If there were the option, there would have had more money, more profit, more competitive score, more review score and more player, assuredly.
Chasing the mythical “wider audience” does not always make for a better or more successful game. It can, more easily, result in a mishmash of features that may not work well together but “senior management” believes or focus groups suggest would attract different segments of a larger audience.
They had needed more money and more profit from more player.
Obviously, but that doesn’t necessarily flow from having a bastardised mish mash of mechanics from other games. Tightly focussed games can work too.
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The mechanic is necessary part of more successful arpg video game. It is essential part, it is a must-have option, assuredly. I wish LAST EPOCH had the option since the game had been released.
No. What you don’t appear to get your head around is that just because you think a thing is important doesn’t mean it’s important to anyone else, let alone many other players. As Airowird said in your duplicate thread (thanks for that, it’s always helpful) here, there are several groups who either won’t care or actively not want it. That doesn’t diminish that you really want it (& that’s totally fair), but we should never think that what we want is important to anyone else or would be a net positive to ther game or EHG.
That’s fair enough.
But this
is demonstrably not true if you mean it as a universal thing. For you & some people, sure. For everybody? Absolutely not.
You need to understand this.
I think what’s driving this is one of these;
- new player ‘whoops!’
- mid game buyer remorse
- end-game, ‘I don’t want to do the campaign/ corruption again’
- I’ve run out of character slots
To ease the pain of 1 and 2, give each player a relatively painless way to get a once-only respec-all consumable.
To ease the pain of 3,
- Let players skip the campaign via a faster adventure mode. I’m so tired of the campaign. And since you are here and listening, can you make re-skililng adding/removing items with skill levels less annoying? Please?
- Let corruption be pickable, account-wide. Heheh, I can already hear folks losing their minds over this. Ok, how about ‘simply’ (
don’t be mad, I know it’s way harder than players realize) make the corruption process less of a slog/more entertaining. That would fix it also.
To fix 4, sell more character slots.
They already did. They added a bunch of buffs to the boss stacks (forgot their name now) and they even let you immediately catch up to the highest corruption you have.
Getting to 500c in one monolith is pretty easy and fast, which means that getting 500c in all monoliths is easy and fast as well. Not to mention the glyphs that let you gain stability as well, so it’s even faster.
And if you want 1k+, which isn’t intended anyway, then you have to slog some more.
I don’t agree with account wide corruption unlock because I don’t want my newly created character to immediately start doing 1k+ as soon as I unlock empowered monos. That removes all feeling of progression I might have with that character and I would probably drop it really fast.
Also, since killing a shade brings you to your highest corruption (or increases it), that means that a character that can’t handle 500c like your alt does would have to be constantly bringing down corruption after killing one, just to be able to continue playing.
I would agree, however, to unlocking empowered monos (at base 100c) account wide. That way, when you feel you’re ready for empowered monos you can just switch, rather than be forced do all the normal monos.
They could have updated the option, then saw result of the update, if the result were not good, they could delete the option. I predicted that they would have liked the result, assuredly. I assured that they and company would have received more money and more profit from more player, assuredly. You seemed that you did not want them and company had more money, more profit, more player, higher competitive score and higher review score.
New player would have liked the mentioned option, assuredly. Old player might not have liked the option, though. Company and they are demanding more money and more profit that are why they need to update the option.
The new player ‘whoops’ definitely needs some work still, same as the mid-game one.
The time invested at those stages is too long compared to end-game for a respec, it actively is a detriment for progression for a decent amount of time.
End-game respec is nonsensical to include, it takes 10 minutes to do it. If you’re playing in end-game it happens automatically on the side that you’re back up to the top again in no time.
Running out of character slots is currently a major aspect, given we ‘only’ have 25 that’s a problem with 15 distinct classes available. It means a single character per class (not build) in Legacy… with 10 characters leftover for SSF, HC and cycle in total. That’s a fairly small amount. But given EHG struggles with database size it’s also understandable. Might want to fix up their Bazaar to save up and allow people to have 30 slots at least, which would be a substantial improvement already.
Also as you mentioned, the selling is a viable option for character slots.
Also corruption boss progress… it’s been sped up drastically and Blessings stay permanently. So you can farm up for different builds beforehand and adjust the corruption level accordingly ahead of time rather easily.
That’s been a proven detrimental method of development. Generally it causes disgruntled people and a substantial loss of the playerbase if it happens repeatedly. Which you deem as the prime way to actually implement things.
Still factually wrong. The correlation between player count and revenue is miniscule, the higher correlation is between overall play-time and revenue. That means a single person playing 20 times as much as others is usually 20 times as valued. Up to a specific limit which I don’t know the datapoint off, it’s shown to fall off after a while.
There were all predictions. I wish they took my feedback and commandment, though. As I have seen the success of DIABLO IV, I have assured the company and them more money, more profit, more player, higher competitive score and higher review score, inevitably.
D4? A success?
The only thing which is carrying D4 is their franchise name, the game’s been a massive disaster and utter failure for the size of their PR and development budget, underperforming compared to every other live-service game in the genre, including D3.
C’mon. According to fact, DIABLO IV is more successful than LAST EPOCH. Why did you deceive everyone here?
You seem not to be all too knowledgeable if that’s your argument.
Last Epoch has ~100 people working on it and basically no budget. The game came to light on 19th April 2019, which means it’s roughly 6 years old now.
Assuming the worker count back then which was gradually growing over time, the shelf-cost it has and the upkeep costs for servers we can say that the game is a ridiculous success.
The sales are over 2,2 million copies sold since it came out, the price though also increased since then. So if we take a medium price-value of 25€ per copy we receive 55 million € in revenue.
