Game has dropped in popularity to closed beta level

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Charan wrote:

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JoannaDark wrote:

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The game losing players is a myth.

Well that must explain why the rare times i do login, i see all my old buds from CB, offline. Believe what you will, but many people walked away from this game since OB. We can all sit here and trash talk all day with stats from our assholes, but the facts is, only GGG has access to the real numbers.

Promised Land syndrome. Happened to my main account as well. Went from lots of familiar faces online to virtually none of them, and a bunch of strangers constantly messaging me -- thanks, GGG, for allowing them to friend-add me without my permission or even notification, given a full friends list.

But what I'm not sure about is why people left precisely. The game didn't change *that* much from CB to OB. It gained an act, the balance was a bit off, the desync is pretty much what it was in CB in my extensive experience.

I am still of the belief it wasn't the game that changed, but the community. The loss of a consistent in-game chat was a huge impact on the camaraderie found upon logging in. It was necessary, of course, but GGG really fucked up when they made the social side of PoE a 'secondary' factor and relegated improving it to Open Beta rather than Closed.

Thus my statements above.

The game itself is better than ever in my opinion. The new skills are fun, the new supports are amazing, the graphics continue to improve, the additional uniques are interesting. The Skilldrasil still needs tweaking but there's room to move there.

The only thing OB really promised to CBers was no more wipes. Chris knew that this would bring a LOT of people back.

And it did.

Briefly.

But after that absence, I expect many of them felt the game should be much better than it was. Like I said, Promised Land syndrome. And it's now at that point that most people with common sense have come out of the desert and told the Prophet to go fuck himself. Anyone still following him is deemed a fool. And perhaps it is so.

But no more foolish than those who left the flock to seek a real oasis but then heckle at the prophet and his followers, as though THAT is going to do any good at all.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

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Seeders wrote:

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But after that absence, I expect many of them felt the game should be much better than it was. Like I said, Promised Land syndrome. And it's now at that point that most people with common sense have come out of the desert and told the Prophet to go fuck himself. Anyone still following him is deemed a fool. And perhaps it is so.

But no more foolish than those who left the flock to seek a real oasis but then heckle at the prophet and his followers, as though THAT is going to do any good at all.

What the fuck? This game isn't the second coming of Christ.

Its a fun game with a decent player base for a new developer still in beta. 2.46 million accounts is an incredible feat for GGG.

I think gamers live in a fantasy world where games are supposed to make their dream world a reality. As soon as that veil has been lifted, a good game becomes rank shit in their eyes.

I'm sorry, I probably should have iterated what I call the Promised Land Syndrome. And it's not about Christ, who didn't even live to 35 years; it's about Moses, who led an entire race to wander a desert for *over* 35 years. It's about despair, not hope. Mostly, it's about the big question: just how long do you follow someone else's dream?

Basically, during the latter days of CB, a lot of people were waiting for this miraculous OB event, which would fix absolutely everything and no matter what you told them. Chris himself stressed that OB wouldn't be a one day thing -- it'd be everything from January 23rd until 'release'.

OB hits and nothing really changes. The 'Promised Land' turns out to be much like the old land, give or take.

This mentality of obviously partly GGG's fault but certainly not completely. Unlike many other devs I've encountered, GGG are not prone to grandiose promises of doubling things and releasing the. best. game. ever!...their biggest crime, if you want to go there, is in conceiving a brilliant game that realistically would take at least twice as many people as they have available to make and maintain at a pace that players would find satisfactory.

My apologies again if my metaphor somehow unnaturally inflated where this game stands.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Now there is progress.

I cannot disagree with your perspective, Windays.

Question remains: what exactly changed?

When you (or anyone else) says that we now need to trade to get to/survive end-game, or that the customisation that was in CB is 'gone', can you clearly state how? It is one thing to say 'this is broken' and another altogether to look at what is broken and figure out why.

Or is this like asking someone to do GGG's work for them? ;)

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

So in essence, the addition of Act 3 and the subsequent level of Maps broke this game for you?

There was insufficient balance testing of Act 3 pre-OB on Alpha. Of that I have no doubt.

Has the release of an unbalanced PoE acts 1-3, normal-Merciless 4 months ago been neglected then?

Again, I cannot disagree. But I want to be clear: is this the heart of the matter for you? The shift in balance resulting from the addition of a third act? Did that cause everything else 'wrong' with the OB?

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

So in essence, the addition of Act 3 and the subsequent level of Maps broke this game for you?

There was insufficient balance testing of Act 3 pre-OB on Alpha. Of that I have no doubt.

Has the release of an unbalanced PoE acts 1-3, normal-Merciless 4 months ago been neglected then?

Again, I cannot disagree. But I want to be clear: is this the heart of the matter for you? The shift in balance resulting from the addition of a third act? Did that cause everything else 'wrong' with the OB?

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kasub wrote:

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

So in essence, the addition of Act 3 and the subsequent level of Maps broke this game for you?

There was insufficient balance testing of Act 3 pre-OB on Alpha. Of that I have no doubt.

Has the release of an unbalanced PoE acts 1-3, normal-Merciless 4 months ago been neglected then?

Again, I cannot disagree. But I want to be clear: is this the heart of the matter for you? The shift in balance resulting from the addition of a third act? Did that cause everything else 'wrong' with the OB?

I think its the general increase in damage that has made the game favour higher HP far too much.

It's also because of how unbalanced HP is on the passives. Your base HP and passive HP interact perfectly together and you can't compensate no HP nodes through gear(except with kaoms).

You can easily compensate the lack of crit, acc nodes or elemental damage through gear however. You can actually get far higher numbers through gear. People don't enjoy taking HP nodes that much and they feel restricted into making each build with many HP(or ES) nodes and getting those few keystones and offensive nodes.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

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Windays wrote:

Of course that would only be if I wanted the game to be successful outside of a niche neckbeard group of try hards who hang on my every word.

Btw, hows that working out for ya?

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rahven32 wrote:

The whole original post doesn't have anything to do with the game really. Most people who play games never visit a forum ever. The traffic the website has doesn't mean anything when it comes to how many people are playing. It's apples and oranges basically.