alot of skills still bugged or doesnt work the campaign unfinished you know what lets focus alot of our effort on a paid class instead of actually adding content to the game or fix the current content that will make people like us more! 
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+1
I might understand and accept it if a high-quality game with a significant amount of content was getting a DLC, as is usually the case with decent games… But in our case, the DLC is coming to a game with 3-6 playable/beautiful/cool builds per league, two gameplay holes with mobs, one uber-boss, and a bunch of bugs, the most significant of which is probably the gold duplication that carries over from league to league, breaking trades on days 3-6.
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I’m sorry to say, but in the direction things are heading right now, EHG and LE are done for. A furious community is relentless. This downwards-cycle will continue and is self-enforcing. Review bombing has turned Steam reviews “mostly negative” already. EHG has lost all the trust of the players and once that is lost, it is hard to gain again. The poor-character people and the ones that always hated on LE will now double-down and continously spam how P2W, AI-slop, buggy, unfinished and bad graphics the game is. Even if it may not be true, it doesn’t matter. Content-creators (= free-marketing and hype building) are also turning away (Dread, Wudi, Sleepy Cat, …). Who can blame them? It is tiring when chat is spammed with LEBad comments endlessly. How does EHG want to hire good devs when noone wants to develop for a P2W-labeled hated game? How does EHG want to keep their devs when they get nothing but threats to whatever they do or say publically?
The only positive I can think of this desaster is that LE might drag Krafton into its grave.
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Are you really just going to make a different post every day to whine? Let me help you make it sound more professional.
Dear EHG,
The announcement of paid for content in the form of DLC classes is an upsetting one. The current state of your game has bugs that have persisted since I was but a boy, and while I do see that you have a stickied post in the bug reports forums about this, I am concerned the progress has been slow.
The campaign has been unfinished in the years after the game came out of early access, and while some players post that they don’t care about the story or want to skip the campaign, they do not speak for everyone.
The announcement of a new class was a welcome one, but I did not expect it to be paid for content. With the state of the game, it may be more important to focus attention to the current content. I can only assume with the task force of programmers at your disposal that you can handle both, but it would assuage me greatly if you could give the people a more detailed roadmap of your short terms plans, as everything else mentioned is just so far away.
Alas, the consumption has claimed me, and I feel the need to rest. I hope this letter find you and you team well.
Signed,
Please no pay to win
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Keep in mind that Last Epoch’s business model has failed.
So if EHG spend their time and other resources in fixing bugs = they will go bankrupt.
If they spend their time and other resources finishing the campaign people already paid for = they will go bankrupt.
They need to create something they can sell. Even if it’s incredibly ridiculous to release an expansion before the campaign is finished, that’s the situation they’re in.
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I get what you are saying but both are equally important. The dlc class is a long ways away, they aren’t going to bank on that bringing in money for at least 2 seasons, so right now bug fixing and content to retain customers and maybe used properly to hype up the expansion and class coming is just as important.
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We at least have 2 more seasons/big patches before any premium content is coming. That is still plenty of time t ofix a lot of things.
Especially with their latest effort of making a comprehensive thread about long lasting issues I am sure that fixing thing is on top of their priority list.
The developers did already say that the expansion is still a few seasons away, so by then they will finish the company. So this argument from the players is not an argument.
We don’t know if that’s the case. It has to happen first.
I for one cannot foresee the future, even if pattern recognition makes it seem for some like I seemingly can… but I can tell you… I cannot 
I’d personally be somewhat surprised if they managed to “finish the game” (campaign, all skills for all masteries & whatever else they’ve said is core content) in the next ~1 season (so that they’d finish everything else off & then be able to focus fully on the expansion/DLC class/etc). That said, we don’t know how many work streams they have running at any one time. 
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Not quite true.
EHG has been paying probably high-ish salaries to an increasingly vast team for over 6 years.
Business wise, it is a big success.
The failure is that this big team has been unable to complete their game in such a long time, mostly because they try and do everything at once with no direction, and they somehow managed to put themselves in trouble.
Two seasons away. Less than one year.
Chapter 10 alone took them four years.
So yes, they MIGHT finish the campaign before the expansion. But I can see why many observers have serious doubts about their capacity to do that.
They are indeed more on track to finish the company than the campaign (sorry, I assume that was a typo, but it was an amusing one).
If by “somewhat” you mean “extremely”: so would I.
‘We have to sell since we would go bancrupt otherwise’ → This is all the info needed, business failed.
There is no discussion further possible even. That’s the decider. Bancrupty is a failed business plan.
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Going to have to disagree with you here. What you’re describing here is their ability to run a business & a big part of that is being able to do that profitably because that profit allows you to keep on doing whatever it is your company does. Haemorrhaging cash since you were formed & being unable to turn that around to a net cash infliw is most definitely not the definition of a successful business.
Start ups do often run at a net cash outflow for a period of time, possibly an extended period of time, this is normal & that’s why you see some start ups (especially tech start ups) go through multiple rounds of funding because those rounds provide the cash the company needs to keep paying their bills until they can get sufficient regular revenue to pay their own bills. You could say, “but Llama, isn’t that what’s happening here?” & yes, it does look quite like that to be fair.
