Your judgement paladin from patch 1.2 character name of Judgement_Dreed has very low EHP and only a max physical hit of 2425.
This low amount of EHP is a recipe for disaster and will result in a lot of 1 shots. It is important to build proper defences in this game as you start to enter empowered monoliths so you can better handle the difficulty spike.
The point is exactly that you differentiate the Season/League/Cycle as a limited run of a shared economy from the technical and content update/expansion/patch.
Maybe LE will go the PoE road and all expansions will stay free, or they go the Diablo route and have paid expansions like Vessel of Hatred.
Let me summarise:
The announcement contains the term ‘expansion’, and suddenly many people conclude that this could entail additional costs. And then there is a lot of discussion (and concern) based on a very vague and unfounded assumption. Is that correct so far?
Why?
No, it just means that they want Playstation players to wishlist the game that is coming to Playstation. This trailer was created for and shown at Playstation’s State of Play event. Krafton may not be involved at all in this.
Less tin foil hat, more Occam’s razor please. Thank you.
If you’re hiring staff that aren’t capable of doing the work you need them to do then that’s on you. You’re either hiring lower skilled/experienced people (your choice & if you intend to train them up that’s a fair point), you’re hiring people that don’t want to do it or you’re hiring people that lied during the hiring process.
As I said, yes, though assuming you’re keeping your employees reasonably well stocked on work (this is also a requirement for contractors BTW) then the cost of that piece of work will be substantially higher if you use contractors because you’re using them on a short term basis for their higher skill/experience level to gain access to those skills for which you don’t have a full time job’s worth of work.
Then don’t hire people who can’t/won’t do the job. Plainly spoken.
Not necessarily, no. If you have sufficient work to keep someone occupied for a “long time” then why would you use a significantly more expensive contractor? They get paid more because they don’t have any job security.
But you did say that adding more people reduces efficiency without any caveats which is demonstrably wrong. Do you think your one man band experienced coder would be able to put out comparable quality art or sound? No? Perhaps they need specialists in those areas? But wait! That’s reducing the company’s efficiency!! 
But it’s allowing them to concentrate on their respective areas of expertise which allows them to work more effectively & efficiently!! The confusion!!!
Nothing can ever be guaranteed. Welcome to adult life.
One thing doesn’t prevents the other. PoE isn’t designed to be played without trade and yet there is a sole self found mode.
It’s about how the game design was made and how the drops are designed and LE was designed to play online, this is especially noticeable with how the drop pool works.
In the kickstarter, there’s even an mp “video” on the kickstarter page, trade has it’s own section on it, etc.
This is a design decision, the devs don’t want to do content that requires a party.
Amd it was being worked on for years before 0.9 (which was pre-launch), this is why there was a drought of content before 0.9 was released. LE was always intended to be an online game with an offline mode as well.
Um, no they weren’t? I mean, mp was talked about in the kickstarter so I’m not sure why anyone could be confused about that.
Performance-pay (PFP) gives a higher income, usually. Long-term, it comes with increased mental and physical health risk for the employee, as PFP leads to more hours, pressure, and stress. The employee starts to exploit themselves, because they feel the need to perform above reasonable expectations.
And I named a bazillion of reasons why at this specific point people wouldn’t be ‘fine’. As mentioned above.
Reducing it to a singular thing is generally nonsensical. Something can have a large impact… but when EHG would fix the difficulty spike simply there - fully - then it still won’t change this outcome in any drastic way.
Unlike what you’re proclaiming.
Why? Because there’s a ton of extra reasons which lead to it.
So if that happens and it still goes on… would you go all ‘pikachu face’ at that moment or rather have a bit of foresight beforehand to realize things are not black and white purely?
First of all… your data is generally flawed for a single reason.
The higher player-count the higher the percentile of ‘tourists’ in a game. This is a given. Makes it seem as if games which have a high amount of players actually do worse since their retention percentiles are worse.
That’s why there’s a distinction made between ‘tourists’, short-term players and long-term players.
