Interesting decline of players

General
181

Yes. In later seasons it wasn’t even hard. Just get the right set (like tal rasha) and push. You already get all legendaries in a day or two, plus whichever primal you want.

That is very debatable. It all amounts to having fun and fun is subjective.

In theory, PoE has the best end-game because it has a dozen different mechanics you can choose to do, so you can simply do the one you enjoy the most. But some players find it too complex, so it’s not fun for them.

D3 only has 1 activity and if you find pushing rifts boring, then it’s not fun, so it’s not the best.

182

in plus, D3 has Group Find. I had lot of fun pushing grifts in party. is like chess you know, if play chess alone or vs computer can getboring, but if playing with other people is fun.

183

That is also debatable. Some people don’t like playing with anyone else, or they don’t like playing with random people. Some people have social phobias or poor connections. So playing alone is the only option for some.

Plus, PoE also has group find. You can simply join ongoing games, much like you could in D2.
LE also has a group find channel. Hopefully we’ll get more features regarding this (even though I’m one of those people that only play with friends or alone).

184

Folks tend to assume that their experience is universal, their opinion is universal, and they speak for everyone when they talk. But your fundamental point here, that it’s “too late for a first impression” is just wrong, on three counts.

First, because most people who will eventually play the game haven’t done so yet. Path of Exile has a minimum of 80% of its total sales which occurred after the game had already been out for a year and a half. It’s too late for a first impression for you, but the idea they can only try to get people to come back or stay is laughable, with 1,000,000 sales or thereabouts there’s literally billions of people who have not played the game, with more being born every day.

Second, because you make new “first impressions” all the time. When you release a new season, an expansion pack, a new cycle, whatever the case may be. For POE, ignoring the approximately 100,000 people who bought the game in the last month (landing it at #75 on the Steam top sellers over a decade after launch), all the returning players who checked it out for the new cycle had a new impression of it in its current state. The idea that someone forms an opinion of a thing which is then indelible rather than evaluating it anew when something changes and they come back to it, just isn’t true.

Third, because it implies that most people have a negative first impression of Last Epoch, when the opposite is true. Over 75% positive reviews, meaning of those 1,000,000 people who have scoped it out, it’s likely that 250,000 or less (given that all studies show folks are more likely to leave a review when they have a negative opinion than a positive one) people out there had a negative first impression. If 10,000,000 people eventually play the game, that means those with a negative first impression from the game’s launch state account for 2.5% of all lifetime players of the game.

D2 had over 100 people working on it. Last Epoch has less than 75. And I agree, it’s silly to compare them because Last Epoch is such a better game. But the point you miss is that you don’t need end game for a game to have staying power.

Path of Exile, of the 10,000,000+ people who have bought and played it, only 50% even beat the first boss. I’m in that group, fired it up, checked it out, found it wasn’t for me. It happens, not a big deal. Less than 20% of all players have gotten to level 60 with a non-hardcore character. So more than half of all those who liked it enough to play and beat the first boss made it to level 60. And less than 10% have gotten to level 90. That’s not unusual - Baldur’s Gate 3, the game of the year, had only 52% of players finish Act 1, only 20% of players beat the game, and less than 4% of players beat it on Tactician mode, to say nothing of Honor mode.

Most people play just a little of a game and move on. There’s lots of good games out there. So while folks complain about “endgame”, I’d be surprised if even 20% of players have beaten the game and gotten to the point where it’s a concern whatsoever. The average Last Epoch player bought it, fired it up, had fun for 20-40 hours, had fun, and moved on. They’ll come back randomly down the road, or especially if there’s a big event like a new cycle, expansion, or major update. They have never fought Julra, they’ve never visited much less posted on the forums, and they have absolutely none of the concerns you have regarding the robustness of the crafting system, or especially endgame, and have zero idea as to what the relative balance is within the game.

