I actually didn’t realize this was the case. Don’t I feel foolish. They did promise offline play also, so I didn’t think cycles / seasons were going to be the core content feature. The pre-release builds didn’t come off that way either. Had I realized that, I probably wouldn’t have supported this game in the first place.
Yup, if you go to the kickstarter & scroll most of the way down they talk about cycles. It’s there along with MP & trading and all the other stuff that wasn’t there during early access/beta/alpha…
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99.999% of players are not competing on leaderboards. Most people arent hitting 1k waves on arenas. Most people just stopped playing cause they delayed their updates. It’s a lot less complicated than you’re thinking. Like you said, most players are not doing HCSSF.
You are just only viewing the game through your very narrow lens of extremely high tier play with statistically abnormal number of hours played. LE is much less focused on catering to streamers and people who are going to play 3k hours per league/season, and is very publicly focused on creating a base of content that to fill the game and be accessible to as many players as possible (with Aberroth being the exception, abberoth is not intended to be attainable by all casual builds).
As for high end build nerfs, you can read their detailed posts explaining why those were done. They were generally all bugs. And if there is one or 2 overperforming builds, all the competitive players complain that there is no reason to play any other builds, which is bad for build diversity and trade economy. Nerfs to overperforming builds are necessary to sustain interest in competitive play and they also don’t do it mid season so it’s already a non-issue for leaderboards or private events.
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I unironically believe this game is still in EA and the season we had is just a test. It has great potential and I think they need another year XD.
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To the OP: nerfing endgame has next-to-nothing to do with player acquisition.
LE needs to acquire new players, and at a significant rate.
This probably won’t happen until the next Cycle/Season, and even then it’ll only happen if they run a successful marketing hype cycle.
Where was this made publicly because if so they made a terrible product when average Joe comes to mind
I don’t know how many times I said this about the game. At the end of they day I think they needed money to move on, what is understandable, but that was not a very good thing to do given the state of the game.
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Any time anybody asks about having new content only be in the new season economy the devs say that there isn’t enough content to do PoE style releases where standard doesn’t get the content til later. I’m not gonna bother finding the quotes for you cause there’s dozens if you read any forum posts or watch any dev streams.
As for lacking content, yeah, pretty much everyone agrees. Your negativity doesn’t fix or solve anything though. They have an updated roadmap and while I don’t necessarily expect them to adhere to the dates they announced, I have other game to play until they eventually add new stuff. It’s a game. You’ll be fine.
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At the moment, yes. After they’ve finished doing the core content (I want to say that might be around 1.4 but I could just be pulling that from my arse) they’ve said the whole “all content goes to both” thing may change.
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There is still so much missing in game listed on the Kickstarter
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Yeah, some of them were dropped & won’t be added (Lost Memories, Gates of Memoriam & Epoch’s Call), so as far as I’m aware, only PvP has yet to be added.
I agree with OP, EHG does use the ‘easy’ method of nerfing Skills/Nodes/Builds/Synergies that don’t really need it since they are so gear-dependent. Totally agree, they should focus on the bad Skills/Nodes and be buffing those to make them competitive. One of the early draws to this game was that pretty much any Mastery could do well, that has changed over the years.
That being said, this is the core of an amazing game. Crafting, Progression, Loot, Bosses, Maps/Echos, mix of casual and endgame content, CoF and MG factions, multiplayer resonances. All great stuff for being the ‘new guys’ in ARPG’s. I hope there is more of a marketing push for this game around Season 2 to bring in/back more players. PoE2 is garbage at this point (still months to go for EA though).
So back to the original point, let’s hope the nerfing turns into buffing some of the weaker skills again. Great game, not-so-great math. There are some fun classes/masteries, just not viable in current state. I’m hopeful!
You know, even if you don’t agree with the premise the details inside a post are nonetheless valuable. And the points brought up are viable ones.
And the game is doing really bad after all. Partially because of the extended time between cycles and partially because the expected amount of content for the environment they’ve placed themselves in is just not upheld properly.
People can complain as much as they want and talk it up… but that’s just the reality of competition on the market. Either you shine… or you whine.