Also you’re reducing it again to a single factor here rather then taking the cummulative effects of several reasons into consideration.
A major one is and always was choice paralysis and mental burnout from overexposure of varied content until that was handled with the scarab rework and hence full player agency over the content.
You can see it with the retention rates directly how content variety and player agency have impact actually.
Harbinger did really well, Abyss too, Bestiary did worse but recovered because of major changes towards the end (the thaumathurgic nets), incursion simply went baaad but also had a recovery. Delve did far worse then Abyss for example but still well… and from there it went downhill with Betrayal for retention.
By that time GGG has been told repeatedly for years that their game struggles from being bloated and throwing everything at the player at once. Nothing was done and numbers got ever worse and worse up until you can see the curve smoothing out again when GGG stopped their substantial nerfing spree after Lake of Kalandra. Otherwise it would’ve already smoothed out during Siege of the Atlas.
You can easily see the overall impact of the game by watching the so called ‘floor count’ of players. For example LE has around 3500 players ‘floor’ while PoE 1 ‘had’ a floor of 15k people during Delve up until at Legion it dropped substantially, the time when player agency was the worst, constantly dropping and dropping. Having the floor drop is really bad, that were the bad years of GGG. This went on until Sanctum which recovered the floor to those 15k roughly, not perfectly so but they at least got a sizeable core audience back around that timeframe.
That’s… pure nonsense.
Side-content is everything not at the core experience.
Dungeons are side content.
Arena is side content.
Any substantially sized game needs those in some way or struggles with player retention. Those things are there to allow your mind to ‘reset’ basically, getting out of on monotonous direction.
Imagine Guild Wars 2 without all the side-stuff to do but only the core gameplay loop of progressing through the story and doing direct events in the world. No jumping puzzles, no collection stuff and no life-skills.
Imagine Final Fantasy 14 with only the main storyline stuff, no side quests, no golden saucer, no anything there.
People simply burn out no matter how good something is, if it’s repetitive they do.
If that would hold true then ‘Dwarven Realms’ would be a vastly more successful game then it is.
Not too complex and does exactly what you propose, you run in, you kill hordes of enemies, you finish the area, done. That’s all you do from the beginning to the absolute end.
Layouts don’t really matter after all, mob types also don’t really do unless very distinct in a Hack’n’Slash game.
But still… it does substantially worse despite having a - while relatively RNG - very very solid itemization and progression system. Something which LE struggles severely with after coming close to empowered.
Yes, and 70% of players never go beyond Chapter 3 or so… so that would make everyone actually doing so a genuis of gaming!
Once again, don’t reduce things to a single reasoning. It makes no sense, you can inflect everything as a reasoning then and make it seem like it’s actually upholding.
That only is a thing when you have no comparison by either playing in a relatively closed of vacuum by your own or surround yourself with similarly skilled players. So you then lack the ability to create a proper distinction.
If you stay in a position where you see people which aren’t experienced then this won’t happen.
Much like in any segment. I’m really good at doing some specific carpentry stuff, top 1% world-wide of carpenters… and I know so because I’m seeing what others do regularly. Same with gaming, my biggest hobby. I know I’m a ‘good gamer’ overall because of experience, but after weeding out those which don’t actually invest themselves into any game I’m still only slightly above average, if we take those which have gaming as a distinct hobby then I’m even below average.
Nono… you still don’t fully have it… that was the cashing out 
That has passed. The former owners of EHG can just turn around, leave and never come back whenever they want now. Nothing is holding them back. Everyone will detest them for not living up to their promises as they should (and should legally be bound to actually) but otherwise? They’re ‘done’ financially. They have no holds over the future, it’s not theirs anymore.
Krafton paid them money and now they don’t own anything, no stakes left.
They absolutely do.
Beginners are overwhelmed from the sheer scale.
Mid-tier players get bored out from the non-stop same-ish content as they progress without major change.
Higher tier players are utterly underwhelmed and not challenged.
Neither their game sizes nor their mechanics nor their QoL are catered to any one singular audience type.
