Whether or not you like the current state of the game is subjective. What I said however was not subjetive, it was very objective. Let’s look at it again.
I said the early game abandoment by players went from 33% over 1 month to 50% over 1 week. That is objective. Even if you want to say that it has more players and it’s core that was there before still is, that is incorrect which leads me to the second point.
GGG Alienated it’s core audience and it’s actually the second time they do it. The game started as a hardcore game, but as expected of a hardcore game, it’s audience was rather niche and they weren’t able to grow. Then they alienated them and made the game easier for the average player by introducing ascencion and over several years, making the players stronger while not making enemeies stronger. This is what build them an actual solid core of people playing the game and how the game grew to be loved. Then they started making everything hardcore again, once again alienating it’s core player base. The difference is, the first time it was a marketing decision, the second was thinking they are so big they can’t fall from their throne (and they may be right but more on that later).
This lead to massive early league abandoment by it’s players as they suddenly can’t play the game anymore because they can’t do anything. You may thing it’s such a great thing that you need mirror level gear to do everything (I’m exagerating but it drives the point across) but all that does is remove from the pool the amount of people able to play and enjoy the game.
What do you think it’s better. A game where gearing is easy and everyone can do everything and have fun, therefore the only advantage a good player has is having more currency to make better builds and rare builds that need that level of currency to work or a game where only 10% of the playerbase has a chance to do all the content and the rest barely scrape the bottom of the barrel and have no fun?
Another thing that shows that PoE is bleeding players is the trading. Which has been terrible as always due to not having a proper market place and means to prevent market manipulation. But I remember that prior to delve I could easily find what I was looking for since players were not leaving the game early and I could find it usually at reasonable prices. If you are to look at the market these days, 1 week in you start to notice the dip in the amount of stuff in the market and worse as it goes, not to mention the prices as astronical compared to before therefore making gearing a nightmare.
So your theory that PoE is stronger than ever is incorrect. You are suffering from seeing a big number on your screen and thinking they are better than ever and never really questioning how much of this big number is sand thrown in your face.
Now, whether this happened as a direct result of Tencent getting involved with GGG or not I don’t know. Like I said, they had already done some questionable decision starting with Delve before Tencent was brought in, but the real big and bad changes started after Tencent was involved. Could it be a coincidence, maybe. But in my experience, coincidences don’t happen often and a lot of people are complaining that where Tencent touches, the game turns bad. We are not talking about politics or them being chinese. No, we are talking about the games they finance becoming bad. There is absolutely no morality involved in the equasion here. The problem being, LE is now financed by Tencent as well which rings alarm bells.
Lastly. Yes, Tencet is a chinese company and they have a bad goverment and they do bad things, yes. But honestely I don’t care about that. Realistically speaking, I have no way to affect anything that happens in china or how they affect the world. I simply do not have that power and as you so well said, western companies do things on that level of bad if not worse at times. But again, if I’m to be realist with the situation, if I was to boycot any company that does bad things, I’d die of hunger because ALL companies are terrible or are involved with some bigger company that is terrible. Thus, all I can realistically chose is not whether I support them, but whether what they offer me (regardless of their practices) interests me or not.
So again, the problem is that Tencent ruins games they touch. LE, just like GGG developers said they retain full control over their game, but I don’t believe it, not after seeing the 2 things that mattered on GGG which was the game becoming a lot worse and their forums deleting any comments that says bad things about Tencent. It very quickly showed who was running the show.
As for LE specifically. LE already has many issues. Builds types that should work and don’t like totem builds. Minions that are just not good enough by the standard that is expected of minion builds. Crafting that while not being as bad as PoE is still plenty bad. Over the past couple years we have not seen improvements to this. We have seen some changes, but every change has actually made the whole thing worse. That is why I am looking at LE and thinking it has a rather grim future.
LE had a major opportunity. With PoE alienating it’s core player base they could have so very easily captured that player base by going straight after these players and presenting them with a game that was an alternative to PoE. But more and more, they are getting closer to what PoE is instead of presenting themselves as the alternative. Tencent being on board just makes it all the more likely that such becomes true.
@PDA898 - Average player is not defined by what they complete. Average is defined by the skill level of the individual and the average time they have to play on a daily basis (since the more you play the better you’ll get, up to a certain point of course). In order to define the average you look at the skill of every single player, tally it up and then divide by the number of players.
Now for games like ARPGs it’s harder to numerically represent though I’m sure someone could find a way to do it. The average therefore is as I said in the middle and after you find what is the average you will notice rather quickly that somewhere between 40% and 60% of the player base are around that skill level.
And I don’t think they should be. I know they should be defeated by sub 10ex and you know why? Because the majority of players in PoE won’t see 10ex. This is a fact. They shouldn’t be barred from most content because of that. But here’s the funny thing, it’s not just end game bosses, even red maps are not doable with that budged, not if your build is meant to clear quickly and safely so you aren’t constantly dying.
Now you can say some people can do most content on almost no budget, but that are the good players, not the average player.
As for LE, no, it’s not easy to gear up. Yoiu will event gear up to barelyt passable levels, but not to the levels that you should be gearing up and that is just one of the problems LE has.
