3-6-10 years. Older players get bored, have less time as they age up and this contributes greatly to retention, more so than anything else I'd say.
Everyone tends to think they are the average player, but that might not be the case. Anyway, the point of this post was to actually help you because I think you're very mistaken in regards to crafting. High end gear crafting is for pros, yes. But if you're just looking to craft gear that can take you through red maps and the normal bosses, it's very easy to get. It varies from build to build, but if you're playing something that's noob friendly/very viable (like SRS or EA and others you can easily find), you can get gear by simply doing the following: * For your armor slots (body, helm, boot, gloves) buy a good fractured base (top 1-2 tiers of armor/evasion/ES stats) with T1 either life or resists depending on price. T1 resists are stupid cheap, like couple C. Then you spam a few Essence of Greed (one is around 10c max) until you get a 3rd useful stat (either another resist, MS or something else you need). * Weapon is more complicated, if you have a divine you can buy something decent. If not, you can look up early crafting guides - this can also be done as described above (fractured + essence spam) * For rings/belts/amulet it really depends what you need but again you can craft something decent just by following the above method. This is how I get my early red map gear every league. I rarely buy until T16, and when I do it's mostly to avoid having to buy essences which used to be a chore (but thankfully will stop being so as of next league thanks to the currency market). If you need more detailed help on this, you can look up some youtube vids, or feel free to PM me and I'll be happy to help you. But honestly it is SO incredibly easy to get this kind of gear even if you are the unluckiest RNG-cursed person in the world. |
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Agree with Felix - I craft useful stuff for myself to make it through yellow maps, not "saleable" items. Those types of crafts require a ton of knowledge and a TON of currency, more than I've ever had, but they're absolutely not required for clearing T16s. It's the kind of optimization you need for ubers, etc.
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