New Season is horrible

Feedback and Suggestions
22

Absolutely!

Because both provide a significant difference in player agency.
One feels like ‘it leads you along’ while the other feels as if you’ve got full control.

That’s not to be underestimated!

3 options, execute, imprison and free. Albeit it’s also more complex as the available possible results depends on the number of people still ‘alive’ from the attack, then their connection to each other as well as if they’re in the same safehouse-group.

This allows specific outcomes to be targeted to a degree, for example you can absolutely guarantee +1 level to someone when you got more then 2 people still alive, killing them will with a 100% guarantee raise their level.
Besides that you get specific options depending on if they’re friends or rivals, backstabbing ones or exchanging connections from people to enforce different outcomes.

Not really a lot in the LE system with primordials available… all you do is ‘get this part more’ basically. Which is fairly boring you gotta agree in comparison… the complexity simply isn’t there.

Fine system nonetheless as a basis.

Which in our situation the result is manyfold possible which allows a quite vast array of strategies. From target farming specific safehouses, to swift safehouse rotations to boss-access farming and so on. Whatever you need… and the setup for the specific layout is taking quite a long time if you’re far away from it.

Longevity is definitely there.

Yes, true! But it’s also really really reductionist as it’s solely focusing on the enemy and not on the mechanical result, which is more important for the player unless the enemy has some really interesting mechanics which lead to unique outcomes.

Which core audience?

EHG is a 100+ people sized company which provides a product that currently looses over 10% of the active playercount to the day before… that’s kinda harsh I gotta say.

Yes, PoE 2 has also - once again - screwed up majorly… so we cannot compare it even properly (also not yet since it’s not past the weekend and playercount dipping properly). You cannot compare 2 screw-up products and say ‘But they do as bad!’ It’s like comparing if the Rana Plaza or the Eitai Bridge (google em if you don’t know em) were better handled… it doesn’t matter since both were horrendously mismanaged.

You always compare it against a working product where people come back and which doesn’t have any atrociously severe issues.

EHG cannot support itself if Cycles keep on going like 1.3. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Cycle mechanic or the core product… it needs to become solid, as a released product.
And sorry to say… since it’s a released product the expectation (reaosnably so) is to provide a solid core product together with at least a decent Cycle mechanic.

23

This just isnt true really, games survive with 20k players showing up to updates. Aslong as cost is relative.

I dont know what ehg does spending wise, thats the real question.

Plenty of old mmos continue to be updated on a regular cadence to a 10k playerbase. So all that really matters is income vs spending.

So if the 10k players are spending, and they are not blowing through cash its fine.

24

I mean… you just ignored basically all economic aspects at once, it’s even baffling to see that.

What’s the difference in monetization methodology? What’s the difference in server setup? How many active workers are working on those respective products?

Just for a start.

Provide exact examples for the specific MMO and I’ll gladly point out their expected costs and differences in server structure needed to even support their game, hence the differently sized needs for hardware and bandwith.

Obviously old MMOs are able to support themselves on a vastly lower playerbase, though they also don’t have 100 workers dedicated to that specific product which has barely any monetization available (the MTX shop is laughably small) without any merch or anything else on the side supporting them. The LE franchise is miniscule.

If you compare it to server structures then also there’s a vast difference. For example GW 2 supports 200 people per area, which is the limit of their specific server setup. That’s a full machine commonly, a decent amount of players with the relevant updates happening.

LE is a ARPG though, it has direct input which needs to work in milliseconds and precisely. You cannot use a predicitive method without severe downsides as most MMOs do and then simply sync with the client’s input afterwards should it divert too much. Both need to be up to date, which reduces the available capacity substantially. We’re talking about likely 10-20 people per server rathern then 100+. Hence significant higher upkeep costs.

If you go with very old MMOs like Wurm Online or Everquest 1 then you’ll easily see that those setups can support 200+ people easily on a simply home PC properly… a industrial server can likely support 2000+ even. That’s magnitudes of difference.

You’ll also hardly see a vast amount of official servers for FPS games because their bandwith needs are significantly higher then MMOs commonly are, which ramps the costs up. We’re talking 50-100 people per machine commonly, the hard limits for games like Battlefield usually.

