New Season is horrible

Yes, I know the discussions and I’m aware of the partly irrational aversions against it, but unfortunately that doesn’t change the fact that such mechanics are popular among a large number of players, otherwise they wouldn’t be so widespread and accepted. And as mentioned: nobody is asking Eleventh Hour Games to jump on the most predatory models, as for example Diablo 4 has often done in the past or Torchlight Infinite is still doing today. In POE, the challenges are free, plus there’s a season pass for a fairly small amount of money that can be completed with average playtime, completely without “daily logins” or the heavy pressure you know from gacha games like Genshin Impact or mass shooters like Fortnite.

In the end, it’s just about the need for a little bit of MTX for playing a season, something you can put on your virtual shelf, at worst even just for ten bucks if they don’t want or can’t do it differently. It’s rather doubtful that anyone would die or suffer serious harm from that.

Time-limited events already existed in Ultima Online back in 1997 and are not some invention of modern online games, so I can’t really understand the outrage.

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Maybe they’re seen to be a bit more predatory/malicious nowadays? I’m constantly reminded of that video of a dev describing how to milk your players, treating them like wallets rather than people you depend on…

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A lot of things have been around for a long time until we as a society started to realize they’re not good things to be around.
Smoking has been around since the middle ages. Recently we’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t good and we’ve been adding legislation to protect people from it.
Gambling has been around since forever, but recently we’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t good for many people, so we’ve been adding legislation to protect susceptible people from it.
Same as bull fighting, which is seen as a cultural traditions in many countries (including mine) but which is slowly being outlawed, or heavily legislated.
Same with plenty of other things that have been around since forever but which now have restrictions on how they can be used and how they are publicly available to the public.

Just because something has existed for a long time doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

And, again, I’ll reiterate that I have nothing against supporter packs being rotated, first week twitch drops or even battle passes like PoE uses. I’m fine with all of those.
But I can certainly undertand how some people that have a propensity to addiction can more easily fall prey to these tactics that the majority of people just shrug off with “just don’t buy it if you don’t want to” because they literally can’t not want to, so legislation must be put into place to not let it get out of hand.

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Battlepass isnt the answer, the challenge bar in poe is not a battle pass.

its similar, but it isnt a purchased challenge bar that rewards seasonal mtx and premium currency.

That would be kiracs pass, which is extremely easy to beat, and rewards mtx.

The key to battle passes is that they cant be too challenging to complete, they are just a chore checker to keep you playing so you get your money worth.

The challenges of a league in poe are more like seasonal achievements meant to be hard and something you do other then play the game.

for example if they sold a poe challenge style system that shit would be flamed and deservedly so. imagine paying 20 bucks for a seasonal pass that you then fail cause you didnt pick an uber build or something etc. lol

Yeah, it’s a long list that I’m resisting mentioning…

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No … You stated:

I replied that Riftbeast + Primordial Uniques are literally a “real seasonal progression system” and that each season has added a new individual “real seasonal progression system” - which yes are all part of the core game, but were nonetheless added for each season respectively.

And then you went on a rant about how factions should become battlepasses which would be a better progression system, and that nothing carries over from season to season …

Both of those statements are false. And the game itself, the moment to moment gameplay, to me, is the main reward. All the items and content are just bonus when you actually enjoy your time playing the game. It sounds like you’re trying to monetize the game, more than actually improve how fun it is to play. Battlepasses are not fun, and just turn me off of playing because I don’t want to be handed a list of chores to do, I want to relax and be entertained.

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Yeah, but that’s a very broad definition. PoE’s atlas passive tree & LE’s Warlock/Falconer passives both fit that, since they provide some form of seasonal progression (until you max them out, obviously) & they were added in a season.

If I want to do chores, I clean my kitchen.

