Last Epoch’s Season 4 and Beyond: Expansion, Paradox Classes, and Roadmap

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Honestly what I think the devs need to do is figure out how to reduce / manage costs immediately, because even if they make money back from an expansion or dlc they are still spending any an alarming rate.

Next they need to find a way to maximize profits. Obviously. But what I mean is assuming they don’t have a contract with steam stating otherwise, bring the game over to epic as well. They guarantee sales and charge less than the 30% steam charges. Also EHG should have their own store, or sell the supporter bundles in game to prevent more lost revenue claimed by steam for purchasing on their platform.

The last and probably hardest part is to find out why they have bad retention, or what their customers want prioritized going forward. Did people buy supporter packs or MTX, and why or why not? Survey link on the forums, or in game, or email lists which you have from account creation. Incentivize participating with raffle style draws for supporter packs.

The way they are going it’s going to be let’s say 6-8 months before the expansion is out, and even longer possibly before the dlc class is out. Assuming charging for either means you are hoping to get by up to that point and then banking everything into that one moment to keep afloat, but unless the game turns around and finds ways to reach more players and retain the ones they have I don’t think it will be enough.

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Over a year, no, they make quite a decent profit as you can see from their statutory accounts (here, if you’re curious).

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But they already admitted that they didn’t make profitable money and there needs to change something. They can’t magically make the game profitable.

Also this “selling your soul” metaphor doesn’t really work. Having paid content is not something completely unreasonable or out of norm. While many people don’t like it, it is not that crazy of an idea for them to do that.

There is no “evil practice” here. Just a company who tried and didn’t get it right the way they initially wanted to do it.

They also donvt want to make a “quick buck”. LE is here to stay for years, if not decades. But for that they need to be profitable.

Profitable doesn’t equal managers filling their pockets and leaving the customer empty handed.

Wheather or not the quality of the content that will come for the extra money will justify it we have to see.

I also want to say, that I am not super happy with how things are going, but all that doom and gloom is very much exaggerated from many people.

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lmao. won my bet. the last cashgrab is here. thx for that. xD game is dead and boring anyway.

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And your idea of doing something is aggressive monetization that is anti consumer instead of fixing the underlying issues that are the reason for the game not to be profitable?

Yes, having paid content is completely unreasonable because it’s very aggressive monetization. Generally you have pay for the game and DLC but nothing else, free to play with MTX and in the worst case possible pay for the base game and MTX which is already bordering on aggressive monetization. Le is wanting you to pay for all 3 which is just unacceptable.

Now, you are right that Krafton isn’t trying to just make a quick buck, they invested millions on this. The EX owner of EHG already made their quick profit, they are around and working but at this point if it fails, they got their millions anyway.

However the problem here is, while Krafton isn’t looking for quick profits, they want to stay in the market and make those millions and more over time, the reality of the situation is they are just another EA and so many other companies. Completely disconnected from reality or at least the reality that is the gaming market and community. This will not turn them more profit, this will make them lose even more money because people now are unwilling to spend money and even play the game.

Understand fanboys like you will not save the game. Having a fair monetization and fixing the underlying problems will. The game was already doing poorly when the fanboys and the rest of us were playing and spending money, now you are turning a huge portion of those people away and forget attracting new people when the game isn’t in a good state, even more so when there are plans to even increase the base price of the game.

When The Cycle: Frontier launched many people told them the problem although many were not good at expressing what it needed but some like myself did. The devs sunk their heads in the sand and didn’t fixed the issues, even going as far as banning some of the people who were more vocal about it. The fanboys in that game, much like you here said that they had plenty of investors and they weren’t going to just cut of the game so easily because they wanted profits and so they would give the devs time to bring the game to the point where it made profit while I and many other said. That is not how the business world works. If the investment isn’t turning profits soon and if it doesn’t shows signs of recovery, they cut their losses very quickly. In 9 months the game was closed proving once again who was right and who was wrong.