Exactly what EHG stated… a mid-tier ARPG audience. Not as ‘sweaty’ as PoE players, not as casual as Diablo players… the ‘in-between’ hence.
That means gameplay for around 100-150 hours comfortably, that means mechanically mediocre bosses, that means the ability to overpower enemies substantially with according skill at any stage of the game rather then having to play ‘catch-up’.
The ‘leeway’ if how much mistakes can be made, how swift one reacts and how you can build all adhering to a single mid-tier audience in comparison to the core competition on the market.
LE currently has around 40-60 hours of gameplay though, which is too little. Their systems start to fall apart at around 30 hours already though, so that’s clashing.
Then you got the extremely grating variance in difficulty. From ‘this is a nice game’ at the beginning Acts 1-2 (at least mid of Act 2) to ‘is that it?’ from 3 forward until you reach Act 8 and get utterly dismantled by Lagon which is completely out of place. To then have a ramped up version that should’ve had you prepared for from Act 3-8 already but never happened. And then… you go into monoliths which are so piss-easy comparatively you’re bored out of your mind to suddenly get slapped left and right after adjusting to that when moving into empowered.
So obviously it’s not even remotely adhering to anyone properly. The only people staying long-term currently are those which either have no high bar to overcome to ‘stick’ in a specific game… or the game does by happenstance do something which ‘speaks’ to them so to say.
Is it intentional though? By no means. It’s similar to how I’m playing ‘Wayward’ for over 1000 hours now despite it being a simplistic game that is clunky… but I simply stuck to it as my relaxation game because my bar is basically non-existent there. Is it great? Nah… decent little game but that’s it.
In comparison I’ll once again - since it’s a great current example - to Silksong. It starts with the premise of being a relatively hard game, it stays at that and it demands constant improvement of your abilities without being utterly overwhelming. There is no handholding like yellow ledges, it is unfair at times and the whole design tells you outright ‘this is what I am’ at any time of the game. A coherent gaming experience.
There’s several of those games… Grim Dawn, Ori and the Blind Forest (or Will of the wisps, both), Project Zomboid, Factorio, Minecraft, Avorion, Abiotic Factor, Dwarf Fortress, Barotrauma and so on. Games which simply put out the statement of ‘what they are and who they cater to’ by being coherently designed. Be it intentionally or out of sheer luck (like Barotrauma plainly spoken, but they swiftly leaned into it after realization struck).
Last Epoch doesn’t do that, the game basically tells you non-stop conflicting information of ‘what it is’ along the way. This feels shit for nearly everyone. Sure, it has the ‘spark’ of potential greatness, but it isn’t able to actually show it off.
It’s like a No Man’s Sky at release, the developer telling you it is all the things it isn’t and you’re non-stop disappointed hence. Now EHG needs to pull off to actually put in what the game promises to provide and remove all the stuff it ill-fittingly points towards as you progress.
You shouldn’t wonder what happened to the starting experience after progressing a bit, you shouldn’t be surprised about Lagon, you shouldn’t feel bored out after beating the campaign, you shouldn’t be stomped into the ground for reaching empowered, you shouldn’t feel ripped off the rewarding progression after getting exalteds introduced and so on and so forth. All major issues… and I’m not even starting to talk about live-service aspects which EHG simply fails completely to handle.
Yeah, so obviously implementing Aberroth which is beyond PoE boss difficulty is smart… right? Or doing Lagon? Or having a itemization system that has a vastly more stringent progression system then PoE does? Just lacking the complexity of the crafting system (which plainly spoken GGG are idiots for not streamlining finally into a unified UI since years now).
On the other hand being easier then any Diablo game the second you move into normal monoliths, boring you out completely with having to basically run ‘lifeless non-challenging content’ for ages to progress upwards until the bosses at least start doing ‘something’… all before being thrown into the most grating switch-up with empowered again.
It’s all over the place.
You can talk from one side, I can talk from the other side and still we both would be right because it’s damn hard in LE to be wrong about stuff that needs fixing. I just think you’re reducing the issues far too much… it’s a lot deeper then you think, there’s so… soooo much wrong with the game currently on all ends.