I’d argue that that is a trifle disingenuous as they wouldn’t have been working of chapter 10 for 4 years, they’d have been doing everything else for most of that.
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Fair enough, but where do you see bankruptcy?
The servers are running, the staff is still there, and the shareholders are richer than they have ever been…
Selling is only a failure if you do it kicking and screaming. Judd comes across as very happy to sell, I don’t see any failure there in a business sense. They didn’t go into administration, they decided to sell. Willingly.
To answer Llama at the same time:
True, I mispoke, as a BUSINESS it doesn’t look successful.
But it is highly successful on a personal level, for all involved.
You mention tech start-ups. Many are (were?) just about having a fantastic idea, vaguely beginning some half-assed implementation, and selling the idea as early as possible for a gigantic sum. The people doing that are generally considered extremely successful (on a personal and not business level, I suppose).
Guilty as charged, it was disingenuous. I was there, I know what they were working on.
But it does raise the question, if they couldn’t manage for years to dedicate a small part of their 100 strong team to the campaign, will they be able to get a bit more organised now?
Maybe if Krafton helps them, otherwise I am not optimistic
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‘We have to sell, otherwise there is only bancrupty’.
‘We haven’t made profit since 1.0’.
Just because something is ‘crawling along’ doesn’t mean it’s a successful business. The father of one of my acquantances owns a clothing shop franchise. 20 years ago he had 7 shops, today he has 2. He downsizes steadily because the rent was outpacing income.
The franchise still exists and is open today… but is it ‘successful’?
I would argue ‘no’.
Which EHG did. ‘We have no other choice’ is the ‘kicking and screaming’ part.
Sure, go ahead and say ‘we really didn’t want to, but we had to’ when you’re working together with your new boss basically. I’m sure the boss will have a very good view of you, you’ll make it big rather then suddenly ‘retiring our of your free will’.
Did they want to sell? Was it their plan not to be independent anymore?
No?
Then it is not willing but forced through circumstance.
I willingly eat and drink every day as well after all, that’s very ‘willing’, right? The alternative would just be dropping dead.
Doesn’t mean I would enjoy avoiding it entirely, nothing better then fixating more on the stuff I love to fixate on instead of having to do other stuff.
Not willing at all 
Not for all.
But the owners definitely! That cannot be denied, you’re 100% right with that part.
And hence the business plan was successful.
Was the plan to sell from the beginning for EHG? Or was it a fallback plan because your initial plan failed?
The first two is for the moment until they run out of cash because they’ve been running at a loss for a very long time now. The latter has nothing to do with anything.
I’m not surprised, he’s likely made a shitton of cash, but that doesn’t mean the business is doing well.
Because the alternative was to go into administration.
Absolutely!
The term used when I was at BT was “exploring opportunities outside of the business”.
If the “business plan” was just to make a shitton of cash & ignore everything else.
Exactly.
Obviously, that is the question. And that is where we have different perceptions.
You think no. I think yes.
Your friend slowly downsized his franchise throughout the years. Down to two shops instead of seven. That is sad for him, but he did what he had to do to keep it HIS franchise.
EHG kept on hiring and hiring at a really fast pace despite losing money, while Judd by his own admission spent years demarching potential buyers (that is an important distinction. Krafton didn’t make an offer first. EHG contacted them.). It doesn’t make sense if the plan was not from the start to sell as soon as the paycheck would become big enough.
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If it’s ‘no’ it’s incompetence.
If it’s ‘yes’ then it’s deceiving the community for years, hence utterly disgusting and they deservere to shut down for that alone without reprise.
I’ll hence lean to ‘no’ unless proven otherwise, which is milder for the results. Pleasure of the doubt at least.
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That emotion is fair. It’s a broken promise and lost trust. But it is an emotional reaction nonetheless. Rationally thinking, every other life-service isometric ARPG has an even worse monetization system than payed classes alone in a moral sense. PoE1/2 included, no need to talk about D4 or TLI. It’s the same saying we have with politicians: “Watch what they do, not what they say.”
Absolutely! To a degree.
I went into PoE knowing full well the monetization system they provide and what it’ll boil down to.
I as a customer was aware. I decided ‘for me personally it’s worth it’ despite some aspects of it being something I dislike… but the upsides outpaced the downsides. So a net-positive in my mind.
In LE I went in with the same baseline… but not that baseline is changed. And now? The balance between upsides and downsides doesn’t hold up anymore. I don’t have any idea about the expected price-point for the future and I have no idea if the pace of updates will increase substantially compared to now to suddenly be in the same position as PoE price-wise for me over time.
It definitely doesn’t uphold in quality… some interesting mechanics but overall a very messy game still, be it the unpolished and unfinished story, the middling graphical fidelity, the rag rug style of mechanics being thrown together or even the functionality of the existing content at times.
That simply doesn’t have the same value as a very polished game which also provides several times more content and plays quite similar in the end… with a few details of difference since I got no learning curve in either game anymore… which would be a net negative for PoE… but that’s not there by now.