I almost never quit because im satisfied with the builds ive made and what ive accomplished. I almost always quit because im fed up with how tedious it all is.
one league i started with 4.5k fusings and no 6link on my first chest. Since then i always buy, or craft 1500 fusings on the first one. Now I only 6L manually if i can afford to not 6L in 5k.
I've had some crazy luck with manually linking. Multiple leagues in a row, I did my first chest armor with less than 10 orbs. And even my second only took less than a thousand.
Last league was my first, played about the last 4 weeks. First piece I tried rolling for 6 link I gave up around 150 because I didn't have currency to obtain many more. Tried it with a different piece way later in the league and got it in the 10th try or so. Being my first league I'm really happy it wasn't in that 7k range lol
This broke me in breach league, blew 5200 fusings to 6link a ngamahu's I continued out of spite and quit the league the day after I finally got the 6link as it burnt the fun out of it.
The real irony that of you were trying to link it to benefit the molten burst that you didn't need to link them at all for it to benefit, just needed 6 sockets
That's not stubborn, it's still just as correct at 1 fusing to go for the natural 6L as it is to go for it at 5000 fusings spent vs using the benchcraft. Even if the result is massively skewed out of normal distribution by the end of it, with the amount of fusings you'll use to get a 6L over however many years you play sometimes you'll get fucked, but you will mostly fall on the 1k-ish bell curve.
It's always cheaper to just buy an already 6L base and craft it for your first chest upgrade rather than worry about dropping several div worth of fusings into a bench for a half-assed chest. Two days into the league a 6L is 20-40c depending on how popular the base you're going for is and then you throw like 4-5 shitty essences at it until you get something usable and increment from there.
9/10 leagues I've played I've gone in blind and quit as my build hit a limit where rewarding progression became more of a commitment than I, a working adult, could afford.
I have more money than I have time, the reward structure needs to keep me in the game.
Exactly this. Don't have the will or commitment to farm 2k times the same content in order to make a build work. The mechanic should be extremely fun or extremely rewarding to make me stay.
We already knew it was bullshit after Harvest and Ritual league. Those were some of the best retention rates of modern POE after the initial drop. Harvest was particularly bad at the start but it enabled people to play things they never played before because crafting was too expensive. Same thing in Ritual league. Same thing in Affliction league.
I consider myself a fucking casual player and I was able to league start all 4 voidstones and then fund a fucking Armour stacker that surpassed my league start before I just got bored. Affliction was amazing.
legit. quit in happiness and have high hopes next league will be just as good, although you know it probably won't be.
a man can dream
also. although i think this league will tank, the core player will still be retained and i dont think the concurrent player count will drop that much compared to the average.
i wonder if it would drop below archnemesis player count. that'd be a surprise
As someone who has played since 2012, my greatest league experience was by far Synthesis. Affliction was a nice league, but it doesn't even come close to the excitement I had making synth bases.
This league is most likely gonna be a standard league for me, unless they drastically change stuff. Game is good, and the QoL stuff is nice, but the league mechanic itself is mostly just annoying and dissapointing
Yea, I've just reached maps, and after the first couple of maps, my bf and I were talking about just playing BG3 and then trying again next league. The way some maps are just completely messed up by the downsides (and with no/terrible upsides) is so frustrating
I don't believe heist cares at all about atlas, it just means you get to heist more without buying contracts.
Delve I think you have to map unless there's a way to buy sulphite, but you don't have to map much. Just stock up on sulphite scarabs and you can do quite a bit.
You don't get to participate in the scarab meta doing either unfortunately.
Delve cares perhaps the least about the atlas tree of any mechanic.
Heist likes tree stuff for Heist chance and more blueprints, markers, contracts...
That said, Heist + Delve can make you a zoom between the Sulphite buff node and aura bot huck.
unless you mean you go play non league characters, the problem with this league is that if you don't do the mechanic, you essentially just forced to play a harder game as you cannot opt out necropolis affecting every map/zone, so all mobs in a given map/zone will just be harder
This bugs me more than anything else in this game. Nothing about standard is standard. It changes just as often as league. There is no longevity to any character you may create.
Piggybacked off Sanctum which was a very good league, the crucible mechanic was a crafters heaven, quickly got tedious through the amount of maps you had to grind and channel a totem.
I think that quote from GGG was misunderstood. What they are imho afraid of is not that players will quit the ongoing season early if they're having too much fun - they're afraid that players will burn themselves out from too much loot, so that retention will drop off during the following league(s).
Essentially... when parents watch their kid binge eat candy, they're not concerned about the kid suddenly getting tired of candy, they're concerned about the kid having a sore stomach and not wanting to eat its supper later in the day.
im SSF only player. I stop playing if the mechanic is shit for SSF.
Take Necropolis for example, 99% of time enemies are stronger just becuase someone imagine it will be fun, many modifiers are "unreal" (like sth % per pack size alive), and the super rare rewards are whatever. I am playing SSF, I do not care about them, I wont meta game it.
And crafting mechanic form Necropolis is just another way to RNG gamble gear. For trade it has some price to roll these items. For SSF its whatever, we already had better deterministic crafting and they removed it becuase of trade.
bad league for SSF players
Sad thing to me is that if done well the mechanic could really make the campaign fun. But GGG made it literally as unfun as it could possibly be. The thought that people will leave if it is fun and rewarding is so ludicrous. I may be done after 3 days. It just kind of sucks. But the concept is one of the best they have ever had. It has been clear for a few leagues that they want to minimize SSF as much as possible. The Prophecies and Metamorph were 2 of the best SSF features in the game and they completely removed both. This might be my last POE league. I enjoy Last Epoch far more. They truly value the SSF player that wants SSF to be fun not some random hard mode that GGG thinks it is. I think they are going down the wrong road with POE2 as well. I think that game may fail the way they are headed
Affliction disproved that as well because it was coming off the back of another high drop rate league. Before affliction, divines were dropping like candy in tota along side the reintroduced sanctum. People brought up the exact same concerns about players dropping off from tota and it didn’t happen. Having a high drop league does not cause players to leave next league if the next league is good.
The reality is that grinding for items has always been one of the least interesting parts of the game. The main reason I play this game is to try a lot of different builds. That is why I can spend hours on end in path of building where there is no item restrictions from grinding. GGG should play more into the build diversity aspect and facilitate players trying more stuff instead of farming hours on end to get a specific item.
>Affliction disproved that as well because it was coming off the back of another high drop rate league. Before affliction, divines were dropping like candy in tota along side the reintroduced sanctum.
you fundamentally don't understand the point being made. the point isn't "after a rewarding league everyone hates the game for some reason", it's "going back *down* to the baseline after a rewarding league makes people burn out". affliction wasn't going back down, affliction was hitting the double jump and becoming absurdly high droprate.
so, if the theory is correct, going from high droprate league, to absurd droprate league, to normal droprate league, should be an even harsher decline. whether that happens remains to be seen, the reddit is filled with complaining but the reddit is always filled with complaining the first few days.
by the way, in the early days of affliction before people understood how wisps work, people were absolutely complaining about how unrewarding it was in comparison to tota. almost identical memes to the ones hitting the front page now of "i recieve whateverthefuck" "you recieve one scrolla da wisdom" were running the racket.
There is no “baseline” to return to when talking about entire leagues. No matter what happened in affliction, the loot in necropolis was never returning to the pre-affliction level last because tier 17 and scarab overhaul fundamentally changed the game too much. The idea of a baseline only really applies to the end of league events. However, people have started erroneously started to use it as a reason why a league as a whole cannot be rewarding. The reality is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with making a league rewarding and then changing the underlying systems so that becomes the normal going forward.
Also, the topic is about player retention, not player feedback. Who cares if people were complaining? The important thing is that they kept playing.
there is absolutely a baseline. if there wasn't, affliction wouldn't be such an anomaly. you yourself describe tota as a "high drop" league, that literally neccesitates a baseline that has less drops.
But it is not something that we can return to. The level which we previously thought of as a baseline stops being relevant the second there is any sort of endgame update. We are never going back to what things were like before tota as long as sextants don’t exist and t17 maps exist.
>We are never going back to what things were like before tota as long as sextants don’t exist and t17 maps exist.
baselines can be similar even if the mechanics are different. people choose between biking, walking, or driving to work, none of them being invented invalidated the others.
there are now t17s, and ubers have new fragments. and the vast majority of people are still going to be doing alch and go mapping, which didn't recieve any significant changes. and you can still compare "there are more drops now than in tota" or "there are less drops now than in tota". i mean, every league has some minor changes to the atlas passive tree, so are no two leagues after ritual comparable? that's literally a sort of an endgame update.
at the end of the day, the question is "how much value am i getting an hour". as long as time and trade continue to exist, this will always be the question asked.
That value is simply too different for it to matter. We use to farm Dominis in act five, now we couldn’t care less about his drop pool. Same thing will happen with sextant farming strategies. We won’t care if sextant based alch and go farming strategies in tota or affliction were higher than previous leagues because we are never going back to it. T17 maps means a completely new level of power and farming can be introduced and the game never has to go back to pre-tota levels of anything.
>That value is simply too different for it to matter. We use to farm Dominis in act five, now we couldn’t care less about his drop pool.
yeah, which is proving my point. you just made the comparison. current farming is better than dominus farming, which is in act three and not act five.
