Why casuals are most important for le future

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42

Which is… why I especially mentioned ‘if they have a choice’.
And those without choice, how much quality will they put into their work?

Good idea but no business sense = fail.
Bad idea with a great business sense = timed fail.
Good idea with great business sense = win.

That’s the point.

Yes, and you compete with 500 other products which produce a product ‘for the masses’.
A lonely little farmer can’t compete with a farming conglomerate unless they have a specific niche.
A woodworker can’t compete with IKEA if they try to make furniture out of fiberboard.
And so on and so forth.

A small studio isn’t there to provide ‘what everyone else provides’ as they can’t grab a hold for a reason.
Those passion projects are not without reason focused on either a great gameplay or a great story, the first the permanent lasting ones and the second a success story, a one-hit wonder.
But you’ll have a baaaaaad time if you go in and say ‘Yeah, lemme make the next great Battlefield successor with my 5 man team!’. That doesn’t happen.

You use a niche, you cater to that niche, you don’t break out of the niche with the working product… you make a new product while upholding your niche product to fall back onto.
LE is… a niche product of the genre which made it big because they made it well. Fairly simple.

5 1/2 or so currently, not 9. You don’t stop if your product meant for perpetual improvements does well. That would be fairly dumb.
It’s selling the golden goose to make a regular goose farm. Why would you do that? It’s more effort.
No, you use the golden goose to build up goose farm on the side gradually and make the best of it as long as it lasts.

43

Sadly I fear EHG is going to be brow beaten by the blasters and zoomers to take a lot of the game play out of the game. I really really hope they stick to their vision. Compromising with the zoomers and blasters is a slippery slope, very rarely resulting in them being satisfied. First it is “make Lotus Halls shorter” then it is “echos have to many dead ends” then “why can’t we have 100% evade up time”. Next thing you know it is not LE anymore.

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44

Refering more to the game in 4 years time. I am aware its around 5 now.

I get the analogy. In the case of competition i see none outside of TQ2 and PoE2. My understanding the audience is different. So LE being good or bad to players wont effect it as much as the devs think they do. Why EA keeps making money. Borderline monopoly on sports games and they are a case example of bad company, similar to ubisoft. All are profitable.

I agree in theory. I not seen much unique from LE yet. But that can be built in easy. Especially if it is front loaded as i suggested. I can make a video on that on some point.

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If it’s going fine… why would you stop? :stuck_out_tongue:
‘Nah, it had its time, I’m outta here now!’?
I… don’t understand.

D4, Torchlight Infinite.
Same exact genre, both greedy and hence screwed up. Torchlight infinite actually has a good playstyle as well, just their quality sucks.
Diablo 4 has good graphics and decent combat… just everything around sucks.

Eelectronic Arts is actually stagnated since 3 years by now.

But besides that… we’re back at the niche.
Who in their right mind would go into this sector without making something entirely new rather then established highly licensed areas which cost you a arm and a leg while there’s alternative options?

Welcome to Rocket League, Descenders, Golf with your Friends and so on.

Innovation has no meaning in ‘doing something well’.
You can make a fantastic burger as a chef and people will flock to you over going to McDonald or Burger King… why? Because the age old and not innovative product is ‘well made’.
Prime example… BattleBit.
Good mechanics, nothing new, just well executed. That’s enough. Players don’t care about innovation, they just want a good fun product. If your innovations are bad and your game is otherwise well made it’ll still fail.

Also LE has a fresh take on the established mechanics, that’s enough innovation. The crafting system is well executed as a baseline one, it has a D2 Affix system, which is what people want exactly, it has some flashy mechanics, a general fluid gameplay and some mechanical bosses (where more focus is put on at the moment) while not falling into the major pitfalls the others do.

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46

It’d take more than 10k, but probably, yes, which is a bit sad.

It was hated before then. Partly due to how they announced it & partly by it being a mobile Diablo game with mobile “mechanics” (ie, egregious grind & p2w). Don’t you guys have phones? Poor Wyatt.

If they hadn’t stuck the Diablo name on it then yes. From memory it was even quite similar to a previous game by the same devs.