If a game cannot hook me without chores and checkboxes, I do something else - playing other games, meeting with friends, watching a movie, reading, the half a dozen hobbies that come with TTRPGs (modelling, painting, writing…)

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Ya, I’m not trying to define seasonal progression systems here. Just rebutting the “there’s no real seasonal progression” comment, when clearly, each season has added a new progression system. I understand that other games like POE and Diablo have temporary seasonal progression systems which differ from what we have seen in LE. But really, I was just disagreeing with factually incorrect statements.

Well thats the wrong way to think about it kinda.

its more for traditional battle passes you pay say 10-20 dollars, but get the premium currency back or value equal to greater then the battle pass if you play till the end of the season.

its not strictly chores, some have chores like FN, others dont like genshin which just requires you sign in.

its just a way to make players spend money that has good value if they keep coming back. its a way to get metrics thats all.

battle passes I personally dont think are evil or anything when they are done well. As generally they are again, a really cost effective way to get mtx, assuming you dont care too much about the mtx in question. The downside is they take some time to mature.

So people who are overzealous might spend 20 dollars, then only play 3 days and not finish the battle pass.

I guess my view is that while the systems you mention are progression systems, they’re not limited to the season, they were added to legacy at the same time & they’re core systems. Unlike the league mechanics we get in PoE/etc which only exist (in that format) for the season (before often getting watered down & then added to legacy/core). LE will likely get that after they’ve finished adding the core stuff.

Right

I’m not so sure that smoking and the damage it causes or the pointless killing of animals are on the same level as a battle pass. As I’ve already said, nobody is demanding that EHG squeeze every last penny out of their players by implementing the most harmful and obnoxious system possible. The manifestations of such systems across various games are very diverse. Some are terrible, others are fair, and plenty of examples have already been given. That’s why I think the fuss about this is exaggerated and the discussion lacks rationality. Almost anything can lead someone into addiction, literally anything. Whether a battle pass in a game carries such a high risk of addiction that it justifies this level of rejection is highly questionable. We have a saying for this: using a cannon to shoot sparrows.

Just because something has existed for a long time doesn’t mean it’s a good thing" certainly wasn’t my point either, even if I may have expressed myself poorly here. However, my post consisted of far more than just this sentence, so I don’t see why we need to fixate on it now.

This is no longer about whether someone should reject the product. That’s up to each individual. Here, people are being aggressively missionized in a way that’s frankly alarming.

Yes, it’s a rant, certainly. My rant started when you deliberately began misinterpreting what I was actually trying to say and put words in my mouth that I obviously didn’t mean, just to make a point, which, by the way, you are doing again. I’ve understood your opinion, but you are not the center of the universe, so you can stop trying to explain the world to me. It’s ridiculous.

That’s what’s been done historically, true.

And then you look at Torchlight Infinite and they seemingly have only core implementations? :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s really just semantics here to make a difference… if it’s solely a seasonal mechanic which gets removed then first of all I wouldn’t play the respective game, permanence is a big thing for me and I frown every single time when PoE does not make something core or neuters it into oblivion. My biggest gripe there.

Also why I don’t play D3/D4 at all.

As for ‘adding it in a balanced way’… first off… we’re talking EHG here, so that comment is off anyway :stuck_out_tongue:
A viable way is to overtune the respective league-specific mechanic and then downscale it after… without reducing functionality. During the Cycle it’s hence a focus mechanic and afterward just a existing one. That system is actually good and it’s used by both PoE and Torchlight Infinite.

It’s the itemization progression primarily, which leads to issues left and right.

The one thing PoE does extremely right and why the longevity of that game is so massive is that you get basically from every single place something which is universally usable but also is exclusive to be obtained from that specific place.

The older the mechanic the less pronounced it is… but as competition on the market ramped up GGG switched over, which led to the current situation of it becoming ever more focused.

What I mean with that is mostly crafting materials. One specific rare crafting material dropped can enable tens of hours of effort put into the game afterwards as you try to finish what it has enabled.

