The reason for the low level of active players in Path of Exile

I stopped playing this game for the same reason as many. I want to escape from the cruelty of the real life for a hour of two. And when you play PoE you get cruelty even worse than irl. Their policy "We don't want noobs" must end soon or they will lose playerbase. Because, we "noobs" are what fills the servers of every game :)

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

I guess I am being a bit of a whiteknight as you put it and I don't intend to offend anyone or undermine their opinion but I see what's happening on the D3 PTR forums and can't help but see similarities in this thread. Loot 2.0 gave them much better gear but go to the forums and look what they complain about - drop rates and they use much of the same arguments I've seen here. I play SF only unless I'm borrowing gear to piss around with and I enjoy my play (although I wish magic and rare items had more mods to make them more interesting and deep). I guess I'm just not sure what nGio and his company are really asking for. Do you want the game to be easier or would you not care if the game was made more difficult to compensate for increased drops of 'better gear'?

Loot 2.0 is not a fixed thing. In the CB they had something called Friends and Family going (whatever that was) where the droprate of legendaries was considerably boosted. Since then they toned it down. So much so that as of now legendaries just don't seem to drop anymore. Blizzard justifies this by making it possible to craft/buy legendaries with certain materials. Only now the chances to buy one seem to be much, much higher than seeing one drop.

RoS has a ton of other issues though, game mechanics which make you wonder whether Blizzard has gone completely wacko. The Tias wrote a lengthy post about it, on the first page in this thread: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/11307900907?page=1

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Aetherium wrote:

question is, do you need to be the very best of all to enjoy the game? if answer is yes, thats not the game for you, why not just play singleplayer game to be the hero in it :)

Tell me how is one supposed to enjoy the game when you lack the gear to progress?
Stash is loaded with ok items that would sell as low/mid leveling gear (especially in HC+nem),
but one can't sell them because there's no AH?

Yeah it's not really worth waiting online and scan the trade chat spam for 3 hours,
just so one can bump into the right potential buyer/seller to get a few chaos and burn them in 3 seconds on their item which they hoped would get upgraded but infact got downgraded.

Game is broken till they give us a auction house type practical system to instantly buy and sell what we need and want to.

With the current drop rates of currency (which was ironically supposed to act as a crafting system), upgrading your own gear remains a joke, and farming currency is the only way to buy gear from others. And again, even then you have to tab out of the game and use poexyz.

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Zavjera wrote:

I stopped playing this game for the same reason as many. I want to escape from the cruelty of the real life for a hour of two. And when you play PoE you get cruelty even worse than irl. Their policy "We don't want noobs" must end soon or they will lose playerbase. Because, we "noobs" are what fills the servers of every game :)

It's a hardcore game for hardcore gamers from hardcore gamers. That's how it's marketed and that's how it's sold. Got a problem with that?
I don't want noobs in my game either and I will fight with every possible way against casualizing this greatest ARPG since D2. That's the reason you see those two supporter pack titles beside my name.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

I guess I am being a bit of a whiteknight as you put it and I don't intend to offend anyone or undermine their opinion but I see what's happening on the D3 PTR forums and can't help but see similarities in this thread. Loot 2.0 gave them much better gear but go to the forums and look what they complain about - drop rates and they use much of the same arguments I've seen here. I play SF only unless I'm borrowing gear to piss around with and I enjoy my play (although I wish magic and rare items had more mods to make them more interesting and deep). I guess I'm just not sure what nGio and his company are really asking for. Do you want the game to be easier or would you not care if the game was made more difficult to compensate for increased drops of 'better gear'?

The only droprates i am much concerned with are those of uniques. The reason i am not too worried about messing with them is because they are only a small part of endgame gear, rares are much rarer and i do not intend to make them any easier to acquire. In fact i would like to see eternals being much rarer so that they cannot be acquired for just 3 ex, which makes it harder to achieve perfect gears.

Unlike many others i also have no interest in self-found. It is a noble idea, but i prefer an open community where you can share items, trade and fight over loot.

Let us theoretically say top-end uniques were now twice as common, that would mean it would roughly take only half the time to acquire the currrency to purchase those that you needed. For example the build i am working on right now needs an auxium and a voltaxic rift. The farming stretch to get them will be 10h every single day for about 2 months, of doing the same areas over and over, a time in which i in comparison would have been able to acquire full gears on not just one but several character in D2 by trading on bnet. I would have felt satisfied so many times maybe over 30 times by the time i would be satisfied one time in PoE.

What i am trying to say is that there are too long barren periods and that they result in player exodus. I also think this is because they are too long, they are not balanced well for rewarding game quality.

The jab i took at whiteknights was because they ignore all ability to recognize balance. They simply cannot judge when something is too much or when it is too little, and it becomes just black and white to them. Suddenly they think in an absolute way such as: "drops must be rare else everyone will be BiS", and they neglect the entire spectrum of balance.

