Game has dropped in popularity to closed beta level

Search engine results =\= game players.

The game has been in beta for like two years and anyone who isn't deluded knows that the "open beta" fad is not a beta but a method for developers to release games with an excuse for everything that's wrong. It's absolutely ridiculous to suggest that this is a testing phase -- it's no more in testing than Diablo 2 was half a year after release, it still received patches and overhauls but was a released product. It's frankly hilarious to see literally every single problem deflected with "it's beta, shut up" when in reality these problems have gone unfixed for two years, a beta so much longer than any other game ever that this in itself should raise alarm bells.

We have GAMEBREAKING issues that people are marching from the game in large numbers over and they barely get a passing mention by the dev team, having received no serious attention whatsoever since they were brought up two years ago. The game is crumbling, failing, dying because it's absolutely buried in problems that make it nearly impossible for people to enjoy it for more than a month or two, and other people have the audacity to blame the player or to say that there's nothing wrong because there's an arbitrary "open beta" tag attached to the game, something people with a clue have long known is nothing but a trick to make gullible people eat up a product of such low quality that operating a cash shop at all is barely defensible.

There was a closed beta that it cost money to try, which should say something about its numerical popularity. There has since been a very succesful soft-release, and it's a genre where people were very willing to give something new a chance after the disappointment of D3. Yet the game's popularity is now comparable to - or even worse, by some accounts - what it was during that closed beta for which an invit cost money, despipte being free and much expanded upon now, and some people are still wilfully obtuse enough to suggest that there's no cause for concern despite this massive, staggering collapse in activity. This is like if the DVD invention had been a less succesful product than Betamax and someone tried to say that this was no cause for concern. That's the magnitude of the retardation involved in trying to claim that there's nothing wrong with the current state of the game.

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Jakabov wrote:

We have GAMEBREAKING issues that people are marching from the game in large numbers over and they barely get a passing mention by the dev team, having received no serious attention whatsoever since they were brought up two years ago.

I'm not arguing with you, because I haven't been playing that long, but what issues are these? The only "GAMEBREAKING" issue I've come across is desync and the developers have mentioned it so much I'm sick of hearing about it.

Desync, itemization non-progress, melee unviability, physical damage unviability, wildly overtuned damage intake, endgame map bottleneck, astounding mismatch between the amount of currency items needed to progress and the amount you can obtain, general class (read: build) balance issues, horrendous over-emphasis on the life stat, and the lack of diversity in racing content (more than 95% of racing gameplay takes place in act 1 normal).

And just to elaborate a little (edit: ok a lot):

Desync: the devs may mention it now and then, but they still haven't done anything yet. It was brought up way back in the early days of CB and Chris said he expected to have it fixed before OB. Heh.

Itemization non-progress: POE has the same issue D3 had, it's nearly impossible to find good items. You tend to go for such a long time between jackpots that it becomes obvious that something isn't right. There's a ballpark for what's the "correct" ratio of time vs. reward, and POE is so far off the mark that it boggles the mind.

Melee unviability: this is pretty widely documented and acknowledged. Melee gameplay is so much weaker than ranged that it's not competitively viable as a whole. There's a select few melee builds that are okay, but generally it's an established fact that melee is incredibly underpowered.

Physical damage unviability: elemental damage dominates every aspect of the game, to the point where there isn't a competitively viable build in existence which does more than half of its damage as physical. Even the ones generally considered physical builds typically do more than 75% of their damage as elemental. The best melee and archery builds are both builds that pretty much ignore physical damage in favor of stacking additive elemental.

Wildly overtuned damage intake: mobs in the higher-level content do so much damage that the game literally isn't playable with anything but a tank character. A build is not considered endgame-viable if it has under +200% life from passives. You will get hit for 3-4k damage per hit in some places. The damage intake of this game is so wildly off the charts that literally every character that has ever made it past level 80 has been a tank build.

Endgame map bottleneck: well-documented issue, you cannot sustain a pool of maps and must eventually buy more. Even if you chisel/alch/chaos all your maps, it's nearly impossible to get past the lower 70s of maplevels. The only high-level players are the ones who buy a ton of maps and pool with all their friends who play all day. See the most recent discussion by the guy who hit level 100 and explained how it took a team of like two dozen people pooling resources, and he had to keep a trading character on a second computer so he could trade for maps constantly, including while playing in maps with his main character.

