While me and many others understand that staying profitable is mandatory so the studio doesnât closes door and the game isnât gone, have you perhaps considering that itâs even less profitable to go back on the promises like not charging for additional content or adding like pay to win (I know the last isnât whatâs happening here, just using examples).
Consider the following scenario. You decide to ask for money for an expansion (I know Krafton has the deciding power but you have the power to relay to them how strongly your community feels about this and the consequences of such actions). Immediately after the majority of your community says, no weâre not going to buy it and on top of that, we are so against this that we will not buy and supporter packs, we will not buy any MTX and we will not even play the game. This is then promptly followed by changing their positive reviews to negative and the reviews reading. Devs promised there would be no MTX, no season passes and no P2W and they lied just to sell the game as they added a paid expansion.
The reviews are now firmly in the negative, the reputation of the company is in the gutter by their own doing. Suddenly your 1.3 profits looks like a fortune compared to what you made from the few people chose to buy the expansion.
This is not a way to do business. You donât lie to your entire community and expect there wonât be any consequences from this.
Letâs look at what WILL actually save the game. First letâs fix the massive issues it has.
We have enemies and some bosses who do significantly more damage than others. Itâs a huge and noticeable spike that doesnât feels good and itâs not just the campaign, each map is completely inconsistent based on what enemy types it rolled and this is horrible.
Next we have the difficulty spike going from normal monoliths to empowered monoliths as well as how much harder things like cemeteries and tombs are. power must remain consistent and difficulty should not raise in big spikes, it should be raised gradually at a rate that the average player can keep up with, at least until they are in empowered. After they hit empowered and can farm grand blessings and gear. Gear must be target farmable no matter if itâs a unique or a specific base with a specific exalted affix. Trade must also be made FAR more accessible than it currently is and there should be some method to prevent prices from going insane.
Remember what is the goal for the game. An ARPG that is easier than PoE and harder than D4. Meaning a game that is not directed at bad players nor directed at good players. The target audience is the average, a game whose difficulty stands right in between PoE and D4.
Stop nerfing defenses too. We keep seeing defense nerfs, especially for the ward because some builds at high end get to insane levels but rather than only nerf those builds by making sure the insane high ends are brought lower by limiting extremely high end gear or limiting skills that gain ward per hit, ward is instead hit with a nerf that affects everything meaning the things that were working just as intended and in a good balance spot are now no longer working.
Fixing these basic thing will make people play a lot longer and people who play a lot longer feel far more inclined to spend money on the game.
Then you should start doing other things right. Your MTX are frankly speaking bad. I could open the MTX store right now and there is either nothing or next to nothing Iâd want to have because frankly speaking, the skills of your graphics designers arenât up to the challenge. You need people who are very good at this making MTX around the clock so that people actually want to buy things because they look good. If your quality isnât up to at least the level of graphical design of PoE 1 then your MTX is unlikely to sell. Remember, up to par with PoE 1, not PoE 2, PoE 1 is good enough.
Then start learning from the success and mistakes of your competition. PoE has alienated itâs average players for at least 5 years now. That is why LE has always had a very good chance of success in the market but you have been making LE harder and harder. Tap the market they have been alienating like you were meant to.
Your monolith system is bad and I am going to say the loud part out loud. Nothing you do to monoliths will change that. Itâs a bad system and needs to become something closer to PoE 1 mapping system specifically. You can have ideas like timelines and so on to keep your theme, however you need to allow players to chose their maps and those maps must not be campaign maps or part of them, they must be either hand crafted or partially procedural generation that creates good map layouts for players to clear. Itâs just that simple. Iâm not saying copying PoE entirely but Iâm saying, take notes from what they do well, much like how they took notes from your trading system.
Lastly fix the things that are just weird or donât work right. You still donât have minions down right. Playing a necromancer in anything that isnât a single minion build or explody skeletons (AKA a caster cosplaying as a necromancer) isnât viable. You are afraid to give the power and make permanent minions very hard to kill. The point of permanent minions is that you summon them and thatâs it. If you need to summon them all the time they are not really permanent are they? Whether itâs a timer on their head or an HP bar that depletes very easily, the end result is the same.
Fix things like summoning 2 minions or 2 totems cost twice as much. There is no reason, we invested the points into that, we shouldnât be penalized twice by having to both pay twice as much mana and wasting points into something that is not really making it more powerful. In fact fix mana because there is a difference between a build needing a little bit of mana to become mana stable and needing mana generating skills to use in between the damaging skills. The more skills a build has to use, the clunkier it feels to play.
If you simply fix the issues and make MTX good I guarantee money follows but if you insist on going this route that was probably set by Krafton but you havenât firmly set your foot down and said no to them and hereâs the why. Then I already explained what happens next.
I have predicted many games would fail if they kept following their path and honestly itâs become quite easy to see how things will end at this point. Last game I said, if you donât change things the game will fail was The Cycle: Frontier. I told them, if you donât add a PVE mode with human opponents on it, the game will fail and apparently I was blocked because that was spreading misinformation. 3 seasons later they closed doors because they werenât profitable so believe me when I say that unless you fix the actual issues with the game and make MTXs desirable, there is no future for LE and going back on your word to the player will only hasten it.
Now with 90mil+ ya got from Krafton im hoping to see new endgame content for S4 cuz S3 was rly boring⌠PLS don,t add more nemesis/beast systems itâs enough lol Ya need make better quality skins if ya wanna make $$$ AND add more Endgame. I can afford to pay for expansion 20-40$ if itâs good but it will prob kill LE and split playerbase, okay you might milk half player base for expansion for 1 season but then what? Ya gonna loose a lot players if it will be paid probably but itâs whatever your decision to make will see how it goes i guess.