Why POE2 is dying

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GregoryAdams#7051 wrote:

The only thing that matters is player retention between leagues. Since there haven't been any leagues, there's no way to tell.

But let's not beat around the bush here. Personally, I don't like PoE 2 and I wish they would focus on PoE 1 more.
Now, clearly, they've been neglecting PoE 1 for PoE 2, so it certainly seems like it's an either-or thing. And if that's the case, yeah, I would prefer for PoE 2 to die and for them to focus on PoE 1 again.

Is that selfish? Sure. But at least it's honest.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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Nyon#6673 wrote:

Unfortunetly you dont understand how game releases work.

When an early acces launch has such a huge success that they reach almost 600k players on the first day, and then go into winter holiday where alot of people are away from home and playing less or not at all, there is no universe where the number of players arent going to be less.

Please provide one example of a game launch that looks different.

People play games even more during this time lol, everyone's at home during the holidays.

And your "600k huge success" of players is most likely never happening again on this game btw.

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GregoryAdams#7051 wrote:

The only thing that matters is player retention between leagues. Since there haven't been any leagues, there's no way to tell.

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

Yes. It is dying. Can it come back? Sure!

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CroDanZ#1818 wrote:

Me and many other people already told you that the game is currently in Beta.....Google what "BETA" in games means.

If you want a perfect polished game wait 5-6 months till 1.0 release but stop flooding the forums with your "mimimi, game is dying becasue it's not 100% how I want it to be" threads. ;)

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

Yes. It is dying. Can it come back? Sure!

Does that mean GGG shouldn't deeply care why hundreds of thousands of players that paid for access are quitting?
Of course not.

Disclaimer:

I already know a few elite GGG bootlickers will spam this comment section telling me I don't understand charts or numbers, that its "normal", or "everything is fine", or "play something else -stop whining".
Let them. It's all they do, all the time, and we can't stop it.


Firstly I'd like to say there are lots of positives about POE2, and it could have a decent foundation for a great game in the future. I'm not here to talk about those, however.

Problems:
1. Ascendancies are bottlenecked behind bad mechanics and RNG
2. Crafting is meaningless and random
3. Magic find ruined the economy completely, you are now either rich or poor
4. Maps and areas are way too big
5. Melee is dead, it feels clonky, bad, slow, and punishing
6. T1-T10 maps feels pointless and has little or no rewards
7. Endgame is a one-shot fest unless you run a meta 15k energy shield build
8. Armor is effectively pointless when it comes to mitigate dying
9. Building life builds are punished heavily, ES builds rewarded heavily
10. Build diversity bricked due to all the problems above
11. Campaign too long to incentivize multiple runs/leagues for most people
12. Death penalties makes no sense in normal game mode
13. Bosses too scarce in endgame

My conclusion? The game was dropped at least 6 months prematurely. A closed beta until mid 2025 should have been done. But that ship sailed.

Fast fixes:
Release ascendancy points throughout the campaign for now. Incentivize most players possible to engage with and try the content for EA purposes, and work towards a FAIR and non-RNG based trial with the full release.

Make exalted orbs the most common currency. It will still make crafting pure chance, but until the whole system is reworked, at least people will have a chance of trying to craft items. It is dead as of now.

Armor scaling have to flatly mitigate damage -but cap the total max mitigation. At least until you can fine-tune the balance. As of now armor builds are dead.

Increase animation time and attack speed of most warrior skills by a lot. At least until armor and life builds are fixed to become ACTUALLY tanky.

The passive tree have about 50 energy shield nodes and 3 life nodes. Considering life builds are the common melee characters, this is literally opposite of what would seem normal. I'm not even sure there is an easy fix here.

Remove XP penalty on death. This is a no brainer. Getting to 100 is hard enough as is. At least until all content is balanced. Stop the 1 death map bricking too. It makes no sense for a normal game mode.

Make teleportation map markers in maps too, until you can scale them better.
All maps should have a boss -bosses are among the best features of POE2, don't remove them from players.

Remove all magic find on gear, and boost MF with 50% as base.

Reward players for doing T1-T10 maps much better. Increase drop rates, increase waystones. Make it much easier to get 4 and 5 linked skills, at least in EA where you would think GGG want to playtest as much as possible.

You could do all this fairly easily and the overall experience for 90% of the player base would be better.
YES, I know there are some elite get good gamers that don't wont anyone but them to enjoy the game, but give them ruthless mode, and we can stop having to argue with them all the time.

What I would do?
Announce a rollback and restart servers 1. February. Until then, remove death penalties, give out ascendancy points in campaign, and increase drops by at least 100%.Let players go bananas for a month, really trying out builds and the full extent of the game.
GGG buys themselves a full month to dig deeper into fixing more problems, while making the game accessible until then.

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TheWroth#7505 wrote:

Ascendancy:

I believe a lot of people like roguelike style mechanics, I find the Sanctum Trial real fun, hard but rewarding (I almost always drop something interesting). The 4th boss is a problem to me though, I can easily defeat it, but the "instakill" mechanic I can't do alone, as i'm not using MS boots and other things like that.

The Trial of Chaos is pure RNG, but it isn't thaaaaat hard, the unfair part of it is that you need to do, if you are lucky, at least 3 times to face the trialmaster and get the last ascendancy point.

Crafting:

Although craft should get some atention right now, I don't think that make something like "exalted to be more common" would be good, exalted is common already.. even alone or with 1 or 2 party members it's possible to drop a lot of it.

Armor:

A lot of friends of mine run warriors build and actually tank a lot of damage, they are not immortal gods but to say that "armor builds are dead" makes no sense.

Melee:

Same thing as before, to say "that melee is dead" is joke. i'm not wasting time in this point.

Passive tree and life nodes:

It would be good to see more life nodes in the passive tree, but the amount of ES nodes is not unfair. I agree that we need a buff by having more life nodes in the tree, but ES is doing fine rn

XP loss:

As frustrating as I know it is to lose 10% of XP every death, meaning a loss of good hours of farming in the endgame when you reach 90+, I really don't understand why people cry so much about it. lvl 100 is supposed to be a challenge and without the xp loss there is no challenge whatsoever. "uhhh but I need those points to finish my build"... I rarelly see a build that need to pass lvl 91 to be finished, those 9 last points should not be relevant for you to be able to "do your thing". the 1 portal is unfair though, I don't want the 6 portal to be usable again after deaths, but we should be able to refry the map at least 1 time, some forgiveness would be nice. We also could get the revive mechanic in maps active. if they do something like "every player can only revive an ally 1 time per map would be good, and if the player is revived before the end of the map he doesn't lose any XP. The game will still be punishing we have some options to work around.

Maps:

All maps with bosses and something like the checkpoints would be great, I agree. I really enjoy most of the boss fights in this game.. but the lack of maps with bosses in the endgame is sad.

And no, i'm not a pro player with meta builds. i'm a casual player that played for quite some time the 1st game. playing PoE 2 as Infernalist using a bunch of different minions and without srs because I dont like it.