Last Epoch is POE Killer now

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DarkJen wrote:

We need more competition and ideas.
We need more fun!

This!

Competition creates quality. It forces people to do their best. Hell, a healthy competition often makes all competitors better, without either one of them "dying" or being "killed".

LE looks good, and I will try it out one of these days. But LE will never "kill" PoE. Hell, people are going all crazy about the minor speed nerfs on flasks and Smoke Mine this league. How these people can even come close to liking LE, is beyond me. PoE will always be the fastest ARPG out there, and people craving speed will probably stick to PoE.

Right: if the server goes down on a GaaS, it is effectively dead.

Or is it?

If a game is truly that beloved, No-life finds a way. The absolute oldest online game I ever played, a text based rpg designed for BBSes called Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD), is still online and people still play it. Private shards for most dead but good MMOs abound. Sometimes they are so faithful the devs endorse them (I believe this happened with CoH).

Path of Exile isn't good in this regard because it's not the game people would need maintained, but the market. This is of course by design. One more way in which GGG retain control and ensure that PoE WILL die on their watch. I could probably play it offline as a static game and get a lot of time out of it (say hello to my Titan Quest roster: 23...or my Wolcen one: 78) but I am fairly sure GGG themselves don't think the majority of Exiles could. I think the notion of a game being alive because its devs are constantly fucking with it is extraordinarily strong with PoE. And so Exiles in turn start to see this as the defining factor for a game being alive or dead.

With very few exceptions, buy to play games can function long after their devs have moved on. That is the entire point of buy to play, a welcome carryover from a time before games could be fixed post release in a speedy fashion. From a time before people expected games to be deployed somewhat broken but patched multiple times thereafter. Games were a lot simpler then, certainly, but devs also had to say, decisively, 'we have finished making this game. It is made. Complete'. And because they didn't have to actively keep it alive, it could never actually die. As long as someone could play it.

Amusingly a lot of these games died simply because the hardware left them behind. Hence the remaster. Hence the remake.

I own a LOT of dead games in this regard. I imagine most of you do.

They lived a good life though, if they were good games. If they were really good, they might enjoy some sort of reincarnation or renewal. And if they were masterpieces, people defied concepts like planned obsolescence and found ways to emulate the experience.

PoE has not really lived a good life. It has just sort of grown, with no real understanding of the importance of an ending. After all, no one really wants their all-consuming addiction to end, outside of moments of painfully still clarity that yes, it is an addition. It is both more and less than just a game, if its possible death means that much to you. That moment of panic in which you ponder your life without it, alive and familiar and comforting and most importantly, *there*.

Judging by how many of you no longer understand what it means to be a casual Exile (you know this is an oxymoron after all), I think PoE's actual death would leave a significant hole in your daily routine.

And that is why, at the heart of it, Exiles speak of PoE killers with such fervour...on the PoE forum. To other PoE addicts. It's not that you want PoE to die or that you want other games to kill it. You want to be ready for when it actually happens, so simulate it anytime a potential PoE killer comes along.

I was wrong then. PoE isn't your ex and the New Game isn't some fresh crush. And you don't really want them to clash. But it's fun to pretend, to trial run what it might feel like if they did. To see if you really could be satisfied by whatever follows PoE's place in your gaming regimen.

Because if it really did you would embrace that instead.

And I freely admit my own addiction here. I will very likely never join another online community as I did this one. I'm not looking for a replacement. A PoE forum killer, if you will. Even if GGG themselves did that years ago...their presence was never that important to me. After all, I Rule Wraeclast, not them. They work for it. They reap it. They sell it. They use it. Their business and mine only coincide when one of us screws up -- and you'd better believe the monitoring goes both ways. Difference being, of course, all I can do is point out when they screw up. I screw up and I really get pointed out. With the pointy end. Pointedly.

Stupid little tangent there, sorry. I felt it important to point out that when I speak of PoE as an addiction, I don't mean my own meta-game here. I mean genuine daily play of PoE for several hours. For months. Maybe even years. Not all addictions are equally harmful though...It all comes back to how you feel when you seriously contemplate its sudden and absolute absence.

Because that is what its death would ultimately mean. Nothing less than that.

Which is why this isn't a concept anyone here should invoke lightly. Especially not when talking about a replacement that only resembles a typical PoE experience in the most superficial of ways...the best ways, maybe, but probably not the most important. As noted by those pointing out what quintessential (if violently contentious) PoE features Last Epoch has yet to implement successfully.

