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

Announcements
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I didn’t know anything about Kickstarter or any promises. I just came across Last Epoch in recommends, and I liked it. Everything I saw - I liked. I don’t have much experience with ARPGs. I play occasionally but don’t spend all day every day on it. What I didn’t like much was the sparse endgame, the reset of points as a “penalty” or for gold, and a chest for gold. Nothing else. Great way to spend time. Someone else might find more significant flaws, but again, I’m not an experienced player in this genre.

I don’t care whether seasons, global patches, etc. will be paid. But I do care about a paid class. That’s something like “There is a monolith for free players, and there is one for paid players where the chance of getting good loot is higher.” Because come on, the whole balance afterward will be built around the paid class since those who bought it will need to be shown that their money wasn’t wasted. And that will just be the beginning.

Yes, over time, I started learning more about LE. And when Krafton bought them, I saw a video showing GD’s answers on Twitch, where he swore there would be no sales of core content and that everything was fine. No, I clearly understood that core content sales would happen. I was curious about how it would be done. But selling a new class? wtf dudes.

Sell the stash tabs, sell skill point resets without penalty, sell mastery respec without gold, sell story skip. Make really beautiful cosmetics. There are plenty of things that can be monetized >.<

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If you want to make money, try releasing beautiful MTXs. 99% of your MTXs look terrible, so I don’t think it’s surprising they’re selling poorly.

Another big question: the game only has one uber-boss and two mob-filled areas, and you’re already releasing paid DLC. I might understand if the game already had a significant amount of interesting and varied content and you suddenly said you’d tried everything and there was no other way to make money, but that’s not the case right now.

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Well paid class might not be to bad if price is reasonable but it’s highly doubtful, Ngl this might be the last season for LE

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EHGs “strategy” for how to manage a company:
Release the game half-finished → hire more people
Release a new season → hire more people
Almost go bankrupt and get bailed out → hire more people
Wonder where all the money went → hire more people

Are the current workers so inefficient that you need more than 100 people to make a mid-sized game?

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Developers .I hope you will listen to the audience and cancel the paid class.You know yourself that you will kill Last Epoch. I really like the game, But if there are paid classes here, I will unfortunately leave this project.And I’m 100% sure that a lot of people will do it.It’s better to make a paid battle pass like many people do.

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Free expansion but paid character? What? It’s an insult to be honest. I’d much rather pay for an expansion than a new character.

Just make stash tabs a purchasable thing like in PoE and make better and more cosmetic MTX. People would much rather buy stash tabs than characters because buying more stash tabs is a choice, you can live without it but a paid character feels mandatory. It’s a VERY bad idea.

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Did Krafton banned you from interacting on your own forums or why is it on Reddit? And it’s locked on Reddit.

The more I dive in this, the more worried I get.

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What you don’t understand is that it’s not really about paying for something in a game, that’s fine, it’s about not lying to your playerbase. You can’t in good conscience keep telling the players “Krafton is not going to change the workflow or monetization of the game” right after the deal and 3 months later introducing paywalled classes that operate on a different leveling system which, if you don’t pay, you’re never going to experience. Just be upfront about it ,you don’t care about the player enough to tell them the truth, let’s just lying to them for as much as possible and then shove some extra paid dlc into the unfinished game. I’m sure this will make your (ex) company grow so much

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They’re scared of real feedback and to interact with the community i guess

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I don’t! EHG is balancing slow and bad. Getting another construction site for free is nothing I like at all.

They can’t consider. If they falter on every corner they become an even bigger punch line. if they wanted to consider things they would’ve made a survey sent out by mail to every player to answer within a week. All they did was throwing mud to see what is sticking but they still threw mud.

Don’t argue with Heavy about it. I think he is to far gone when it comes to LE. He would most likely give his left egg and his firstborn :slight_smile: .

Hero Siege had some cheap classes over the years still the complete edition was at 200+ quid at some point. Sure I bought the full pack on a discount for 20 quid and never looked back but a lot of DLC’s sum up. Imagine you want to start to play WoW with your friends but you have to buy every expension there is to do so. Almost noone would do this.

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I mean yea WE know that, they need to lol

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While I dont like paid classes, if price is acceptable (relatively low) I can deal with it. The game needs support somehow and i have bought very few of them since they are kind of bad. I always saved my store points for “cool stuff in the future”. I never saw reason to use them. Nor have I bought more than one support pack because it happened to have cool item in it.

