Ok, then I misunderstood that part. My bad.
Yes. But if it’s the same content for both options, the majority will simply go for standard. Because they follow the path of least resistance. Even if they end up enjoying it less.
If you place a button with “Get to level 100 with BiS gear”, most people will click it. They will then get bored because there’s nothing left to do, but they will still use it and then leave.
So most people would join legacy, do the content in a couple days and then stop playing because there is nothing else to achieve.
Pretty good. Because PoE does that and their numbers follow the exact same trend as LE’s which doesn’t do that.
So if that was the reason, we’d actually see a much higher retention rate in LE, which is not the case. If anything, the retention rate is lower, although other factors can contribute to this, so there’s no real way to reach a definitive conclusion.
That is the 1% of the 1%. No one else gets 40/40 that fast.
I no-lifed PoE for about a year and I got to 36/40 twice. I never got to 40/40, although most of the time I didn’t no-life the game, just that year.
In fact, I’d say that less than 1% of a season’s players even get to 40/40 at all. Ever.
The big difference is how long it takes to do it. If you have to reset, it takes them 2-3 weeks. If they didn’t have to reset and they could use their gigachad ultra char from last league, it would take them 2-3 days.
I won’t either. But that’s because I don’t have to.
Although I will admit that my retention drops radically because of that. In Season 1 I played less than in 1.0 because I already had strong characters. I logged into my high level FG and immediately respeced and had a working shield bash build.
Killed Nemesis and a bunch of Harbingers and then I got bored.
Yes. But you’re the exception to the rule. Much like a seasonal player that plays the whole season. They’re outliers.
Seasonal players tend to play for a month, for the most part. By then they achieved their goals, seen the new mechanic and don’t feel like they have more to do, so they switch to another game.
Standard players tend to play on and off. They don’t have as much time. They stay away for months at a time and then return to play for a couple of weeks or a couple of months.
The biggest issue with this is that seasonal games, by definition, don’t have many permanent players. They keep switching games for other seasons that are starting. It’s why EHG delayed their release date. Because players will stop playing one game when another one releases a new season. So the number of players that stay for the whole season is a minority.
Which means that your biggest income comes from the big influx of players in the first week or two of a new season. And games do everything they can do make sure players return on day 1. And seasonal players are the ones that do that, not standard ones.
They are not the only consistent ones. They are just the majority of the consistent ones.
I’m not downplaying anything. I know there are dedicated players that will stick with the game. LE currently has 3k. PoE1 currently has 7k. Neither is close to enough to keep the game alive in a seasonal model.
Because, if there is no difference between season and standard, then the vast majority will play standard. Meaning everyone starts with a level 100 gigachad character. Especially the loyal fanbase.
If you allow content to be the same for both and you don’t make content for them, then the majority will play 2 days and be done with the content.
I didn’t make up an issue. You’re not getting it. You introduce a seasonal mechanic that’s supposed to last at least 2 weeks starting from a level 1 character, with a totally fresh start and economy.
If you give the same content to legacy, then most players will play that content in legacy with their level 100 characters already. And they will finish that content in 2 days because they don’t have to grow their character.
So instead of having a huge peak that slowly tapers off over time, as more and more players reaching their goals or get tired of the game, you then have a huge peak that sharply drops off a few days later. Only to stabilize on the bottom with the loyal fanbase.
So instead of PoE having 10k players only in the last couple of weeks of a league, they would have 10k players for 3 months.
If you think I’m making your points for you, then you misunderstood me again.
Streamers don’t play D4 more than a couple of days, despite making a seasonal character, because the game is too easy and they complete the season in a couple of days.
Likewise, if streamers could simply pick their level 100 gigachad character and try out the new content, they would be done in 2 days as well. And just like they don’t keep streaming D4, even though it’s one of the games that gets them the most followers, they also won’t keep streaming LE or PoE once they’re done with the content.
Because it’s boring to keep playing when you don’t have more objectives.
Yes, they do. That’s why in those first couple of weeks are important to have as many players as you can. And the ones that jump on day 1 more consistently are the seasonal ones.
