Patch Strategy is off

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Xzorn#7046 wrote:

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

I rather like PoE2's patch strategy.

Comparing PoE to Warframe is not really all that straightforward. The two games have a very different core gameplay loop and revenue model. Warframe is an endless game-as-a-service where people never restart from scratch; the idea is to provide endless new gear to grind and endlessly drop in new pieces of content that might or might not need grinding for new gear.

The comparison was in relation to frequency of patch and updates. Yes the gameplay loop influences player retention but this person over here only quoting peak player numbers while ignoring that often the average is 30% of that is just silly.

In the end I was just trying to get the point across that players tend to like frequent updates over huge lull periods and as the developer you risk losing them to other games. It's not hard.

I guess it is though since somehow these others don't know what beta development phase is.
There's games I've gotten EA for just to name snipe too. The term means nothing.

Boy oh boy, how funny it is seeing you just completely ignore me, because you know you're not having any idea what you're talking about, and your comparisons don't make any sense at all.

Thanks for proving that.

Have fun with your failing indie-game, you sweet, sweet "developer".

El. oh. él.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

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Xzorn#7046 wrote:

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

I rather like PoE2's patch strategy.

Comparing PoE to Warframe is not really all that straightforward. The two games have a very different core gameplay loop and revenue model. Warframe is an endless game-as-a-service where people never restart from scratch; the idea is to provide endless new gear to grind and endlessly drop in new pieces of content that might or might not need grinding for new gear.

The comparison was in relation to frequency of patch and updates. Yes the gameplay loop influences player retention but this person over here only quoting peak player numbers while ignoring that often the average is 30% of that is just silly.

In the end I was just trying to get the point across that players tend to like frequent updates over huge lull periods and as the developer you risk losing them to other games. It's not hard.

I guess it is though since somehow these others don't know what beta development phase is.
There's games I've gotten EA for just to name snipe too. The term means nothing.

Completely agree with everything you said. Dropping to less than 20k from 300k+ and shrugging it off with a "it's a seasonal game" is nuts

PoE1 has the same sort of a content cycle; does that mean that PoE1's strategy has also been "nuts"? The main difference is really just that PoE1 tended to have a 3 month cadence; which PoE2 might eventually go for too, once it's further in development.

There's always tradeoffs in how you do these sort of things. More frequent content patches means a smaller bang for a league start and fewer players hopping in at the league start. It also means that it is a bit harder for players to follow the state of change.

I also did not at all ignore that the average player count is lower than the peaks. Vice versa. I specifically pointed out that it is really just proof that the approach GGG has chosen works as intended. One can of course argue if that is a good approach - IMO, it is. I would also point out that PoE1 and PoE2 are the most played Diablo-like ARPGs - potentially after D4, hard to say - so obviously the chosen approach can't be horribly wrong.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

The idea of a cycle between poe1 and poe2 so that you're always playing one of them each 2 months also barely makes any sense. Considering poe2 peak had at least 2x the number of players than poe1 peak even though it's still beta, you can safely say at least half poe2 players don't give a shit about poe1 and aren't going to play it

I don't play PoE1 either anymore - far as I can tell, that strategy is simply to accommodate the PoE1 playerbase, a large part of which have been fairly loyal long-time players and revenue bringers of GGG.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

So you leave half of your playerbase in a limbo for two entire months, maybe three months with a game full of performance issues, unbalanced mess, bug hell. Of course player numbers are going to drop massively instead of averaging a decent amount until next league

Why would that happen in PoE2 when it didn't in PoE1? It's really a super common pattern in ARPGs that the player counts go up and down between major content updates. Last Epoch has had that even stronger than PoE. Grim Dawn had it too. Even Warframe, which is heavily focused on the game-as-a-service concept and on infinite grinding and trickles out smaller content updates between major updates, loses half its players two months after a major content update. Less drastic drop than PoE1/2 for sure, but a drastically different game design.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

This might get better once we have a real endgame, but when players feel like the game is abandoned while the devs work on something else that they don't care about...

This is the one thing I really wonder about the most here - why's 4 months felt to be such a long time that it makes you think a game is abandoned?

4 months is a fairly short time for making major features and content updates to a video game. And this isn't even a particularly rare or slow cadence. Grim Dawn for example had three major content patches in 2018. Then it had a huge year in 2019, and then went back to three major content patches in 2020.

Many MMORPGs do about four content releases a year. GW2 for example. ESO moved to a seasonal model from an annual large content update. IMO that was a mistake.

They do do smaller patches more frequently than PoE2 as well, usually to fix bugs or balance issues, but PoE1/2 also do bug fix patches and again, balance patches mid-league have not been generally been all that well welcomed.

I'm also by the way fairly sure that the majority of developers, designers and artists don't switch between developing PoE1 and PoE2. That you don't see frequent patches or announcements doesn't mean there's no development being done.

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quarki#9020 wrote:

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Xzorn#7046 wrote:

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

I rather like PoE2's patch strategy.