Yeah, you take it out from damage basically to have the leeway, but many skills just suck as they’re undertuned, which is another issue, grating disparity of builds. When I play my zoo necro I feel like a wet noodle compared to playing VK with erasing strike that just laughs at the world.
Ah yes, the mode which wasn’t actually ‘offline’ until 1.0?
For a game which was inherently since the kickstarter designed to be ‘online only’?
CLearly not designed to be a online game 
No you don’t, you need a good variety and enticing options for character costumization. A finished game isn’t mandatory either… but it definitely needs a enjoyable gaming experience… which LE doesn’t currently offer long-term for the majority of people.
Huh?
You mean the thing which was always the focus to be made after the core gameplay was handled? Since we always had to be online only despite not being able to play together with others?
Which are not lawful in the EU, they simply don’t apply
Hence why the follow-up statements are ‘per case’ basis related to misleading business practices mostly.
The majority simply doesn’t apply to a EU citizen and are often handled for the sake of US ones though… as there they can be done simply without repercussions.
Cause it’s concerining, that’s why people concern themselves with it.
That’s naive beyond end.
You get staff which is there to acuire funds from social pools.
You get staff which is great at roping in others to do their work for them.
You get staff…
It all depends on which system your company is in. EU is different from the US. Yes, in the US it’s a shit-show for workers, people even work out of their friggin cars without a fixed home simply to afford food as they can’t handle living from a full-time job. But I don’t wanna get into failing systems of ages old never reformed systems which are stagnating since decades… no country is without em, but that excess in a mess there is just baffling by now even in comparison.
If someone needs money to afford living people do lie. If someone doesn’t feel rewarded from their job they seek options - if able to - to ensure they need to work as little as possible.
Salary only made sense back in the beginnings of automation jobs and became ever more of a limiting factor, but let’s not get into that too far, it would be a massive topic by itself. Contractors and hires are both not without fail, but overhead is known to be less with one system then the other. Reliability is lower with contractors though and time-investment higher. Costs lower though.
But given EHG is overselling and underperforming it wouldn’t work anyway, there is no ‘let em cook’ mentality for the game, they agressively pushed into the sector, expanded their company until it’s becoming paralized from weight and now they’ve got to deal with the fallout, it’s not rocket science, it’s one of the biggest factors of companies with initial success failing after all.
And a hire does have that? Especially in the gaming sector?
Sounds more like hires for game-development are doormats to me. All the downsides without any upsides.
Might be, look at indie studios and what they produce at times. Hollow Knight, Silksong, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rain World.
Wanna say any of them have bad artistic depiction? Or a bad sound design? Is any of them badly coded either?
And some things are riskier then others. One is a hail-mary attempt and another is a reasonable expected outcome. Guess which is which.
Content which is needed to have a party versus designing your content to allow parties and group-related activities simply are two different pairs of shoes.
I agree with the concept… but EHG simply failed to provide the basics of using the live-service aspect by now.
Exactly and hires have no agency, it leads to less hours but more stress and anxiety based around internal expectations. A loss of control over your own time and is directly correlated with depression even unless the conditions are right. No direct causation yet but heavy correlation being seen. Which means it’s - obviously - based on the work environment circumstances… but that’s not a thing you gotta worry about in performance based pay.
It also depends on the country and the relevant options related between salary or performance-pay.
And education with the respective preparation to allow managing your life in a healthy manner when doing performance pay. You’re prone to overwork yourself only if you don’t know how to limit yourself or organize your work.
The big part of salary has always been safety related aspects. ‘You work for us, we don’t pay you as much as a individual separate contractor but because of that you’ll be safe here for the foreseeable future’. That safety aspect is gone since nearly 2 decades by now but people act as if it’s still a thing.
I need to point out that EHG literally stated:
[…] Perhaps as the size and
scope of the game/team grows
we’d have to charge for expansions
or something but really we’re
against predatory monetization and
P2W stuff.
