TBF, SWTOR’s open world pvp had very low fps as well & that came out the back end of the same year.
They don’t. I don’t see them arround here engaing on this topic. They don’t give a rats behind about their OFFICIAL forum and I don’t want to look at discord and reddit to get their answers. They simply don’t care about what is happening and look at things how to please instead of interacting with their community on the most obvious platform there is.
They treat the forums like a zoo. They claim to look into everything but they don’t interact and stay hidden on the sidelines. it’s just a bad joke. When I remember where LE started and how active the devs have been then this is a huge letdown.
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You not wanting to go on discord/reddit does not mean they’re not saying anything.
They don’t tell stuff where it is most important… at home you know… where it is easy to find and to see without making accounts on 2 different plattforms on top and use search functions to go through everything. If they don’t care about their home page and to interact with it why is there one to start with?
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Yeah, but Tera Online’s system was more fast paced, hence precision-wise you needed the FPS and the ping.
You can play WoW with atrocious ping… but you can’t play BDO with atrocious ping for example.
In both cases it’s bad but in one it’s vastly worse.
Which is the point though, isn’t it?
Forum = First party, their personal place, the hub of information, the center of attention as it should be.
Discord/Reddit = Third party, which gets short answers and links to the actual stuff only.
So it not being visible on their website means it doesn’t exist basically, we’re not at a teaser-hunt of any kind…
I disagree with Kulze on a lot of stuff in this thread,
But this I must agree on. If there are things to say - forum would be the ideal place.
It is the place where statement was made in the first place.
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While I completely agree and would love to see any dev response to this thread now that we’re well past 400 replies, ultimately nothing will change. The deal is done and even if Judd and the team want to eat a huge slice of their regret cake it doesn’t undo the sale of their IP nor would it appease those of us who are done giving money (and playtime for some of us) to the “dream” now that the dream is owned by Krafton. It’s not like they can go “yeah, so our fans aren’t happy we’d like to pretend this never happened.”
The last patch was weirdly in 2016, yes. But you understand what I meant: Core mechanics and balance changes. I think those were mainly bug fixes, over the years. (Well and, small expansions, an item or two, etc.)
I’ve always proposed rolling the last expansion into the base game every time the new one comes out, so people are only ever a set amount of money away from being on a full account. You could also give people loyalty pricing to where if they’ve bought more than one expansion already they get a discount on that account of 50% going forward on new expansions or something. Especially if you’re going to treat them like an MMO where they just keep getting content for years.
But above and beyond that, why not just have a game that is so good it’s profitable within the first year of sales and then it goes away until an expansion comes out? Then people wouldn’t have to play it constantly in order for the game to get made in the first place. If you want more profit, just make more games. This low-balling the customer and giving them the minimum necessary product quality in order to attract over-spenders is just a toxic value proposition to everybody involved, except the companies engaging in it. How many people want to play one Titan Quest worth the content spread out over 25 years of gimmicks and season resets? I’d rather just pay my 50 bucks and get the same content once.
I dunno, call me crazy, but that seems way more rational to me.
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Which is the main reason why live-service games are under such massive scrutiny.
The majority delivers piecemeal content which is by no means viable for the timeframe invested to develop it. A majority of time goes into repeated balancing and into upkeeping the online environment itself.
For a game which really really doesn’t focus on any reliable online-only aspects it’s just a mess.
We could argue if we had guilds, if we had group-based content and the likes it would make sense. In PoE for example it makes sense because it’s heavily based around trading and hence community-based access. Through CoF in Last Epoch (and MG being hot garbage) this is not upheld though.
It could simply be a form of temporary connection hence rather then a full-scale ongoing online-only experience. With the option for ladder-specific aspects being actually only-only and hence vastly more freed of any exploiters or cheaters comparatively (you always have some in some way, the prevalence is the problem).
I never understood why Last Epoch went the arbitrary live-service route when they’re not using any live-service related aspects at all as a primary factor.