Comparing PoE to Warframe is not really all that straightforward. The two games have a very different core gameplay loop and revenue model. Warframe is an endless game-as-a-service where people never restart from scratch; the idea is to provide endless new gear to grind and endlessly drop in new pieces of content that might or might not need grinding for new gear.

The comparison was in relation to frequency of patch and updates. Yes the gameplay loop influences player retention but this person over here only quoting peak player numbers while ignoring that often the average is 30% of that is just silly.

In the end I was just trying to get the point across that players tend to like frequent updates over huge lull periods and as the developer you risk losing them to other games. It's not hard.

I guess it is though since somehow these others don't know what beta development phase is.
There's games I've gotten EA for just to name snipe too. The term means nothing.

Boy oh boy, how funny it is seeing you just completely ignore me, because you know you're not having any idea what you're talking about, and your comparisons don't make any sense at all.

Thanks for proving that.

Have fun with your failing indie-game, you sweet, sweet "developer".

That's rather unwarranted for tbh.

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

I also did not at all ignore that the average player count is lower than the peaks. Vice versa. I specifically pointed out that it is really just proof that the approach GGG has chosen works as intended. One can of course argue if that is a good approach - IMO, it is. I would also point out that PoE1 and PoE2 are the most played Diablo-like ARPGs - potentially after D4, hard to say - so obviously the chosen approach can't be horribly wrong.

You're completely missing the point. No one is talking about a lower average player count. This isn't average drop in player count, it's going from 350k to less than 20k. This is their model, it's indeed working as intended, but instead of thinking of mitigating this drop of players you accept as normal

Obviously no one is expecting that a live service game based on seasonal content would keep a steady 300k throughout the entire 4 months, but with constant patches you could at the very least keep the game with a healthy economy because you still have players that are playing the game after a month of league launch

Let alone the fact that poe2 is far from a finished game, I'm not going to talk about performance and other stuff, just the list of bugs is long enough that getting 10 bugs fixed in 3 months is like a drop of water in a sea. What we get is 100 bugs fixed in the fourth month, instead of 10 bugs fixed every week

To name one, it has been over a month already and one of the main parts of the game, the ritual tablets, don't even drop. How badly do you think this affects the players who still want to play the game? How about new players?

Maybe some people think new players don't exist, there's no reason to care about what they get after the league is done after first month

I have to say though, thank god for async trade because the game would be unplayable without it and is the only reason the league is still somewhat alive. I sincerely doubt we would have even 10k players if async trade wasn't implemented in 0.3. This just goes to show that their old model maybe isn't as perfect as you think, though

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

Last Epoch has had that even stronger than PoE.

You mean the game that declared bankruptcy?

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

Grim Dawn had it too.

You mean the game no one ever heard about and the ones who did never bothered playing again instead of going back for another season?

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

Many MMORPGs do about four content releases a year. GW2 for example. ESO moved to a seasonal model from an annual large content update. IMO that was a mistake.

Both games are on life support

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

You're completely missing the point. No one is talking about a lower average player count. This isn't average drop in player count, it's going from 350k to less than 20k. This is their model, it's indeed working as intended, but instead of thinking of mitigating this drop of players you accept as normal

I don't think it's normal or abnormal. It just is.

What I just don't think is true is that it needed changing, given that the changes have their own drawbacks.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

Obviously no one is expecting that a live service game based on seasonal content would keep a steady 300k throughout the entire 4 months, but with constant patches you could at the very least keep the game with a healthy economy because you still have players that are playing the game after a month of league launch

And you'd risk that the league start has fewer players joining it, making that less exciting.

Ofc one can see that the risk is minimal and worth taking.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

Last Epoch has had that even stronger than PoE.

You mean the game that declared bankruptcy?

I mean as an example of a modern ARPG. I'm also not aware of its studio declaring bankruptcy. I am aware of the developer being acquired by Krafton.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

Grim Dawn had it too.

You mean the game no one ever heard about and the ones who did never bothered playing again instead of going back for another season?

I mean as an example of a fairly modern ARPG, that is very well known and respected in the ARPG scene as one of the best ARPGs of its time.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

Many MMORPGs do about four content releases a year. GW2 for example. ESO moved to a seasonal model from an annual large content update. IMO that was a mistake.

Both games are on life support

No they aren't.

GW2 had its 5th highest revenue in 2024 and just released its 6th expansion a few days ago. It's had a drop in players this year for sure, but mmo-pop estimates that today it has had 80k players. That's pretty healthy for a traditional MMORPG.

ESO's estimated daily players for today stands at 180k and there's new content regularly.

This is one of those things that the modern silly hype culture has created.. A perception that unless a game is literally in like top 10 most played games in the world, it is dead and pointless and the devs must have been wrong.

And if a game doesn't keep pushing in new content at least monthly, preferably every few weeks ago, a bunch of people will think that now it's abandoned.

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

PoE1 has the same sort of a content cycle; does that mean that PoE1's strategy has also been "nuts"? The main difference is really just that PoE1 tended to have a 3 month cadence; which PoE2 might eventually go for too, once it's further in development.

