Nobody cares about PoE Next Seasons anymore, the game is more and more broken, and is in utter shambles already.
I am not an avid POE player, for me, the combat is somewhat outdated for modern standards but once the next POE league is released all the ARPG players will play it for some time again. POE 2 hype will carry POE 1 for quite some time as well.
PoE 1 is dying with each season it gets less players. The game is too outdated and too poorly managed, PoE2 release will be the final nail in the coffin imho.
Unless PoE2 will have at least half the endgame available to PoE1, PoE players will keep returning to PoE1.
After reading the patch notes Iām estimating the 24-hour peak will continue to be around 4k loyalists who donāt understand when the devs hate them and hate fun. It will jump back up for the first 5 days of the patch because people always want to see whatās new, then it will fall off the grand canyon again.
Not really, no.
Looking at the PoE Database:
- Necropolis, the latest league, had 189.712 concurrent players at league start
- Affliction, the league before Necropolis, had 167.593 concurrent players
- Ancestor, the league before Affliction, had 165.823concurrent players
While there are some ups and downs, looks like Path of Exile is actually thriving.
PoE actually has has more players since the release of D4 than it did before. Because PoE is the superior game, and continues to release new and fun content. The devs understand ARPGās and fun, and they continue to provide that to the customer barring Necropolis league which was abysmal.
More players is due to diablo 4 bringing more people to the ARPG genre, and those people go to PoE and LE soon, after completing D4.
That does not mean the quality of PoE increasing from season to season, or itās ability to retain players.
I myself, played PoE after completing D4. Then I played LE. So d4 > PoE > lE is a cycle between arpgs bringing in people. That does not mean those are loyal fanbase or they are going to stay.
There are a bunch of vids exploring why PoE is such a disaster of a game. Negative feedback has been on the rise. And Necropolis was a joke, with urgent nerfs early season, after people looted hundreds of magebloods/hhs/mirrors.
they should be very explicit about what they fixed /changed since launch.
those who left because the tooltips ate fps would be happy to know thats fixed for example. no way they followed patch notes to spot that 
i wouldnt be coming back if i didnt somehow hear about it being fixed. it was so janky.
now my worry is that some echoes/monos had bad performances compared to others. iāll see if thatās better for the new cycle and leave if its not. i value pristine smoothness over anything else. hell iād play a stick figure rpg happily as long as itās steadily performing like a champ.
I think most people in this thread are a bit too optimistic. Maybe more than 50,000 is a very ideal result.
id say 50k in itself is a pretty ideal result. I honestly think that LE development didnt focus enough on the right things and as a result left the initial content launch stunted. THe single player portion ending abruptly, and the multiplayer issues have surely left a bad taste in many peoples mouths. I personally am still treating this like beta and dont expect something resembling a full game till at least 1.6
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I actually asked this question in the chat channel a few days ago, and the prevailing response was 20,000 to 50,000
Thatās nothing new, though. There have been videos and negative feedback every since PoE launch, along with hundreds of āgame is deadā even before 1.0.
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Regardless, the statement āPoE 1 is dying with each season it gets less playersā is not supported by the number of concurrent players on league start.
Subjective opinion. The average player retention in the latest leagues is higher than the average for older leagues.
You sound like you want Path of Exile to fail. But we have no objective evidence that the number of players has been falling.
1.1 has been out a few hours - Steamcharts shows around 71k and immediately the playbase has been dropping (currently 46k) just like release week. Itās clear many people had high hopes but our dreams of playing online with a smooth experience have been dashed once again. Best wishes EHG.
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Iām probably not even going to log back in for 1.1. It looks like they addressed some of the concerns of quite-end-game players, but also nerfed some of it, but they didnāt address any of the things that kept me from dumping more time into it.
The leveling / campaign experience, even the first time, was probably the most boring of any ARPG Iāve played. And you have to do it AGAIN (more or less) for any alts, and now again for a new season (that is normal, except for the fact that other ARPGs have already figured out players donāt like being bottlenecked through the campaign over and over).
Respeccing is annoying at best and just generally feels discouraged, especially considering the crazy RNG for finding even approximately right gear if you arenāt using the merchantās guild. This discourages experimentation and finding your own build, in addition to just being a weird pointless time / effort sink.
The boss fights are mostly interesting the first time, but because of monoliths (or the non-merchant guild) youāre going to fight them dozens and dozens of times, and they shoehorn in ways to make them take basically the same amount of time regardless which makes it feel like you arenāt progressing at all. Also, they really arenāt particularly special the 3rd, 4th, 5th time much less the 20th.
10,000 players is nothing to sneeze at, this isnāt Diablo (which itself a lot of people just bought for the campaign, and is struggling to remake itself after abysmally received lack of end game and layers of tedium), but I do hope Last Epoch devs will consider making changes for those of us who want to experience it but also play other things. I completed an entire open world, high quality game in less time than I spent on my Runemaster and my Runemaster wasnāt even level 90 or very well geared (despite trying to take a shortcut and follow a guide / loot filter). Thatās a pretty terrible feeling when a lot of gamers have a lot less time than they used to, and there is way more competition in the medium than ever before.
Edit: To be clear, I donāt mean I need to be level 100 before the game is fun. The beginning endgame (when you get into monoliths and have cleared the map and are level 50-60 so you have 90% of your build online) is pretty fun and way better than D4, even with the revamps D4 has done. But it sucks to get there, and then actually refining builds is iffy, and redoing boss fights that are built to be tedious gets pretty boring, basically the endgame gatekeeps itself from being more fun by putting a bunch of barriers in the way. Clearly there are some people who enjoy it but Iām not sure making it more fun for the rest of us would hurt that.
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Looks like so far 70k peak and already down to 40k.
This is not a good sign.
Maybe over the weekend it might hit 100k, but Iām not holding my breath.
Iām guessing EHG is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror and think about the future of this game. Because right now this direction isnāt it.
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While Europe is asleep you mean? Did you expect the vast majority of the playerbase to be in the US?
Iām not going to lie. They did a really bad job marketing the update but I understand why they are holding off. The game just needs more content. More meat on its bones. Before it can push a Cycle like PoE pushes a League.
I only heard about the update by chance. There is too many things releasing right now that I nearly didnāt even notice.
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While I think this whole conversation just generally isnāt productive. At least in the way itās being presented. Donāt pretend like the game is gonna have some magical resurgence of players from EU. Itāll go up and down one or two times. And probably settle at a number low enough for these forums to get doomer. You spend a lot of time on here cause I recognize you even though I havenāt played in a while so kind of need to expect this to be coming.
Edit: Came off harsher than I wanted it too. Just generally saying kind of have to expect these comments and what we saw day 1 is probably the best itās gonna get. Would be very lucky to see higher. Even on the weekend. The only scenario I see it getting higher from is from people like me. People who heard about the update last minute. Nothing to do with where the players are from or when they are playing.
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