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47

Not really. LE claim to fame is unironically that it isnt as indepth as its rivals.

LE selling point is that it is somewhere between diablo and PoE in terms of complexity and depth and difficulty. As soon as they “Cater” to the super minmaxer arpg players aka poe players, they lose their market share.

Yeah, we cant become a mobile game. But there is a reason a mere 70k returned for “pinnacle” bosses. Why would I play PoElite when I can just play PoE? This game needs to make a name for itself that isnt “uhh poe players asked for pinnacle content, guess we need it”

Ive never even heard of the term “pinnacle” bosses outside of poe.

LE was sold as “An arpg for all skill levels and players” many of the most recent choices sorta fly in the face of that mindset/design choice. I think the other road map stuff looks really interesting and seems more LE speed. This patch was entirely made to placate the influx of “Arpg” players. Which are basically just poe players, because lets be honest, Diablo players are just normies, and what else is left? grimdawn? thats like 50 yr old grandpas game.

Dont get me wrong, I do think PoE does lots of stuff right, but LE really needs to stop listening to the influx of players that came when 1.0 dropped that are just here for the short term and will jump ship as soon as the next poe league drops.

48

But… but… don’t you have a phone??? :stuck_out_tongue:

You could see how he desperately tried to find a reason to make it hype after realizing nobody was happy about it.
It showcased in a prime example how detached the developers were from the actual wants of the players.

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49

Because they’ve been playing it for months by the time the LE league starts & they may wish for a bit of a break before they sweatlord PoE again for the next season.

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50

No, there isn’t A reason, there are lots of reasons. Like the fact that half the 250k from launch would never ever ever return to the game even if it was the bestestest game in history, simply because that’s how gamers are these days.
Also the fact that the cycle launched on a tuesday. It remains to be seen what numbers the weekend will show.
Also the fact that, since cycle and legacy are the same, the distribution in LE should be much more equal between the 2. And since they were expected to not have the boss yet, many possibly simply waited to start playing in the weekend.
Plus a bunch of smaller facts, like these last 2 days being the euro semifinals.

Reducing things to “the single reason” only is reductive and actually undermines the argument you try to make.

Funny, that’s what D4 called Lilith and after that Duriel. Guess you must have missed that.

Pinnacle boss is the most sounding name and it’s what you think about. But the most impactful thing in this patch, the one everyone will be interacting with the most, is actually nemesis. And that is for everyone.

51

except they already do that with all the unique items and the skill trees and the idols and the fact that crit mitigation is mandatory and the fact that pinaccle bosses are a thing.

A “Superboss” is common within a lot of games, almost every RPG has at least one boss that is way harder than the main story final boss.

They added evasion and improved filters to have two rules - these two things are good for the more “casual” player in ways that may not be immediatly obvious, they are also good the more serious LE fan, the difference to the Majasa fight is night and day. Also the cycle mechanic can be used starting from some of the earliest zones. Also a bunch of the more annoying enemy types have been changed, the enemies that spammed undodgeable void bolts in ruined era were swapped for enemies that fire a javelin in a straight line, this was a change that benefitted the “casual” audience (AND LE fans).

The addition of a few superbosses isn’t going to effect the casual player in ANY way, as they will drop it before they reach those bosses, you may see this as a negative, but I see it as a positive - in that it only has upside(appeals to LE fans) with no downside(no effect on casuals).

That is still going to be the average LE players, and poe players know what they are talking about when it comes to ARPGs and what makes them fun - at least to some degree. The main audience for LE will allways be the ARPG market outside of a miracle. LE takes a lot of inspiration from PoE and improves on its systems in a lot of ways. Ways that happen to be good for the “casual” audience, but are also really important to long time hardcore ARPG players.

I get the theme of your argument, being a “LE should not be too hard as to put players off initially”, but that isn’t an issue, superbosses are not things that are the initial impression of the game, campaign is the initial impression of the game. And the campaign effects LE fans as well, the campaign does not need to made easier, but QoL changes and some additional things to do during campaign would appeal to both groups.