And EHG does spending wise roughly 50k per month for their salaries (that’s lowballing it) with roughly another 50-75k for servers. Pre-tax even. That means they need to sustain a influx of at least 100k per month and I’m probably off by quite a bit still as I’m really lowballing everything there.

That’s if we only take the supporter packs (the most bought commodity of ARPGs as poeple are used to it) as income would mean a mandated sales-count of 3350 supporter packs sold per month. Which obviously is not realistic, MTX are also sold, some whales are there and so on. But for the sake to even it out (as a miniscule percentile of players spent beyond shelf-price anyway) I’ll put it in a fixed percentile of players actively playing the game that need to buy over the course of a Cycle (3 months).

We got roughly 50k peak during the weekend, a 50k peak means that we’ll have around 250-400k individuals playing. Obviously that drops substantially over those 3 months, but sales also happen in the first 2 weeks mostly, which has to be taken into account.
Hence just for arguments sake we’ll heavily inflate the number of monthly individuals playing to 150k for every single month.

That means from those 150k players we need to sell 3350 packs per month. The common amount of players actually paying into a shelf-price product is between 1-3% as much as I know (likely changed over time, got really old data there from studies over a decade ago).

That alone means we have between 1,5k and 4,5k potential payers. Which is barely drawing even.

If we take the reality that number is roughly 100k at best. The vast majority pays the pack for 10 and not the pack for 30. MTX payments in-game are generally a rare thing as well. It’s questionable if EHG is even drawing a net positive with 50k peak for a Cycle.

Now next up take into consideration that EHG hasn’t sold to Krafton solely for shits and giggles. There is a reason behind that, and that reason always boils down to money.
Be it money for expansion (which is miniscule visible only after the acquisition) or to sustain themselves (which is likely given the premature release which artificially created hype and hence monetary influx).
This points towards EHG hurting for money, seriously hurting for it. The ARPG live-service genre is a cutthroat environment, one of the harshest live-service environments existing, MMO’s are child’s play comparatively.

So the chance that they can sustain themselves in 50k peak as we see with 1.3 (which is by the way dropping, we haven’t seen a single increase since 1.0, only falling overall if the timeframe is taken into consideration) is very low.

Yes, you can hope and think it’s ‘fine’ for them, I do as well, and it would be great if it were! But the chance for that to be the reality is so so soooo low that it’s not worthwhile even to take as a chance.
Sadly so.

EHG is bleeding money, their product is literally dieing currently and they got a limited timeframe to fix it. That timeframe has since 1.0 become more and more narrow and the actions directly relate to the stress. EHG does create panic-releases since a while now, their pre-release quality wasn’t the best but their post-release quality is beyond atrocious already. They fumbled and they’re still on the ground after hitting it hard sometime between the last 3-4 years.

25

Yeah well my main concerns are 1. they have 100 employees.

That seems like overkill, the quality/experience does not match what seems to be 100 people.

Stardew valley is made by a singular person, and while update way less frequently, the quality of the product is quite good.

So I feel like they need to better use their 100 people.

And number 2, yeah selling to another company points to issues in funding that no one can deny.

But everything else is to much speculation on my or anyone elses part. I dont know enough specifics.

Like PoE1 has supposedly been working with a skeleton crew for years, but many of the updates were still good. So does one really need tons of money/people to keep the game running?

And I have 0 idea on the relation between arpgs and mmos in terms of competitiveness or server requirements. Other then that even modern mmos can sustain themselves on what people will call a “dead game”

And last, I have 0 idea on the spending habits of majority of users, the mtx in game is actually quite decent, i was surprised at how far the mtx has come to being actually decent. And I see lots of people in game with mtx, so I assume people are buying.

I still stand by my opinion that if this season is the straw that breaks the camels back, then no one was sticking around anyways, so it basically wasnt real to begin with.

26

Exactly, that’s the biggest issue there, absolutely so.

EHG failed to create a efficient content pipeline where everyone knows exactly what to do, when to do and how things change without interfering seriously with other departments when changes do happen… and they absolutely do happen if one wants or not.

No, that’s the point after all.

You can run it on a skeleton crew.
You can expand seriously when you don’t run it on a skeleton crew.

But EHG sadly didn’t solidify their position first but went the perfect way of failure… which is expanding before having their foundation handled, likely at the fear or misplaced thoughts of it being mandatory.

