Community smaller?

Is it just me or is the community smaller this time around? I'm playing on an alt account, just so I can finally buy some points, that said I noticed that the trade market is much smaller than it was compared to the prior seasons. While I understand I'm somewhat ahead of the curve, already doing red tier maps on day 2, the market wasn't this small at day 2 -- especially compared to Legion. I also notice far less people running around town etc. Hopefully the situation will improve in the coming days but the community does seem smaller this time around at day 2.

It would not shock me if the community is smaller after the absolute mess Legion was with all the lag and constant crashing. (I think Fallout 76 was more stable) I lasted about 3 weeks before I threw in the towel.

I haven't come back after that but plan on giving Blight a try. However if its another mess... I am going to take my money/time someplace else and come back next season to see if GGG can fix their engine/servers/code.

Blight has been very stable for me with no crashes, no real lag, no issues to speak of. Admittedly, I didn't play Legion, so didn't experience that dumpster-fire. Delve, on the other hand...

Anyway, I only played a few hours yesterday and didn't notice any appreciable "absence" of players in the town zones.

The real key will be examining the Marketplace offerings and number of them. We should see about three pages of "Belly of the Beast" within the next week to ten days or so. (ie: By end of next week.) Five or six pages by the end of the League, at the least. There should be a handful of Kaom's up for sale at any one time by the middle of next week, too. For "End Game" items, that's more problematic. I'd expect to see about a page or so of Starforges by halfway through the League, for instance. There should be a good dozen or so Watcher's Eyes for sale just before the halfway mark, I would think.

Chaos to Exalt usually ends up somewhere around 70's mark or so, depending on currency farmers. (I generally calculate it at around 75, but it does vary and one has to watch the currency farmers/etc to get it right.)

And, the pages and pages of leveling items and lowbie Uniques should start to ramp up pretty soon. For some item classes, you won't even want to search those items due to pages and pages of crappy uniques nobody will ever, ever, buy. :)

So, check the Marketplace. PoE is a "Gear Game" and the variety/amount of items in the Marketplace are, IMO, a good indicator of the current health of the population. Players are looking for very specific gear and are trying to buy very rare gear - It should be something that is utilized by all the players who aren't playing SSF.

Note: I haven't played in a couple of Leagues, so will be watching this very closely to gauge what the health of the playerbase might be these days.

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Morkonan wrote:

Blight has been very stable for me with no crashes, no real lag, no issues to speak of. Admittedly, I didn't play Legion, so didn't experience that dumpster-fire. Delve, on the other hand...

Anyway, I only played a few hours yesterday and didn't notice any appreciable "absence" of players in the town zones.

The real key will be examining the Marketplace offerings and number of them. We should see about three pages of "Belly of the Beast" within the next week to ten days or so. (ie: By end of next week.) Five or six pages by the end of the League, at the least. There should be a handful of Kaom's up for sale at any one time by the middle of next week, too. For "End Game" items, that's more problematic. I'd expect to see about a page or so of Starforges by halfway through the League, for instance. There should be a good dozen or so Watcher's Eyes for sale just before the halfway mark, I would think.

Chaos to Exalt usually ends up somewhere around 70's mark or so, depending on currency farmers. (I generally calculate it at around 75, but it does vary and one has to watch the currency farmers/etc to get it right.)

And, the pages and pages of leveling items and lowbie Uniques should start to ramp up pretty soon. For some item classes, you won't even want to search those items due to pages and pages of crappy uniques nobody will ever, ever, buy. :)

So, check the Marketplace. PoE is a "Gear Game" and the variety/amount of items in the Marketplace are, IMO, a good indicator of the current health of the population. Players are looking for very specific gear and are trying to buy very rare gear - It should be something that is utilized by all the players who aren't playing SSF.

Note: I haven't played in a couple of Leagues, so will be watching this very closely to gauge what the health of the playerbase might be these days.

I am examining the market the most notable ones are just rares being put up are in much smaller quantities, rings for instance don't go into the double digit pages. So much so that it becomes more challenging to cap your resists alongside optimal stats, e.g. high Life / Energy Shield. From my experience with the 2 prior leagues these things would have better choices by now, even at day 2. Instead, I am seeing much less choices in terms of things like rings, amulets, and belts etc. I also notice even the leveling legendaries I put up for cheap prices, a fusing or two or an alchemy, isn't flying off as quickly as it would the prior leagues.