2 Likes
185

Those two sentence just seem so dishonest. I can’t imagine trying to defend an argument (debate, whatever) comparing two games that launched almost 19 years apart (LE early access launch is April 2019, D2 is June 2000) in completely different circumstances. D2 definitely at the birth of the genre, and I don’t know many who would argue that it wasn’t the birth of the genre. PC gaming is pretty new. Windows 98 is two years old. The first GPU, NVidia’s GeForce 256 is one year old. To pretend that LE didn’t benefit from 19 years of improvements to everything and iteration on the “Diablo-like” genre is… I can’t find a single diplomatic thing to say about your position. I’ll just say it’s bullshit.

LE launched in early access and benefited from 5 years of feedback. I played D1 at launch. I played D2 at launch. I played D2 LoH at release. I loved each one of them, as soon as it was available.

I have never loved LE. I admire it for it’s possibility. I dislike it for it’s masochistic approach to itemization. I despise it for it’s inconsistency. It’s all over the place in almost all of it’s systems. The game needs so much polish, and I don’t get anything from any of EHGs communications that say to me that they realize that is the case. In fairness, they are intending to upgrade the version of the Unity engine they use. Ok, I’ll be generous, one thing.

LE is an entirely 3D game. Maps, characters and mobs. Everything. D2 was just 2D sprites. There is good and bad there for both. LE’s animation job is much more complex, and yet, D2’s animation (at the time) was breath taking. The first game that I can remember (this is actually for D1) being jump-scared by an invisible demon appearing right next to me. Next-gen level of immersion… 19 years ago.

You talk at length about how most gamers never see end game activities. I agree with this.
And that said, the 1.1 release of LE is almost exclusively focused on a ‘pinnacle system’. So even from a ‘game as promise’ perspective, I’m failing to find what they are saying compelling. Or even comforting, really. In 2000 the end game was when the story was finished you either started a new character, or you played a new game. Except D2 changed that. D2 players literally caused the invention of end game activities. Game dev’s eventually figured out that they should probably accommodate that concept with actual end game systems.

I’ve been watching/playing this game since … I think 0.7ish. The complacency of the fans of the game for what they imagine it some day will be feels like it has become an existential threat to the game. I wish more people were saying, “I want game consistency improvements”. I personally want to see a timeline where 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 have 20-50% of the budget focused on getting systems to work correctly, consistently.

Focus on getting combat tight. Move to attack has never worked consistently. Skill input consistency seems to be impacted by player system performance and player system performance on even beefy systems is inconsistent. More often I have to hit the second skill I want to fire off twice to be sure it will fire. My fingers know to do this now! Items not doing what they say they do. The list is large. The game has been playable by the public for 5 years and many of these issues have been around since I started playing, and I don’t get any indication from EHG that they give a shit about any of that. Or maybe it’s just beyond them.

So, better than D2? The two games are simply not comparable because they became playable 19 years apart. Computer Science, by itself, has made incredible advances in 19 years. Computer game theory and computer game system design where pretty new concepts in 2000 and they have changed substantially. And yet there are still people playing D2 today (D2R).

So, again, D2 created the genre. Because of all of those reasons, D2 is still (and probably always will be) the more impressive game. Let’s return in 20 years and see if anyone even remembers LE, then we can have a comparison between D2 and LE.

wow. Didn’t realize that I felt so strongly about all this.

2 Likes
186

some maybe. not everyone.

there is a fundamental problem with your 3 counts, your 3 counts are based on another game that had a different development plan.
PoE have been building a game for the public right from the start, EHG made LE for them to play how they want. its a totally different development plan.

i dont miss this.

the staying power comes from balance, skills, crafting, endgame activities and some just want ‘god mode’ and ‘give all LP4’ buttons.

i personally dont care about endgame as much as other people, my interest comes from making up random builds, i have multiple LP3 items and some LP4 items, do you know how many of those i have slammed? 0 (you can grind a lot when you are averaging 15 hours a day).

i mess around with base uniques and see what they can do, so thats skills and items for me, when skills are not working properly, i dont even need to bother with items, because items depend on skills to get you anywhere.

some of my problems are from skills not working like they should, having too high mana costs or having a silly cooldown.

