LE to me had the best end game, maybe it just needs more frequent update for ARPG lovers to take it seriously, instead of as a contingent plan.
Personally, I played hundreds of hours in early access but left relatively early in official launch because I was mad with LP system and low FPS.
This season has been great but I can guess the turn-offs for people coming from POE2, LP, one-shotting, poor graphic. Though POE2 is not in good shape now…
I’m new to the game, just level 85 now, but the Arena stuff looks like it would be a great way to keep playing once “done.” Does it not serve that purpose?
Id hazard to say most players fall to two extremes.
They are the arpg vets who want to beat the newest toughest challenge and dont care how they do it, they roll the meta build, and beat the game in under a week and move on. We see this in PoE even where up to half the playerbase is pretty much gone in less then a few days.
The other extreme is the people who show up cause they got a news post on steam “oh new patch cool!” they play for 1-2 days hit empowered monos get bored/cant progress and go “ill try that another time”
The minority is the people who are generally not good enough to beat the game in a week, but also dont give up when hitting a wall.
There is also the ride or die LE fans who play regardless of patch cycle.
That is EXACTLY why I gave up on POE just recently, and for good. I still love the skills in that game, but, if I can’t progress my characters properly, and WITHOUT TRADE, I don’t want to play.
The newest toughest challenge is Uber Abbaroth, you think most vets beat him before leaving the game? Probably not, it’s too boring for the most people to farm up to that point.
This is not even remotely close to the truth. As I previously said, 1-month retention in POE 1 is usually over 50%, everyone can easily check it on the steam chart.
A week is a bit of an exageration, but basically yes. you dont keep most of your players, 70% is top end, 30% leave in the first few days, and by week 2, its down to 50%.
The logic still holds true, people are downing uber shaper on day 3 these days in leagues. by a month no one is left.
1 week, over 50% sure, but by 1 month only affliction of recent had over 50%.
Yes, waggle is chain farming him on HCSSF on judgement paladin, he was killed by meta players days in.
The hardcore players beat him, and then closed out. There is a feedback thread from someone who played 90 hours since season start, and beat abby, at 4 hours of gametime a day, thats still only 23 days or so. So for hardcore players they can shorten that to just over a week easy.
Not a week, you said “less than few days”, so in 1-2 days.
These plots are different from Steam charts
Not sure where that data comes from. But even so, 35% of players still nearly not “no one is left”.
Most people don’t play hardcore, and leave before 23 days — most of them already left. So this is almost for sure, that most people are leaving LE without killing Uber Abbaroth.
Im a non casual casual player in PoE. Aka I play a lot more than the casual player but I do not play it “properly” as the streamers would say. Never got a mirror in thousands of hours. Only got a headhunter/mageblood in like…maybe 3 leagues in years of playing. And here comes IMO about retention. I do want my build to be at least decent in PoE and at least beat all the bosses. Not U Bosses but normal ones so I try to optimize my build…in some leagues by dropping 10 divines in a week. In some by dropping 10 in a day. Or by linking my 6 socket armor in 1k Orbs of Fusing OR by linking it in 6k orbs of fusing down the road cause screw the crafting option. The patch is not bad in LE it just does not take you 1 month to get from starter build to a decent build even if you are quite the casual. It is a game that does not hate people having fun unlike PoE 2 and whatever vision is in there but aint for me.
Because theres nothing to do in the endgame.
Arena is dead because snapshotting is a thing, and there aren’t enough competitive builds for arena to do something. Probably most of the people who would have competed on the arena ladder gave up after they figured out how far ahead minion snapshots are compared to regular builds.
Also VisionGL tournaments aren’t happening yet (not sure why)
I wish there was more things to compete on. I wouldn’t hate a leaderboard for corruption either.
I personally bounced off the game because of how difficult Uber Aberroth is. It just felt like a wall I couldn’t reasonably overcome, and it made me feel like a bad player.
I wasn’t motivated to try other characters or off-meta fun builds because I knew they wouldn’t stand a chance against the final challenge.
If the reward behind Uber Aberroth was just a title or cosmetic, that would be fine. But the fact that there are powerful and cool items locked behind this boss makes it feel like I’m missing out on core gameplay.
That sense of being cut off from the fun made me lose interest and drop the game.
Snapshotting has always been a thing, why do you think arena wasn’t “dead” before but is now? Nothing’s changed.
Arena’s “dead” because very few people actually enjoy it.
The problem with Uber Aberroth his he is landslides harder than anything else in the game and between regular Aberroth and Uber Aberroth there is such a huge leap in terms of difficulty, grinding and playing super powerful builds that it doesn’t keep as much players.
PoE 1 and PoE2 have so much more diverse endgame activities with various different difficulties.
All the different pinnacle bosses are differently hard for certain buidls at certain stages of progression and allow a much smoother curve and a reasonable next target to aspire to.
For example both of my builds I played in 1.2 killed Aberroth within 2 or 3 days and yet I can’t (and probably will never) defeat Uber Aberroth after over a week of farming.
Between Aberroth beign on autopilot farming with no chance of dying and grinding corruption there is no good target to aspire too, other than pushing corruption.
