What's with all this hate on the forum?

General
1

I played on launch (S1), I got 2 characters to lvl98, and 1 to lvl100 back then. Then I quit for a few years to play other games. Game was super fun in my memory back then, spent about 300 hrs

Came back to the game about 1 month ago, now have a lvl97 and lvl100. Still having a blast. Took a bit to learn and catch-up on the new mechanics for the past few seasons, but still a very awesome game. Even paid for some cosmetics this time around, just to show support. I definitely got very unlucky with corruption though, saved up for a while, got multiple of same item to corrupt, then failed on all of them! But that is the whole point I guess, the thrill is what matters.

I came to the forum to post about a wall-stuck bug: Hard STuck - Clipped Last Epoch with Medal.tv

But found so much hate about the game on here lol. Are these all hardcore players who play every season? I feel like if you quit for a bit and come back, the game honestly a blast to play.

3 Likes
2

The game gets hate because the game is mismanaged, simple as that.

Nothing more behind it. People don’t want the product that was promised to go under because of decisions which bode badly for everyone in the long-term, so people point those things out.
Also simple as that.

Nothing more behind it.

1 Like
3

In general the devs prefer bugs to be reported in-game (F8 by default) as it includes more data & you can include screenshots as well.

As to all of the “hate”, I think it’s mainly disappointment & yes, I think it’s from those who are more emotionally invested in the game (some of us since early beta).

2 Likes
4

I brought LE March 2025 and have knocked off :

I guess you could say at one point being 10-12 hours per day I was hardcore but as the initial love wore off the patterns began to emerge. Bugs never being fixed is a huge one. No comms with the people who play the game. Very slow between seasons 9 months, 7 months - the quickest I recall was 4 and that had minimal stuff added, even the bigger gaps get minimal new stuff and then the new stuff like rogue skills are broken and 1 shot the main boss before he moves - ironically bosses are also an issue with abby, uber abby and shade - shade also double agent for the prison boss with the omen stuff. Lack of content, lack of bosses, nerfs to the things the majority of people loved including imprints and builds like acid flask/explosive traps. The old nerfs just killing off builds never to return for some reason which actually dwindles down the amounts of builds we can play which is weird because other games are expanding and allowing more than ever (POE2) - I won’t get into the mechanics of the skills and limited trees and how each of the classes has a theme so creativity is very locked down but yeah. I don’t have hate I have hugeeeeee dissapointment.

They could save it but if it’s not done with season 5 (whichever year this actually comes out) then I’m fully done.

PS the played date on my screen shot was to login and give a friend a bunch of items not to play. I haven’t played in 2 months.

1 Like
5

I see. You’re definitely a very consistent supporter of the game by playing this amount of hours. I guess this game is in a state of “not good enough for players who play beyond X hours”.

1 Like
6

Wasted potential, for the most part. But also:

  • Gamebreaking bugs that despite being reported multiple times (i.e. smoke traversal bug) were not fixed for 2+ years. Some still probably aren’t.
  • Krafton acquisition.
  • Breaking promises (paid class).
  • Long waiting periods between seasons (while some like 1.3 were underwhelming, too). People just got used to PoE’s schedule.
  • Hit and miss balance (some subclasses/items/skills just feel abandoned)
3 Likes
7

Exactly, but I have over 750 hours now since March of 2024 and I’m still loving it, and can’t wait for Season 5 and LEO!

I do acknowledge the game has issues, as other’s have clearly and consistently pointed out, but the game is still being developed and I do have much hope for the game, despite the releases being further apart than desired.

My Last Epoch glass is “Half-Full”, rather than “Half-Empty” :slight_smile:

8

As long as you’re enjoying it.

1 Like
9

If x = 2, then yep, definitely.

10

The tendency is that the people which have been here longer have become either inactive and left (there’s a lot of old names missing which were very active and started pointing out issues for a while… before simply disappearing) or are still voicing out the issues introduced years ago by now.

So yes, it is simply ‘not good enough’. Be it for EA supporters which were promised multiple end-games and a finished campaign. Later EA supporters which enjoyed the gameplay of LE ‘as is’ already and then the itemization got massively messed up. Or people coming during release and since then plainly spoken nothing happening while implemented mechanics aren’t fixed or just turned around 180° causing problems in the opposite direction (Boss DR versus Boss Ward as a prime example).

The game has been ripe with major issues since a while simply, had to be sold because it got so bad and is still not improving while keeping up the same mistakes pre-sale from everything that’s externally visible.

