GGG: Why your 48h Cutthroat was unsuccessful. (Long Read)

I remember the PK art on baal runs, this was so fun :D Also the poison amazon lvl 30-ish that killed lvl 60-70 chars. Chat was hilarious.

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If Cutthroat can't stand on it's own and requires external rewards for people to just try it (not even invest time into it, but simply try it), doesn't that tell you that Cutthroat is catering to such an insignificantly tiny crowd that GGG are effectively wasting their time by working on improving it?

It's certainly the conclusion I would come to.

But then again, I don't really give a shit abot cutthroat and wether it succeeds or fails.

Ok next season no rewards and no demis at all and you will see nobody will participate.

Why do you think I don't do races this season.
It's the same boring shedule with even worse rewards.
Mods were introduced to combat normal mode races and now we are back at boring normal mode races like in season 1 but with reduced duration.

With currency rewards almost everyone raced in CB and now I clicked a random race and it had 389 participants.

Next season will offer some Descent Corruption race and it will be promoted till nobody likes it anymore.

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Hilbert wrote:

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If Cutthroat can't stand on it's own and requires external rewards for people to just try it (not even invest time into it, but simply try it), doesn't that tell you that Cutthroat is catering to such an insignificantly tiny crowd that GGG are effectively wasting their time by working on improving it?

It's certainly the conclusion I would come to.

But then again, I don't really give a shit abot cutthroat and wether it succeeds or fails.

Ok next season no rewards and no demis at all and you will see nobody will participate.

Why do you think I don't do races this season.
It's the same boring shedule with even worse rewards.
Mods were introduced to combat normal mode races and now we are back at boring normal mode races like in season 1 but with reduced duration.

With currency rewards almost everyone raced in CB and now I clicked a random race and it had 389 participants.

Next season will offer some Descent Corruption race and it will be promoted till nobody likes it anymore.

Cutthroat was extremely unpopular even back when it was part of the race season, so you are arguing a moot point.

My point is that there simply aren't enough people interested in the concept of cutthroat no matter what GGG do with it. Most people who play this game simply aren't interested in PvP in any way shape or form, the main audience of this game are people who love to hoard stuff and play PvE.

Or let me put it this way, what reason do we have to believe that Cutthroat could ever be popular?

As far as I can tell the people actually interested in cutthroat are a very tiny minority in the already pretty small PoE community, same goes for PvP by the way.

What I find most bizarre about all of this is the fact that GGG put more work into cutthroat than actual racing, you know a part of the game that already has a playerbase.

edit: You know when it was first announced that GGG wanted to focus on Cutthroat and try to improve it I didn't really care because I gave them the benefit of the doubt (big mistake on my part I have to admit) and thought: "well maybe they know where they are going with this", but after having tried two of the cutthroat events I quickly came to the realization that it's still just the same boring snoozefest that it always was and they haven't really changed... bupkis.

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Cutthroat was extremely unpopular even back when it was part of the race season, so you are arguing a moot point.

The first CTs had a lot of participation but the problems like 6player party Griefing and GH destroyed the participation over time.

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My point is that there simply aren't enough people interested in the concept of cutthroat no matter what GGG do with it.

Yeah and I blame GGG everytime to turn PoE into an eternal Grindfest and ignoring the retention rate.

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Or let me put it this way, what reason do we have to believe that Cutthroat could ever be popular?

If it's balanced, not grindbased and prevents griefing it may become popular.

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As far as I can tell the people actually interested in cutthroat are a very tiny minority in the already pretty small PoE community, same goes for PvP by the way.

GGG should have seen in October 2012 that PVP is broken and the abysmal droprate nerf killed PVP entirely.
Those PVPing are like <10 players and several RMTed legacy items.

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What I find most bizarre about all of this is the fact that GGG put more work into cutthroat than actual racing, you know a part of the game that already has a playerbase.

To be it rather looks like they want to destroy their Racerplayerbase so some no lifers will receive rank 1 and 2nd of class is 5-6 levels below them.

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edit: You know when it was first announced that GGG wanted to focus on Cutthroat and try to improve it I didn't really care because I gave them the benefit of the doubt (big mistake on my part I have to admit) and thought: "well maybe they know where they are going with this", but after having tried two of the cutthroat events I quickly came to the realization that it's still just the same boring snoozefest that it always was and they haven't really changed... bupkis.

Look if devs ignore feedback that will be the downfall of any game.
This "You will like what we will do" didn't work in so many games.

I told the devs that GGG has 1 more chance to do it right and that was Act3 but they decided to turn A3x into the release.
The games current state is something if you put MMO players into balancing.