[…]
Source:
So yes, I think the time for monetization has come. Otherwise it would NOT make sense to use “expansion” which is widely used to identify paid content.
Please clarify!
Thanks for explaining logic. 
So, you’re saying that it makes sense to be concerned over nothing, a term that is in no way associated with what people read into it (expansion → purchasable content) and no evidence that they could correlate? If so, this is concerning. 
In a company environment with performance expectations, you’re not really allowed to limit yourself. If the goal of the company is performance increase, it means they want to incentivise employees to put in more effort and more hours than employees would do with fixed pay.
Limiting yourself is in direct opposition with the goal of PFP - making people whip themselves for higher productivity.
PFP does not lead to fewer hours worked, but more, according to studies. As always, exceptions can exist.
The perceived fear of not knowing what the future brings as external contractors contrary to the perceived security of a permanent contract still exists. Perceived job insecurity is a high risk for anxiety or depression.
What a terrible announcement without any details whatsoever, and hinting at a paid expansion when you promised otherwise.
Seriously, wtf is going on over there?
What you named as the one reason was a few monsters that had a bit too high damage that oneshot the player and especially when it happens from off screen and I did agree that this is also a problem but not the single one, not by far. Even if you smooth out that particular issue players are still going to die very often because let’s be realistic here. If a player is dying often then the cause isn’t just a few overtunned monsters. You also have the temporary buffs that monsters get from maps like extra critical chance, more damage, more HP, etc… But the problem is as I detailed many times early but you seem to be hyper focusing on the word difficulty. Grand blessings are not something a player can get. The player is not powerful enough to get them yet he needs to get them to do empowered content but you also can only get them in empowered content. Constant nerfs to defensive layers. The lack of ability to target farm what you need or a trade system robust enough to guarantee that the player can trade for what they need. Of course, I also talked about overtunned monsters especially majalsa monsters. All of this is making the game very difficult and that difficulty with the points I specifically addressed, must be dealt with.
This data is far more revealing than you give it credit for. Prior to Ascencion the player base was as I said tiny. The player base growth percentually between ascention and delve was much higher than between delve and today and that takes into account covid which was a major growth for PoE in overall numbers.
Yet the biggest percentual growth for PoE had it keep it’s player retention. There is no appreciable change in the player retention from beta all the way to delve in terms of percentage, however there is a huge difference after (not directly after but in the years that precede delve and the game becoming harder). Why is that?
The reason is simple, when the average player had enough power to play maps at any tier without suffering from a gear wall issue, people played for a lot longer, they were having fun. Once the gear wall was in place people stopped being able to progress and have fun so they started to quit earlier and earlier.
Your idea of tourists is the usual BS propagated by the top players who just want to feel superior to everyone else who can’t even play the game because it was made unreasonably hard.
Fun fact, I never had a problem with PoE being a hard game. I had a problem then they made it easier, people like me then spent money cause the game was now fun and then they pulled a 180 again making us feel like we were robbed. If it’s meant to be a hardcore game, make it hardcore, don’t do a bait and switch.
Yes and no. Dungeons are side content, arenas by the use of arena keys are side content but map arenas aren’t.
Side content is meant to be harder content or content that requires specific builds to deal with and this is fine to exist but the majority of players don’t do side content. Again look at PoE. You think the average player is doing side content? No, they are specifically mapping and the ones that don’t listen to the meta farming strategies which they obviously will never be able to pull off because they don’t have the gear nor do the play the game at a speed where they are hitting maps day 1 and making multiple divines a day, they are doing the sensible thing, they don’t do hard side content, and they might do easier side content like harvest and sell juice, boost scarab drops and so on. PoE does have this weird point where some side content isn’t actually too hard but the point is, side content isn’t that necessary. It’s cool for it to be there but the average player will not interact with it if it’s made in the way it is meant to be made as extra challenge with potentially better rewards.
Also don’t compare it to GW2, you cannot compare 2 very different genres because side content in both games have VERY different means. One is giving you new ways to challenge yourself, the other is giving variety but not really more challenge.
