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

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Will no one say any hardcore aspects of this game are trivialized by trading?

Being completely self-found in either game mode is hardcore. Depending on what sort of gearing goals one sets to achieve doing self-found, the game can go from manageable to insanity.

But Trade nearly erases this issue of gear. It's not completely wiped out because people still have to find or make the gear in order to sell or buy it. Theoretically, if people held onto their gear instead of assigning some arbitrary value to manipulate other players with, this game would actually become very very difficult.

This has been discussed in this thread, and was mentioned in other threads as well.

It boils down to hardcore having different meaning to different people.

For the people at GGG hardcore imply's "time-investment" and that is where it stops, nothing about challenge, no adversity to overcome, just time-investment as the sole restriction.

Like you mention, there whole design is produced around the concept of totally rofl-stomping the content with trade. what prevents you from trading? Time-investment.

And i agree, if you play the game self-found one time and maybe put some additional
gimp-rules on yourself, then it becomes quite a challenging game.

However in it's current form it is not. Wealth is your only challenge, once achieved nothing is left to do.

This is such a great game.. I love hardcore. Its a great hobby and can be addctive at times.

Hardcore is where one should want to be playing.. The economy is much better, the adrenaline factor, challenge factor.

So with that being said. I have invested countless hours leveling up to 70ish with many characters. When you get to that point and respect into a build and its complete garbage its a huge let down.. So now you have to either grind again or spend a fortune to get Regret Obs.

So basically everyone reviews the forms for builds and goes with them. Its very annoying when you come across something when you do have good gear, health pool, mana pool, damage mitigation, and damage. THEN BOOM one mother fucking shot and your dead... Or you desync and you lose 50 hours of play time in an instant..

They really need to get rid of exiting the game to save peoples asses. Its not true hardcore when you just hit a macro key and it saves your ass for being dumb..

Just watch twitch its a prime example everyone ask for their build see's them running maps so they figure they will just do the same build.

They need to change the tree a bit to give some other builds a much more unique feel. If your 70+ and you spec into certain stuff being level 70 should grant you enough sustainabilty without having to go to a cookie cutter build.

Thats my opinion. Thats all.

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Mrgrimm312 wrote:

This is such a great game.. I love hardcore. Its a great hobby and can be addctive at times.

Hardcore is where one should want to be playing.. The economy is much better, the adrenaline factor, challenge factor.

Brace yourself, softcorers yelling 'Alt+F4! Alt+F4!!!' are coming.

Yes, this forum is flooded with negativity... as is every other gaming forum on the internet.
Take a look at the SC2 General Discussion forum on teamliquid.net. Balance whine galore, you could easily deduce that no SC2 player is actually enjoying the game.

This means that the vast majority of opinions offered here can safely be ignored by GGG because they simply do not represent the (silent) majority. You can easily verify that by talking to players ingame, they sing a much different tune than the Doom&Gloom which can be found here.


PoE already is complex and big enough that a lot of players have very different goals in this game, set by themselves. If I look at the guild I'm in, there are (just some examples)
- our leader, a diamond supporter, who does a lot of racing, writes guides and doesn't care much about the ladder. Seems to be enjoying himself a lot.
- a guy playing Nemesis selffound solo and also races. He is in for the challenge and enjoys the game a lot, taking it slowly.
- The guy I play Domination with. He is in it for the builds, for mapping and just for playing the game.
- Me, well, I'm just a nolifer and this is my game <3

Not one of them complains about bad drops or PoE being unrewarding. Why? Because we all know what to expect and we all know how to get fun out of the game.

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griD wrote:

This means that the vast majority of opinions offered here can safely be ignored by GGG because they simply do not represent the (silent) majority. You can easily verify that by talking to players ingame, they sing a much different tune than the Doom&Gloom which can be found here.

The silent majority you speak of, more than likely, does not exist. People who beat the game on normal and are satisfied to move on are gone. The massive Steam number dropoffs speak volumes. In large part, it's the people who actually care about a game that are willing to waste their time in a forum. You might not like what they have to say, but it doesn't mean they can be ignored.

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Taganov wrote:

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griD wrote:

This means that the vast majority of opinions offered here can safely be ignored by GGG because they simply do not represent the (silent) majority. You can easily verify that by talking to players ingame, they sing a much different tune than the Doom&Gloom which can be found here.

The silent majority you speak of, more than likely, does not exist. People who beat the game on normal and are satisfied to move on are gone. The massive Steam number dropoffs speak volumes. In large part, it's the people who actually care about a game that are willing to waste their time in a forum. You might not like what they have to say, but it doesn't mean they can be ignored.

Hint: Look at dropoffs from other games on Steam. If a game is marketed heavily (which PoE was) on a gaming service used by MILLIONS, the dropoff will obviously be very large, this isn't specific to PoE, but applied on EVERY SINGLE GAME advertised on steam.

I am OP and I present my opinion as fact.

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Taganov wrote:

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griD wrote:

This means that the vast majority of opinions offered here can safely be ignored by GGG because they simply do not represent the (silent) majority. You can easily verify that by talking to players ingame, they sing a much different tune than the Doom&Gloom which can be found here.

The silent majority you speak of, more than likely, does not exist. People who beat the game on normal and are satisfied to move on are gone. The massive Steam number dropoffs speak volumes. In large part, it's the people who actually care about a game that are willing to waste their time in a forum. You might not like what they have to say, but it doesn't mean they can be ignored.

Even with the declined numbers you're looking at 13k people that play on steam alone at a given time. There's also different people playing at different time zones, and then add in that more people play without steam than those that play with it. So ballpark (and this is a very low estimate) 40k Active players. There are what maybe 200-300 people that regularly post gripes on the forums, maybe a total of ~500 regular forum visitors at most (I see the same names ALL the time)

So rounding player number down AND rounding forum criticizers up we have 1.25% of the active game population vocalizing their dislike of a part of the game. With real numbers being even lower than that b/c of rounding.

So it is inevitable that the majority is silent, and this most likely means that they have no issue with the game that needs brought forward as that is the most widely used reason to post on the forums.

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Cribstaxx wrote:

Even with the declined numbers you're looking at 13k people that play on steam alone at a given time. There's also different people playing at different time zones, and then add in that more people play without steam than those that play with it. So ballpark (and this is a very low estimate) 40k Active players. There are what maybe 200-300 people that regularly post gripes on the forums, maybe a total of ~500 regular forum visitors at most (I see the same names ALL the time)

40k active players is a very low estimate if we say there are 25k concurrent players (half Steam half non-Steam). It's more close to ~100k daily active players and a lot more weekly/monthly active ones. Source: LoL player numbers and the ratios between concurrent and active players.

Unique drops should actually be lowered, and orb/currency drops should be greatly increased!

It would still force trading (as unique's would still be extremely rare), it would keep the economy stable, and would actually allow people to craft. An increase in crafting would still keep orbs scarce on the open trade market. You would see a whole new market for well crafted rares.

And God forbid...it might even allow people to sanely attempt a 6link.