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This is why many of us prefer the non-“games as a service” model games like Diablo 2, Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, and weirdly Guild Wars 1.
Guild Wars 1, despite being an MMO, was unique in that it sold itself as an RPG experience that you happened to be able to play with people from all over the world, there was a base game and two major story expansions with one final “connective” expansion leading up to the 2nd games release. Aside from balance changes, the game now is the same exact game as it was 15 years ago. They didn’t need to sell quarterly content to drive sales like modern ARPGs nor did they require a subscription fee like other MMORPGs. They thrived solely on the handful of microtransactions for expanded storage space, character slots, and the odd costume (cosmetics) here and there.
Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, and soon to be released Titan Quest 2 follow this same idea of release the game and then a handful of expansions but keep microtransactions to a minimum and let the game speak for itself instead of using fomo tactics to draw people into resetting their progress every 3-4 months (and lets be real: “play seasonal or you’ll miss out on these cosmetics/banners/profile frames/etc” is fomo tactics)
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Honestly, I think there isn’t much they could say.
Any reassurance that all will be fine would sound at best as naive, at worst as dishonest.
I think the only thing they could say that would make people accept this decision would be full disclosure - telling us how dire EHG’s situation was so people understand why there was a desperate need for someone to give them resources, and an explanation about why the other options they had were worse than Krafton.
But of course they are never going to tell us that.
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Is that an actual screenshot? It’s real? Is the context around him speaking about Krafton? Cos if it is, then we’re truly fucked. They have a good head for what games and monetisation should look like? Really? Oh boy…
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Not really no. I don’t disagree with you/Macknum that they should (IMO) be commenting here as well, but I’m not being ridiculous and saying that because they aren’t saying stuff on a particular platform that they aren’t saying anything at all.
And new bosses, but yes.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with that entirely.
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the game is not making enough money to sustain the studio and the people who are working from home around the world. they were also unable to further develop future leagues/seasons on time. ehg was actively looking for someone to buy them out and krafton was chosen because their offer was the highest.
with these funds from krafton the idea is that the development team is now secure financially and worry free. they can now develop future seasons on time without issues.
the game however, in my opinion, is not a very good game. it looks really bad, has performance issues since forever, character movement and attacks are jank, it’s incomplete even though it has been officially released, spaghetti code and the servers have issues to this day.
all of this to say that in my opinion the game won’t be able to suddenly turn a profit because of this acquisition. but they will have to make a profit one way or another from now on. how will that be achievable? we’ll have to wait and see.
I personally didn’t play the current season because I was unable to log in due to server instability at the beginning of the season, after that I completely lost interest in the game.
To me it’s like that. I don’t use reddit and i don’t use the Discord so I’m flying blind 
. To me they only post something once in a while without any big interaction. This isn’t it and I’m against using multiple platforms and throwing my personal data arround when they could simply adress stuff here.
Just throw in a dev tracker section and be good for example. So far I feel like they are done with their homepage and use it as a “read news and patchnotes here and that’s it” and that’s it. That’s not communicating for me but lack of communicating. It’s obvious that the say stuff but the fail with doing it in a manner that you can stay informed by looking at the homepage and their forum on it.
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Except now the issue isn’t “we don’t have the funding to develop the content we and our players want” it’s “we don’t have the authority to implement the content we and our players want” since everything needs the Krafton stamp of approval and they’re only going to approve content that seems like it’ll make them more money.
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I think that’s a completely self imagined boogieman that many LE players believe in. I don’t think that will be the case at all. I think ehg will continue to make they want to make.
I do think that krafton will obviously want a return on investment and if the game doesn’t begin to turn a profit krafton is entirely in the right to make profits happen one way or another and ehg is fully aware of this. this can mean a number of things, from restructuring the studio (translation people getting fired) to direct game interference like paid qol or power via various systems (think torchlight infinite or lost ark).
this whole situation seems like a self inflicted wound by ehg. the game is not making a profit as to sustain the studio, why would throwing a bunch of money at the problem suddenly fix this. not to mention the heavy pr blow that this acquisition is causing.
they had their reasons for doing this and if it’s a calculated risk we’ll see if it will pay off for them in the long run.