LE could also just return to the state it was before launch, with 10k or less average players because of things the community is complaining about dont get resolved.

just because other games have managed to start doing better, doesnt mean all games will and you also need to know exactly what changed it for the better.

92.8k total (71.7k positive / 21.1k negative = 30% negative) reviews of 1,000,000+ players.
of those 92.8k, only 16k are from people that have played 100+ hours.
i guess we could just assume over a million people are happy because a random study says its ‘ok’ to assume a result for someone’s argumentative benefit.

just wondering, does this study tell you how to calculate the people that just dont leave a review regardless of experience, like me?
surely because its all based on assumption we can go 50/50, so it looks like all of a sudden 50% (500k) of the players are not happy, this is fun.

187

Having 90% of players try the game, and stop playing within a few weeks, should not be the standard that game companies aspire to. Having 80% of players leave within a few weeks should not be considered “successful.” Number of sales of game should not be considered “successful.” Having a game where 80% of the players are still playing 3 months later would be acceptable. Having 200% of the players playing after 3 moths would be considered “successful.”

The bar is so low, because games these days tend to be unpolished / unfinished at launch, with expectations that “it’ll get better in the future.” Games should be good at launch, and better in future, not buggy at launch, and less buggy with each patch. There tend to be two main reasons I’m hearing people get frustrated with the game and stop playing. One is bugs, like can’t even target undead monsters, getting stuck after a dash, or maybe just DC’ing frequently. The other reason is the game isn’t fun to keep playing. The majority tend to be the game isn’t fun to keep on playing.

Thus you have many people providing feedback as to what fun would be for them. PVP, D2 runewords, harder content, easier bosses, better loot filter, less difficult to change talents, harder leveling experience, etc etc. 10% stay and love the game as is, and praise it and its systems, slandering and “Correcting” the other 90% for suggesting things should change.

D2R is currently the best ARPG, but I’ve already beaten in, by having all end game items and am able to farm all content quickly. There are no more items to get. I’m thirsty for another D2R, and LE is currently closest thing to it. I wish LE was more like D2R, my favorite ARPG. But it isn’t, and it’s not nearly as fun to play. But it’s currently the best alternative option, so I play it anyways. I suggest, that they change it, so that it is much more like the game I love. I think many people would also welcome that change, perhaps 50% of the 90% that left. Still the 10% who remain, are saying don’t change anything, for this current, LE loot system is vastly superior. I disagree. D2 was just another game, but then they released the expansion, LOD, and they transformed the genre. I believe the cause to be the Runes and Runeword system, which when I found out about it, changed the game completely for me, and the game went from just another game to the funnest and addictive game I’ve ever played.

Suddenly I wanted high runes, to make super epic gear. I tried farming for hours but I didn’t get any runes at all. I changed from single player to online servers. I started looking in “trade” and saw someone was willing to exchange 9 keys for a mid rune. Keys were easy to get for me, so I’d play for a few hours, get a set of keys, and then trade them for a mid rune. Once I had 5 mid runes, someone in trade was willing to trade for a high rune. By the end of the week, I had my first high rune. I then started to pay attention to what other things people were willing to trade for mid runes, and by the end of the second week, I had a second high rune. And so it went that after a month I had my first runeword. Many months later, I had many runewords.

The system worked and was progressive, with each week I can clearly see my progress towards getting powerful items. I could do things such as farm keys or bosses for tokens, and then exchange those tokens, keys, for runes to make runewords, then could exchange those runewords for other runes, and over time, I could get extremely powerful. Certain uniques that dropped were also rare and powerful. Thus just about any activity I did, was valuable towards getting powerful gear, be it buy low sell high in trade, or farm bosses, farm runes, farm keys, farm uniques. And at the end of each day, I could see my profit and rewards and progression, and it was awesome and addictive.

