Game is dropping like a stone

Agree.
Game is a joke in its current state.
It has the potential and the fundamental to be good but they did a very bad job with it.
They have alot of work to do and they will loose all of the new players who tried this and some of the old timers too.
Game is a horrible mess all around.

What are you talking about OP? The retention is record breaking still. There are more people playing right now (305k high today) than ever played PoE at one time in its entire history. And it's EA.

Calm down. Have some coffee. Farm some Ex.

Based on Steam achievements what does the POE1 playerbase look like?

Half barely play the game. Only 45% kill Siren.
Only 15% clear the campaign and get into maps.
About 12% clear merciless lab. 8.5% Uber lab.
6% killed Shaper. 3% killed Sirus.

Now maybe this is special pleading but my point is that the bulk of the playerbase are going to be "casual". They may well be coming to the end of their PoE2 play experience. Or will do so in coming weeks. (This is also true for Diablo or any other comparable game).

Just about every POE1 season has seen massive drop off. Unless the EA is to have significant shake up every few weeks why would it be any different?

I guess what I'm saying is that even if you started with millions, you aren't going to have that many people doing high level maps forever.

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Samsca239#7647 wrote:

Based on Steam achievements what does the POE1 playerbase look like?

Half barely play the game. Only 45% kill Siren.
Only 15% clear the campaign and get into maps.
About 12% clear merciless lab. 8.5% Uber lab.
6% killed Shaper. 3% killed Sirus.

Now maybe this is special pleading but my point is that the bulk of the playerbase are going to be "casual". They may well be coming to the end of their PoE2 play experience. Or will do so in coming weeks. (This is also true for Diablo or any other comparable game).

Just about every POE1 season has seen massive drop off. Unless the EA is to have significant shake up every few weeks why would it be any different?

I guess what I'm saying is that even if you started with millions, you aren't going to have that many people doing high level maps forever.

so 2 things. It's been a couple of weeks and you see the drop off. They are not dropping off because they have completed content and there isnt much to do, they are dropping because they are bored, frustrated etc.

Regardless, how much money do you think people who are dropping are spending in the store? Or will in the future?

The economics of a game like this are pretty simple. Create cool content, keep people engaged and having fun, give them reasons to buy things in the store.

Fail on all 3. It wont be economically viable. Any "hardcore" player with half a brain should be hoping they make it more accessible for casuals, and put in a hardmode for the uber people, because an hardcore only game does not last very long. All manner of hardcore games went bust because there is just not enough people to sustain it.

Worst part for me is GGG silence, they released a game in a rough state then took xmas break. Id rather they released this after xmas and worked on fixing the issues.

At this point the frustration is rotting and people would rather just stop playing which is evident in what your saying.

Personally i'm frustrated with the economy the most, the POE1 trade function is attrocious and an ingame / alternative solution should come out.

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Kimsektnan#7571 wrote:

Worst part for me is GGG silence, they released a game in a rough state then took xmas break. Id rather they released this after xmas and worked on fixing the issues.

At this point the frustration is rotting and people would rather just stop playing which is evident in what your saying.

Personally i'm frustrated with the economy the most, the POE1 trade function is attrocious and an ingame / alternative solution should come out.

GGG went silent after saying why they are going to be silent

There really should be some bad luck protection for certain things in this game. Also magic find really does seem broken OP as I have only just found out. A lot of people, me included, have been wasting time, currency sustaining maps. I even sacrificed some ele res to equip an amulet that has 28MF but didn't seem to make a difference. What happened was that about half an hour ago I had a 'golden charm' drop. Never seen it, didn't know it existed, and I bet a lot of you have never seen this charm drop either. This charm has +20MF on rares and uniques and guess what, I ran 3 maps since (small sample I know) but I've been having waystone drops left and right, like the difference was just night and day. Almost all rares I kill with the charm filled drop at least a map, a rare, an exalt/regal or both, and each map I had at least 1-2 rares that dropped 2-3 rare items on death. This extra 20MF may not seem much, but it felt like it changed the loot drop for me fundamentally. I'm not complaining about the extra drops, but I think it's a bit unfair that most players struggling to sustain maps will probably never even know this or have this charm help because it's too rare.

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Ironhide75#7617 wrote:

The economics of a game like this are pretty simple. Create cool content, keep people engaged and having fun, give them reasons to buy things in the store.

Important note: leagues aren't a requirement to satisfy any of those criteria.

+1 game falls off on late maps +10 and ascendancy. Combine this with being one shotted and armor feeling bad compared to evasion/energy shield, mobs being over-tuned like the lost men or arrow guys that shoot exploding chaos orbs, chaos damage in general, explosion on death or volatile plants, and to top it off xp loss, it's pretty grim on that progression.

Unless you are playing the market you will not really find a gear upgrade on anything worthwhile. Don't make the mistake of rolling warrior, it's in a bad state leveling up and I'm using some of gold and currency to level up an archer and it's been a way different experience.

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t0lkien#7048 wrote:

What are you talking about OP? The retention is record breaking still. There are more people playing right now (305k high today) than ever played PoE at one time in its entire history. And it's EA.

Calm down. Have some coffee. Farm some Ex.

Comparing POE2 to POE1 is absolutely pointless.
Contend with the actual arguments.

Imagine GGG is a fishing boat.
They drop the nets and get 1000 fish. Great. They make some money, buy a new, bigger net, then go out to sea again. Then they catch 10.000 fish. But due to faults in the new net they loose 5000 of those fish.
Would ANY person in their right mind think "Oh, don't worry about the bad net, it still got us four times more than the old one".
Sane people go "damn, we really need to fix that net". A manager telling his boss that it's A-OK would and should be fired for making such idiotic statements.
Apples are not oranges.

Secondly, there IS NO RETENTION!
Either you don't understand the word, or you didn't bother even googling.
They lost a record 150k players in two weeks on average week medians, excluding xmas completely.

If you have strong opions on something, for the love of god -at least bother doing a minimum of fact checking before posting them.
It waters out conversations, it's misinformation, and it makes you look stupid.