Why POE2 is dying

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

You're comparing a PoE league that got delayed and abandoned for 6 months then blah blah blah

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

Yes. It is dying. Can it come back? Sure!

Does that mean GGG shouldn't deeply care why hundreds of thousands of players that paid for access are quitting?
Of course not.

Disclaimer:

I already know a few elite GGG bootlickers will spam this comment section telling me I don't understand charts or numbers, that its "normal", or "everything is fine", or "play something else -stop whining".
Let them. It's all they do, all the time, and we can't stop it.


Firstly I'd like to say there are lots of positives about POE2, and it could have a decent foundation for a great game in the future. I'm not here to talk about those, however.

Problems:
1. Ascendancies are bottlenecked behind bad mechanics and RNG
2. Crafting is meaningless and random
3. Magic find ruined the economy completely, you are now either rich or poor
4. Maps and areas are way too big
5. Melee is dead, it feels clonky, bad, slow, and punishing
6. T1-T10 maps feels pointless and has little or no rewards
7. Endgame is a one-shot fest unless you run a meta 15k energy shield build
8. Armor is effectively pointless when it comes to mitigate dying
9. Building life builds are punished heavily, ES builds rewarded heavily
10. Build diversity bricked due to all the problems above
11. Campaign too long to incentivize multiple runs/leagues for most people
12. Death penalties makes no sense in normal game mode
13. Bosses too scarce in endgame

My conclusion? The game was dropped at least 6 months prematurely. A closed beta until mid 2025 should have been done. But that ship sailed.

Fast fixes:
Release ascendancy points throughout the campaign for now. Incentivize most players possible to engage with and try the content for EA purposes, and work towards a FAIR and non-RNG based trial with the full release.

Make exalted orbs the most common currency. It will still make crafting pure chance, but until the whole system is reworked, at least people will have a chance of trying to craft items. It is dead as of now.

Armor scaling have to flatly mitigate damage -but cap the total max mitigation. At least until you can fine-tune the balance. As of now armor builds are dead.

Increase animation time and attack speed of most warrior skills by a lot. At least until armor and life builds are fixed to become ACTUALLY tanky.

The passive tree have about 50 energy shield nodes and 3 life nodes. Considering life builds are the common melee characters, this is literally opposite of what would seem normal. I'm not even sure there is an easy fix here.

Remove XP penalty on death. This is a no brainer. Getting to 100 is hard enough as is. At least until all content is balanced. Stop the 1 death map bricking too. It makes no sense for a normal game mode.

Make teleportation map markers in maps too, until you can scale them better.
All maps should have a boss -bosses are among the best features of POE2, don't remove them from players.

Remove all magic find on gear, and boost MF with 50% as base.

Reward players for doing T1-T10 maps much better. Increase drop rates, increase waystones. Make it much easier to get 4 and 5 linked skills, at least in EA where you would think GGG want to playtest as much as possible.

You could do all this fairly easily and the overall experience for 90% of the player base would be better.
YES, I know there are some elite get good gamers that don't wont anyone but them to enjoy the game, but give them ruthless mode, and we can stop having to argue with them all the time.

What I would do?
Announce a rollback and restart servers 1. February. Until then, remove death penalties, give out ascendancy points in campaign, and increase drops by at least 100%.Let players go bananas for a month, really trying out builds and the full extent of the game.
GGG buys themselves a full month to dig deeper into fixing more problems, while making the game accessible until then.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

And for anyone who thinks the game "isn't dying", it slowly is.

See that little "Avg. Players" number? Since launch that has been consistently and only going down. Never going up. So people are leaving the game, for one reason or another. And they're leaving this early. When they paid 30$ to play it.The game having a peak only about a few days into EA is really really bad. This tells you that the peak was mostly just hype generated from twitch and content creators.They are leaving before even reaching the endgame which is what is supposed to keep you as a long-time player in this type of game. This should be extremely concerning to GGG and to anyone who wants this game to succeed. I know people will still disagree, but that's because they aren't looking at this game as a seasonal live-service f2p one, but as a "one-time purchase" one playthrough triple A title which it isn't and never will be.

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Ashyev#5110 wrote:

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

You're comparing a PoE league that got delayed and abandoned for 6 months then blah blah blah

Nice copium , what happened with player retention on the last league occurred every single league for all of this game existence

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Nyon#6673 wrote:

Unfortunetly you dont understand how game releases work.

When an early acces launch has such a huge success that they reach almost 600k players on the first day, and then go into winter holiday where alot of people are away from home and playing less or not at all, there is no universe where the number of players arent going to be less.

Please provide one example of a game launch that looks different.

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

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Toaru_Majutsu_no_Index#1288 wrote:

Spark light weaver since day 1, done with all content, currently making my sanguinist work

So you just casually runs a build that contends with all the current upsides of the game release and very few of the downsides, and you response is "don't change anything".
Great stuff.

Go roll a warrior and play melee, and come back to me.

I could have even advocated to nerf ES builds, but I didn't, I'd rather they fix life and melee.
You've got it good. A lot of people didn't go meta spark meta ES.
But I guess you presume we all play your build?

I presume you also play 5+ hours a day, and good the upside of the economy.
Try broadening your perspective.