Wishing all the best to the devs

Off-topic
1

I’ve bitched a lot about LE. and i did so out of love. I wanted something different than POE, but LE ended up becoming another POE, so now i m back playing POE. i cannot foresee myself coming back to LE at this point. If i m comparing games based on modern d-likes. POE1 simply wins. i cannot emphasize how badly i wanted something else and how i want LE to be a great competitor to POE.

that said. i want to share some love and encouragement to the devs. despite not being too financially successful, you pay your team a proper wage. and you’re doing all you can to keep the game going. you guys have done a great lot and come up with MANY interesting ideas that even POE should take notes (and they did).

despite saying stuff like i ll never come back to the game. i did that many times with POE. and here i m, still playing poe. who knows i might come back to LE again. we simply do not know. despite it being unlikely. there is a huge lot that i appreciate in LE. there are a butt ton of things that LE does that are interesting and unique in the d-like genre.

for sure, it is not a financial success as one would prefer, but it still is a huge accomplishment to get as far as you did. and it is admirable. most people wouldnt get the same level of success. ffs, you went against the behemoth called poe which had years of time to cook in a comfortable place where it had no competition. you also competed against diablo, which is the originator of all d-likes.

its legit amazing. if i were to make my own game, to get even 10% of where you guys are at would be an achievement.

i legit hope for the best of this game and your dev team. being on reddit sometimes i see a lot of doom on how LE is dead. same with the forums. i think it really depends on how we frame things. LE is an amazing game with tons of content, but comparing it with other games can be… unfair to say the least. as a consumer/gamer of course we are just going to compare anyway. but the point i m trying to convey is that LE is something to be proud of regardless.

cook the game more. or dont. do what you need to do. if you can make LE better, make it better. if its not feasible, then maybe change the scope of the game. i dont know, it is not up to me to decide nor it is my place. but whatever it is. i for one will be silently watching from afar. cheering you on. if it gets too difficult. please remember to be selfish and take care of yourselves.

all the best guys!

3 Likes
2

See you around.

1 Like
3

I’m curious but what do you mean by LE become another PoE?

4

hello there.

i came to LE looking for an alternative to POE. things i enjoy/learned to enjoy:

  1. Organic player growth and exploration
  2. Build diversity
  3. Games that reward my time

When i first came to LE, it was during early access. during that period LE hit EVERYTHING i wanted. Actually not exactly everything but its mostly all what i want in a modern d-like

  1. Organic growth - The hardest content in the game was corruption 100. you could go higher for more rewards but it was totally optional. It was a set goal that was not too difficult for any casual player. You never felt like you were doing too bad as the ceiling was low and there was plenty of room to make your build more interesting. You could be unoptimized and it didnt matter. NO ONE would feel forced to read up/watch a build guide. This is peak organic growth.
  2. Build diversity. True diversity comes when games have low ceilings. Low ceilings allow players to be sub optimal, a good build is rewarded but a decent build is enough to clear content. This goes hand in hand with the difficulty ceiling. If the ceiling is low then the minimum player requirement is also low, and thus players have room to be suboptimal.
  3. In LE crafting materials are VERY generous, and is easy to understand. All throughout the campaign i m busy crafting/improving my gear organically without need for trade. typically by the end of the campaign i could get t20 self crafted gear which is something AMAZING. failure doesnt feel too bad as i know i can farm up the materials again with reasonable amount of time.

That is my assessment of LE back during EA. after season 1 released, they introduced aberoth. this is a corruption 300 content. the ceiling has been raised significantly. based off memory, even in EA i was struggling in C100. but thanks to CoF and other improvements, I could now push to C250 with my own build. and in season 2, they released uber abberoth which was C500. so how does this change my assessment of the game?

  1. Organic growth - Still there, but only for campaign. Once at the end game, C500 is a very tall order to climb organically. I’ve seen people retort saying that they came into the game blind made their own builds and managed to clear uber abby. not a few, in fact many. but on the flip side there are many that also share my experience where the builds we make simply do not work as well. The game simply is unbalanced. we can see this back in S2 where sentinels just simply better.

