Actually, while PoE early on had a mostly 3 month season loop (a few were 4 months, a few were 2 months), for the last 2 years they’ve all been 4 months long and Sanctum was even 5 months long.
So it seems like player expectancies might be shifting (or they don’t mind).
D4 isn’t consistent either, with some seasons lasting 2, 3 or 4 months on the short 5 seasons they’ve had so far.
Excuse-me, what norm is that?
No, there’s no such norm like that. As DJ pointed, not even PoE has been so strict like this and all future Leagues are subject to have their length adjusted according to the company’s needs/capabilities/intentions.
3-4 months cycles is what EHG themselves want their game to run as a seasonal ARPG. Again, because they WANT it to be like that, not because they’re following some kind of ethereal “norm” you’re making up right now.
Getting it to being sound would be a decent start already 
But sooner or later you gotta get the recipe down at least partially… they got over 5 years to get that going but never went into it fully, the feedback is not the issue.
PoE’s MTX prices are high, yes… but they’re also qualitative sound nowadays. The old ones were a mess.
Sanctum was 4, Crucible was 5.
It cost GGG a lot to have that happen as well, they messed up with Crucible, badly so.
Also they provided information that they’re moving away from the unsustainable 3 month leagues, putting a few weeks extra into the work to make sure quality is up to par, which has shown to be a good choice and it was properly communicated.
EHG didn’t properly communicate and is nearly 100% beyond the expected 3 month cycle, even if we say they go with 4 months it’s still ~50% overtime.
That’s not an acceptable range, especially while interfering mid-cycle on top of that because they realized they screwed up.
Their planning was sub-par (1.2 and 1.3 being in need to be switched was obvious for the priority), heir organization was (everyone working on the same thing instead of teams working on different aspects) and their handling of the situation also was bad. They just stepped from one puddle into the next so to say.
To be fair… nobody sane expects things from Blizzard anymore
It’s what the live-service ARPG sector found out works the best though. between 3-5 months, 3 is highly unsustainable for quality releases which are substantial over time. 5 is on the high end and people loose interest to a degree it hurts retention for following cycles… hence 4 is the golden situation actually.
And yes, companies mess up and can’t uphold that regularly or divert from it. It’s nonetheless a unspoken standard of the sector, and with a reason.
EHG always said they’d like to have a 3-4 month cycle, but they haven’t so far said anything definitive about it. So they haven’t really went into “overtime” because they haven’t yet set a stable cycle duration.
Also, 1.1 was 1 month behind because of organizational issues, which were clearly communicated and presumably fixed. And there’s also a reason for the delay for 1.2.
What they said isn’t that 1.3 and 1.2 will be switched, it’s that they’ll be merged. So the next big patch in Q1 2025 won’t have mono expansion and then the next cycle after that will get primordial uniques. What we’ll have is that the next cycle will have both the mono expansion and the primordials as well.
Honestly, it’s not much different than them releasing both on schedule, since you’d get 1.2 around November and 1.3 around February. So the timelines don’t change much, we’ll just have a longer 1.1.
Think about it like this:
Imagine someone is a “hater”. Someone who completely, 100% does not like the game.
If he sees someone who is 99% negative and 1% positive about LE, what will he think?
He will see someone who likes the game more than he does. Since he does not realize he’s a hater, he will claim the person who likes the game more than himself is someone who only says good things and who is all about being positive. He’ll claim those players - even those who are just 1% positive - are trolling those who offer criticism about the game and using “praise” to hide how they’re actually nothing more than fanboys.
When you are in one extreme, it’s easy to see anyone who’s different from you as being in the opposite extreme.
Now flip it around. If we have someone who completely, 100% likes the game… In front of someone who is 99% positive and 1% negative, what do you think he will see?
A fan will actually criticize the game. They do it so the game can get better.
Iv criticized the game as well doesnt make me any less of a fan than any fan of the game
I do it cuz i love the game and want to see it improve.
Devs cant improve the experience/game if no one criticizes it.