I dunno… gameplay-wise the quality of Torchlight Infinite is on roughly the same level as Last Epoch, but it’s sub-par in UI and easing new players in. PoE 1 is a monolith, PoE 2 is expected to provide massive changes before their actual release.
Those alone are in the way of Last Epoch… we don’t need to talk about Diablo 4, that won’t gather a massive amount of players unless Blizzard gets the stick out of their ass and provides immense content updates rather then the jokes they give out and praise to the high heavens for no apparent reason while trying to position their expositions in a way as if they’re actively competing with poE 1 and PoE 2… while failing miserably for obvious reasons.
It never was. They game was designed with MP in mind, even offline characters weren’t actually ‘offline’ but saved on the server. Only in 1.0 the ‘true’ offline got implemented. The focus is and always was on the MP live-service experience.
They actively created it that way… in beta… without the ‘minority’ talking them into it.
So no.
That I agree with.
You’re 100% right with that piece there.
You’re forgetting to achieve the end-goal of creating a baseline we also need underperforming builds to be buffed.
We see little of that though, mostly the upper areas being cut to avoid power-creep, not the upheaval of sub-par combinations to ensure variety.
True that many of them fell under the category of ‘broken and OP’ but there’s also the issue that several of those situations became a situation because of mistakes from the devs without wanting to intervene despite it being glaring and outright bugs.
Which are both bad thing to happen. Both sides need to be ‘middling’ changes. Less caution with the buffing… if something becomes strong, fine! Worst case backpedal lightly to get into an acceptable range.
And nerfing also needs to be handled the same way. Leave it strong and do it again if needed.
This way people with OP builds have a buffer to adjust and underowered builds can shortly feel powerful before being reigned in. See it as a timeframe to allow people with those respective builds to adjust and adapt rather then being thrown down the gutter.
That would ease it substantially I think.
How much of that money has been given to investors? How much of that has been handed out in salary? How much in upgrades of tech? Upkeep? Investments? How much is left?
You’re severely underestimating taxes as well. Roadmaps mean crap if they’re not upheld in the expected timeframe for the majority of customers and just because something is ‘still there’ doesn’t mean it’s ‘flourishing’.
But you’re right that the game isn’t ‘dead’. But it’s also not ‘doing well’.
And if you don’t count a game as ‘dead’ before the servers shut down then that’s your own problem. Games die vastly before servers are shut down for a myriad of reasons, you’re solely limiting your own perspective with that thought process, that’s on you, not others.
Thanks for that arbitrary post showcasing a lack of knowledge of how a company is run and what is needed.
EHG has 100 people, if we take a 2000 payout per month per person (unlikely, it’s higher) then that alone costs 200k per month, which relates to 2,4 million a year. Then given steam already takes 30% of sales up-front we can already remove 9 million, hence 21 million. Then we need taxes, which often relate to around 50% of profit for the respective year in several countries, let’s say 30% to be on the safer side (it’s more likely). Hence another 9 million gone, which results in 12 million left.
So without upkeep, investments and any auxiliary costs we’re solely talking about 5 years of upkeep here best-case.
2-3 years is a very viable expectation at their size without taking microtransactions into account.
Oh… and passion means jack all if you’re broke and can’t keep the ship afloat, people got to feed themselves and their families. You can’t create something on wishes and dreams.
PoE also likely makes a magnitude more given their business model focuses on MTX bundle sales primarily, which repeat every 3-4 months, that focus is by far lower with LE, which makes it so worrying long-term.
PoE was never even remotely ‘dead’. It also deed between ‘mediocre’ and ‘fantastic’, the longer it ran the more it went into a great direction financially. With LE we - yet - can’t see this trend though, we might be able to see it starting 1.2 as we have more markers to discern if that’s the case… or if it’s actually doing badly.
Which is part of the issue. Reliability is a bit thing with cyclic content.
Always think as a pessimist to not be disappointed. Speak like a realist and wish like a positive person.
Far less then LE at that time since their company was substantially smaller. Which is the worrying bit.
EHG is big by now… but it doesn’t showcase - currently - the output towards the customer of being at that size.
No matter if there’s an engine update or not, or big changes upcoming or not… the customer can’t see it yet, hence unless that ‘hits’ when it’s the time it’ll provide no upside for them in the meanwhile. And if it is unstable or badly balanced for some reason for a too long time it’s a dangerous situation.
