It's your own fault for gamers leaving the game

General
111

I see your point even though I disagree partially.
Especially regarding the prophecy example.

Why are you gathering 5-10 prophecies (depending on your lenses and CoF rank that is the nubmer of prohecies needed for 100 items to drop) for the same condition?
Pratically speaking you could have gotten way more out of prophecies when you spend less time rerolling just for those specific prohecies with different conditions. And than that would lead to a much more spaced out experience where you every now and then get a few of the items you want.
From my experience you can unlock 50-100K favor within 2-3 hours if you are playing at 400-600 corruption. That is not enough to buy neough prophecies for 100 items from the same condition. If you are sparing your favor so strictly to get so many items out of one condition that is a burden you put on yourself.

But I think we are also talking about slightly different types of friction here.

The type of friction I was mainly refering too would be things like overcoming certain challenges to get some type of reward. Like Legendary Crafting requiring a dungeon boss kill. This is probably not the type of friction most people would be thinking of as a first thought. Because a “boss reward” is not really a typical type of friction, but in LE’s case, because it is an integral part of item progression it kinda is.
Otherwise we would have a crafting station somewhere in town or just like regular crafting open a menu for that.

Second thing I was refering too would be the respeccing of skill sand masteries (skills losing some exp and masteries being not respeccable). This makes things much more meaningful, even though a lot of people hate it, I think it is a net positive for the game, because otherwise our characters would be lifeless shells that can be anything.

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That is a exaggeration. EHG fixed a lot of things.
If they ahven’t fixed certain gam breaking bugs there is very likely a reason for it, such as not identifying the issue at hadn or something.

While having gameebreaking bugs like that causes players to drop I agree, I doubt that some of these gamebreaking bugs where so widespread that it caused thousands or ten thousands of players to quit.

While I do reckong these bugs exist, they are rare and very far between considering the whole communtiy and how many people actually have them.
A tiny fraction of the community is affected by such things.

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Let me first say I think LE is a fantastic game, even in its current state. I would expect this game to be gaining in player base.
The game breaking issues, are being minimized by the community. Those who no not suffer just see this as a great game and do not know how big of an issue this is.

I have blinders on and am not seeing anything they fix at this point because the game is not playable.
There is (well, was) a very large community that cannot enjoy this game due to disconnects.
Spend 10 mins and check THEIR forums and you will see that this HAS gone ignored.

A tiny fraction of the community is affected by such things? Buddy a tiny fraction of this community is the only thing left.

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For every person reporting issues and bugs in the forum there are multitudes of people playing without an issue.

Again, I don’t say there are no such gamebreaking bugs, but the way you phrased it in your first post in this thread makde it sound like those issues are the reason the player base is declining.

Surely there are some people who quit because of it, but in a genre where player retention between major updates is already something to account for anyway, you can’t make correlations between that and a problem that affects an unknown number of people.

There even is the potential that many of the disconnect problems are not even due to the same root cause.
Some might have been fixed already, some EHG is still looking for fixes.

Also just because the current active plaer number dropped doesn’t mean all of these players not playing the game anymore have neglected and quit the game for good. The majority will return for sure with 1.1 or another major update after that.

They always put fixes out for various differen things. It is unfortunate that you have an issues that doesn’t seem to be fixed for your specific case, but that doesn’t mean EHG is doing nothing and ignoring people.

There is no reason to believe that EHG is not willing to fix these issues, some might just not be as easy to identify and solve.

Or maybe the issue is maximized by the loud minority :wink:

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Mostly this.
I’ve tried before to point out obvious issues, and I was always met with the same couple of fervent defenders gaslighting me, and coming up with bunch of “its your fault for this or that” excuses that didn’t make sense.
I got tired of it, and now I’m just sporadically visiting the forum to catch up and see if any of the issues I’ve had have been fixed, but nope.
I’m talking about game breaking bugs like shield throw builds being useless as the shield sometimes just hits invisible walls, or about the inconsistency of the grind and how long it takes for you to obtain any meaningful gear on non meta builds in a timely manner. After all, the game was marketed as something between D4 and PoE, a more casual experience where you won’t have to spend your entire life on it to complete a single character.
If I put my tinfoil hat on, I’d say there’s design to keep people playing by not giving them what they need on purpose. On my battlemage, I couldn’t find a single level to mana strike affix, on another character they dropped every now and then.
In come the defenders about how my filter is not setup properly, or how my build is not good enough, or this or that. I just got tired and stopped playing, and I won’t play until anything meaningful is changed. In PoE you can get a divine orb extremely early, which will mega boost your progress, and it’s fun! Nothing of that sort can happen here. There’s is no surprise, just endless painful grind.