Comparatively the longevity in LE simply is not given as core drops are everywhere… so each content vies for ‘being the best’ simply. The few things which are not universally acquired have no chance to be reliably acquired in target farming form.
Sure… you can get a specific unique target-farmed… but not ‘a specific unique with the fitting LP value’. Everything in LE is a huge drop-gamble simply and not broken up into chunks.

People have a far easier time to rest on plateaus between struggles to reach their goal, LE doesn’t provide plateaus, it provides a singular steep cliff… and even if the peak isn’t as high as other mountains you wanna overcome offer it’s a vastly harsher journey to overcome it without any breaks.

This is also upheld with the crafting system which is one of the best if not ‘the best’ for early- to mid-game. It absolutely falls off late-game though and becomes a chore.

LE’s systems are very narrow in their range where they’re enjoyable and as soon as you move out of that they become anything but. They don’t scale well simply.
Has always been the case but with the rampant power creep it becomes all the more visible.

It’s never working in the way Mike imagined it from the beginning.

There’s a reason why PoE or Torchlight Infinite have methods to specifically focus on 1-2 mechanics from the myriad they provide, making not investing into a mechanic so bad that you won’t feel bad ignoring it simply as you can scale it to 20-50 times as rewarding in moments.

EHG simply hasn’t got it into their heads yet on how to implement side-mechanics so they don’t cause mental fatigue.

As you’ve mentioned with Torchlight personally, it’s a fantastic way to implement systems.

That never was, is or will be how it goes though.

What is imagined here is that it’s a time-limited thing. Hence you do it inside the Cycle and afterwards you ‘missed out’.

That’s turning off quite a lot of people nowadays. It’s fallen out of favor ever more and more since people realized it turns a game into work, into a chore… not a fun thing as it’s supposed to be.
You hence do things solely for the result, despite the journey itself being boring. This has never been a functional thing to uphold long-term, you burn out swiftly this way.

If it’s a one-time thing where you unlock the MTX by paying then fine… but not if you miss out after. Things tied to in-game progression is fine as long as you can do it today… or in 10 years still. With a guarantee to be there in 10 years still actually.

Actually they do.
They use a alternative method instead if not available.
Different methods have different upsides and downsides.
Someone can become addicted to cigarettes but if they’re not available in a widespread manner then would instead become addicted to sugar… drinking… gaming… a craft… sports… psychology… anything can become a addiction.

Don’t provide addictions which solely have a negative outcome simply, easy as that.

You would be surprised how little that term actually exists. Impulse control is defined by your stress level, your convictions (which is a purely extrinsic thing as they’re shaped purely by your experiences) and your genetic setup.

If you got for example a adrenaline addict (thrill-seeker) then you can have things like bouldering, racing tracks, airsoft and paintball areas and so on around… or you don’t have those in the area and hence they might fulfill it instead by street-racing.
Kinda telling which is the better option, isn’t it?

Like with everything there is a golden line where you derive positive aspects from it rather then it turning into a negative.

Your argument is flimsy as it’s a pure ‘black/white’ one, which is not reality.

And yes, we constantly have to take the well-being of people into account which are acting in non-optimal ways. That’s what it means to be a society instead of a barbaric ‘might makes right’ tribalistic group.
Despite all modern tries to get that into the head of people it’s something which is not easily ingrained it seems… that neither ignoring nor being overbearing is a good thing… it’s taking it into consideration and acting simply according to it.

You build buildings with consideration for physically disabled people nowadays, you create teaching environments with the consideration that we have intrinsically different brain setups from individual to individual, with different learning focus and different proclivities. (Not done much but some countries start to lean ever further into it luckily). And so on and so forth.

You don’t simply ignore it since it’s more convenient for you.

I reject the inherent aspect of FOMO.
Any FOMO used is not customer friendly, end of the topic for me. I haven’t found a single instance where it would provide a positive overall experience without methods existing which don’t have the inherent downsides of it attached while still providing the upsides. For the customer mind you.

It hasn’t vanished.
That thing you mention simply never existed for a surprisingly vast portion of the population in the first place, a substantial percentile.