One argument is all meta builds ARE self made builds. True. I wont deny that as it is fact, but i want to point out that whenever a person makes a self made build that somehow aligns itself to a meta build, it definitely works well. but what if a person makes a self made build but it simply does not align itself with the meta? a way to imagine it is people throwing dice. sometimes you throw it six times and you get a perfect combination of 1,2,3,4,5,6 or something near that combination. but sometimes you get a random combination of number 1,1,5,2,4,6 that doesnt make much sense.

A lot of people who argue that they made a self made build “easily” that can clear difficult content are akin those who rolled a nice combination of dice and are solely basing their experience based off their one dice roll. if they start rolling more. or look at the rolls other people are doing then they can start seeing more variance.

ultimately, due to the existence of uber abby, all it does to me is i feel punished for trying to play my own build. previously before S1, i can proudly tell ANYONE that wants to try LE to never follow a build guide and do your own thing. it is something i can never do in POE. but after S1, build guides have too much benefit. the difference between a meta aligned build and one that is not is humongous where weaker players struggle at low corruption while people who dont bother to study the game and just follow a build guide can literally face tank uber abby.

  1. build diversity. this becomes a touchy subject. to me build diversity dies when the ceiling is raised too high. the main argument people will give is “WTF are you talking about, theres still a gazillion viable builds that players can use”. which is true. even in POE. theres a gazillion viable builds that can clear everything there too. my argument stems from TRUE diversity. my idea of a perfect d-like is where players NEED a decent build to clear content. you cant put points everywhere spreading yourself thin and expecting to be able to clear content. there still needs to be some level of “intelligent choices” made for your build. and that is why i choose to mention the word “decent”. it doesnt need to be hyper optimized. it just needs to be decent. a good build supplemented with good gear can be decent. good doesnt necessarily have to mean optimized. its just good. to elaborate on my perfect d-like, a decent build should be able to clear all content. BUT an optimized build should reward the player by allowing them to make more mistakes (more tanky) and clear content reasonably faster (more DPS). a good visualization is a decent build can clear the toughest boss in 3-5 minutes. but an optimized one can clear the toughest boss in 1-2 minutes.

the problem is, with the ceiling raised do high, decent builds simply dont cut it. currently OPTIMIZED builds are the bare minimum to clear content. theres little room for error. what diversity is there really when everyone’s practically “doing the same thing”. and those that dont, most often than not will just not be able to clear content.

one may argue that such gaps are good and rewards players for having strong builds. a valid point but for that to exist you kill off organic growth. players need to hyper optimize. players can feel punished for trying to learn the game organically as theres a lot of room for error. trying to make a build work requires a lot of time and resources. trying to fix a build has similar costs. why waste so much time and effort?

if i m being honest, i felt pretty sad when i found out that the devs play their game by following build guides on max roll. you’ve crafted a very intricate game with tons of choices giving players tons of flexibility. they could have used the build guides to figure out what is causing players have such spikes in power and pull them down. instead they chose to create harder content to give challenge to players who follow build guides.

this is more or less the same path that POE took. POE used to be a very slow and deliberate game. getting 100k dps was considered quite powerful back in the day. but some players found ways to multiply damage. 500k. 1 mill. 10 mill. 1bil. dps. the devs leaned into player power and kept adding more difficult content.

in poe “starter builds” are a thing. which to me is something i view in utter disgust. its a sign that the game is so unbalanced that you need a different build to build up your resources before you actually “start” playing the actual build that you want to play.

  1. Rewarding my time. previously i mentioned how generous LE is when handing out item drops and crafting. everything they gave even today, is still generous but ONLY if you’re thinking up to c100. to push higher, you need T7 or T8 mods. these are RARE. dropping one on an item base that you want is RARE. it takes a lot of time. there are new tools provided such as havoc rune which is amazing. but if i m being honest. it simply is a bandaid for someone with their finger cut off. its not enough. people may argue that it is. but thats only true if you no life the game. if you’re a casual player, more often than not, you will simply run out of crafting potential.

