The current concurrent players chart looks crazy

I'm only here because I didn't play 0.3 much, and I have hopes .4 will get better quickly. If it doesn't, oh well. But yeah the current league mechanic is even worse than what they did in PoE1 with "breach 2.0" and that hideous blob of purple walls and worse blight was hard to top.

"

BDL2267#4033 wrote:

I'm only here because I didn't play 0.3 much, and I have hopes .4 will get better quickly. If it doesn't, oh well. But yeah the current league mechanic is even worse than what they did in PoE1 with "breach 2.0" and that hideous blob of purple walls and worse blight was hard to top.

PoE2 0.3: Best league on PoE2 until current date, only backlash, the engine didnt had the necessary optimizatios, content wise, to me it was the best, specially regarding crafting with somewhat deterministic crafts.

PoE1 Keepers of the Flame: Very nice league, I only played Settlers, then I played Keepers due to downtime. Being more familiarized with mechanics by analogy with PoE2 experience... I still managed to grab 36/40 and last time I check was top 600 bracket in console.

You probably missed the best league for a long time :)

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scaeva_#9735 wrote:

PoE1 Keepers of the Flame: Very nice league, I only played Settlers, then I played Keepers due to downtime. Being more familiarized with mechanics by analogy with PoE2 experience... I still managed to grab 36/40 and last time I check was top 600 bracket in console.

You probably missed the best league for a long time :)

Since Modern PoE (3.0) Keepers might be the 2nd or 3rd worst League Mechanic ever implemented because it took away Breach 1.0 in favor of a PoE2'D style of Breach Mechanic.

I can understand why you think Keepers is a good League Mechanic compared to what you have played which is quite blissful and I am a little jealous.

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ZaruenVoresu#5823 wrote:

As someone that is very much enjoying , I have to disagree, not everyone agrees that this league is a bust.

There are definitely some major hurdles but the druid class is actually a huge thing for some of us.

the league mechanic basically doesn't work... its the same game, they just added druid and reset the currency. so yes, resetting the economy alone gives u a reason to play but... god damn the end game is the same boring ass stuff, they should've just ignored druid and this HORRIBLE "league" mechanic while only focusing on the end game.

if patches are gonna be like this it aint looking good

I doubt this has anything to do with any specific complaints about druid or the league mechanic. POE 2's campaign is just so bad to replay that in leagues without a big content expansion there's going to be poorer and poorer retention.

For reasons I'll never understand, despite being willing to be innovative with POE2 in certain areas, GGG elected to play it totally safe with POE2's campaign and make zero effort to add replayability or seasonal variance. In fact they doubled down on all the things that make ARPG campaigns tedious.

POE1's campaign is more tolerable by being relatively quick and easy, but even in that game it's always felt like an outdated relic of the genre totally in conflict with the idea of seasonal resets and wanting to experiment with alts and interesting builds. With POE2 this issue should've been number 1 on the list of areas in need of innovation. And no not by adding some lazy alternative to the campaign, but by designing the game from the ground up to be enjoyable to replay from level 1 to endgame.

"

iobdoi#2851 wrote:

I doubt this has anything to do with any specific complaints about druid or the league mechanic. POE 2's campaign is just so bad to replay that in leagues without a big content expansion there's going to be poorer and poorer retention.

For reasons I'll never understand, despite being willing to be innovative with POE2 in certain areas, GGG elected to play it totally safe with POE2's campaign and make zero effort to add replayability or seasonal variance. In fact they doubled down on all the things that make ARPG campaigns tedious.

POE1's campaign is more tolerable by being relatively quick and easy, but even in that game it felt like an outdated relic of the genre totally in conflict with the idea of seasonal resets. With POE2 this issue should've been number 1 on the list of areas in need of innovation. And no not by adding some lazy alternative to the campaign, but by designing the game from the ground up to be enjoyable to replay from level 1 to endgame.

That might be your opinion and you are entitled to it, but the general consensus is that the campaign is at the moment one of the best parts of the game and most people enjoy it and playing multiple characters through the campaign.

That said, if you have already most builds played into the endgame, this league doesn't offer much new stuff other than the druid and corresponding skills, which you can experience in a week or even a weekend, so quick drop off in players was to be expected.

People should really step away from the steam charts and trying to frame data according to their own agenda, it starts to get annoying.

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scaeva_#9735 wrote:

- streamers: streamers should be split into two categories, one for those which trully enjoy the game, and the ones which are only concerned with engagement farming (= revenue). A lot of content on platforms like youtube paints a very sugarcoated reality that only works for short term revenue to GGG, as people will jump in, and then never return because, well, loot explosions on group farming arent the stuff of everyday player. Then there are other issues, which I will touch bellow.

