Why I think the game fell off so hard and why its disappointing

General
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This is gonna be a hot take but this is the reason that I think the game is so quiet and dead right now.

Anyway I had high hopes for this game, but ultimately I believe the reason why the game died was exactly what I feared; the dev’s taking the boring approach of constantly nerfing the competitive builds in the endgame to the point they are annoying to play. I have played maybe 20-30 different builds, gotten close to 1k waves in arena, and I would say that almost every time a novel build popped up that was fun and competitive, it was nerfed in some way, and the game lost builds because nobody wants to play that anymore. The most recent victim was runemaster. Some older fun builds that got the nerf hammer and never recovered would be Glacier mage, for example. Now if you want to play glacier mage, you have to play pseudo melee instead of cast on target, and if you take cast at target so it feels good, say goodbye to all your damage because the penalties are so bad (No crit multiplier IIRC or something like that, it was so crippling that you wouldn’t bother trying to play it)

If you look at most of the streamers for PoE2, PoE1, many of them are SSFHC streamers despite most of the audience not playing HC. When I see posts on reddit about a player build that beat 4th ascendency in PoE2 in SSFHC, it gets 1.5k upvotes etc. This is because people like watching the best of the best, top 1% players, struggle to achieve something difficult. Its fun to watch the best compete.

But in last epoch, there is no competition anymore, or no reason to compete. Because the dev’s took the boring approach of prioritizing nerfing top builds, (which only results in less build diversity overall) instead when the approach should have been heavily focused on all the underpowered and underplayed abilities and talent trees, which would result in many new builds popping up that people want to play. That never happened, some skills that were garbage remained garbage for years during the early access until past release.

Now all that remains if you want to compete high on the arena ladder are stupid supertank builds like where you have an abomination to run around and kill/tank for you, and you hide around the corner wearing two shields on your character with 100% block chance (I’m not kidding, this is the rank 1 build rn, go look it up). #2 is some shield throw build with the minion, another build on the same page, hiding with 100% block chance and high armour. Alternatively the only other competitive build was some full glass cannon marksman with zero defenses (negative res) which threw down ballistas that 1shot the entire screen, that was peak dogshit gameplay. Anything else isn’t competitive and not worth playing, so you have to play that crap if you want to compete on the ladder. Its boring as hell and nobody is competing.

Its really unfortunate because I saw this coming ages ago, I saw the dev’s focus on nerfing top builds, and it does nothing for the game. The golden days are gone, where I could play shaman totems build or turbo sentinel (another unjustifiably nerfed build that was high skill cap gated and is now dead) and compete in tournaments hosted by vision. Those were the glory days and I didn’t even realize it. Now tournaments don’t even run because there is nobody interested in competing.

I have hopes that one day the devs get it and decide to focus on buffing weak builds and focusing more on competition so that people have a reason to play and stream the game, but honestly I don’t really see it happening any time soon. I had such high hopes for the game on release, but on release, after preparing probably more than most players would (I played 6+ gear and build variants on runemaster that pushed between 500-800 waves) I found that ward had been nerfed, runemaster unjustifiably nerfed, and I sat looking at the new warlock class that flew around with thousands of ward killing things effortlessly, I tried to reroll and play it but I absolutely hated the DoT playstyle, then I quit because I realized there is and will be no competition. And its ultimately because devs decided that focusing on cultivating competition was not important, some casual players have some bias that competition is elitist (?) or bad for the game, who knows, but everything that I have ever played which was viable has been nerfed to the ground. Think back to EQ werebear, which was gutted so heavily we will never see it as a competitive option, whereas they could have focused on buffing everything else and had 10x the amount of build diversity and options in the game.

Ultimately, if i decided to come back and compete, I would be playing with 2 shields and standing around with an abomination smashing everything for me, it sounds so mind numbingly boring that I probably won’t ever bother. Its a shame.

End of rant, keen to hear your opinions, try to keep it on topic and not personal

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TLDR;

‘dead game’

I stopped reading after you said:

There’s no reason to take somebody seriously when that’s the premise of their post.

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He is not wrong though. If we go by online numbers, the game is not doing that hot. Out of curiosity I checked grim dawn and it has 5x more ppl playing it.

To stay on topic, I can only chime in from a ‘semi’-casual pov as the game never managed to keep my interest after finishing non-empowered monos. The classes are just boring or feel unfinished. Be it janky feeling abilities, steep mana costs, cooldowns or a myriad of downsides attached to skill passives that work as fun blockers for me. I felt like I was fighting against the various systems instead of the mobs.

