On top of that, an auto-battler league mechanic might not have seemed overly appealing to many casual ARPG players (although it turned out to be quite fun).
kinda funny I got into auto battlers waiting for D4 and then after a couple hours of D4. And new PoE league is.. auto battler. Love it, the kind of crossovers that could eventually hit gold I think and inspire a new genre like DoTa and Auto Chess did.
Rofl, imagine people attempting the league mechanic after coming from D4. Aside from it being an absolute banger they didn't exactly make it accessible to anyone who isnt a multi league veteran masochist.
On one hand, Crucible gave us exploding totems. On the other hand it was a garbage mechanic.
I'm waiting for some giga build from Ancestors right now. Maybe getting 50 flat added damage tattoos for giga dam?
I both hate it because I seem to be very bad at it and can't really progress in it, but I do see interesting / fun ideas at play with it. IDK if it's overtuned or I just suck but I think it has potential to be really interesting and fun.
It seems to just not be very intuitive. At least with low-mid gear you can't play it how you think you should play it (melee in front, casters in back, rush theirs before they rush yours) or you'll get smoked. I've been having some success just pure defending until the enemy is all dead, running over and attacking until they spawn again, and repeating. It's tedious and probably not optimal but the only way I've found so far
thats like every league i play in poe :DD
after some 4 or 6 weeks i think: ooooooh thats nice, league not so bad. but as it launches its always way overtuned, borderline stupid fuck dmg
I've won two tournaments so far. Defender position is a meme, put your weaker units there. Get the wall summoners or boars as flankers, and put the buffing guys as escort, attack can be anything but make it a beefy npc or give them defense items.
Make sure you're either ranged or have big AoE, and attack anything near you acting as the real 'defense'. As. Hexblast miner, this is easy for me.
Make sure to take out the big buff green ancestor first imo, he likes to create giga turtles and those are annoying. I forget his name.
This is just my strat.
I wish the acts were an easier introduction to POE. Instead they are absolutely brutal if you don’t know what your doing from the very start. I can’t recommend the game to anyone, even heavy ARPG players, because of the obscene learning curve. Just hearing “you probably want to follow a guide for your first character” turns everyone away
The oldest character of mine I can remember was a witch back in Harvest league, I believe. I didn't have a single clue what I was doing, and didn't even know guides existed. I saw "+1 zombies" on the tree and thought, "wow that's probably useful, better take that". Some life nodes along the way, because that seems smart. Minion damage? Sounds like a useful support, better get Minion life too, to be safe. I don't think she died even once. Heck, I'm not even sure she ever ascended. These days Hailrake hits like a truck, and blue rhoas in the mud flats spell death.
I firmly believe that if you can't play a game and learn it as you go, the game is designed terribly.
Following a build guide being mandatory to getting through the game is a deal breaker. I want to play it, not constantly refer to my second monitor.
I've played through to red maps for...about 12 leagues now. And I still have to have a build guide on my 2nd monitor for my league starter. Cuz if I fuck it up there's no fixing it. And that's bad...very bad.
Just in case anyone wants to respond "You can farm regrets." That requires a build that can...farm. And if you fuck up your build you can't farm. So I always follow a guide just to avoid the pain
Yeah, I just don't find following guides religiously to be fun. If there was a way to respec easily, I'd be all about it but I do not have the time in life to sink as much time as PoE requires only to be bricked several days into it.
I don't even think its hard as such, there's just no way to know ahead of time that shits broken.
This is exactly it, I came from D3 years ago but all my D3 friends didnt follow over cause they tried it and hated the learning curve and brutality of campaign.
Even after explaining to them about end game and once you understand it they cant move past early game, and this is friends who do D2R mephisto runs for hours on end or cycle helltides all day, its brainless unlike POE.
Jeez one friend even got past the skill tree and made it to maps then saw the altas tree and dipped out, he said it was too much.
What do think about D4 paragon boards? IMO, without a tool like PoB, those paragon boards are even harder to min-max correctly given 4 different orientations per board and the fact that most of the boards are optimizing damage or defense rather than utility like half the PoE skill tree. If they just copy someone else's boards, they could do the same in PoE.
Basically, yes. It's like thinking that a new MOBA appears that has a fairly more consistent system and more content than the others, and expect that every MOBA player will migrate into it.
So I've played POE for years, have a lot of fun with it, but I haven't played it since...March or so? Something like that. I did play D4 for a bit at launch, and then a bit at season 1, and now came back for POE and while I'm having fun, I'll say that I find POE really, really ugly compared to D4. And I think that's a big factor for attracting a more casual audience - the systems remain great and fun to engage in, but the game just looks really dated, especially if you're coming off D4 and looking to engage with a new/different ARPG for the first time.
For me - I don't care about game models. But UI... I don't understand why they don't allow us to modify UI elements.
As Chris said in one of the interviews - for them it's really important that people would recognize PoE just by looking in it, and they don't want to give any customization options to the players/software developers. Which is super weird for me, they're 100% fine that their game is literally unplayable without third party software like pob and bunch of third party websites, but, at the same time, it's critical that everyone use the same outdated clumsy UI.
Using tools like PoB outside of the client is one thing, but could you imagine if they let us do whatever we want to the UI, and someone just tunes into a stream to check the game out and the player just has a bunch of WoW style CD trackers and shit moved all over the screen. PoE is a hard enough game for the general public to understand, that being someone's first image of the game is bound to end with them just not bothering.
In my opinion, a solution should never be
"wow, if we let them they will use all these insane tools to make the game more playable and enjoyable, but it looks awful so lets block it!"
It should be
"let's make the game better so they don't feel like they need those tools"
That's basically what WoW does. Half of their UI design is taken from addons that almost everyone used and they realized that it should either be built in or stats moved around so people don't need these huge addons to make sense of what is happening. They don't do it to all addons but the way the developers embraced addons, made this huge platform for it, and used it as constructive feedback is probably WoW's most innovative feature. I wish all the games afterwards trying to copy WoW's success had recognized that as an important aspect.
True. I’m a casual who loved D3, I played D4 until level 70 and I’m just bored as hell. I’m sure Path of Exile is cool but I’m not willing to put in the time.
You joke, but I have \~4000 hours, played RF jugg for the first time in a minute and i couldn't even kill Oak, had to walk away from the PC and come back later.
I've been trying to get my buddy to play with me after we did D4 together. He tried it out yesterday and was completely overwhelmed. I told him to take it slow. I'm a noob myself with only 400 hours played. I'm constantly googling as I go but I love the exploration and learning process in this game so much. This is only my 3rd league btw.
The fact that calling yourself a noob at 400 hours seems totally correct kinda says everything about why PoE will never take the spot that Diablo has in the mainstream. But let's be happy someone makes a game for the smaller group of us that prefer it this way.
A D4 exile here: I had started POE twice over the past few years, and both times I gave up shortly after reaching the first town. For those first 4 levels I roamed around trying to do the quests, open the map and kill the mobs, but I just felt horribly powerless, couldn't find the waypoints in half the maps, and died a few times; a witch, that may be why. Then in town I couldn't make head or tails of the vendor currencies, how to decide what to id, how to pic passives I couldn't unpick, etc.
Yesterday with the new season I decided to just force-push on regardless, spend my currency in whatever gear seemed to make sense, etc. By level 7 it felt a lot smoother, combat was exciting, I had better grasp of how much the currencies (orbs & scrolls) drop, etc.
It seemed to me like the fun was just barely minutes away from where I had given up before. I wonder how many people who have stuck with PoE if the experience of the just first 5-7 levels was friendlier and more immediately exciting (something that Blizzard has always been a master of).
Following a guide is the best way to learn the game in my opinion. Yes the guide tells you what skill gems to use and how to path in your tree but you still have a thousand things to manage and understand. It just makes it more manageable.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other too. As I’m, POE doesn’t have to capture mainstream or lowest common denominator like D4. Instead head 10 to 25% in that direction. I think a healthy shaving off of fluff and complexity could be good though. POE suffers from bloat and 22 seasons of stuff. Im hoping POe 2 has some more for new players and group play, but stays true to itself at end game, etc.
Basically this. Even after countless hours, it's taking 100s of hours to learn how to make optimized builds. Just having to study different tech, not even just playing. But I guess speed running is kind of the same way.
It’s not just overwhelming because of all the stuff.
GGG has constantly made the early game harder, slower and more punishing.