in fact its ironic. the game started out being more generous than POE but by the end game, it flips. POE is the generous one. the amount of time and effort i need to get what i want in POE can be a great amount. BUT I CAN get the item by farming up currency and buying it off players. in LE? I CANT. in most cases i just spend time and getting failed/incomplete crafts. it just feels bad and i just feel like i m wasting my time as i dont feel like i m getting any pay off. i m no closer to my goal one month ago. its all layers of RNG that i just need more luck and more effort to overcome. but i’m already tired of the game. i dont feel like my time is rewarded.

so yeah whatever edge LE had over POE was in the past. LE could have gone a different direction but it went in the same direction that POE took. thus it became another POE.

and if i m going to play a POE-like, the best POE-like is still POE. its a pretty tall order for ANY game company to compete with.

4 Likes
5

I feel exactly the same as you do, but I wouldn’t say Uberroth is the main reason.
To me, LE became a pure PoE-like when they started going the way of adding unnecessary complexity to everything. Trees for this, trees for that, more categories of items than I have fingers, new mechanics for each dungeon, more mechanics to evolve your items depending on their category, blah blah blah…
Of course, a lot of it is fake complexity, the game remains relatively simple, but at a quick first glance, it looks overwhelming. Just like PoE.
And it strongly pushes people towards using guides, because trying to understand that many mechanics on the fly simply feels too much. Just like PoE.

LE used to be a game you could just pick up and immediately have fun making your own build, experimenting with skills and items. These days are gone.

6

This FEELING is the one sole reason why i LOVED LE so damn much. now LE has been relegated to someone i used to know, while POE is winking at me once in a while. oh and… time for me to go home and play poe lol

have a happy weekend

7

Thanks for sharing.

I like to pretend Uber doesn’t exist, that way there is still quite a lot of build diversity.

300c in early access was a lot harder that 300c nowadays because the modifiers used to scale with corruption, so I think 300c and normal aberoth still allow for decent as you have described builds to be viable.

8

if i m being honest, i do that for poe too. uber pinnacles dont exist to me

9

While I dont feel like I dont enjoy LE anymore, this is a very real take and Its my same feeling.

They added all this “hard” content way to early, and its even more unbalanced then PoE.

you can do ubers in poe with 10m dps, they will be slow, but doable if you can do the mechanics. 10m becomes 3m when you account for the ubers less damage mod. but getting 10m is not so bad in poe, and while I personally never chase these kinds of numbers, plenty of builds hit them.

uberroth is so crazy overtuned, and builds in LE are so restricted in some ways, that some builds just will straight up never do uber, its not possible even with perfect gear. And this leads to it feeling like “why am i even trying? my build is pointless” which isnt true, cause other hten uberroth its a good build!

I think they have added too much creep and random shit instead of focusing on the core of the game, and its sad. Still want to play the game, but its real depressing to look at.

2 Likes
10

EHG has so many interesting ideas and i think its simply a tragedy of timing. EHG is actually experiencing the same problems that GGG once had,

GGG had financial issues and was struggling to retain players and get funds. one big reason why POE has a huge power scaling issue is because GGG didnt have the luxury of being able to balance the game. what i mean is they COULD figure out why skills were doing a ton of damage and nerf/reworked accordingly but they were worried that it would alienate the playerbase. if players enjoyed breaking your game and if devs kept nerfing your builds to the ground would you feel happy? to me i would feel like i contributed to making the game more balanced. but not everyone feels that way. many could feel upset their OP build now is much weaker. all the time sunk into getting the gear to make the build wasted.

GGG could not afford to alienate its players so they chose not to slam players with nerfs. they dont want to potentially lose the small player base they had. so instead all overperforming builds were showcased. GGG had many “build of the week” highlights back in the day. and allowing those builds to shine helped a huge lot with their marketing as more players found it interesting and wanted to make their own whacky build.

