Looks like a lot of players don't want to play tower defence.

"

It needs to be said more - this is not good tower defense.

This is very basic of tower defense genre and even that is not well done.

Exactly. I'm impressed they got it working as well as they did with the time they had (and that's being a bit generous) but this is just not worth playing for long.

I don't think it's such a great idea to implement very rudimentary minigames as your core league mechanic. I like TDs but if that's all a new POE league has going for it I might as well play a proper game that does it way better.

I skipped Syndicate (too complicated) and Legion (not rewarding for non meta builds) and absolutely enjoy Blight.

The performance is the only reason I might stop playing though! It get´s worse each league, it all started with Syndicate... I don´t know what they are doing but each time a new league comes out, I have no issues but then they release a patch and the game runs like crap.

Shouldn´t the performance improve with patches? Even ZiggyD is super unhappy about it right now, he almost never plays POE these days, which should give Chris some idea as to what goes wrong with his game.


We need a massive performance patch, they promised us improvements for loading times on HDD´s, they promised improvements for Betrayel lags and this since months, nothing has ever seen the light of day. It´s so disappointing how a company is just not doing anything to make their customers happy.

The summoner rework is amazing, the league is fun to engage with, but the poor performance overshadows it all.

"

Thats it...

GGG doesnt get it.

Pretty good summary actually.

Sometimes its mind boggling. Players literally tell GGG the things they like (Delve, Breach, Legion, ect...) yet they continue to balk, for reasons I cannot fathom.

"

It needs to be said more - this is not good tower defense.

This is very basic of tower defense genre and even that is not well done.

I could talk and talk about it. But lets say one example - bosses.

Great Bosses in TD games go alone and they have some different mechanics - specific ways to be defeated.You can focus on them and enjoy them as you see behemoth that is many times bigger than other mobs and when you bring it down, its a great feeling.

Here : mob that is 50%bigger than other mobs, lost in hundreds of other mobs. Dies without even knowing it was a boss, just some league achievement pops out.

An aspect of TD completely missunderstood, as almost 99% of other spects that make great TD like pausing waves, rushing waves, being rewarded for faster/more dangerous clear.

Why would we play very basic and inferior version of everything that is on market, because of the bad drops? And why that defense in blighted maps has to be 5 minutes? Why cant it be 30 minutes or an hour. You just have to balance it with loot! Thats it...

GGG doesnt get it.

Agreed, this is not TD. The appeal of TD is region-level and frontier-level strategy, not single combat or FPS run-n-shoot while you also have a tower interface open to buy tower upgrades.

While TD is often a popular game mode in RTS games where you generate a number of troops and build towers to defend against successive invasions of enemy units, GGG extrapolating this concept to minion builds as a source of "troops" breaks down due to the limitations of the rendering engine and the AI pathing.

In RTS games, troop movements and pathing are governed by a few simple rules and the engine can usually handle dozens or hundreds of identical musketeers, orks, etc. Even sophisticated rock-paper-scissors unit-counterunit calcs are easier to make when most units have similar health pools, ranges, LOS, and damage templates.

There's almost always a pause between waves as these games recognize the load on servers when there are too many goons afoot. Tower repair, reallocation of garrisons, upgrades, and retrenchments if necessary during the last phases of the wave and the intermission. Corpses disappear over time unless part of the module says you can capture artillery or enemy siege engines.

In PoE, every entity is potentially doing their own thing and has knock-on effects in proximity to other entities. Add in some flashy spell/magical effects, and then leave the corpses on the battlefield for AIs that reanimate them/explode them. Also, no pause between waves, and bosses have their own packs which have unique AI and flashy magic effects.

Naturally this seems like the "ultimate td experience" but what really happens is it lags like stink and is full of bugs and glitches as monster mods overlap and interact with tower mods and map mods in unpredictable ways.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

In fairness however, your take on this essentially eliminates any context of success, or lack there of, of each league.

Even GGG tends to celebrate strong numbers(cititng records of players for example), so it only stands to reason that they should put on their big boy pants if things dont go as well, or interest drops.

Making excuses about other games, player personal preferences, ect... shouldnt taken into larger consideration with regards to the quality, and concepts, if their development plans.