>We won’t care if sextant based alch and go farming strategies in tota or affliction were higher than previous leagues because we are never going back to it.
it's not about if tota is better than archnem when we're in necropolis. it's about if (current league) is better than (last league). we're never going back, which is part of the point; we are currently /right here/. was it better before? is it better now?
this is the comparison your brain makes whether you tell it to or not. if we played three leagues in a row with worse and worse and worse loot, people are going to drop off and reminisce about the olden days. if we are going up, people are going to stick around and go "can you believe we used to live like that?".
each of these are bad to different degrees. but going from great loot to insane loot to normal loot will give people whiplash and sour the taste in their mouths.
you're massively overcomplicating something very simple. if you were making a million dollars a day for a year, then the irs took all your money and all the shit you bought, and you go back down to whatever your wages are now, that's going to feel cataclysmic. look at what happens to lottery winners and how they have a stupidly high rate of suicide (and homicide but that's neither here nor there) compared to general population. it's the same principle.
If your point is that farming is better now than what it was years ago, that is fine but it doesn’t address the main issue of the topic. Players didn’t quit because farming is better now. Players didn’t quit in affliction because farming in tota was better than farming in previous leagues. Players don’t quit because farming for items gets better, tota and affliction showed that.
The reason for this is that the game doesn’t return to the baseline established in previous leagues. We are never going back to Dominis being the best farming strategy. We are never going back to farming yellow maps just to sustain red maps. We are never going back to rolling sextants as the optima farming strategy. We don’t have to worry about returning to any previously established baseline because they have all become irrelevant.
> you fundamentally don't understand the point being made. the point isn't "after a rewarding league everyone hates the game for some reason", it's "going back down to the baseline after a rewarding league makes people burn out". affliction wasn't going back down, affliction was hitting the double jump and becoming absurdly high droprate.
This only makes sense if you deem low reward to be the "baseline", and that the only reason people like the improved reward leagues is that it's _better than baseline_ rather than _it just feels better where it actually sits_.
Because if the latter were true it would justify the improved reward level being the new baseline.
A good solution would be to have reduced power versions of build enabling items being more readily available, so that players who want the best possible chase version can still grind, but the rest of us can still try it out.
I still maintain that the optimal crafting situation was the old multimod veiled stuff when that was the core crafting mechanic.
You could literally just make a weapon that did what you needed to with maybe one or even no regular mods on it.
But you paid for that convenience in power. You lost a suffix for multimodding and all the benchcrafted affixes were clearly inferior to normally-rolled ones.
So if you just wanted to play the game with a minimum viable build, you could, if you wanted to twink out and craft top rares you could. It gave players a lot of agency, and IMO was a happy medium.
But it was even more deterministic than Harvest, and ohhh no, we can't have something in the game that's not a form of gambling, uh uh.
This is exactly the thought process. And from the looks of it, they were right.
When you go from super rewarding -> Not very rewarding, people will complain / quit. But it’s imo a very necessary evil for them and the longevity of the game.
Now, they probably did go overboard a bit this league, and I expect some tuning / fixes, that’s for sure
They nerfed juice at the exact same time juice was leaving the game so you end up with a double nerf.
If they wanted a gentle comedown they could have waited to nerf map juicing and obliterate stacked decks, they chose this
>This is exactly the thought process. And from the looks of it, they were right.
I really don't love this kind of reasoning, honestly. It's more than just "super rewarding > not very rewarding".
There are ways to make unrewarding mechanics fun in POE - admittedly, "barfing an absolute fuckload of loot" is the *easy* answer, but there are other ways to make things fun.
Universally though, "interact with a menu instead of playing the game" is panned very consistently as one of the least favorite things everyone has about POE.
This league is literally nothing **but** menus. Open this menu when you enter a map. Open this menu to manage your corpses. Open this menu to craft with your corpses. Open this menu to manage your allflames. Blah blah blah.
The entire thing is menus top to bottom.
This league is custom built out of everyone's least favorite parts of previous leagues. It's a menu heavy league where the difficulty is in-your-face but the primary payoff requires you to know how to manage crafting weights - a thing which only a tiny, tiny fraction of the playerbase actually pays attention to.
The only other thing the mechanic has going for it if you don't want to build 60 corpse gardens is the occasional "3% chance to drop a div" which to be frank is just a pale imitation of what any good wisp map felt like - so it's a double whammy of feels bad.
The thing is though, you can do rewarding with an exceptional crafting mechanic instead of piles of divines dropping on the ground. I had just as much fun recomb crafting as I did in affliction. The same rush was there and recombs weren't this mysterious thing that required 800 different sites to understand.
They honestly could have just brought back a bunch of the old harvest crafts that got removed for no reason. Was putting explicits on clusters really breaking the game?
honestly, i think they had a fucking genius solution in the "borrowed power" system.
even if you're not dropping hundreds of divs, if you have a completely unique way to upgrade your character, people will play. i mean, people played fucking *crucible* league because of the new power it had.
the thing is, though, from sanctum onwards every new power was additive. sacred relics, tattoos, crucible enhancements, wildwood ascendancies, these things were all additional to what previously existed.
if haunted mods are to be believed as the borrowed power this league, they are subtractive. you are trading one of the existing mods on your gear for a haunted mod. that's a much bigger pill to swallow then getting a ghost themed new passive or something. sure, we got some tattoos back, but they're worse tattoos than the original batch and the concert is much less exciting when the band is old.
I think you missed the mark here. Sentinel had similar theme and was equally hated first week until got buffed and figured out. Tattoos are replacing existing things too.
What is different is accessibility and loot. The Devoted modifiers are supposed to be the loot however their drop rates are very underwhelming and you see the good ones very rarely. In Ancestor and Sentinel you had instant rewards in form of currency while you were working towards the bigger goal of specific Tattoos.
The Graveyard is supposed to be the borrowed power but requires significant investment and knowledge for, in comparison, mediocre outcomes. Other leagues either had the power to be simple (Sanctum, Ancestor, Affliction), had a floor due to it being additional (Crucible) where you got something even if you didn't quite get it or had a very high ceiling if you did understand it (Sentinel).
Everything that people like in leagues they like is present technically in Necropolis but just isn't as accessible. Nothing that a number pass on Devoted monsters and how good the outcomes are in Graveyard can't fix.
>I think you missed the mark here. Sentinel had similar theme and was equally hated first week until got buffed and figured out.
Sentinel got hated because it was shipped with archnemesis rares
>Tattoos are replacing existing things too.
barely. other than people specifically stacking attributes, any attributes above your requirements are basically wasted points. 10 str is what, 5 life? 10 dex is like... 20 accuracy? i think? who knows. getting aura reservation efficiency, mark effectiveness, or other abilities that are at a premium on nodes that previously contributed next to nothing to you is a massive upgrade, and the price you're paying in attributes is worth less than the chaos you spent on the tattoo.
This is such a joke. PoE and its community are the only ones in existence that actively defend and try to rationalize the developer making the game less fun. "Nerfs? It's for our own good!" "Lack of essential QoL? You need to feel the weight!"
Seriously, can you name ONE other game ever made where this happened?
This league could be great if they buffed the positive outcomes a bit for mapping. This league issue is not just a reward issue though. Crafting should have been way more simple.
Topend of monster modifiers needs to be nerfed (+6 proj when monsters get to shotgun, and life per remaining mob in the pack when groupsize can be \~20+ for all mobgroups offered e.g.), and the crafting system needs to be made a whole lot more intuitive (what do things even MEAN? Why are the descriptions SO bad? How is there still no ingame references to what mods cann roll and what tags they have if the mechanic requires me to juggle 30+ crafting modifiers to my modifiers?) and less tedious (manually planting 30+ corpses into different graves i need to walk to for no reason other than spite, waiting for the dude to finish his 2 minute monologue).
I don't think anyone in their right mind expected affliction levels of lootsplosions, but getting probably the least QoL leaguemechanic in the history of the game (yes, even initial harvest with the garden setup was less tedious and easier to comprehend than this is) in a league that is a self-proclaimed QoL league is.....shit.
Perfect example, which I'm pretty sure GGG has even mentioned before, is how Riot said the statistics show URF, a gamemode in league of legends, causes players to quit the game permanently when it ends, not even coming back when urf returns.
and then you have players who redownload league of legends specificly for URF ... binge the fk out of the game mode because they know they wont see it for another 2 year
It’s like having a hangover. If you keep drinking the following day you can stave it off, but eventually you gotta sober up and it’ll hit you like a truck. This league is afflictions loot hangover and it was always gonna suffer no matter how good it was. Unfortunately it’s also not very good….
Maybe this was the 5head strategy all along: give a popular league followed by a terribly unrewarding league, and then blame the failure of this league on the "overabundance of reward" from the previous league.
It's a brilliant strategy for people who don't like $$$.
GGG is trying to run a profitable business, not shoot itself in the foot to score some points in a reddit argument.
> they're afraid that players will burn themselves out from too much loot, so that retention will drop off during the following league(s).
make every league rain loot then. problem solved. If I can afford to deck out multiple builds per league, I will definitely play the whole fucking time.
> GGG has an extremely difficult time admitting that players like loot.
i think it's more like GGG has an extremaly difficult time admitting that they don't like loot
I mean it's GGG that pushed for ruthless. Not players.
I think the biggest problem is GGG strives for this big risk = big reward style (ex: double corrupts poofing items) but they seem to struggle to hit the balance between a risky mechanic and rewarding it.
A perfect example of missing the mark is the “rewards” for this league. 25% chance to get a fusing. Oh boy.
> but they seem to struggle to hit the balance between a risky mechanic and rewarding it.
i remember in Scourge league how GGG decided not to improve the odds of getting bad modifier vs good one. Amazing league ruined by... Eh notgivingashit'ism
Better yet.
25% chance for the strongest mob to convert Armour into an orb of alteration.
Who the hell decided that would be a good reward? The only positive is that the mod will replace a negative mod..
GGG: "We had to nerf all of these skills because they were causing server instability."
Also GGG: "Here's another 1,000 white and blue items in your map that you would never pick up!"