What do u think happened when players wete pointing out how annoying it was to respec a skill and it went back to lvl 1. Yes that used to be a thing.
Hiw do u think we got the skill respec and min lvl system we have now.
How about MG UI being improved
Thats right players criticizing the game.
Yes, but would you use words like “Do this or the game will die”?
A fan of something can be unhappy with certain aspects and formulate their critique in a civil and constructive manner.
A hater will use inflammatory language, throw insults, state why it is bad (in their opinion, even though they will sell it as objective facts most of the time) but not constructive criticism in the form of advice how to improve the situation. Even IF you give a constructive advice - people usually don’t like to take advice from people who just insulted them. Natural psychological reflex, I assume.
The delivery of advice is pretty important.
At times, yes, sure. When applicable.
‘Make sure to provide consistency as early as possible or the game will die.’
‘Have at least resemblance of balance or the game will die.’
‘Have the game at least start up for the majority of people or the game will die.’
There’s a few sentences where it absolutely works
To be fair, the second example is the one which is the most unlikely to hold true, too severe and it’ll also hold true.
So yes.
As can be seen in D3, you can do a lot of things wrong and the game still won’t die. People are too fatalistic or attribute way too much importance to the things they consider important when many times they are not that serious.
PoE was very inconsistent for the first 3-5 years. Their balance was all over the place (though usually not as bad as 1.0 in LE), the quality of their updates was the same, with some leagues being great and some being quite underwhelming, and yet they managed just fine.
They slowly built up their game identity and quality, attracted a more stable playerbase and now they’re thriving. But it was only from 2017 onwards that they started having a higher playerbase. Until then they survived with 10-20k peak players just fine.
Same can be said about D3. The launch was a mess, RMAH was a disaster, but they still turned it around with RoS and even managed to do just fine afterwards with minimal seasons and endgame.
LE is closer to PoE than D3. Their systems are mostly fine, they still need to improve on the foundation they created and to tune things like balance. But given the current state of the game, the only way LE will die is if they decide to make drastic changes to their game and ignore their target playerbase.
Which doesn’t seem at all likely so far, given EHG’s track record and communication.
And what you see constantly is “I don’t like this thing, if LE doesn’t change it it will die” when really all they’re actually saying is “I don’t like this thing, if LE doesn’t change it I will leave and I hope it fails”. Which is something completely different.
To be fair D3 nearly died at the beginning, and would’ve done so if any other competitor was on the market at the time… which it really wasn’t, it were the times Blizzard was ‘the golden goose of videogames’ still, the first game they messed up.
Same with PoE, they had a really… really easy time, there was literally no competition on the market, not a singular game at the time they released. Sure, D3 was there… but D3 was casual, PoE grabbed all the D2 hardcore fans.
LE though has competition, and a lot of it. Hence their quality needs to be better from the beginning then their competitors were, obviously so. The others created a new flavor of cake… and now LE wants to make their off-brand, obviously they need to establish themselves in a solid way.
As for the last bit:
Yes… yes that it something utterly different 
And in I imagine 95% of the cases not true at all.
‘That should be changed, I worry that I won’t be able to play the game in the future otherwise because it won’t exist anymore’ is more likely the be the case.
Yes, but as Llama likes to say, it’s not a zero sum game. PoE players still play LE. So do D4 ones. And vice versa. So even if LE isn’t at a point where they can compete for top place, they’re definitely at a place where they can keep existing.
The quality of LE currently just determines how many will come to it with new cycles and how long they stay. But it’s not at a point where they are in danger of having 0 players when a cycle starts.
Most players these days only play for about a month on these seasonal type games anyway.
Very true, but the big question then is: Which of those 2 is their ‘main’ one?
Because the chance to spend on the ‘off’ one is low. Sure… they keep MG functional and the game not an empty wasteland at least… but that’s not what brings the company very much forward.
If they spend their 60€ per league in PoE already then spending some more on top in LE is quite a bit less likely after all, outside of the big spenders.
So the quality will not only determine how many will come… but also directly how many will throw money into EHGs face And that’s kinda important for the overall future of the game.