I didn’t play that one so I can’t speak to it (never even heard of it in fact) but let me tell you something I played but not many people did. Chronicon. It’s not a game with many players or well known but it is one of the most solid ARPGs that exist. It has the absolute best crafting system ever made in an ARPG and it has the best minion system ever made in an ARPG (so good in fact that PoE 2 copied their minion system but still made it slightly worse).
You want to know why Chronicon is not up there with games like Grim Dawn? The art style. Pixel art just doesn’t has a lot of draw and to be fair, it’s not the most flattering when it comes to ARPGs with lots of particles on screen. However the systems and gameplay wise is probably the best. The only thing that PoE does better is the mapping and the whole gem system and there is no other point where any other game has it beat that I can think of. Funny thing, you want to know what you do at end game? Mapping! that’s it, you just map and it’s pretty good. Could have used a more robust mapping system like PoE. The ability to pick map layouts and kinda chose the penalties that are present on the map is really the cherry on top of the cake it needs (that and not pixel graphics).
This isn’t true. If EHG themselves are said that most players quit when they hit empowered monoliths, that very clearly shows where the absolute largest percentage quits so there is no way that 70% are quitting in chapter 3. This is not speculation, this is directly for EHG mouth.
How many people get a hands on experience seeing people who are of average skill play on a day to day basis? I certainly don’t and almost no one does. This isn’t even a case of whether you surround yourself with people that are as good as you or not. The point is, if you play good enough an average player will look to you as a bad player because you play so much better, you could point out many mistakes or things that could be done better (that doesn’t means the average will be able to do better, just that you can see what is wrong because people only grow so much better and to grow past that requires an investment the like it’s a job and gamming, even as a hobby is not meant to be a job, it’s meant to be fun, esports and the like being excluded here) and unless you know for a fact that the player you are watching play is in fact statistically average, your assumption is going to be that he just isn’t good or maybe like you said, that he just doesn’t cares. In all likelyhood, it is an average player who has reached the limit of his skills baring treating the game like a second job.
Yes I understood that very well though perhaps have not expressed myself well enough. When I say got to cash out, I’m speaking in the past, it has already happened.
You tell me a game that is for everybody and I can point it out that it isn’t. Just to take a more extreme example here. You can make a football game that is meant to be for everybody. Is it though? No, I hate football games so it’s never gonna be for me.
There isn’t such a thing as a game for everyone. There cam be a game in any genre that is aimed for everyone who likes that genre and that is possible to do through difficulty settings but of course, it has to be a game that is done right and we already agree that the triple A industry is just trying to cash out without putting in the effort. We could certainly debate the reasons why but we’re already getting far off topic here.
I can agree with what you generally say here but the things I’ve been saying about the difficulty and the specificity of where it is going wrong are not actually against this point. Smoothing out difficulty is necessary, we’ve both already agreed on this. I just point out what are the nails sticking out that need hammering.
The only point why we’re having this long discussion is most on the point that you said very early on in this discussion that empowered content is easy for anyone who ha already played the game for a while now and I disagree on that. Empowered is a huge difficulty bump and you do say so here that it is there and it shouldn’t. Everything should feel like a smooth progression where the game gets harder but the player gear and passives make him stronger to overcome that.
No, I’ve talked about this a lot already. The problem is precisely that. Difficulty is in a bad spot, itemization is in a bad spot too. Though I haven’t specifically addressed aberoth in this post because to be honest having a pinnacle boss which doesn’t even takes that much time from the team to implement is not really an big overall issue. But I’ve actually said this in feedback posts that aberoth and other pinnacle content was bad for the game, in fact I was already against the difficulty of fights like Julra (granted can be overcome with gear but we do have the itemization issues already). If the game is meant to be anywhere between PoE and D4 then pinnacle content isn’t the way forward, it is something that can be considered to be added at a point where the game is in a good state for the challenge hunters so long as build enabling or progression gear isn’t tied to it.
