Rogue has now reached 20,000 corruption. I don’t know when this happened precisely because I moved on from LE to another ARPG about a week ago, but I am going to take a controversial position and say that the existence of such broken builds is harmful for LE. My argument is based on two principles.
First, players are invested in their characters. This is the stated reason why EHG refuses to make balance changes within a cycle, and is also apparently the reason why EHG closed the community testing program – players wanted to figure things out for themselves since this gives a sense of ownership.
Second, a player’s sense of achievement in the game is connected to the success of their characters. This success can be measured internally by whether the character is able to complete the content provided by the developers, or externally by comparison with other builds shared by the community.
The developers have been adding more challenging endgame content appropriate for top tier builds. Good, but a squirrel build is never going to be able to complete that content. The message this gives to a player who invests a hundred hours in a squirrel build is that they are not successful at the game, regardless of their skill or the quality of their equipment.
This message is strongly reinforced by the existence of 20,000C rogues when many builds with apparent skill and equipment support cannot reasonably break 1000C. This gives a very real sense for anyone who plays, e.g., a build with mortal minions, that they are playing the game poorly and that no amount of practice or grind will help. Then why keep playing?
For comparison, Grim Dawn was released in February 2016, and had the last major expansion in March 2019. They have 5k persistent players compared to the 1.5k in LE before the 1.4 patch. Anyone who plays GD knows that one of the major differences is balance. EHG, if you don’t want to keep driving your community and player base away, you need to get your shit together and balance the game.
) the CT program, they wanted to get rid of most of the people who weren’t contributing as much, which is fair. The reason you gave is likely the reason for getting rid of the streamers from it though.