I think I need to spell out the core theme of my point, being “the players that actually stay are the ones that matter the most, do not anger them”, being that those that love this game are both the most effective advertisers to bring in new players and the most likely to spend money. You may be able to gain more people that would stay by appealling to the general ARPG audience or to audiences just a little outside of ARPGs, but that should never come at the expence of those who already love the game, preferably you would do somthing that both groups like(for example the dodge button). Also I should note you only need to do a little bit every few cycles for the ones that stay(they already are staying, whatever you are doing is working).

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52

But… are the bosses hard to kill?

And also, if it caters to all types of players for the genre… does it mean every player has to be catered to for every singular mechanic in the game?

You can’t cater to the hardcore group without providing hardcore content in terms of difficulty.
You can’t cater to the casuals without providing casual mechanics to repeat as much as you want without stress.

We have both in LE. You go MG, you buy the stuff from the bosses, you simply play monoliths as a casual, maybe a few of the bosses in-between done by yourself.

As someone ‘sweating through it’ you go and push corruption, make the game as hard as possible, beat each boss on the most ridiculous level you can manage.

I would say the game handles that fairly well. Just progression rates for the different parts need to be adjusted.

Agreed… and EHG does it surprisingly well. Wouldn’t have expected it to go that well actually.

53

That’s the purest sort of BS. Can’t read the rest, has probably been called out 25 times in 50 replies.

The best things in life are free and they matter a lot more than money - fun for example. Now LE isn’t technically free, but milking us instead of satisfying us is not EHG’s style, which is highly appreciated. It’s the game made by gamers for gamers approach.

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54

no, it means that when you cater to one group, you merely have to avoid pissing the other off. Superbosses do nothing to casuals. If EHG were to make an invincibility cheat that would piss off a lot of players while appealing to “casuals”.

No stress in the game whatsoever is actually bad for casuals - it makes the game boring, which is worse than the game just being hard for them. The campaign has to have the right balance of difficulty for them to be engaged. The hardcore players simply need stuff after the campaign to include hard and interesting content. What they want doesn’t allways effect the other. And when it does there is usually a way to make both happy, even the endgame dungeons have easier versions.

An example of a change that I would like that would benefit BOTH is to simply allow loot filter to change drop sounds, it would matter a lot to the mono speedrunners but would also be useful to the casual player.
Another would be changing how julra legendaries work, currently it is on item type that separates the dungeon tiers, but that creates a lot of friction - I think it should be instead be linked directly to the LP, so that making an item legendary is harder the higher the LP. This would benefit casuals as they would be able to get 1LP items upgraded without going T4, it would benefit the min-maxers as they would have a reason to do T4 julra for every single slot.

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55

I actually think LE does this just fine. Early game is easy enough that it’s appealing to casuals. You get gear upgrades regularly and barring some odd choices, it’s easy to progress the campaign with whatever skill you choose. It’s also easy enough for hardcore players that they just rush through it (or, most likely, just jump to monos at level 25ish).

Mid-game starts getting a bit harder, but is still accessible to casuals. It still allows some progression until they feel they’ve had enough. And it starts getting interesting to harcore players (even though normal monos is still a slog, even with the new glyph).

Late game is clearly targetted at the hardcore crowd. Gear progressions slows to a crawl, you do the same thing over and over. Casuals aren’t going to be pushing corruption to 300c or pushing the limits. That’s only for the hardcore crowd.

So LE actually has a good balance for both crowds. It can always be improved, but as it is it’s appealing enough for each.

I actually disagree with this. I think the way it is now is better for casuals. Right now, tiers are linked to the unique level (not type). And casuals are more likely to have low level LP uniques than high level LP uniques. So this way they can interact with the dungeon, make a better low level LP unique that will help new characters or even their current one.

Not only that, but if casuals do happen to luck into a mid-level unique with 3LP, they’re then screwed because they need a higher tier fight which will probably frustrate them.

Changing tiers to LP would only help the hardcore crowd to craft 1-2LP rare uniques more easily.

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56

I thought they were linked to item type, not item level. But if they are linked to item level as you say then that is better than my idea.

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57

Yeah, it’s linked to item level.

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