What makes people quit any ARPG game. The only thread you'll ever need to make your game GOAT

Hello.
16k hours in PoE.
400 hours in PoE 2.
Thousands of hours in other in other, inferior ARPGs out there.

What makes people quit? TL;DR at the end. The main reason is a bit complex and has many aspects, but try and follow, I'll try to bold key elements along the way.

Poor class balancing (ascendancies) - The first domino from the domino effect.

You cannot have a class/build be more than 1.5 times better than another one. And "better" is a relative term.

How to fix this: During development, have 2 players play simultaneously, 1 next to each other and see who reaches X first. Spark Archmage cannot be at X content after 3 days, while Slam Titan is at 50% of that. Find out key attributes to adjust and adjust them before release, be it movement speed, overall damage, action speed, etc. (as a Titan first build player, I couldn't believe how much faster Spark Archmage is after I tried it...)

The balancing was so bad, that 80% of the builds in the leaderboards 2 weeks in were Spark Archmage or Monk / Gemling Staff stacker.

In a perfect world, what you would do now is hire a bunch of math geeks and tell them to fix this, by buffing everything else, so it's as fast as Spark Archmage and Gemling Stacker, instead of nerfing those two. (I know you think the slow slams of the supposedly heavy Titan look cool and they do, at first, but after a while they are just boring and slow..), so let's focus on making the builds fun and fast to play, before we lose any more people.

Poor balancing effecting game economy - This is the second domino that falls.

Of course, a few days in, the streamers/youtubers start with their guides, which are really a double-edged sword in an imperfect world (imbalanced game).

And what follows? Prices for items involved in build guides are now worth 800% more..
Some guy who never watches guides, just starts and has played a lightning sorc in D2 ever since he was 12 years old picks Spark Archmage and surprise surprise - items are worth so much, that you'd have to farm days/weeks to get the currency, which leads to disdain, which leads to burn-out, which leads to quitting the game.

People with room temperature IQ thinking they have a higher than room temperature IQ:
"Go PlAy SsF tHeN" - This is where the 3rd domino falls.
This is the vicious circle - Some players don't enjoy SSF, because they cannot socialize/trade, etc. and want to have the best of both worlds - They want to play the class they love and have affordable endgame gear, and why shouldn't they be able to have that? It's game after all.. It should be fun, relaxing and provide short-term as well as long-term gratification. And because they don't want to farm X amount of time to get a simple rare item that the build they are testing entirely depends on, because they would have to play a whole other build in order to farm that item and then switch to that build and at this point we're getting so far into the rabbit hole, that even the best ARPG game is just Not enough to make this worth it.

In a perfect world, SSF would have other means of getting items, that are otherwise super rare in Standard league.
Imagine a questing/achievement system for example, where if you do X and Y and Z, you get a very specific rare item that is needed for the build you are testing.

I'm talking entirely different mechanics for SSF, where if someone asks "What's the difference between SSF and Standard.", you don't just say "You can't trade in SSF.", but more like "Oh man, where do I begin...".

The bottomline is, when most players begin, they have in mind a build they want to play/try, but the game is not rigged like this right now. You can't just swap builds whenever you feel like it. And if your build can't beat X content, because that rare item that would finish your build just doesn't drop, you HAVE to switch to another build, which again, causes disdain and burn-out, because you're not playing the build you Want to.. Basically - you are stuck. (Talking about the majority of players, not hardcore players with thousands of hours like us old dogs).

You said it yourself that you want your game to be more accessible to players new to the genre and while we can see you have taken steps towards achieving that, there are still ways to go until it's perfected.

TL;DR:

What you have created is a game of chess, with 32 chest pieces, where 4 of them are queens, 10 are knights and the remaining 18 are pawns.

Exception to the above statement:
Super rare/expensive items/jewels that make almost any build viable in super-endgame. (again, this is not a solution, as it breeds disdain & burn-out and that's not how super rare items should function (basically break the game))

Solution:
1. Watch the top builds on Youtube that are insane, zoom around and nuke the entire zones and murder every Breach spawned monster within a fraction of a second.
2. Make everything else as powerful and as fast as that build, instead of nerfing anything. (The age of nerfing is over. Kids watch 12 second reels, fast-forward movies and have attention span of 10 minutes on a good day, this is the sad reality. Everything needs to be faster! (Yes, even the heavy Titan needs to be able to jump around like a maniac, to match those temporalis spammers on youtube)) Do you wonder why some people are going back to PoE? Well, this is it.. Build viability via speed..
3. Try to make it a rule for you to only "nerf" something if it is unbelievably, insanely OP and game breaking (aka - Bugs. Example: Those time-lost jewels that affect passives and provided a multiplicative bonus instead of additive or something like that, forgot what the issue was, but basically it was clearly a math bug.)

