Why POE2’s Direction Is Worrying for Veterans and Newcomers Alike

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Sandcubicle#5745 wrote:

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themozzer#1372 wrote:

Just to add on the note about the "slowed down and more methodical gameplay" they have been bringing up as a core design principle for POE2, from what I have seen in my playthroughs is that this applies to the characters, and not really the enemies/bosses at all.

This. They made the distinction from PoE1 very early on. It’s not PoE 1.2 with updated graphics, but PoE 2 that does its own thing.

Total non sequitur. I don't think the reply you quote says what you think it says... smh

+1

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rob_korn#1745 wrote:

PoE1 is not "made" for zoomers. It's a choice. When I want to zoom I take my Legion atlas (almost never). Otherwise I go farm harbingers, blight or simulacrums. If I don't feel like exploding packs I go farm Maven or whatever. Do I even talk about Valdo's maps ? Is that zoom zoom ?...
The money /hour is even the same, cuz the market evens out (though I would say ignore the div/hour and focus on your own fun/hour, but ppl are stupid and jealous).

previously you asked if i m jealous, now youre saying ppl are stupid and jealous, but for the sake of people reading i ll respond to you.

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I have the tools to make the choice. And so do you, you DON'T HAVE to play HH flicker every league. If you got sick of it is by your own doings, not PoE1 fault. You gave examples, but stayed in the zoomies ones. Open up, there are options that are not.

You made the choice in PoE2 to not play flicker and go with your 2 handed guy. Why don't you do it in PoE1 as well, instead of burn yourself out of zoom zoom ?

did i ever say i was sick of the zoom? i think i haven explained properly. to put it simply, i like zoom content to be in poe1 because thats how poe1 already is. and zoom IS fun in poe1. but i dont want zoom content in path2. reason being, you simply cant balance zoom content in a meaningful way without creating a huge numbers gap.

but to be real, i have a love hate relationship with zoom. zoom is fun, but because zoom exists, poe1 is balanced around zoomers. which is why i kept mentioning numbers gap. i m not complaining about zoomers or zoom content in poe1. that ship has sailed.

i dont want zoom to exist in poe2. simple as that. and i've explained why already.

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I may get what you mean with the cars (maybe), but I do think only the D2 one is valid. D2 is indeed nostsalgia driven now, it's a "dead" (aka not a live service anymore) game.
But for PoE1 / PoE2 it's not valid imho. I don't care about PoE2 close to PoE1 or not, I just want PoE2 to be fun. But that's not enough to say that :
I want PoE2 to be fun FOR A LONG TIME. And that zooming hate doesn't make sense in that regard.
PoE2 will have to evolve, bring new stuff, bring power creep, and sooner or later get somewhat "faster", because that's the sole purpose of this game. There shouldn't be and "end" to it. You have to strive for new, bigger, harder things.

what you think is invalid doesnt matter, GGG already has shown us the direction of path2. if you dont understand why i dont want zooming in path2 after all i've said, i really dont know how to make you understand it.

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Regarding Zarockh, you don't have to design with player speed so much, why is that even a concern ? The goal is to link the points, scale it with baseline speed and that's it. What if a player has 500ms ? Well he will do it faster and be rewarded for that investment. Why is that even an issue ? I will be proud I succeeed regardless of another player doing it faster than I do. The point is that he has the CHOICE to be fast, and I have the CHOICE that I don't want to handle such speed / don't want to sacrifice something else for it.

you've missed the point. if players need to be fast to not die, they will forced to be fast whether they like it or not. you talk about choice, does a player have a choice with zarockh? 30% ms seems to be a requirement to complete him. a choice between dying and surviving is not a real choice.

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Regarding the gap between players, again, why is that an issue ?
It's a PvE game, mostly played solo. Why is it a problem that ben is destroying the game while I enjoy my slow ass zombie army ? I just copy what feels fun to me, and ignore in admiration all the rest he does. Why does it matters that ppl are having billion DPS builds ? I cleared everything with my slow ass 20m dps build. What if I didn't clear ? Cool, I'll see what I can improve for next league.

spoken like a true "elite gamer". gaps simply make less players able to do harder content. when players are punished hard, they are forced to optimize. if they are forced to optimize they have to be hyper efficient with their builds.

you talk a lot about player choice. where is the player choice when they are forced to optimize? if the gap is reduced players could make more interesting builds as they are not punished too harshly.

also i mentioned that you were downplaying yourself, previously. slow? 20m dps build is slow? slower than flicker for sure but you're still wiping content faster than a vast majority of players.

i really dont care that you copied a build, because really, thats your choice. i do understand it. its easier and you dont need to waste your time and effort trying to understand a huge part of the game. i dont look down on build followers.

