I leave it up to other people to speculate on what this means.
I just found 70k hours quite astonishing, because that is 8 years straight, no sleep. Something like that.
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honestly, if I were a DEV I would make this game free to play, I would focus on supporting pacs and real expansions, I would also make the game more deterministic with unique items having a maximum of 2lp and having a mechanic to be able to reroll these affixes, to reduce the gap between a good item and complete rubbish, I would remake the forging system to scale with lvl and bring crafting to t6~t7 affixes as well as the possibility of normal items having 6 affixes, the set items for me should be totally remade and always come with 2lp.
If the next league doesnât have a peak of around 150~200k players we can already consider this a dead game, today the player average was less than 4k.
If you were a DEV, youâd be at your wits end with all the players calling you names because you did mechanic X with value Y instead of Y-1.
No matter what design choices you make players will complain. You see this in LE, you see this in PoE, you see this in D4/D3, you see this in GD, etc. No game is immune to this because everyone wants the game to cater to them.
I highly doubt it will reach 200k since the new stuff doesnât justify it.
As for it being a dead game, just go search the PoE forums for all the doomsayer posts saying the game was dead/dying over the years. And yet, itâs still very much alive and kicking.
Once the devs start adding more varied endgame, the peaks at cycle start will be higher and the troughs at cycle end will be a little higher. It will never be a lot higher, seeing as even PoE caps at 20-30k, but it will increase.
The game will only die if the devs decide to blindly add everything the players ask for, you know, like expansions, etc, instead of trying to balance changes with keeping the game identity in mind.
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Why 2?
They used to, apparently, back in the distant past, but they changed it to 4. No idea why. Also not sure it really matters since they could just tweak the affix values to give the same totals but with 6 affixes per item instead of 4.
Definitely yes to the former but no to the latter, then theyâd just be a different shade of unique item (rather than the current redheaded stepchild). Or they could just get rid of sets completely & convert the existing items into uniques (with a bit of a buff) & the possiblilty to get LP or WW.
Do you know how many years it took PoE to get league peaks of consistently over 100k? Around December 18, bearing in mind 1.0 was October 13. Though TBF, thatâs not counting the people playing on the non-steam client & I canât be arsed to look through years of statutory accounts to see if they mention player counts.
âDed Gaemâ is a common refrain from people in any game. PoEâs had people saying that for years. 
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Actually since even before 1.0. Every time someone doesnât like something in a game and it doesnât get changed to what they like, players will declare the game dead, even in the face of facts pointing otherwise. At this point âThis game is deadâ is simply a synonym for âI donât like something/anything about itâ.
It happens again and again and again.
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Yup, I derisively roll my eyes as the comment deserves.
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Itâs the most classic and timeless of all salty gamer whinges. Every game Iâve played in the last 30 years has had people screaming that it was dead or dying.
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Game only has 4K right now because d4 released a new season thats actually decent lol
If the game is so dead just stop playing it/living on the forums, that simple.
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Someone saying a game is dead is just a reliable as people complaining about people saying a game is dead.
Complaining about complainers complaining is a classic complaint in the gaming industry.
I donât like your complaint about people complaining about people saying the game is dead, so I want to complain about your complaint about people complaining about people saying the game is dead.
And to further point out that people complaining about people complaining about people saying the game is dead is what is killing the game.
I would argue that the former is more reliable than the later.
Email support.
Nah, my friend, these are the hyper-advanced takes that can only come from someone whoâs built his own DOS machine. That being said, even if I give the most generous estimate and assume VileNation has been PC gaming since 1989-1990, thatâs still an average of 6 hours per day. For 35 YEARS!
I will admit, though, considering Iâm a complete offline player, I want the game to be dead so that people can stop going to the forums and making thread upon thread about how dead the game is. If the forums arenât completely littered with complaints and instead about people who actually enjoy the game, there will be peace.
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I remember my first 486SX-25 with a teeny tiny heatsink that I upgraded to a 486DX4-120!!! Fear teh powah!
I donât want to flex (okay, I kinda do 
) but I had an 8086 CPU with a whopping 4.5MHz (with a turbo button to boost it all the way up to 9MHz), 64Kb RAM, Hercules graphics, 3.5 AND 5.25 floppies AND an amazing external hard drive of 20MB!!!
This was somewhere in the late 80s and it cost way more than a top of the line PC costs these days, relatively speaking 
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Yeah, we had some 8088s at uni 'cause clearly physics students needed to learn machine code.
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Yeah, I had a C-128. Did my first âcomputingâ on the Vic-20 in my school. And helped with a BBS run off an Amiga.
I wonât even mention that I knew a guy, who knew a guy, who had one of those shmancy-fancy TRS-80s from Radio Shack.
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Itâs been over 1 month since the average number of players has been below 5k, please.
for me it could be 1, but as there are people in love with huge RNGs 2 satisfy this, more than that all other items become immediately irrelevant, think if you are using an item with 4 affixes it drops a single lp4 you wouldnât even use it, but it It absorbs everything you are using and gives you even more. he understands? On the other hand, it becomes frustrating not to progress your build because you donât drop or acquire a single LP3~4 (which is exactly what we see now).
-the same argument goes for 6 affixes on non-unique items, so that they are valued and compensate for using them in your builds
understand, a game dies when it loses the ability to renew itself, even if it maintains numbers (wow is an example of this). PoE has always grown in number of players since its beta until close to ultimatum since then the game has stagnated, every game has a natural rotation of people joining and people stopping, when this count tends towards more people stopping than new players joining the game dies, and PoE is a free game which is an advantage, it was purchased by Tencent before current Chinese laws so having a relevant playbase for the LE is still a promise. I like the game, I think it has the best early game of all modern ARPGs, I love the class system and its skills, but its late game is very problematic, I hope it gets it right and becomes popular.
The thing is, WeAreViledNation constantly reminded us that he is a content creator. At one point, I opened his YouTube channel and saw his face in a thumbnail. If he is beyond 30, the key to eternal youth lies in his genes.
I learned assembler code on those, too. Coding was never more fun.
Sounds more like late 70s, early 80s. Pretty sure we had a 386 or 486 by 1990 or 1991 with 33 MHz. Played Monkey Island on it as my first PC game, IIRC.
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Yeah, would have been right around there. We played Wing Commander I on a 486, which was completely unplayable with âturboâ toggled on. Game played in fast forward, and was over before you could finish reading the mission notes.