1 month league response to low player numbers?

I don't know why people make player numbers their business,GGG will know all about how many are playing and actually know more.It's in their own interest to keep it going.

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Game population seems fine to me. All towns have players, I can find groups and people to trade with readily at all times of day; 4am, 7:20am, 5pm, midnight.

Exactly,seems fine so players will be more attracted to playing.Saying it's dying serves no purpose other than to spread negativity.

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Jojas wrote:

It is low now and will go up again with the next mini-expansion/4-month league, then down again over time, then up again with act 4, and so on.

Of course GGG tries to keep people occupied between leagues, that is just standard business practice. It would be seriously daft not to offer anything to anyone who is staying between leagues.

Your assumptions are just ill will.

This. Very well put along with many other posts.

So many games in the past do very little to keep players occupied during further development. GGG has done a great job keeping their players occupied with new leagues with cool mods and then incorporating them into standard/hardcore for the casual that play at their own pace.

This is the reason GGG will stay around for a long time. It's not just the game that keeps me around; it's the way that the players come first.

There is a difference between dying and a lull. Big difference.

I think ist a genre-thing. People these days don’t play one game for a long time but every month 2 new games. One could say ARPG’s in general are dying.

If you want to play a game with huge activity then go on and play call of duty with the legions of retarded teenagers who pretend to bang every moms on the planet several times a day.

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DogFaceNoSpace wrote:

There has been a long thread that poe is dead recently. Many people say that poe is not dead, but even those that blindly love poe cannot deny that player numbers have dropped drastically.

I was wondering if the decision to run a 1 month league in between the temp leagues is a decision motivated by the low player numbers.

I can imagine that GGG want to boost their microtransaction sales and player count. Also there must not have been a lot of income lately. There were no new supporter packs and a lot of players quitting until the new league start.

 As of late I'm not sure what in the world GGG is up to. You are of course right in that GGG wants as many MTXs as possible (duh, that's where the revenue comes from) so we will always have new ones added. Nothing new there. But GGG totally and bizarrely baffles me any many others when the change was made with how purchasing stash tabs are activated. Stash tab sales has got to be GGGs biggest revenue generating MTX and to make a change that has such a major impact to the way we keep our temporary league items in the permanent leagues for long term use has caused a lot of head scratching (can't buy tabs and keep remove-only gear for the long term so buying tabs is out for now).

 You are correct that daily players is down considerably, some is due to the fact that we're between 4 month leagues, some is due to players taking a summer break, but some has to be because of burnout and/or stagnation. PoE is getting or has gotten to where we (anyone who has played over a year) know all the maps, have seen all the monsters, have suffered and pushed through the desync as best possible, have played many, many builds to try all kinds of skills, and in general have been there and done that. So now GGG has to:

A. feed us new zones to get us interested in playing more
B. give us better rewards for time played (better quality drops)
C. overhaul the PoE game engine to reduce desync more
D. launch their trading system to spur the trading part of this game
E. come up with a better endgame than just grinding forever

 GGG has done a good job with A but the B through E items have not changed much (if any) since the beginning of OB in January of 2013. GGG can say they are working on C or D and it's an "ocean sized" problem to solve (but hey GGG, Magellan's crew made it across the (at that time) unknown Pacific Ocean in less than a year so are you really that understaffed in the coding department?) but after a year and a half and still no B through E (not even one of them) this is leading many to believe that PoE is on it's last legs as a "fun to play" arpg. There will always be the extreme players happily playing here (every game has them) but that special extra something that elevates a game from middle of the road to great or the rare few that become famous (such as D2) is not here in PoE. The balance of risk/rewards/time just isn't good for many and so the drop in popularity is not surprising.

 I strongly believe that GGG has failed to provide a suitable endgame to sustain playing interest, grinding for 10s of hours to gain a few exp is boring to most. I read where some one said he lost about 30 hours of grind time on his level 97 character when he died. 30 hours to gain 10% exp at level 97? I can believe that and in the same breath think "what's the point? I mean, if I spend 1000+ hours of my life and grind a build to level 100, what then?" GGG has no endgame other than the grind itself and a high ladder ranking plus maybe a BiS gear. But that is not enough for the majority of arpg players. I've thrown in my 2¢ worth on what I think the endgame map grind goal should be to motivate us:

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Arrowneous wrote:

 GGG also needs to rethink their strategy on the end play (levels 68 to 100). Right now GGG has PoE exponentially more time consuming to grind XP to level up. This keeps us from getting to level 100 too fast and being bummed out with that but I don't see that as a problem but as another storyline element that needs to be leveraged. GGG needs to use the whole story of being exiled to Wraeclast as a punishment for crimes committed and use the 100 level cap as a goal to be reached to get pardoned and allowed to leave Wraeclast as a free person. If we can play our characters up to level 100 and then get pardoned for our crimes and get a great conclusion to all the grinding to get to level 100, complete with a cinematic ending like D3 has, then the incentive to keep on playing and grinding XP will be worth it. A great level 100 goal is needed. When we get our character pardoned and leave Wraeclast that build will be retired and placed on the pardoned exile ladder with all the stats viewable to all. Then there will be a big currency reward given (100 fusings + 100 jewellers or something really rare but immediately usable) which will be placed in our stash along with our current inventory gear (as a new read-only tab). Finally, that character is permanently retired and no longer playable (similar to what TorchLight has). We take our great reward and start over with a new build. Getting to level 100 should not be seen as a rare once in a blue moon achievement but as a more common and easier to reach goal with less grinding at the top 32 levels.

 PoE has many great possibilities for the endgame to be much better and more fun than it currently is now and GGG should make some sweeping changes soon to re-invigorate the loyal but tiring (and grind exhausted) PoE fans before the player base collapses from fatigue and burnout.

I posted this on March 5th as one way to get us to desire to play a build to level 100. Right now GGG has nothing for us so there is no desire for most to grind on. It's very easy to get burned out and quit. Even more easy to rage quit if it takes approx. 30 hours near the end (the level 97 build) to gain 10% exp and in one quick desync moment have that time wiped out.

 Most PoE players (the 99%) are looking for a much more rewarding endgame and until GGG delivers something better than we have now (which is nothing) PoE popularity will continue to wane and it will be the end.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

We play a game because we like it. We don't play the game because other people like it or don't. It doesn't matter to us. Quit acting like it's important.

It's not important that people are quitting the game? For what I know game = players and players = game. If one dosen't exist the other dosen't exist.

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n0S0up wrote:

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Shagsbeard wrote:

We play a game because we like it. We don't play the game because other people like it or don't. It doesn't matter to us. Quit acting like it's important.

It's not important that people are quitting the game? For what I know game = players and players = game. If one dosen't exist the other dosen't exist.

You all could quit and leave me alone to play. As long as GGG didn't shut down the servers, I wouldn't notice the difference.

What's likely to happen, IF support for the game falters, is that GGG goes on support and cuts development. We don't know how much it costs to run a game like this. We don't know how much they currently make. All of this talk about "PoE dying" is pure speculation.

Diablo 2 after 1.10 was supported by a team of two. Two people. That's all.

What makes me play this game not as much as I would like to do are the standard leagues.

The league that is completely dominated by bots, chinese farmers and 24/7 trade chat lurkers and infested by overpowered legacy items.

My only motivation to keep playing this game is rolling new characters once new league starts, but whenever they're almost at their end I just feel like there is no point anymore to play them since they will roll to the trash leagues and the character might as well be dead for me.