Generally the pages of items are far less than they were last league at the same mark, at the very least we'd be hitting 10+ pages on gear in general whereas now I don't see much hitting past 5 or 6 pages.

To some degree I do think the loot drops of the league mechanic is a lot less generous as compared to Synthesis & Legion so I do think that plays a factor. But even then just looking at the PS4 community I'm seeing a lot less activity. Any event, the weekend is coming up so maybe things will turn around by then.

Leveling has been a cinch though so I don't think that is as problematic, I was above level 70 (level 74 to be exact) by the time I reached the epilogue on Blight.

GGG's strategy seems to be "who cares if players dislike leagues and quit early on? because they will be back at the start of the next league".

The strategy works on PC where they have a long-standing following of players who've had that behavior pattern drummed into them over a decade or so. On console, we're not used to that; if we lose interest we just drift towards the next big thing and won't automatically return unless a league looks amazing.

If I hadn't quit Legion early I'd no doubt be playing Blight because it's easier to just keep playing a game I'm already playing than stop and play something else entirely. If the trailer looked amazing, it could have encouraged me back.

But the trailer looked bland and uninteresting. Nothing about it made me feel worth my while hooking-up my PS4, charging my xontroller, stop playing all my mobile games and changing my whole platform back to console.

A bad trailer was just the start: my experience of PoE on console thus far doesn't fill me with enthusiasm that Blight will be in any way playable - I expect a frequently-crashing lagfest based on that trailer which is something I don't want to put myself through again right now.

I've seen a ton of social media posts by people who think similarly, and aren't playing Blight due to disinterest because of these reasons.

So I'm not surprised the community is smaller. The question now is how much time will it take for these people to start trusting GGG again?

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UnclePobatti wrote:

A bad trailer was just the start: my experience of PoE on console thus far doesn't fill me with enthusiasm that Blight will be in any way playable - I expect a frequently-crashing lagfest based on that trailer which is something I don't want to put myself through again right now.

Well to be fair Blight is an improvement from Legion in terms of crashes and errors. It's closer to Synthesis in terms of technical quality. Although I've not yet had the opportunity to do a Blight Map, where based on what I've read on the forums is where a lot of the problems seem to occur (so I can't comment on that due to the rarity of the map). But otherwise all other aspects I've encountered less crashes and issues compared to Legion -- which really was a step back in terms of technical quality.

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Chaplin1108 wrote:

...I am examining the market the most notable ones are just rares being put up are in much smaller quantities, rings for instance don't go into the double digit pages. So much so that it becomes more challenging to cap your resists alongside optimal stats, e.g. high Life / Energy Shield. From my experience with the 2 prior leagues these things would have better choices by now, even at day 2. Instead, I am seeing much less choices in terms of things like rings, amulets, and belts etc. I also notice even the leveling legendaries I put up for cheap prices, a fusing or two or an alchemy, isn't flying off as quickly as it would the prior leagues.

Interesting. I play on XBox and noticed it seems you play on PS4? (The quote tags show your "realm" as "Sony.") It could be that the later release on PS4 just means that it hasn't yet had a chance to develop a following. Also, I have no idea what kind of marketing efforts GGG has undertaken, there. From what I have seen elsewhere, just in general terms, there isn't much in the way of marketing for PoE on consoles in general, though I don't browse console game websites often. /shrug (GGG is now owned by Tencent, IIRC. They should put a few monies into doing some marketing, taken from the deepest gaming-monies pockets on the face of the Earth... :) )

I have yet to really look at the Marketplace. I progress a bit slower than most, getting delayed by exploring a bit, not skipping content, go through a couple of gearing cycles as I go, etc. I also don't generally buy leveling gear. From what little I have seen, I have been surprised at some lower prices than I would have thought for certain items.

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To some degree I do think the loot drops of the league mechanic is a lot less generous as compared to Synthesis & Legion so I do think that plays a factor. But even then just looking at the PS4 community I'm seeing a lot less activity. Any event, the weekend is coming up so maybe things will turn around by then.

(Ah, PS4 confirmed. I tend to glance at keywords for items of interest, then click to respond...)