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Crackmonster wrote:

So long as PoE remains as unrewarding as it is, it will not attract as many players as it could, simply because the gameplay is not fulfilling enough. Still a great game, but you need to go no-lifer just to get the very basic items required for a properly competitive build, and that is where many lose interest.

It takes around 1.5k+++ hours before you have completed the circle of just feeling one character has reached near completion to the point you are satisfied and want to try something else because of that.

Due to that raw time restriction, very few players get to experience more than a very few builds to a satisfying level of their potential, and so being restricted to a small part of the game's potential it is less interesting, in particular when it is a game focused around freedom of choice.

Only flippers, people who do not care about constantly selling their items on all characters so that they can focus their entire wealth on one character while gaming nonstop, those who play in full organized groups and those who spend every waking hour of their time on poe get to experience the fullness of the game.

That is why PoE has so low player numbers in a genre we know has potential for many times greater player bases.

I agree. However, I probably don't have a clue on how to properly end the "circle". So in my case it is most likely my build and not so much my items. Still, I have hit a wall. Having said that, just one cool, good and useful drop would be nice I guess =). So my PoE time is most likely done, but it was really fun the time I played. It is a great game!

Also a notion i had almost forgotten was that the D2 system of attainable unique items created playerbase and community culture.

When uniques where rather attainable and it was entirely possible to base builds upon just uniques, that created a flow of things.

What D2 didn't get right was that the rares in D2 were too weak. In PoE rares are not too weak, in fact for the vast majority of builds you only want 1-4 uniques at most if you consider BiS, or even half-bis gear which i think is just great as it is.

I would envision a game similar to D2 where the uniques were farmable and you sometimes find one of the good ones or at least semi good ones(think shako). Like in D2, everyone would be able to build characters that would function with these uniques, but when they needed to really gear their characters, when they decided to invest time in a character to maximize its power progression, they would eventually replace almost everything with rares since rares are simply better in terms of raw power.

Flashforward to PoE nowadays, we are not too far from that vision. New uniques are always being added and they will have that function. However, they will never really serve that community culture supporting function if they remain extremely rare.

Unique drop rates have to be increased across the board, low, mid and high-end ones, but at the same time it is important that you still have much more power to gain from acquiring rare items so that it is not only about getting fairly attainable uniques like in D2 and then being done.

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Quantume wrote:

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Aetherium wrote:

question is, do you need to be the very best of all to enjoy the game? if answer is yes, thats not the game for you, why not just play singleplayer game to be the hero in it :)

Tell me how is one supposed to enjoy the game when you lack the gear to progress?
Stash is loaded with ok items that would sell as low/mid leveling gear (especially in HC+nem),
but one can't sell them because there's no AH?

Yeah it's not really worth waiting online and scan the trade chat spam for 3 hours,
just so one can bump into the right potential buyer/seller to get a few chaos and burn them in 3 seconds on their item which they hoped would get upgraded but infact got downgraded.

Game is broken till they give us a auction house type practical system to instantly buy and sell what we need and want to.

With the current drop rates of currency (which was ironically supposed to act as a crafting system), upgrading your own gear remains a joke, and farming currency is the only way to buy gear from others. And again, even then you have to tab out of the game and use poexyz.

So, you want GGG to abandon their vision entirely to create a bigger appeal for the game? Plenty of Companies do that, I say let us have an untainted game for once. I'd rather have the game fail commercially and stick with its guns, than have yet another auction-housed casual experience. Fact is, some of us actually LIKE manual trade. For one, it slows down inflation by having a barrier of effort for trading, secondly it allows you to actually make good deals if you work for it.

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Yohanu wrote:

So, you want GGG to abandon their vision entirely to create a bigger appeal for the game? Plenty of Companies do that, I say let us have an untainted game for once. I'd rather have the game fail commercially and stick with its guns, than have yet another auction-housed casual experience. Fact is, some of us actually LIKE manual trade. For one, it slows down inflation by having a barrier of effort for trading, secondly it allows you to actually make good deals if you work for it.

Yup, this is why I'm weary of asynchronous trade. I fear if trade becomes easier it might undermine my ability to SF by forcing me to trade through adjustments in drop rates in the freer trade system that's intended to protect the economy from inflation and power creep.

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Yohanu wrote:

So, you want GGG to abandon their vision entirely to create a bigger appeal for the game? Plenty of Companies do that, I say let us have an untainted game for once. I'd rather have the game fail commercially and stick with its guns, than have yet another auction-housed casual experience. Fact is, some of us actually LIKE manual trade. For one, it slows down inflation by having a barrier of effort for trading, secondly it allows you to actually make good deals if you work for it.

This.
Also the game is NOT dying at all. In the last few weeks I've got at least 10 of my friends interested in playing PoE and the numbers are only growing when they tell their friends about it. "Complex itemization with complex character building with no hand-helding or casualized shit." has been the sentence that catched their interest.