With mastery respec is there gonna be build/ gear templates for quick switch?

General
41

Because it not only causes player retention to substantially reduce but also the market to become even worse then it already is.

Up to 1.1 if you wanted to be a ‘early adopter’ so to speak for MG, hence getting the highest amount of profit from it then your pick had to be something which will do well in the campaign and decently well in Monoliths. That was a distinct choice there. Playing for efficiency or playing for trying out something new?

Now that’s gone. This allows anyone to pick whatever works for the campaign and then switch over to something which does especially well in Monoliths. Causing quite the time-reduction in setting up a early cycle character of you know half-way decently what you’re doing.

Also it causes supply and demand of MG (which is already a mess) to become even further skewed. Top-end supply is nigh non-existent, low-end supply has utter overabundance… with the middle? Basically not existing at all. We got two extremes.
Now that means since you don’t need to play up an extra character that the demand of top-end gear will rise, with barely any change in supply. That’s not good with how everything is going currently.

Yeah, together with re-working the initial game and screwing up a few small things. Luckily the game has been half-way decently kept in a similar state otherwise.
It definitely caused your choices to be far far less meaningful though, not nice. But at least done in a way which isn’t making a complete 180 in how it handles stuff… like LE did here.

Absolutely. I agree 100% with that.

My first was MG. This is my second. Expect to be disappointed I would say, makes it less severe when it happens :stuck_out_tongue:

Nooot quite ‘that’s all’.
It also makes those caring about their choices and those usually focusing on multi-character plays during a Cycle either play quite a lot less (setting up a new char in the same base class isn’t 20-60 hours but… 2 minutes now) or simply will stop playing if they feel the change is severe enough.

Is it worth it to gather those leaning towards a more casual approach at the cost of those above?
I would argue ‘no’ since the game hasn’t been designed in a way to cater to that group of people majorly.

But… umh… that’s exactly what happened? :stuck_out_tongue: Formerly we had 15 classes, now we have 5. Sure, parts were shared between them… but the core combinations could only be done when you leaned into it. Now you’re a ‘generic’ Acolyte, you’re not a necro for example… you now play ‘Acolyte’.

Exactly what the lack of having the respec is supposed to avoid.

Really? Do you have any statistics? Can I see them? :slight_smile:
Oh… and since it’s kinda important as a 1k hour playing customer is valued roughly 10 times more then a 50 hour playing customers… do you also have overall medium play-time of the respective group affected?

Would be very interesting!

I can tell you the outcome though even without looking at it:
There’s more people quitting because the functionality wasn’t there then those quitting because it got introduced.
The loss in play-time overall though is higher.

42

I dunno about this part actually.

Right now it seems like snubbing your long term userbase for the quick cash flow of more purchases is how these games are rolling. Look at PoE2, id say the vast majority of hardcore poe1 players are not eating up poe2. poe2 is far more popular among new players, and GGG is happy to let the poe1 diehards suffer to collect more paychecks from the new players.

The 1k hour player has already spent money, with no promise of them spending more. New players always need to buy in as its not a f2p game, so im not so sure if there is a business connection with high hour players in this particular instance. like ill be honest, I have like nearly 2.5k hours now I think and all ive bought is the basegame back when you had to buy a supporter pack to get access, and then i upgraded to the whatever edition that gave you the two armor sets as a thank you for all the good hours, think my total purchase amount is something like 95 dollars lol, which is something like 26 hours per dollar spent, great value!

43

I did say we could also have rare materials that could be farmed for extra respecs. D2 has them but they’re rare to get and make serial respeccing impractical.
Also, D2R continues to get new content released, including balance changes, new runes, new items, etc. So it’s not solved and it still only has the 3 respecs (one per Den of Evil, as you pointed out, which is the very first quest you get anyway).

The reason players like me are disappointed is because there were ways to fix this without causing anyone to rage quit. And EHG has excelled in finding those types of solutions in the past.

This is actually also an issue for leaderboards. You get the #1 spot for Paladin. Where you had to make a new character and start over to get the #1 spot for VK, you now only have to respec and you can get it right away.
Blasters will get #1 spot for all 3 masteries immediately, throwing anyone out of the race.

Unless they change the leaderboards to not care about masteries anymore and only class.
But either way, I can’t see that this change is good for the competitive players.

3 Likes
44

It’s the mobile-game segment which does that mostly. Simple games with tons of user turnover. Easy to get into, loads of options to pay for stuff. Miniscule retention time.

The more complex and big a game becomes the more you want long-term solutions. Quick turnover rates are counter to learning in-depth mechanics. That takes time, but if you don’t provide a meaningful reason to stay for that timeframe then people don’t do it and simply get annoyed at ‘those mechanics which just suck’ despite being not designed for them but those which are active longer-term.

What are you talking about? PoE 2 is ridiculously well received by the PoE 1 community?

Quite the contrary. The biggest hurdle for a company is to make a player open their wallet once. When that happens they inhibition threshold to do it again becomes vastly lower. That’s a very well researched topic even.

I’m a penny-pincher… but I paid over 800€ over the years into PoE, the longer I played the easier it was for GGG to sell me something interesting.
I haven’t played those 7k hours in LE though, they got… 20€ besides my shelf-price from me for now. And very low reason to open my wallet for more still.

Now imagine someone with a lower inhibition threshold then me, as well as some funds to actually pay for stuff.