I think you're right on the money, here, in terms of what we can expect for the Early League market. This is not the "Loot Explosion" I remember for Delve League or even Abyss. This league has a variety of drop mechanics that do not focus on generalized drop tables. And, not every Blight nodule will have gear on the drop list, it seems.

Very good point, there. Also - The Currency Explosion effect experienced in Delve, at least by men, isn't present here. That may help keep some item prices down a bit, but puts some keystone items out of reach for quite a few. Will just have to see how it works out. (For both platforms.)

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Leveling has been a cinch though so I don't think that is as problematic, I was above level 70 (level 74 to be exact) by the time I reached the epilogue on Blight.

I haven't experienced any issues with that, either. For me, on XBox, this League has been very stable aside from a few hiccups here and there. PoE is highly dependent on the quality of the player's connection. Extremely so. (I don't know if they have changed anything, there, or not. It may be that they have lowered the frequency of checks/updates a little bit.)

I'm sure if it's because I'm in the EU but when I play there are about one or two people in any town while I was levelling while in Oriath the number goes up to five lol. When returning to Act 1 Lionseye there were even more people. Basically it feels to me there are less active players compared to the two previous leagues. Maybe people are fed up of the Blue Screens or crappy trade.

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AbilityPoints wrote:

I'm sure if it's because I'm in the EU but when I play there are about one or two people in any town while I was levelling while in Oriath the number goes up to five lol. When returning to Act 1 Lionseye there were even more people. Basically it feels to me there are less active players compared to the two previous leagues. Maybe people are fed up of the Blue Screens or crappy trade.

I was looking over the weekend and to me the population is definitely less. The market situation hasn't changed much. And I started checking https://ps4.poe-racing.com/ as I did last season and noticed that the amount of people leveled past 90 are significantly smaller than the prior season, I'm just 91 and I'm already ranked 78 (as of writing) as an Occultist (I have 40% exp). The numbers for competition are much smaller now when generally was ranked around 200-300+ last season.

Now I don't have access to metrics or anything, but PS4 absolutely looks like it has less people on it.

I've noticed a lot fewer people in town, and a lot less being listed on the market, though there definitely seemed to be a decent number of people logged in at launch (but even then queues seemed a lot shorter than last time around).

I think it goes deeper than loot explosions. GGG has never really done well with optimizing the game - but PS4 is honestly in bad shape. Crashes are frequent if you're playing as intended. Now, if you want to turn off all sound in-game... crashes mostly disappear. However, even when you disable your sound, blights will reduce framerate to single digits if you do not kill all of the spawns almost instantly.

T1 blighted maps are impossible; while a minion build will carry you through most slowdowns, input in blights will stop being processed. Framerate will only return once you die (while you stay out of the map) or the blight map/encounter fails.

I threw money at GGG because I'm appreciative of them expanding their player base, and going with complexity over accessibility. I hyped up my friend that used to watch me race on another account and got him into it, and he threw money at GGG too. Both of us did it with the expectation that there would be issues.

But...

I've dealt with the constant BSOD on PS4 since launch with the expectation that it'd be patched. So far no change. There was even an increase in BSOD frequency.

I've switched to playing with no sound, just so I can keep going without so many crashes.

But then there's Blight. The major selling point for this league - is literally unplayable. And it doesn't seem to be an isolated occurrence. The only way to avoid the framerate killing events is to skip all league content completely.

Searching for gear is (intentionally) painful. GGG wants people to slog through 50 pages to find one piece that could be helpful to you. The end result is the same as the game it usurped - the loot explosions (which have filters by default on console to remove the clutter of useless junk) is meaningless and players spend ridiculous amounts of time trading. And there's buying - because the only way new players know how to sell is to vendor. Premium tabs and the need to use third-party sites to organize trades isn't explained from the get go. And we know how many F2P players like being told purchases are mandatory.

My friend I brought in - he did well as I guided him through the intricacies. But he's tired of all the useless garbage drops. He's tired of sifting through everyone else's garbage drops trying to find something useful. He doesn't want to use a cell phone to try to share his PSN on a third party forum just to try to make a decent trade. And he's tired of constantly crashing. He's just flat out done.

Honestly, I'm not so sure I'm not. I could always go back to playing it on PC, but how console has been treated and knowing there's no possible way they could have tested it for console doesn't leave me with a good taste in my mouth.