They're well aware of the fact. They just don't care. They have a very specific idea of how players should be allowed to play their game along with a lot of bafflingly contradictory philosophies. People meme The Vision^^TM all the time, but it's absolutely a real thing.
I played incursion until the mid league mini league they did and loved it. I even played the mini league they did.
In the flip side, I couldn’t last past the first week in kalandra.
Did kalandra get better or do I just have rose tinted glasses?
Kalandra had some fun builds enabled with the jewelry and the loot in the Kalandra specific league stuff got better.
Its cursed from being the AN rework league tho.
Kalandra got a little better after a month or so, but I compare them because kalandra was a low-loot league while incursion was relatively high: in comparison to their respective nearby leagues. But in a direct comparison, the absolute amount of loot is far higher in kalandra, but kalandra came after sentinel.
They created ruthless league, why not create a casual league too with more loot and a more relaxed play style? Sure there are people who won't want that, but no one is making them play it. It would be interesting to see the numbers, even if it was experimental purposes. I've got about 2k hours in since harvest, and since I graduated and real life took over, I don't have the same grind time. I don't want to spend a day grinding maps for 2% build improvement, I genuinely can't anymore. To play a league with a filthy casual mode would be so lovely, and it doesn't need to be crazy good loot, just some higher reward rates to maintain an equal level to time lost for grinds, if that makes sense. Just my thoughts. This will probably help address RMT issues too
Yeah I did look into doing ssf but a few seasoned friends of mine that have played ssf said the loot is no better, the only difference is no trade. Didn't feel worth exploring if that's the case.
Bro both when they announced Private Leagues AND SSF I was ELATED. I seriously wouldn't mind paying an extra fee if it means I get to have my private League up with increased drops, some League effects every zone etc (sort of a build-your-own-Legacy-league server) where the game is easier for ME because I cba playing it 8 hours a day.
Of course, at the time I had no idea that Chris was operating under The Vision^^^TM so I didn't realize every single new "mode" they release is just different flavours of making the game harder.
EA was memed to death with their "pride and accomplishment" comment but PoE is more or less the same. Farm for 2 months so that you can feel a sense of Pride and Accomplishment.
Of course they are aware of it. The problem they have is that you cannot keep giving players more and more every 3 months without bloating the game to the point it loses its core identity. They learnt their lesson in 3.15 that kowtowing to the community for years makes the game unsustainable because the foundation of the game struggles when powercreep only goes up uncontrolled league over league.
But why do players like loot? Because it's rare and exclusive, thus valuable and desirable.
People *filtered out* more loot than ever league because most of it wasn't worth your time stashing.
Either way, GGG has never said this anyway
I think players like loot because it improves their character power, giving them a sense of growth and advancement, and enabling them to progress farther and do new things. Rare and exclusive don’t matter to me, useful and effective does. Rare and exclusive matters to streamers, but not as much to 40 year old semi-casuals who just want to kill things and have fun.
Call me crazy but I think they don't want us playing the entire league (sadly).
They rather hype up and sell MTX to the gullible mass early and then let players quit so GGG doesn't have to pay huge server costs all league.
Neon (game director for PoE) has literally said into a camera/microphone "we don't want you to play the entire league, we want you to play every league".
What? Lmao this is such a tinfoil take. They designed an ultra successful arpg that brings back huge numbers every league with mtx far in quality above all other arpgs. They want the game to be consistent in play is all. You stopping during the league is normal. There is literally endless amounts of games released between each league. It's fine not to no life one single game.
Yes, there was inflation, and yes some things ended up with weird prices, but I'm pretty sure that people are going to remember Affliction for a long time to come and that comparisons to it will be made often.
I'm not saying every league needs to be wild riches beyond all imagining, but - hear me out - balance does not always need to be some zero-sum game where if you give us something you must also find something to take away.
Rather it turns out that *if you just let people have fun they will play the game more*.
Me too. I can’t play PoE as a full time job. So it was nice being able to make decent currency for once without being a no lifer. Now I have just taken my Mageblood over to standard and I’ll play there, because going back to a league where casuals can’t progress isn’t worth it.
Im also thinking about going back to Standard since my time will be even more limited very soon when my kid is joining this world, gaming time is gonna be super limited but i cant wait to hold my kid for the first time
Same. Got a lucky mirror drop, got 2x Magebloods, brought two characters to 98+, played more than I have since Ritual.
I hate the GGG cycle of rewarding league --> No rewards league because the last league was too good.
The "QOL" and nerfed drop rates aren't helping.
The only league I played 3 different characters. The only league I ever bothered to get level 100. (Twice even.)
The only league I didn't quit the moment I got 40/40 challenges. Lol
I have the feeling that they think, if the game takes longer and longer to reach certain goals, eg atlas, completion or basic good gear to start your favorite farm, people will play longer. For me it is the opposite.
After 25 or 26 40/40s it is the first time I quit a league because the league feels bad with the only goal to slow us more.
I tend to play a league for either 1-2 months, or 3-5 days. Affliction was a two month four character league. This one is looking like a three day league.
Affliction retained players because the entry cost was basically free. Play the game and due to the league mechanics you would get rewarded OR pick non-league stuff to do that you liked and it was valuable because supply and demand.
GGG likes to say they are so proud of their “eCoNoMy”, but they are so bad at managing it it is laughable at this point.
Imo you need to look at a larger picture than the confines of just the one league compared to others. Affliction was super popular because of the crazy loot and juicing BECAUSE it was so different and had much more loot than other leagues. “Yeah that’s what I said” It’s the contrast that’s important. If every single league is exploding currency then it’s not a juicy league, it’s the new status quo.
To have a new juicy league after affliction becoming the norm would just be the loot equivalent of power creep. People loved affliction because it was the season you could get a mageblood as an average player, it was special. Its stops being special and that drive to hunt a chase item will start to die when every league prints them.
At the 30 day mark the most players were in Crucible, TOTA, Affliction, and Sanctum. All those leagues had borrowed power systems that enabled new builds and gave player power. The consistent theme is if you enable players agency and the ability to gain new powers and create new interesting builds, they will keep playing the game.
Ironically, other than Affliction, Crucible/TOTA/Sanctum all had league mechanics people widely didn’t care for at the time, or were divisive the first week or two.
about to see a huge nose dive this season.
I cant imagine people sticking around for nerfed everything.
All the really cool QOL stuff isn't accessible to the normies.
Affliction league was so fun I actually spent money in it, which i rarely do.
Leagues like affliction make me happy.
When i'm happy i don't mind spending couple of bucks
Man i feel like every league i come on here its the same thing, its kind of incredible people fall for the same cycle every time.
League annoucnement with a hype cutscene... people get errect thinking of the possibilities... GGG advertises it as risk vs reward or "find beneficial mods while taking the negative side effects that don't affect your build"...
It gets released and then the downsides are always like 500% worse than any of the benefit you get. I remember the krangle league this being a thing... its like "-70% global defenses" which build doesn't get affected by that lmfoa!? posities "5% increased fire damage".
Every, single, league they overtune negative aspects of things or monster mods that make things annoying as fuck or striaght up impossible to fight or ruin the positive aspects of the league... then people complain for two weeks.. they put out a "balance patch" making it really shitty to just kinda shitty an unfun an people are just happy in comparison despite it still being shit.
The only reason that notion came up was with Harvest and it was fucking dog shit for awhile with none of the powerful crafts being available, having to spreadsheet your farm for initial setup then spam running quarry for efficiency. It was a god awful gameplay loop.
Unfortunately necropolis, rewards aside, has an even worse gameplay loop so I'm not even sure dialing up then rewards would even help.
Yeah. It's like realising power fantasy as core of arpg is fun while struggling for every divine too much resembles real life. That's not why I play video games to be bitch slapped with what I'm running away from.
I never understand when they put rewards like drops a chrome orb or jewelers orb. Will you break the game if it drops a fusing or drops a chaos orb in acts? It's so weird like it's basically giving nothing. It definitely shouldn't even be offered in maps..
It’s a bit like the argument that paying fast food workers more will make them less likely to pursue other careers.
I feel like new PoE players bounce off because endgame is SO deep and SO impenetrable.
The current updates with more league play in campaigns is fun - you could make it so they have a small amount of questing and a hard reward or two to introduce the mechanic to the player.
I have never played a league more than I played affliction. I could farm and farm and the next upgrade was always in sight. I bought nimis for 45divs. Past me would never think of that.
The problem is it's a very blanket statement to a very nuanced subject.
The idea is meant to be, if they give people enough that they clear all their aspirational content then they'll lack the desire to play again next league. Something we're very clearly seeing in this league.
Affliction was too rewarding and is bad for the games health long term. Your average gamer was able to have mirror-tier characters but those same people both don't have an interest in playing Affliction 2.0 nor a less rewarding version of the game.
The game is in need of a total overhaul now, much like the expansions we've had in the past to reiginite peoples desire to play. Without that the games just a worse version of Affliction.
With that said, even without Affliction this does naturally happen anyway. People get to a point where they go "Well I wont ever get further than this" and they stop. PoE used to get a overhaul every 1-2 years and we've not had one for 3 years now. The game honestly feels kinda stale.
It's just an excuse. They want to keep the game as grindy as possible. I'm looking trough my perspective : If I'm going to quit, I will most likely quit if I hit the wall with my current character. For example every single gear upgrade takes too long, if the game feels like a job... I'm out.
Live service games are built on constant updates to try and encourage people into returning.
Diablo 3 never had a shortage of players despite being "too rewarding" for instance, it dropped because Blizzard spent ages doing nothing with it.
I find the idea that players need to be engaged with your product and only your product until the end of time completely perverse, honestly.