There's always tradeoffs in how you do these sort of things. More frequent content patches means a smaller bang for a league start and fewer players hopping in at the league start. It also means that it is a bit harder for players to follow the state of change.

I also did not at all ignore that the average player count is lower than the peaks. Vice versa. I specifically pointed out that it is really just proof that the approach GGG has chosen works as intended. One can of course argue if that is a good approach - IMO, it is. I would also point out that PoE1 and PoE2 are the most played Diablo-like ARPGs - potentially after D4, hard to say - so obviously the chosen approach can't be horribly wrong.

The part I've been concerned and argued for is that I'm not sure the development model worked early on. PoE1 didn't start to really pop off until around 2017 when they finally completed the story acts. Hell, it took them 2 years to simply add Act4.

This was a considerably smaller staff of course yet they still had majority of game designs in place with plenty of skill and build options. They simply lacked content.

PoE2 released a very sloppy foundation. Esp given experience from PoE1. They entirely forgot why "Reduced" and "Less" was in the game thus the 0% Action speed boss was possible. Above all. PoE1 did not hide behind a beta tag. They did a proper Closed beta 2011, Open beta 2013 then release in 2013. PoE1 had most of what they intended to have for core game design in 2013.

PoE2 0.1 didn't have half the classes, few skills and so few options it's laughable to call it a beta. That's what irks me the most. Then people talk about EA which isn't a development cycle. PoE1 cycles work now because they have years of content and designs stacked under each phase. PoE2 does not. It's just "Well, this is the Fireball + Flame Blast 4 month period I guess".

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

This is one of those things that the modern silly hype culture has created.. A perception that unless a game is literally in like top 10 most played games in the world, it is dead and pointless and the devs must have been wrong.

And if a game doesn't keep pushing in new content at least monthly, preferably every few weeks ago, a bunch of people will think that now it's abandoned.

This is just how the market works in 2025, almost 2026. We aren't in 2004 anymore where the only options were WoW and one or two other half decent games. There's way too many options now, and if the game isn't a top contender, you might not even hear of it. And if the game isn't doing too well, people will just move to something else because there's a big name releasing almost monthly if not monthly. It has nothing to do with a silly hype culture but how the marketing and market changed

You don't need to believe me either, it wasn't long ago that steam announced they're changing how their store and library works exactly because of this issue. Yea those games are technically not dead, but for all intent and purpose they might as well be

Here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/collection/steam/?emclan=103582791457287600&emgid=507342099205587494

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Xzorn#7046 wrote:

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

PoE1 has the same sort of a content cycle; does that mean that PoE1's strategy has also been "nuts"? The main difference is really just that PoE1 tended to have a 3 month cadence; which PoE2 might eventually go for too, once it's further in development.

There's always tradeoffs in how you do these sort of things. More frequent content patches means a smaller bang for a league start and fewer players hopping in at the league start. It also means that it is a bit harder for players to follow the state of change.

I also did not at all ignore that the average player count is lower than the peaks. Vice versa. I specifically pointed out that it is really just proof that the approach GGG has chosen works as intended. One can of course argue if that is a good approach - IMO, it is. I would also point out that PoE1 and PoE2 are the most played Diablo-like ARPGs - potentially after D4, hard to say - so obviously the chosen approach can't be horribly wrong.

The part I've been concerned and argued for is that I'm not sure the development model worked early on. PoE1 didn't start to really pop off until around 2017 when they finally completed the story acts. Hell, it took them 2 years to simply add Act4.

This was a considerably smaller staff of course yet they still had majority of game designs in place with plenty of skill and build options. They simply lacked content.

PoE2 released a very sloppy foundation. Esp given experience from PoE1. They entirely forgot why "Reduced" and "Less" was in the game thus the 0% Action speed boss was possible. Above all. PoE1 did not hide behind a beta tag. They did a proper Closed beta 2011, Open beta 2013 then release in 2013. PoE1 had most of what they intended to have for core game design in 2013.

PoE2 0.1 didn't have half the classes, few skills and so few options it's laughable to call it a beta. That's what irks me the most. Then people talk about EA which isn't a development cycle. PoE1 cycles work now because they have years of content and designs stacked under each phase. PoE2 does not. It's just "Well, this is the Fireball + Flame Blast 4 month period I guess".

As a "developer" you clearly have no understanding of what a beta actually is.

El. oh. él.

+1

Poe1 is a totem of the past and should be left in an neverending league loop so enthusiasts still can play it.

100% of development power should be transferred and kept at Poe2.

From what I hear, they planned releasing a lot more this year than they did. Many weapons, skills and specs are still missing.

I am understanding that they released PoE2 because it was already playable extremely enjoyable game, rather than that being at near-finished state. Now they are focusing on the larger features rather than balance changes that will need readjustment every major release anyway. They are doing the logical choice.

However there is one fact I am disappointed about: Lack of new skills in existing weapons. 99% of work has been done for the weapons already, so I don't understand where are the new skills. I feel like they lack some fodder employees that work hard to add more things once it becomes too much waste of time for the key employees. Quantity is also important, not just quality.