I eliminated nothing. I was only saying there could be a million different reasons why we see less players play this league than the last. Just using ONE graph and ONE league to conclude with "players are not playing because GGG are doing a piss poor job" just doesn't cut it. One league doesn't say anything about your "larger consideration".

Is this leagues first week less successful than the last? Sure. Do we know why? No.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

BL3 and WoW Classic should have no bearing on GGG's development work, and commitment.

Of course they shouldn't. But big games like that DO haven an impact on the numbers, because they (often) target the same kind of players - and they are also games people tend to really sink themselves into, making little room for other games.

What am I saying here? Using graphs, numbers and statistics on a SHORT TERM basis, is more or less useless, because the graph only tells us the numbers - everything else is PURE speculations. And the amount of "conclusion" in the OP based on this graph is mind blowing.

"

Phrazz wrote:

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

In fairness however, your take on this essentially eliminates any context of success, or lack there of, of each league.

Even GGG tends to celebrate strong numbers(cititng records of players for example), so it only stands to reason that they should put on their big boy pants if things dont go as well, or interest drops.

Making excuses about other games, player personal preferences, ect... shouldnt taken into larger consideration with regards to the quality, and concepts, if their development plans.

I eliminated nothing. I was only saying there could be a million different reasons why we see less players play this league than the last. Just using ONE graph and ONE league to conclude with "players are not playing because GGG are doing a piss poor job" just doesn't cut it. One league doesn't say anything about your "larger consideration".

Is this leagues first week less successful than the last? Sure. Do we know why? No.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

BL3 and WoW Classic should have no bearing on GGG's development work, and commitment.

Of course they shouldn't. But big games like that DO haven an impact on the numbers, because they (often) target the same kind of players - and they are also games people tend to really sink themselves into, making little room for other games.

What am I saying here? Using graphs, numbers and statistics on a SHORT TERM basis, is more or less useless, because the graph only tells us the numbers - everything else is PURE speculations. And the amount of "conclusion" in the OP based on this graph is mind blowing.

But the logic is flawed.

The numbers are the numbers. Trying to find any numbers of reasons why the league didn't go well, without examining the league itself, is fools gold for any conclusions you arrive to.

That's like saying the more successful leagues were only successful because of an absence of choice of other games. I dont believe that.

I firmly believe the leagues speak for themselves, and drawing comparisons to each league is actually the best measure (with the lowest margin of error)

I suppose we can agree to disagree, but imo the Steam numbers are quite valid to draw significant conclusions since it accounts for 40%+ of the total community.

Iunno. This has been my favorite league in the five or six I've played.

"

ffogell wrote:

It's a representative sample, just because it literally doesn't tell you everything isn't a good reason to dismiss it.

ok, a small subset of the playerbase dropping faster than usual is an small indicator.

but worry not, blizz is about to ban those "layering glitch" abusers in wow classic. player numbers will go up soon. maybe also on steam

"

Draegnarrr wrote:

Only 10% of the players could be on steam, that could still be used as a projection of how well a league is doing as long as the two groups are similar enough.

No it wouldn't. Wtf how can 10% of a playerbase be used as a projection of an ENTIRE league?

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

But the logic is flawed.

The numbers are the numbers. Trying to find any numbers of reasons why the league didn't go well, without examining the league itself, is fools gold for any conclusions you arrive to.

"

That's like saying the more successful leagues were only successful because of an absence of choice of other games. I dont believe that.

I firmly believe the leagues speak for themselves, and drawing comparisons to each league is actually the best measure (with the lowest margin of error)

I suppose we can agree to disagree, but imo the Steam numbers are quite valid to draw significant conclusions since it accounts for 40%+ of the total community.

Of course they should "look into" the league. Of course the leagues themselves are the main criteria for success. No one is debating that.

"

That's like saying the more successful leagues were only successful because of an absence of choice of other games. I dont believe that.

No, this is the definition of a strawman, and it's FAR from "like saying that".

OK, we can agree to disagree: You think it's fine to conclude after ONE week of ONE league based on ONE graph that GGG are failing and are doomed, because they drag PoE in the wrong direction. I mean it's too soon to say, and too little information pointing in that direction.

Look, I can bring along strawmen too.

The ONLY thing that graph shows us, is that this league is less popular (among Steam users) than the last. It doesn't show us ANYTHING else.