Yeah, we can analyse their decisions without having been in the room (or discord chat) but not having actual data does make it hard to opine on,especially as an accountant. That said, one can come up with reasonable expectations as an accountant.
Though tax only gets paid on profit and I’d expect the majority of that to be recognised in the US (which doesn’t have even close to a 50% corporation tax rate) but I’d be curious to see how they’re dealing with the international sales given they have employees in a lot of different jurisdictions which would probably give them a “presence” for tax purposes. They may “just” be transfer pricing the net profit over to the US to be taxed but I’m not a tax accountant (though I could ask our tax guys who sit a few desks over, but the main one talks soooooo much ).
By definition of the word I’m with you on this topic buuuuuuuut… there was no meaningfull buff for my taste that made me say “Uhhhh skill X got a buff now the skill is remotly intresting!”. All we got were some small scale baindaid number increases that do so little they could kept to their nerfs only.
I don’t know how many times the community told EHG to take their time and release a finished and polished product because there are no second first impressions. I’m sure they had good reasons to publish the game like it was but in the long run I guess it hurt the game more then it actualy helped and on piece of this puzzle is balancing and their lackluster time needed to crank arround some numbers.
I’m sure coming patches will spice things up and we will see some buffs but it’s most likely to little to late and most likely only the diehard fans will be there in season 2 unless the timing is epic and there is nothing else to do.
In my book that’s a case of “Tell me you can’t balance without telling me you can’t balance.”. I realy want LE to be good but I start to simply lose all hope. Didn’t Mike say if ppl do 4 didgit corruption they messed up?
I don’t agree with this. 1.0 buffed some paladin stuff, especially Healing Hands, 1.1 buffed Shield Bash and Summon Raptor which became viable (and even strong) options, to mention just a few.
There was also a huge buff to sorc. So much so that it will probably get nerfed next patch.
You might say that your preferred skill/class didn’t get it, but you can’t say that they only applied band-aids when you have one-shot skills that weren’t viable before it.
Balance is extremely hard to get right. No ARPG so far managed it properly without massive changes over a long period of time.
PoE needed more than 5 years to get a handle on it. And even now they often release something that is utterly broken and needs to be nerfed immediately.
D2 never got it right. They fiddled around a lot with it, but Hammerdin was always top build.
D3/D4 never got it right. They just buff an underpowered class to a point where it’s not overpowered and then either nerf it or buff the next in line to take its place.
Pretty much no game of this nature (including regular RPGs) is ever balanced without a lot of changes. This is because there are way too many combinations you can do that will break the game. Even Starcraft, which is lauded for its excellent balance only got there after a few patches and an expansion, even though it has a lot less variance than an ARPG does.
In my book that’s a case of “Balance is extremely hard (not to say impossible) to get right on your first try”. Which is why no other game in the genre or adjancent genres ever achieved it.
I’m pretty confident that they’ll eventually get it right. Somewhere between 2-5 years from now. Because it’s unrealistic to expect it sooner. It will get better over time (like 1.1 had better balance already than 1.0), but it will be a long time until we get a reasonable balance in the game.
So yeah, Mike did say that. And they will still mess up a lot more in the next patches. Because it’s one of the hardest things to do in a game like this.
Almost no game is balanced in a good way outside of games that mirror everything like shooter games where both sides can have the same stuff and it comes down to skill. Then againa lot of games are much closer then what we have with LE. Sure D4 just got a new class that was a clusterfuck when it came to balancing but all other classes were the closest the have ever been. I’m not for homogenization but there are skills missing, there are bugs there are pretty useless bases and uniques ingame and whatnot.
Well I take a look how many high performing raptor builds there are and how far they pushed into corruption. I know 1 person who played shield bash that turned out to be a tured sooner then later. A lot of Sorc stuff came from the former introduction of the runemaster. It’s a bit like saying Rogue was so good at patch whatever when it freshly introduced stuff for Rogues.
To me it was a bad descission to publish the game unfinished because blancing is nothing they can concentrate on when they need to patch up everything else about the game because it’s bugged or simply not developed to be published. Sure only a certain ammount of people can work on one task and they do multiple tasks at once but i guess balancing is not high on their “to do” list.
Most of these games aren’t balanced either. You usually always have some combination/class that is stronger and one no one uses because it’s much weaker. Only with time can they all balance out.
Is it? Sorc has been overperforming this last season by a lot. So they nerfed it mid-season. Season 5 was dominated by barbs.
Looks to me they’re just doing the exact same thing they did with D3. They buff up one of the underperforming builds in such a way that it becomes overpowered. Sometimes they’ll nerf the top overperforming build, but mostly they just ramp up the numbers over and over so that the previous underperforming build is now the top dog.
Which is how you got to the ridiculous damage numbers D3 had. And I don’t see any indication of D4 being any different.
