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.

They also released the season during the biggest release window of games there is. There were like 3+ major launches within one or two weeks of launch (Battlefield, Arc Raiders, Tarkov, PD2 just came out, COD, a bunch of other shit) and people just naturally bled off to those games.

That said the casual+ people I know are still playing and loving it. I stopped playing probably 2 weeks in, but my entire crew didn't even really start this league because of RL stuff. The tree gave people what they thought they wanted, but once you have your rares you just start the currency grind and the mageblood quest.

No matter what, people will complain. Loot is too easy, loot is too poor, there is no winning. The breach mechanic did get tuned over the 2-3 weeks I played towards the better for sure, but I didn't think it was completely awful like some people. I didn't need it shitting out divines every fortress, but ironically, if you had juiced enough maps it would. People just didn't get there before they started complaining.

GGG since Chris left has started catering to the casual crowd. The loud complaining, 'where's my build guide', 8 hours a week to play type. That's fine, this game is probably starting it's sunsetting tour, even if it takes 2-4 years, and it's just fan service now. The problem is they're starting to cater to the same crowd in PoE2 so we don't have a "hard" PoE to play. It's just blast to red maps, craft/buy your god gear, blast more juiced maps, seer an apothecary card somewhere good, blast more maps, get mage blood, play "build of the league" for 5 days, and quit. The whole cycle is getting shortened by several days every patch.

TL;DR People wanted the game to be easier. It is. Now they play it less because it's too easy too quickly. They've done this to themselves.

Deathwing said:

I applaud your restraint to not mention Reddit that entire post.

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It was in there, I deleted it just for you.

If you're going to hand out this much character power you need something for people to direct it at. A big part of why Affliction was so successful is the high character power combined with how much stank the Wildwood let you put on to every single map at a cost no higher than being able to properly navigate the thing.

The "Guard Ailith" map encounters are obtrusive and aesthetically displeasing hindrances. I would block them 100% of the time if there was a wheel on the atlas to do so.

The league mechanic was excellent early. You could actually do it at low gear levels and the rewards from the tree were extremely powerful early. And then... it falls off hard.

The hives can be pretty good but they are wave events and people tend to either love or hate wave events (simulacrums and legion 5 ways are not popular farms for example).

I think people were just unhappy with how few good juice mechanics were still functional this league. Its not like the settlers or merc league mechanics really juiced anything themselves but those leagues had much better retention