This is what will happen to LE if fanboys like you keep giving Krafton hopes that this is the right way. They will stubbornly keep going in the wrong direction and not do what needs to be done and when the game just keeps failing to make profit and the situation just looks worse by the minute, they will cut their losses and close down LE for good. So you can either keep being a fanboy and be part of the problem or you can stop for a moment, think about what behaviors you are trying to excuse and then offer actual solutions to the problem instead of excusing bad business practices that are bad only for the players/consumers as well as for the industry in general.

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A) Stop fuicking hiring when you’re goddamn broke maybe?
B) Fire half your team and keep those responsible for models primarily in. Or you get your whole team being gone before long. Either/or. Sucks for em, tough luck when you fuck up… actions have consequences.
C) Take 2-3 extra months until the Cycle releases… the goodwill and patience is already burned away, doesn’t matter anyway anymore. Use that to make MTX… more MTX… better MTX… and get your shit together about proper monetization routes which don’t make only die-hard blinded fans stay which you expect to be whaling… just for em to realize that they’re alone and stopping as ‘now it sucks actually’. This includes private Cycles which are paid for. This includes supporter Packs providing full point return. This includes decorations in-game with a area where you can actually socialize and show off, with the whole town functionality and Faction functionality in it. Ya know… the sensible stuff other games do for a reason.

Here ya go, solved.

I mean… not hard. They literally got the recipe showcased by others.

Their game systems scale like ass.

That’s why.

You enter exalted zone which is also at the time of entering empowered monos… and suddenly you got the grating difficulty difference you experience and compared to before you play for nothing as stuff simply doesn’t drop anymore. Kinda obvious when you can craft everything to the top-end and then suddenly you have to scramble hours to find a single worthwhile pickup as it goes on.

It’s grating.

Also dungeons are absolute shit, asked to be fixed and never properly touched.

Not to speak of a nigh unobtainable last boss with barely any aspirable content available otherwise, immediately turning away tons of people upon realizing that.

Also not hard… really not… same shit as always, same shit which has been talked about since years now and always the same people going ‘but thaaaat’s aaaall fiiiine!’ and now the game’s failing so hard we don’t even know if they can turn it around despite atrocious actions purely to get money.

If you tell your customers you won’t have it then it becomes unreasonable though.

Also damn simple as that.

There is.

Sell ‘A’ provide ‘B’. Any follow-up stuff? Doesn’t mean shit, that’s the core, that’s their responsibility as a company. I don’t have to care for the reasons behind it, you can if you want… but the fundamental part was broken.

Really now? Paid classes… not a quick buck?
Kinda seems like they’re panicking as they’ve fucked up so badly to not provide MTX since fucking years now properly despite people saying ‘please provide us decent stuff to friggin buy from you finally!’ that they’ve not gone over to ‘immediate’ result stuff which does ruin their reputation entirely at long last.

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Base game + paid cosmetic and now you put class behind paywall ? Mhmm not sure about this one chief.

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If there was a monetization process that sped up how often new classes are released, is this really a bad thing? Would you rather wait for 1 new class every 3 years when a new expansion comes out or have 2 or 3 new class options every 4-5 months that cost a little money?

This system could be the kick in the pants that LE needs to keep updates relevant.

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Yes. Not only you are milking your player base for it but you are creating an incentive for them to make the new class overpowered so people feel like they have to buy it. Then they balance it later out and ship out the new broken class.

This system would be less of a kick in the pants and more of a kick in the nuts that would leave it on the ground gasping for air as it dies a slow and painful death.

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Good run ! u can rest now ! RIP LE ! Rip my 30$ and 70$ sp pack

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They had a business model, but barely produced anything to sustain it.
Wouldn’t have taken any actual magic to figure that one out, though.

Make more, make them look good, maybe try to fulfill some class fantasies?
Now it’s far too late in the game for that, so now they have to resort to shadier things.

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Any chance we can get the class for free and the expansion maps/whatever as a paid object?

Because let’s all be real here, EVERYONE would prefer that. We can toy around with the class in a lot of the existing content, multiple times, by default. For better or worse, the new zones/monsters can only be experienced once even if ran mutliple times.

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If they have already announced it, rather than gathered opinions, etc., and so on, sooo… Krafton moment

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There is a chance for them to go back on things. This is many months down the line and if the discontent is very high that they see that making this move will cause the game to instantly fail, they will at least reconsider.

