That will depend on what EHG does to market the new season, but otherwise you could say the same thing about pretty much any game.
Blizzard launches a campfire chat to talk about the new stuff and then releases stuff. Which is then echoed out through content creators and media. Most new players will come because of the content creators. Is that an effort from Blizzard to pull players in?
GGG does pretty much the same thing. A trailer for the new league, followed by extensive patch notes, both of which get echoed by content creators. Most new players will come because of the content creators. Is that an effort from GGG to pull players in?
Content creators (from the genre) will all join in Season 2, even if EHG does nothing. How long they remain will depend on the quality of the content and the timing of other releases.
As I mentioned before, pretty much all content creators have a positive opinion of LE, even if it’s not in a state yet to engage for too long. So a new release will have them trying out the game and seeing what changed.
We haven’t. But Mike has talked about it several times (without spoilers). And we don’t really have a reason to doubt Mike when he says that. So we can really expect big changes to the monolith system and endgame in general. Whether they will please everyone or will be enough to retain people for long is what remains to be seen.
But the fact that they listened to the community and tried to address it via big changes isn’t really a guess. It’s part of their various channels of communication.
Obviously, that is the same for any game. If GGG started releasing leagues again like Bestiary or Blight, they will fall off as well. Any live service game’s health depends on the quality of its constant releases. And that counts both for attracting new players as well as for loosing them.
But due to the nature of the genre and its playerbase, that also means that a single bad release doesn’t immediately doom it, just like a single great release doesn’t save it.
They shouldn’t follow them blindly, but they should listen to it. Which is what EHG does. GGG as well, to a certain extent (they did have to be forced by the community to add Harvest back in, after all).
Is it? Fun is a completely subjective term that means something totally different for me than it does for you. Some people find arena a lot of fun. I find it excruciatingly boring. Same for delve in PoE.
After all, you have a lot of people that find D4 fun.
Not to mention that you have to make choices to reduce fun in favour of game balance, for example.
It’s not as clear cut as “This option is obviously more fun, let’s put it in the game”.
They are accurate, though. You have a lot of players that pick up a game and never finish it. Many just play it for a few hours, if that much. There is a sizeable portion of players that buy a game, try it under 2h and then refund it unless they’re really enjoying it.
What this means in practice is that launch numbers are inflated by these players. But after the initial launch (or if there’s an expansion, the season after that), numbers should be more stable since they are comprised mostly of returning players.
That should be pretty certain. PoE1 is pulling 200-250k players in the last leagues.
That should also be pretty certain. TLI is pulling 20k at peak.
How many we will actually get back will depend on the hype for the new seaon, how EHG markets it (if at all) and the timing of the release compared to PoE1/PoE2/D4 releases.
I don’t think it will be make or break (meaning that if it’s not all it should be the game won’t die right away), but it is very important. There was a huge break for it in order to fix some of the biggest issues, so players expect a lot from it.
If it does well, it will likely send LE in an upward trend. And if they keep doing a good job that trend should continue.
However, if it does bad, even if the game won’t die right away, it will certainly require a lot more effort to pull back up.
Funnily enough, I don’t mind the MF situation at all. It’s pretty much like it was in D2: you get a character for MF and have other characters that you equip with the gear you got from the MF one. But I can understand that not everyone enjoys that.
Some of the stuff that was dropped was dropped still in EA and was clearly communicated with the community. As for the incomplete stuff, it’s just incomplete. It’s not abandoned. They will keep working on it until it’s finished.
Balance especially is very hard to achieve. You can easily see this in PoE2 where, despite over 10 years of experience and pretty much working on the game for 5 years now, balance is all over the place.
Even in early acts the balance isn’t great. You have monk and warrior struggling with their early choices while ranger and sorc do fine. So much so that there’s already a trend of “Get a bow and level with lightning arrow until you get your build online” for most classes.
But I expect that during this year of EA they will keep working on it until it’s tighter. Same as LE.
I think that’s a bit harsh. I don’t think it’s because they got bad feedback. That already existed in EA and they kept communicating. Rather, it’s because the forum suddenly became extremely toxic, with insults and death threats.
Personally, I would probably do the same thing. “This game is in a terrible state and I don’t find monoliths fun” is something useful you can interact with, but “This game sux, f*** you, you should all be homeless” isn’t.
CTs are already testing new stuff. So they know plenty of what’s coming next. They are very aware whether it’s enough or not. More so when they get more of the final stuff.
Aaron, for example, is very excited about the new stuff, although we all know that Aaron is an assumed fan. And recently there was a post made by a CT by mistake in the general forums where he was kinda underwhelmed.
Point is, CTs are aware of what’s coming since they’re trying it out, so they can make a judgement on whether it’s good enough or not.
Didn’t you frequent the forums after launch? You had dozens of new posts everyday from lots of new people. The first month after launch was anything but an echo chamber.
The feedback they reacted to was “Endgame is repetitive and not engaging/varied enough”. I think we can agree that this is something almost everyone will agree on, whether you like LE or not.
I think this is just because many people enjoy the atlas tree. Like I said before in this post, fun is very relative. There are many people that enjoy PoE1’s crafting system. I hate it. There are many people that enjoy LE’s crafting system. I tolerate it. This is mostly because I don’t like crafting in games. At all.
However, you have many people that love it and will spend an entire league in PoE just crafting.
So it doesn’t surprise me if some people do enjoy the atlas tree.
I do find it more baffling that so many people like the passive tree when most content creators keep saying things like “I think this is the best option but without path of building, we can’t really know”. If you have over 10 years of experience with a similar system and you still need an external tool to validate your choices, that doesn’t look like a good system to me.
Obviously. But pretty much every choice a game makes will attract some players and repel others. So any game choice always boils down to “What type of players do I want in my game?”. This is true for any genre.
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