So yes, the game is only good enough for most people for a single playthrough… or maybe 2 or 3 even. But beyond that it just isn’t solid enough to sustain itself as a live-service model.

Plainly spoken people wait on 1.5 to see if the acquisition has changed anything internally which we can’t see before leaving. And some will keep an eye out until the expansion - and the promised finished campaign at the same time, otherwise it’s unacceptable - comes along.
We’ll see a significant drop again after 1.5 if it’s not a banger… and we’ll see the death of the game after some struggles of the expansion isn’t turning it around fully in some way as console players have a lower retention timeframe then PC players at average, and shelf-price is not a sustainable system for a company of EHG’s size.

So people are doing the ‘waiting game’.
You can enjoy the game massively and still know ‘something’s direly wrong with it’. Or you can be one which is disappointed with the game at large… either/or if the issues aren’t seen then that’s a problem as a individual and LE will be a teaching moment for the future with a very high chance.

2 Likes
11

Hate? These forums have barely any activity. There’s all of 3 topics that had any replies in the last 24 hours and there’s maybe 1-2 new threads a week. Look at the official forums of any other online-service game that’s in even a semi-healthy state.

What you’re seeing is apathy, not hate.

4 Likes
12

I don’t post much, but I’ve been lurking the forums since at least beta 0.9, and as Kulze said, a lot of people who used to post simply abandoned the game. I recognize him and a few other posters who still are active, but there are also people who used to post but don’t anymore. I myself have only came back because Season 5 is getting closer.
Forums are also, to be quite frank, a very outdated medium - which is very sad, as they were overtaken by much worse alternatives - namely Discord and Reddit, but nonetheless, forums are just not a popular format anymore and realistically, what do you want people to write about when the last 2 seasons were…mediocre, not even talking about quality, but the amount of content provided.
I suspect we will get Season 5 reveal trailer early next month (August) and that is when the forum will start feeling alive again, at least for some time.

2 Likes
13

Yes, Forums aren’t as widespread used anymore, this is true. But pushing it to ‘it’s a old medium’ simply isn’t doing it.
Last Epoch is one of the 5 biggest games of the genre, together with PoE, TLI, Grim Dawn and Diablo. It’s a ‘monolith’ of the scene. One would expect engagement accordingly, but it’s just… a desert. Thumbleweed flying by, crickets chirping, and it’s plainly spoken baffling.

I’m writing half-way regularly in a few gaming forums or reddits, depending which their main medium is proclaimed to be for interaction. And not a single one of those is even remotely as silent as is seen here.

As examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/

This is ‘Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead’. A free open-source project going on since years, ASCII game and hence absolutely not widespread, which has fallen a lot out of favor since the core developer team makes very… weird and nonsensical choices going against their own development manifesto.
Still, in the last day alone? 12 new topics, not to speak of the engagement inside those topics.
Reddit is their core platform for engagement.

Then we got:

‘Vintage Story’. Basically a ‘Minecraft Clone’. That one’s more leaning towards survival and ‘Invested effort causing enjoyment after overcoming it’. Multiple years of development, still Alpha, feels like a complete game though.
And what I linked to is ONLY the ‘Suggestions’ segment of the forum.

Those 2 examples alone show the sheer difference. Both are not ‘mainstream games’ at all. Not on Steam, you gotta find out they exist even, no PR besides long-term existence. They are ‘invisible games’ when it comes to the common publicity.
But still… despite expected low concurrent numbers (Each of them is estimated below 5k concurrent players at nearly any time based on sales numbers/engagement numbers) you see dozens of new topics. People simply sharing their experience, their designs, their fanart or their stories. A huge amount providing feedback, and the quality of discussions especially in Vintage Story being a LOT higher then here.

If a game with I think 5 ‘core’ developers which earn nothing and do it as a hobby get more engagement and a game which has 20 developers (with several being part-time) gets a multitude of engagement at their respective medium they’ve chosen to interact primarily with… then I expect a 100 people sized company which has been sold for nearly 100 million and now being backed by a 7,5 BILLION dollar company to at least keep up and manage it accordingly, especially when highlightes in Steam and being well known as one of the ‘large competitors’, having reached AAA status size-wise and in expected quality. Sadly also doing the same mismanagement as many other ‘AAA’ sized studios do, which leads to what we see.