in fact GGG just went bonkers creating build defining uniques. balance be damned. and to add on to that, they kept adding more difficult content to cater to all these overperformers. personally i think the golden age of POE is right before they introduced maven. shaper and elder WERE difficult back in the day but maven was the day GGG said FUCKIT. if anyone here has played poe and they know how maven invites work, you would know that its not a balanced fight where the best way to do the event is to be either super tanky or have such a high dps you can burst down the enemies asap. for example if you left baran alive, maven could make a shadow copy and both could use huge area of denial affect which make the small arena have very little “safe areas” to stand on. AND thats not forgetting to mention if you had all the other bosses in, each one had their own telegraphed huge ass aoes that were balanced around the player getting out of the way. where do you run? if you were playing trumelee. when do you do damage? if you were tanky and could outlast everything then you needed AT LEAST good dps. or else maven could give enemies shields or heal them so much that they could even be back at full health. you were forced to find ways to negate the health regen.

how is that balanced? it simply is a dps check. you’re expected to have huge ass aoe skills that allow you to damage the enemy from anywhere on the screen at a “safe” distance. personally i could never clear “the fear” invitation for YEARS. theres too much damage to avoid. one day i said fuckit. i gave up all my life and went fully dps. i lost a few portals but i could finally clear the feared. the key was to simply delete the enemies before they can become a problem.

after maven we got more pinnacles. and then one day we had ubers. uber sirus is an absolute FUCK YOU to trumelee. he had tons of area denials and if you somehow found an opening to start wailing on him. he could spawn and area denial RIGHT UNDER YOUR FUCKING FEET. and he could always casually resort to standing right inside an area denial effect.

POE is not balanced. but it was still the best game in its genre.

one huge difference between POE and LE is timing. POE released when there was no other game in the market. there was D2, TQ and perhaps sacred2, dungeon siege2, torchlight. but people were hungry for a good diablo clone. blizzard was sleeping for the most part. which is what helped POE grow. POE had LITTLE competition and players were hungry. there were a lot of players who were really irresponsible with their money, such as Charan. the maker of “charan swords”. he bought 3 ultimate supporter packs. 10k USD each if i recall correctly. which entitled him to make 3 uniques which ended up becoming iconic swords back in the day with VERY unique mechanics such as being a 1 handed sword counting as a 2 hander. or the fact that it actually TALKED when certain events triggered.

in comparison LE came out into a competitive market. poe existed in a very polished form. how the hell is EHG gonna compete with that? its a very tall order.

then we can talk about seasonal mechanics. POE’s early leagues sometimes were BASIC AS FUCK. such as having random boxes appear on the ground or just some random “exiles” appearing, but players found it unique and interesting ideas because they never saw it before. GGG had ample time to grow, making poor ass excuses of seasonal mechanics, which now blossomed to full fledged seasonal mechanics that have a complex flow that involves many different mechanics with unique bosses that have interesting movesets. on top of all that you have very unique rewards AND FREE MTX challenge rewards which are god damn high tier in quality. (the current league keepers kinda looks bland but it still has a huge lot of value for a free mtx).

LE is YEARS behind in seasonal mechanics. its really an unfair ground where POE had years of UNCONTESTED growth allowing them to BUILD a loyal player base, before cranking up their seasonal mechanics. its a logical assumption that if players didnt support GGG during new seasons, then GGG would put less effort into seasonal mechanics. its a cycle of symbiosis between the devs and the players. i like your game, i like what youre doing, here have my money, keep making more of that. and the gamedevs will be like sure thing, heres more of what you like and i m making it have more content/quality because a lot of you are giving me money. the wheel keeps turning.

on LE’s side. it has NO TIME to grow that way. POE’s seasons have set the benchmark. LE has no time to make a 3 month league all about loot lizards. players will compare LE with POE. oh thats it? but in POE we have xxx yyy zzz.

so when you say LE added too much. the way i see it, is theyre trying to follow the path of POE. which they really ARE doing. but unlike POE, the path now is not the same. different time, different environment.

if i m being honest GGG actually is facing the same issues as LE has in POE2. the very existence of POE1 is self sabotaging their attempts at POE2.