And with substantial we’re talking not about a ‘1 in 1000’ situation here, one major group of individuals which are affected are people with ADHD. ADHD causes ‘discipline’ to not exist. This concept doesn’t apply to their brain setup, discipline is not a thing which happens when your brain is literally controlled by dopamine craving.

That sub-group of the world-population includes around 5% of all people. This is a 1 in 20 situation.
A classroom is commonly 30 people sized still in many countries… which means you got between 1 to 2 people in one which it doesn’t apply to.
You got 50 people in a 1000 people company.

To get into it you need to realize what the term ‘impulse control’ actually means:
Inhibiting urges to resist immediate gratification in favor of long-term goals.

For that you need to have a brain able to thing into the future, ADHD goodbye hence immediately, which are one of the biggest groups which play ARPGs by the way, the setup of the genre specifically plays into gratification through dopamine release in steady packets with extreme outliers present on top creating a ‘chase’.
That’s inherent, hence the percentile of players with ADHD is likely to surpass 20% or more.
The second biggest ‘outlier group’ of ARPGs are people with autism. Optimization, pattern recognition non-stop and reliability of situation versus outcome create a huge amount of stability, which is a big craving.
High Impulse control for autistic people leads to meltdowns and shutdown. And for those not suffering from inherent meltdowns/shutdown to severe life-threatening burnout. Autistic individuals without ADHD make up roughly 10-15% of the community I would argue. The combined part (AuDHD) without any specific leaning likely another 5-10%.

Which leaves everyone else, and then we get into gaming addiction for social situations (fleeing reality to achieve success as it’s otherwise not seens), we get people which have no social interactions and hence use a online environment as a crutch instead. We got people which are collectionists and hence playing this genre as they make their collection a in-game one. We got people which are… there’s a few more groups, ever getting smaller without substantially overlapping with others.

The truth is that as most hobbies anyone doing it in a highly invested amount and not a ‘mediocre engagement’ which is not the core audience targeted with the genre specifically are people which have one or several mental issues ongoing.

That’s the reality of the situation which is often ignored.

It’s also the reason as to why the same annoying issues pissing everyone off get repeated with every… single… ARPG made ‘from ARPG players for ARPG players’.
Why?
Because they are drawn to the genre so heavily because they suffer from one or several of those conditions and it’s a exception if not.
So obviously when in charge of creating something their emotional and neurological setup enforces a specific methodology of work which leads to the commonly same outcomes.
Which is why when a company tends to become huge and hence corporate (with sociopaths and psychopaths commonly at the top, just gonna mention that most CEOs are falling into those categories with few being a exception again) the outcome of the products tend to fall off in quality and you see instead ‘AAA’ quality for products.

To have a ‘vision’ to ‘burn with passion’ is not the norm, it’s the exception. Exception enforces the focus to be extreme in one area which means your other areas will suffer, this is what is made up with having a working social environment to make up for weaknesses through others. Commonly that’s depicted as having a disability nowadays as you cannot work long-term and function in a ‘normal’ environment. Your brain setup is offering so much energy in one place that you have no chance to do the others as well. You can at best shift your focus, that’s it.

Actually we are.

Ever heard of ‘whales’?

That’s all I need to say, those are a sub-group of addiction based buyers which make the majority of revenue for companies. At the cost of sometimes literally dieing to do so.

Go ahead and puff a lungful of smoke into a baby carriage and then say this sentence again.
That’s why you’re not allowed to smoke indoors and at crowded public places like airports or trainstations only in dedicated areas at best, if at all.

Factually wrong though.
Albeit it depends on your distinct definition as there’s leeway, but I personally don’t think your distinct specific methodology would align with it would align with the narrow aspect of the possibility of that statement to become truthful.

Both are a ‘no’.
Plain and simple.

