Path of Exile is free to play, and has existed for about a decade. They did not always have 100k concurrent users. In fact they didn’t hit that until March 3rd, 2018 with the Betrayal League, about 4.5 years after launch.
Wolcen launched to over 100k users, and flopped hard. Many people are probably also wary and waiting for the game to launch before buying it.
Last Epoch is a game with a box cost of $35, which is going to keep a lot of people away. Last Epoch is also in early access, which is something a lot of people avoid. Last Epoch currently does not have seasons, which is another thing people are waiting for.
The mp event was a sign up thing, which also required users to enter a code into a field in steam that they don’t normally interact with, and the signups only went up about a week beforehand. Asking people to sign up for a beta test, of a game they can already play without mp, in a setting where they won’t keep their characters after the 10 days is up, with all these steps, is asking a lot.
The number of people that had issues getting the client, even when they signed up, was pretty high on its own. Now imagine how many people tried, failed, and didn’t bother. How many didn’t care to test it, when it’s coming in a month anyway?
Yes, trade is a factor. So are all these other things. You can’t expect Last Epoch to be on an even playing field with a game that released 10 years ago, with regular updates.
If LE does leagues with races and ladders and stuff, make leagues have no trade whatsoever. No gifting, trading, AH, or anything. BUT, on the permanent server (non-league), have completely open trade. All the way up to an AH. This makes it so that people can’t abuse trade shenanigans to cheese the leaderboards. If someone’s goal is to abuse the system, that should be a precise thing to prevent.
If trade is a thing in the game, I REALLY don’t want to labor like I do in PoE to get the item. I want to just go up to an NPC and click to buy it for whatever the cost/currency is. Part of what makes trading so awful is trying to coordinate with other players.
How about the following Idea about trading and avoiding to reduce the drop rates:
Every Item has a small chance to be dropped as a “Disturbed” Item. Only Disturbed Items can be traded, as they dont break when try transfer to a different timeline. (i.e. Player)
Additonally, if needed, every Unique can be made tradable by a quite rare consumable. (Or maybe through a Dungeon? Or a Dungeon, with a slight chance to drop “Disturbed” Items.)
This way, the droprates could stay pretty much the same and the only thing that would need to be adjusted is the change of an item being a “Disturbed” item.
I’ll preface this post with a disclaimer that it may not at all be possible, but could be an innovative way of protecting trade from bots. What if at the end of any of the dungeons you had an option to go into an area that contains Gregory the traveling merchant. Once in there you have to look around the small area and and locate a unique captcha code that is part of the 3d landscape, when you enter that it would send a totp code to which ever totp client you have registered with the game ( you all have phones right?). This would allow you to put up your unmodified normal, magic, rare, shards, or 0lp unique for sale, and browse an anonymized selection of the same. For bonus points if the devs wanted to they could scale what is shown in the merchant window based on what tier you have completed. Additional bonus points, if no one wants your item in 5 days it is returned to you. Unless of course everyone wants to be scrolling through pages and pages of common uniques with crap stats.
I’m happy playing SSF if they make it bound to account and not bind to character. (As long as it’s not DOA) If they mess up trade they are most certainly going to tell the people that love POE and D2R they might as well not show up. That’s a big group of players.
We’ll see soon enough how popular the game is when 0.9 launches. I simply think it’s going to be far less popular if they didn’t take such a strong stance on trade at the end of last year.
If the only reason people play POE is because of trade then it must not be a very good game.
Here’s a thought: maybe LE can still be successful even if it’s not a carbon copy of POE. Maybe people like to play different games because they’re different, not because they’re the same. I know, crazy idea.
Do you want to see a game die before its release due to archaic non trading systems that arent in place costing many developers their income and eventual jobs, sweet cool.
Sorry that the whole game needs to cater to YOU because YOU dont like trading but at the end of the day you could do everyone a favour and play SSF and not engage.
Devs probably decided game isnt sustainable without it and some people are going to have to deal with it
You have no idea how many people were on the servers for this event and all of your doom and gloom statements to try and push your view of trade mean nothing.
We have opened more spots for tomorrow, Sat Feb 4th @ 2pm CST for the pack the server party
(Reddit - Dive into anything)
This post on reddit did not say “we don’t have enough people” it said we have opened more spots, which I take to mean that they went past 10k sign up. Game is going to do just fine.
We actually do know! Thanks to the fact that the event was exclusively on Steam and steamdb tracks the numbers, we know that the cap during the ‘pack the servers’ portion was about 2,300, which I imagine is well below the goal.
My bad, I linked to the post that specified the actual pack the server event but really meant the second open beta event overall. My belief that the game will be fine whether they stick with just gifting or add some trade still stands. (corrected)
This statement has no basis in fact. and is pretty low.
I would like nothing better than for EHG to hit it out of the park with a cool innovative limited trade mechanic that protects well from bots, limits or eliminates RMT, and still supports their vision. The gnashing and wailing of the “Full open trade or your game will fail” crowd would be like sweat nectar.
If you’re referring to the standalone client, it can’t be used for the event.
The numbers were low, but I sure didn’t expect them to be high. I don’t expect 0.9 numbers to be that high. It’s still not “launch.” Even at launch, I don’t expect insane numbers. I expect numbers to build up over time.
Well the pack the server was the peak so I think we can safely infer from there that the number of unique players for the event was below expectations.
While that is usually true, the launcher was not included in the beta event. Steam was the only way to access the beta test, so those numbers encompass the entire player base of the MP event.
Edit: Just saw that Xolak answered for the second part as well. Thanks Xolak!
Was it really, though? I’m curious how much they actually expected. Considering the previous peak was under 10,000 with a “PoE exodus” or whatever that was about, and the requirements to get into the event, I personally thought we’d see no more than 5k, if that. It’s still an early access title
Given that the entire purpose of the ‘pack the server’ event was to stress the servers enough to potentially crash them, yes I think it’s safe to say 2.3k players at the peak was below expectations. The only other option we can infer is that they were hoping for a number around that level and have such little confidence in their server that they thought it might be enough to crash them.
PoE is in the middle of their strongest league potentially ever in retention terms. ( theres a post on reddit right now about it as its always talked about repeatedly) I already quit Sanctum league nearly a month ago and theres 2 more months to go as they extended the league
perfect opportunity to play LE. I hadnt logged in to LE in nearly a year but I went on to test my ping from Australia (56MS constant) played to about 45ish monoliths and logged off. If LE was releasing RIGHT now it would be amazing timing for me for example. I want to keep playing but its pointless right now
edit: one thing to point out regarding Steam numbers. I play PoE on the standalone client since 2013 and not steam, so I and others do not appears on those metrics. Its speculative 65-70% of PoE players are on steam, so you have maybe 20-30k not accounted for
Torchlight Infinite im sure does not track mobile users on steam so again you could be missing a huge number of players.
The only players not tracked on steam for LE is GOG? users
And I’m not entirely sure why.