POE2 was the best attempt at making a slower and more deliberate take on d-like genre. almost all the bosses in the 3 act campaign can be done using melee basica attacks with good gears. you can dodge roll and actively avoid damage. but to keep players invested, they released the inital game along with the end game. the end game is practically POE 1’s endgame. fuck balance. all the care and consideration evaporated. similar to LE, POE2 turned into another POE.

and as mentioned. the best poe game is poe. there really is no contest. LE could have been its own thing and i would probably would have wanted to jump on LE. now i m more keen on TQ2 and NRFTW. these games feel more slow and deliberate. they are different from POE so i dont compared them to POE. i enjoy those games. and i do realize if LE becomes the game i like, they would alieanate their existing playerbase. there really is no correct answer.

you cant please everyone.

11

When was that? That has to be before Elder was introduced because GGG only needed 20% of their playerbase they had at that time already to - I quote - ‘Keep the lights on’.
There even was a interview with Chris Wilson back quite a few years ago where he stated that the company can run profitably with 5k playerbase, something which was vastly more at that time already.

At best that’s in the earliest of early days, and there the powercreep itself wasn’t that massive. The major thing creeping was actual content ceiling being added, namely new bases at that time. From the core bases over to the Atlas bases, all of that caused the power to change substantially, something which hasn’t happened that heavily anymore since years now.

Yep, that’s fair on the other hand!

But also… GGG always was stating that their game is supposed to be difficult and having a lot to achieve at the top-end, needing to invest time and effort into it. So it aligns with their statements.

For EHG this is sadly not the case, they’ve taken a stance of ‘everyone and anyone can play our game decently’ which causes those top-end additions which feel like you’ve not finished the game unless you handle em to be wildly unfitting.
It’s not timing here for the market… it’s timing for their own game, and that is something you have full control over.

It was before they went with the Archnemesis League and screwed up a ton of their game.
That has luckily recovered by now and the game is actually in a better position right now then it was ever before.

As a decent player (not a great one) you can absolutely do all content, including uber-bosses. It’s the time-investment which limits people to achieve that, not the skill level mostly.
Which is a good thing. If something takes to long but you can achieve it you simply stop when you’re not in the mood for it anymore.
Comparatively when you stop because you see no chance to actually get to your goal you’ll likely be pissed off. Which I would argue is worse by far.

For a ARPG based on loot acquisition the time aspect is the better solution compared to the skill aspect… because that guarantees the core premise of why the majority of people keep playing the game long-term is upheld from start to end.

Sirus itself always was a badly designed fight and they never fixed it, agreed.

They can’t, that’s why the game’s financially failing. They had to provide something special not seen in the other games but instead it’s a generic copy with some crumbs that are ‘interesting’ here and there.

True, but unlike GGG there is something which EHG has. One upside: A showcase on which things are working and which not. ‘How to do it right’ is shown clearly by several other games of the genre.

And they screwed that up despite of it. The one upside they had was squandered.

12

i would say in the very early days of poe. when exactly i cant pinpoint. but i would say its logical to assume they couldnt afford alienating whatever playerbase they had at that time.

i remember how critical a lot of people were on tencent’s partnership. but i would say GGG became empowered after the cash injection. they went crazy and did many things REGARDLESS of playerbase outcry. they nerfed the fuck out of harvest, introduced AN. they flipped div/exalts causing their loyal STD playerbase to lose 90% of value (unless you had a ton of divines where you suddenly became super rich). GGG did many things that they wouldnt have done but now theyre brazen.

it already achieved that even before shaper. a lot of newer players even today struggle at yellow tier maps. there are things harder to achieve in poe now, but are way easier now. like getting to 100. back in the day people took literal months to get to 100. now we have people hitting 100 on day 1 league launch.

following a build guide helps immensely.

sirus is one of my fav bosses actually. to me there are a few things to fix.

  1. make his “teleport” be changed into a flame dash so players have a way to visually track him
  2. disable his die beam from firing off if the player is outside the arena area.
  3. make the spinning beams avoidable by ALL movement skills. if you use dash you are considered as getting hit. like wtf. thematically i get it but practically any movement skill that doesnt have the teleport feature is objectively a worst skill.
  4. during the clone phase make the real one increasingly obvious before he fires off his beam.

done! sirus fixed (imo). i’ve posted on forums before but nothings been done. ggg has moved on.

i’d say its a very hard comparison. by default anything EHG did would automatically be compared against poe. and i would say i appreciate EHG for being different. for example season content being available to permanent players. this was one of the biggest reasons i would chose LE over POE. i cant fault them for not getting to where they need to be. they tried and it didnt work out. but theyre not done yet.

let them cook. tho by the time they cook i might have lost most interest.