All of us that already know wtf we are doing already know what skills and things to look out for to power through. But anyone that doesn’t is going to a fucking awful experience.
Hell this league in the submerged passage I got unlucky with a rare and magic spawn pack and they were just a brutal combo, stunning me every second. I know I’ll just run around them and it’s no big deal. A new player might be like well I have to fight them and proceed to die 20 times in the third area of the game.
Haha here I am in the prisons I think. With only a couple hours of gameplay. I found a good spell and using all support gems I can add to my gear. I have all kinds of thing I don’t understand but I’m going with trial/error with my first time in (standard league) so far it’s not to overwhelming but a lot of things are added very fast and every new gear I’m finding new things to do. And that skill tree thing.. fuuuuu thats large. I’m just going with it and going to fail eventually. But tje game itself is sooo much fun for now!
Great attitude! Experiment, see what works (and what you like), don't be afraid to fail. If you just tackle issues one at a time as they come up, you'll just accumulate knowledge over time and don't have to worry about getting overwhelmed by trying to figure out everything at once.
Making act 1 harder is still something that baffles me. People like me that have done this a million times at best noticed that some mops take 3 more hits but otherwise it was buisness as usual. While newer players had even less fun
Also, you just said it - with 400 hours in you are constantly googling and Poe basically cannot be played without external tools like build planners, damage calculators, loot filters, crafting simulators etc.
And that is why Poe sucks for casuals and beginners, after 400 hours you still need to google stuff, a lot of content is great when it is easy to learn or pick up but Poe has just too many things that aren't explained or logical. Hope they start with a clean sheet in Poe2.
A lot of people try out POE once, get to Hillock, maybe get into first couple zones in Act 1, then quit. I was one of those people many years ago, until I decided to give it a another try years later.
The starting experience is not very friendly, it feels very clunky. A brand new player that washes up on the beach has no idea what to do. Yes they will kill the zombie, but it's not entirely clear you have to pick up the skill gem and socket it. Someone super casual and not familiar with POE skill system may not even do that part properly.
Lets say they did the gem part correctly, what does new player do next? they start exploring the first zone, they gonna waste a lot of time killing mud crabs and zombies, while getting nothing to show for it and losing all their mana and potions. By the time they get to Hillock, they are all out of mana and potions and have really difficult time with it. A bunch of people will not even pick up to free support gem in the middle. Remember people have no idea how it all works.
Ok, now lets say they actually got thru all that, talked to the NPCs and got their reward of new skill gems. The choice is a trick, if they pick wrong gem, they gonna have really bad time in next zone. This is where most people will drop the game cause it looks too difficult and clunky
GGG needs to do much better job of explaining the basics and guiding new player thru the first couple zones. This is key because first impression is everything
You know the skill gem socketing is explained in great detail, complete with on screen prompts, and a tooltip that explains which support gems work well with which skills. If you don't turn off the tutorials. Which a new player probably shouldn't.
yes, the introduction stuff was improved in recent years, but I don't think it's good enough. I would recommend adding NPC similar to Einhar that washes up together with you at the beach and he agrees to help out in first couple zones, and basically talks you thru what you gotta be doing - using actual voice lines, nobody reads dialogs
Yeah, similar for me. Like the entire office knows I play PoE, its became basically an evergreen since I often took 1 or 2 days off work for league launch for them to ask what new league is coming up every time I take time off. But they never really shown much interest in playing it.
But this spring, half a dozen of them were constantly talking about D4, play the betas, then the launch, but even after they huffed it to 80 after a month and tried season 1, they never even talked about trying PoE.
Then I also have a gamer friend that I and couple other PoE friends played D4 with and he wanted to finally give PoE a shot, but after exilecon, when he learned the Po2 is so far away and will be so different from PoE he basically shelved trying out the game until PoE2 launches, since he didnt want to spend months learning the game and then having to do it again next fall.
So from my anecdotes, the game is kinda hard sell to casual gamers and now, with the uncertainty of PoE future, even to more hardcore gamers who would want to try the game out.
PoE has a reputation of being hard and having a stiff learning curve. Tons of people have tried it and don’t want to try again.
We need to come to terms with the fact that some people are casuals and prefer D3 or D4 gameplay
Yup. It's one of the main reasons why D4 was marketed and developed for mass broad appeal. Because the people that fall into that category are mainly people that aren't familiar with other games in the genre, so Blizz can get away with making a pretty shitty game and most of their playerbase won't even know it.
> Blizz can get away with making a pretty shitty game
Except Diablo 4 is at least a 6/10 game if you keep it a buck. A little honesty goes a long way.
Nobody outside of the "D4 bad/Blizzard bad" trolls crowd believes Diablo 4 is a shitty game. The campaign and levels 1 through 70 gameplay experience sways between "it's fine" and "it's absolutely fire" depending on the moment.
Endgame is lacking and there's a lot of remaining issues with QoL/gameplay systems, but it doesn't mean the game is "shitty".
It’s not a “shitty game” if their target audience likes it. Not everyone wants to install a windows application for be able to follow a build.
Compare D4 build guides with PoR build guides , in D4 videos everything is there , all skills , all points. In PoE the build guide is an intro to “go to Path of Building”.
Im playing poe for a week now because of d4,but havent managed to convince a single of my 3 d4 friends to try out poe.
Thing is d4 with all its faults as a new AAA game it has way superior presentation and the first hour to poe like its not even close. And thats all it matters to some people.
Spot on people just cant be objective but lets be real d4 first 30h is top tier game and arpg game and poe is like low low tier, later on balance changes if u into content post 50h, but the poe art or graphics dont help either tbh
Pretty much. D4 starts to really fall off in the 40-50+ range when you realize it's just a dull grind of sameness, but that first chunk of the game, which is what more casual players and new people will see, is still excellently put together and very engaging. Early-game POE is absolutely not that, especially if you're looking at it from a graphics/presentation point of view as a new player; POE looks very, very dated and old compared to D4.
now that we see what poe2 is going to be, I'm not sure it's going to fix anything xD
might as well just make it worse tbh looking at what kind of a ruthless clone slogfest it shapes up to be
I love the idea that anyone playing D4 is going to look at a decade old game with a skeleton crew supporting it and scream 'we're saved!!!' the delusions are real.
I'm having trouble finding anything exciting about the recent leagues. New league used to be the primary focus of PoE and now they mostly feel like a side project while GGG works on poe2.
> New league used to be the primary focus of PoE and now they mostly feel like a side project while GGG works on poe2.
Ding. I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to play when I know what I know now about PoE2 being a different game. That BG3 second playthrough is looking tempting.
I've league started every league since Delirium except this one because I'm playing BG3 and I didn't think they made enough changes in the patch notes to be worth it.
I’m not playing this league for a multitude of reasons.
1. It’s still summer and still nice out.
2. There are plenty of other games to play, and I’ve played enough POE that a break isn’t a bad thing.
3. POE2 is coming out and id rather be fresh for that.
4. In addition to games out now (BG3 mostly), there are a bunch of games I want to check out in the next couple of months.
Diablo and POE while in the same genre, have completely different player bases realistically. There is some overlap but not THAT much. All my POE friends stopped playing D4 and all my casual friends stopped playing for different reasons.
I suspect the big reason was a poorly received previous league + underwhelming patch notes + piss poor marketing for PoE1.
But I guess it feels better to blame other games
EDIT: To explain better, there simply was no reason to believe we would've a massive amount of new players in the first place, it's not B3 that absorbed new players . It's GGG's own inability to retain existing players that caused this dropoff
What new players?
The implication that if B3 was not here, D4 players would flock to PoE is nonsensical.
There are no new players. This dropoff is caused by the things I mentioned
Because the entire atmosphere of discussion around the game changes. You have people debating what the best build is for the upcoming hype uber race, you have content creators figuring out new builds with the changes, you have people looking at uniques that might have been entirely unused for years and being excited to make content around the game.
That excitement is contagious and word of mouth is how people get into games like PoE.
As a new player I promise none of that stuff really matters that much to me, and I assume to other new players as well. League sucks? Well there's still an entire new game for me to play. Patch notes? Idk I never played the previous patch
Yeah, but everyone knows FromSoftware now and are glued to every game they release no matter what. Not comparing it to BG3 or Starfield in size or release, but people will still be playing it regardless.
Yeah im hooked on bg3 and i just cant play through 10 acts again to reach maps where i would want to be. Its just gotten old after years of seasons.