This is 100% true. Streamers and no-lifers obviously were a generalisation, I'm talking about a small portion of the community who play the game a lot. As it is for most of the games I know, the people who like the game will play it no matter how good it is. Basically, if your retention is above a couple of days of in-game playtime, you are far more likely to keep playing after that. The only difference between people who play a lot and the people who don't is how fast they can get to that point.

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scaeva_#9735 wrote:

- Game Balance: balancing PvE content because a few builds are super potent is hard. The path GGG is taking on this, appears that they were trashing lower/mid range builds rendering them useless by balancing content to hyper performing builds. Streamers have their share of guilt here, probably more than Jonathan, that seems to the preferred target of the community.

It is 100% true; it is extremely hard to do in a game like PoE with a lot of degrees of freedom (variables). The main issue I have with it is simple - the game is in early access. I get it, they don't like the backlash of the people who played the build. But THERE ARE ways to mitigate the consequences. For example, give all of the FREE RESPEC! Allow us to revert all the skill gems back to the uncut version (not only "spectres" or "companions"). The funny thing is, if you have good gear, it's probably good on many skills. And if Lighting Arrow is to be nerfed in 2 weeks, with an in-game notification, allowing people to prepare, it would solve most of the issues, IMO. The main reason I'm advocating for it is simple - it is literally impossible to calculate a broken build. You can only react to it. And the more often you react to it, the less of issues of the same type occur. It is a question of: how many balance passes do we need to make a game somewhat balanced? And the answer wouldn't be THAT different, no matter what. And the only question then is: how much time does it take to make this number of changes? Is it gonna be 5 years of early access de facto?

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scaeva_#9735 wrote:

This is where it hits harder... The current game design and implementation is leaning heavilly for a hyper performing build for league start, gather currency, hyper inflating the market and then experiment. Much of this experiments, which are utterly by mechnical fails from an analytical point of view, only perform at very high end. This means that if someone sees a video or likes the playstyle and goes with that build as a league started, they will be in trouble, specially if the game dificculty was modeled after hyper performing builds.

Not only that, but experimentation is punished heavily in the game atm. I don't really get why I have to buy Lvl 5 support gems in the currency exchange? Someone can say, because it boosts the economy or something. But the cost of those is symbolic for anyone who played more than 20 hours on a character. So if it is arbitrary in the first place, why do we have it? I'm insisting not on implementing it, like, yesterday. I just want to know that it WILL be in the game. It's not some new league mechanic taking a large resources to develop and implement. Give me reassurance and faith; this is what I need.

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scaeva_#9735 wrote:

I quit day 4, after bricking my character day 2 running out of gold and resources. Leveled another character, to find out I picked another build that with some investment can be nice, but required at the current market inflation heavy investment in time. I dont particularly like the new incursion mechanic, I dont like broken characters like druid... So I will just quit :) Meanwhile gonna work my campaign progression and optimize what I can for next league.

This is the other side of the coin of the "your choices matter" thing. But the thing is, when I enjoy the game, and the gameplay FEELS different, I also feel like my choices matter. I felt meaningful choices when I experimented with various skills, and those felt different. The reason why I don't feel like my choices really matter in the skill tree: there is no real power in it. I could talk about a "power increase per point" being too low, but I'll say a couple of things about keystones instead. This is literally insane what they did with Giant's Blood. You need TRIPLE attribute requirements (about 500 str for a top 2-h hammer). It might be fine for a pure warrior, but it limits the builds. I wanted to play a warrior with the maces, transforming into a bear from time to time. It was "the fantasy" I wanted to make real in my character. But because Druid's skills and equipment "cost" intelligence to use, I have to pay this tax. It basically means - people who can afford this keystone are extremely rich. And it cuts me, as a player, from the fantasy. Not only that, it makes your health (which is much weaker than ES) lower... Like, WHY? The good keystone is Hollow Palm. You pick between the various but similar playstyles. If values for this keystone were at least somewhat decent, people would feel the impact of their actions. Meanwhile, the Giant's Blood is just no longer obtainable for 90+% of the warrior builds again.

"

scaeva_#9735 wrote:

I can speculate it was done in order to keep people playing for longer periods, if this was the case, they sent a huge shot in their own feet... Because it was the perfect aspirational content for players, to seek that perfect deterministic roll.