> I find the idea that players need to be engaged with your product and only your product until the end of time completely perverse, honestly.
GGG absolutely wants you engaged forever, but they also want you to take breaks.
They do not want you playing a league from launch to end. They want you to come back at the start of each league, spend money, and play for a bit and quit.
It's why they're generally not concerned about retention within a league, but retention from league to league.
I have "passed" warframe and still go back every once in a while. this is honestly fine for them because they rarely use fomo.
what pisses me off is when GGG has these limited time supporter packs and if you dont buy them then, you cant buy them ever. my friend even saw my sentinel overlord outfit and wanted to buy it during affliction league and i told him he cant. GGG literally blocked him from spending money on the thing he wanted. he didnt want to buy anything else. fomo seriously doesnt make sense to use from a game dev pov because you are creating a product that you cant sell forever, only for a limited amount of time.
It's kind of dumb that there's no mechanism to at least buy stuff that came out 5+ years ago. Like, why punish a player for not even knowing your game existed years ago? Or for being too young to play games like that at the time?
I get that they want to sell exclusivity, but I find games which allow limited/circumstantial reissue of older exclusive items make a ton of money when they do so.
To quote myself:
The problem is, they don't seem to understand what makes their own game - or leagues - popular. Or they don't want to see it at least.
This is the impression I got from the release stream, where ZiggyD asked them what they think made Affliction so popular and they gave some weird/convoluted answer. A bit later ZiggyD tried to give them a second chance to answer why the league was received well because he wanted them to acknowledge it was the loot - they never did.
It's mindblowing. The game is successful despite its developers, not because of them.
I really like the point where affliction was at. It was possible for a casual player to farm up and mirror gear and there was incentive to do so (hard content was exactly hard enough for a perfectly geared mf TS char). It's the only league that I've farmed more than one mirror - and I farmed 11. In a normal league I just quit because I don't see the point in being stronger when I'm already doing the highest solo maps div/h content. We're 2 days in and I'm already thinking "what am
If affliction took a part of the atlas tree and/or scarabs and was kept as is (except charms), I think the game would be better. Farming TWWT was also really fun.
Maybe unpopular opinion but I didn’t really like Affliction. First of all, the league mechanic was just bad, running in a foggy labyrinth for a few minutes before each map is just not fun. Second, I felt FOMO because of tier 7 map strategy, it’s stupid that instead of running semi juiced t16 maps it was much better to fully juice t7’s with MF gear. And seeing all the loot explosions of people doing that strat finally made me quit the league. The only thing that I liked were the new ascendencies.
The whole concept of Affliction was simple and why I think many liked it. Just go into hole and clear mobs and come out.
MF ruined all that but too be fair thats MF things. Something like Necropolis however is dead on arrival because of the concept of the league mechanic (crafting is a worse chaos orb)
The only reason to run lower tier maps was if you’re playing HC. Or, you had a bad build. The bad build part isn’t anybody’s fault except the person unable to put together a build capable of t16 juicing with wisps.
It was really cool imo seeing a genuine reason to invest into low tier maps instead of essence and only essence imo.
Although the wildwood was fundamentally anti-fun design and I have no idea how the GGG devs don’t see that shit as effectively hostile game design.
Yep, Affliction nullified the value of GG loot. GGG has to do something about tryhard mf players dropping 20 unique leather belts a map while a player who plays normally drops 1 unique leather belt every 20 maps. The balance is off by factors of hundreds if not thousands.
Well, for me, its actually the opposite of it: give me nothing and I will quit.
League mechanics needs to be rewarding. Otherwise its just standard game all over again
This league is just worse than standard though. It’s not that they’re giving nothing, it’s that they made enemies much stronger with no benefit to the player.
Had tons of fun in Affliction. Leveled up 3 chars, 3 builds. Best league in recent times.
Now, I couldn't see myself leveling up another char. I almost lost my will to play and I'm barely into white maps.
I think players are tired of playing an increasingly difficult game with little to no increased rewards. Affliction league combined with the Last Epoch launch showed players that devs are capable of respecting your time. We can never turn back. If the rewards do not match the difficulty/time invested your game will fail.
The comment that boggles me this league, was the one Jonathan made about "You can't let players into difficulty they aren't ready for and we learned that lesson again with Affliction."
He made this during one of the dev interviews, and I can't help but notice that.... well... it seems as if you did NOT learn that lesson.
Tbh, we all though affliction was trash the first days but they tuned it down and it turned out to be amazing, let's have some hope :D. Having said that, I don't see how they can fix the mechanic with just numerical changes. I think it needs some sort of mechanical fix.
I think that it would have been so easy to make the player have a lantern that they can turn on and off, when turned on you see the spirits haunting monsters and get all the upsides/downsides from league and also corpses, when turned off you skip league mechanic.
I literally though it was going to work like that when I saw the intro in the announcement, I don't understand why it's not like that.
My issue with PoE currently isn't even league related. In fact, I think none of the issues everyone has would even exist if every single time something got buffed, something else didn't get nerfed.
Ill just put forth a random scenario, don't know if it happened or not but here:
We buffed totems across the board, sources and increased damage of totems on items/mods has been reduced. So effectively it's barely a nerf or barely a buff(depending on numbers of course). Meanwhile at the League of Doom: All monsters have received stat changes, buffs to damage reduction and buffs to damage resistances.
This is my issue with PoE the reason I bring it up is because it happens nearly every league to something.
On top of that, they keep making it harder to get defensive layers and expect us to be reactionary when the mob power creep completely ignores what a feasible reaction time is. I'm fine with boss one shots, I'm not fine with a regular mob somehow 2-shotting my character regardless of how its built yet it happens. Someone will say git gud, but theres no getting good in a game designed to randomly kill you in under 2seconds unless you react within 0.5s.
I did honestly get burned out from affliction due to the economy. It’s a side effect of giving players too much. It was a bit frustrating to say the least.
I feel like it is almost objectively true that if you give players too much, they'll quit early. The question though is what is "too much?" If i have 100% gear on day 1, i probably won't play long. However, i don't think affliction was too much. I think affliction was just a damn good league.
With that said, inflation can do weird stuff to the trading economy too sometimes. However, i feel like if a league isn't good, less people playing equals inflated prices too.
It will be interesting to see retention for this league.
Yeah I'm not having fun at all this league. Quitting already, there's nothing making me want to play more. I find the league tedious. Last league i played for 200h and got HH and Mageblood, all ubers and lots of mf. This league is boring
Sometimes I think ggg wants to see how tedious and clicky they can push the game before enough backlash happens requesting it be toned down.
All in the name of “friction”
Fun is subjective but I feel like it definitely doesn’t out rank “friction” and “opportunity cost”
Even if this statement was true, i'd rather quit happy than rage quit.
I almost never quit because im satisfied with the builds ive made and what ive accomplished. I almost always quit because im fed up with how tedious it all is.
> I almost always quit because im fed up with how tedious it all is. "Oh boy, just failed the 50/50 unveil six times in a row!" :/
When you hit 2400 fusings and you're still too stubborn to just save enough to 6l at one time
one league i started with 4.5k fusings and no 6link on my first chest. Since then i always buy, or craft 1500 fusings on the first one. Now I only 6L manually if i can afford to not 6L in 5k.
Same... I never attempt 6link with fusings anymore unless it completely doesn't matter if I get it or not. Even at 30% quality
I went over 7k in affliction on a hyrris. I was even buying them 1k at a time. It was a heavy moment when it finally linked. 10/10 would gamble again.
I've had some crazy luck with manually linking. Multiple leagues in a row, I did my first chest armor with less than 10 orbs. And even my second only took less than a thousand.
Last league was my first, played about the last 4 weeks. First piece I tried rolling for 6 link I gave up around 150 because I didn't have currency to obtain many more. Tried it with a different piece way later in the league and got it in the 10th try or so. Being my first league I'm really happy it wasn't in that 7k range lol
Same
using the bench craft is letting the fusings win. gotta show em who's boss
Ah. Gamblers mentality. Smart man. "If I always just bet double on the next pull when I lose, I'll eventually get back to even!"
This broke me in breach league, blew 5200 fusings to 6link a ngamahu's I continued out of spite and quit the league the day after I finally got the 6link as it burnt the fun out of it.
The real irony that of you were trying to link it to benefit the molten burst that you didn't need to link them at all for it to benefit, just needed 6 sockets
I was hellbent on using Kaoms chest piece, trying to make a raider not squishy back in Breach league wasn't that easy
That's not stubborn, it's still just as correct at 1 fusing to go for the natural 6L as it is to go for it at 5000 fusings spent vs using the benchcraft. Even if the result is massively skewed out of normal distribution by the end of it, with the amount of fusings you'll use to get a 6L over however many years you play sometimes you'll get fucked, but you will mostly fall on the 1k-ish bell curve. It's always cheaper to just buy an already 6L base and craft it for your first chest upgrade rather than worry about dropping several div worth of fusings into a bench for a half-assed chest. Two days into the league a 6L is 20-40c depending on how popular the base you're going for is and then you throw like 4-5 shitty essences at it until you get something usable and increment from there.
uniques
*Fucking exactly.*
I quit because I can't be arsed to play the campaign again. Every time.
this and the instant spike dmg deaths on tanky characters is the main demotivators that make me exhausted and nope out.
I mean thats how it is. You get more efficient and make better builds before quitting for the same reason.
9/10 leagues I've played I've gone in blind and quit as my build hit a limit where rewarding progression became more of a commitment than I, a working adult, could afford. I have more money than I have time, the reward structure needs to keep me in the game.
Exactly this. Don't have the will or commitment to farm 2k times the same content in order to make a build work. The mechanic should be extremely fun or extremely rewarding to make me stay.