I do drop in from time to time to see what devs are cooking, hoping we go back to pre-online-patch content awesomeness and frequency. For me the game went downhill after online servers were introduced. Also sad to hear that top end players, the aspiration for us casuals, got shafted with nerf hammers :confused:

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People just move on and play different games when they get bored and then come back later. With D4 seasons and now PoE2 I’m not really surprised LE has gone quiet, that certainly doesn’t mean the game is dead. As soon as I’ve done a few playthroughs of PoE2 I’m ready to jump back into LE.

As for the nerfing/buffing, I do wish some of the under achieving builds/skills would get buffed. I’m hopeful this will happen in the patches ahead.

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Firstly, game isn’t dead.

Secondly, the only mistake the devs made was caving to the vocal minority and turning the game into a PoE Clone when their vision was for a single-player offline RPG. We have what we have now and there’s no going back, but I truly think the devs didn’t want a seasonal ARPG and caved the pressure of PoE fans who want every game to be like PoE (we already have a ton of them over on the Titan Quest 2 Steam Forums)

Edit: game is still fun, especially in True Offline where the network latency is non-existent

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This is not true, though. From the start this was their plan. It’s on their kickstarter goals, namely:
-Offline and online multiplayer action
-Massive end-game content and replayability, trading, PvP, Cycles(seasons), Ladders, and Achievements

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Well, TIL. I found the game after it was already in EA and still Single Player only and given how rocky adding multiplayer was combined with the way EHG was unsure how they wanted to handle trading/auction house and how they don’t have a set idea (or haven’t shared one) for how they want cycles to work, I hope you can understand why it seems like Multiplayer and Seasons were tacked on due to people asking for it rather than something that was planned from the beginning

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I think a few things factor into the issue

Engine upgrade took a while. They couldn’t develop new/old stuff at the same time

Perceived window of interest was vastly under-estimated. Who knew Vessel of Hatred would be such a stinker (lol) Plus PoE2 EA got delayed. They could have released without much completion but hindsight is 20/20

Everyone works remotely

I’m not worried though :smiley:

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I mean, why this is the case is blindinly obvious & has been the case for months, so I’m not sure this is even a particularly tepid take let along a hot take.

Yeah, this isn’t the reason why. It’s also wrong. But you do you. They aren’t nerfing competitive builds, they’re trying (not saying they’re necessarily succeeding) to nerf the over performing builds.

Umm, no. Nerfing the top X builds (if done properly) doesn’t reduce build diversity, it reduces the distance between the highest performers & the mid (& lower) tier performers so more builds are closer together.

It’s maths/data interpretation & that’s complicated.

This I do agree with, though IMO it should be done in conjunction with a nerf at the top. Rather than just buff “all builds” (in principle) to 1k corruption & force every player to grind their eyes out to get to a decent level. If most builds could do, say, 500c +/-10%, that would be a lot better, just that some people would have to “suffer” smaller numbers (teh horr0rz!1) & you then buff the loot a bit if you want to make the drops similar to 1k.

That’s incorrect. Some skills & passives were buffed or changed. This is what the devs call a “rework”.

This will always be the case in an infinitely svaling game that doesn’t allow for massively op glass cannon builds. It’s not wrong, you just don’t like it. There is a difference.

But, but, you saw it coming!!

What’s the saying? Improvise, adapt, overcome? Or should that have “until you get sad that numbahz knot bigga then bitch about it on the forum”.

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They didn’t cave. Going all the way back to there kickstater the game was always planned to be a live service seasonal based game.

Trading was also a part of the kickstart campaign which mentioned the bazaar

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Yup.

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I do wish they’d spend some time to buff up builds/uniques that just aren’t worth even trying to make work. If I’m going to try to make a build at all it’s gonna be because of some cool looking unique, but half the time the ones that look cool end up being grossly under powered and/or have some no fun allowed limitations like proc cooldowns you can’t reduce or stack limits. I know they’re already looking to make a pass at set items at some point, but I hope some of the uniques get the same treatment.

As for nerfing high end builds: I’m so so on it. I think the competitive aspect of the game is dumb, so nerfing people’s fun for the sake of that sucks. But I also think that the game’s content should be taken on it’s own terms. If they make some big crazy boss fight like Abberoth, people should have to learn and execute on the mechanics rather than just obliterate the boss in seconds. Otherwise what’s the point? It might as well just be a DPS dummy.

In general when balancing a game you need to have some concept of what “balanced” looks like. What’s the average supposed to be? What’s an acceptable deviation from that average? How easy should people be able to make the content? How difficult can it get before it’s unacceptable?