In understand that you think I am trying to reduce it too much but I think at this point we’re talking past each other. To me you were early on reducing things too much to the issue being offscreening and oneshots. and to you I am just blanketly saying it’s a difficulty issue when we have already exposed many points where the game is certainly failing to deliver. It can all be encompassed under difficulty or progression issues but there are certainly many topics under that which we are refering to and by no means trying to make the problem smaller than it is.
Even then it is perhaps not bad if things change little by little rather than demand everything to change at once, there is only so many development time between cycles but we can both agree the problem is not that the problems aren’t seen, the problem is that the Devs aren’t listening because these are problems that have been reported multiple times and not only nothing has been done but there has been no communication from them saying. We realize this is a problem and are working on it. They clearly are ignoring the problem.
Hence why I am here addressing Krafton directly in this post. While I don’t have huge hopes that Krafton will listen, investor selfdom understand how to make a good game because their understand business even if not the gamming industry as a whole. Because asking EHG before they were acquired for the necessary changes fell flat on it’s face. Maybe Krafton if they want to make their investment return anything will listen and force EHG to make the necessary changes. It’s a long shot but better to try and fail than to simply idly watch both EHG and Krafton with no clue as to what monetization will work for LE sink the ship.
I’m sorry but what? You can’t take away from damage. Prefixes are damage, suffixes are defenses. If you need a temporary suffix to cover a weak spot that is meant to be covered by a blessing, something else is coming out of that defensive layer. This is not a discussion about whether you prioritize maxing your defense or offense affixes. This is about what you can even have on the gear in the first place.
How about your most ambitious plans like fixing bugs, they’re present for years now like fixing the deathscreen features only working in English? Or missing health bars? Or broken monster names? Or fixing the translation in general? Or basic things like complete the campaign? Or making multiplayer stable? Or fixing the game’s performance? 
I tell u guys/girls who doesn’t like it can uninstall it what u think these kind of things should be for free??? U have spent more money in POE1 just to be able to play the game by buying stash tabs. Here U have completely functional game with payed cosmetics but somehow that posed a problem as well because obviously people think u should pay 30 dollars and expect free updates for life what a joke. This is a good thing to release payed expansions every year on top of free seasons it will generate profit to employ more people and obviously it will generate more content and and then seasons will not be so cheap as season 1 and season 3 will almost nothing to do. For those that do not see this logic which is good for company and for us players its a shame, those who love the game will stick around and those who don’t will uninstall it and problem solved. Be happy it is not payed to win if it was then I would fully understand some peoples reaction but this is just bitching with no good reason what so ever mostly cheap bastards that are to cheap to pay one expansion per year news is that company is not living from those guys which payed game for one time and then never support it again expecting everything for free while other people support it. This is like paying meal one time and expect every next one to be completely free. And for those saying EHG has promised something 2021 and now is breaking promise ask yourself did you ever broke a promise course life situation pushed you in different direction all of a sudden a lot of people are saints
Or more of Overton windows.
We have to wait for more info on “expansion” to see if it is a PS5 promotion tactic only or they are watching our reaction (tin foil hat ON) 
reaction of always the same 20-30 people complaining instead of being happy that the game is going in a good direction. More money-more content-happy players
Nice moving into PS5 too!
Expansion is probably paid, not clarified but everything points at it.
Sad thing. I don’t care much about contracts and I was gladly paying a supporter pack every season I played.
But we were told the business model was: pay once, then optionally pay through cosmetics.
Now we are getting a paid “expansion” instead. To me the deal is broken, maybe the next one, is to add pay to win features? Big red flag.
Maybe I will pay for the expansion maybe I’ll be out. Still to be seen, but any remaining trust was broken. Hard to invest into a game that could be potentially P2W.
Maybe they make it a paid expansion, maybe they just use new marketing terms.
‘major expansion’ certainly sounds more hype-y than ‘season’.
Over 3k hours + many in CT. I will 100% not pay for an expansion as someone who bought most of the MTX and supporter packs based on the devs saying many times that it’s a one purchase game. If we are going down the expansion + in game purchases route AKA D4bad. You can miss me with that bs.