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These are two different things, though.
The shield throw bug (and other skills like shield rush) definitely need a fix. No one disputes that.
The grind is a design choice and it’s something that some players enjoy. No matter where you draw the line on grind, there will always be players that think it’s too much or too little. So it’s up to the devs to decide where they want their game to land, what type of players they want playing their game and what’s their game’s identity. Because the grind is a part of the identity.
Then it’s up to the players to decide if they want to play the game or not.

Personally, I like the way the grind is in LE. I think D3/D4 is much too easy and PoE is much too hard. LE, to me, is in the goldilocks zone.

Of course, each player feels differently about this. But it’s not a game issue that needs to be fixed, it’s a game philosophy that players need to decide if they like or not.

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The players are deciding.
They marketed the game as such. Where you won’t have to spend much time on a passive tree that’s huge, or need 3th party tools to make a build viable.
There’s also always the option of Hardcore where they can pander to the players that want huge grinds. We’re talking like we can’t have both things. We can. One is casual, as they marketed the game, and there’s already a HC there for people looking for a challenging grind and fights. Am I taking crazy pills? What are we even talking about here…

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That is fine. Not all games need to appeal to all players and not all games want to reach #1. Some just want to provide an experience to their playerbase.

There is no difference at all between hardcore and softcore. The grind is exactly the same. A hardore character that’s still in hardcore and a softcore character that has the “deathless” tag are objectively the same thing.
And players that like to play hardcore aren’t looking for extra grind. They’re looking for the challenge of not dying. It’s completely unrelated.

They never marketed the game as casual. The only people that marketed the game as such were players/streamers. And, if they were doing it right, they were marketing it as more casual than PoE. If you want a casual game, there’s D3/D4 for that.

We can’t. Not unless they introduced another game mode. And making an “easy loot” game mode and a “hard loot” game mode would effectively change the game’s identity to D3 2.0.
While that would appeal to some players, it would also cause many of the current playerbase to leave.

The idea that “It’s an option, you don’t have to use it” is a false argument (and a dishonest one at that), since having an option that effectively cripples your character isn’t really an option for almost everyone. Just for the few that like challenges.
Much like introducing an option for “God mode” would still be an option but would very effectively kill the game.

Yes. What you want is D3 loot. What EHG (and a significant portion of the playerbase) wants is something else.
It doesn’t matter where you draw your line on where the loot grind is just right, lots of players will hate it and leave because of that. So EHG has to decide where they want their line drawn.
Right now it’s harder than D4 and easier than PoE. And it seems that is where they like it.

It’s not a game issue, it’s a game philosophy. One needs fixing by the devs. The other doesn’t. That doesn’t mean that they won’t change it at some point and make it easier (or harder). And when they do, most likely the players that were happy with it will leave and new ones will come in. But it still won’t be a game issue and not something that needs fixing.

From everything EHG has done so far, it seems like they are much more interested in making a good game that they (and players like them) would like to play, rather than trying to reach #1. If they do fine, but their game identity, for now, is more important than that. Which is just fine for a significant portion of the playerbase.

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More gaslighting. Just like I said above.

Grind is grind. The game is a grind. Nobody is disputing that. The game is literally killing monsters. What you’re conflating is grind with how you grind, and before I get more gaslighting I’ll elaborate.
Grind is killing monsters to achieve a goal. Those monsters drop loot that make said grind easier and easier and more satisfying. That’s literally the game. That’s it!
What we have now is just grind, and unless you spend tons of time in the game you’ll never reach that satisfying part of killing monsters easily, and you’ll never have the sense of achievement. Just a blunt time wasted. You do understand what the sentence “Progressing in a timely manner” means? If I spent just as much time here as I spent playing PoE, I’d still be at corruption 200.
Everyone marketed the game, and EHG did nothing to elaborate. They just went with it. I couldn’t be fked to be honest, but I’m pretty sure they also mentioned that in a developer video on youtube where they talk about what the game is going to be.

Go fervent defender. Forward! I’m going back to my cave, and I’ll come back in 3 months when maybe something changes. You’re just unwilling to understand the issue. For you, there’s no issue. It won’t be long when more players leave and the actual situation finally penetrates that thick skull.