13

Are you sure? Tencent acquired their first tranche of GGG in May 2018 & the rest in March 2025. Archnemesis was Feb 22 (almost 4 years after the initial purchase & 3 years before the final one), the Harvest nerf was in 3.14 (March 21, 3 years after the initial acquisition) & divs/exalts were flipped in Aug 22. I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame/credit Tencent for stuff that happened 3-4 years after the initial acquisition, that’s an awfully long time for a large soulless megacorp to do stuff.

2 Likes
14

Actually, when PoE released there was already Diablo 3. Granted, it had a disastrous launch, which was only fixed with RoS in 2014, but D3 was released a year before PoE.

15

Yeah, I always wonder why people are so critical of Tencent in relation to the product.
Sure, it’s china’s spying device Nr.1… but for the product itself it’s generally not bad, they’ve always been rather hands-off.

Krafton though? They’re all but that, they’re inserting themselves into the products in the worst possible ways. Always have. They’re product-harbingers basically, shittyfication as a company sadly.

That’s because of their eldritch build-design, it’s not because of the difficulty of the game content. Anyone who’s understood this part had always a very easy time back then. Neither Atzirir, Shaper or Elder were specifically hard. The first hefty boss was uber-elder because of the dual-mechanic that implemented loads of chaos… at least compartably.

As for the level 100: Yes, that’s gotten easier, but it’s a given. More mechanics means more avenues to optimize. The majority of people still does reach level 95, that median there has actually never changed, just more options to don’t do common content and instead do leveling content of some kind. I for example prefer 5-way runs if the char can do it quick, if it’s a tanky char then heist, and if it’s neither I just do low-tier maps with some dumb farming strat to be on the extra safe side. Like essence-farming.

It’s always worked, people just don’t have the patience to achieve it, for good reason, it’s boring after all.

Design-wise with the feeling of him he’s great. Hence visually.

Mechanically? A disaster.

Your points are a prime thing, yes. The movement part is more a thing of reworking the movement skills themselves, some are just crap. There’s a reason everyone uses only a few and Dash is commonly not in that list :stuck_out_tongue:

There’s some more though, like the option for the darn storms to still overlap and block your entry into the arena. Also not only the beam is a problem but other offscreen stuff too, like the degen underneath you, lovely when it happens in a narrow in-between of two storms which won’t move right at the entrance and you cannot do anything but die.

They are.
And they screwed up.

And sadly they really didn’t do anything ‘different’.
The only stuff they did is the faction system, which is a really dumb move for live-service but a really great idea otherwise.

The season content being available is not a major change… nice stuff… not major. Neither is the skill-tree for the specific skills, nor the idol system (which is a in-built charm system from D2) nor the end-game (which is the thrown-out old system of PoE 1 with the scaling method and a bit of a awkward unpolished progression system… works though) or anything else. LE does really not anything new outside of the LP-system… which is not a good system in total sadly in how they’ve implemented it, but a interesting one if it were polished and properly designed… which it is sadly not. And the top-end drop-only methodology of itemization… which is atrocious design-wise at such a broad usage.

Kinda the reason why it did doubly-well :stuck_out_tongue: Blizzard basically gave everything to GGG and lost it entirely starting with D3. Since then not a single Blizzard game has ever been decent anymore, and even WoW (which was top-tier when it started) has only seen a gradual downfall in design-quality since then.

16

Sure, but by the time PoE exploded with the war of the atlas (first time they got to 100k players), RoS had already been out for 3 years. And RoS did get good reviews by the players.

I think the reason isn’t so much the disastrous D3 launch but more that they targetted a very different playerbase, both in terms of difficulty and aesthetic.
So D2 fans kinda gravitated naturally to PoE because it felt closer to D2 than D3 was.