Cept this isnt actually useful, and every dev will tell you this. We are not game designers, its not our job to fix it, simply to express why its bad. or why we feel its bad.
Many times skills are not actually bad mathematically, they just feel bad and it clouds our feeling of its balance. This is a problem that needs fixing too.
I can express why waiting a year per patch is terrible. As they say “Strike while the iron is hot” trying to shape cold steel wont do you much good. They need players to find niche bugs, give feedback on why they feel like class X is bad etc.
I think its okay to be stern in feedback, ya calling them “dumbass stupid heads” wont get you brownie points, but you can still call stuff awful when it is.
Balance is bad. It feels bad when I play skill X, blast up to 300 corruption without changing my gear from level 10. then I try skill Y, half my nodes dont work, and I have almost no damage and I struggle to do baseline empowered, why is this such an obvious problem that they never seem to fix?
I cant tell them what to do to fix skill Y other then first and foremost fix bugs, but its their job as devolopers to make the fix. if I say “damage is low” they need to brainstorm how to fix that.
I just always read these, “or X will die”, posts as ransom notes.
Then I giggle. Rarely, I read them.
So, to reiterate,
“EHG, You need a 1.2 BEOFE Q1 2025 or LE will die!”
Love,
Anonymous
p.s. I don’t know what a 1.2 BEOFE is, but if it is not provided, your LE will assured not survive to the morning
It sounds a bit like it’s related to a Banoffee pie. But probably not as nice. Kinda like I’m related to Henry Cavill (because I have both an X & Y chromosome).
Sure, feedback in the form of ‘it does not feel good’ can be useful, and the moment people go into the detail of why it doesn’t feel good, actual advice isn’t too far away. If your feedback does not include actionable advice, it is not constructive criticism.
Even if you don’t spell it out, the dev can easily read advice into this: reduce the delay between stopping the movement and begin of the attack to improve the player-experience.
Or to use your example:
Disclaimer: I am not exactly familiar with upheaval. Maybe it is a good skill, I don’t know. Just picked it as an example.
Also, there is a vast difference between being stern and being a jerk. Criticism and advice works better if it is delivered in a polite, non-aggressive manner. You don’t want the target of your critique to become defensive - which is a very natural human reaction.
The question one should ask themselves: “Do I want to deliver constructive criticism, or am I about just to vent my frustration?”
At times both.
And as a customer I should be able to expect a company to handle it in a professional manner, knowing that any negative sentiment isn’t addressed at an individual but at the overall state.
Mind you, active attacks on individuals are not acceptable, but even the most negatively voiced comment has to be taken into consideration with the exact same weight as the most fervent boot-licking comment.
That’s a given for a professional stance, for a company… no, that ‘normal human behavior’ is to be actively pushed to the side. Developers have to accept that their creation is under scrutiny (which feels bad, sure) but nonetheless it’s their creation and not them personally.
Regarding listening to feedback. Listen to the book I wrote as it’s important
From my experience player feedback in some cases is actually so bad listening to them can kill your game.
Eg: pirate101 made by KingsIsle. The game was very toxic pay to win mess full of crabs in the bucket. Devs listened to the pay to win cc and their community of sheep. Result was increase in pay to win and toxicity. Mass scale witch hunts pushed out all players from the game and killed it flat out. The dying out cc began to feed on each other’s guts until all the players quit. Result was a husk of a game being sold to MGI which is worse then death.
One of the reason I am so ADAMANT against EHG and their polls for public feedback. Listening to bad feedback is a speed run to kill your game. Listen to smart players…. Not the massive hoard of clowns.
People should not be dismissive of criticism that wasn’t delivered nicely, but most people will be less receptive - even if they try to be professional. It’s still people you are talking to, not robots, not companies. You can push your humanity to the side only so much.
My comments don’t aim at ‘how to take criticism’ but ‘how to deliver it’.
If you want your feedback/criticism to be useful, you should concern yourself with the delivery to maximize the effect.