Which actively makes in-game purchases harder. ‘I already paid for the product, why should I give them more?’ is the general societal consensus for shelf-priced games.

F2P games contrary are expected to be paid further ‘It’s how they make money and even stay in business’, entirely basing it on player perception, often leading to much higher amounts of money being paid.
The downside is that the communities are respectively heavier on bots and RMT, as well as leaning towards being more toxic. Banned? Pfff… new account, didn’t use any money either! It has ‘no value’. Paid for it? ‘I better behave!’.

1 Like
45

Easily solved if it’s a big deal. Don’t put respecced characters on the leaderboard or only allow their best. The biggest content creators don’t even seem to care about arena leaderboards anyway. I don’t get the impression EHG cares about leaderboards much.

As far as retention issues, it’s because it’s been a VERY long time since season 1 launched and a lot of players quit early then anyway because they only had stuff to do for a week. POE2 is having massive retention issues after a much shorter period of time for similar reasons.

46

identity!! = identity (identity - 2) (identity - 4) …

(Yeah, I’ll find the door.)

3 Likes
47

Because Arena is a mini-mechanic at best and nothing ‘grand’ which keeps someone invested long term. Only a small sub-group can stomach that content for more then an hour.

Wanna check your percentile retention again? PoE 2 is one of the best retained games ever released in the H&S market… just saying… 20% after 2 months? That’s nigh unheard of. D3, D4 and LE would cry in happiness if that happens to them.

It’s one blatantly false statement. Especially since despite EA buy-in (making it a shelf-priced item for the moment) it retains 70k player during weekdays from the initial release peak of 580k. And a release peak is expected to loose 80% of players permanently over a 1 month period commonly. PoE 2 lost a bit more then 50% only.

48

It’s lost almost 90%

https://steamdb.info/app/2694490/charts/#max

PS: You guys are getting way too heated. I’m out.

49

Once more, false.

Peak was 580k on December 8th.
Weekend numbers of the last Sunday (strongest gaming day) is 92k
To be exact it retains 16,9% of the playerbase at the current time hence.

But yeah, should’ve said 15%, which is close to the 1 month drop-off normally. Not the 2 month drop-off.

As said, the common drop-off which is nominal is expected 80%. Everything below is deemed a ‘failure’ officially. Everything above 60% a ‘massive success’. December to January drop-off was 38,8% and January to February 49%

Both are substantially in the ‘massive success’ area. Albeit cummulative drop-off does get reduced over time, still keeps January to February in the ‘success’ range despite higher player-loss.

50

Most new players find some build enabeling stuff they think they need to use or to have fun with and chage the class because the item combination looks like fun. This happens again and again and again. For new players this changes nothing from my point of view because new players use what they get and most likely go back and forth without having a good build because they lack the gear to have meaningfull stats.
More choice isn’t always better. Mostly blasters and knowledgeable people will benefit from this change while new players will appreciate to be able to juggle classes without much benefit.
The problem I see with this is that new players will have a not so good experience because they will might end up with 3 not working builds instead of focusing on one build at a time.

That’s a very valid point. Then again swapping from a OP mastery to a normal mastery will leave people desatisfied. That’s what we know from the first season and other seasons in other games.

I care a bit about it because it offers nothing in the long run as mentioned above. All it does is making the game more bland instead of better BUT this is a question of personal taste and I understand everyone who likes the change. To me this is just the next bandaid change that is implemented without deeper thinking.

If I compare the feedback of people and that this was implemented by popular demand I ask myself why there is still no auto pickup for runes and stuff because people want this for years and there are far more topics about this then mastery respeccs.

It just makes little sense to me.

2 Likes
51

I totally agree with this. They did cave a bit with autotransfer.
But it is kinda baffling how such a polarizing issue like mastery respec, where EHG has taken such a strong stance in the past regarding the character identity aspect of it, is suddenly pivoted like this, whereas a topic that is almost universally agreed upon by all players like autopickup for materials is still a hill they want to die on.

As a sidenote, EHG has said in the past, very explicitly, that the reason they didn’t want mastery respec is because your mastery is your class, not a subclass/ascendancy type of thing.
So I guess class respec is coming soon(ish)? :laughing:

3 Likes
52

It’s not, they hate it. PoE 2 has a lot of players, but if you had taken a look at the Path of Exile 1 reddit, they were whining incessantly about PoE 2 (until talk about the sequel became forbidden there). IMO, PoE 2 has not been made for the PoE 1 community - the slower pace of the game is making the PoE 1 community furious.

53

Look at the influencers and their communities and you don’t have that.

Reddit is and always was a cesspool of a mess. You don’t get proper community consensus from there, it’s a decent way to at least see a direction but much like any other medium it needs to be taken with a salt of grain as negativity is the primary leading force of why people engage with those mediums. Exceptions obviously apply, but are not the majority norm.

And a game which is different then they game they got to love is obviously against many people’s enjoyment. It was designed to not be like PoE 1 despite being obviously PoE still in style. But the grand majority of the community is either neutral towards the game or positive. You just fell into the ‘the loudest ones aren’t the majority’ trap there.

54

Well, kinda. Ziz, Ghazzy and Rax, for example, have said repeatedly in their streams (and in their videos) that many PoE1 players in their community don’t like PoE2.
Is that a relevant enough number? We have no idea. But there is a sizable portion of PoE1 players that don’t like it. It’s not universally liked by that community.

1 Like