Yeah, that’s because the server structures are relatively simplistic.
You won’t be able to run ‘Star Citizen’ at home… that’s why that game guzzles up hundreds of millions in funds like nothing else.
But you can absolutely run your own private WoW server and easily have 50 people playing on it without it causing any issues.

It’s all a scaling issue. The more precise movement needs to be the higher the needs for the hardware. Having server and client synchronize all mobs and all inputs in nearly real-time with security measures on top of that is a large task.
Hence as mentioned:
FPS is atrocious to handle, that’s why Star Citizen costs so much to sustain.
ARPGs are following after, not quite as precise and taxing… but still very heavy requirements.
More classic ones like Eve Online, Wurm Online, Everquest, Ultima Online and so on have a very high leeway, hence low amounts of bandwith used which relates to vastly fewer data… and hence less data needed to be handled by the server.

Less data is less costs, directly.
Stronger servers are needed for high quantities of data and the bandwith costs are also increasing with it.
Higher costs means more physical machines interacting.
More physical machines interacting means more upkeep for support personal too.

It scales heavily.

Yes, they are buying. Remember though that the threshold for someone to buy further into a game after a shelf-price is entirely different from a F2P game.

F2P has managed to build up a expectation of ‘Pay a bit so we can improve a bit’ as a baseline.
Shelf-price titles have still the expectation of ‘Buy it and use it without any extra forever’.

To a large degree, EHG will have to downsize very likely. They overextended like many many other companies.

A massive amount of players are inflated numbers from spillover happening. This means they won’t reliably come back again unless the game offers substantial improvements as the disaprity between their main game and LE will always be a make-or-break situation.

Sure, some ‘stick’… but the spillovers don’t pay, they use their funds to pay their main game, not the backup one.

27

No he really didn’t. He stated twice the important bits:

Sorry, three times.

Now, I know I’m only an accountant & not an economist, but in my experience, companies with higher income than expenses do tend to survive (assuming all orher things are equal & nothing comes along to fuck them over).

Yes & all that boils down to income v expenses, no need to get into the details on this.

And all of that paragraph boils rown to “LE’s probably more expensive to run than an old time MMO”, but it in no way disagrees with his statement.

Doesn’t change the broad economics that income>outgoing=good and income<outgoing=bad.

You know this so I don’t know why you’re trying to argue that his statement is wrong.

That’s not really an issue. If they’re running at a loss they’ll get a credit from the local tax authority (US).

Unless they have a conversion ratio on the higher end, probably yes.

That’ll be because the skeleton crew doing it are highly experienced. EHG weren’t when they started this & I’m not sure if they are now either.

I think the differences between EHG & GGG (including early-stage & current) would make for an interesting project.

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28

Every build will use primordials. If you have no useful uniques for it (and there are several general purpose ones that should fit most builds), a single T8 affix will always be an improvement over a T7. Even a T8 health will be a big improvement.
Most builds will run at least 1 exalted item, so there’s no real reason not to run a primordial in any build.

The only real difference between them is that you keep “leftovers” in metamorph to run later. When you reach the end of the map, you have a few choices for each gear slot from what dropped and you run them. Same as rift beasts, except they’re delivered over a longer period of time.

So the only difference between both is PoE lets you keep the “path not taken” bits to run a new one later and LE spawns a few random ones on their own (if you take the woven tree node for it).

29

The Riftbeast & Primordial Uniques are literally a “real seasonal progression system” which was added in Season 3. The Riftbeast progression system is a brand new seasonal progression system which was added on top of last season’s Weaver seasonal progression system, which was added on top of Season 1’s Harbinger seasonal progression system …

There’s a ton of progression systems available to you right now

30

This season is bad because there is no player agency. There is no incentive other than having a primordial unique that could unlock a new build and see how well it does in the monolith.