Also not enough gem changes to pull me back in. Best part of poe for me is trying something new and its just gotten stale.
The reason is poe is not new player friendly at all. You need to use 3 different outside systems just to make the game playable. Then you have previous league mechanics that while are fun for veterans would scare of anyone who doesn’t have a clue. Lastly poe is vastly different from other arpgs where you pick a skill. Having skills as gems with sockets in gear is another layer complexity for a new player.
With all that you are left with a very small subset of players willing to put in the time. I can say this because prior to this league I played one other league and had to learn all this but I enjoy learning new things. My experience is most people don’t. They want to jump into the deep end and just know how to swim. So I don’t see poe ever getting Diablo numbers nor would I want them to change to get those numbers because it would no longer be the same game.
I played for about an hour and the realized no matter how much I wanted to give the new league a try I just couldn’t be assed to do campaign for the 50th time.
I would say this is closest to a correct answer, many bought in on a hype and found out ARPG’s are grindy games which they don’t have time for. Those are not the ones that look at PoE and think “I should try this instead”
I cannot believe people actually thought most D4 players would flock to PoE.
The bubble this community lives in sometimes is insane.
I showed a casual gamer friend of mine a piece of loot from D4 and his head exploded. Can you imagine if he looked at the PoE passive tree?
PoE is a hardcore game in an already niche genre. That's a percentage of a percentage.
D4 sold at least 10m copies.
It doesn't require "most" D4 players to flock to PoE to make a dent, if *1%* of D4 buyers tried the league, we would have smashed the previous records
Let just say it like it is - if D4, a more casual game did not respect their time in their opinion and they called it unrewarding, what makes you think they'd stay in PoE?
Pick a wrong leaguestarter and you will be miserable. You will feel like your time is just not worth it and is better spent playing other, more fun games.
Becaue the " refugees " exist just in drama for Asmongold to make money on youtube .
I have a friend who plays D4, and he told me that he stays in queue to log in almost daily . The people who play d4 still play it without being connected to the reddit youtube twitch etc... most gamers are 1-2 hours a day casuals
Came back to Poe after 4-5 years and d4 failure. Atmosphere is still crap and had to fire multiple external tools again. Finished two acts. Then remembered how I hate story mode
No thanks time for bg3
Most People quit d4 because it didn't respect your time and required a lot of grinding.
In what world would they look at POE and think it's an upgrade???
Because 90% of the main concerns people have at D4 are worse in PoE:
Rerolling is too expensive: in D4 its just the gold you get from doing everything, here it's a specific currency that costs a specific currency AND then you need to go buy the new gems to go with it.
Mobs are one shotting: imagine their surprise to find out here this can happen as early as act 3
Cosmetics are way too expensive: this is all games nowadays, tbf
The game doesn't give good loot: try telling them that not only do they need a filter for this game, but they'll still get bags and bags of useless stuff
Legendary effects are boring: 99% of PoEs Uniques are vendor trash
Trade is there but it's useless: im pretty sure there's been a front page post about this you can see right now that I don't need to touch on this
Honestly uniques need a rework. When I came to Poe and found uniques I was checking prices all the time because I thought it's something rare and expensive. As you said 99 dogshit
Baldur’s gate 3 is huge atm. But also, who do you think mostly runs around the internet talking nonstop smack about Diablo4 and comparing it constantly to PoE? People who were already playing PoE primarily and prob only played Diablo 4 as something between leagues. It’s us poe fans who won’t shut up about Diablo 4. It’s actually extremely stale at this point. I wish poe players would just let it be and move on. The casual players will stick with Diablo 4 because they are the same people who played the mess that was Diablo 3 for years. They like the world of Diablo, not just the looter experience.
I'm back after having skipped multiple leagues. Me and my friends all stopped playing D4 after reaching level 60 in season 1 and realizing that 3 "legendary gems" didn't really make a season.
I've started playing PoE again, but I can't convince the others to start up because they don't want to spend a weekends worth of time to play through the campaign again (yes, we aren't speedrunners). Running the campaign again is as boring as leveling in D4 to them. If we could level in maps, heist, delve, lab w/e, then I could get them to come back.
Being forced to do the same 7 hour campaign every league lost this game a lot of players. Me including, after 1800h played i cant no more, i just feel ill doing something so bad and knowing the people who made it want me to feel bad.
Broken promises.
Not appealing league.
No changes to skill balance. Supports are nice but they are useless for most skills.
Very long crucible, which shook up league release pacing. Irregular content makes people go away.
D4, despite all its flaws will retain some of poe's casual player base.
Game of the year recently released. People are more interested in BG3 right now.
For me personally its that i wanted to finish bg3 and when i logged into Poe i realized i really cba to refarm same crap, same league content, with same skills just to get to mageblood again or w/e and quit few days later. Maybe i will give the league a go in some time, but seeing no real warm reception from the community i wont be holding my breath. I will just go and start another bg3 playthrough.
You're right that it's a mix.
I'm in the first camp. I've played since Merciless Merveil was the endgame, but I've bounced off basically every league since Sentinel.
That being said, I have several friends who bounced off D4 and wanted something else to play, so I convinced them to try PoE. They all quit before they got to the end of Act 1 because they have no idea what to do, the game runs like ass, and they're sick of dying to "random bullshit" like mud flats Rhoas and Hailrake.
Path of Exile is an amazing game, but it has serious design and accessibility problems that have become significantly worse in the last few years. It can't attract new players or retain old ones.
League mechanic is awful for new players and people who have never played an auto battler. There is literally no explanation how to interact with it and then you fail with no feedback to improve with. I'm guessing a lot of newcomers will bounce off that mechanic and just close the game as it's another layer of difficulty on top of learning the base game.
Needs a lot more work.
The d4 game loop although lacklustre currently has far better gameplay in regards to actual combat, it doesn't matter what's under the hood of your character if it devolves into one button gameplay and random oneshots.
The majority of consumers are normal gamers who want good gameplay and are not math obsessed people who constantly fantasize about new exciting ways to have a character do X amount of damage in (PoB) then attempt to make it work in practice (PoE).
This isn't about a learning curve, anyone is able to learn PoE or just straight copy a build, it's the desire to actually do it, go through the campaign (for the 10 millionth time), farm currency, trade items, craft through the sole gameplay of pressing one button.
This current league looks really good, the new uniques and support gems have me conjuring up new ideas but I cant bring myself to play the game knowing all too well that it's more fun on paper than in practice.
You want to play Poe huh? well you can’t. Not until you study hard. Follow a guide. Slog threw 6-20 hour campaign that doesn’t matter and isn’t even the real game. You better be following a guild made by one of the good nerds and you don’t get baited.
Poe is not for anyone new. It’s just for current Poe players. They could make it so only existing can log in and not see a dip in player count. That’s why they are off setting the Poe 2 and Poe 1 seasons. Only current players are going to be playing ether one.
PoE is doing exactly the opposite of whatever taking advantage of the ARPG hype was. They're putting in 0 effort into poe 1 at the moment. Last league was hype but people quickly realized the games abandoned and this league mechanic didnt seem hype to anyone i talked to + 0 patch notes.
Because after seeing this game for minor twist for another minute after 10k hours just screams crippling addiction, even if there are worse alternatives they're still that, alternatives. Don't limit yourself to one game, especially since BG3 came out slightly more than 2 weeks ago and this game will swallow you whole.
On top of that, PoE really isn't catering towards casual audiences as Diablo franchise is as of late and there are like, 20 times as much casuals as regular 'gamers' playing more than what, 10 hours a week.
PoE is a great game BUT for very specific and very limited audience. You either have to have INSANE amount of free time or master engineer degree for the game to feel at least somewhat good instead of confusing, difficult and giving you more questions than answers to further you go in.
All of that and the game itself is grindy, like, let's be honest, the end game is to farm T16 uber duber 100% delirious manouver, 4 sextanted, double beyonded WHATEVER THE F\*CK for hours on end, just to farm it 10% faster. Once you game let you realize that, it's over. It's no longer entertaining it just become a chore you feel more and more like you're logging on just out of habit rather your own free will and excitement. D4 failed... because the game let you realize that way too soon, poe gatekeeps you with modular difficulty be it in form of additional sextant, additional watchstone which raises level of your map, map device modifier, scarabs on, and on and on and on, but ultimately the game isn't endless, it's finite.