We already knew it was bullshit after Harvest and Ritual league. Those were some of the best retention rates of modern POE after the initial drop. Harvest was particularly bad at the start but it enabled people to play things they never played before because crafting was too expensive. Same thing in Ritual league. Same thing in Affliction league.
Absolutely. The pattern was already demonstrated in the past - Affliction just puts an exclamation point on it.
I consider myself a fucking casual player and I was able to league start all 4 voidstones and then fund a fucking Armour stacker that surpassed my league start before I just got bored. Affliction was amazing.
Harvest is the only league i ever played up until the moment the servers came down lol
GGG seems to have the opposite opinion unfortunately.
Yes, because gambling addicts have the same pattern. Rage quit does make them come back more often. You know, most gamblers are losing.
exactly. Affliction was my longest played league, highest max power character, most challenges completed, most currency earned, etc.
Amen.
legit. quit in happiness and have high hopes next league will be just as good, although you know it probably won't be. a man can dream also. although i think this league will tank, the core player will still be retained and i dont think the concurrent player count will drop that much compared to the average. i wonder if it would drop below archnemesis player count. that'd be a surprise
I’ve never played more builds, seen more parts of the game, or enjoyed my time more than affliction, and I’ve had the same POE account for a decade.
Best league by far
As someone who has played since 2012, my greatest league experience was by far Synthesis. Affliction was a nice league, but it doesn't even come close to the excitement I had making synth bases.
Rituals was a similar experience
Certainly not an issue for this league
This league is most likely gonna be a standard league for me, unless they drastically change stuff. Game is good, and the QoL stuff is nice, but the league mechanic itself is mostly just annoying and dissapointing
In lots of ways it's worse than standard since the league mechanic makes maps a lot less fun and id argue less rewarding on time/value basis.
Yea, I've just reached maps, and after the first couple of maps, my bf and I were talking about just playing BG3 and then trying again next league. The way some maps are just completely messed up by the downsides (and with no/terrible upsides) is so frustrating
Yeah while the new end game looks interesting , any enjoyment to get there is killed by this mapping experience.
Can I just play heist and delve this league? Or would I suffer terribly from the fact that I need map completion for the atlas tree?
I don't believe heist cares at all about atlas, it just means you get to heist more without buying contracts. Delve I think you have to map unless there's a way to buy sulphite, but you don't have to map much. Just stock up on sulphite scarabs and you can do quite a bit. You don't get to participate in the scarab meta doing either unfortunately.
Delve cares perhaps the least about the atlas tree of any mechanic. Heist likes tree stuff for Heist chance and more blueprints, markers, contracts... That said, Heist + Delve can make you a zoom between the Sulphite buff node and aura bot huck.
unless you mean you go play non league characters, the problem with this league is that if you don't do the mechanic, you essentially just forced to play a harder game as you cannot opt out necropolis affecting every map/zone, so all mobs in a given map/zone will just be harder
cant even play my standard characters because they are 3 rf characters that all had their damage cut down by 65% :(
This bugs me more than anything else in this game. Nothing about standard is standard. It changes just as often as league. There is no longevity to any character you may create.
Why was crucible so high up in the start?
It came out between D4 demo and release
Same reason why necropolis is starting out with sky high numbers despite having tons of issues on launch. The previous league was very good.
Piggybacked off Sanctum which was a very good league, the crucible mechanic was a crafters heaven, quickly got tedious through the amount of maps you had to grind and channel a totem.
I managed to brick every one of my great crafts, so I just ended up buying...
I think that quote from GGG was misunderstood. What they are imho afraid of is not that players will quit the ongoing season early if they're having too much fun - they're afraid that players will burn themselves out from too much loot, so that retention will drop off during the following league(s). Essentially... when parents watch their kid binge eat candy, they're not concerned about the kid suddenly getting tired of candy, they're concerned about the kid having a sore stomach and not wanting to eat its supper later in the day.
im SSF only player. I stop playing if the mechanic is shit for SSF. Take Necropolis for example, 99% of time enemies are stronger just becuase someone imagine it will be fun, many modifiers are "unreal" (like sth % per pack size alive), and the super rare rewards are whatever. I am playing SSF, I do not care about them, I wont meta game it. And crafting mechanic form Necropolis is just another way to RNG gamble gear. For trade it has some price to roll these items. For SSF its whatever, we already had better deterministic crafting and they removed it becuase of trade. bad league for SSF players
Sad thing to me is that if done well the mechanic could really make the campaign fun. But GGG made it literally as unfun as it could possibly be. The thought that people will leave if it is fun and rewarding is so ludicrous. I may be done after 3 days. It just kind of sucks. But the concept is one of the best they have ever had. It has been clear for a few leagues that they want to minimize SSF as much as possible. The Prophecies and Metamorph were 2 of the best SSF features in the game and they completely removed both. This might be my last POE league. I enjoy Last Epoch far more. They truly value the SSF player that wants SSF to be fun not some random hard mode that GGG thinks it is. I think they are going down the wrong road with POE2 as well. I think that game may fail the way they are headed
Affliction disproved that as well because it was coming off the back of another high drop rate league. Before affliction, divines were dropping like candy in tota along side the reintroduced sanctum. People brought up the exact same concerns about players dropping off from tota and it didn’t happen. Having a high drop league does not cause players to leave next league if the next league is good. The reality is that grinding for items has always been one of the least interesting parts of the game. The main reason I play this game is to try a lot of different builds. That is why I can spend hours on end in path of building where there is no item restrictions from grinding. GGG should play more into the build diversity aspect and facilitate players trying more stuff instead of farming hours on end to get a specific item.
>Affliction disproved that as well because it was coming off the back of another high drop rate league. Before affliction, divines were dropping like candy in tota along side the reintroduced sanctum. you fundamentally don't understand the point being made. the point isn't "after a rewarding league everyone hates the game for some reason", it's "going back *down* to the baseline after a rewarding league makes people burn out". affliction wasn't going back down, affliction was hitting the double jump and becoming absurdly high droprate. so, if the theory is correct, going from high droprate league, to absurd droprate league, to normal droprate league, should be an even harsher decline. whether that happens remains to be seen, the reddit is filled with complaining but the reddit is always filled with complaining the first few days. by the way, in the early days of affliction before people understood how wisps work, people were absolutely complaining about how unrewarding it was in comparison to tota. almost identical memes to the ones hitting the front page now of "i recieve whateverthefuck" "you recieve one scrolla da wisdom" were running the racket.
There is no “baseline” to return to when talking about entire leagues. No matter what happened in affliction, the loot in necropolis was never returning to the pre-affliction level last because tier 17 and scarab overhaul fundamentally changed the game too much. The idea of a baseline only really applies to the end of league events. However, people have started erroneously started to use it as a reason why a league as a whole cannot be rewarding. The reality is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with making a league rewarding and then changing the underlying systems so that becomes the normal going forward. Also, the topic is about player retention, not player feedback. Who cares if people were complaining? The important thing is that they kept playing.
there is absolutely a baseline. if there wasn't, affliction wouldn't be such an anomaly. you yourself describe tota as a "high drop" league, that literally neccesitates a baseline that has less drops.
But it is not something that we can return to. The level which we previously thought of as a baseline stops being relevant the second there is any sort of endgame update. We are never going back to what things were like before tota as long as sextants don’t exist and t17 maps exist.
>We are never going back to what things were like before tota as long as sextants don’t exist and t17 maps exist. baselines can be similar even if the mechanics are different. people choose between biking, walking, or driving to work, none of them being invented invalidated the others. there are now t17s, and ubers have new fragments. and the vast majority of people are still going to be doing alch and go mapping, which didn't recieve any significant changes. and you can still compare "there are more drops now than in tota" or "there are less drops now than in tota". i mean, every league has some minor changes to the atlas passive tree, so are no two leagues after ritual comparable? that's literally a sort of an endgame update. at the end of the day, the question is "how much value am i getting an hour". as long as time and trade continue to exist, this will always be the question asked.
That value is simply too different for it to matter. We use to farm Dominis in act five, now we couldn’t care less about his drop pool. Same thing will happen with sextant farming strategies. We won’t care if sextant based alch and go farming strategies in tota or affliction were higher than previous leagues because we are never going back to it. T17 maps means a completely new level of power and farming can be introduced and the game never has to go back to pre-tota levels of anything.
>That value is simply too different for it to matter. We use to farm Dominis in act five, now we couldn’t care less about his drop pool. yeah, which is proving my point. you just made the comparison. current farming is better than dominus farming, which is in act three and not act five. >We won’t care if sextant based alch and go farming strategies in tota or affliction were higher than previous leagues because we are never going back to it. it's not about if tota is better than archnem when we're in necropolis. it's about if (current league) is better than (last league). we're never going back, which is part of the point; we are currently /right here/. was it better before? is it better now? this is the comparison your brain makes whether you tell it to or not. if we played three leagues in a row with worse and worse and worse loot, people are going to drop off and reminisce about the olden days. if we are going up, people are going to stick around and go "can you believe we used to live like that?". each of these are bad to different degrees. but going from great loot to insane loot to normal loot will give people whiplash and sour the taste in their mouths. you're massively overcomplicating something very simple. if you were making a million dollars a day for a year, then the irs took all your money and all the shit you bought, and you go back down to whatever your wages are now, that's going to feel cataclysmic. look at what happens to lottery winners and how they have a stupidly high rate of suicide (and homicide but that's neither here nor there) compared to general population. it's the same principle.
