Game is dropping like a stone

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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Moerlin#4140 wrote:

They're on holiday and the playerbase needs time to catch up to the rest of us who've been saying Endgame has some serious problems so they can give feedback too. Too soon to say the game is doomed.

Oh I can't wait for a big chunk of the playerbase to get to maps and see the endgame. It's gonna be more entertaining to watch than new years fireworks.

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z3mcneil#3966 wrote:

It's no surprise a lot of gamers have zero understanding of how business decisions are made so talking 'corpo lingo' isn't gonna work here. Please stop comparing apples to oranges, different genres, different target audiences, different business models. A lot of wishful thinking, instead of trying to interpret data.

The AAA RPG titles are single player, single time one-and-done experiences, your average Joe casual gamer merrily spends a couple of months, maybe even using cheats, to finally beat the game once and that's it, the idea of NG+ or starting a new character sound weird to them, like why would I do that I already beat the game. Even 2.5 years after release, just look at the steam achievements on what percentage of players beat Malenia or Elden Beast. Your Souls or AAA action game crowd typically hardly touch ARPGs or live-service games, poe and Diablo are looked down upon as inferior, 'not skill based' games made for nerds who like looking at a skill tree all day doing maths.

PoE's live service model is revolved around the core concept of infinite replayability, not infinite boring unrewarding grind or infinite punishment. Right now the game is not the former, it's much closer to the latter. The game is NOT built around the campaign, even if the campaign is the best part of the game (also, with a bigger budget, can we stop imitating Diablo 2 in so many ways and have some originality for once? The acts and settings are still so close to D2's that if PoE2 campaign is a dissertation, it wouldn't pass the plagarism check).

GGG themselves stated that the campaign should take about 40h (still too long for the seasonal multi-char model most veterans of the genre are used to) and endgame about 200h. So please stop comparing Elden Ring, which is much better, much harder, and for 90%+ players has no endgame, to poe2. In this regard, the endgame right now is failing quite badly. Unless you're no lifer, most people who have already reached endgame won't be able to stomach grinding maps for 200h, not even close. Most casuals haven't even reached the endgame yet, and since most of them don't check these forums, they'll be in for a nasty surprise when they get there.

Which is why PoE2's peak player dropoff from 500-600k at launch which was fantastic btw, to 400-420k which was still good, suddenly this week to 300-320k when other top live-service games are stable or getting a holiday boost is not a good sign. The holidays are a major BOOST to entertainment activities, travelling only impacts businesses significantly on the 24th. Christmas -> New Year is the biggest window for film box office for decades and it's traditionally the same for MMOs. Last weekend PoE2 still had 400-420k, there's no reason it should be at 300-320k now. You don't lose 200-300k or close to half the launch players in the first 3 weeks of your endgame heavy (as in 80% heavy, according to GGG themselves) live-service game when most people haven't reached endgame yet. This is paid EA not f2p, customers who have spent money on this EA in theory are more motivated to stay put until at least they feel they've gotten their money's worth. It's not the launch of a new poe1 season, we have a lot of data on how that goes in a 3 month period.

Pre-release there was a lot of hype, lots of fans expected a masterpiece that is 'the true D2 succeesor' like BG3 was to BG2, and were fully prepared to invest a lot of entertainment time to play this game. I was one of them, but I didn't spend nearly as much time playing poe2 as I thought. The more you put deliberate time wasting and unfairly punishing mechanisms in a game, the more people reject the idea and play less, it's basic human psychology.

And I must stress here, instead of some users spending a lot of valuable time arguing with others pointless in the FEEDBACK forum, all of you should go check out the 2 major magic find threads. Increased item rarity/magic find is SEVERELY BROKEN right now and is destroying this beta's in game economy for everone, this is a much more urgent issue. If you're in maps, you need to know this.

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Lord Pinkleton#8277 wrote:

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+1 to all the arguments in the original post.

Played Monk and Warrior. As expected, dying erasing everything on the location was the legit most dogshit part of doing acts. I'm not sure what idiot played souls games and thought THAT was the go to difficulty mechanic. This is NOT difficulty, it's tediousness.
This is even worse in maps. What idiot would waste their time in mapping and risk losing progress? Death? Map gone, xp gone, loot gone, waypoint gone and time wasted. That should be a demotion at GGG alone for that BS.

It's weird, cuz the gameplay is so damn fun as a monk, not to mention smooth and reactive. Monk is something I hope marauder and duelist will play like.

Oh yes, let's not forget trials. 1:1 anti melee mentality, outright insulting me as a player by wasting my time in the extremes. Sorry but why tf would I play a waste of time? I thought you want me to have fun in your game, not feel like I'm wasting time playing your game?

I'm not even sure they played any of the souls games because I feel like they don't understand any of the mechanics they seemingly are borrowing from them. Even in the Souls series, dying is frustrating but if you can make it back to where you died you're rewarded by getting your Souls back and if you're really struggling you sorta auto-overlevel the area slowly and you can always turn any souls you've collected directly into character power through upgrades or passive points and those can't be taken away from you.

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ConradN7#7540 wrote:

Yeah pretty much. It feels like they slapped in whatever they wanted without having any understanding of what makes souls games great. I feel like they hired amateurs from blizzard ngl

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z3mcneil#3966 wrote:

expected a masterpiece that is 'the true D2 succeesor' like BG3 was to BG2

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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ConradN7#7540 wrote:

Yeah pretty much. It feels like they slapped in whatever they wanted without having any understanding of what makes souls games great. I feel like they hired amateurs from blizzard ngl

Wouldn't be surprised if they did. Most of this game is full of questionable at best, and horrible design decisions that only remind me of certain WoW expansions like Shadowlands and BFA with how they got over-designed with too many systems that players hated lmao

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ConradN7#7540 wrote:

Yeah pretty much. It feels like they slapped in whatever they wanted without having any understanding of what makes souls games great. I feel like they hired amateurs from blizzard ngl

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drallcom3#6603 wrote:

GGG doesn't seem to understand that souls-like and loot progression don't mix well. Equip resists or a better weapon and suddenly the boss is super easy. Fail to do so and the boss is frustratingly hard. Souls-like only work with very flat progression. Even Elden Ring is only a soft souls-like, because you can just grind and overlevel (a reason why it's so popular).