When I log into LE, the uniques I need don’t impact my character’s power that much. Also I don’t really need many uniques. Mostly what I need, is a T7 that drops with good stats. So I just go around waiting for that to drop. When was does drop, it goes into the bank, until I get an LP2 to drop, for don’t want to waste a well rolled T7 on a LP1. Finally an LP2 drops, and well, the main stat I wanted didn’t get trasnferred, but 2 other decents stats did. Now I wait for another T7 drop. Some days I don’t get a good T7 drop. Most days I don’t get a good LP2 that drops, just LP2 for uniques no one cares about. It is kind of a goal to get towards, but at the end of the day, most days it is a wash. Can’t buy low and sell high on trade, for anything you buy cannot be sold. Can’t search for good rolls in trade to buy, because there are no range filters, only stat filters. So I have to click next for 50+ pages looking a good range on the stats I want. So trade isn’t fun. There is nothing addictive or exciting about the current system. Most days it feels like I’ve made no meaningful progress, no major increase in wealth, no increase in power. Just “well the stat I wanted didn’t get carried over, guess I better farm again and try a 3’rd time.”

If the goal is to make a game where the player base increases due to how fun it is, then no, the game is not currently successful in its current state, and they should think about changing direction. If the goal is to make a game that they want to play to have fun playing, and they are having fun playing it, than yes, this game is successful by that standard. In the mean time, I’ll keep leaving suggestions about what would be fun for me, and hope that some game company makes something close to it someday.

188

GGG set out to make the game D3 should have been. EHG set out to make the game that players with their mindset/playstyle would like.
They didn’t set out to make a game that 3 people would like, they set out to make a game that players like them (which there are plenty of) would like. It’s different from what you’re implying.

Balance isn’t important for most players. D2 was never balanced and that didn’t stop anyone. Hammerdin has ruled D2 from the start while other builds were clearly very inferior to it, like poison necro.
Likewise, endgame isn’t important either. D2 has also shown that.
Also, most players don’t like crafting. Not in D2, D3 (as little as there was), PoE, LE.

In fact, the only real important thing for whether or not people like an ARPG and stick around is the combat. If the combat feels good and fun, they’re bound to come back. If the combat doesn’t feel good, then they stop playing. Even if you have the most amazing endgame mechanics and perfect balance.
That, and bugs. If a game has game-shattering bugs, like crashes, constant disconnects, etc, that will make them stop playing as well.

Steam store already gives the % of reviews. Just checked and it says 71% positive reviews for all time, 77% reviews for recent.
The number of hours people played isn’t relevant because most players won’t even finish the campaign of empowered monos. But they still bought it, played it and will possibly come back to play it again in the future.

If you’re going to nitpick reviews, then a very significant part of the negative reviews are due to the launch issues and not the game itself.

That isn’t the reality of the players, though. This is not because of what the companies do or don’t do. It’s because the vast majority of players only play a game for a short time before switching to a new one. This is because there are many many many available games to play and limited time to play them.
Look at BG3. It was GOTY, applauded by critics and players all over. Peaked at 875k players. 2 months later it had 333k. 1 month more and they had 200k. Now they have 80k.

Which is why some games use live service models. So they can keep having that peak.

This only works for live service games, though. Just look at Cyberpunk 2077. It took a huge hit due to their launch state and never recovered from it.
Sometimes games can recover from a bad launch via a DLC or expansion (which is the same thing but with a different name). Most games don’t.

However, live service games have a different tolerance. Because you know the game will keep changing (not necessarily for the better for some players). So it might not be good for you now, but it might get better and you might enjoy it if you check it in another year or 2.

Some players take an aggressive stance on change, much like some players also take an agreesive stance on lack of change. But on both sides there are also players that do it in a constructive manner.
And, of course, the vast majority don’t even interact with forums/discord/reddit in any way.

That is debatable. It depends on the type of player. Personally, I prefer PD2 over D2R and would also prefer LoD over it if it wasn’t for the difficulty in getting it to work properly on modern PCs.
Some players will say that D3 is the best one, or PoE or D4 or Grim Dawn, etc. None of them are right and none of them are wrong.