One is simply accepted as a evil which isn’t so great as to extinguish the good the game provides otherwise.
Every bit of ‘evil’ does extinguish a bit of the ‘good’ though… so why not simply do ‘good’?

We got games which showcase it being possible. I’ll eagerly point towards No Man’s Sky every time of the day.
They didn’t scale up their group massively.
They just work and release stuff.
They don’t do PR, they just exist and provide a good product.

Their product is even buggy as heck… but they not only made up for their mess but went above and beyond without asking for a single buck beyond yet.

So… if they can do it I’m sure other companies which bitch and moan about it can do too. Just gotta do it right. Make a great game, provide more then you promise, then you can go and make expansions. Undersell it, provide more then… move on further and further. This is a endless functional concept.

What goes around comes around, simple as that.
Provide a customer with something not positive for the customer and the customer will not open the wallet as eagerly.
Provide something which can hurt people through some means and any healthy country is prone to legislate the crap out of it.
Abuse any system and the system gets more rigid and limited if it causes damage.

Simple as that.

Explain in detail which part is irrational. I’m happy to have a proper discussion about it and go into detail for this topic.

Yes, cocaine was also very popular around the second World War… good thing it isn’t anymore :stuck_out_tongue:
And in the 1930’s to 1950’s smoking also was seen as healthy, as a good thing. People found out it is anything but, so it’s now getting tackled gradually.

And not long ago people found out how our psyche works in terms of addiction… how far have we gotten with cigarettes again since 1950? It’s a gradual process and will take ages… but it’s being ever more reduced for good reasons.

You see… even for a neurotypical and also otherwise healthy brain addiction is a issue if the environment is respectively bad. So the task of a proper society is to remove first the things which cause personal downfall (they’re the most fun things short-term but kill you also long-term in one way or another) while following up to make the social structure into one where the majority of people can thrive. The opposite of what modern society sadly currently is in many areas despite all our technological progress.

And I take both as the negative examples for PoE, not the positive ones.
Including stash-tabs for money.
Including supporter packs which are phased out.

Even including the so highly praised Helldivers 2 shop which has a circulating shop, that’s the negative aspect of that game.
With a fixed shop that simply gets expanded? No issue at all. But that’s not the case now, is it?
I’m also not fine with the money unlock for the battle passes there. Why? Because it’s functional unlocks, not vanity, despite not being time-based.

Why is daily better then weekly? Or monthly? Or yearly?

Imagine someone which is highly addicted to a game for 5 years, a collectionist. 100% collect everything! And now this year a exclusive time-based reward comes out!
They also get at the same time a once in a lifetime option which will get them tens of thousands per month and set them up for life.
Which option do you think they’ll pick? The ‘fun’ one or the one which builds their future? After all… they’re already a addict, the chance to give up the opportunity is high.
That’s direct damage.

Just because you can’t see the direct effect easily doesn’t mean it won’t have effects. Society is becoming gradually advanced enough to take those things into consideration, and that’s a good thing to happen. Cultivating society is good, but nothing good is there without having to sacrifice something inherently. That’s the reality of life.
If you’re gaming 40 hours per week you give up family life, unless gaming is your job, hence being a streamer. If you work 60 hours a week you won’t be able to spend time with your family, you’ll be the breadbringer… not a parent… not a partner.
Nothing in life comes for free.

Why limiting it though?

Incentive is enough when you allow it to for example need only 40 hours during a cycle but 400 hours outside.
It still exists, it’s harder to get though. You don’t have to ‘give up on it’ you just will make it up as you keep engaging anyway.

Yes, and witch-burning existed in the medieval ages… that doesn’t mean we should keep up the tradition :stuck_out_tongue:

Exactly!
How it should be!
100%

Yeah, stabbing someone to death is also not at the same level as slapping someone once… but nonetheless both are ‘not good’.

Keep the definitions simply instead of arguing ‘but one evil is a bit less of an evil, so it’s fine, right?’. No, it isn’t.
How about ‘no evil’ instead?