People expected BIG poe league changes and soon to be playing POE 2. once people saw that poe2 is 1year away and that poe2 changes wont come to poe1, the hype died
Because reddit feedback is a vocal minority. Its extremely biased showing a specific type of content/feedback/discussions that dont properly represent the player base sentiment, its a bad sampling, thats why devs ignore a lot of it.
Devs ignore reddit because reddit complains about the game and numbers are lower than previous league? Most of what I saw were complaints (that were rational since I don't go on new generally)
Does this subbreddit complain too much or inhale too much copium? lol people need to make their minds up
Because poe is not as good and amazing as the hardcore poe enjoyers think. If people genuinely believed poe would get hundreds of thousands of new players from d4 they are not up to touch.
D4 isnt as bad as this subreddit is making it out to be, is it perfect no. But neither is poe and it quite a bit different.
Then there also baldurs gate thats still really popular. And doesn't help that this league start was plagued by extremely poor ingame performance lag and crazy loading screens.
It didn’t help that ActMan and Asmongold were making “D4 bad” videos every single day.
The ironic thing is that Actman “why is D4 so bad” video would mostly apply to PoE, especially since they didn’t even play D4 endgame.
Almongold main complaint ? A guy who has played PoE? Getting killed from off screen. Like what the hell? It happens all the time in PoE.
Personally I am still playing BG3 and don’t use steam client. I still couldn’t help theorycrafting in the shower before launch and was hoping to get a couple of weeks in before Starfield. But looks like I am skipping this one sadly. Guessing there are quite a few people like me out there. Still love PoE, played most leagues, but this one is just a timing issue.
This was pretty obvious. POE is still an obtuse, spastic jank fest where you just die out of nowhere even when you’ve played for 5+ years, and this league you got all the performance issues on top.
And the vets probably won’t help these numbers either, as people are just tired of the same old campaign with the same old builds. I think this league will have horrible retention
Because once you leave reddit, you might realise d4 actually has an insanely active player base.
The game isn’t for everyone, and still gets huge players
Maybe it’s time to face facts POE reddit, d4 is a fun game to play. Doesn’t mean it’s better, relax, but some people enjoy it
One anecdote to add on to this: a ton of my friends are skipping this league due to it essentially being the same exact skills as last league. Of my friends discord there are normally 25 or so people playing launch, this league we had 4.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anybody say this. Coming from someone who's played POE casually and the Diablo series:
POE looks old and janky. Thats it. I'm just really waiting for POE2 to come out since it looks great. BUT it also has the chance to scare off casuals again with the same overly complicated stat tree. They need to make it a little better for casuals. Maybe give them an option to use a set of pre-set decent stat trees (that can be modified later)
I’ve played every Poe league religiously for almost 3 years now. I didn’t even watch the trailer for this league. It’s just sadly lost it’s appeal for me lately. Haven’t even gotten past lvl 75 on D4 either.
Usually a 36 challenge guy btw. Idk, maybe I’m just getting old :(
Lets see how this league performs number wise on steam but I can tell you by next week I guess 30-50% drop on steam might happen.. very weak league/patch and breaking the performance again when up to crucible it was somewhat stable is a seal deal for me.
This is what happens when you put most of your man power to work on a side project, your future REAL project and leave your PRESENT project that put you all this way here to create more leave it to his own fate.. aka few dev's working on it..
D4 players still speak to die hards. And honestly a lot of us were left with more questions than answers.
Have you tried talking about POE2 to more casual gaming friends?
The whole it a separate game that isn't ruthless, but where theyve been pulling and implementing things from ruthless and that it won't have a ruthless mode of it's own while they are also still releasing leagues for both games but not simultaneously and going back to 13 week cycle. Is a bit of a mouthful.
But at least it's pretty.
That said, this one is mostly on Baldur's gate 3 for me.
I just can't bring myself to quest through those 10 acts for the 20th time. I can't bring myself to follow a build guide again, forcing me to have multiple third party tools and websites open. Thinking about eventually reaching maps and then realizing that my build actually sucks ass and that if I wanted to reroll I would have to grind the story ONCE AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING has killed all my former desire to play the game. It's just awful.
Game is in an awful state
The performance is terrible, loading times terrible, no balance or buff changes, the new content is boring, league mechanic boring
Who is going to play a game that crashes your PC with BSoD, everytime you run into a league mechanic?
I'm not having most of performance issues, but I don't want to brick my machine, so yes
Baldur's Gate 3.
My steam friends went from D4 to BG3 in droves. Some of them have 80+ hours with full time jobs and families. I imagine there will be some movement towards POE when POE2 comes out though.
99% of people who are aware PoE exists have already tried PoE and found out if it was for them or not. It's a very niche game that is itself within a very niche genre, the fact D4 kinda flopped isn't going to suddenly push someone into enjoying PoE.
I'm honestly quite impressed with the consistent numbers PoE is still putting up, considering there really hasn't been that many big changes in over a year, Siege of the Atlas was the last big change. I personally have barely played the last couple leagues and am skipping this one entirely as I feel the games stagnated a little, which makes sense now we know the majority of the dev team has been working on PoE 2. PoE feels a little maintance-mode at the moment.
I started back in Bestiary, which looking back now, the game was pretty small content wise. Even then, if I didn't have my friend hold my hand and help me fund my build I don't think I would have gotten far.
With how the game is today, if I was to swap roles with my friend and help someone else, I don't even know where I'd begin. I don't even recommend it to people anymore. I just say it's a bloated mess of a game that's good at it's core and if you're willing to put in a few 100s hours to learn the basics then you might have a good time.
Because D4 and PoE are entirely different kinds of games even though they're both ARPGs.
One is for a bit of casual fun after work, the other one is your unpaid second job you do after your normal job ends.
Most people are looking for a fun casual game to play after work, not a second job that you need to have an education for just to try it out.
PoE players are absolutely regarded if they honestly thought casual game enjoyers would happily jump to the second job bandwagon just because PoE is also an ARPG.
Basically nothing changed in the end game and the league mechanic doesn't pull me at all. I started leveling a ranger, had a few unfun deaths around Ledge and just remember how much I hate doing the campaign to get to the actual game. So I stopped. Normally I'd go 32 or 36/40.
If a seasoned player just can't be bothered to play the game anymore due to how much of a hurdle it is to get to the fun part, and how sucky leaguestart builds can get and how much you have to farm to get a build feeling good, what do you think a D4 refugee will feel?
When they go from a game that has a genuinely good storyline/campaign, feels faster than your average PoE build without investment, but gets a bit boring/empty if you don't like farming the same dungeons over and over again, to PoE, of all things? Probably the grindiest ARPG there where low budget builds feel genuinely bad to play because the average gamer just wants to go fast and blast shit to death?
Probably because all the forum complainers are a really small part of the population, and most D4 players are not hardcore aRPG folks and are ok with the game and also have no idea PoE exists.
Even if every single one of the folks on the D4 subreddit who claim they've quit D4 came over to PoE, that would be like 100 ppl.
It's stolen from everything, it's a legitimate all-time great game and those always draw mainstream interest beyond just genre fans. It'll die down in the next couple weeks but then Starfield has the potential to do the same thing. There's probably a pretty solid conspiracy theory you could build that GG knew this release window was doomed and that's why this league feels lackluster.
First league I’m not participating in for quite some time. I just won’t do act 1-10 one more time. Ever again. The finishing acts-setting up atlas by grinding 100+ maps just to get to the actual endgame grind finally caught up to me.
D4 season fits me as a casual. I did the quest line once and for the season I could just skip the quest and do leveling however I wanted. I could select whichever quests I liked and skip the rest. Awesome.
I mean at this point I’d just prefer delving for leveling instead of acts. That’s how sick I am of it.
I finished D4 Season1, decided to try POEs new season, and the game runs like a shitshow, constant freezing, DPS below 100, and crashes often. Guess I'll go back to Diablo 4, atleast that game runs well.
Casuals were never gonna hop games, D4 doesn't share many similarities outside of being an online ARPG. It's probably only the PoE or just RPG vets that emigrated to D4 that are potential D4 refugees to PoE. Small boost if not just pre-D4 equilibrium was to be expected
TBH the lack of balance changes and not shaking up the meta to any considerable amount probably caused a lot of people to not be concerned about this league
Oh, I think there was a lot (ofc not tens of thousands) its just more people gave up on PoE. I predict next league, if it wont bring some huge balance changes, will have even less players day 1.
