It’s been a while since I got epoch and I’ve been through a few patches, I’ve given my feedback on things I thought needed changing but honestly I’ve seen very little of it making any difference in how the game is developing (despite the fact that I’m not the only one saying these things). One of the unfortunate effects of not being a large streamer who has a huge community backing, my word is worth practically nothing.
Still I believe there is some point in addressing the issues that LE faces, even more so now that it is very close to 1.0 and most of its defining features are either there or close to completion.
I’ll preface this by saying one thing. There will be many comparisons with PoE, regardless of whether or not this is a game in its own right, it’s a game out on the market and has competition and the only real competition is PoE and Diablo 3 (that later however wouldn’t be as big of a competitor and I have no knowledge of so I’ll stick to PoE).
Let’s begin thus with players’ expectations. What do players expect out of LE? Well, these expectations are going to be different, possibly even very different from what the Developers have planned for LE. It is however important to understand that LE doesn’t exist in a vacuum and therefore must respond to the expectations of it’s player base (which is the market).
A small part of the players coming here will be people who like ARPGs in general and just expect a good game with no real big expectations beyond that, these are also going to be the more vocal community because they didn’t came here looking for something different as what is on the market already satisfies their needs, instead they came here to expand the options available to them of games to play. Again, these are the vocal majority but a minority in numbers as far as the total player base is concerned.
The major part of the player base are going to be people coming from other games, disappointed with what they offer or simply disappointed with how it changed over the years. Yes, I am looking at PoE as the primary one here. Since these people are your biggest customers and the life blood of your game that will keep it alive, it is important that you realise one very important thing. If you fail to hold on to these players they will just go back to where they were like PoE or Diablo 3. If they come here for changes and something better but they perceive this game to be more of the same problems that exist in where they come from, they will stick to the one they know the best and have invested more time into.
It is therefore very important that EHG understands very clearly that their plans play second fiddle to player’s expectations. Do understand that I also understand that you cannot make everyone perfectly happy with how the game is. But the core problems that these players identify with other games must not exist in LE or people will leave and LE will never stand a chance of being an established ARPG on the market capable of competing with the others out there.
So what are the things that players expect to see a major improvement over games like PoE?
Let’s start with crafting. Crafting is the one form of gearing in LE and therefore crafting takes on both the role of how easy it is to craft items and gear up your character. The one perhaps major issue that PoE has is how terribly bad it’s crafting system is, where only those who have unlimited funds get what they want and everyone cannot get anything. This is further exacerbated with how hard it is to gear your character with how they moved all of the player power from levelling up to very high end gear. This creates a feeling on the players that it is impossible to finish a character gearing and that they can never have a strong character or do the content they want because of that.
It is true LE crafting system is already way ahead of PoE but the question that remains is, is it good enough to keep the people who are leaving other ARPGs to come here hoping for a better system to be satisfied? The answer is a very definite no!
The minimum expectation for a player who will have finished the campaign and are now getting into maps (we’ll call them maps for the sake of brevity) is to have full resistances and a strong level of power as well. For this I’m going to say at the very beginning of maps, players expect 2 tier 5 resistances in each gear and at least 2 tier 3 attack affixes. In other words, bare minimum expected is full tier 16 gear with 2 affixes (the resistances) being soft caped.
The expectation is to have a full set of T20 gear well before the map is upgraded to level 100 and probably have most of the gear already t21 or t22 by the time they are starting level 100 farming (what I’d call the actual start of end game).
The problem with the current crafting system is that it’s still very much RNG and RNG systems hardly make up for a system that allows players to gain the kind of power they need.
Once again, if players do not feel they are being able to complete their builds and a build is never completed before it is soft capped, then they will just go back and not come back. You need to change the crafting system from partially deterministic to being fully deterministic. Chronicon is an example of a game that is mostly deterministic in the crafting and it works out really well and while I’m not saying to copy their system, you need to take a page out of their book in that players need to be able to complete their builds reasonably fast.
With crafting out of the way, let’s talk about trading. Trading is very important in an online ARPG. However when it’s poorly implemented it always creates issues. We have 2 very clear examples of what not to do. Diablo 3 failed very hard with it’s auction house system but in all honesty it failed primarily because they had a real money auction house. Second we have PoE trade which happens through direct trades only and it’s very much unsupervised which leads to artificial inflation of prices as well as scams. These are all things to avoid but LE is already looking like instead of trying to do better it’s just going to copy the tried and failed methods of PoE. I say failed because the majority of people hate it. The ones who like it are the scammers and the flippers which are the people who break the whole system and ruin it for everyone. There is also something to be said about not being able to instantly trade, sometimes having to wait hours to be able to do a trade.
So let’s look at proper solutions. People want to trade instantly, they don’t want to be scammed and they want prices to be fair rather (not artificially inflated). The solution is therefore a trading house. A trading house works as follows. It can be accessed from any safe zone where there is a storage chest. Players can then put items for sale and buy items.