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I don't know, we may already be going circles in that discussion. I feel like you have blinders, streamlining yourself in a specific gameplay to justify some questionable design, thinking it's a fatality / curse. I don't understand how leaving no player agency is a good thing / improvement.

path2 has much more player agency than poe1. how many times did you need to actively avoid damage in poe1 vs path2? with 20mil damage you're deleting more or less anything and everything before they become a problem.

but yeah we are going in circles because we are not trying to understand my pov.

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Now, on a personnel level, probably as a conclusion if we going circles :
I do think it's good PoE2 is a slower game at the moment. Because it's a good baseline to rebuild back again, and I think GGG is just having a hard time scaling things up in PoE1 for new leagues (so I expect it to disappear, or at least die, question is when).
From there, they will be able to rescale their way up overtime with interesting things (in the end this is the same concept as leagues. PoE2 is a fresh restart).

a lot of people tend to forget poe's history. poe was unknown, no one knew GGG. in fact poe looked really shitty "back then". poe was a huge gamble and one of the staff sold off their house or something to help finance the game.

when players found interesting interactions or ways to multiply damage, ggg stoked the flames and highlighted it under build of the week vids. tho in actuality the build is over performing. they had to do this because they needed players to be engaged and throw money at them. they could not afford to slap a nerf and make players ragequit and feel as tho their efforts are not met with reward but instead a punishment.

this kept happening, many things overperformed. ggg didnt nerf things and kept allowing it to happen. ggg felt players were getting bored and they were clearing content "too fast", and as mentioned they couldnt afford to drive players away, so they were FORCED to introduce harder content. and just like that, a game where players doing 100k dps was seen as being a good build, became the baseline. now we need millions of dps.

ggg recognized all these problems and they recognized how they allowed it to happen.

they do not want to make the same mistake in path2. lessons were learned. look at the recent nerfs that they did recently. skills overperformed? poof! nerf hammer. 10 years ago they would never have done that. but now things have changed. ggg has the financial stability and global recognition that they can finally make the game they wanted to make.

think for yourself. if poe1 was such a great game, why did GGG intentionally split path2 from poe1? ggg acknowledged that melee in poe1 sucked so bad that the only way to balance the game for melee was to make the game balanced around that from the ground up. everything revolves around balance. i used zarok as an example because its a good example of how balancing can be a nightmare if zoom was allowed. you dont seem to understand it but its fine.

simply put, once zoom is introduced back into path2, all their efforts that they painstakingly put into making the game balanced around melee would be poofed. the game will just be poe1 all over again.

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The only question is to what pain level we start again, before rebuilding. It's not whether or not the game will have zooming aspect. IT WILL HAVE, and already has. You're just lying to yourself if you think otherwise, or just are clueless about a live service arpg. An ARPG that doesn't scale overtime is a dead one (D2), and is only played out of nostalgia.

yeah there is some level of zooming now, there are somethings overperforming. will ggg allow this to continue? i m betting no.

using d2 as an example is rather funny tbh. it uses a whole different business model so thats really a bad example. there is zero financial incentive for blizzard to create more content for d2 at that time and they wanted to focus on other projects. d2 was not their one and only cash cow.

as for scaling. there are a ton of battle royales out there that do not scale the damage. totally different genre i know. instead of introducing items that are OP, they introduce new items that do things differently, they introduce new game modes and etc. horizontal growth. the ceiling is already set and is balanced. poe1 has a both horizontal and vertical growth where the ceiling keeps going higher.

if we take pubg as an example, ggg could do the same. set the ceiling not to high and make it grow horizontally.

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I feel the "reset" for PoE2 is too big at the moment, compared to the choice tools we have available in PoE1 (maybe that's an EA problem, and will be fine at 1.0). But that's fine, I'll just give it time to grow back to a bearable level. What is worrying though is that it is at the expense of PoE1 schedule, so, yeah, I don't like it much and could make me bounce off completely. Time will tell...

tbh, i understand your pain. you dont want path2 to diverge from poe1. thats a very valid feeling to have. especially since you love whatever you have in poe1.

when you say i m lying to myself. i could say the same to you. you cant deal with the fact that path2 is diverging further and further away from poe1.

and the fact is, players are loving path2.



i took this and sent to a few of my friends a few days ago.

i m pretty sure GGG would still pour love into poe1 as its still their child.

path2 would never have happened without poe1 and owes its success to poe1.

but the reality is poe1 is what GGG needed, path2 is what GGG wanted.