I wont buy stuff JUST to support. They have to have something I want. So far there has been no such things.
If the classes a have a reasonable price and appear interesting, there is still a chance that I will toss money at them, but I dont like the idea that content like classes are paywalled. There is a high chance I will buy first one, but if I feel they arent worth it, I will not buy future ones.

And at some point, if they keep adding these, to get content fully, the price will keep going up unless they add older stuff to “base” price.

There are games that have large number of small addons. To get a “full” game costs far too much. Sometimes even so many and confusing that I dont even understand what I should buy. Not exactly ARPG, but destiny2 is one such game. I will never touch that game. Do not let LE become a game that people will think “I will never touch that game”.

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Yes, because bringing a company back from the brink is so easy & simply accomplished that it is a frequent occurence, so much so infact that companies failing & going bankrupt is a rarity.

:roll_eyes::roll_eyes::roll_eyes:

I hate the phrase but, “tell me you don’t know how to run a business without telling me you don’t know how to run a business”…

If a thing is so easily accomplished & you’ve been complaining about it for years but it’s never been done/whatever, maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t them. I’m not saying it isn’t them, but you people typing stuff on the internet doesn’t magically make it so.

Not when the company has been operating at a loss for years (ever?), no. In English, “trying to make a quick buck” usually has the connotation of doing something a bit iffy & then fucking off, aka, milking your customers before scarpering with the cash. Not what’s happening here, which I thought you would have known, being such the paramount business mind that you are.

Yeah, & given what the internet says about their Beloved new Overlords, that bit “worries” me, even if EHG had a proven track record on class balance (I mean, they kinda do, but not like that).

Hellgate: London tried that, it didn’t work for them. Which was a pity 'cause it was a good game.

Not if you’re using it as a pejorative. That just makes one a bit of a dick.

They can have mine if they want, he’s desperate for a job.

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So… yeah… A lot of mixed feelings on that announcement.

No good answers, I will wait and see, will probably halt MTX support if the implementation is poor.

I understand the reasoning of needing to generate more revenue and that combined with the acquisition via Krafton is always going to not go well across a large portion of the community optically, but personally would rather have paid xpac than paid classes. Particularly with history of new classes being overtuned and potentially creating a perception of p2w if tuning is slow on it (even if it falls within the normal means).

But I also know that others prefer the current implementation or would rather not have any implementation at all (not going to happen most likely with the 65M Krafton dished out).

Just a tough situation all-around with no (feasible) good solution

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Anyone else pay for the lifetime sub? I did, for secret world too. Different times. For those that aren’t familiar with it, it was basically a very large upfront cost (like $200) on subscription based games with the idea that you were subbed for its lifetime. Absolutely loved Hellgate, particularly the Stonehenge stuff, which friends and I got free access to with the lifetime thing. The game collapsed however because people weren’t really buying into the sub. It also released unfinished, thanks to EA.

What life was like before Kickstarter which had tiers way higher than $300.

The big reason I said EHG needs to figure out what’s going on with their costs / incoming revenue / whatever is exactly because we don’t know the internals processes. We can guess and speculate, we can voice our opinions and offer suggestions, but at the end of the day EHG devs have to be willing to do the legwork themselves. Forums posters are probably less than 1% of 1% of the total group of players, and even getting 10% of THAT number to do a survey would be generous. There’s no quick fix.

Best they could do is set up steady seasons starts, like quarterly, and then figure out their costs and income quarterly so they can have flat comparisons. The long seasons, no MTX between seasons, and limited maintenances (bug fixing, balancing, etc) doesn’t help their bottom line.

They suffered from the same self fulfilling prophecy fortnite did. They saw spending was low on single player, but ALL of the mtx (not counting the gambling boxes) were in battle Royale, so they focused everything into their battle Royale without even questioning why it was more profitable.
For EGH they released an incredibly small amount of MTX that people just weren’t that into (and which ranged from reasonable to outrageous prices) and they release them so sparsely over such a long period that there was no way that system was going to be profitable, and have thus abandoned it for other means of income, without really asking why it wasn’t profitable for them despite being profitable for PoE. They desperately need to listen to their customer base (not necessarily implement everything anyone says) so they can understand what people want to see for the game to be a success.

People who cry out that they will never support anything they put out, and people who say they will buy absolutely anything no question are equally not helpful. Be constructive with your praise or criticism; what do you want changed, what do you love the most, etc.

None of that matters at all though if the devs aren’t willing to listen.

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I am sure they didn’t break the promise lightly and they tried otherwise. They did and they already outlined that in the past announcement.

Just because thigns changed doesn’t mean they didn’t tried to prevent it.