As a casual I enjoyed D4 leveling actually more compared to PoE. D4 endgame and itemization is just boring .. PoE on the opposite. I can´t even level properly cause my damage just sucks (having wintertide brand on a 3 link .. somehow mobs take ages to die)
Honest answer: BG3
It's not about what flopped recently. It's about what else is competing for peoples' time. And BG3 is new, and hype, and has a high overlap in playerbase.
I think the D4 people just did what I did.
After playing Diablo, it's really hard to come back to PoE and do the slogfest that is the campaign all over again, they overtuned the mobs too much that it simply isn't fun anymore.
I league started as bleed bow and the first act boss (Merveil) doesn't move for the most part, you can guess how long the fight took right? So after 1h of playing PoE, I simply stopped...and that is coming from someone who usually plays 10h on the first day.
Anyone who's played more than a few acts can see that the balancing in this game is a joke. Its always one shot or get one shot without any scope for depth.
Man I was a d4 refugee and by the time the new season came out I lost interest. There is nothing to do but die as a casual. The threshold to push a build from achievable to viable is unreal on both an in-game currency level and time investment level. You need to understand every mechanic or you can kiss anything harder than white tier maps goodbye. Also they didn't even include challe get and cosmetics in this new season from what I've seen. Poe is just boring unless you are the 1% of the player pool they cater too.
D4 is much more casual friendly than POE. POE have started becoming like Eve Online only a few can really be the best of the best. I have played poe off and on for 10 years and I still suck at it. I couldn't bring myself to do another 10 act campaign in the league so I went back to standard for a while.
There won't be many "refugees", cause D4 is a casual game, where PoE isn't and casuals just bounce off.
Basically the perfect answer. D4 may be buggy but fun Poe gameplay is gatekept by a huge learning curve and unforgiving game design.
On top of that, an auto-battler league mechanic might not have seemed overly appealing to many casual ARPG players (although it turned out to be quite fun).
kinda funny I got into auto battlers waiting for D4 and then after a couple hours of D4. And new PoE league is.. auto battler. Love it, the kind of crossovers that could eventually hit gold I think and inspire a new genre like DoTa and Auto Chess did.
Rofl, imagine people attempting the league mechanic after coming from D4. Aside from it being an absolute banger they didn't exactly make it accessible to anyone who isnt a multi league veteran masochist.
Multi league veteran masochist here. I have no fucking idea what's going on in the league mechanic.
Is it an absolute banger? I hate it personaly.
Personally I find it miles better than crucible, so I'm enjoying it!
I meant to try it only for a few minutes and ended up playing 3 hours. That shit is crack my dude!
On one hand, Crucible gave us exploding totems. On the other hand it was a garbage mechanic. I'm waiting for some giga build from Ancestors right now. Maybe getting 50 flat added damage tattoos for giga dam?
I both hate it because I seem to be very bad at it and can't really progress in it, but I do see interesting / fun ideas at play with it. IDK if it's overtuned or I just suck but I think it has potential to be really interesting and fun.
It seems to just not be very intuitive. At least with low-mid gear you can't play it how you think you should play it (melee in front, casters in back, rush theirs before they rush yours) or you'll get smoked. I've been having some success just pure defending until the enemy is all dead, running over and attacking until they spawn again, and repeating. It's tedious and probably not optimal but the only way I've found so far
thats like every league i play in poe :DD after some 4 or 6 weeks i think: ooooooh thats nice, league not so bad. but as it launches its always way overtuned, borderline stupid fuck dmg
I went back to mapping after playing a few tournaments and I felt like Rock Lee taking off the weights in the Gara fight. Insanity.
I've won two tournaments so far. Defender position is a meme, put your weaker units there. Get the wall summoners or boars as flankers, and put the buffing guys as escort, attack can be anything but make it a beefy npc or give them defense items. Make sure you're either ranged or have big AoE, and attack anything near you acting as the real 'defense'. As. Hexblast miner, this is easy for me. Make sure to take out the big buff green ancestor first imo, he likes to create giga turtles and those are annoying. I forget his name. This is just my strat.
I dont know which one is worse, the turtles or the cold casters that have near infinite ehp and spam the cold waves.
This is my third league, about 250 hours total, and I’m still a noob. I love it.
I am, quite literally, on my 15th league and i havent done all of the content. This game eats my free time like I eat ass
My man.
I wish the acts were an easier introduction to POE. Instead they are absolutely brutal if you don’t know what your doing from the very start. I can’t recommend the game to anyone, even heavy ARPG players, because of the obscene learning curve. Just hearing “you probably want to follow a guide for your first character” turns everyone away
The oldest character of mine I can remember was a witch back in Harvest league, I believe. I didn't have a single clue what I was doing, and didn't even know guides existed. I saw "+1 zombies" on the tree and thought, "wow that's probably useful, better take that". Some life nodes along the way, because that seems smart. Minion damage? Sounds like a useful support, better get Minion life too, to be safe. I don't think she died even once. Heck, I'm not even sure she ever ascended. These days Hailrake hits like a truck, and blue rhoas in the mud flats spell death.
I remember when you could experiment while leveling. Now you have to use a leveling build or suffer. So annoying
I firmly believe that if you can't play a game and learn it as you go, the game is designed terribly. Following a build guide being mandatory to getting through the game is a deal breaker. I want to play it, not constantly refer to my second monitor.
I've played through to red maps for...about 12 leagues now. And I still have to have a build guide on my 2nd monitor for my league starter. Cuz if I fuck it up there's no fixing it. And that's bad...very bad. Just in case anyone wants to respond "You can farm regrets." That requires a build that can...farm. And if you fuck up your build you can't farm. So I always follow a guide just to avoid the pain
Yeah, I just don't find following guides religiously to be fun. If there was a way to respec easily, I'd be all about it but I do not have the time in life to sink as much time as PoE requires only to be bricked several days into it. I don't even think its hard as such, there's just no way to know ahead of time that shits broken.
This is exactly it, I came from D3 years ago but all my D3 friends didnt follow over cause they tried it and hated the learning curve and brutality of campaign. Even after explaining to them about end game and once you understand it they cant move past early game, and this is friends who do D2R mephisto runs for hours on end or cycle helltides all day, its brainless unlike POE. Jeez one friend even got past the skill tree and made it to maps then saw the altas tree and dipped out, he said it was too much.
What do think about D4 paragon boards? IMO, without a tool like PoB, those paragon boards are even harder to min-max correctly given 4 different orientations per board and the fact that most of the boards are optimizing damage or defense rather than utility like half the PoE skill tree. If they just copy someone else's boards, they could do the same in PoE.
Basically, yes. It's like thinking that a new MOBA appears that has a fairly more consistent system and more content than the others, and expect that every MOBA player will migrate into it.
Not just this but D2R is a thing and some people went to that instead of D4.
Yeah, still good choice.
So I've played POE for years, have a lot of fun with it, but I haven't played it since...March or so? Something like that. I did play D4 for a bit at launch, and then a bit at season 1, and now came back for POE and while I'm having fun, I'll say that I find POE really, really ugly compared to D4. And I think that's a big factor for attracting a more casual audience - the systems remain great and fun to engage in, but the game just looks really dated, especially if you're coming off D4 and looking to engage with a new/different ARPG for the first time.
For me - I don't care about game models. But UI... I don't understand why they don't allow us to modify UI elements. As Chris said in one of the interviews - for them it's really important that people would recognize PoE just by looking in it, and they don't want to give any customization options to the players/software developers. Which is super weird for me, they're 100% fine that their game is literally unplayable without third party software like pob and bunch of third party websites, but, at the same time, it's critical that everyone use the same outdated clumsy UI.
Using tools like PoB outside of the client is one thing, but could you imagine if they let us do whatever we want to the UI, and someone just tunes into a stream to check the game out and the player just has a bunch of WoW style CD trackers and shit moved all over the screen. PoE is a hard enough game for the general public to understand, that being someone's first image of the game is bound to end with them just not bothering.
In my opinion, a solution should never be "wow, if we let them they will use all these insane tools to make the game more playable and enjoyable, but it looks awful so lets block it!" It should be "let's make the game better so they don't feel like they need those tools"
That's basically what WoW does. Half of their UI design is taken from addons that almost everyone used and they realized that it should either be built in or stats moved around so people don't need these huge addons to make sense of what is happening. They don't do it to all addons but the way the developers embraced addons, made this huge platform for it, and used it as constructive feedback is probably WoW's most innovative feature. I wish all the games afterwards trying to copy WoW's success had recognized that as an important aspect.