More grinding, more gearchecks, more partyplay and the worst thing of all unthoughtful systems.(How do you explain flaws like the unique Vaal mask?Or a unpreparable chargesystems, which allows better skills only to be used if half or three quarters of the map are cleaned)
Players can ignore retention rate and believe "core gamer" explanations. But poestatistics, racestatistics, forum/reddit activity, announcement postings etc. speak another language.

Remember how many stashtab sales PoE had when the game was active? Only 1! And now we had several weekend stashtab sales already.

And then you will receive the ability to create own leagues with the same settings players don't like or forum trading making RMT even easier and they will wonder why it didn't turn out to a higher playerbase.

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SlixSC wrote:

Cutthroat was extremely unpopular even back when it was part of the race season, so you are arguing a moot point.

My point is that there simply aren't enough people interested in the concept of cutthroat no matter what GGG do with it. Most people who play this game simply aren't interested in PvP in any way shape or form, the main audience of this game are people who love to hoard stuff and play PvE.

Or let me put it this way, what reason do we have to believe that Cutthroat could ever be popular?

As far as I can tell the people actually interested in cutthroat are a very tiny minority in the already pretty small PoE community, same goes for PvP by the way.

Your point and is a complete logical fallacy.

The reason that the current active community has no interest in a PvP league is because this game simply offers no PvP leagues.

Imagine a hotdog stand that has served all-beef hotdogs every day for a couple years. This said hotdog stand is trying to introduce a vegetarian soy-based hotdog and serves it once in a blue moon.

How many of their customers are vegetarians do you think?

How accurate and unbiased do you think the feedback for the new soy-based dog would be?

Do you think that if the hotdog stand offered a soy-based dog every day rather than once in a great while and actually advertised it that they would obtain a new vegetarian customer base that was not there before?


Something to think about.

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Griefer wrote:

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SlixSC wrote:

Cutthroat was extremely unpopular even back when it was part of the race season, so you are arguing a moot point.

My point is that there simply aren't enough people interested in the concept of cutthroat no matter what GGG do with it. Most people who play this game simply aren't interested in PvP in any way shape or form, the main audience of this game are people who love to hoard stuff and play PvE.

Or let me put it this way, what reason do we have to believe that Cutthroat could ever be popular?

As far as I can tell the people actually interested in cutthroat are a very tiny minority in the already pretty small PoE community, same goes for PvP by the way.

Your point and is a complete logical fallacy.

The reason that the current active community has no interest in a PvP league is because this game simply offers no PvP leagues.

Imagine a hotdog stand that has served all-beef hotdogs every day for a couple years. This said hotdog stand is trying to introduce a vegetarian soy-based hotdog and serves it once in a blue moon.

How many of their customers are vegetarians do you think?

How accurate and unbiased do you think the feedback for the new soy-based dog would be?

Do you think that if the hotdog stand offered a soy-based dog every day rather than once in a great while and actually advertised it that they would obtain a new vegetarian customer base that was not there before?


Something to think about.

So what you are implying is that if GGG somehow offered a long-term PvP league they would see this massive influx of new players out of basically nowhere? Dream on brother.

The community, as it stands right now has no interest in neither PvP nor Cutthroat. Sure you could spin this around and assume that there is huge group of people who want nothing more but to play Cutthroat in Path of Exile, but have no interest in playing the core game itself, outside of a cutthroat scenario.

I mean I highly doubt that because even Cutthroat would be centered around the core game, so that assumption seems pretty unreasonable, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument.

So in any case, I see no reason to believe that these people exist and most importantly, I don't see how GGG could possibly even reach them if they existed, because GGG simply lacks the marketing to really draw attention to their own game.

But let's be honest here for a second, this game isn't even in a state where it deserves a bigger community. So I think GGG's efforts are better invested by improving the core game itself, rather than working on something that doesn't appeal to their current playerbase at all but (at least according to you) instead appeals to this huge group of people we don't even know exists.

But just to point this out, you shouldn't go around accusing people of having commited a logical fallacy, when your own argument solely relies on this vapid assumption that there is this huge group of people who would all be playing PoE, if only PoE had a long-term cutthroat league.

With that said, I think you've actually managed to convince me, because now I really hope they start a 4-month cutthroat league in the near future.... just so I can see it fail, quote your post a few months in and go "I told you so."

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SlixSC wrote:

So what you are implying is that if GGG somehow offered a long-term PvP league they would see this massive influx of new players out of basically nowhere?

I believe what they were saying was that offering a long-term PvP league would allow them to see if the interest was actually there or not -- it would help differentiate lack of activity due to flat out disinterest vs lack of activity due to needing to be around at very specific times for a very specific event.