They abolished that in favor of bringing out PoE 2. It was a gamble for them and it paid dividents back.
So yes, they didn’t uphold their Standard… with very early mentioning that it will be this way, telling the reasons in decent terms (could’ve been better but whenever is that not the case? The whole premise is that it’s the baseline of EHG for them to not do that properly given the topic 
) and then went through with their plans.
So no, they didn’t ‘break their plans’ but instead went reliably through with them. The biggest pushback for a league was a month for GGG before that as much as I know, which in the grand scheme of things over the many years they’ve been active since release (not counting pre-release) is what the customer base expects after all.
Yes, that’s a fairly sad state I’m disgruntled about as well. They got 20 construction sites ongoing at once rather then focusing on finishing one properly as a focus.
For now, but the thunderstorms are at the horizon already. We don’t know if it’ll clear up or not.
In this sector? It absolutely is. It’s seeing a non-tech company struggling for 30+ years in comparison, that’s how fast-paced the gaming environment is after all.
The original quote was that as long as they can gather a solid 5k playerbase they can keep the game going basically endlessly. With an attendum that 15k players is massive profit, yeah.
Nowadays obviously more.
That’s… I don’t know where you get that from.
PoE 1 doesn’t have that.
Torchlight Infinite doesn’t have that.
PoE 2 has recovering life bars… with a substantial phase-change telling the player ‘shit hits the fan’, hence it’s a very meaningful thing.
Lost Ark has the multiple health bars, which is an asian creation… a good one actually as it showcases a swiftly moving bar which is nice for our brain… but doesn’t randomly change.
Last Epoch? every 33% an arbitrary massive shield comes up. No phase change that’s substantial, no nothing. That feels bad. It’s not the system itself which is an issue it’s how badly it is implemented.
Also quite wrong, PoE 1 and PoE 2 offer more substantial changes, from causing secondary skills to be created with their usage to remote usage through traps or totems over to changing the functionality completely like skeletons which don’t act as a horde but instead explode themselves or a healing minion which can be adjusted to cause your skills to make hefty damage instead. Which is the polar opposite of the initial functionality.
Not to speak of the myriad of ‘RPGs’ otherwise doing a vastly better job in that singular regard… LE does a ‘decent’ job, but what you’re describing is in no way a realistic look on it.
Dunno, I heavily agree with the initial statement there. Don’t see where you see the ‘nonsense’.
Seems more like you just don’t understand the approach of thought there rather then it being ‘nonsense’.
Yes, the new system heavily focuses on having high DPS and low DPS builds get simply screwed over since the have to wait for a fairly substantial amount of time. Which goes counter to what DR was supposed to do, hence hindering high DPS players in a very substantial way (failed with burst damage though) while allowing low dps players to experience the fight in a normal intended way.
It isn’t though?
Accessibility doesn’t mean ‘shallow content’, it means people can easily get into it and do the stuff available.
Obviously it’s ‘accessible’ if it’s shallow… which - sadly - currently is the case, but that’s not the only way to achieve it, and actually shouldn’t be the primary way to achieve it.
If we go by providing a proper experience for a large portion of people we need to take into consideration those which will stop after finishing the campaign (hence a solid experience through and through there… not the case) as well as those which will put excessive amounts of hours into the game since they’re always your core audience. The game ‘speaks to them’ so much that they want to experience more. What better thing do you get as a dev? If they become disgruntled though… that’s a baaaad sign. To date only D3 - because of the power of their franchise name - has managed to uphold shallow content with returning playerbase reliably despite going that route. Otherwise you don’t see it existing, no matter the genre. All long-term living games have some form of mechanical- or content depth-which keeps a substantial amount of people in them.
With retention though. EHG acquired a massive amount of new players with 1.0 but lost them nearly completely.
That’s a problem.
You’re the second person to comment before finishing the thread.
To which I replied:
No, the offline characters were always saved on your pc.
This isn’t true, though. All major updates since 1.0 saw some buffing of underperforming skills/classes. It just isn’t enough because warlock/falconer, along with the implementation of a pinnacle boss, increased the baseline further than pre 1.0, so we have a lot of underperforming classes.