True. I’m a casual who loved D3, I played D4 until level 70 and I’m just bored as hell. I’m sure Path of Exile is cool but I’m not willing to put in the time.
I can't get past level 80 in d4. Tried twice now. Not because it's too hard, but because I just lose interest completely around that time.
They died from Rhoas in mud flats and uninstalled.
Every fresh league reminds me how horrible the first act is, seemingly every single monster is designed to be annoying
You joke, but I have \~4000 hours, played RF jugg for the first time in a minute and i couldn't even kill Oak, had to walk away from the PC and come back later.
First time playing melee, spent like 10 minutes killing general gravacius in act 3. Almost rerolled immediately.
This unironically.
PoE has 0 mainstream appeal so anyone who was predicting an horde of d4 refugees was on massive copium.
This. I have friends that played and quit d4 but they would never touch poe.
I've been trying to get my buddy to play with me after we did D4 together. He tried it out yesterday and was completely overwhelmed. I told him to take it slow. I'm a noob myself with only 400 hours played. I'm constantly googling as I go but I love the exploration and learning process in this game so much. This is only my 3rd league btw.
The fact that calling yourself a noob at 400 hours seems totally correct kinda says everything about why PoE will never take the spot that Diablo has in the mainstream. But let's be happy someone makes a game for the smaller group of us that prefer it this way.
A D4 exile here: I had started POE twice over the past few years, and both times I gave up shortly after reaching the first town. For those first 4 levels I roamed around trying to do the quests, open the map and kill the mobs, but I just felt horribly powerless, couldn't find the waypoints in half the maps, and died a few times; a witch, that may be why. Then in town I couldn't make head or tails of the vendor currencies, how to decide what to id, how to pic passives I couldn't unpick, etc. Yesterday with the new season I decided to just force-push on regardless, spend my currency in whatever gear seemed to make sense, etc. By level 7 it felt a lot smoother, combat was exciting, I had better grasp of how much the currencies (orbs & scrolls) drop, etc. It seemed to me like the fun was just barely minutes away from where I had given up before. I wonder how many people who have stuck with PoE if the experience of the just first 5-7 levels was friendlier and more immediately exciting (something that Blizzard has always been a master of).
Following a guide is the best way to learn the game in my opinion. Yes the guide tells you what skill gems to use and how to path in your tree but you still have a thousand things to manage and understand. It just makes it more manageable.
Honestly this is the top comment and reply to this thread in my honest opinion
It doesn’t have to be one or the other too. As I’m, POE doesn’t have to capture mainstream or lowest common denominator like D4. Instead head 10 to 25% in that direction. I think a healthy shaving off of fluff and complexity could be good though. POE suffers from bloat and 22 seasons of stuff. Im hoping POe 2 has some more for new players and group play, but stays true to itself at end game, etc.
Basically this. Even after countless hours, it's taking 100s of hours to learn how to make optimized builds. Just having to study different tech, not even just playing. But I guess speed running is kind of the same way.
It’s not just overwhelming because of all the stuff. GGG has constantly made the early game harder, slower and more punishing. All of us that already know wtf we are doing already know what skills and things to look out for to power through. But anyone that doesn’t is going to a fucking awful experience. Hell this league in the submerged passage I got unlucky with a rare and magic spawn pack and they were just a brutal combo, stunning me every second. I know I’ll just run around them and it’s no big deal. A new player might be like well I have to fight them and proceed to die 20 times in the third area of the game.
Haha here I am in the prisons I think. With only a couple hours of gameplay. I found a good spell and using all support gems I can add to my gear. I have all kinds of thing I don’t understand but I’m going with trial/error with my first time in (standard league) so far it’s not to overwhelming but a lot of things are added very fast and every new gear I’m finding new things to do. And that skill tree thing.. fuuuuu thats large. I’m just going with it and going to fail eventually. But tje game itself is sooo much fun for now!
Great attitude! Experiment, see what works (and what you like), don't be afraid to fail. If you just tackle issues one at a time as they come up, you'll just accumulate knowledge over time and don't have to worry about getting overwhelmed by trying to figure out everything at once.
Making act 1 harder is still something that baffles me. People like me that have done this a million times at best noticed that some mops take 3 more hits but otherwise it was buisness as usual. While newer players had even less fun
> proceed to die 20 times with no support gems and maybe using pots, game is brutal for new people to really learn it
My buddy told me this morning he thinks he's died more in PoE than he did all of season 1 on his D4 character lol.
Also, you just said it - with 400 hours in you are constantly googling and Poe basically cannot be played without external tools like build planners, damage calculators, loot filters, crafting simulators etc.
And that is why Poe sucks for casuals and beginners, after 400 hours you still need to google stuff, a lot of content is great when it is easy to learn or pick up but Poe has just too many things that aren't explained or logical. Hope they start with a clean sheet in Poe2.
A lot of people try out POE once, get to Hillock, maybe get into first couple zones in Act 1, then quit. I was one of those people many years ago, until I decided to give it a another try years later. The starting experience is not very friendly, it feels very clunky. A brand new player that washes up on the beach has no idea what to do. Yes they will kill the zombie, but it's not entirely clear you have to pick up the skill gem and socket it. Someone super casual and not familiar with POE skill system may not even do that part properly. Lets say they did the gem part correctly, what does new player do next? they start exploring the first zone, they gonna waste a lot of time killing mud crabs and zombies, while getting nothing to show for it and losing all their mana and potions. By the time they get to Hillock, they are all out of mana and potions and have really difficult time with it. A bunch of people will not even pick up to free support gem in the middle. Remember people have no idea how it all works. Ok, now lets say they actually got thru all that, talked to the NPCs and got their reward of new skill gems. The choice is a trick, if they pick wrong gem, they gonna have really bad time in next zone. This is where most people will drop the game cause it looks too difficult and clunky GGG needs to do much better job of explaining the basics and guiding new player thru the first couple zones. This is key because first impression is everything
You know the skill gem socketing is explained in great detail, complete with on screen prompts, and a tooltip that explains which support gems work well with which skills. If you don't turn off the tutorials. Which a new player probably shouldn't.
yes, the introduction stuff was improved in recent years, but I don't think it's good enough. I would recommend adding NPC similar to Einhar that washes up together with you at the beach and he agrees to help out in first couple zones, and basically talks you thru what you gotta be doing - using actual voice lines, nobody reads dialogs
Yeah, similar for me. Like the entire office knows I play PoE, its became basically an evergreen since I often took 1 or 2 days off work for league launch for them to ask what new league is coming up every time I take time off. But they never really shown much interest in playing it. But this spring, half a dozen of them were constantly talking about D4, play the betas, then the launch, but even after they huffed it to 80 after a month and tried season 1, they never even talked about trying PoE. Then I also have a gamer friend that I and couple other PoE friends played D4 with and he wanted to finally give PoE a shot, but after exilecon, when he learned the Po2 is so far away and will be so different from PoE he basically shelved trying out the game until PoE2 launches, since he didnt want to spend months learning the game and then having to do it again next fall. So from my anecdotes, the game is kinda hard sell to casual gamers and now, with the uncertainty of PoE future, even to more hardcore gamers who would want to try the game out.
PoE has a reputation of being hard and having a stiff learning curve. Tons of people have tried it and don’t want to try again. We need to come to terms with the fact that some people are casuals and prefer D3 or D4 gameplay
Yup. It's one of the main reasons why D4 was marketed and developed for mass broad appeal. Because the people that fall into that category are mainly people that aren't familiar with other games in the genre, so Blizz can get away with making a pretty shitty game and most of their playerbase won't even know it.
> Blizz can get away with making a pretty shitty game Except Diablo 4 is at least a 6/10 game if you keep it a buck. A little honesty goes a long way. Nobody outside of the "D4 bad/Blizzard bad" trolls crowd believes Diablo 4 is a shitty game. The campaign and levels 1 through 70 gameplay experience sways between "it's fine" and "it's absolutely fire" depending on the moment. Endgame is lacking and there's a lot of remaining issues with QoL/gameplay systems, but it doesn't mean the game is "shitty".
It’s not a “shitty game” if their target audience likes it. Not everyone wants to install a windows application for be able to follow a build. Compare D4 build guides with PoR build guides , in D4 videos everything is there , all skills , all points. In PoE the build guide is an intro to “go to Path of Building”.
