You made a horrible mistake with this, you have lost the truat of your most precious asset, the players. Krafton is shady, any company that buys (or “joins” with another,), and all if a sudden people are “fired” and its explained “they abandoned their responsibilities”, sorry bro. That much of a bonus payout I cannot imagine people would walk.
My wife and I will watch and see where this goes, I want you and your company to succeed, we genuinely love playing Last Epoch, but if Krafton does stupid shit then we can no longer support the game. Good luck and best wishes.
They sold their souls to the devil for money and the promise of something better. Let me guess… they’re not getting involved as long as you reach your work and money goals as you’ve been doing, right?. The problem, which you clearly didn’t consider, or at least didn’t think would affect it so much, is that the amount of money you made before was 100% tied to the will of the people who followed you and supported EHG, the indie company. The MTXs and packs were to help that indie company realize its dream, i know i did. If we take into account the reviews and all the messages on the forum and Steam, it’s more than clear that you’ve just angered and alienated the vast majority of your dwindling player base. That much money will never come in again (i also know im not spending a cent anymore), and you clearly won’t reach the numbers Krafton wants, and that’s where we’ll soon see that 100% acquisition come into play. As we say in the Rio de la Plata, “Son unos boludos y les va a caber”.
I mean, it’s not like their record has been particularly stellar either. Approximately one year in, they did a Kickstarter and grew their team to about 30 people. That’s just short of a medium sized studio. Five years in, they get the Tencent investment and grow to over 100 people. That’s on the medium-to-large size. For context, studios of that size deliver entire games of this complexity within 3 years sometimes.
After all of that, they still have core aspects of the game that don’t work well, the game looks visually not-that-amazing, and plenty of bugs and issues still haven’t been fixed. There’s a decent amount of content in the game, but it’s spread out across a LOT of grinding.
They’re firmly in the C category on the grading scale. And that was with all our feedback and telling them what was wrong with the game in real time.
So, even if it was just EHG doing their thing for another 3 years, will the game be that much more complete and have that much more content? Or will it just be more seasonal gimmicks and cosmetics?
I’m not on the treadmill anymore, so I don’t really need to evaluate that value proposition, personally. I think I got my money’s worth, mind you. I’m not complaining. EHG did okay. But do I think it’s worth putting Tencent and Krafton software on my machine, risk my personal data and network safety in the event that they have bad actors or data leaks, or bad updates? Is it also worth it to play a thinly repainted version of the game I’ve already played every season due to peer pressure? No, not really. Not now. I think I’ve gotten what I can get out of this game at this point.
on the polish of the game I agree.
The UI state is unacceptable
Animation are barely enough, with a lot of desynchs especially on aoe. Monster abilities without cues. Walking slowdown near stairs. For a 30$ game, are you kidding me?
I partially disagree with the grind.
i left POE because it was waaay more grindy and also the mandatory shitty trading.
You are right with the grind if we were talking the previous season, 1.1. it was atrocious and the cache system was unfair. This season is better and you can finally ignore exalts for full 2LP unique builds. I "finished more characters this season than in 4 months in 1.1. You can effectively beat ubby with at least 5 achievable builds
Well I mean, how everyone values their time is different, right. PoE IS way more grindy. I played that game for less than a few hours before I decided it wasn’t worth getting addicted to the rigmarole of it and setting goals for myself I would never achieve without affecting my career and family life.
I personally think if you can’t achieve max level and near-best-in-slot gear within about 100 hours, whoever is making that game doesn’t respect your personal time. And 100 hours is generous. I have to be having a great time doing whatever I’m doing and seeing all kinds of new enemies, neat bosses and cool drops I could use on other characters for that to really be worth it.
Edit:
As as aside, this is a big part of why I don’t play MMO’s or Season games anymore in general, is because I value my time too much. I don’t want to play a game that never ends. Too many other things I’d rather be doing. I don’t see ARPG’s as a replacement for sports like Chess or Golf.
Well, and, I don’t want existing content to change or be replaced that I might want to replay or share with friends later. If games change constantly, what was great about those experiences goes away also, and that’s frustrating to me. Diablo 2 is still just as great today as the day it came out, if you play it again now.
This idea that we’re going to update and change things constantly to make them e-Sports and keep people playing indefinitely takes away from the durability and specialness of the game itself. It turns it into something we can’t admire and appreciate going forward and compare things to later.
I just don’t think this desire to create a permanently patched game fits or makes sense for every kind of game. I guess you can have ARPG that is a never-ending e-Sport that changes constantly, but I think there’s only really room for maybe one or two of those. And I still don’t see why those patches and changes can’t just be expansions and more classes / maps like we got with Titan Quest. Why that didn’t become the model for expanding these games, I will never understand.
Yes, I will. To the extent I have in the past. I always buy the latest package. That’s it. I don’t use the microtransactions except what I get from the main package I purchase each season. I appreciate EHGs history since I’ve been here almost since the beginning, even when I’ve stepped back from much gaming.
If their work changes for the worse in the future I will have no problems pulling that back, but I’m not over-reacting to what MIGHT happen and railing on the forum that they’re dead or bad people or many of the other hyperbolic crap that’s being spewed.
And you do you, that’s fine, I’m just pointing out that Krafton has a pattern and EHG’s wishes and past are no longer relevant for Last Epoch going forward.