Astounding mismatch between the amount of currency items needed to progress and the amount you can obtain: to level past like 80, you need to start spending way, waaaaay more currency on rolling high% maps than you can possibly obtain via gameplay. So much so that many people feel forced to resort to RMTing in order to level as it is the only alternative to playing with a big crew that all feed eachother currency/maps.

General build balance issues: there are like five builds that are truly competitively viable (i.e. good enough to keep up with the other best builds), the build diversity is absolutely minimal. Freezing pulse is so vastly superior to every other elemental spell that using the others can barely be justified, for example.

Horrendous over-emphasis on the life stat: it's called Path of Lifenodes for a reason. Every build needs to spend like more than half of its passives on stacking life because it's the only really viable form of defense. The same applies to ES for ES-based builds.

The lack of diversity in racing content (more than 95% of racing gameplay takes place in act 1 normal): doesn't need much explanation. Instead of setting some of the races in, say, level 1 versions of maps or something, they all begin at act 1 normal. Since most races are about an hour or two, nearly all racing gameplay takes place in A1N and people are getting sick of playing that content over and over and over and over many times every day.

honest question...

i have been here a very long time. what i don't get is what has changed so much from cbt to obt besides # of forum trolls?

i started playing in sept 2011 when all classes started on same place on the passive tree so i have seen pretty much every change.

what is so different besides the added content and features? my game stability is virtually teh same. i have a ton more gems to play with. more gear. more vendor recipes. i can actually trade without dropping crap on the ground.

do you all just miss MoC that much? seriously i am curious cuz this game just seems to get better and better to me, so much that its basically all i have played since that day in sept 2011 when i got in cbt.

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scorpitron wrote:

honest question...

i have been here a very long time. what i don't get is what has changed so much from cbt to obt besides # of forum trolls?

i started playing in sept 2011 when all classes started on same place on the passive tree so i have seen pretty much every change.

what is so different besides the added content and features? my game stability is virtually teh same. i have a ton more gems to play with. more gear. more vendor recipes. i can actually trade without dropping crap on the ground.

do you all just miss MoC that much? seriously i am curious cuz this game just seems to get better and better to me, so much that its basically all i have played since that day in sept 2011 when i got in cbt.

It's the things that didn't change from CB and the things that did change as well. Pretty much all of the stuff the poster above you listed. Some if it is issue's that have existed well before OB. A good portion of it though is from the changes in OB.

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Destradoz wrote:

Some people here have absolutely no clue as to what makes up a dead game. I've played games with an average population of 1k players, and even that had enough of a population to not be considered dead.

Were they F2P games that funded themselves solely on microtransactions without a publisher or any financial backing?

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Windays wrote:

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scorpitron wrote:

honest question...

i have been here a very long time. what i don't get is what has changed so much from cbt to obt besides # of forum trolls?

i started playing in sept 2011 when all classes started on same place on the passive tree so i have seen pretty much every change.

what is so different besides the added content and features? my game stability is virtually teh same. i have a ton more gems to play with. more gear. more vendor recipes. i can actually trade without dropping crap on the ground.

do you all just miss MoC that much? seriously i am curious cuz this game just seems to get better and better to me, so much that its basically all i have played since that day in sept 2011 when i got in cbt.

It's the things that didn't change from CB and the things that did change as well. Pretty much all of the stuff the poster above you listed. Some if it is issue's that have existed well before OB. A good portion of it though is from the changes in OB.

but what if i disagree with that claim? I mean we are still in beta and the dev manifesto seems to have at least a crude roadmap to many of the things listed in the post you reference.

i think the biggest issue i see are people who insist that getting to 100 is the point of the game. imo its not. level capping is just so MMOish. I and everyone i know play builds to prove/disprove they are fun/viable. reroll reroll reroll. the game just seems tailor made for HC players like me and my friends.

so in those terms i'd say the game has held true to vision and is only getting better.