Path of Exile

Pasteton said:

One of the worst retention leagues ever. Hope ggg doesn’t attribute this to the async trade, if anything that stopped it from being by far the worst. This just turned out to be such a garbage boring mechanic. The tree is cool and it’s nice getting loot dumps but the mechanic in maps is just being skipped by everyone. I’ve used my giga brain analysis of all previous leagues and their success and have come to this conclusion for ggg -

1) if you tie good loot directly to a mechanic, people enjoy it more than when it’s the same amount of loot but indirectly (ie the genesis tree in this case)

2) number 1 especially applies when it’s a ‘stop and do this shit’ mechanic like this league. (If it was something like sulphite then nobody would be upset)

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The wild part is that the mechanic itself isn't inherently bad, it's actually amazing if you're playing SSF. In that context, the drip-feed of self-earned loot and incremental upgrades feels great, because you need every scrap you generate. The problem is that PoE's primary ecosystem is trade league, and in trade this mechanic lands squarely in the "why am I wasting my time?" category.

You're being asked to stop mid-map, run a chore-like encounter, slog through twenty-four waves of bullshit, and then walk away with rewards you could've bought in thirty seconds for pocket change. The length and pacing of Hives just kills any sense of momentum.

So what we ended up with is a league that's SSF-core but pretty trade-irrelevant. It's a well-designed solo progression loop bolted onto a market where efficiency is king. It's not that the mechanic is unplayable, it's just that it completely misunderstands what motivates the bulk of the player base. For the time it demands, the payoff simply doesn't justify the interruption.

The tree 'crafting' was simply too powerful and accelerated everyone to week-4 burnout on day 5. Day 1 of the league you were a fool if you didn't remove every rare item from your filter after your first interaction with the provisioning tree.

What used to take people days/weeks to do in terms of fleshing out their character took 16 hours instead. Everyone had 120res/35ms/130 life boots by the time they hit red maps, and the same was true for every single rare item slot.

You can adjust the in-map encounters, tweak their loot etc, but that won't keep people playing longer when there just isn't gear to chase besides mageblood or original sin or other insane unobtainium uniques.

ronne said:

The tree 'crafting' was simply too powerful and accelerated everyone to week-4 burnout on day 5. Day 1 of the league you were a fool if you didn't remove every rare item from your filter after your first interaction with the provisioning tree.

What used to take people days/weeks to do in terms of fleshing out their character took 16 hours instead. Everyone had 120res/35ms/130 life boots by the time they hit red maps, and the same was true for every single rare item slot.

You can adjust the in-map encounters, tweak their loot etc, but that won't keep people playing longer when there just isn't gear to chase besides mageblood or original sin or other insane unobtainium uniques.

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I don't think it shrank the progression by weeks. Days certainly. It hurt some of the markets as well. Such as essences/Rog which are so insanely valuable in the first weeks. I think its good insight into the average persons view on progression. I was glad to just get into T16s so smooth without having to grind it out in whites/yellows. I want to be able to get to juiced deli maps or uber farming with whatever character I'm in and the real fun doesn't start until you start a map strat at T16 (even if it is a white/yellow map strat).

I also think that people just burn out. This game is pretty old and its not going to do the same amount of retention on all but the most hardcore fans. POE2 stuff also doesn't help. I'm sure people are like "whats the point POE2 comes out in a week" type of mentality.