You see, I’m against needlessly killing animals for example. I’m not a vegan as I have a condition which causes me to get depression when not eating intense tasting meals regularly as a regulatory measure… which meat-based products are the easiest one and alternatives tend to give you all sorts of metabolic issues sadly.
But if there’s a alternative product which is affordable, doesn’t wreck your body and provides intense taste experience I’ll be the first to get it, obviously so! Because it has no downsides for me that make my life harder or shorter!
So the second that happens I’ll ‘suddenly’ be a vegan, like many other people.
Until then I’ll not be averse to holding the butcher’s knife personally instead. Life begets life. And planta are also life by the way.

You might see it as extreme and ask ‘where does it end?’… and the answer to that is always ‘when we can’t find any faults anymore at all’. Whenever and however that might be, because we’re kinda far away from the perfect things in basically everything :stuck_out_tongue:

And some are addiction causations… and some things simply are possibilities but not inherently causing it.
You can ruin your body by overdoing sports as much as doing heroine. Just look at individuals like ‘Travis Pastrana’ (very interesting person by the way) and what thrill-seeking through sports can lead to. Just because the guy has more luck then anything else doesn’t mean that a proper preemptive realization of his conditions and proper treatment existing wouldn’t have saved him from literally having his spine shoved through his pelvis, or every bone in his body broken… twice over even I think it is by now.
Would you argue for his safety a treatment which provides no serious side-effects to sustain the needs of his brain would’ve been better for him as a individual long-term? Sadly nowadays we aren’t as advanced to provide that yet, so it went as it went.
But that’s what the future of humanity strives for. Reducing downsides by still upholding the needs of individuals being fulfilled, whatever shape they take. And some measures are simply benefiting that… others are detrimental.

The same as owning the world and being miserable is a worse existence then owning nothing and being actually happy… not saying it, but being.

Because it’s an important aspect.
Your examples are based on ‘other games do it too, so it can’t be bad’ as a core premise. Which is not the case.
Just because others do it doesn’t mean it’s good is a big point though.

And yes, it is accepted that using some ‘evil’ measures, hence things which cause problems for people are in a competitive environment where it’s allowed a necessity sadly to thrive. Hence reducing that to the bare minimum is the best viable solution. Until regulation comes in and enforces it to become forbidden entirely.

Only as long as the individual has the actual capacity to decide on that.
Otherwise that’s not the case, which is the case for those regulations after all and why the examples provided are preemptive statements of things which act on the same base principles and hence need to be looked at very very very closely as well.

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I quoted you …

:open_mouth:

How dare you

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I honestly haven’t played TL:I that much because it triggers my OCD quite badly with all the constant notifications, especially when they don’t even go away.
Played it for a few days, never going to return to it. Same as Undecember.

So either of them can have the bestest most brightererest ideas and implementations and I will never see them with their business model.

Well, if it’s overtuned, then it’s not a core mechanic. It’s a season mechanic which then gets balanced for “real” play.
If TL:I’s mechanics were the same in the next season, then I might give you a point there, but if they’re just like PoE, then no, they still have seasonal mechanics. Just because all of them made core so far doesn’t mean all will, much like almost all of them made core in PoE in the first few years.

EHG might not be good at getting balance right, but with these mechanics they are trying to add them in a balanced way, not an overtuned way. They don’t have the need to downscale it when the next season comes along.

I do have to admit that trying to finally chase 40/40 (this was before battle pass) is a part of what led me to burn out on PoE.
Turning it into a chore list made me keep playing when I would have probably stopped for the season, but eventually burned me out and I stopped playing it entirely for years.

This is also the same for games that use daily quests. They will usually keep me playing for longer than I would have once, then I switch them off and never turn them on again.

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Which is fair, though looking it up for game-design reasoning and understanding is a good idea overall.

I also don’t enjoy FIFA, nonetheless I looked into the monetization system and the drawing method there to find out what the gaming sector does.