Just wanna say OP... that 200 hours in warframe... those are rookie numbers... :P

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exsea#1724 wrote:

tbh, i understand your pain. you dont want path2 to diverge from poe1. thats a very valid feeling to have. especially since you love whatever you have in poe1.

when you say i m lying to myself. i could say the same to you. you cant deal with the fact that path2 is diverging further and further away from poe1.

and the fact is, players are loving path2.



i took this and sent to a few of my friends a few days ago.

i m pretty sure GGG would still pour love into poe1 as its still their child.

path2 would never have happened without poe1 and owes its success to poe1.

but the reality is poe1 is what GGG needed, path2 is what GGG wanted.

Pointing to numbers so early is idiotic. D4 also held high player numbers for a month or so. Helldivers 2 similar numbers of players as PoE2 at launch yet struggled to pull 50k concurrent until the most recent patch. There reduction started before the Sony issue too. I do think this will hold players for longer, but the fall off will happen.

GGG has not doubled their devs team so either PoE1 is getting cut back or both games will not receive the dev time they deserve.

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Nothv13#0740 wrote:

Pointing to numbers so early is idiotic. D4 also held high player numbers for a month or so. Helldivers 2 similar numbers of players as PoE2 at launch yet struggled to pull 50k concurrent until the most recent patch. There reduction started before the Sony issue too. I do think this will hold players for longer, but the fall off will happen.

GGG has not doubled their devs team so either PoE1 is getting cut back or both games will not receive the dev time they deserve.

stay angry!

cheers

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Nothv13#0740 wrote:

Pointing to numbers so early is idiotic. D4 also held high player numbers for a month or so. Helldivers 2 similar numbers of players as PoE2 at launch yet struggled to pull 50k concurrent until the most recent patch. There reduction started before the Sony issue too. I do think this will hold players for longer, but the fall off will happen.

GGG has not doubled their devs team so either PoE1 is getting cut back or both games will not receive the dev time they deserve.

Honestly, pointing to numbers is fine. The numbers that guy shared aren't really indicative of the picture, though.

• Maximum Peak players was reached on Sunday the 8th, at 578,569.
• Next highest peak players was reached on Sunday the 15th, at 517,541.
That's a 10.55% drop in concurrent players, in one week, in a game that's PAID early access. Only people who were certain they'd like the game paid to get in.

• Today's (Tuesday the 17th) peak player count was 414,680.
That's a 28.33% drop in concurrent players, in 9 days. Again, in an early access game that people had to pay to get into.

It's averaging more than a 4% drop in players from the previous day's numbers, as best I can tell from steamdb.

If this pace keeps up, and it actually seems to be accelerating, PoE2 will be under 50k concurrent players within two months of launch. You can run an exponential decay calculation to check this. 578,569 at 4% per day over 60 days will take it under 50k. If it keeps picking up speed, it might even hit that point in 7-8 weeks total. That's a catastrophic failure.

Obviously, they may be able to find ways to stop the hemorrhaging, but it's not looking great when all they keep doing is sticking Band-Aids on the Holy Grail Black Knight with both his arms and legs chopped off. And that's what they did to PoE with PoE2. They chopped off all the most important parts, and hope people won't notice because the graphics are better.

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ErdrickDragonsbane#5911 wrote:

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Nothv13#0740 wrote:

Pointing to numbers so early is idiotic. D4 also held high player numbers for a month or so. Helldivers 2 similar numbers of players as PoE2 at launch yet struggled to pull 50k concurrent until the most recent patch. There reduction started before the Sony issue too. I do think this will hold players for longer, but the fall off will happen.

GGG has not doubled their devs team so either PoE1 is getting cut back or both games will not receive the dev time they deserve.

Honestly, pointing to numbers is fine. The numbers that guy shared aren't really indicative of the picture, though.

• Maximum Peak players was reached on Sunday the 8th, at 578,569.
• Next highest peak players was reached on Sunday the 15th, at 517,541.
That's a 10.55% drop in concurrent players, in one week, in a game that's PAID early access. Only people who were certain they'd like the game paid to get in.