It doesn’t matter if LE tries to stay like it is, if it tries to get “closer” to D2 or PoE or D4. Whichever they do, some players will leave and some players will stay. So they just have to decide which players they want to play their game.

189

D1 and D2 didnt really even have competition, a lot of people enjoyed it because there wasnt anything better, and most people that are still enjoying it comes from the time they spent playing it (you cant teach an old dog new tricks).

nowadays more people have more powerful hardware to both play and develop 10x better games than D2 was, so comparing it becomes silly.

190

Find a game, ANY game in any genre, where they have 80%+ of peak player count after 3 months. Most critically acclaimed game in a decade, universal goty Baldur’s Gate? 3 months in it had less than 25% of peak players. Pick a genre. Pick a game. Find any game, ever, which hits the standards you describe.

Edit: Also,

Case in point. Game has 70+% positive reviews, 77% recent, but yeah, your opinion is the majority one, 90% of players agree with you and share your opinions. Naturally.

1 Like
191

Better games is a dubious statement, though. For some people D3 is a better game. Or PoE. Or even D2. It’s a personal metric based on your idea of fun.

Either way, balance has never really stopped anyone from playing. PoE has always had balance issues. It was way worse a few years ago than it was now, but even now it isn’t balanced. Some builds have become completely unplayable.

You can’t ever achieve perfect balance. The most you can do is to nerf the previous builds that were stronger and buff the weaker ones, but it will inevitably run out of your control again and new builds will suddenly become OP and others will become unplayable. No ARPG ever managed balance, nor will they ever. It’s a chaotic system.

It’s not that important to a player whether all builds are relatively balanced or not. All that matters to most players is if the build they’re playing is fun or not. And in an ARPG that mostly means combat. As long as a build has fun combat, players will like it.

192

yes, it comes in all flavours and sizes.
people even enjoy indie games, which some have the same or worse graphics than super mario which ran on ms-dos, but they have better mechanics.

are the indie games better than super mario?

i believe this mainly comes from developers not accounting for certain interactions and how they handle it, than it just being a cant balance issue.

partly agree.
games do need smooth and accurate combat systems which is what D3 focussed on.
LE doesnt really have a smooth or accurate combat system (in my opinion).

if a build is fun, but you keep dying because its weak, then you wont really like it.

1 Like
193

No, it’s a can’t. It’s a system that has an exponential number of variables. Even without going into the fact that different endgame mechanics will have different balance thresholds, it’s not possible to fully balance the astronomical number of combinations and permutations games like these have.
You would have to strip it down to bare mechanics to be able to do so and even then it would still be hard to accomplish.

To be fair, though, most players (from among the minority that does care about it) don’t expect true balance. They just want balance in a certain ballpark. For example, if you have builds that can do between 300 to 600 corruption, most players would be fine with that. It’s when they can do 300 to 5k that it becomes an issue.

That’s a fair argument. I enjoy combat in LE. Not for all builds, but for most. I also enjoyed combat in D3, which is why I usually played for a week every now and then until last year. Same applies to many other games, like D2 (which I still play every now and then, more than D3), GD (which I still play every now and then, though not so much as D2) and PoE (which I don’t return to anymore because the grind burned me out).

Yes, but in LE any build can successfully do empowered monos (base 100c) easily. So if a build is fun, you can keep playing it at low corruption. This is only an issue if you feel like you need to hit corruption X to have fun. Which I don’t think is the mindset of most players.

194

No worrys, i already feel the same.
It doesnt matter how rare the uniques in LE are and how many LP they have.
In the end it only matter what you get after Julra, and mostly u get the kick in the a**…thx for nothing, farm again pls.
The different between D2 is not only you find an item and you can use it directly.
The main reason why D2 is different and special to all ARPGs, every itemtype is usefull.
You need the white items for socketing, the etheral for merc gear, socketing items für runewords, blue ones for crafting and the rare/set/unique can directly use.
There isnt anyone which is just a filler, you need all of them.
And you get that dope when it drop, no other game have or had that in this way.
Same like a slotmachine where you draw a nice row.