The fact that EHG has no hold over the future of LE and Krafton has a track record of ruining the games they get ahold of is enough for me and many others to safely say that the long term future of LE is dead, even if short term it seems to be going fine
My biggest concern, and one that I’d like to pretend foreknowledge will help curb, is basically the inevitable self-fullfilling prophecy.
As has been obvious in this thread, people don’t have much faith or love for krafton, which may materialize in negative steam reviews, lowered player numbers, and reduced spending for mtx. And that’s going to affect the bottom line for some time, as any new mtx incoming people will be weary will have krafton hand in it, and people on the fence of interest in purchasing the game might be put off, maybe not forever but in the short term definitely to see what your future holds, made worse with the current storm surrounding krafton right now.
Lowered revenues because of a publisher with a seedy track record will be the excuse they need to take over more control, despite the fact they are going to be responsible for it, and it’s inevitably going to be the end of your vision.
The truth about publishers, all of them, is they create nothing. There is no passion or imagination. They exist purely to make money off the backs of people doing the actual work, and that’s why it’s so hard to trust such acquisition as anything but troubling. The money made is spent on market research to find out how to milk even more money. Skeptical I know, but it’s because it’s been observable repeatedly.
I hope this isn’t the case but you should expect reduced revenue for the future as a result, and hopefully as a collective with krafton you can be realistic as to why.
I mean, they actively undermined one of the most creative projects on the internet that was known only as being a passion project by the person who created it. And it’s turned into a huge fiasco and lawsuit.
The other company that could have bought out EHG at some point - And might have if not for Krafton - Tencent, runs open air prisons called Xinjiang and North Korea, as buffers against their neighbors and other cultures. They are owned and supervised by the most dangerous regime on the planet, the CCP.
These are companies we obviously shouldn’t be giving our money to because their interests actively go against our own. That’s putting it nicely.
Moreover, anybody who is telling us we’re irrational for having concerns about these kinds of companies either doesn’t know, doesn’t care about facts in evidence or has something to gain from telling us there’s no reason to be alarmed.
Whenever you experience that kind of cynicism, you should refer back to people you trust more who you know in person and make sure they’re seeing what you’re seeing. That’s the only way to make sure you’re sane in an increasingly insane social media culture.
I want to believe you but lying exists. The ability to lie. Spew bullshit out of someones mouth and then put it on paper right before doing the opposite of what you actually intend on doing. And that is what happens in almost every case when such purchase is made. It almost never stays the same. Either its gonna be different (not good or bad just different) or bad. I do not know/remember of a single case where the change was all about positives
diablo 2 is still an outdated abominable grindfest with abysmal drop rates.
It has a good campaign but further difficulties are a boring time sink, with huge difficulty spikes with some highs when something finally drops like any other ARPG. But true at least is well done and not a bugfest with MTX.
I still don’t understand how people can still say it’s superior to more recent ARPGS, and I’m old enough to have played even Diablo1.
i can’t get around you saying seriously you value your time and you bing diablo 2 in the picture
Diablo 2 ends. You can play it as much or as little as you want. (~35 hours to finish, ~240 hours to complete.) And it isn’t being patched constantly. Even if you played it a thousand plus hours trying to get best-in-slot items on Hell mode, you’d still be playing the same game by the end of it.
Live service games will never end. You can play them an unlimited amount of time and never be done. Some people have multiple thousands of hours in games like PoE and LE, and some of those people probably still don’t have a single best in slot item. And even if they did, they probably won’t when the next season comes out.
There are things out there that are certainly more evil than Diablo 2, even if you think it only exists for the best in slot grind. I personally just think it’s fun to play because I enjoy retro games.
Yeah? I mean, I’m not here since the very start so I don’t know. I started playing in EA, I think when I started, the Falconeer hadn’t been released yet.
So you might be right.
I was just granting what he was saying so I could defeat his logic. But I guess it won’t matter how many times I try to reason with him, having a look at all his badges, I can assume he has spent quite a bit of money supporting EHG, so his response is an emotional one, because if he actually looked at it logically, he would also have to admit he wasted his money supporting a game that sold to a corpo slop publisher that destroyed many of the games they bought. Oh well…
This is probably a big win for a big part of your team. But I must admit that apart from a huge check on the table (which I respect), I don’t see in what world we can trust a publisher like Krafton who destroys everything they touch (and I’m not only talking about Subnautica). I hope the future proves you right and that everything goes well for you and for the community
And that’s the big problem nowadays with how games are developed… and how they’re preserved.
Live-service games have a serious problem because what you buy in today might not be the game you like tomorrow anymore.
The same goes for developed games… what is promised isn’t always - and rather rarely actually - delivered in full.
There is nobody holding a company in the game development side accountable, no mass refunds for delivering something different then initially promised… no guarantee to keep the product in a enjoyable state. Exactly why ‘Stop Killing Games’ is making such big waves.
This situation is after all the follow-up of what that initiative tries to create, the ability for customers to keep their purchase, and optimally in the way they purchased it at least.
Because currently you got not a single bit of safety in your payment, your money can simply be thrown into the bin despite buying a product and not paying for an actual service (that is solely attached to the product and not the product itself) or using a rental (which would be a monthly subscription system instead).