I would agree if that related to the Tencent share-selling. There it was indeed a boogieman. First off Tencent had no majority voting power and secondly Tencent is known to not interfere too heavily.
Yes, they do interfere but not in any massive meaningful way commonly that tends to go detrimental.
Here we have another situation though. Krafton is known to interfere… heavily so even! They were the ones which were responsible for the unfitting MTX designs in Tera Online. They were they ones in charge of deciding on weight-percentiles for their gatcha-like MTX specials which were fraudulent in PUBG. They were responsible for QA of both games and utterly failed their job.
Their track-record is anything but stellar, quite the contrary.
Yes, it’s a hail mary solution hence, otherwise I cannot explain the sale. Why hail mary? Because EHG seems to have been in danger of bancrupty, hence to have any chance of the product to be kept up and at least finished in the state initially intended they needed someone else to take over.
This is actually the most lenient situation that can be possible, anything else would lean towards either really really dumb decisions or towards neglicence leaning in the direction of fraudulent business practices even, depending on country.
It absolutely is.
Though how the wound happened is something many don’t seem to understand.
It wasn’t simply ‘the studio isn’t making enough money’, that’s the symptom, not the cause.
The cause is mismanagement, overextending heavily (why does the studio have 100 workers with their numbers? That was a dumb decision) and they haven’t learned from that either as they’re now hiring again!
The core reason was inexperience and a lack of market research as well as following proper project guidelines.
Nobody can tell me that neglecting MTX implementation for years in EA while not having a proper feedback to production pipeline hasn’t caused severe issues.
And that’s before we even start going into the non-cohesive planning behind the scenes. Something which should never be visible to the customer but is so severe it showcases actively in the game.
Maybe you might ask now why I said the last bit?
Look at Affix shards and how exactly they are implemented, then ask the question of ‘why?’.
The initial reasoning was that they would be given a function related to trading, the ability to exchange them with other people. Which is… yes… aceeptable, warrants their state.
Without that though they have no purpose. Picking them up has… but itemizing them doesn’t, and neither does having them in the inventory at any time since it has no purpose at all. The opening of the inventory and mass-storing is a non-functional mechanic which hasn’t been followed up upon.
This is a well known sign of problems. Effort, resources and time have gone into making this system the way it is to then drop it later. This also means Effort, resources and time have been invested in creating a new system instead to take the place, which was the current implementation of MG.
This is not the only instance it happened. Each time this happens (and it involuntarily does a few times during development) it does actively use up money. Too many such instances or too little proper cohesive planning does rise the costs exponentially upwards.
The same system which is pre-planned to the end with in-depth quality assurance can cost 10000€ while the lack if it can easily cost 500000€ instead.
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They literally can’t:
EHG has said “Krafton wants to let us do what we’ve been doing” but in reality, Krafton only wants their recent acquisition to make them more money. So if EHG’s ideas don’t look profitable, they won’t be implemented. I work for a company that was acquired and told “you can keep operating as you have been due to the clout your company has in the community” and in under 2 years we’ve been fully integrated and don’t even operate under the original name anymore
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my point was that there’s no reason for krafton to interfere and change anything as long as the game turn in profits. I strongly believe they will let ehg do their thing without any restrictions as long as profits come in line with expectations set before the acquisition.
that being said, to me it doesn’t make sense that it was just a matter of more money but I am no game dev. maybe that was the issue all along and this money is going to fix it. you know what they say, you need to spend money to make money. that being said last epoch to me looks severely behind the curve and I don’t see it becoming a relevant option without a complete graphical overhaul and that’s just the truth. I’m sure even the devs agree on that.