14

Your analysis is all good, but it ignores that EHG’s preferred medium isn’t the forums or reddit but rather discord. It’s where Mike sends everyone with questions/suggestions. And the discord server is decently active, even in downtime.

Now, should the preferred medium be discord? That’s debatable. I’d say no simply because, unlike the forums or reddit, you can’t consult it without creating an account. For all of them you need an account to post, but you can check the forums or LE’s reddit without logging in, which you can’t with discord.

But as far as engagement goes, their preferred medium still has plenty of it.

1 Like
15

I think a lot of it has to do with those being sandbox games. There is no real goal, but there is a nearly limitless possibility of self-imposed challenges. They follow a vastly different gameplay cycle than ARPGs/PoE-likes.
Also, what DjSamhein said. And I agree about the whole account thing. Not to mention how fragile Discord servers are. Arguably Vintage Story has a more healthy development cycle, too. Vintage Story has been also gaining a lot of attention as well, due to the enshittification of Minecraft.

1 Like
16

ded game saddly.

i don’t think we will have updates anytime soon or ever

17

That’s the whole issue though.

As a company in the business of selling their digital product which is to a large degree based on community interaction (as any live-service is) it’s a necessity to primarily focus on a personal solution instead of a third party.

Solely for the sake of security for the customer, not even to speak about convenience and coherence.
Third party gets things linked to but the information has to be in their own digital space under their full control, anything else is a massive error.

So plainly spoken I don’t care which medium they ‘prefer’, they don’t have the same standards as a open-source basically hobby project, they’re to be held to a much much higher standard.

I agree! It’s definitely a good portion of it.

But then what about Grim Dawn?

Overview sucks, it’s a SP-game without community aspect, there’s multiple threads active just today. I see 2 minutes, 7 hours, 9 hours, 2 hours… they got a multitude of activity despite even more significant downsides of it being a static map, a static experience and especially one which primarily focuses on single-player without a distinct sandbox context, RPG focus for creation of stories or creative aspect.

We don’t need to speak about Path of Exile which has 5 times as many active topics for today then LE has has in the whole week.
D4, which focuses very heavily on casuals and hence has a much lower engagement rate for a Forum anyway also outperforms LE’s forum with the ‘general’ section alone.

The only exception is TLI, which doesn’t provide a community space itself but has a dedicated and well managed news section split into featured news, general annoucements and event anouncements. They’re a non-communication company which despite of it has as much engagement as a company which uses their forum for announcements rather then a dedicated system.

Not a single company in the same genre does provide information outside of their website with the exclusion of interviews… which are often linked as well. No ‘twitter only’ sneak-peaks. No ‘discord only’ spoilers. No ‘Reddit only’ answers for long-standing questions. It’s either all in their official space… or simply non-existent.

18

And yet, in the examples above, you had no issue with plenty of them using reddit. :man_shrugging:

1- That would mostly be because they had a new expansion released just a week ago, after a couple of years with little new stuff.

2- GD does have a community aspect to it, it’s just not core to the game. But there are even “seasons” and “races”.

19

None of them uses reddit for information distribution about their game. Those are all services for community discussion itself.

The community interaction between each other and the official information channels are 2 different topics. We cannot conflate them together. But I see that the way I wrote above makes it misleading and doesn’t differentiate enough there as I’ve spoken about both official channels being used (from the company for their information) and about community engagement with each other (which nobody cares where it is, it just has to be present to showcase a healthy product)

20

EHG doesn’t either. They do create posts on the forums for announcements, patch notes, etc. They just don’t discuss things on the forums (other than a few exceptions) and only engage on discord.

There was a time when some stuff announced on discord didn’t make it properly on the forums. Even then, it was mostly secondary stuff (like an interview about to start).

So, other than the fact that discord requires an account to consult and reddit doesn’t, there is no difference between posting game information on their own medium but discussing on a 3rd party tool like your examples.

And in the case of official information, there is even usually some followup of EHG staff replying on the forums for a bit, like Judd replying to people on the Krafton or expansion announcements, replies in patch notes/hype week announcements, etc.

EHG does have a communication issue with the playerbase, but that is because they actually communicate with the playerbase in a way the rest of the big games in the genre doesn’t.

Let’s not pretend GGG or Blizzard actually engages with the community in the way EHG does. If you have a technical question it’s the players that reply. They don’t have a channel where Mike and other EHG staff actually answers them in a clear way about game mechanics, for example.

EHG actually directly replies to players in many many situations. GGG rarely does so, even on reddit, Blizzard never does so.