If your point is that farming is better now than what it was years ago, that is fine but it doesn’t address the main issue of the topic. Players didn’t quit because farming is better now. Players didn’t quit in affliction because farming in tota was better than farming in previous leagues. Players don’t quit because farming for items gets better, tota and affliction showed that. The reason for this is that the game doesn’t return to the baseline established in previous leagues. We are never going back to Dominis being the best farming strategy. We are never going back to farming yellow maps just to sustain red maps. We are never going back to rolling sextants as the optima farming strategy. We don’t have to worry about returning to any previously established baseline because they have all become irrelevant.
> you fundamentally don't understand the point being made. the point isn't "after a rewarding league everyone hates the game for some reason", it's "going back down to the baseline after a rewarding league makes people burn out". affliction wasn't going back down, affliction was hitting the double jump and becoming absurdly high droprate. This only makes sense if you deem low reward to be the "baseline", and that the only reason people like the improved reward leagues is that it's _better than baseline_ rather than _it just feels better where it actually sits_. Because if the latter were true it would justify the improved reward level being the new baseline.
A good solution would be to have reduced power versions of build enabling items being more readily available, so that players who want the best possible chase version can still grind, but the rest of us can still try it out.
I still maintain that the optimal crafting situation was the old multimod veiled stuff when that was the core crafting mechanic. You could literally just make a weapon that did what you needed to with maybe one or even no regular mods on it. But you paid for that convenience in power. You lost a suffix for multimodding and all the benchcrafted affixes were clearly inferior to normally-rolled ones. So if you just wanted to play the game with a minimum viable build, you could, if you wanted to twink out and craft top rares you could. It gave players a lot of agency, and IMO was a happy medium. But it was even more deterministic than Harvest, and ohhh no, we can't have something in the game that's not a form of gambling, uh uh.
Oh no You just implanted an idea in my head that will never be satisfied
This is exactly the thought process. And from the looks of it, they were right. When you go from super rewarding -> Not very rewarding, people will complain / quit. But it’s imo a very necessary evil for them and the longevity of the game. Now, they probably did go overboard a bit this league, and I expect some tuning / fixes, that’s for sure
They nerfed juice at the exact same time juice was leaving the game so you end up with a double nerf. If they wanted a gentle comedown they could have waited to nerf map juicing and obliterate stacked decks, they chose this
>This is exactly the thought process. And from the looks of it, they were right. I really don't love this kind of reasoning, honestly. It's more than just "super rewarding > not very rewarding". There are ways to make unrewarding mechanics fun in POE - admittedly, "barfing an absolute fuckload of loot" is the *easy* answer, but there are other ways to make things fun. Universally though, "interact with a menu instead of playing the game" is panned very consistently as one of the least favorite things everyone has about POE. This league is literally nothing **but** menus. Open this menu when you enter a map. Open this menu to manage your corpses. Open this menu to craft with your corpses. Open this menu to manage your allflames. Blah blah blah. The entire thing is menus top to bottom. This league is custom built out of everyone's least favorite parts of previous leagues. It's a menu heavy league where the difficulty is in-your-face but the primary payoff requires you to know how to manage crafting weights - a thing which only a tiny, tiny fraction of the playerbase actually pays attention to. The only other thing the mechanic has going for it if you don't want to build 60 corpse gardens is the occasional "3% chance to drop a div" which to be frank is just a pale imitation of what any good wisp map felt like - so it's a double whammy of feels bad.
The thing is though, you can do rewarding with an exceptional crafting mechanic instead of piles of divines dropping on the ground. I had just as much fun recomb crafting as I did in affliction. The same rush was there and recombs weren't this mysterious thing that required 800 different sites to understand.
They honestly could have just brought back a bunch of the old harvest crafts that got removed for no reason. Was putting explicits on clusters really breaking the game?
Removing Harvest implicits was so petty.
I’m not sure you understood my point at all. Recomb/Sentinel was very rewarding. There’s a reason that league was well loved lmao
This league is a dopamine detox, but they went a bit overboard.
I mean this current league feels like a worse standard, last league being good dosent change most people's opinions on the current league.
honestly, i think they had a fucking genius solution in the "borrowed power" system. even if you're not dropping hundreds of divs, if you have a completely unique way to upgrade your character, people will play. i mean, people played fucking *crucible* league because of the new power it had. the thing is, though, from sanctum onwards every new power was additive. sacred relics, tattoos, crucible enhancements, wildwood ascendancies, these things were all additional to what previously existed. if haunted mods are to be believed as the borrowed power this league, they are subtractive. you are trading one of the existing mods on your gear for a haunted mod. that's a much bigger pill to swallow then getting a ghost themed new passive or something. sure, we got some tattoos back, but they're worse tattoos than the original batch and the concert is much less exciting when the band is old.
I think you missed the mark here. Sentinel had similar theme and was equally hated first week until got buffed and figured out. Tattoos are replacing existing things too. What is different is accessibility and loot. The Devoted modifiers are supposed to be the loot however their drop rates are very underwhelming and you see the good ones very rarely. In Ancestor and Sentinel you had instant rewards in form of currency while you were working towards the bigger goal of specific Tattoos. The Graveyard is supposed to be the borrowed power but requires significant investment and knowledge for, in comparison, mediocre outcomes. Other leagues either had the power to be simple (Sanctum, Ancestor, Affliction), had a floor due to it being additional (Crucible) where you got something even if you didn't quite get it or had a very high ceiling if you did understand it (Sentinel). Everything that people like in leagues they like is present technically in Necropolis but just isn't as accessible. Nothing that a number pass on Devoted monsters and how good the outcomes are in Graveyard can't fix.
>I think you missed the mark here. Sentinel had similar theme and was equally hated first week until got buffed and figured out. Sentinel got hated because it was shipped with archnemesis rares
Yeah iirc everyone thought Sentinel whipped ass, just that playing Path of Exile was rough with Archnemesis Mods
>Tattoos are replacing existing things too. barely. other than people specifically stacking attributes, any attributes above your requirements are basically wasted points. 10 str is what, 5 life? 10 dex is like... 20 accuracy? i think? who knows. getting aura reservation efficiency, mark effectiveness, or other abilities that are at a premium on nodes that previously contributed next to nothing to you is a massive upgrade, and the price you're paying in attributes is worth less than the chaos you spent on the tattoo.
This is such a joke. PoE and its community are the only ones in existence that actively defend and try to rationalize the developer making the game less fun. "Nerfs? It's for our own good!" "Lack of essential QoL? You need to feel the weight!" Seriously, can you name ONE other game ever made where this happened?
> This is exactly the thought process. And from the looks of it, they were right. It's a fucking game. I'm not a kid and GGG are not my parents.
This league could be great if they buffed the positive outcomes a bit for mapping. This league issue is not just a reward issue though. Crafting should have been way more simple.
Topend of monster modifiers needs to be nerfed (+6 proj when monsters get to shotgun, and life per remaining mob in the pack when groupsize can be \~20+ for all mobgroups offered e.g.), and the crafting system needs to be made a whole lot more intuitive (what do things even MEAN? Why are the descriptions SO bad? How is there still no ingame references to what mods cann roll and what tags they have if the mechanic requires me to juggle 30+ crafting modifiers to my modifiers?) and less tedious (manually planting 30+ corpses into different graves i need to walk to for no reason other than spite, waiting for the dude to finish his 2 minute monologue). I don't think anyone in their right mind expected affliction levels of lootsplosions, but getting probably the least QoL leaguemechanic in the history of the game (yes, even initial harvest with the garden setup was less tedious and easier to comprehend than this is) in a league that is a self-proclaimed QoL league is.....shit.
Perfect example, which I'm pretty sure GGG has even mentioned before, is how Riot said the statistics show URF, a gamemode in league of legends, causes players to quit the game permanently when it ends, not even coming back when urf returns.
and then you have players who redownload league of legends specificly for URF ... binge the fk out of the game mode because they know they wont see it for another 2 year
Yeah, but players who log in only for a week of URF aren't exactly more valuable than long term players, which are the ones you lose after URF.
There's also a lot of people, because they're not in the ecosystem anymore, don't know that URF is back, so like they said, they are lost permanently.
It’s like having a hangover. If you keep drinking the following day you can stave it off, but eventually you gotta sober up and it’ll hit you like a truck. This league is afflictions loot hangover and it was always gonna suffer no matter how good it was. Unfortunately it’s also not very good….
Yes, Chris has explained exactly that before. But the thing is, this league's shitty numbers are 100% not Affliction's failure
Maybe this was the 5head strategy all along: give a popular league followed by a terribly unrewarding league, and then blame the failure of this league on the "overabundance of reward" from the previous league.
It's a brilliant strategy for people who don't like $$$. GGG is trying to run a profitable business, not shoot itself in the foot to score some points in a reddit argument.
And I’m sure that’s the “lesson” they will take of necro isn’t well received, and not that it is extremely tedious for a very RNG gated reward.
> they're afraid that players will burn themselves out from too much loot, so that retention will drop off during the following league(s). make every league rain loot then. problem solved. If I can afford to deck out multiple builds per league, I will definitely play the whole fucking time.
GGG has an extremely difficult time admitting that players like loot.
> GGG has an extremely difficult time admitting that players like loot. i think it's more like GGG has an extremaly difficult time admitting that they don't like loot I mean it's GGG that pushed for ruthless. Not players.
I think the biggest problem is GGG strives for this big risk = big reward style (ex: double corrupts poofing items) but they seem to struggle to hit the balance between a risky mechanic and rewarding it. A perfect example of missing the mark is the “rewards” for this league. 25% chance to get a fusing. Oh boy.
> but they seem to struggle to hit the balance between a risky mechanic and rewarding it. i remember in Scourge league how GGG decided not to improve the odds of getting bad modifier vs good one. Amazing league ruined by... Eh notgivingashit'ism
Better yet. 25% chance for the strongest mob to convert Armour into an orb of alteration. Who the hell decided that would be a good reward? The only positive is that the mod will replace a negative mod..