Lots of people in this forum have reached 900+ corruption with Shield Bash. They even killed Aby with it. And there were a lot of Shield Bash builds in the arena as well.
And this is a skill that probably couldn’t handle 100c before 1.1.
Not really. Sorc wasn’t that great in 1.0. In fact, it was quite often underwhelming and you would be better off using Runemaster for the same skills. It was the changes in 1.1, with Archmage top among the offenders, that made Sorc so brutally OP.
That I can agree with. But I feel like they felt they had to release it sooner. Maybe because of financial reasons, maybe because of market shifts, I don’t know the reason.
It definitely would have been better to launch it in a better state. The problem is that there was too much to add/fix and they would take years (and probably go bankrupt) if they waited until it was all implemented to launch.
That is not the sense I get from everything they’ve done so far. Not in the least. As I mentioned, in every major patch there have been many buffs to previous underperforming stuff. Even Acid Flask, which was a noob trap for years, is now a viable skill.
Balance in 1.1 was much MUCH better compared to 1.0. I expect 1.2 will further improve it. And in a couple of years, it might be just fine. Or it might take a little longer.
As I said before, balance is one of the hardest things to achieve in a game of this nature. Most games take years to achieve it and some give up and never do.
You can be a sarcastic redditor all you want, but we’ve just seen Sony (a massive company fyi) close Firewalk Studios because of the abyssmal failure of Concord. Turns out some anons really do know their stuff better than multi-billion international corpos.
Yeah, that to a degree as well, definitely! With the falconer raising the bar high.
It’s more about long-standing unfinished/half-finished or left behind classes not getting the respective effort put in to bring them up to par with others which is a bit of an issue.
For a whole grand of a month.
And then since it’s a SP game and not in need of non-stop updates it’ll fall behind again. A live-service game which does overall as well as a SP game is a failed game because of the business model.
Luckily we don’t see that generally, Grim Dawn is a grand exception on the market and LE is doing ‘ok-ish’ at least. Not even remotely ‘well’ but likely good enough to sustain them for a while.
Not all too long though in the grand scheme of things with their numbers.
Based on what metric?
It’s not the most complex.
It’s not the most malleable.
It’s high in RNG and with a distinct end-point per item.
I don’t see how it could ever be considered ‘the best’ in that state. It’s ‘ok’ at best though
Exactly that. They either need to ramp up their processes or they’ll fail long-term. Fine for a while, baaaaad state currently.
This statement is factually wrong. We can factually say if a game is dead when comparing High vs Low points. If Last Epoch was to triple it’s “current” players it would still be dead.
When you have nearly 300k players and are down at 1k that is factually, statistically a dead game.
Last Epoch is a great ARPG that no one is playing. It died for a lot of reasons the main culprit was lack of fast development of content and adjusting to feedback after a rough launch due to stability.
They had an abymal new cycle launch with only 70k players which is bad it didn’t bring back players. Yes players move on in the ARPG genre but they should come back which the majority of player DIDN’T do with Last Epoch. They quit for good and the numbers show that clearly and factually.
I hope the best for Last Epoch and it’s Dev team but they need to do MAJOR changes and MAJOR new content that ARPG players can get excited about and want to come back.
Again 1k people playing right now is a dead game, it’s undeniable and it happened due to a lot of reasons. Last Epoch needs a 200k+ cycle start and it really should be maintaining 30-40k players at the lowest point till the next cycle. (This would be an active game)
I do love Last Epoch it scratches an itch I love in ARPGs but people aren’t playing because it’s dead, there is no new content or reasons to play. I hope some day to play Last Epoch again and there is a reason to play.
ARPG players are looking for an ACTIVE game and Last Epoch isn’t it so they don’t bother. Once a game dies it’s tough to turn around. I hope EHG can turn this around. Until then people are playing other games.
Any Video Game with less than 1,000 players on a consistent bases is considered “Dead”
However a game that has less than 1,000 players but still receives updates and new content added to the game. it is considered not dead.
Simply put – a dead game in 2025 is an online multiplayer title that has lost its development support and has too tiny of a player base to function.
More specifically, games with fewer than 500 MAU (monthly active users) that haven‘t received updates in over 6 months are considered commercially dead by publishers. They cost more in server fees than they make back.
So in other words – dead games are no longer financially viable nor fun to play.
I could keep going, but considering that
A) the devs are still actively in development of the game.
B) players are still actively playing the game and chatting together in global chat (even partnering up with Randoms)
And C) no one is complaining about not being able to find anyone online when they are
It’s factually not a dead game. ffs, you people act like a game needs 100 million active players or it’s dead. 1000 active players is still a healthy player base, it’s just not a groundbreaking amount of players.
Or it could be a seasonal title which has had no new content since late July when it already struggles with a relative dearth of content and there are other, much larger titles, with much more content. And if we’re going to compare apples with apples from steam charts, LE is at ~2k an hour ago (mid week before the US wakes up) with a December average of 1.8k down from a March peak average of ~81k.