PoE1 has a dozen different bosses from different content and PoE 2 also has qutie a few bosses and all of them have very smooth difficluties you can work through.
While I prefer LE as a game overall, both PoE games have a much smoother and better endgame experience and curve.
I am confident we will get there eventually with LE, but it will take time.
How is an item that gives you damage reduction or + to skills or haste core gameplay? There is nothing unique or fancy about both Uber Aberroth drops. They are just giant stat buget items.
I agree that Uber Aberroth is very difficult, I don’t think its too difficult, but there is stuff missing on the progression towards Uber Aberroth.
Yes, just adding difficulty to the Uber Abarroth without changing overall difficulty curve and making gameplay more diverse clearly doesn’t work.
EHG are adding new content for years, but it’s all feels almost the samy, only rewards differ. I noticed it in the interview before launch, they talked about different mechanics how to improve items, idols, etc, and didn’t even mention gameplay. Like, who cares about gameplay in the game 
Some of it is just retention hacking. Making the game deliberately more grindy to try to keep people longer even if the experience isn’t as fun.
But if I were just to talk about LE, for me the issue is that once I’ve gone through the game on one character, getting through the content a second time just feels like a chore. There’s not enough interesting stuff to keep me engaged and there’s a lot of the same stuff that has to be done on every new character regardless of what you’re doing. To the extent that I enjoy making builds, needing to go through all of that homework just wears me out.
It’s nice that they added new stuff to endgame, but while I think the crafting additions were a huge success, I think the actual endgame content doesn’t address that core issue that keeps the game from feeling more fun to replay. It competes too much for that core required progression loop, so at best they’re a side distraction and at worst they’re slowing you down. It doesn’t help that most of them aren’t any more challenging or interesting than regular monolith gameplay. It’s just still the case that if you want to reach a satisfying challenge in the game, you have to push corruption before you find it or go do Abberoth/Uber Abberoth, which isn’t really new. Personally, Most of the woven echoes I’ve done exactly one time for the points. The only ones I’ve repeated were some of the crafting ones. To be clear, I haven’t really done any I’ve hated. I just haven’t done any that have stood out enough to want to go out of my way to do them.
A lot of that has to do more with the friction involved in accessing them. Having to do a cemetery to set those up ahead of time is a pain, especially since you’ll just lose any you don’t finish if you push corruption. I think I’d probably do them a lot more often if you could just throw them into the echo web at any time as you want.
Also, the tombs/cemeteries being procedural hasn’t really done anything for making them feel varied. There are only so many blocks they have to place so they still kind of all feel the same. You know what to expect even if the exact layout is a bit different. You can even pretty reliably expect what kinds of side things you’ll find it them. A chest here and there, an exiled mage, a champion, whatever. Stuff you could find anywhere in a monolith and you see them in roughly the same distribution each time. They could be a lot cooler if there were some small chance to find some crazy stuff in there. A special cache that gives better loot, a secret rare boss, something.
I hate a lot about GGG/PoE, but the one thing it has going for it is it just has a lot of solid content and the atlas structure is a pretty compelling way to move through the endgame. It’s just a shame it gets ruined by their stubborn design decisions.
LE doesnt have the amount of content, and is a relatively fast game - unless you play HC, after about 2 weeks you have probably done most of the content, even as a relatively casual player.
This patch did add a bunch tho, and we also see people are still playing in pretty good numbers. So hopefully, over time it will become even better. It seems alot of people really enjoyed this patch, some of whom never thought they would go back to LE.
There’s at least several problems with LE that weren’t so far adressed.
Let’s put it a different way.
LE is fast food. it’s tasty. it’s accessible. it’s fun.
But it’s also very shallow (mechanically) and gets old really quick.
It’s the “zoom-zoomiest” of ARPGs and also easiest unless you’re willing to grind for hours to get to a point where enemy DAM and HP catches up to your DPS/EHP.
This by default makes it the easiest to burn out on. You get screens annihilated and loot bombs from the get-go. You don’t have to work for it. Every and any build will give you that, thanks to zero difficulty campaign/normal monos. Once you get the empowered monos, the charm has mostly went away.
LE can be a great game in the future but it needs further improvements.
It needs:
I’d also like more tactical options, but I’m aware that modern ARPGs are mostly about attracting casuals every few months through 1,000,000 loot explosions per second and clearing screens with a fingersnap.
Both D4 (in the past) and POE (right now) tried to introduce a slower, more tactical and harder gameplay, but it was met with a furious backlash of people who just want to blast things running 20000 km per second and get bored within a week.
I don’t think LE lacks content now, many things to do for min-max. For me it’s more like after certain point, I know it becomes almost impossoble to further inprove my build or it takes way too long… and even if I do, I will still get instant kill by dot damage in high corruption.
And Eterra’s Blessing.
And healing totems for Spriggan Form.
And Summon Spriggan auras.
Those are honestly mostly healing skills or buffs.
What I mean by defensive skill is something like, say, Sentinel’s Shield Wall or maybe Rebuke.