• Today's (Tuesday the 17th) peak player count was 414,680.
That's a 28.33% drop in concurrent players, in 9 days. Again, in an early access game that people had to pay to get into.

It's averaging more than a 4% drop in players from the previous day's numbers, as best I can tell from steamdb.

If this pace keeps up, and it actually seems to be accelerating, PoE2 will be under 50k concurrent players within two months of launch. You can run an exponential decay calculation to check this. 578,569 at 4% per day over 60 days will take it under 50k. If it keeps picking up speed, it might even hit that point in 7-8 weeks total. That's a catastrophic failure.

Obviously, they may be able to find ways to stop the hemorrhaging, but it's not looking great when all they keep doing is sticking Band-Aids on the Holy Grail Black Knight with both his arms and legs chopped off. And that's what they did to PoE with PoE2. They chopped off all the most important parts, and hope people won't notice because the graphics are better.

This is one of those reasons why I think the first major patch is gonna be the most important. The question becomes, is today's patch a Major Patch? The reality is not really, it's a lot of changes, but nothing truly substantial. How the numbers end up after the release of the first major content is gonna be the actual test to see if PoE2's future is bright or not. Right now more people are gonna bleed out as they finish the campaign once or twice or burn out on maps. That's just reality with big games. How many people come back for the first real content release is what people should be looking towards, and the longer it takes and if the content and changes aren't worthwhile, then more than likely PoE2's gonna be in a rough spot. The more the EA goes on without being able to get people BACK into the game, the worse it's gonna be.

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ErdrickDragonsbane#5911 wrote:

Honestly, pointing to numbers is fine. The numbers that guy shared aren't really indicative of the picture, though.

• Maximum Peak players was reached on Sunday the 8th, at 578,569.
• Next highest peak players was reached on Sunday the 15th, at 517,541.
That's a 10.55% drop in concurrent players, in one week, in a game that's PAID early access. Only people who were certain they'd like the game paid to get in.

• Today's (Tuesday the 17th) peak player count was 414,680.
That's a 28.33% drop in concurrent players, in 9 days. Again, in an early access game that people had to pay to get into.

It's averaging more than a 4% drop in players from the previous day's numbers, as best I can tell from steamdb.

If this pace keeps up, and it actually seems to be accelerating, PoE2 will be under 50k concurrent players within two months of launch. You can run an exponential decay calculation to check this. 578,569 at 4% per day over 60 days will take it under 50k. If it keeps picking up speed, it might even hit that point in 7-8 weeks total. That's a catastrophic failure.

Obviously, they may be able to find ways to stop the hemorrhaging, but it's not looking great when all they keep doing is sticking Band-Aids on the Holy Grail Black Knight with both his arms and legs chopped off. And that's what they did to PoE with PoE2. They chopped off all the most important parts, and hope people won't notice because the graphics are better.

I'm sure there are a lot of ghost players like me in those numbers who will remove the game forever as soon as their friends decide to quit or take a break. Some of the reasons for me:

-A lot of crashes
-No auction house
-Stash tabs are missing
-No loot filter, why do we even need one?
-Website and trade site constantly down
-Ascendancy locked behind worst mechnanics in the gaming industry ever
-Death penalty -%10 exp
-Gems and supports makes no sense, randomly drops
-Bad passive tree
-Maps can't sustain themselves even with the spending of a lot of currencies on them, and even those currencies can't sustain themselves.
-Builds and skills constantly getting nerfed, slummed to the ground. This only proves the faulty design, one guy exploits it and you have to take it down completely and ruin the game for everyone else.

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exsea#1724 wrote:

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We are already going in circles, I guess you went past half of my points (I can accept the other half, your zoom relation is weird to me, but it's whatever).

But one last thing, that you deeply don't understand. Having hard content to catter to top players, the zooming being part of the genre, power creep having to be brought each league, etc, is not my thinking :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM_5S55jUzk

GGG is setting up a base to have a healthier and easier developpement increment cycle (ppl talk about what PoE2 is supposed to be, but forgot that they hesitated a long time to have a seperate campaign, merging with the same endgame as PoE1)
Thinking it will stay slow is just fooling yourself and not understanding what we doing here (and as I said, mapping is already fast for top players, right now. Nerf fubgun :D ).

Pulling the numbers after such a PR campaign over a new game made me laugh though, ngl.

Anyway, time will tell, good luck and have fun, thanks for the discussion.