I would assume that the majority of people participating in the cut-throat events are/were already hyped for cut-throat events and fairly eager to play. Tons of players may think it could be interesting but have scheduling conflicts or don't find it interesting enough to jump into.

Running a longer-term event can provide a larger picture of overall playerbase interest / retention. The format as it is is probably only going to provide good data on interest / retention of people already into cut-throat (which is probably a good idea at this point in time since the format is still fairly raw).

I don't think that GGG are silly enough to try to extrapolate data about these events to the entire playerbase. I would expect that they're using it to try to improve the core of the format, and that after an iteration or two of that they'd be running longer events -- this is assuming that they're taking an aggregate analysis sort of approach to looking at play trends, an arguably reasonable assumption.

Judging interest of the playerbase as a whole really can't be done -- by you or me or the devs or anyone else -- without looking at data trends over a fair amount of time. Trying some things out for a known interested minority of the playerbase and then seeing how many people swim in the pool when it's open all the time is the only reliable way of getting a handle on whole-playerbase interest levels that I'm aware of.

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Hilbert wrote:

With currency rewards almost everyone raced in CB and now I clicked a random race and it had 389 participants.

Far from everyone, lol.

The races in CB were interesting if you could finish high on the ladder: a big chance of winning some high-tier orbs. Otherwise have fun with your 2 fuse orbs. Also there was going to be a huge reset at the end of 2012. So who cared about the orb influx of races.

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exhortatory wrote:

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SlixSC wrote:

So what you are implying is that if GGG somehow offered a long-term PvP league they would see this massive influx of new players out of basically nowhere?

I believe what they were saying was that offering a long-term PvP league would allow them to see if the interest was actually there or not -- it would help differentiate lack of activity due to flat out disinterest vs lack of activity due to needing to be around at very specific times for a very specific event.

I would assume that the majority of people participating in the cut-throat events are/were already hyped for cut-throat events and fairly eager to play. Tons of players may think it could be interesting but have scheduling conflicts or don't find it interesting enough to jump into.

Running a longer-term event can provide a larger picture of overall playerbase interest / retention. The format as it is is probably only going to provide good data on interest / retention of people already into cut-throat (which is probably a good idea at this point in time since the format is still fairly raw).

I don't think that GGG are silly enough to try to extrapolate data about these events to the entire playerbase. I would expect that they're using it to try to improve the core of the format, and that after an iteration or two of that they'd be running longer events -- this is assuming that they're taking an aggregate analysis sort of approach to looking at play trends, an arguably reasonable assumption.

Judging interest of the playerbase as a whole really can't be done -- by you or me or the devs or anyone else -- without looking at data trends over a fair amount of time. Trying some things out for a known interested minority of the playerbase and then seeing how many people swim in the pool when it's open all the time is the only reliable way of getting a handle on whole-playerbase interest levels that I'm aware of.

Complete and utter nonsense.

Take the 48 hour Cutthroat - 1600 characters created over the span of 2 days... 2 DAYS.

On the very same day they ran an Endless Ledge race which had more characters created than the 48 hour cutthroat in just an hour... 1/48th of the time.

So really what you are saying is that, this really gives us no reason to believe that the current playerbase just isn't interested in Cutthroat, because for some reason all the people interested in Cutthroat just happened to not have time to sign up for the 48 hour cutthroat.

And you could come up with the same bullshit excuse to justify low player numbers in a 4 month cutthroat league aswell.

"nah its not that people just aren't interested in cutthroat, they just don't have the time".

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The races in CB were interesting if you could finish high on the ladder: a big chance of winning some high-tier orbs. Otherwise have fun with your 2 fuse orbs. Also there was going to be a huge reset at the end of 2012. So who cared about the orb influx of races.

Incorrect.
Pre 9.12 you received only a few orbs but all were rare ones.
Post 9.12 you received more orbs and 1 Orb per 8 Orbs was rare.

So even if you did bad you received 1 divine/exalted/gcp for sure and that had far more value than grinding 2-3h.
The Chaos,Regal,Scouring,Regret... tier made the rewards look good/bad.




@SlixSC
Look the issue isn't that players aren't interested. The issue is that PVPers play other games because GGG uses settings regular PVPers HATE.
Don't think I will play long term CT if the drop rates and other settings are the same utter garbage as in regular/4 month leagues.
It would just become another RMT rigged league.

Same goes for totally broken mechanics for PVP.
GH,spamable spells mustn't freeze and if the balance devs think they need permafreezelocks then CT will utterly fail.

If the devs think that stacked traps are needed then that will be the lame way CT will be played in long term.

If you remove all racing rewards the playerbase racing will also heavily drop.