You don't want PoE to die. You just want to be ready for when it does. But as this thread's very premise confirms, PoE will always be some sort of alive as long as it remains the measure by which other ARPGs are judged. As long as that is true, it is too precious to die. To GGG, to Tencent, to you.

And by becoming the ARPG measure is how it "killed" Diablo, in case you weren't sure. You only need look at how many people wish D2R had more PoE features to see that.

--
Edit: interesting coincidence. GF is catching up on Animal Crossing after a long absence by using a little trick players call time travel. You alter the switch's date to play the days you missed. Fail to do this and your island will be all sorts of crap after months of neglect. Nintendo are perfectly cool with this...

Sort of.

See, the game still reads server time to implement seasonal events like Halloween. So no matter how much she changes the switch time she will not get to enjoy what happened to the game during that time. This is an example of how a game can be dead and alive at the same time. Detached from real time, Animal Crossing has its own internal time -- alive. But it won't update with real time changes no matter how much you mess with the internal clock -- dead. Playable but not complete.

Incidentally this was done so that players couldnt manipulate their switch time to effectively data-mine future events.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

PoE has not really lived a good life.

its the greatest arpg that has ever been made, that probably ever will be made and it enjoyed long term by more people than any other arpg in history by such a long stretch its absurd. no arpg has even done 1/10 of what this game has, its lived 10x the life of any game in the genre, and it shits all over all of them. every single one of them is utter trash compared to poe. all those offline compatible arpgs are shit compared to poe and most hardcore arpg heads will end their lives having spent significantly more time playing poe than those games. so their eternal nature is meaningless.


so no, that statement is wrong. i know you want to believe these things, but they are not true, and trying to convince the world they are true is not gonna change the fact theyre not and you know it. deep down you know what ive just said is right, you just dont want it to be true.

people will play poe without an economy, almost all the big streamers play solo self found hardcore, the game works fine in that format and if it was resigned to that format drop rates could be adjusted so average players would feel fine being self found. take away the economy and community aspect of poe and its still 10x better than any other arpg out there.

Although the premise that LE will kill POE is absurd, I do think LE and other games getting better is good for POE if for no other reason than competition creates innovation.

To this day, I think the worst thing to happen to POE was D3 slowly dying and losing support from the developer. D3 provided a critical need in the ARPG marketplace. A casual friendly ARPG on rails that enabled killing things and didn't require much investment in time or knowledge of the game. It scratched the itch without much investment.

LE or D4 can't come fast enough. Then people can find other games to meet their needs, rather than hoping that a single caters to every category of gamer.

To the original point of the post, POE won't be killed by any external games. I think there is enough dedicated POE players to keep the lights on, even it means scaling back on the scope of leagues. The only way POE dies is if GGG turns off the lights.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

PoE has not really lived a good life. It has just sort of grown, with no real understanding of the importance of an ending.

I think you need to pick one. You talk about other games - beloved games - masterpieces - that get emulated long after their obsolescence. Yet the PoE players are the ones who get labeled addicts. I have little doubt that if PoE ended abruptly, tomorrow, that a dedicated few would take to making a cracked offline version, or perhaps modding GD or D2 to function like PoE with items and mechanics if they could find a way.

So either admit that - that PoE is in the same category as those other fabled games, or call the rest of the players who pursue such necromancy with other games 'addicts' as well.

Which is to say that if addict is a pejorative, lets not act like PoE is unique in that space. And if it were true that no one would resurrect it, then I guess the community is less addicted than other gamers to other titles after all.

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Exile009 wrote:

Last Epoch doesn't even have trade yet. We'll see how everyone's favorite darling of crafting accessibility fares once that trial by fire rolls in...

No one talks about this and I'm going to keep harping on it as well. The closer LE tries to emulate PoE, the more and more of the same dev vs community problems its going to run in to. It's gonna be a speed run of everything this game went through (and is still going through). They'll never please everyone and if the game is fortunate enough to 'make it big' they'll have a perpetually angry set of vocal minorities clamoring for the game to be made their way.

