That was an obvious hyperbole/sarcasm.
I just meant that not doing this would lose them a lot of money. It probably wouldnât be enough to bankrupt them, but it could seriously hurt their future growth as a gaming company.
I would wager that the amount of players that play both games and will be playing LE in the new date is far higher than the number of LE-exclusive players that are pissed off enough to leave.
Either way, itâs a choice they had to make, for better or for worse, and there wasnât really any good choice left, just the least bad one.
It can, as long as the studio size and server farm size also reflect that. EHGâs studio size and server farm size are already too big to sustain with just 10k players. Much like GGG is also in the same situation.
The bigger the studio, the higher the expanses and the higher the income needs to be to overcome that increase.
Yeah, thatâs fair. As other people have said, itâs not an irrational take. Youâre perfectly entitled to feel that way. We were just trying to provide a different point of view, mostly in the hopes that you would be more understanding and lenient on EHG.
Mostly because this time it wasnât a situation created by their development failures (like the original postponment was) but one that was imposed on them by external factors.
Anyway, we donât have to continue this argument. We know your point of view (and even agree with it to some extent) and you know ours (and even agree with it to some extent). So all thatâs left is the impression you have of this (like you said, an emotional stance) and that canât really be swayed entirely by logic.
Absolutely, flexibility is important⌠but for design philosophies that needs to happen very⌠very slowly overall. And if itâs done those implementations need to be purely experimental with the ability to go back a momentâs notice, after all design philosophies are based on targeting specific audiences with specific gameplay aspects⌠so changing that will inadvertently cause a portion of your players to be unhappy.
Since itâs a hard choice beforehand thatâs a risky move, and for a risky move the preparation for the worst-case scenario (missing the goal) has to be taken into consideration.
Yes, still, weâre talking about design philosophies, hence the core aspects your game is inherently built upon. We can all disagree on it⌠but if those get changes quite regularly then a game looses all identity simply. You can never be sure if itâll still be something you payed into a league from now this way⌠which is not a good situation for a live-service game. They need stability after all.
Yeah, thatâs absolutely true.
Given their actions though anything else would showcase utter incompetence on the highest level though.
Premature release of an unfinished product absolutely demolishing the several years long positive perception built up for the game. Utterly broken core mechanics for the Factions during release and juuuust enough to make it at least workable for a common Cycle timeframe. (Yes, Iâm talking about MG here).
If itâs not financial issues then that would be far worse. It would after all mean EHG is doing their job really really badly and they dropped the ball in major ways from the moment the release was prepared for to date.
Their game can survive with as little as 10k players. Their game when he said that which was at a time GGG wasnât as massive as today. Nowadays 10k player would kill GGG. 5k players miiiiight be barely enough to sustain EHG given theyâre 100+ people strong by now.
Because when Chris Wilson made that statement GGG had, iirc, around 20-30 people on the team. Which means that a 100 people team wouldnât survive with just 10k players.
I would like to add, since I didnât see anyone address itâŚ
EHG never promised a 3-4 month cycle. They also never implied/stated/claimed that cycles will be 3-4 months. The singular statement was Mike (I think, might have been Judd) saying âweâd like to aim for a 3-4 month cycleâ
This is a goal theyâd like to reach, a projection of their intent for the gameâs future, not a reflection of how the cycles will work while major developments are still happening. As you rightly pointed out, weâre still missing story chapters, they have more important things to work on than living up to your expectations.
Yeah, a bunch of stuff they had planned for Season 2 was scrapped. Including the next campaign chapter and the primordial uniques.
They did warn us about it, though. The whole purpose of postponing the season for several months was so that they could work on the endgame, since that was the part most players complained about. So most of the stuff from the earlier roadmap didnât make it for the new one.
We donât even know if there will be a new chapter on Season 3, either.
Yep, but itâs the unwritten industry norm and diverting from it is to be said out loud instead of afterwards going all âpickachu faceâ when your community does find it startling.
If not⌠plainly spoken? Then LE wonât exist for a substantial amount of time. 3-4 months is the standard for a reason as less simply is not feasable (and 3-4 is a really harsh thing to ask for) while more causes players to simply forget about your product in the meanwhile to a decent degree.
Actually nah⌠currently not. But that includes story chapters, end-game improvements and a revamp of the balancing anyway, so⌠would say thatâs exactly what they should live up to given they released
Yes, and itâs absolutely fair there, it was visible that their roadmap was not properly thought through when it dropped⌠but it become obvious when the Aberroth release made it so clearly visible what that would entail in detail for content depth presented⌠which caused EHG to shift.
Mike had said on one of the streams/podcasts I think they will be putting out a new roadmap after 1.2. He also said something on ancient hunt and primordial uniques will be happening (stuff from the old roadmap not sure if I got the names right).
Iâm guessing a month or two after 1.2 launch and ironing out bugfixes and any other issues, theyâll release this.
I know Iâm cherry-picking, but this is a point I personally wanted to talk about, given that the others were already discussed. Anyway, I feel as though people might be too lenient with the delays since (sorry for repeating this yet again) 9 months for new content in a new live-service game sounds like it should be considered unacceptable and heavily criticized. It has happened with other games.
For example, Halo Infinite. The devs also planned for each season to be about 3 months long. Come the launch, and season 1 is 6 months. Then season 2 is also revealed to be 6 months. Later on, season 2 is announced to be extended, making it 10. Of course, no one was happy with this. It was very baffling that a studio larger than EHG, one owned by trillion-dollar Microsoft, would struggle with coming up with consistent season cycles. Hell even GGG got shit for taking so long with PoE1âs new league. Many didnât mind the first time since focus had to be given to PoE2⌠until the league kept getting delayed because of PoE2.