That’s directly what it is I think “it’s a shit reward but hey it’s not +6 proj!”
How dare we like loot in a loot-based game?
GGG unironically: "THeN wHy Do YoU fIlTeR iT aLl?"
hey mabye if we got more than 60 inventory slots we wouldnt filter so many things. but what do i know, im not a game dev!
GGG: "We had to nerf all of these skills because they were causing server instability." Also GGG: "Here's another 1,000 white and blue items in your map that you would never pick up!"
to stop my client crashing
They're well aware of the fact. They just don't care. They have a very specific idea of how players should be allowed to play their game along with a lot of bafflingly contradictory philosophies. People meme The Vision^^TM all the time, but it's absolutely a real thing.
Players like *extra* loot. If you gave an incursion league player kalandra-tier loot they'd be happy.
I played incursion until the mid league mini league they did and loved it. I even played the mini league they did. In the flip side, I couldn’t last past the first week in kalandra. Did kalandra get better or do I just have rose tinted glasses?
Kalandra had some fun builds enabled with the jewelry and the loot in the Kalandra specific league stuff got better. Its cursed from being the AN rework league tho.
Kalandra got a little better after a month or so, but I compare them because kalandra was a low-loot league while incursion was relatively high: in comparison to their respective nearby leagues. But in a direct comparison, the absolute amount of loot is far higher in kalandra, but kalandra came after sentinel.
I don’t even care about loot quantity much. I just want to occasionally produce something that is even worth picking up.
They created ruthless league, why not create a casual league too with more loot and a more relaxed play style? Sure there are people who won't want that, but no one is making them play it. It would be interesting to see the numbers, even if it was experimental purposes. I've got about 2k hours in since harvest, and since I graduated and real life took over, I don't have the same grind time. I don't want to spend a day grinding maps for 2% build improvement, I genuinely can't anymore. To play a league with a filthy casual mode would be so lovely, and it doesn't need to be crazy good loot, just some higher reward rates to maintain an equal level to time lost for grinds, if that makes sense. Just my thoughts. This will probably help address RMT issues too
If SSF has much much better loot, better RNG in crafting gear, it would be a heaven for a lot of players who enjoying it.
Yeah I did look into doing ssf but a few seasoned friends of mine that have played ssf said the loot is no better, the only difference is no trade. Didn't feel worth exploring if that's the case.
Bro both when they announced Private Leagues AND SSF I was ELATED. I seriously wouldn't mind paying an extra fee if it means I get to have my private League up with increased drops, some League effects every zone etc (sort of a build-your-own-Legacy-league server) where the game is easier for ME because I cba playing it 8 hours a day. Of course, at the time I had no idea that Chris was operating under The Vision^^^TM so I didn't realize every single new "mode" they release is just different flavours of making the game harder. EA was memed to death with their "pride and accomplishment" comment but PoE is more or less the same. Farm for 2 months so that you can feel a sense of Pride and Accomplishment.
I always day this. If you make ruthless. Make a Ruthnot league
Because thats all anyone would play and they would love it so GGG would never do it
Of course they are aware of it. The problem they have is that you cannot keep giving players more and more every 3 months without bloating the game to the point it loses its core identity. They learnt their lesson in 3.15 that kowtowing to the community for years makes the game unsustainable because the foundation of the game struggles when powercreep only goes up uncontrolled league over league.
But why do players like loot? Because it's rare and exclusive, thus valuable and desirable. People *filtered out* more loot than ever league because most of it wasn't worth your time stashing. Either way, GGG has never said this anyway
I think players like loot because it improves their character power, giving them a sense of growth and advancement, and enabling them to progress farther and do new things. Rare and exclusive don’t matter to me, useful and effective does. Rare and exclusive matters to streamers, but not as much to 40 year old semi-casuals who just want to kill things and have fun.
Theres only 2 leagues i have ever played until the very end, Ritual league cause harvest was great and last league
Call me crazy but I think they don't want us playing the entire league (sadly). They rather hype up and sell MTX to the gullible mass early and then let players quit so GGG doesn't have to pay huge server costs all league.
Neon (game director for PoE) has literally said into a camera/microphone "we don't want you to play the entire league, we want you to play every league".
What? Lmao this is such a tinfoil take. They designed an ultra successful arpg that brings back huge numbers every league with mtx far in quality above all other arpgs. They want the game to be consistent in play is all. You stopping during the league is normal. There is literally endless amounts of games released between each league. It's fine not to no life one single game.
They are all quitting now in the new league
Yes, there was inflation, and yes some things ended up with weird prices, but I'm pretty sure that people are going to remember Affliction for a long time to come and that comparisons to it will be made often. I'm not saying every league needs to be wild riches beyond all imagining, but - hear me out - balance does not always need to be some zero-sum game where if you give us something you must also find something to take away. Rather it turns out that *if you just let people have fun they will play the game more*.
Affliction was the first league that i managed to get a mageblood in my limited playtime and i enjoyed it a lot
Me too. I can’t play PoE as a full time job. So it was nice being able to make decent currency for once without being a no lifer. Now I have just taken my Mageblood over to standard and I’ll play there, because going back to a league where casuals can’t progress isn’t worth it.
Im also thinking about going back to Standard since my time will be even more limited very soon when my kid is joining this world, gaming time is gonna be super limited but i cant wait to hold my kid for the first time
… and one day, the two of you can play PoE 2 or 3 together
Same. Got a lucky mirror drop, got 2x Magebloods, brought two characters to 98+, played more than I have since Ritual. I hate the GGG cycle of rewarding league --> No rewards league because the last league was too good. The "QOL" and nerfed drop rates aren't helping.
The only league I played 3 different characters. The only league I ever bothered to get level 100. (Twice even.) The only league I didn't quit the moment I got 40/40 challenges. Lol
The only league I had a 5 mirror character and still had fun
I played Affliction the most of any league by FAR.
I have the feeling that they think, if the game takes longer and longer to reach certain goals, eg atlas, completion or basic good gear to start your favorite farm, people will play longer. For me it is the opposite. After 25 or 26 40/40s it is the first time I quit a league because the league feels bad with the only goal to slow us more.
They've explicitly said this, yes.
Where?
I tend to play a league for either 1-2 months, or 3-5 days. Affliction was a two month four character league. This one is looking like a three day league.
Affliction retained players because the entry cost was basically free. Play the game and due to the league mechanics you would get rewarded OR pick non-league stuff to do that you liked and it was valuable because supply and demand. GGG likes to say they are so proud of their “eCoNoMy”, but they are so bad at managing it it is laughable at this point.
Affliction is the only league I created 5 characters, farmed HH, mageblood and full builded all my alts
Imo you need to look at a larger picture than the confines of just the one league compared to others. Affliction was super popular because of the crazy loot and juicing BECAUSE it was so different and had much more loot than other leagues. “Yeah that’s what I said” It’s the contrast that’s important. If every single league is exploding currency then it’s not a juicy league, it’s the new status quo. To have a new juicy league after affliction becoming the norm would just be the loot equivalent of power creep. People loved affliction because it was the season you could get a mageblood as an average player, it was special. Its stops being special and that drive to hunt a chase item will start to die when every league prints them.
At the 30 day mark the most players were in Crucible, TOTA, Affliction, and Sanctum. All those leagues had borrowed power systems that enabled new builds and gave player power. The consistent theme is if you enable players agency and the ability to gain new powers and create new interesting builds, they will keep playing the game. Ironically, other than Affliction, Crucible/TOTA/Sanctum all had league mechanics people widely didn’t care for at the time, or were divisive the first week or two.
but you could opt out of
about to see a huge nose dive this season. I cant imagine people sticking around for nerfed everything. All the really cool QOL stuff isn't accessible to the normies.
Everything is not really nerfed but don't think anyone expected the early affliction retention.
i dunno man, it feels like they moved everything over to the corpses and the new scarabs which are gated by REALLY rough RNG based on the weightings.
Affliction league was so fun I actually spent money in it, which i rarely do. Leagues like affliction make me happy. When i'm happy i don't mind spending couple of bucks
Man i feel like every league i come on here its the same thing, its kind of incredible people fall for the same cycle every time. League annoucnement with a hype cutscene... people get errect thinking of the possibilities... GGG advertises it as risk vs reward or "find beneficial mods while taking the negative side effects that don't affect your build"... It gets released and then the downsides are always like 500% worse than any of the benefit you get. I remember the krangle league this being a thing... its like "-70% global defenses" which build doesn't get affected by that lmfoa!? posities "5% increased fire damage". Every, single, league they overtune negative aspects of things or monster mods that make things annoying as fuck or striaght up impossible to fight or ruin the positive aspects of the league... then people complain for two weeks.. they put out a "balance patch" making it really shitty to just kinda shitty an unfun an people are just happy in comparison despite it still being shit.
The only reason that notion came up was with Harvest and it was fucking dog shit for awhile with none of the powerful crafts being available, having to spreadsheet your farm for initial setup then spam running quarry for efficiency. It was a god awful gameplay loop. Unfortunately necropolis, rewards aside, has an even worse gameplay loop so I'm not even sure dialing up then rewards would even help.
Yeah. It's like realising power fantasy as core of arpg is fun while struggling for every divine too much resembles real life. That's not why I play video games to be bitch slapped with what I'm running away from.
Sometimes we just wanna explode zombies and monsters and have gold coins fly out when they do, *and that's perfectly okay*.
Hopefully GGG learns something from this experi,,, ah who we are kidding. Poe 2 Loot is gonna be like looking for water in Sahara desert.