I do not use pejoratives in relation to other people here. I don't have to. Or, I am pleased to finally admit, really want to. I save my contempt for bigger, more meaningless things. :)

And I figured my own explanation of why a PoE addiction is not the same as a PoE forum addition made clear enough that I see addiction as something much more nuanced than a state to be pitied or even overcome without a great deal of self-reflection. Hence why I also said not all addictions are equally harmful. I'm utterly addicted to nail biting, for example. Doesnt mean I can't grow them when I make a conscious effort but if I find myself lapsing, my default state seems to be one of nervous gnawing. Do remember that one very common factor for facing addiction is the notion that you never stop being addicted -- you only stop doing that to which you are and always will be, in some way, addicted. Sometimes that cessation is lifelong. Sometimes its a choice. Sometimes its not. Often, I would argue, its driven by extenuating circumstances. Most obvious being health, but just as likely is availability and access.

Which brings us back to gamers, who have always to a degree been at the mercy of availability and access.

So absolutely those who seek to maintain a game experience beyond various limitations or technical difficulties are possibly addicts. Probably even.

What you also may have missed but absolutely acknowledge is the curious positive flipside of addiction: ingenuity. That old saying about necessity being the mother of invention. Without a state of addiction, of blurring want and need, we wouldn't have poe.trade. or PoB. Or private DAoC servers. Or emulators. Or anything else gamers come up with to meet the demands of any given game that aren't met in a more official capacity. Heck, a gamer who has turned meeting those needs into an addition itself is a formidable force. Admirably so.

You might think I am being loosy goosy with the definition of addict here but I needed you to see that I do not use it in some flippant, lazily negative way. No self-aware addict should...and I am fiercely addicted to explaining myself when someone seems to have read me wrong. ;)

Now as to a PoE addiction, I do think it's fairly unhealthy based entirely on how unhappy it seems to make people based on changes outside their control. Surely the key angle of PoE's volatile meta, something GGG have claimed would be a defining factor from the start, should be why people are addicted, not something to be tolerated or endured. I suppose that is the crux for me: why did something become an addiction, and is it still an addiction for that reason...or is it an addiction in and of itself, some routine or ritual that is its own meaning bereft of whatever drew you to it in the first place?

If the latter, then I think there is something to be addressed. If not, all good.

Many would say it's only an addiction if its the former. Those people, I would argue, do use the term as a pejorative. I would quietly think them hypocrites, but am happy to leave it at that.

...I find LE kind of bland. It has all the ingredients for my idea of an addictive as hell ARPG but it doesn't have the recipe quite right. As opposed to Wolcen which has fewer such ingredients and doesn't bother trying to cook them. I am a sucker for salad if you use the right dressing. :)

PoE, in comparison, is like those trendy meal delivery kits. They give you the ingredients and instructions and if you follow the steps you can make a pretty good meal. But you are equally free to ignore them and possibly waste a bunch of food. And me, well, if I am going to pay someone to deliver a meal my baseline is its either ready to eat OR aiming to mimic a restaurant level experience. PoE is too undercooked and unpolished to be either.

Anyway. LE has a lot to offer. But I don't think EHG would ever delude themselves into thinking that is all it takes to "kill" an addictive as hell competitor...thankfully they don't have to. It's only gamers who feel otherwise, because as I said, they DO have to make a choice. You can play a bunch of games...but you can be seriously addicted to only one at a time. And PoE is built with this premise at every level. PoE, like any GaaS, thrives on FOMO, which will almost always keep people coming back. Choosing to play that game in that moment over all others.

LE on the other hand is sort of just there. Something to check on now and then. For a buy to play game, that suffices. For a f2p GaaS, it's a death sentence.

I'll say I misread your intention, but you must concede that 'addict' is a personal and loaded term (with pretty heavy, non-gaming, real-world implications) for a lot of people - I suspect I won't be alone in reading a different definition than the one you speak.

On topic, LE has said they'll be aiming for something like seasons, but not ones that launch during PoE league launches, right? That screams 'competitor' to me. Not even trying for the moniker 'slayer'. Much like what we're seeing with FF14 and WoW, all the LE team can do is make the best game they can and hope for the other guy to stick the proverbial stick into his own front bicycle tire.

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Chavolatra wrote:

Last Update is fantastic and turned in poe killer because 1% game balance destroyed this game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oxspDb7GPo&ab_channel=LastEpoch

LE is truly a great game but currently nowhere near to PoE in terms of content and depth, but more to come very soon in between POE leagues.

IMO both games will thrive together in the future, both do their own thing ! More choice of games is better for us ;)

Just love how many gr8 games we have nowadays (PoE/LE/GD/D3/D2R/D4 etc and dont mention countless indie top down arpgs...), think back a decade ago there was not much choice ...

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I will very likely never join another online community as I did this one.

:(