  • It doesn’t really matter what choices you make with the evolution. Apparently there are 60 evolutions to choose from, to me they are all more or less the same.
  • It doesn’t really matter what lineage you created.
  • The beast has only 3 or so visual stages.
  • I don’t hunt it, I walk through a cave with 2-3 layouts and kill the mother or it appears in the campaign / mono and I kill the young that I spared in the cave. As with Exiled Mages or Nemesis, I always just choose to spawn them basically or I ignore them.
  • Sometime after campaign / early mono, on a semi-decent build, the beast is just as easy to kill as any other boss.
  • Once your build got the Primordial Unique with decent rolls you can completely ignore the mechanic for the rest of your playtime on that build.
  • Getting that Primordial Unique is just a boring side-currency grind. They invented 5 new currencies because they had no better idea of what to do with different evolutions otherwise. You emotionlessly buy it from a vendor. There’s no dopamin-drop (except for the 3 special Primordial Uniques) or overcoming a challenge.
  • Power creep with Primordial items but nowhere to find a challenge to use that new power on (not counting Uber Abberoth or pushing 1000+ corruption)

The worst of all of this: The thought of having to do grind this boring mechanic each season from now on.

31

And all of those are core content. There is currently no seasonal content.

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32

Semantics.

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33

On the one hand it’s semantics, on the other it isn’t.

It was introduced this season, so to players’ perception it’s a season mechanic.
But on the other hand, season mechanics are something that are exclusive to seasons, which none of LE’s are, and that IF it makes it to core (in PoE there’s no guarantee it does, in D3/D4 it never does) it won’t have the same format (being watered down for balance).

So the fact that LE is adding core content is actually more than just semantics because they are adding everything in a balanced way that will remain unchanged when next season comes.
Which is why you don’t have a rift beast 100% guaranteed in every map, which you would if it were a proper “seasonal mechanic”.

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34

Yes, the factions are a brilliant idea and I quite like them, one of the main reasons why I currently prefer playing Last Epoch over other action RPGs. But that’s not what I mean, and it’s also not what has become the industry standard for these kinds of games.

What factions are currently missing is that nothing carries over beyond the season, unlike, for example, the challenges in POE, the pass in Torchlight, or pretty much any other service game. With its season model and monetization, Last Epoch doesn’t really want to be all that different from those games. In the end, it basically boils down to a simple battle pass, which doesn’t even have to be as badly designed as in other games, just look at POE or Division 2.

But yes, the solution is simple: add another faction or take one of the existing ones (Woven or Forgotten Knights would be fitting) and stick some MTX rewards to a few levels that you can carry over into the next season. I wouldn’t mind if the MTX on those “tracks” only unlocked when you throw them €10 or buy a supporter pack, as an additional bonus. Problem solved. Or make 1–2 items free and sell the rest through the methods mentioned above, just like in POE or any other battle pass.

Those who don’t care or don’t like it can simply ignore it, it doesn’t affect their own gameplay. Those who want it can buy it, both the company and the players win. It’s hard to deny that this is relevant for many players, otherwise these models wouldn’t be so incredibly successful and widely accepted. In POE2, one of the biggest uproars around the new season was the fact that there were no challenges, so they quickly slapped in a mini-challenge. Even the new AC: Shadows had a free battle pass.

That’s what I mean.

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35

It does feel like the end game is “off” but I’m not sure exactly where.

So Mike talked a lot in the past about adding side stuff do do in maps. But I do think we’re reaching the cap on that. I don’t want any more side stuff to do in individual maps. It feels bad to skip em but it can also feel slow and tedious to full clear all the time. I guess it’s a matter of playing enough to find the balance.

Raising corruption in monoliths doesn’t feel quite the same as unlocking higher tier and new map tilesets in POE. It feels more like delving in POE which many people get bored of.

So I guess one thing they could try in the future is what Torchlight Infinite does, minus the pay 2 win pets. They add new and completely self contained side content, you don’t do them in maps, that tends to provide a good way to progress certain item slots of your character and such. They have their own NPCs to enter the content and collect rewards. You can boost the drop rates of the specific content or drop types you prefer in a drop tree.

Side content that is separated from the monolith, and is more than just dungeons would help break the tedium. And actually I wouldn’t mind being able to customize drops of existing side stuff in maps. Maybe remove some of the event types for a while and boosting the drops of the ones you keep.

Monos simply don’t have the replayability of poe1 map tiers imo.

36

TL:I has by and far the best “End game specialization” tree that much is for sure imo.

Id love of it if we got a “end game passive tree” like TL:I.

TL:I actually has a really robust end game, but the issue with it, is that its a lot of power creep.

Where as right now getting a nemesis that gives exalted, or a rift beast that drops exalted is mostly side options of the same thing here or there. in TL:I every new patch is a new mechanic that does not interfere with an old one. The cube does not block access to candles etc. So by the time you are minmaxing every slot, the damage scaling is crazy.