Yup, that was why the responded to feedback & switched what was being developed for 1.2 hance the delay.
Like PoE with it’s 3.25 peak of 76k dropping to 29k & 12k in subsequent months. Gotcha. I guess PoE’s never been an active game evaaaaaar by that metric.
I listed the definition of a Dead game it’s comparing High vs Low points. When you go consistently down over time the game is dying and is dead if there is an extreme variation compared to it’s highest point.
When a game had almost 300k players and is at 1k that is a dead game. If there was 5k player it still would be a dead game.
When a game has a peak of 10k players and is at 1k players it’s not a dead game it isn’t performing well but the High vs Low isn’t that huge and sustaining 1k from a 10k peak is fine.
This is how that works.
A dead/dying game describes a game that had SIGNIFICANT drop off of players from it’s All time high. That is literally what a dead game is. You can take a massive game like World of Warcraft that has millions of players and when it loses millions of players people say the game is dying despite having a large player base.
A dead game or dying game is about HOW MANY PLAYERS LEFT. Not how many it currently has. This is why WoW and many games stopped reporting numbers because players don’t want to start playing a game that is dying. They want to play a game that is growing and has the perception that it is growing.
Facts.
I don’t want LE to be a dead game but this isn’t about what I want or opinions. It’s about the facts and numbers don’t lie. I really hope that EHG can bring back the players so LE isn’t dead anymore. Until then as the numbers say…people are playing other games.
I want to add I’m in EHG’s corner but they got a huge battle to regain players because ARPG players view LE as a dead game so they won’t try it. I do love LE and it’s a shame it’s dead and it’s one of the reasons I’m not playing it. I’ll wait till it gets revived and more players/content. The new season can’t start soon enough and Seasons need to be every 3 months.
Sorry not going to be gaslighted when we have clear facts. If you can’t acknowledge that LE is dead then how do you fix LE? People ignoring facts are part of the problem and why LE isn’t being played.
He won’t see this because he blocks people that disagree with him, but if that were true, then PoE1 is a dead game, even though each new season has broken previous records. All because it ends their seasons with around 10k players from a peak of 250k.
So would any seasonal game be dead because of the same numbers you see in any game that has this model.
But you shouldn’t disagree with him, otherwise he’ll block you as well.
What is the difference between a game dying and already dead?
I mean, I’m past 25y old, so biologically speaking I’m dying, yet still very much not dead. Assuming analogies still have to make sense in whatever land you’re from, that means there is a difference, so what is it?
LE is being played right now by atleast 1 living being, so that means it isn’t dead at all, right? Just facts, can’t ignore those!!
I love how I list sources for my definitions, and he just says “no, because I have a different definition that I made up!”
It’s like arguing with your friend in grade school “I’m shooting my ultra mega blaster cannon”, “I block it with my hyper omega shield of destruction!”, “you can’t block my ultra mega blaster cannon with your hyper omega shield of destruction because my ultra mega blaster cannon has hyper omega shield of destruction destroying particles!”
It’s funny you say that because even if they did “fix a dead game” it would still be dead by his definition unless it peaked over the highest point of all time, and as soon as it drops below that by a “significant” (no clear guidance on when it becomes significant) it’s dead again.
Game peaks at 1 million players, it’s “dead” by ABomb’s definition by 500,000 active players.
I don’t know about you, but if I had to take a 90% drop in pay, I’d call that pretty bloody significant. Personally I’d call a 40% drop significant but maybe that’s just me being a bit more numerically aware/astute.
Funny, that sounds more like perception than facts.
Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that. Probably because I’m too busy trying to gaslight him.
Saying “Facts” and “This is how it works” doesn’t make you right. The 300k initial peak can be explained by a combination of factors that will probably never happen again.
Huge Marketing campaign for 1.0
The novelty effect
Some players tried the game and realised it was not their cup of tea
A good release timing
Wrong I’ve explained it. LE could have 3k players and it still by definition would be dead.
If you are arguing these facts you aren’t helping LE. You in fact are part of the problem.
Important steps to SAVING Last Epoch
1 - Acknowledge LE is dead and want to correct the problem
2 - Create thrilling new content, marketing to bring back 300k players
3 - RETAIN a healthy % of those players
4 - Launch another Season growing the LE player base to new All time highs.
I want Last Epoch to be revived and hopefully some day flourish. If you want it too stop gashlighting and acknowledge a lot of work has to be done to bring back 99% of the players that quit.
That’s all that can be said. Now time to play some PoE 2 which is not a dead game while waiting for EHG to fix this problem and hopefully pull off these steps I laid out.
I’m not a tax accountant (though I could ask our tax guys who sit a few desks over, but the main one talks soooooo much 
).