Does it suck? Yes
Is it a broken philosophy? Yes

I wouldn’t call it a “promise”. Because in a industry where it is about money and keeping employees and a company afloat you can never ever promise something will stay for ever.

Even with how much it sucks they tried explaining themselves and tried to do it in a way that still gives us a lot mroe free stuff, only some stuff is not entirely free.
But when a game that gives you hundreds, if not thousands of hours having to pay a little bit extra at some point is really not that big of a deal as people make it.

Does it suck? Yes Do I personally like it? No? Is it reasonable and understandable? Yes

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A game will always have problems. For some people its problem A for the next person its problem B.

While “fixing” some of the issues they might create new problems for new people. There will always be somebody stopping to play because of some problem or design decision.

But some people (not you speicfically) said if they fix A B or C the whole game will become all of the sudden top tier and magically will bne profitable, which is simply unrealistic and somewaht delusional.

I never said that. I still expect more new stuff that comes free (e.g. Season 4 and 5 + the Expansion). And that stuff has to be good for me to keep playing the game. But then throwing in some extras that are paid is fine, if that means the devs can keep delivering these free updates as well.

I can assure you I have no sunken cost fallacy going on. If I don’t enjoy a game I don’t enjoy it. Weather a game is free, paid or f2P with MTX/microtransations. I always support and keep playing the game, if the game is actually fun.

I neglected a lot of games, that I have sunken sizeable amounts of money in. I am not attached to any single game that much that I keep playing it, just because I paid X into it already. And even games that shut down or that I stopped playing after a certain amount of time I usually got my fair share of enjoyment out of them, so that I am not upset about the money spent. (For me personally that threshold is roughly 1€/1h gameplaytime). So for 30€ played if I get 30 hours out of the game I am happy and wouldn’t call it a loss. I know that my personaly threshold is a lot lower than a lot of other peoples, but that is ok. Measurign by this metric I am already very happy with LE so far and I am continue to enjoy it if they next seasons will bring some more. (I still have some other builds with some of the primordial uniques, that I want to play in season 4).

At the end of the day you and I just seem to be on very polar opposite sides of a spectrum and that is fine. But calling me a fanboy just seems odd. I am not blindly obeying or following LE/EHG. Yes I am a big big fan, but I am not blind and brainlessly following everythign they do. Their game design just aligns a lot with how I like my ARPG’s

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They have to whether they like it or not. This is a case so strong that if they refuse to be reasonable they will lose all the millions they paid to acquire EHG because I can guarantee that their revenue is going to lower by at least 50% when they are already not being profitable. Personally I think it will tend closer to 80% but PS5 sales might for that specific season make it look a bit better than that but the revenue from all other platforms will be completely gutted and after the release on PS5 then they won’t even have that extra to say it wasn’t so bad.

What you call being a punch bag every time people riot is not being a punch bag. It is listening to reason. I will agree in some cases people exaggerate and there is no need for relenting to that because in those cases it won’t actually affect sales. But in this specific case is just listening to reason.

Remove the planned aggressive monetization, at worst add a seasonal pass but be more like helldivers 2 and such where you can complete it whenever you can and you can buy any seasonal pack at any time to remove FOMO, make the MTX high quality, no one wants to buy things that don’t look good and last but even more important than the MTX. Fix the issues with the game that make people stop playing after a week. They know the reasons, people have told them multiple times. People have been telling the exact same reasons since beta and I can tell you, this fix could be done in a couple months worst case scenario with a much smaller team than EHG has.

You do this and I guarantee that LE will be profitable very quickly and it may even take away many players from PoE and Diablo 4. Not that I’m saying they will stop playing those, that’s dumb, just that their main game would become LE.

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There is a main reason why people quit this game. First off, this game was marketed to people who want an easier game than PoE and harder than Diablo 4. It was meant to exist right in between these. I can tell you I experience more success with PoE than with LE because of a few issues.

Gear is more important than people let know. You need more damage than just the tree and most defenses are on gear. It’s not worth farming gear bellow 100 corruption and ideally you want 300 or more.

You need grand blessings, some of them very high rolled for your defenses, also for attack but that one is a little less important. You only get those at 100 corruption or higher (empowered).

MG doesn’t lets you trade without too much grinding making it’s use restricted to the best players and CoF also has the grind problem but also the targeted farming it gives is ridiculously bad.