In fact look at why we have a paid class instead of a paid DLC. Krafton wants to add aggressive monetization, they already saw how bad of an uproar that was with them wanting to monetize DLC which is why they remained quiet for so long, they were trying to figure a way around to add a way to force us to pay while not saying that the DLC is paid. Also they are actually making the DLC paid for anyone who buys the game later down the line but hope to shut us up since we already got it and unfortunately on that end they have been successful because sadly people only care about themselves.

Still, if we make it very obvious that we will not tolerate them adding monetization past base game price and MTX they will have to relent if they don’t want to the game to die before it even gets to the paid class point.

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It seems we’re are just on opposite sides of the spectre in terms of what we think is ok and what not.

You call me a fanboy. And I call many people disconnected from reality with their keyboardwarrior posts about how a) b) or c) would fix all the problems.

I want to emphasize that I do not agree with everything EHG did, even in the past. But I think I am a lot more reasonable then a lot of other people especially here on the forums or on other platforms like reddit.

I also don’t like the new direction, but before the game is shut down I rather pay some extra premium for other stuff if that keeps the game alive. And I understand that some people are upset about it. But the way and tone many express that is unreasonable.

Just because I still support a game and a dev that I love, spent thousands of hours in and hopefully spend even more time with, doesn’t mean I m a Fanboy. I still have my gripes about LE and some design decisions they made in the past. But most of the stuff that I critique usually isn’t one of the things the “broad public” thinks is bad.
What I like just aligns a lot with what EHG did in the past. And to have more of that maybe we need to endure a few things we don’t like.

There is never a perfect game or dev studio, that does only things the player base loves. At the end of the day even a video game is a business.

I don’t really care for Krafton, what they did or what they didn’t (a lot of the sensational headlines are not the entire truth anyway). But I do care for EHG and the people working there, I met many of them and they are genuinely some of the most genuine and pationate people I met in this sector. I wish them the best. And if that means that some extra money goes to Krafton, so be it. If LE keeps delivering I am still on board.

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RIP Last Epoch

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How much?
Where’s your limit?

And you can you imagine that said limit for people is ‘0’ as well? Does that make them ‘unreasonable’ comparatively?

What’s the exact value for it to become ‘reasonable’? 5€? 10€? 100€?

Why not make it a subscription model simply then? Because if they need regular influx of money that’s the obvious solution, isn’t it?

Actually that’s kinda the description there :stuck_out_tongue:

Though the term which was thrown at you was more ‘white-knight’ then ‘fanboy’ because the second is fine, the first is not. And you’re not the first commonly. You’re simply a fanboy.

You should, and it paints a very clear picture too.
Why should you? Because if you care for EHG you would want to know what happens to them and how the working of Krafton is. You seem to miss that EHG has no actual control anymore, and is not allowed to speak up freely under contract.

Which in the US is the absolute common way to handle things as a reminder. So if Krafton tells EHG to say ‘yeah, we’re trying everything, this is the most mild option we could think of’ then it could as well be Krafton demanding them using this exact option, not allowing any other option and laughing in the faces of the devs.
And you wouldn’t know.

Because that’s what it means to be fucking owned by another company, you cannot speak badly about them as you’re not allowed to no matter what. If you do you’re gone and sued on top.

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Maybe, maybe not. This is down the line at least 7 months, quite possibly more. Like Elhazzared said, there’s still a lot of time to correct the mistake.

Here’s the thing though, I got the game way back during the Kickstarter days. With the lowest purchase that got me access, I wasn’t a crazy investor, I just wanted a new ARPG and the videos/photos seemed up my alley. I never really read ANYTHING in the kickstarter notes, and apparently EHG promised “never pay for new content”, paraphrasing, there.

ANYONE that believed that sentence, is a complete and utter moron. It’s absolutely unsustainable, it might as well be fiction. Optional or not, MTX IS NEW CONTENT. By the very definition of the term, they had already broken that. But people keep drawing lines in the air to protect this or that in their brains with circular logic, it’s a coping mechanism, I get it.