This means it takes a longer time to get them all up to the same baseline, but they have slowly been doing that all the time and we’ll have more coming in 1.2.
When your balance is all over the place, much like PoE1 was, or even D2, it takes some time to get them reasonably balanced. But there hasn’t been any major patch yet in LE that hasn’t buffed some underperforming stuff.
Pretty much everything that was nerfed so far (that wasn’t a bug) has still remained as overperforming builds. Warlock and Falconer are still among the strongest classes. Even bolts paladin did fine with the ward nerf. They just don’t do 5k corruption anymore, but they still do 1k+.
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You know what’s even crazier? Grim Dawn has more active players than even Path of Exile.
So, clearly, going along this logic; Path of Exile is also dead game.
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Ahh, this definitely falls into the “statistics don’t lie but liars use statistics” bucket. Yes, at the moment, GD has more active players than PoE. Bug PoE’s average for the last 30 days and December are a fair bit higher. GD player numbers appears to be slowly growing while PoE is getting towards the end of it’s quarterly cycle. GD’ player numbers this year have been in the 1-3k range while PoE’s fluctuate between 8k & 80k depending on where it is in the season & how well the season is doing.
So while I agree with the point you are making, how you’re making it feels a bit disingenuous.
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Disingenuous? I’m simply taking the metric at hand as the post I replied to is doing.
Grim Dawn is statistically doing better, and will continue to do better going along this line of thinking.
Does this mean anything, at all, in any grand scheme? Absolutely not.
Last Epoch isn’t dead, isn’t dying, and won’t die until EHG decides to shutter the game, if at all. That’s the only metric that matters, period.
Clearly not as many people play Last Epoch for whatever reason but the fact of the matter is there is a player base here and as long as one remains and EHG continues to stay afloat, who gives a shit?
If you dislike the game and EHG isn’t catering to you then maybe it’s time to move on to a game that suits you better? Not you in particular Llama, just a general statement.
LE has the best crafting system of an ARPG and I’ll take it over whatever has GGG sticking their heads up their asses and refusing to add anything decent in regards to crafting as not everyone’s a trade lover. 
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LE is not performing well atm because of one big reason: They released a game that was supposed to have cycles/seasons with fresh content every 3 or 4 months. But there were no cycles. The economy reset wasn’t what I’d call a cycle. So the real 2nd season of LE will come whopping 14 months after the release of 1.0.
You can’t sustain a high player number of a live service game without live service.
I’m certain that with the new cycle we will see a lot of returning players. That’s the nature of these kind of games.
A friend of mine is streaming ARPGs. Last few weeks he was streaming PoE2. But after we talked about the upcoming LE update he threw in a LE stream. He has received very positive feedback from his viewers (around 300). People are interested in LE and are waiting for new content to jump back in.
While LE has not the production quality if PoE2 or D4, it has a lot of unique features. Like faction systems, highly customisable skills, the best crafting system of all ARPGs.
LE has its place in this genre and I still prefer it a lot over D4.
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In your frenzy to reply and « um, actually » everyone about everything, you seem to have completely missed the point of my post.
I was making fun of posts by armchair accountants with very limited informations and no apparent experience « analyzing » the business decisions of a multimillionaire company. Nothing more. My point was that it’s a stupid waste of time to extrapolate business decisions of that magnitude without knowledge, experience and without being part of their discussions.
And here you are, digging up that irrelevant 2-weeks-old sarcastic clownerie just to make some napkin finance, rounding up or down « a few millions of dollars ».That’s quite the irony.
Edit :
And where did I said that ? You have a peculiar talent to pick a single word out of context and make it an ‘argument’. All I said about passion was : “Maybe they forgot about that money thing and the perennity of their game / jobs / company / passion ?”. I was suggesting , by using sarcasm, that this game matters to people who are working on it, and they are doing the best they can to give it perennity. And I was implying that maybe we should trust them a little bit, instead of babbling 2k words pseudo-essay about business decisions with very limited informations.
But for some reason, you picked the word Passion and now saying that “You can’t create something on wishes and dreams.”
Sure, buddy.
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