There are difficulty spikes in the game that shouldn’t exist. Lagon is one case where up until that point you are fine, then he starts constantly oneshoting you with crits. Majalsa mobs are mini lagons, they will oneshot you with crits and well, they hit much harder compared to other mobs. The new chapter is the same, very strong enemies, can oneshot with crits and hit a lot harder plus the fast jumpers that can instantly kill you before you can even react to them.

The difficulty spikes extend to empowered monoliths not just on the type of mobs but the extra HP and damage enemies do with the corruption. Most players already struggle with the last few monoliths before empowered and as soon as they hit empowered they are dying constantly and quit.

Because it’s not worth farming at any point that isn’t empowered, you have an issue where most players can’t progress and quit. It also doesn’t helps that the moment you die you lose the rewards which further makes the player feel like it’s just a waste of their time and not fun.

So what are the fixes? Bring all mobs down to the level of mobs prior to majalsa and also fix bosses like lagon and majalsa. Herot probably needs a touch cause the AoE damage + dash is broken. Smooth the power scaling for enemies so that a player can easily move into 100 corruption so they can start farming for gear and blessings (potentially make blessings easier to get at higher rolls because a lot of the times you are stuck until you can get a high rolled specific blessing. Last allow MG to trade with no restrictions and remove the levels as well as make more powerful the target farming of CoF.

Do this and the game problems will be solved.

You don’t understand at all. There is no free stuff that will ever come out once they close the game because it’s not profitable. It is that simple, if Krafton doesn’t sees a return in investment quickly, they will cut their losses and close down the game.

This is why we must tell them not to do what they are doing and what they need to do because that is the ONLY solution to save LE.

You previous post very much showed that you suffer from it with how much money and time you spent in it.

I am not saying you didn’t enjoy your time. What I am saying is that you are already so invested into the sunken cost fallacy that you are willing to throw money at them and lets them do things things that are not acceptable in hopes the game doesn’t dies while ignoring the fact that doing that very thing is what will guarantee the game will die.

Stop holding on to every lie or half truth a company throws at you to excuse their behavior. Look at it and ask yourself what will realistically happen when they do what they are saying they will do.

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Yes, it is.

Do you know why companies at the brink don’t recover?
Because they don’t severely change. Paniced half-assed reactions rather then thought-through actions at best. Very very rarely it’s different. And most don’t react at all but just do more of the same stuff which didn’t work and then wonder why it goes to shit.

Lemme check… ah yes, ‘paid classes since we’re broke’. Half-assed reaction created out of panic. Check! :stuck_out_tongue:

Yep, maybe.

Sadly it is though in this case.

Sure.
Incompetence and nothing else then utter pure incompetence does excuse that now?

Oh wait… no… it doesn’t actually.

So? What did they do exactly?
Care to tell me in this case?

Because people told em ‘get us more MTX’ and the shop is empty as can be.

People also said ‘provide us places we can socialize’ which would increase MTX sales too. Have we something of that sort?

I personally also stated to them ‘The supporter packs aren’t really supporting but payments, include the full-price as points into em’ and that’s also not done, so the direct quality of the content suddenly becomes primary rather then ‘I give them my support and spend those points whenever and wherever’ with slight incentives on top this way.

They don’t have any monetarized custom cycle options.

They don’t have any monetarized non-timed MTX passes.

They got jack-shit.

So where exactly did they try to prevent it? Where was the action taken? In damn years

And it shouldn’t have even come that far that they need to pull back because they fucked up in the first place.

And yes… some of the things were indeed very very direct and clear-cut. And that’s not the case anymore.
Do we have to ask ‘pinky promise?’ from now on every time they state something? Or is everything just ‘could be, could be not’?

You have exactly zero right to tell people ‘how much of a deal’ something is to them.

The premise is that EHG stated ‘A’ and did ‘B’. It’s up to each individual to decide how much of a deal that is for them. Not up to you.
If someone wants to ignore it… good for them! All power to them!

But pushing against someone rightfully voicing out that it’s utter shit what happened? That’s a big big no-go.

It is neither reasonable that it happened and how it’s actioned currently.

Nor is it understandable why it happened in the first place with their absolutely humongous playerbase which 99,9% of games only dream of

Sure, kinda seems though as if ‘the problems they fixed’ were the wrong ones here :slight_smile:

Otherwise… why aren’t they making money despite having a wildly successful product? And why is the community at whole pissed to no end?

It is absolutely not as it was stated 'that won’t happen.

That’s the premise.

You can turn a blind eye and it’s fine. But never ever say ‘the basis of it is ok’. Because it’s not.
At best someone can say ‘Yeah, it’s shit… but I’ll pay anyway’. Up to them.

Agreed.

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