With that in mind, I just find it interesting that people donât seem as annoyed with Last Epochâs season delays. On the announcement posts regarding it, I still saw plenty of the comments being âWell thatâs unfortunate, but okâ. Now it isnât wrong to think that, and I know plenty of folks arenât happy about season 2 being delayed yet again. Yet, having to wait almost a year for a new season of content for a game that isnât even past its second season after a year doesnât sound like something that should be brushed with ânot a big deal/you can waitâ. Hence why I made my original post in the first place.
So yeah thatâs what I think. Not sure if itâll mean anything since the devs are still sticking with the extra 15 days thanks to PoE2âs content update. I will say that EHG sure as hell ainât getting an extra penny from me lmao
Yes, agreed. And Iâve voiced that repeatedly over the months. It is unacceptable.
Which is a distinct difference from postponing the release a bit further because of it clashing with another game thatâs a direct competitor for the audience though, that has to be taken into consideration.
No worries, we ripped their heads of during those last months more then a few times verbally
And no⌠itâs not âunfortunate but okâ but instead a very massive negative point to EHG for actually messing up so badly with their content pipeline that it came to this situation in the first place. Not without reason people are saying â1.2 is a do or die situationâ. Because it plainly spoken feels like that.
All the goodwill EHG has built up over years in Early Access when release schedules were lenient and not mandated by the industry standard of the genre yet for them they were providing gradual but steady improvements. Not always those people asked for (for years at times)⌠but overall improvements for the game. The majority of left out things were generally brushing up old classes as well⌠and balancing.
But since 1.0 LE is not a EA game anymore, hence the things demanded of it are respectively higher⌠and EHG dropped the ball⌠hard. Shoddy release, awful quality of Factions at the beginning (and still to a decent degree), weird decisions which just switch out one problem with another, throwing long-standing and actually solid sounding design philosophies overboard suddenly and without warning or early proper information to get a feel for the perception of their customers.
EHG is struggling, and hard as well.
Fair!
EHG will be more then happy to simply have their Steam charts be buffed by a player
As for the overall perception? Itâll be that the results simply speak louder then any words. If they provide quality content in 1.2 then itâll give them a good amount of funds, if not⌠well⌠then not obviously
But you can be sure that people are far less willing to spend after the fiasco before then they would be otherwise, agreed.
Eh⌠and to be fair itâs kinda hard to spend a good amount of money when their MTX store is similar to map design in Starfield⌠a empty wasteland
Yeah, thatâs fair. Perhaps more posters here are more chilled out than they are on PoEâs forums? Perhaps PoE has an equal % of relaxed players who are content with being able to play the game or other games while they wait & donât care about posting. But it is a curious thing.
Well, that actually depends on the individual. As you can see from the posts there are plenty of people who are in the âunfortunate but okâ camp, just like there are plenty of people who arenât.
Oh really? There were no other games providing 3ish month leagues for the past 10-13 years? Curious.
D3 started getting into 70-100 day seasons back in 2016, PoEâs have been 12-14 weeks long since 2014. If the only 2 big players in the genre are doing a thing & have been doing a thing for a good 2-4 years, does that not make it industry standard?
Like me, for instance. Iâm in a completely different camp. Iâm in the, âGGG did a dick move, didnât bother explaining it at all, forcing EHG to make a tough decisionâ, camp that doesnât blame EHG even a tiny little bit. Even more empathy for EHG from me. All this noise has zero to do with good gameplay. In the realm of the ideal, games would compete simply on how fun they are. We donât live in the realm of the ideal, we live in a realm of pragmatism. Sometimes that pragmatism is ugly.
I think less of anyone not understanding that. Again, an individual decision, and who really gives a fuck what any of us think about a two week business decision to delay?
I think it was primal hunt and primordial uniques.
Good to know. Thanks.
There are many factors behind this:
-Some players donât feel the need to have 3-4 months long seasons. In fact, some would like longer seasons (5-6 months) so they donât feel they have to rush or no-life the game. This is especially more true these days with many different seasonal ARPGs to play.
-EHG garnered lots of goodwill among the playerbase due to their constant transparent communication. How much that goodwill is and how much of it is gone with these occurrences is again dependent on the player.
-EHG was always open to their own failures. They never tried to skirt responsibility when theyâve failed in the past. When Season 1 took longer than expected they openly said it was because they were not prepared for it. They thought they were, but it wasnât as easy to pull off, so they adjusted their work methodology to accomodate this.
-They had a roadmap prepared. However, player feedback forced them to revise this. If everything had gone according to the plan they laid out, we would probably be going into Season 4 already and have a new campaign chapter, primal hunt/primordial uniques and some sort of monolith expansion. But they realized this wouldnât address the biggest issue people had with LE, which was the limited endgame, which offered little variation. So they decided to, once again, very openly explain that they would scrape their plans and instead work on endgame immediately. From what weâve seen from the trailers, it really was a massive reworking and seems to be worth it (for me, anyway).
-Lastly, this most recent delay was not really on them. They explained this very openly as well, saying that LE is still a small game and needs every season to go as best possible to sustain its future. Iâm sure that if LE was on par with PoE, they wouldnât have done the same thing, but as it is, LE still canât compete with the PoE brand.
Judd has recently said that they now hope to get seasons rolling every 3-4 months (4 months being more realistic). So, with the goodwill they garnered in the past (and because LE really is a fun game with lots of potential), most of the loyal playerbase gave them a pass on this huge delay.
But we do now expect this not to happen again. A new situation similar to this will garner a lot less tolerance from the players in the future.
I think itâs more that GGG was never that great at communicating with their playerbase. One of the strongest points of EHG (to me) has been their ability to communicate openly with the community and even treating us as sort of âequalsâ, where our opinion matters.
Actually, for 2-3 years now PoEâs leagues have been 16-17 weeks long.