Obviously I don’t expect people to do such a thing… but when it comes to your own genre having comparisons and examples do really bode well to have a bigger picture of what is or isn’t possible… and especially when cross-referincing it with other genres as well. The methodology of a trading system like OSRS and the principles built upon there… the itemization methodology of TL:I or PoE comparatively and why they are set up as they are specifically… the positioning of content like in FF14 and why you see content at specific places rather then simply strewn around without much thought… the game-design philosophy directly on how to actually work by No Man’s Sky… and many other examples.

You can take information from many places, check them for viability and how they would work to come up with a great total product. Polished and finetuned since the vast majority of individual mechanics have all underlying rules followed… and if you ignore them you get a comparatively sub-par product. As times go on the bar gets higher and higher as it should.

And for seasonal implementations? They’re entirely falling out of favor ever more, games like Tarkov fall off heavily (not only for the cheating, albeit for a big reason that too, and some others), PoE gets flak for not fully implementing their design into the core game, nobody likes Fallout 76 for their season pass which is one utter chore… and so on.

Which is fine, as long as the mechanic stays the same. It’s a clear focus one time and then becomes a ‘normal’ mechanic afterwards, like all others. A timeframe which doesn’t make you ‘miss out’ on it but simply provides incentive without a inherent loss afterwards for not taking that incentive.

You don’t have to take every opportunity in life, it’ll make life easier for sure… but the only time a missed oppostunity feels bad if you don’t have the option for doing it afterwards anyway, even with a bit less success.

Which is also fine… but some form of focus should at least be there for a Cycle, whatever they decide on. Not to play Cycle itself… just to give players a long-term engagement which is build upon 3 months of play-time… if it’s afterwards a 6 or 12 months time-investment to do it on the side is fine… or if they simply keep it balanced already with the 3 months in mind while simply bringing more variety so it gets overall ‘more’ at the base game as time progresses (hence no need to scale it down) is also fine.

Currently the LE mechanics don’t seem to make the game ‘more’ though sadly… they just seem to shift the goalpost along while infringing on stuff which is pre-existing heavily. Both 1.1 with Nemesis starting at campaign did so… as did 1.2 with the weaver content starting prematurely in full-scale. 1.3 is a bit better there already… but it feels lackluster since it now provides a RNG mechanic behind a long-term grind… which makes acquisition ratio absolutely ill-fitting in feeling related to the 3-month engagement time.

Yes, short-term engagement at the cost of long-term success. A classic example of the ‘throwaway’ society basically. Make game, milk people for their engagement… stop updating and make the next product.
It always leaves people with looking back and saying ‘Yeah… that kinda sucked, wasn’t happy so I left’.

This burning out hurts companies for a loooong time. People don’t tend to say ‘Yeah, that game sucks!’ when they simply start to realize on their own (hence without anything making them run in the hamster-wheel long after they’re feeling exhausted) that it’s time to move on. They’ll instead look back and say ‘Yeah, that was fun!’ and even pick it up again years after again.

Heck… this is why I returned to OSRS 4 times already, they don’t see me non-stop but they do see me over and over again. Minecraft, Vintage Story, No Man’s Sky, Stardew Valley, Wayward, Grim Dawn, Starbound (modded only) and so on and so forth… they all don’t provide the ‘you gotta do it now’ situation, they all let you do things at your own leisure. As it should be.

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Very funny how delusional takes are always guys who bought supporter packs since day 1. How can you have such lack of self respect ?

These guys are p****** on you. A whole cycle to make you fight a dinosaur at the end of a map, and you find a way to defend them.

They sold 3 MILLION COPIES. How can you not see that the AMOUNT of copies sold does not match the content and quality of the game ? Are you going to try and find some obscure reasons to justify that ?

I bought the game very early and really wanted it to succeed, but this level of lack of creativity is unmatched. I repeat myself often, but I don’t understand how people don’t realize how many things are plagiarized from other games ? Is this what you expect from a game that sold 3 million copies ?