In an ARPG it also gets a bit more complicated because gear is a thing. What if a build sucks ass with no gear but becomes completely OP if you get really good gear? Do you nerf it?

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The issue is that, in games like this, nerfing is usually heavy-handed (they know a skill/mechanic is overpowered), but buffing tends to be done very cautiously (because even a small buff may result in an interaction the devs didn’t foresee being made significantly more powerful, thus resulting in another overpowered build).

So we usually get big nerfs with small, incremental buffs. This isn’t an issue when we get frequent updates with multiple little buffs, but considering EHG’s cadence in their Last Epoch updates, well, by the time stuff is made noticiably more powerful we may have died of old age.

To make it worse, often players don’t understand this. Since many players like feeling powerful, they tend to gravitate towards overpowered skills and avoid the underpowered ones. Thus, when things that are too powerful are nerfed and skills that are too weak are buffed, some players only see that “OMG my favourite skill was nerfed and they buffed some stuff that nobody uses, OH NOES!!!111!!!shiftoneoneone!111111!!!”.

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It is wrong tho. By February 2024, LE made over $30,000,000 USD just on sales of the game itself, not including micro-transactions. The game is still being actively developed, with a significant road map, plans to generate new content for up to 10 years, and the online servers are still online. Yes, the concurrent player count is lower than some other games. But that’s a crappy metric to use for a mostly single-player game.

‘Dead game’ used to mean something. Now, it is a phrase with little to no value when applied to ARPGs.

I wouldn’t consider a game dead until the servers shut down and the development stops.

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30mil is impressive, no questions there, but this is a live service game. EGH employs around a 100 people? Those 30mil will burn in less than 2-3 years if they don’t turn this around.
Don’t take me the wrong way, I want this game to succeed, but with current player numbers it’s looking grim :frowning:

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Thanks for that astute analysis. You should email EHG to share your experience of a multimillions company financial statement and management. Maybe they forgot about that money thing and the perennity of their game / jobs / company / passion ? They really should go check steamcharts more often and compare their current numbers. They need players RIGHT NOW to buy the 3 or 4 (quite meh) cosmetics. I’m sure if people buy more of that very cute shark costume in the next few weeks, that will SAVE the company of that oh so grim future.

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See my reply to DJ after he pointed this out like 3 posts above yours.

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I saw that after i made the reply

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PoE survived just fine for over 2-3 years with 10k or less players. And the only competition they had at that point was a flailing D3. Things could be looking better, but they’re far from grim.
This is no different from the (literally) thousands of posts over the years on how PoE is dead. Those existed from before launch, while they were still in beta, all the way to this year, when PoE is more popular than it ever was before. Nor is it exclusive to PoE/LE or even ARPGs. Any seasonal game has a lot of “game is dead” posts. Most are wrong, although by sheer numbers some are correct.

So first, let’s address the obvious: yes, this year could have gone a lot better for LE. They had a solid launch due to the hype (which I believe ended up being more harmful than beneficial, but that’s another story), despite some issues with servers at launch, which they fixed since.
And they’ve had a spotty track record for launching things on time, which led to players losing some interest. They did a pretty good job with 1.1, but it wasn’t enough to hold players due to a somewhat limited endgame.
And then they decided to address that and delay the next release for a lot of months to try and address this.
EHG is still new at this and they’re learning a lot as they go along, especially trying to manage their work methods to be able to release regularly, which will be important in the long run.

All of this together mean that players have lost interest for the time being. And due to the nature of seasonal games, that means that those players won’t return until something new is released. Unlike single-player games like GD, where you pop in every now, players don’t usually pop in on seasonal games until something new is released.
Because in games like GD you already expect everything to be the same and just want to revisit it, whereas the expectation of seasonal games is that you’ll come back when there’s new stuff.

Now, with that out of the way, EHG will have an engine upgrade coming soon (was expected to already be here, actually, but they detected a (presumably) important bug with it so they delayed it to after the holidays.
And they’re working on a huge overhaul of their endgame system, which is one of the most criticized points for player retention so far.

So, assuming they do a fairly good job of it, which I expect they will, and assuming they then manage to get the hang of new releases regularly, which I also expect they will, we should start seeing a player count increase. It will depend heavily on the timing of the releases vs the timing of the releases of the competition, but that works both ways.

Long story short, yes, they can still screw this up and LE could be dead in 2-3 years. But it’s not likely to happen given what we’ve seen so far from them. I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to compete with PoE1/PoE2, but I believe it’s quite reasonable to expect that they’ll have a long future ahead.
Especially because most players aren’t exclusive. Players will hop around from game to game depending on launch dates.

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What was their burn rate at that point though?