Here’s the thing: we have what could be easily considered an endless end game already setup. To put it in terms of a situation that already exists, what’s about to happen here is a D4 situation with the new area/spiritborn (which was awful, the class shouldn’t have been gated). The only way the class will sell is being overpowered. Imagine the streamers (who will all either get codes or purchase it) playing the new class and the new class being ASS compared to the base game ones. Millions of sales down the drain, right there. So we have a lot of content, ready to go, to run with a new class, but the new class is about to be gated.

They can’t not monetize a part this, that much is obvious. Krafton wants their returns, for worse and worse. If they still have ANY say in how this goes, the smart money, the one that keeps MORE players in the game (both choices lose people, it’s about choosing which loses less [or by miracle, not choosing any and making all of it free]), is monetizing the expansion. At this point, no one could care less about Act 11 of whatever. But EVERYONE cares about not having a new class. (Which is why their are choosing to monetize the class, it’s more attractive to players.)

On my own? I’m not coming back if it’s the class I have to pay for. Ever. Given we already had some acceptable closure on the main story with the, open, ending in Majasa, a new class feels a lot more “base game experience” than a new zone. And my line is drawn there, no gatekeeping of the core features of the game.

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“Nobody can plan that much into the future.”
If that’s the case, maybe don’t promise stuff like that? I’m in the wrong for expecting them to uphold their promises, but they get a pass from you from promises that don’t have to be kept?

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Is it a disconnect from reality when other people say fix A, B or C problems or are they problems that is causing these people to stop playing?

When I originally bought LE I played 3 or 4 weeks before stopping for a while and this was the general pattern as they updated.

At a certain point even during the beta they made some problems worse and since then up until now I hardly ever play for more than a week because again, the issues rear their ugly heads and I’m not enjoying the game anymore.

Do I think everyone has the exact same issues as me? No, but I’m willing to bet the majority who quit have some in common for sure and are quitting for the same reason, the issues make the game not fun to play.

What you call being more reasonable is anything but. The monetization methods that are considered reasonable have existed for more than a decade already and LE was really on the border already to go from reasonable to unreasonable because when you sell MTX the most reasonable thing is for that to be your only monetization, you normally have the game F2P. Adding a base price is just on the edge of being unreasonable. Add any more to that and it’s completely unreasonable and why people are manifesting themselves and rightly so.

You and a few others are under the delusion that making people pay more is going to save EHL and by extension LE. Nothing could be further from the truth and we’ve had plenty of examples in the gaming industry showing that it’s the exact opposite.

Companies like Krafton, EA, Tencent and many, many others are highly exploitative and they will try anything to get more money and almost always destroy games because of that. They only care about money, not about anything else and many of them are just because they are basically ran by stock market investors who have no clue how the gaming industry works. Some of them think that the mobile gaming standards apply to PC gaming which couldn’t be further from the truth and in fact we despise the mobile gaming industry because it churns out garbage for people with no brain that just keep getting exploited every 10 minutes they play their mobile games.

These companies only understand that the best way to make profit is doing the right thing when they are faced with everyone saying they will not take that and in the very rare case they do the right thing and it makes them money, then they may stay the course.

What you specifically suffer from is nothing but a bad case of sunken cost fallacy. You believe that because you spend so much money and time in the game that if it were to die that would be terrible and so you are willing to spend even more to try and avoid that. Again this is called a fallacy for a reason. The reality is that your money and that of the few people who have this same problem is not going to save LE when everyone else stops both playing and spending their money. I can guarantee that this move will at bare minimum lose LE half it’s revenue, if I was a betting man I’d say 50% to 80% of it’s revenue is gone by the time they release the DLC.

The only way to get Krafton to open their eyes and yes, I mean Krafton because it doesn’t matters if you care about them or not. They are the EHG boss. They are not telling them what content to do but they are telling them how they have to monetize and they are the ones that say what the company can and cannot divulge. So as I was saying, the only way to make Krafton open their eyes is to tell them. We will not accept this and if you do this all the millions you’ve spent to acquire EHG is lost money. Only after they start listening and tell EHG to fix the game and make good looking MTX, then will LE possibly be saved. Anything short of that will kill the game you say you love.