This alone solves the waiting time and the scammers since people are buying precisely what they are seeing for the marked price. But it does not solve the problem of artificial inflation. The solution to that is simple. Anything that is expendable, like keys or crafting materials, have a set price. Players don’t need to sell these to other players, instead they sell to the market itself and the market keeps it in stock for whomever wants to buy it. This may lead to shortages of materials but if it becomes a problem it’s as simple as allowing the market to just have unlimited amounts of materials for sale (since players still need to gather the money to buy it anyway). Now for item selling it’s another matter, these cannot be priced at a fixed value as they are not something that is expended and it’s always in demand. The solution here is simple to prevent flippers. When a player sells an item, it gets a price tag attached to it that lasts for a year (356 days). If that player wishes to sell the item they bought, they cannot sell it at a higher price than what they bought it for, therefore preventing flipping.
This doesn’t mean this method is fool proof, but it is a solid starting point that can be improved upon as issues appear if and when they appear. But the important part to remember is that if you don’t do better than your competition, then you are not going to win the player base coming here that are looking for something better because they are dissatisfied. If a player is going to be dissatisfied in either place, he’ll likely stay where he was before or in neither place and just look for a different game to play.
Next we look at build diversity. Players have prefered builds they like to use and occasionally try something different. For the most part they stay with what is the most satisfying to play. This is why when games like PoE goes on and nerfs builds or never makes certain skills good enough to begin with, they just don’t play because everything else is not appealing for them.
Why do I speak of this? Well because my prefered builds are totems and minions, these are builds that are not good in LE. Minions are playable, but not in a good state, even more so after the last nerfs a couple patches ago and totems were never viable.
You need to improve majorly on this front or a large portion of the player base is going to come in, see that you have nothing to offer on what they want to play and then leave immediately to go back to PoE.
I urge you to take very seriously the comments you’ve received on minions and totems as well as other builds that are perceived as bad by the community. They are your best friends who are already doing all the leg work for you. You just need to focus on solving the problems they find.
Next I’ll address the content difficulty… From what I’ve played so far and there is definitely content I haven’t explored. I didn’t find anything to be overly hard. There are cases where modifiers make bosses too powerful which is something that may warrant a look at but at its core, with no modifiers in play, any boss is quite doable. This is something you can get right with some time investment into balancing. Make sure you don’t make bosses like PoE did with Sirius and so on because the majority of your player base will not like that. They want fights that are fair and can be won without having to die several times. Yes, I realise the better players may find it boring, but if you make content for the good players and ignore the largest part of your community, you’ll be doing what PoE does and you’ll bleed players.
Lastly, I want to address mapping. This is the one point where you going different is probably going to backfire on you. You have several elements to mapping, a sort of a chain with difficulty modifiers that last for a certain amount of turns and specific rewards as well as a system where maps aren’t important, what’s important is doing the objective and leave.
First I’ll address the problem with stacking penalties. It gets really hard trying to run away from penalties you don’t want, it completely undermines the rewards when the name of the game is, get away from the penalties that ruin your game and start blocking all your available paths. Second, no one wants debuffs that last for X amount of time but rather a controlled, these are the debuffs I take for this map and this map only. People also want the ability to control to some degree what debuffs they take and what rewards they take. Now these can be RNG but players should just be able to say, I don’t like these modifiers/rewards, reroll that and it should not cost too much money because hunting for very specific things with no bad debuffs is going to get costly regardless where getting debuffs that are doable and either not caring about the reward or at least not being too picky about it is going to be doable and cheap which is the goal here. Customising the run to how players want with some level of randomisation.
Second has to do with how maps are handled. Quite frankly, mapping is extremely disappointing in LE because it subverts expectations. People want to go into maps, clear them and then look at the rewards and go again. When you make all maps be, a rush to the objective and leave, it makes mapping really unsatisfactory. Now to be fair, I haven’t played with dungeons yet because right now the game doesn’t offers me any builds that I like to play (remember, I like minions and totems and both are bad in the current state of the game) and so I don’t know if dungeons actually offer a solution to this problem. However, mapping is still mandatory because players need the buffs that come from defeating the era bosses. Therefore they need either be changed so that it is more fun to do them or the era bonus must be attainable elsewhere so that players can get their bonus by playing in a format that they prefer.
This is not to say that the current mapping is strictly bad. I am sure there are people who like it, but I am also sure there are far more people who dislike it than people who like it and therefore something has to be done about it or you’ll lose players as they get bored of mapping.
And this is it. The 5 pillars I feel EHG needs to work on if they want to have a game actually able to compete in the market with its competitors, especially PoE. I don’t have too much faith this will be acknowledged or that anything will really be done. Going by the track record of people asking for improvements in several areas and often seeing nothing happening doesn’t really inspires much confidence. However at bare minimum EHG can’t say that they had no idea of how the community felt about something.
There is of course a small myriad of things that could be nit picked to try and make things better but at some point it would be just smaller preferences that players have. These 5 however are the 5 main big things that need addressing because these are the expectations that players coming to EL will have and if they are not met, as I said before, they will just go back like it always happens.
On a last point I’ll just say that I will not be addressing comments on this thread over what other people think about what I said in this very important piece of feedback. As I explained earlier, the majority of the vocal player base are actually the minority of the player base and they aren’t comming here expecting this to be an alternative to what exists and as such aren’t trully invested in seeing the player base really grow. It is pointless to explain to these players why this things are importants because the only thing they can say is I like it how it is now, regardless of it being good or bad for the game as a whole. The only thing that I care about with this thread is to raise the awareness of EHG as to what will be dictating their success or lack thereof.