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You should search what gaslighting actually means. It’s not just a keyword for people to throw when someone disagrees with them.

Progressing in a timely manner is a personal metric that will change according to the player. For some players LE is slow in this metric, for others it’s actually fast.
Just like for many D3 was way too easy and they left the game.
Just like for many PoE was way too hard and they left the game.

Right now, LE’s gear progression is easier than PoE’s and harder than D4’s. Whichever way you try to shift that line, there will always be players that like it and ones that don’t.
You don’t like the current line. That’s fine. If this is a dealbreaker for you, that’s fine as well. You don’t have to like every game. And not every game can appeal to everyone.

Especially regarding this, because you can’t please everyone. If LE would change to make it so that you like the gear drops and feel that it’s in a “timely manner”, many other players wouldn’t like it and would leave.

No, it seems that you’re the one that doesn’t understand. Because there really isn’t an issue. Much like Dark Souls doesn’t have an issue. It just makes a hard game and players either like or don’t. If they made the game easier, maybe they would have more players, but that’s not what they want.

So yes, more players will leave when they understand that this game isn’t for them.
Much like many players left PoE when they realized that it wasn’t for them.
Much like many players left D4 when they realized that it wasn’t for them.

You just want the game to be like what you want. But what you want isn’t what everyone wants. Or what EHG wants. You can leave and come back later but it’s not likely that it will change, since it’s a game identity issue.

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Who are these many other players? When was the last time you’ve seen player numbers? Have you seen the intensity of these type of posts? They’re all over the forum. Majority have already bailed.

This is such bullshit statement I can’t even.
Majority of the players that came were already part of those 2 games. This is a niche genre. It’s not like it has millions and millions of players like other genres, and it failed to satisfy ITS TARGET AUDIENCE!

Just typical white knite bs. If this game hits all the nails for you that doesn’t mean it hits the majority of the players as well.

And all of you people that defend these type of practices and blatant ridiculous designs gaslight people into thinking its them that are the problem until the game dies with just you ~thousand of players remaining. It’s US that think wrong. It’s US that don’t understand anything. The game doesn’t have problems, it’s the players problems. You write like a spokeperson for EHG, and every complaint is met with “oh no no no, see, you’re wrong about this, the game was designed like this.” Well no shit sherlock, the design is bad! It’s not sustainable, and it only makes people mad.

You should take your own word here. If its personal metric don’t tell me how it’s quicker than PoE and slower than D4.

Honestly, your post is so bad it can be dismantled easily. I don’t have the f time to try to convince someone that is never willing to change their mind. Play the game, do what you want. Just like I’m not playing it.

There’s 1 undeniable fact. Players numbers are dwindling. You’re advocating for status quo, I’m advocating for a change. Guess which one makes more sense.

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The amount of people that will write feedback about things they don’t like about a game is much much higher than people going to the forum and saying “everything is fine as it is”.

People are much less incentiviced to give feedback about something when they don’t have something to criticize.

And the majority of players are types of players playing all of these games still. many many players play all 3 of them or at least 2 and alternate between them.

And I would argue that LE did not fail to statisfy its target audience, because with everything that currently is criticized about the game, there always was and still is a lot of praise for LE.

There are a lot of players that still like this game.

I think the gigantic peak fo players with 250K+ leads people to believe that not because its back to 4-5K that the game is failing right now. But it isn’t. (Overall the game is still growing and it will only get better once there is more longjevity in terms of content and endgame)

The overwhelming hype that the game received might have been a bit too early, because its not quite ready yet for longterms playerbase to stick.

Excluding game breaking bugs and htings making the game unplayable for some people.

The most common pieces of feedback are usually regarding endgame variety and content, all of which is addressed on the roadmap already.
LE just still needs some time to flourish.

What DJSamhein already mentioned in their previous posts.
The goal of a dev is not always to maximize the amount of people playing the game. They don’t want to statisfy the majority of players. They might want to make a game, they want to make and adjust certain thigns along the ways to make it better in some regards, but that doesn’t mean catering to the largest portion of the playerbase, if they would need to compromise on their design philosophy or vision.

You really like to throw the term gaslighting around alot and I still faield to see anybody gaslighting you here.

I don’t know what happened in the past, but I think you might not know what that erm actually means. You might want to look that up and make sure you are using that term right.