In LE you drop a sh1tload of uniques and they all are just pathetic, because you know its just the first step of a few and not the last word.
Same like you draw at a slotmachine, you get a nice row but needs a 2nd draw to confirm it.
For me personally a bad system and not worth to play in longer term, too generic without motivation.
D2 i play since release and there are already uniques i never seen droping in all this time.
Sure, there are only a few, but if they drop you get this dope which gives you the feeling you want.

195

this is where player feedback comes in.
there is more players than there are developers and if asked, and developers listen, the players will/can help with these things before release.

but devs want to keep secrets about things they are working on, so they can try give people a surprise or something, of course someone will find a way something can be abused after its released.

because pretty much all devs follow this strategy of keeping secrets and things always result in being unbalanced, all of a sudden its not possible to balance before release.

meh… maybe its just me seeing as simple solutions and because its so simple, its unbelievable that it could actually work.

196

It’s probable, yes. D3 had PTR’s and the devs listened. Yet, the game wasn’t balanced. It was balanced enough. But not balanced. And D3’s systems were a lot simpler than LE’s or PoE’s. So even with community feedback balance wasn’t achieved. Each season they just nerfed some and buffed others, but inevitably that leads to one other build being stronger than the rest.

Players are great at breaking games. Devs just have to try and rein it in. But inevitably someone will make a combination that will break the game and cause a build to become OP. Reversely, if the devs nerf something, it will also inevitably ending up in nerfing something else that wasn’t OP.

There are currently over 400 different possible affixes in LE. PoE has more than that. This means that for each slot, you can have 400x399x398x397 combinations. That’s 25.217.757.600. And you have over 10 slots, so 250 billion or 250 thousand million, depending on where you live.
Each mastery has 30 mastery skill points plus 10 base ones. You get over 100 points to allocate, so you can realistically put points in all of them. That’s 2^40 = 1.099.511.627.776.
There are over 100 skills. Each skill has over 20 skill modifiers. And so on and so on. No point in keeping this up since the numbers will only get bigger and more ridiculous.

The point is that the system is simply too complex and chaotic to be perfectly balanced, ever. Even with millions of players testing it 24/7. And changing a number in one spot will have cascading effects, where it will also change them in another spot and another, etc.

So, players have come to expect “reasonable balance” instead. Which is why games will usually keep bumping builds/classes up and down all the time. Because that’s the best that can be achieved. And even then it’s not an easy feat and things will periodically get broken.

EDIT: This is not a defense of LE’s balance. 1.0 balance is all over the place and well outside the “reasonable balance” that is expected. I hope they put it in order in time, but I don’t have great expectations for 1.1, simply because it’s a very complex issue.

While most players don’t care for balance, they just want to have fun with whichever build they choose, some players find OP builds less fun and stay away from them while others will only play OP builds and will stay away from underpowered ones.
This means that, for both these groups, there is less choice to play with. For example, I’ve mostly stayed away from falconer and warlock until they’re reined in.

197

Its an ARPG, people play from cycle to cycle from 1 week to a couple of months depending on the amount of content added in a cycle.

198

Welcome to season ARPGs. Nothing new.

199

Well, the game NOW has less than 7k players online, POE has its own launcher and less than 50% use Steam and even so after 2± months I’ve never seen less than 10k on Steamchart.
But the worst part of your comment is about D2, a game almost 25 years old that ran on 2 CDs…you are aware that in its time NOTHING came close to it, that HE created this whole idea of a game that continues afterwards that ends, and people did this because it was fun, old games like FF when you won ended you started from scratch, diablo your character was still there, being able to re-explore, look for new items, not to mention extras like uber diablo, uber tristam… I’ll say it again, you DIDN’T play D2, you don’t understand what it is and the immeasurable importance it had for the world of games.

200

Whoa, some people in this forum definitely prefer spending their time, really lot of time I would say, arguing for mining less topic, also off-topic, instead of playing their almost perfect praised game, or give some constructive criticism to help the developers who are listening to us, well, this tell much about the state of the game and the necessity of improvement.