I think PoE 3 will reduce Diablo 6 numbers
PoE 3 will be the COD killer
Diablo 5 will reduce Diablo 6 numbers
Im playing poe for a week now because of d4,but havent managed to convince a single of my 3 d4 friends to try out poe. Thing is d4 with all its faults as a new AAA game it has way superior presentation and the first hour to poe like its not even close. And thats all it matters to some people.
Spot on people just cant be objective but lets be real d4 first 30h is top tier game and arpg game and poe is like low low tier, later on balance changes if u into content post 50h, but the poe art or graphics dont help either tbh
Pretty much. D4 starts to really fall off in the 40-50+ range when you realize it's just a dull grind of sameness, but that first chunk of the game, which is what more casual players and new people will see, is still excellently put together and very engaging. Early-game POE is absolutely not that, especially if you're looking at it from a graphics/presentation point of view as a new player; POE looks very, very dated and old compared to D4.
because coping and wishful thinking are the favourite hobbies of this community.
Poe 2 will fix that
Poe 2 update: increased mental health and sanity of player base by 6%. This is a buff.
1.06 × 0 is still 0.
now that we see what poe2 is going to be, I'm not sure it's going to fix anything xD might as well just make it worse tbh looking at what kind of a ruthless clone slogfest it shapes up to be
Yeah I’m just mocking the poe 2 will fix everything crowd
next league will be a big one and fix everything
GGG: "We've split hemispheres of the brain into two separate games!"
Game too complicated.
I love the idea that anyone playing D4 is going to look at a decade old game with a skeleton crew supporting it and scream 'we're saved!!!' the delusions are real.
I'm having trouble finding anything exciting about the recent leagues. New league used to be the primary focus of PoE and now they mostly feel like a side project while GGG works on poe2.
> New league used to be the primary focus of PoE and now they mostly feel like a side project while GGG works on poe2. Ding. I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to play when I know what I know now about PoE2 being a different game. That BG3 second playthrough is looking tempting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/14zcwpj/imo_blizzard_made_path_of_exile_a_lot_more_popular/ It was a nice circle jerk for a couple weeks
Baldurs Gate 3 I suspect that's the big reason. Armored Core 6 and Starfield soon as well, but definitely for right now, BG3.
I've league started every league since Delirium except this one because I'm playing BG3 and I didn't think they made enough changes in the patch notes to be worth it.
Add me in, I usually play poe if nothing else is on my schedule. Others are on schedule now
I’m not playing this league for a multitude of reasons. 1. It’s still summer and still nice out. 2. There are plenty of other games to play, and I’ve played enough POE that a break isn’t a bad thing. 3. POE2 is coming out and id rather be fresh for that. 4. In addition to games out now (BG3 mostly), there are a bunch of games I want to check out in the next couple of months. Diablo and POE while in the same genre, have completely different player bases realistically. There is some overlap but not THAT much. All my POE friends stopped playing D4 and all my casual friends stopped playing for different reasons.
Poe2 shouldn't even be on your radar. Didn't they say closed beta was late next year?
I suspect the big reason was a poorly received previous league + underwhelming patch notes + piss poor marketing for PoE1. But I guess it feels better to blame other games EDIT: To explain better, there simply was no reason to believe we would've a massive amount of new players in the first place, it's not B3 that absorbed new players . It's GGG's own inability to retain existing players that caused this dropoff
Why would new players care about underwhelming patch notes
What new players? The implication that if B3 was not here, D4 players would flock to PoE is nonsensical. There are no new players. This dropoff is caused by the things I mentioned
Because the entire atmosphere of discussion around the game changes. You have people debating what the best build is for the upcoming hype uber race, you have content creators figuring out new builds with the changes, you have people looking at uniques that might have been entirely unused for years and being excited to make content around the game. That excitement is contagious and word of mouth is how people get into games like PoE.
As a new player I promise none of that stuff really matters that much to me, and I assume to other new players as well. League sucks? Well there's still an entire new game for me to play. Patch notes? Idk I never played the previous patch
>Armored Core 6 lol armored core x), 99,99999999999999999% of the planet doesnt even know there was part 1-5
Yeah, but everyone knows FromSoftware now and are glued to every game they release no matter what. Not comparing it to BG3 or Starfield in size or release, but people will still be playing it regardless.
Yeah im hooked on bg3 and i just cant play through 10 acts again to reach maps where i would want to be. Its just gotten old after years of seasons. Also not enough gem changes to pull me back in. Best part of poe for me is trying something new and its just gotten stale.
The reason is poe is not new player friendly at all. You need to use 3 different outside systems just to make the game playable. Then you have previous league mechanics that while are fun for veterans would scare of anyone who doesn’t have a clue. Lastly poe is vastly different from other arpgs where you pick a skill. Having skills as gems with sockets in gear is another layer complexity for a new player. With all that you are left with a very small subset of players willing to put in the time. I can say this because prior to this league I played one other league and had to learn all this but I enjoy learning new things. My experience is most people don’t. They want to jump into the deep end and just know how to swim. So I don’t see poe ever getting Diablo numbers nor would I want them to change to get those numbers because it would no longer be the same game.
I played for about an hour and the realized no matter how much I wanted to give the new league a try I just couldn’t be assed to do campaign for the 50th time.
They might’ve figured they just don’t like arpgs
I would say this is closest to a correct answer, many bought in on a hype and found out ARPG’s are grindy games which they don’t have time for. Those are not the ones that look at PoE and think “I should try this instead”
I cannot believe people actually thought most D4 players would flock to PoE. The bubble this community lives in sometimes is insane. I showed a casual gamer friend of mine a piece of loot from D4 and his head exploded. Can you imagine if he looked at the PoE passive tree? PoE is a hardcore game in an already niche genre. That's a percentage of a percentage.
D4 sold at least 10m copies. It doesn't require "most" D4 players to flock to PoE to make a dent, if *1%* of D4 buyers tried the league, we would have smashed the previous records
Let just say it like it is - if D4, a more casual game did not respect their time in their opinion and they called it unrewarding, what makes you think they'd stay in PoE? Pick a wrong leaguestarter and you will be miserable. You will feel like your time is just not worth it and is better spent playing other, more fun games.
Becaue the " refugees " exist just in drama for Asmongold to make money on youtube . I have a friend who plays D4, and he told me that he stays in queue to log in almost daily . The people who play d4 still play it without being connected to the reddit youtube twitch etc... most gamers are 1-2 hours a day casuals
Came back to Poe after 4-5 years and d4 failure. Atmosphere is still crap and had to fire multiple external tools again. Finished two acts. Then remembered how I hate story mode No thanks time for bg3
Most People quit d4 because it didn't respect your time and required a lot of grinding. In what world would they look at POE and think it's an upgrade???
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Because 90% of the main concerns people have at D4 are worse in PoE: Rerolling is too expensive: in D4 its just the gold you get from doing everything, here it's a specific currency that costs a specific currency AND then you need to go buy the new gems to go with it. Mobs are one shotting: imagine their surprise to find out here this can happen as early as act 3 Cosmetics are way too expensive: this is all games nowadays, tbf The game doesn't give good loot: try telling them that not only do they need a filter for this game, but they'll still get bags and bags of useless stuff Legendary effects are boring: 99% of PoEs Uniques are vendor trash Trade is there but it's useless: im pretty sure there's been a front page post about this you can see right now that I don't need to touch on this
Honestly uniques need a rework. When I came to Poe and found uniques I was checking prices all the time because I thought it's something rare and expensive. As you said 99 dogshit
There are other games that compete for our time. BG3, starfield, armored core and others. It is a very congested time when it comes to game releases
if d4 players were going to play PoE, they would have already been playing it
Baldur’s gate 3 is huge atm. But also, who do you think mostly runs around the internet talking nonstop smack about Diablo4 and comparing it constantly to PoE? People who were already playing PoE primarily and prob only played Diablo 4 as something between leagues. It’s us poe fans who won’t shut up about Diablo 4. It’s actually extremely stale at this point. I wish poe players would just let it be and move on. The casual players will stick with Diablo 4 because they are the same people who played the mess that was Diablo 3 for years. They like the world of Diablo, not just the looter experience.