PS: For reference, here is what I did in PoE 2 since day 1:
1. Created Titan. (Wanted to take it slow, read every dialogue, explore every corner of each map, test every skill) Played around 2 weeks with Earthquake / Stampede / Leap slam. Swapped to totems. Meta was there for + skills totem build, everything was super expensive, Titan was slow, I got burned out and quit at lvl 89.
2. Made Spark Archmage - Reached 94 lvl within days and farming Sekhemas trials for endgame gear - saw what I need to be even more insanely OP than I already was - felt overwhelmingly powerful and unfair to the game and I quit.
3. Made a SSF Infernalist, as I was burnt out from all this trading on standard - Most fun I've had in the game, I loved the combination of summons and the effects each provide - certain items just didn't drop, felt slow, quit at lvl 93.
4. Made a SSF Gemling stacker with POTCG, felt really cool and fast, but at this point I was already burnt out, so I played a few days and quit..

Too much emphasis on the builds or items being expensive. These are not even remotely issues for me.

I really couldn't care at all how people play the game. Whether or not they're using a OP build, smashing content.

The only thing that makes people care is the "economy" and because if it, you end up viewing things more negatively, or competitively aka 'this build is better than my build, it's not fair'. The game gets balanced around it. I'd rather just play PoE as a single player game if I'm honest. And not a SSF single player, like a genuine, ARPG experience, devoid of the bastardization it's accumulated due to the emphasis on long term player retention using bad gambling loot styles, toxic design decisions being aimed at keeping players 'engaged', and the destructive way they balance this game around economy first, not fun first.


I agree. The experience WOULD be a lot better if the economy and build balance were not so awful. If I could easily afford a decent build I would probably have a lot more fun. But realistically, for me at least. It's still less fun having the economy, than just a well made, well intentioned game aimed at giving me the best possible solo experience it could. The other things, if they're present. Should be optional. Not mandatory.

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TheseViolentDelights#1049 wrote:

so let's focus on making the builds fun and fast to play, before we lose any more people.

This 100% the wrong approach. The speed is the biggest problem the arpg genre has. Everything is zoom zoom screen wipers with no stakes, no risk, no challenge. Braindead pressing of a button for 500 hours straight.

If there was one thing that was unanimously praised about PoE2 then it was the slow and methodical gameplay of the campaign. The fact that every encounter of a magic or rare mob was a challenge. That boss fights were like a brick wall.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 wrote:

This 100% the wrong approach. The speed is the biggest problem the arpg genre has. Everything is zoom zoom screen wipers with no stakes, no risk, no challenge. Braindead pressing of a button for 500 hours straight.

I wrote in another thread what I think this game needs. Idk if you care to read, but maybe you are interested in an entirely different approach from the PoE1 zoom zoom screen go boom nonsense:

1) Nerf AOE to the fucking ground. I mean complete eviceration. There should be no scenario where a comparably geared AOE build (and in particular ranged) should outperform a mostly single-target melee build.

2) This drastically reduces clear speed and hopefully puts everyone on a level playing field. Once that is achieved each encounter with mobs, especially magic and rare, can be really meaningful again (like in the campaign before chars have all the aoe skills and the build starts coming online)

3) Maps take a lot longer to finish now. Keep the loot quantity of the map, but significantly improve quality. Remove dogshit modifiers no one wants, or adjust the probabilities in favor of desirable one. Remove dogshit tiers that are not appropriate for the level of play. tier1 rolls on ilvl82 items should never happen. This way the "item quantity/time" decreases, but the "item quality/item quantity" increases, meaning much less trash tier items and the fewer items you get are potentially of actual use.

4) Balance trade. Introduce an auction house or a direct selling house if you will. Limit daily trades to say 3 items and weekly trades to 10 items. You can't play the market anymore. No more false advertizing, no more scamming, you can get the items you truly need but can't find, and the "friction" is still there.

5) Introduce meaningful crafting, that can have some rng and can be expensive. The improved item quality at reduced item quantity allows to give crafting that has a tinge of rng a shot. You will get decent items and not just 99% trash as it is currently with the currency crafting. The "pull of the lever" rewards you now regularly instead of just being a source of frustration.

6) The speed of the whole game has been severly reduced. You can remove xp loss since getting to 100 takes much longer now. Instead you gain a +25% xp buff for the next map upon successful completetion of your current map without dying. E voila, you turned a frustrating punishment into a rewarding boon.
You can keep the 1 portal mechanic, death should mean something after all. The node mechanics do not vanish upon death, only if they have already been started at the point of death. The modfiers from the precursor tablets are cut in half with every death in the map.

7) Remove all dedicated one-shot mechanics. They are lazy design.

that a lot of hours played 1 video game