For example, next week LE will launch season 2 and I likely won’t start playing until the weekend. Because I don’t have much time until then.
I might not even start playing in the first weekend because we’re very busy at work and I might not have time then either. Or I might play for a couple of hours.
I don’t know. And that’s the point. If you’re relying on standard players like me (which should be most of them) for the player spikes on season launch, you’re not going to get consistent numbers. You’re not going to get consistent income. And you’re not going to get consistent retention either, because I will be done with content much faster (in game hours) than a seasonal player will, outside of blasters.
Maybe because:
I wouldn’t have any problems with the staggered 4 month content if I knew legacy would always get the same content. Because the content would be fun.
Just like I don’t have an issue with not playing games at launch and waiting for steam sales instead. It takes nothing away from my enjoyment of a game if I only play it a couple of years after it was released.
As for GGG treating standard as 2nd class citizens, I’m pretty sure it’s because they saw their numbers and realized that the majority of their income comes from seasonal players.
Some will also come from standard, but not nearly as much as from seasonal ones. So they leaned into that.
Apparently not, because as we can see with ExSea, it would still be a problem if they have to wait for the content, even if that content is the exact same as it was in the season.
I don’t think any compromise will ever appeal to everyone. That’s just impossible. But there are ways to minimize this and appeal to the majority.
Clearly the D3/D4 models aren’t good for that, since they do seasonal content that never goes to standard.
Clearly the model of both having it at the same time also has huge downsides.
So I think the best compromise you can get is staggering the content, but not like PoE does. Because PoE waters down the mechanics and you never get to really experience them as seasonal players do (not to mention that sometimes they don’t even released it to core).
Having the exact same mechanic, working in the exact same way (obviously with some balance changes being acceptable) is a good compromise to me as a legacy player.
Content bloat isn’t caused by always adding mechanics. It’s caused by never removing them.
The solution isn’t to simply not bring a mechanic to standard. It’s simply to pick a mechanic that’s already a few years old and remove it from the game. Or trim it to become acceptable.
If you do this regularly to the older mechanics, bloat doesn’t happen nor does choice paralysis.
You’re assuming that standard players buy MTX/packs at the same rate that seasonal players do, which isn’t really expectable. In fact, common sense tells us that seasonal players are more likely to buy MTX (using the current PoE model).
So that math doesn’t really hold up.
It actually isn’t. 1 in 100 is closer to the actual number and already a very generous one. The number is likely much lower.
Or at least it was when I last saw studies about this.
That’s still in the game.
That’s also in the game. It’s a dilluted version (but then again, so is every single other one that made it to core), and it took them 2 leagues, but they did make it go core (after player pressure).
It actually isn’t. It’s a good side effect of it, but the reason is simply to save resources (as admitted by Mike on this forum already).
And the reason it actually isn’t is that you don’t control which players go into which towns (it’s first come first serve), so you can easily end up in a town where no one has any MTX.
The fact that it can actually incentivize people to buy MTX is just a bonus.
Yes. Just like I am a forever player of GD. And yet I don’t play it every day. I don’t even play it every year. I simply return to it regularly.
Same for D2. Or many other games.
Yes, some players will play the game constantly. I’d confidently assume that almost all the 3k players in LE for the last months were legacy players. But most people choose legacy simply because of a lack of time to dedicate themselves fully into it.
A no-lifer is a very rare thing in legacy, while being a common occurence in season.
It would be the same thing if PoE released for both realms simultaneously. Because the key phrase here is “nothing to do”. If you start with an already strong character, you consume the new content much faster and are left with nothing to do.
Like you said before, if I just pick my 1k+ character and go kill Aby, I’m done in a day and there’s nothing left to do.
And given the choice, that’s what most players would do (and then complain they have nothing left to do).
I don’t understand what you mean here. D2 ladder exclusive content was always exclusive. The ladder ended and it remained exclusive to ladder.
Everything that was ever ladder exlusive always remained exclusive, including runewords and uber tristram. They were never made available outside of ladder.
Only D2R changed this, where non-ladder gets everything from ladder except the current ladder-exlusive stuff (which is the model being discussed here, D2R already does that).