The thing is, it was obvious from the beginning that it won't work this way. I don't want to be mean, but... Smart thoughts were following them, but they seemed to be faster after all. It seemed like a good idea to remove it, but I don't really think it was well thought through. And it needed to be.

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scaeva_#9735 wrote:

Also something very weird happened in this league, inflation skyrocketed like crazy compared to last league. This made very explicit that early endgame stage became brutally punishing. I feel sorry for anyone who hasnt rolled Druid or any other Meta build (like I did).

I'd like to discuss this a little bit. IMO, inflation will increase in every following league. People will become better and better in the game and will be able to play until the endgame within 5-10 hours, as is the case in PoE 1. They need to regulate the economy by adding sinks for high-end players who will blast T16s by the end of the first day. I will never be able to compete with them, and I'm not willing to try. I want their impact to be minimal. I want tools, prevent them from breaking the economy on day 1. For example, if I start to drop the currency from T1 maps, it will make the gap smaller, but increase the inflation. To reduce inflation, they would have to reduce the drop rates on the high-end (reduce "juising"). It will lead to people who play a lot to leave the league earlier, but it will increase retention rates for everybody else. And again, the only thing that can satisfy such people is inifinitly harer content with better rewards. So add some sort of Temporalis map runs for them, IDK.

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scaeva_#9735 wrote:

That said, only only thing needs to be added: I find more guilty the people that take a beta/early access as serious as a finished product and which keep demanding content, this is a direct shot to streamers. Before content should be implemented the basic stuff around the engine should be fixed, this goes from SMP schedulers (and this is no joke) to motion vectors so that implementations of spatial renderers can work good. This would be a big win in the performance field. Most people would rather play a stable game than a game filled with half backed content that crashes too much.

100% true here. I like the new mechanic and kinda like Druid. You know what I would like more? So they would revisit EVERY SINGLE SKILL in the game and make sure it felt awesome to use. Why do some skills still consume debuffs on enemies? They gave Sniper rifle (crossbow skill) an awesome property. Why don't mace skills have those? They are slow and deliberate. And having some sort of benefits after finishing those skills will be rewarding for the "combo playstile". Why do travel skills, like leap slam or escape shot, not scale their distance with movement speed? Why do I have to stand on top of the infusion to pick it up by default? Why do the "ultimate" skills for the sorceress STILL require you to stand still and cast them? Why do we still have charges in the game? I'm sorry, but they are lame. They need to be reworked or removed. The funniest thing is - they are THE SAME but with different colors now... like, WHY? I can go on and on and on...
I do want to say, they are going in the right direction. There was a "unique" resource called "Valor" for banners. Now it's gone, the game is optimized in that regard. Banner skills now require Glory, as any other ultimate-like ability connected to strength. We still need to have bonuses that banners give while they are not placed (as it is in PoE 1 atm, the banner is always either on your back or on the ground, being much stronger on the ground). The only thing I don't like is that they don't give us anything about those important topics to make sure we feel safe for the future of the game.

"

Nokkyu#1880 wrote:

"

iobdoi#2851 wrote:

I doubt this has anything to do with any specific complaints about druid or the league mechanic. POE 2's campaign is just so bad to replay that in leagues without a big content expansion there's going to be poorer and poorer retention.

For reasons I'll never understand, despite being willing to be innovative with POE2 in certain areas, GGG elected to play it totally safe with POE2's campaign and make zero effort to add replayability or seasonal variance. In fact they doubled down on all the things that make ARPG campaigns tedious.

POE1's campaign is more tolerable by being relatively quick and easy, but even in that game it felt like an outdated relic of the genre totally in conflict with the idea of seasonal resets. With POE2 this issue should've been number 1 on the list of areas in need of innovation. And no not by adding some lazy alternative to the campaign, but by designing the game from the ground up to be enjoyable to replay from level 1 to endgame.

That might be your opinion and you are entitled to it, but the general consensus is that the campaign is at the moment one of the best parts of the game and most people enjoy it and playing multiple characters through the campaign.

That said, if you have already most builds played into the endgame, this league doesn't offer much new stuff other than the druid and corresponding skills, which you can experience in a week or even a weekend, so quick drop off in players was to be expected.

People should really step away from the steam charts and trying to frame data according to their own agenda, it starts to get annoying.

i only play one character in poe2, ill be damned if i make multi characters. in poe1, ill make multi toons.

make it make sense. Poe2 campaign is good, but most players aren't making multiple toons like poe1.

"

golanov#0674 wrote:

"

Looks like we all feel boring about Druid and the league.