I play SSF in that game, and the differences in the hero ladder for stats in SSF vs trade is crazy just because in SSF you have to self farm every mechanic so people generally dont have enough time. Where as in trade people can buy bonkers candles etc.

37

Everything from the faction and season carries over to legacy. You keep 100% of your progress when a season ends.

Battlepasses solve nothing, and will just cause a lot of people to lose interest in LE. Forcing FOMO and daily chores may be fun for you, but I think that’s more a symptom of exposure that you’re experiencing from other games … Much like craving a cigarette is bad for your health, but it happens and you smoke another one … Battlepasses have caused an addiction for you that’s bad for your health.

Please do not advocate for adding battlepasses to LE, those should go extinct from gaming all together. There’s no ‘ignoring battlepasses’ … When something is in it that you like, you can’t really ignore them.

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38

I think you’re deliberately trying not to understand me. It’s not about the progression, it’s about the reward at the end of the progression: namely, there isn’t one. I think that was also clear from the context. I’ve been playing ARPGs for a while and there isn’t a single one I’m not currently playing, so I know how they work.

I find your aversion to a battle pass a bit extreme. Just because they exist doesn’t mean anyone has to buy them, and most people are capable of making a free choice about whether they want to or not. People don’t all become smokers or drinkers just because cigarettes are freely available and you could theoretically buy them. Impulse control still exists.

Yes, there are people with weak impulse control and people prone to addiction. But if we constantly had to take their well-being into account, we would pretty much have to abolish everything that produces dopamine. Like games, for example. Or games that build their gameplay loop on similar mechanics to gambling, like loot-based ARPGs. A bit flimsy.

Yes, you can reject FOMO, and I do too in its most predatory forms. But I think your interpretation is wildly exaggerated. In that case, MTX and also supporter packs would have to be banned, since they work on the same principle. But we all know the game wouldn’t exist in that scenario, because nobody would be willing to pay a monthly fee for it.

39

That is actually a pretty poor example from your part because it plays exactly against what you’re trying to prove. This is because some people are much more susceptible to addiction and to tactics that promote that addiction, of which smoking is a part of.
Which is why, worldwide, many many many measures have been taken so that cigarrettes aren’t “freely available” anymore.

For example, when I was a kid I could go to the store to buy a pack for my mom. That isn’t possible anymore, at least in the EU.
They used to be exposed for sale everywhere, now they’re only available as a vending machine in some places.
They used to sponsor almost everything, right now they can’t sponsor almost anything.

So the fact that legislation had to be created specifically to reduce the temptation cigarettes provide is an argument against, not in favour.

Anyway, this is something I know Kulze will eventually chime in, so I’ll leave the specifics for him.

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40

Actually no, you have to read the statement in its context of course. The claim was: “There’s no ‘ignoring battlepasses’ … When something is in it that you like, you can’t really ignore them.” I find that claim to be absolutely bold and exaggerated, as if any form of impulse control had simply vanished. And as I already mentioned: by that logic I’d have to ban everything that’s fun.

Apart from that, state regulations are more likely due to health aspects, we’re not seriously going to argue that a battle pass in games has the same health consequences as smoking, are we? I’m from Germany myself, here nobody cares that you smoke, what bothers them are the treatment costs for lung cancer later on.

Besides, I wasn’t the one who started the smoking comparisons. I can understand that someone rejects battle passes and any FOMO mechanics on principle, but to invent outlandish arguments and absurd horror stories for that seems at least equally questionable to me.

In the end, in games like Last Epoch, the battle pass is just the logical and better progression of what the game is already based on, as if time-limited supporter packs weren’t the exact same strategy. Where exactly am I supposed to see the outrage here?

Or in other words: I’m happy to be proven wrong. Time-limited supporter packs yes, battle pass no. Why?

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41

I’m not against either. But Kulze, for example, is fervently against both.

And, it should be noted, it’s quite likely the EU will soon (ish, a few years down the road) adopt measures against games using predatory tactics like bundles giving you the “wrong amount” of currency for what you want to buy, so you need to buy more currency than you actually need, and also, relevantly, time restricted deals for digital goods, among other things.

Anyway, when Kulze gets around to see this I’m sure he’ll expound deeply on this, like he did recently in this thread: Battle pass

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