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Most players that like PoE don’t like D4 and vice versa. There will always be a few that will play both, but the vast majority will stick to one or the other simply because they’re totally opposite in who they target: D4 is clearly targetted to the casual crowd, so PoE players won’t like it for being too simple/easy, PoE is clearly targetted to the hardcore crowd, so D4 players won’t like it for being to complex/hard.

No, it didn’t. EHG never set out to make the best ARPG, or the most popular or the one with the highest player count. They set out to make the ARPG they would like to play. And many players that feel like they do also joined in and are still around.
So it’s target audience is, for the most part, satisfied with the game.

Even in a niche genre you have niches. Which is why D3 players and PoE players were, for the vast majority, exclusive. If one liked one of them, they didn’t like the other.

I know it doesn’t. That’s not the point. EHG doesn’t want to please the majority. That’s what D4 is for. And no ARPG (LE least of all) will ever be able to compete with D4 in the casual market. Because D4 is a very good game in what it set out to do. It just isn’t what EHG set out to do.

A game doesn’t have to please to the majority of players. PoE clearly doesn’t and it’s doing fine. LE just needs to find their own comfortable spot and stick to it. Which they did. It’s just not a spot you like. Which is fine. As I said, not everyone has to like LE, nor does it need to please everyone.

Like I mentioned before (in this thread? another one?) not every game needs to be like pop music: easy to listen to and pleasing to the majority. Some prefer to make something they enjoy instead, even if they sell less.
What you’re basically saying is something like “Foo Fighters (or any other non-pop band) are idiots. They could be pleasing the vast majority of fans and do pop music like Katy Perry instead.”

Yes. It is. D2 has the same ridiculous designs and it’s done fine for years. PoE has the same designs and it’s done fine for years. Why aren’t you in their forums trying to change their game?
Or in FromSoftware forums trying to change their “atrocious designs”?

Again, games don’t have to cater to every type of player. And they don’t have to please the majority just for sales. Many devs don’t want to do that. They’d rather make a game they enjoy.

For you. Others like it fine.

Getting absolute BiS gear in D4 takes much (much much) less time in D4 than in LE. And getting absolute BiS gear in PoE takes much (much much) more time than in LE. This is not a personal metric. The personal metric is if you prefer D4, PoE or something in between.

Neither. Or both. It depends on who you ask. If you ask Blizzard, you make more sense. If you ask GGG, I do.
Because Blizzard just wants to sell as much as it can, which is why it targets the casuals. And GGG just wants to make the game they have always made from the start, which is why they target the hardcore players.
I’m pretty sure you could make PoE much easier to grind and create builds and their numbers would probably increase. But they don’t want that. Nor do their players.

It’s fine that you want easier loot. It’s also fine that EHG doesn’t.
I happen to like the way LE is setup in this regard. I also happened to hate the way D3 handled the loot. But you know what I did? I simply didn’t play it. I certainly didn’t try to change the game to please me instead.

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And currently, one can casually do all content without amazing gear.

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That’s not true, I liked both, for different reasons, obviously.

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That’s why I said:

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“Gaslighting” is real term that has a real meaning - a malicious, psychologically damaging practice that occurs in abusive relationships. It is not a synonym for “someone disagreed with me on the internet”, and it is offensive and reprehensible that you keep trying to use it that way. You are not being abused, you are not a victim of anything, and you are not being persecuted. You are just a person who doesn’t like a video game that other people do like.

Have some more respect and decency than to marginalize people who actually suffer from gaslighting than to keep trying to use it as a thumbscrew when you’re losing an argument.

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I don’t feel you are attacking me, on the contrary, I feel we have an exchange of views.

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Last epoch failed to satisfy alot of the arpg fans. I have 1.2K people agreeing with me on my video last epoch is fun until its not as a youtuber with 50 subs and as nonebody because people agree with me.

1.2K is already more then everyone on the forums combined. And they where all largly negative toward the game. A lot of them are hardcore arpg fans from grimdawn and titan quest. There is a reason player count is dropping, will it go up with new season? Yes. Will it go up to what it was? I do not think so. We would be lucky if 20K return for season 2.

My video was still during honeymoon phase of last epoch. If i remade it now it would get evem more likes

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lol. There are more than three times that many people playing the game right now, during the lowest possible point in its content cycle. The number of likes you got on your crackpot video means squat.

Why you people who obviously don’t like the game, and aren’t going to like the game, keep sticking around here to make the same three silly arguments about why the game is allegedly objectively bad is beyond me. Move on already.

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