I've been saying it for months: removing homogenizing omens = removing cheap crafting. I hope no lifers and streamers will enjoy the league. Oh, wait, they won't because for them to do so, the game must accelerate into infinity, which means infinitely hard bosses, fast mapping, and so on. Basically, GGG listened to an extremely vocal minority and removed the affordable crafting from the game again. It means 90+ percent of players will drop the league within 2 weeks or so, as they hit the EXTREME grindwall.

The main point is simple - an average player AGAIN is put into a position where he has to grind for an item for 20-50 hours. But because the game balance at the moment is extremely dependent on items, which means if you didn't get lucky (with the gear or currency), it's over. And if a streamer/no-lifer can grind for 2-5 days, the majority of the people will do it ONLY if the gear they will get will be enough until the end of the league (read it as sorta mirror-tier).
The ONLY reason I still play this league is that my brother gave me a crazy good Talisman he bought for 2 exalts (it should be a couple of divs). Because I just couldn't get any currency (after 60 hours, STILL 0 divs from the ground, lol), and I can't afford to buy anything decent to farm T15. And because of the extremely cheap crafting in 0.3, it was actually possible to buy a really good item for a div or so. I don't really care about items being "too strong and cheap to craft", or how "legal/illegal" it feels for ZiggyD. I want to have fun, and the only way to guarantee it is cheap crafting. You just can't rely on random loot from the ground, sorry. Maybe if you had 30 or so percent of power from the gear, it would be different. Or if you could actually live in the game and didn't have to one-shot 2 screens away if you wanted to not die...
Sorry, but saying things like "ES is too strong" is insane to me. ES is not too strong; everything else is too weak!

I'm not really against removing homogonozing orbs per se. But the in-game crafting system IS JUST NOT THERE YET. If we could swap weapon bases easily and/or when we get harvest crafting in PoE2, then sure, remove them. But not now!

You sum it up perfectly. Having to grind like it is a full time job to painstakingly gather enough currency to buy your gear on the market and be able to play pinnacle content is just ain't it.
0.3 (before nerfs) was so amazing. Being able to put the omens and currency to actual use in crafting and having actual decently deterministic outcomes as someone who isn't in the top 0.1% felt so amazing.

"

Slart1bartfast#0332 wrote:

You sum it up perfectly. Having to grind like it is a full time job to painstakingly gather enough currency to buy your gear on the market and be able to play pinnacle content is just ain't it.
0.3 (before nerfs) was so amazing. Being able to put the omens and currency to actual use in crafting and having actual decently deterministic outcomes as someone who isn't in the top 0.1% felt so amazing.

Not only that. 0.3 crafting allowed any player who plays a lot to innovate and create their own builds IN-GAME. The thing with PoE is, you can make ANY build work if you put enough effort into it. 0.3 was a league when I was sick and was able to play about 200 hours with my lightning sorceress. The build I created was thought out by me from start to finish. And I created all the gear for the specific purposes of the build/fantasy. Now, I wanted to create a hybrid warrior/bear slammer. And because of the pricing in this league, I just can't afford it. The thing is, if I put 200 hours into this league, I will be able to get at least a couple of really good items, and it's just not enough for the build created without PoB. But I'm playing PoE, not PoB, ain't I?

And it's not like crafting was ever not deterministic. The only question was/is, how much currency do you need to invest to make it deterministic? It's just MUCH more expensive now. Like, every craft I made in 0.3 was about 20-30 divs maximum for an item that is on the high-to-mid mirror tier today. Now it's 60-100 divs AT LEAST (based on luck). Again, it ended up being just a balance redistribution of currency/wealth, with a disproportionate amount of it in the hands of people playing more. It will always be the case, but the current rates (shown in the graph btw) show that the current gap is TOO wide. I don't feel like I can ever breach it in this league; therefore, I just don't invest any real time/effort into it. Last league I made about 450 divs, now I have 6. I could breach that gap in power via crafting for a non-meta build before, but I can't in 0.4.

Probably gonna play for a couple more days and will see ya in 0.5. The saddest part is, even if the new endgame is awesome, if the economy issue isn't resolved and new crafting is not as affordable, you will see THE SAME results we have in 0.4 in terms of retention rates. Mark my words again, it's never about new content. It's about when a person reaches their first "uh, screw it, gonna go cook or something" situation. And I'm not talking about rage/tilt. I'm talking about the despair/pointlessness of the game. The current economic gap, IMO, is the biggest contributor to that (with the constant gear upgrade requirements because of the progression curve, but those things depend on one another).