30% are removed because of the Steam cut, meaning 38,5 million € leftover. Even if we count 100 workers from the start each costing 2,5k per month which relates to 30k a year we get a net cost of 3 million € per year, over 6 years hence 18 million €. Leaving 20,5 million for upkeep and taxes available. And that’s not taking a single cent of the MTX sales or anything beyond ‘baseline’ shelf-price into consideration.
LE is a massive success of the genre.
When we look at blizzard we have a 9000 people group working on it. We know it’s been over 6 years in development at the time of release. The marketing budget is estimated to be between 50-100 million €
Even if we take a large portion of the 9000 workers away since they likely will have spent time on other projects too then in a very very low-end estimation we get a working team of 2000 people constantly putting effort into that game.
30k * 2000 = 60 million € in production costs solely there. That means the development of Diablo 4 is estimated to have been well beyond the 100 million € benchmark before release.
We haven’t taken into consideration post-release updates and PR yet. At release it had a revenue of over 500 million €. Which is thanks to the PR.
The revenue of over 1 billion dollars total hence can be reduced by a good 20% since a large portion plays over Steam (but not all), so we leave 800 Million. Then we can easily esitmate another 250 million for the post release upkeep, dedicated staff and further PR since that has only ramped up afterwards. That leaves the game with a profit of around 500-550 million € before taxes.
In perspective with the current numbers we have a rough 6-8 year ‘safety net’ for EHG ongoing while we have a rough 4 year ‘safety net’ for Blizzard there. That’s without taxes and auxiliary costs taken into account. It’s likely a 2 year net for EHG and at best 1 - 1,5 years for Blizzard in the current state.
That means from pure margin % LE was a more successful game then D4 was. The only saving grace as mentioned is that D4 was produced by a monolith of a gaming titan with PR values no other studio can beat nowadays still. And despite of that they didn’t manage to come out on top in terms of percentile margins to a ‘no name game’ like Last Epoch is.
Both games are successes financially. But longevity of Last Epoch currently is higher then that of D4, because the fundamental aspects of both games offer a substantial difference in quality. D4 doesn’t even have the QoL of D3 implemented, from a studio with 30+ years of experience in the sector. Their hitboxes are still a mess to this day, their visibility is awful, with still existing blue effects on blue floor for a boss arena (which is a friggin joke for a studio of this size to even do in the first place, not to speak of allowing it to persist for so long).
So yeah, by percentile margin as well as longevity prognosis D4 is below LE at the current state. D4 was great - and still is great - for a single playthrough. Last Epoch instead has a mediocre campaign but focuses all their efforts to end-game and longevity, which live-service games need… and Blizzard utterly failed to provide with their product.
So we have no intention of making this change at this time. It is possible to change our minds. The way you are attempting to do that is not effective. If you would like to accomplish your goal, here is my advice. I do understand that there is a language barrier here so I’m trying to help.
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Stop using words like “commandment” or “final judgement”. You are offering a suggestion. Something about how forceful you’re phrasing things makes me want to do it even less.
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“Because another game did it” is generally not a good argument. All of the systems works together and taking one element from another game and attempting to slot it in rarely works well.
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Use the phrase “when x happens, I feel y”. Sometimes the best solution isn’t obvious and phrasing the problem this way gives us the ability to look at the issue from different angles. Telling us the solution limits the scope of our investigation.
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Consider why the system is in place and offer specific suggestions to replace it with another system that accomplished the same goal. I understand that you might not agree with the system but assuming that it does something important, maybe we would be more receptive to changing it if you offered an alternative which accomplished the same goal.
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Consider that you might not be right. It’s possible that you are completely correct. It is also possible that you aren’t. Your feedback is very absolute and doesn’t leave room for a discussion. I would be much more interested to engage on the topic with you if it were presented not as an absolute.
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Don’t make duplicate topics.
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Don’t overbump your own topic. Seeing the same thing pop up with no new discussion just reinforces to me that this is not a popular opinion. Every time I see this topic, I do read it. However, in reading the discussion, I am even more convinced that I do not want to act on it. One really solid point is dramatically more effective than a bunch of the same opinion with no well thought out argument to back it up.
I hope this has been helpful.
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Unfortunately, DIABLO IV is still leading arpg game in the world. You could take my final judgement.
I hope you take my feedback, advice, suggestion, final judgement and/or commandment for your own benefit and advantage. You do it or you do not do it, it is up to you. The mentioned things are fact and truth from best arpg video game in the world. Many people have not known it.
There’s a strong suspicion that the poster you’re replying to is a bot, so I’m not so sure how this piece of advice will work. But…
IMO, one issue is that we have (at least) two different groups of players asking for mastery respecs:
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Power players who are at the end game and learn of a more efficient farming strategy using a different mastery, and who would then prefer to respec instead of creating a new character. Honestly, it wouldn’t bother me if this group does not get a mastery respec.
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New players who were asked to choose a mastery at level 10, didn’t really have much information about what they were doing, and soon after find out the mastery they took wasn’t the best one for them. For those players, the feeling of frustration upon making an irreversible choice might be stronger than their willingness to make a new character. This group could use a mastery respec, IMO.
So my suggestion is to have a system in which mastery respec is available to low level characters, but becomes increasingly prohibitive the more one advances through the game. I have no idea how to implement this - making it free but locking it once a character is past level 20? Requiring a gold fee that is exponentially increased the higher the character’s level, until it would require more gold than exists in the game for a level 100 character? Something along these lines.
The respec option with a permanent lock after a specific point is a good choice.
Generally I would say that after a point in the campaign it should get locked in and fixated, beforehand giving you a way to test out the different masteries. Could be right before the first monolith for example as it would make sense, being ‘locked in time’ so to say would lore-wise also be supported in a way.
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