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

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Boem wrote:

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How would you improve the system? There's basically two ways, either give people non-RNG stuff like recipes (or pull a WoW and let people farm dailies for currency..) or you increase drop/link/socket rates by a couple of thousand percent. Note that the latter way would still not guarantee good drops. What GGG gave us is a good mix of RNG and non-RNG progress. You just have to be willing to use every option they give you and not gimp yourself on purpose by refusing to trade.

Introduce crafting in the game.

I agree that they are slowly doing this, but as far as i know you cant stack recipe based property's thus they are not enabling targeted crafting for specific builds.

Increasing drop rates would do nothing for this game, only make it blatantly more obvious at a faster rate how flawed the system is.

That argument is like "fuck when i throw 1 exalt at a piece of gear i will not yield a good result, but if i can throw 3 at a piece of gear it will"

It's the underlying system that has to be changed for orbs to increase in potential
non-currency based value.

Edit : also trading is not an option at the moment. It is a requirement to progress in the competitive game. i am not competitive in this game, so all of this forum shit does not concern me, i play to play. But i do enjoy discussions about it, since i can look at the issue's from a more distant view.

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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.

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Snoozey wrote:

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sidtherat wrote:

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Snoozey wrote:

You don't need a 6 link. Players need to stop thinking they need the best of everything. Lets give everyone 100 mirrors 6 link everything and see how long the game lasts. The drops are fine.

surprising fact: if the game is GOOD you can do that and people would STILL play the game. this might be surprising but it is like this

fun game -> people play a lot
but
game forcing you to play a lot != fun game

i think that some design decisions poe took were taken because someone though that the first implication is <- not ->

You're joking right? An Arpg without an item hunt. That would be swell.

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Snoozey wrote:

You don't need a 6 link.

Players need to stop thinking they need the best of everything. Lets give everyone 100 mirrors 6 link everything and see how long the game lasts. The drops are fine.

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toyotatundra wrote:

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Snoozey wrote:

You don't need a 6 link.

Players need to stop thinking they need the best of everything. Lets give everyone 100 mirrors 6 link everything and see how long the game lasts. The drops are fine.

Of course I dont need a 6 link, that's a pretty good example of how the PoE works and why it's a frustrating experience for many. "It's there, but you can't have it", carrot on a stick GGG mentality. You really think anyone burns through orbs that he needed 6 months to farm, gets nothing and says "WOW! This is awesome!" ? This doesn't apply to 6 link only, btw, I just used that as one glaring example. Game being based on RNG, not on skill, not on time, but on LUCK, man, that's got to go. It's as if GGG dont believe their own game has quality. As if players are gonna quit if they get rewarded with that carrot once in a while, more likely they're gonna quit once they realize months of their work has been for nothing. Players will grind, but you have to give them a reason, you have to give them something in return.

And which drops are fine? Orb drops that are (supposedly) meant for crafting? I've dropped 2 exalts and 1 divine in 10 months. Can I craft an item with that? Or do you mean item drops, where I kill Dominus and keep adding to my ever-growing collection of ilvl 69 Crown of Thorns?

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toyotatundra wrote:

"It's there, but you can't have it", carrot on a stick GGG mentality. You really think anyone burns through orbs that he needed 6 months to farm, gets nothing and says "WOW! This is awesome!" ?

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sidtherat wrote:

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Snoozey wrote:

You don't need a 6 link. Players need to stop thinking they need the best of everything. Lets give everyone 100 mirrors 6 link everything and see how long the game lasts. The drops are fine.

surprising fact: if the game is GOOD you can do that and people would STILL play the game. this might be surprising but it is like this

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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.

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loCurnus wrote:

btw: where do you have your info from that it has so low player numbers? are you near to the staff or anything? where are your infos from?

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Jojas wrote:

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TheTenthDoc wrote:

The only reason there's a "low number of active players" is because we're in the last third of the 4-month leagues and people have realized Standard and Hardcore leagues are absolute shit to play in.

This has almost as many layers of ignorance as PoE has layers of RNG.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Why does everyone think that a game has to be popular to be fun? So this game doesn't float your boat. Move on to one that does.

Ask yourself... why did you post this? Is it to try to make people feel similarly to you? Is it in a vain hope that they completely remodel the game after what you think is fun?

PoE is considered fun by enough people for it to exist. That's sufficient. It doesn't have to be the most popular game on the planet to be good.