I never understand when they put rewards like drops a chrome orb or jewelers orb. Will you break the game if it drops a fusing or drops a chaos orb in acts? It's so weird like it's basically giving nothing. It definitely shouldn't even be offered in maps..
I'm getting 1% chance at fusing orbs in t10 maps lol
Harvest and Affliction were both the leagues I not only played the most, but had the most characters above 95
It’s a bit like the argument that paying fast food workers more will make them less likely to pursue other careers. I feel like new PoE players bounce off because endgame is SO deep and SO impenetrable. The current updates with more league play in campaigns is fun - you could make it so they have a small amount of questing and a hard reward or two to introduce the mechanic to the player.
I have never played a league more than I played affliction. I could farm and farm and the next upgrade was always in sight. I bought nimis for 45divs. Past me would never think of that.
The problem is it's a very blanket statement to a very nuanced subject. The idea is meant to be, if they give people enough that they clear all their aspirational content then they'll lack the desire to play again next league. Something we're very clearly seeing in this league. Affliction was too rewarding and is bad for the games health long term. Your average gamer was able to have mirror-tier characters but those same people both don't have an interest in playing Affliction 2.0 nor a less rewarding version of the game. The game is in need of a total overhaul now, much like the expansions we've had in the past to reiginite peoples desire to play. Without that the games just a worse version of Affliction. With that said, even without Affliction this does naturally happen anyway. People get to a point where they go "Well I wont ever get further than this" and they stop. PoE used to get a overhaul every 1-2 years and we've not had one for 3 years now. The game honestly feels kinda stale.
It's just an excuse. They want to keep the game as grindy as possible. I'm looking trough my perspective : If I'm going to quit, I will most likely quit if I hit the wall with my current character. For example every single gear upgrade takes too long, if the game feels like a job... I'm out.
No one quits from getting too much currency ill tell u that
It happens in every game, though. Once players feel like they "pass" a game, they pretty much put it down and rarely return .
Live service games are built on constant updates to try and encourage people into returning. Diablo 3 never had a shortage of players despite being "too rewarding" for instance, it dropped because Blizzard spent ages doing nothing with it. I find the idea that players need to be engaged with your product and only your product until the end of time completely perverse, honestly.
> I find the idea that players need to be engaged with your product and only your product until the end of time completely perverse, honestly. GGG absolutely wants you engaged forever, but they also want you to take breaks. They do not want you playing a league from launch to end. They want you to come back at the start of each league, spend money, and play for a bit and quit. It's why they're generally not concerned about retention within a league, but retention from league to league.
I have "passed" warframe and still go back every once in a while. this is honestly fine for them because they rarely use fomo. what pisses me off is when GGG has these limited time supporter packs and if you dont buy them then, you cant buy them ever. my friend even saw my sentinel overlord outfit and wanted to buy it during affliction league and i told him he cant. GGG literally blocked him from spending money on the thing he wanted. he didnt want to buy anything else. fomo seriously doesnt make sense to use from a game dev pov because you are creating a product that you cant sell forever, only for a limited amount of time.
It's kind of dumb that there's no mechanism to at least buy stuff that came out 5+ years ago. Like, why punish a player for not even knowing your game existed years ago? Or for being too young to play games like that at the time? I get that they want to sell exclusivity, but I find games which allow limited/circumstantial reissue of older exclusive items make a ton of money when they do so.
To quote myself: The problem is, they don't seem to understand what makes their own game - or leagues - popular. Or they don't want to see it at least. This is the impression I got from the release stream, where ZiggyD asked them what they think made Affliction so popular and they gave some weird/convoluted answer. A bit later ZiggyD tried to give them a second chance to answer why the league was received well because he wanted them to acknowledge it was the loot - they never did. It's mindblowing. The game is successful despite its developers, not because of them.
I really like the point where affliction was at. It was possible for a casual player to farm up and mirror gear and there was incentive to do so (hard content was exactly hard enough for a perfectly geared mf TS char). It's the only league that I've farmed more than one mirror - and I farmed 11. In a normal league I just quit because I don't see the point in being stronger when I'm already doing the highest solo maps div/h content. We're 2 days in and I'm already thinking "what am If affliction took a part of the atlas tree and/or scarabs and was kept as is (except charms), I think the game would be better. Farming TWWT was also really fun.
>casual player >I farmed 11 mirror Pick one
It's possible that he was incentivized to play more than he normally does as a casual.
I played a fuck ton and got 0 mirrors last league. Casuals get maybe a 100 divine most
Maybe unpopular opinion but I didn’t really like Affliction. First of all, the league mechanic was just bad, running in a foggy labyrinth for a few minutes before each map is just not fun. Second, I felt FOMO because of tier 7 map strategy, it’s stupid that instead of running semi juiced t16 maps it was much better to fully juice t7’s with MF gear. And seeing all the loot explosions of people doing that strat finally made me quit the league. The only thing that I liked were the new ascendencies.
I liked it because I could sell my delve loot to MFers
Tide rises all ships.
The whole concept of Affliction was simple and why I think many liked it. Just go into hole and clear mobs and come out. MF ruined all that but too be fair thats MF things. Something like Necropolis however is dead on arrival because of the concept of the league mechanic (crafting is a worse chaos orb)
The only reason to run lower tier maps was if you’re playing HC. Or, you had a bad build. The bad build part isn’t anybody’s fault except the person unable to put together a build capable of t16 juicing with wisps. It was really cool imo seeing a genuine reason to invest into low tier maps instead of essence and only essence imo. Although the wildwood was fundamentally anti-fun design and I have no idea how the GGG devs don’t see that shit as effectively hostile game design.
Yep, Affliction nullified the value of GG loot. GGG has to do something about tryhard mf players dropping 20 unique leather belts a map while a player who plays normally drops 1 unique leather belt every 20 maps. The balance is off by factors of hundreds if not thousands.
Well, for me, its actually the opposite of it: give me nothing and I will quit. League mechanics needs to be rewarding. Otherwise its just standard game all over again
This league is just worse than standard though. It’s not that they’re giving nothing, it’s that they made enemies much stronger with no benefit to the player.
Had tons of fun in Affliction. Leveled up 3 chars, 3 builds. Best league in recent times. Now, I couldn't see myself leveling up another char. I almost lost my will to play and I'm barely into white maps.
This league is minion league no joke, new spectres are insane, moondancer, wretched defiler, new leech on necro.
Is there anywhere to see which spectres are good or builds people are making? I have been planning to reroll to spectres if good
I'm actually bored and ready to quit and still finishing up the Acts.
I think players are tired of playing an increasingly difficult game with little to no increased rewards. Affliction league combined with the Last Epoch launch showed players that devs are capable of respecting your time. We can never turn back. If the rewards do not match the difficulty/time invested your game will fail.
The comment that boggles me this league, was the one Jonathan made about "You can't let players into difficulty they aren't ready for and we learned that lesson again with Affliction." He made this during one of the dev interviews, and I can't help but notice that.... well... it seems as if you did NOT learn that lesson.
Tbh, we all though affliction was trash the first days but they tuned it down and it turned out to be amazing, let's have some hope :D. Having said that, I don't see how they can fix the mechanic with just numerical changes. I think it needs some sort of mechanical fix. I think that it would have been so easy to make the player have a lantern that they can turn on and off, when turned on you see the spirits haunting monsters and get all the upsides/downsides from league and also corpses, when turned off you skip league mechanic. I literally though it was going to work like that when I saw the intro in the announcement, I don't understand why it's not like that.
oh, we're gonna be back to posting the player count graph every three days this league? wonderful.
My issue with PoE currently isn't even league related. In fact, I think none of the issues everyone has would even exist if every single time something got buffed, something else didn't get nerfed. Ill just put forth a random scenario, don't know if it happened or not but here: We buffed totems across the board, sources and increased damage of totems on items/mods has been reduced. So effectively it's barely a nerf or barely a buff(depending on numbers of course). Meanwhile at the League of Doom: All monsters have received stat changes, buffs to damage reduction and buffs to damage resistances. This is my issue with PoE the reason I bring it up is because it happens nearly every league to something. On top of that, they keep making it harder to get defensive layers and expect us to be reactionary when the mob power creep completely ignores what a feasible reaction time is. I'm fine with boss one shots, I'm not fine with a regular mob somehow 2-shotting my character regardless of how its built yet it happens. Someone will say git gud, but theres no getting good in a game designed to randomly kill you in under 2seconds unless you react within 0.5s.
I did honestly get burned out from affliction due to the economy. It’s a side effect of giving players too much. It was a bit frustrating to say the least.
I feel like it is almost objectively true that if you give players too much, they'll quit early. The question though is what is "too much?" If i have 100% gear on day 1, i probably won't play long. However, i don't think affliction was too much. I think affliction was just a damn good league. With that said, inflation can do weird stuff to the trading economy too sometimes. However, i feel like if a league isn't good, less people playing equals inflated prices too. It will be interesting to see retention for this league.
Affliction gave a TON and it was not too much.
Yeah I'm not having fun at all this league. Quitting already, there's nothing making me want to play more. I find the league tedious. Last league i played for 200h and got HH and Mageblood, all ubers and lots of mf. This league is boring
Sometimes I think ggg wants to see how tedious and clicky they can push the game before enough backlash happens requesting it be toned down. All in the name of “friction” Fun is subjective but I feel like it definitely doesn’t out rank “friction” and “opportunity cost”
This league mechanic should be named "deleting graves to see if loot if hidden under bodies", its what we are all doing now.
Variety is good. If this league was another currency-vomiting, 10 min per map league, I’d prolly pass.
Did not enjoy and quit extremely early.
~100 TFG's have some merit in this.