Game is dropping like a stone
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Yeah. Check steam charts.
For those that does not understand player count and ratings, its both going down, fast. No, it's not "expected" or "normal", and any serious company should treat this with great respect and worry. This is a game with 40 ish campaign hours and about 250 endgame hours if you go by GGG's estimates themselves. It shouldn't have peaked until about mid January. The drop-off is happening before most players even reach the worst part of the game, which is early mapping (sub T10), and point 5/6 and 7/8 of ascendancy. For the people not playing meta builds, another brick wall will be found in late maps, as you die constantly and brick your XP gain. When the players that are now battling through cruel reached that stage of the game, expect both ratings and player numbers to drop like a stone. The hype train audience that came from one hit wonders and told everyone we should find it fun or go back to POE1, will take their leave around that time too. They will move on to the next great big thing, that isn't POE1 or 2. Campaign A1-3 is great. The difficulty should have been more of a curve, but the story is good, bosses great, art and sound on point. That's where it all stops for me. Melee is atrocious, ascendancies locked behind content most people dislike a lot, magic find is bricking the economy, crafting a random joke, early mapping is completely joyless and has no drops, late maps are horrible of you are not one of the meta 15k energy shield builds or some sort of one-shot exploit. Passive tree massively unbalanced, and the overall pace combined with map size makes running maps a chore, not an action-filled fast little run you could do between work and dinner. Death penalties beyond silly, punishing most builds while incentivizing a few handful of others. Yeah this is early access. But GGG, this is an abject failure, and I expected so, so much more after all the experience and feedback you have accrued over the years. No, I don't expect POE1 -I expected a lot more. But got less. A lot less. Last edited by JC_GGG#0000 on Dec 27, 2024, 8:00:13 AM Last bumped on Dec 27, 2024, 8:01:23 AM
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" + my feelings are the same. Disappointed by the fact that GGG seems to have actively unlearned everything the learned from PoE1. |
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Yep +1 to pretty much everything.
Also about trial of the sekhemas, I'm a sanctum enjoyer in PoE 1 and even I think it's horrendous in this game lmao. Like it's just a worse version of Sanctum which was already a divisive hate or love it league. Honor being 1-to-1 with your ehp makes actually 0 sense. Resolve being 300/300 and you taking flat resolve damage at least makes sense. Here ES stackers can just get like 15k honor and ignore the mechanic altogether, meanwhile non-es builds with 1500 life are struggling with 3k honor at most if they equip max honor relics. It's actually laughable how much of a downgrade this whole mechanic is. And then Ultimatum was just overtuned garbage. Can't wait for that 3rd ToTA trial(if you know, you know). Turtles, sIlVeR cOmEt, getting hooked, getting bear-trapped, getting stunned for 5 seconds while your character gets up at the pace of a snail, "engaging gameplay" such as channeling on a totem. It's gonna be so fun! /s |
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Saying this game is an "abject failure" is going WAY too far.
They have a really solid core. They just need to make finding items meaningful and work on the scaling diffiuclty. So much of what POE 2 does is amazing. The core gameplay, the boss battles. IMO they're just getting sidetracked by too many secondary modes and challenges and not honing in on what makes this genre amazing and great, the item grind and scaling difficulty. You can spend years creating some ascendancy challenge that players will enjoy for a couple hours, or you can spend years perfecting the core play systems and scaling difficutly and players will enjoy the main game more and for years longer. This has been repeated so many times I hope that GGG are getting the signal. We want a looter RPG, not a half arsed action game shoved inside a looter RPG. That's it. If they can fix those things and tie them together so the game is fun and rewarding when you play it, they win. Yes it's early access. They are collecting all sorts of data and opinions and will likely figure out how to tune content moving forward that addresses the above problems. Last edited by crazyfingers619#3901 on Dec 24, 2024, 7:17:13 PM
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Yeah no one wants to play this game filled with scammers, Jonathan was about to finally implement a modern Auction House to stop all these scammers but Tencent stepped in.
An Auction House would eliminate their HideOut MTX sales people only buy these HideOuts to show off to buyers, if they implement a AH it would kill a large portion of their revenue. Selling a paid game like this then making such bad game designs on purpose to promote Microtransactions is just pure scummy stuff like what Blizzard does. But then again POE is owned by Tencent. |
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" Yeah. It's absurd how GGG has managed to take huge losses on basically every mechanic there is, considering they had 12 years of feedback to work with. You'd think they'd take the easy wins like no magic find, not bottlenecking ascendancies, making armor useless, and resistances bricked. Worse, the gem setup is a giant downgrade, the crafting so dumb I don't have words for it. The best advice I got for campaign is "check each vendor on level up". Like I want to play a browsing simulator. The more I dig into this game, the more I dislike it. GGG has a few more weeks to salvage this mess, but I suspect they are eating up good will and a huge portion of players that will never come back. This reminds more more of a No mans sky launch than a Diablo 2 situation. The fallout is gigantic. Streamers and reviews completely fail to understand that the foundation of success for POE was longevity and leagues. A basic game mechanic with a fairly balanced and short campaign, trials all build archetypes could handle, and a certainty of progression at least till around lvl 95. You could even do meaningful low level map runs to build your character. POE2 has failed in every single of these regards. It's literally the one area they could not fail in. They sold us a single player souls like ruthless experience that is fun for ONE playthrough. Who want's another of the 25+ hours of this campaign every 3 months? Not me. |
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" I was afraid to hear this was the key reason for this, had an inkling it was. The only reason to allow such terrible systems would be because of massive revenue streams. Real darned shame. Oh well, it is what it is. |
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" Instead of GGG deciding to work on a last-minute patch to solve critical issues like the endgame being a huge piece of shit, and Citadels never being found even after 50 hours or more in the endgame, nothing about fixing the Trials that are horrible (and the Chaos Trial is randomly crashing), nothing about giving huge buffs to the Warrior class's movement and attack speed and even damage, among other issues. They decide that the game is great, and that maybe next year they'll think about fixing all this. They'll have a surprise in the new year, that not even streamers are playing this Diablo 4-2.0 anymore. |
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" To be fair I didn't mean the game as a whole is an abject failure. But the big glaring problems that they should have known beforehand is. I mean, everyone with half a brain knew magic find would destroy the poor and the middle class economy in the game. This issues was prevalent in POE1 as well. Then you make good drops so rare it's almost non-existent, make crafting so bad you can't really craft good items either, and voilà, a game where trading is the main source of upgrades. This wasn't some random surprise for GGG. They wanted all this. They wanted a elite top down trade economy to push MTX hideouts and bottleneck progression for the player majority. Why? Not sure. But I presume it's a business strategy, since the company no longer runs under the pretense of "just wanting to make a good ARPG", but rather "Maximize profit". They KNEW Sanctum and Ultimatum was at best contentious league mechanics that a huge portion of players really disliked. Yet not only did they push it, they are gatekeeping ascendancies with it. Remarkably dumb and also unfair. So yeah, GGG failed. Massively. And once the hype dust settles and reality creeps in, this game will lose it's shine REAL fast. Last edited by eldheim#2436 on Dec 24, 2024, 7:26:22 PM
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Sry team holiday is over. Emergency crunsh time to fix the endgame! We just discovered a thread by Eldheim who found out that the player numbers are dropping like a stone, we need to act now! Expect a 70 hour week in shifts. The patch must be ready on the 1st of january, no time to party, Eldheim is expecting a wel lrounded endgame with all the crafting options they had in poe1 and an auction house for convinience! If you call in sick you are fired!
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