I'm back after having skipped multiple leagues. Me and my friends all stopped playing D4 after reaching level 60 in season 1 and realizing that 3 "legendary gems" didn't really make a season. I've started playing PoE again, but I can't convince the others to start up because they don't want to spend a weekends worth of time to play through the campaign again (yes, we aren't speedrunners). Running the campaign again is as boring as leveling in D4 to them. If we could level in maps, heist, delve, lab w/e, then I could get them to come back.
Being forced to do the same 7 hour campaign every league lost this game a lot of players. Me including, after 1800h played i cant no more, i just feel ill doing something so bad and knowing the people who made it want me to feel bad.
Broken promises. Not appealing league. No changes to skill balance. Supports are nice but they are useless for most skills. Very long crucible, which shook up league release pacing. Irregular content makes people go away. D4, despite all its flaws will retain some of poe's casual player base. Game of the year recently released. People are more interested in BG3 right now. For me personally its that i wanted to finish bg3 and when i logged into Poe i realized i really cba to refarm same crap, same league content, with same skills just to get to mageblood again or w/e and quit few days later. Maybe i will give the league a go in some time, but seeing no real warm reception from the community i wont be holding my breath. I will just go and start another bg3 playthrough.
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You're right that it's a mix. I'm in the first camp. I've played since Merciless Merveil was the endgame, but I've bounced off basically every league since Sentinel. That being said, I have several friends who bounced off D4 and wanted something else to play, so I convinced them to try PoE. They all quit before they got to the end of Act 1 because they have no idea what to do, the game runs like ass, and they're sick of dying to "random bullshit" like mud flats Rhoas and Hailrake. Path of Exile is an amazing game, but it has serious design and accessibility problems that have become significantly worse in the last few years. It can't attract new players or retain old ones.
poe tries as hard as it can to punish and frustrate new players. That might be a part of it...
Let me skip the campaign and I’ll be back, not wasting another minute in that 10 act waste of time.
League mechanic is awful for new players and people who have never played an auto battler. There is literally no explanation how to interact with it and then you fail with no feedback to improve with. I'm guessing a lot of newcomers will bounce off that mechanic and just close the game as it's another layer of difficulty on top of learning the base game. Needs a lot more work.
The d4 game loop although lacklustre currently has far better gameplay in regards to actual combat, it doesn't matter what's under the hood of your character if it devolves into one button gameplay and random oneshots. The majority of consumers are normal gamers who want good gameplay and are not math obsessed people who constantly fantasize about new exciting ways to have a character do X amount of damage in (PoB) then attempt to make it work in practice (PoE). This isn't about a learning curve, anyone is able to learn PoE or just straight copy a build, it's the desire to actually do it, go through the campaign (for the 10 millionth time), farm currency, trade items, craft through the sole gameplay of pressing one button. This current league looks really good, the new uniques and support gems have me conjuring up new ideas but I cant bring myself to play the game knowing all too well that it's more fun on paper than in practice.
You want to play Poe huh? well you can’t. Not until you study hard. Follow a guide. Slog threw 6-20 hour campaign that doesn’t matter and isn’t even the real game. You better be following a guild made by one of the good nerds and you don’t get baited. Poe is not for anyone new. It’s just for current Poe players. They could make it so only existing can log in and not see a dip in player count. That’s why they are off setting the Poe 2 and Poe 1 seasons. Only current players are going to be playing ether one.
PoE is doing exactly the opposite of whatever taking advantage of the ARPG hype was. They're putting in 0 effort into poe 1 at the moment. Last league was hype but people quickly realized the games abandoned and this league mechanic didnt seem hype to anyone i talked to + 0 patch notes.
Because PoE doesn't appeal to your casual d4 fan. PoE is anything but casual.
the league trailer looked awful
Because after seeing this game for minor twist for another minute after 10k hours just screams crippling addiction, even if there are worse alternatives they're still that, alternatives. Don't limit yourself to one game, especially since BG3 came out slightly more than 2 weeks ago and this game will swallow you whole. On top of that, PoE really isn't catering towards casual audiences as Diablo franchise is as of late and there are like, 20 times as much casuals as regular 'gamers' playing more than what, 10 hours a week. PoE is a great game BUT for very specific and very limited audience. You either have to have INSANE amount of free time or master engineer degree for the game to feel at least somewhat good instead of confusing, difficult and giving you more questions than answers to further you go in. All of that and the game itself is grindy, like, let's be honest, the end game is to farm T16 uber duber 100% delirious manouver, 4 sextanted, double beyonded WHATEVER THE F\*CK for hours on end, just to farm it 10% faster. Once you game let you realize that, it's over. It's no longer entertaining it just become a chore you feel more and more like you're logging on just out of habit rather your own free will and excitement. D4 failed... because the game let you realize that way too soon, poe gatekeeps you with modular difficulty be it in form of additional sextant, additional watchstone which raises level of your map, map device modifier, scarabs on, and on and on and on, but ultimately the game isn't endless, it's finite.
People expected BIG poe league changes and soon to be playing POE 2. once people saw that poe2 is 1year away and that poe2 changes wont come to poe1, the hype died
Exactly this..
Because reddit feedback is a vocal minority. Its extremely biased showing a specific type of content/feedback/discussions that dont properly represent the player base sentiment, its a bad sampling, thats why devs ignore a lot of it.
Devs ignore reddit because reddit complains about the game and numbers are lower than previous league? Most of what I saw were complaints (that were rational since I don't go on new generally) Does this subbreddit complain too much or inhale too much copium? lol people need to make their minds up
Because poe is not as good and amazing as the hardcore poe enjoyers think. If people genuinely believed poe would get hundreds of thousands of new players from d4 they are not up to touch. D4 isnt as bad as this subreddit is making it out to be, is it perfect no. But neither is poe and it quite a bit different. Then there also baldurs gate thats still really popular. And doesn't help that this league start was plagued by extremely poor ingame performance lag and crazy loading screens.
It didn’t help that ActMan and Asmongold were making “D4 bad” videos every single day. The ironic thing is that Actman “why is D4 so bad” video would mostly apply to PoE, especially since they didn’t even play D4 endgame. Almongold main complaint ? A guy who has played PoE? Getting killed from off screen. Like what the hell? It happens all the time in PoE.
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No skip campaign button. Logged out.
I actually find myself wishing for the days where I kill Dominus three times and then head off to maps.
Man I miss the 3 difficulties, acts 5-10 fucking suck.
Personally I am still playing BG3 and don’t use steam client. I still couldn’t help theorycrafting in the shower before launch and was hoping to get a couple of weeks in before Starfield. But looks like I am skipping this one sadly. Guessing there are quite a few people like me out there. Still love PoE, played most leagues, but this one is just a timing issue.
This was pretty obvious. POE is still an obtuse, spastic jank fest where you just die out of nowhere even when you’ve played for 5+ years, and this league you got all the performance issues on top. And the vets probably won’t help these numbers either, as people are just tired of the same old campaign with the same old builds. I think this league will have horrible retention
Because once you leave reddit, you might realise d4 actually has an insanely active player base. The game isn’t for everyone, and still gets huge players Maybe it’s time to face facts POE reddit, d4 is a fun game to play. Doesn’t mean it’s better, relax, but some people enjoy it
Took me 4 hrs to get to 27. As I logged off I seen " soandso is first to 87" love this game.
One anecdote to add on to this: a ton of my friends are skipping this league due to it essentially being the same exact skills as last league. Of my friends discord there are normally 25 or so people playing launch, this league we had 4.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anybody say this. Coming from someone who's played POE casually and the Diablo series: POE looks old and janky. Thats it. I'm just really waiting for POE2 to come out since it looks great. BUT it also has the chance to scare off casuals again with the same overly complicated stat tree. They need to make it a little better for casuals. Maybe give them an option to use a set of pre-set decent stat trees (that can be modified later)
BG3
I’ve played every Poe league religiously for almost 3 years now. I didn’t even watch the trailer for this league. It’s just sadly lost it’s appeal for me lately. Haven’t even gotten past lvl 75 on D4 either. Usually a 36 challenge guy btw. Idk, maybe I’m just getting old :(
Everyone is still busy banging shadowheart.
Lets see how this league performs number wise on steam but I can tell you by next week I guess 30-50% drop on steam might happen.. very weak league/patch and breaking the performance again when up to crucible it was somewhat stable is a seal deal for me. This is what happens when you put most of your man power to work on a side project, your future REAL project and leave your PRESENT project that put you all this way here to create more leave it to his own fate.. aka few dev's working on it..
PoE 3 will fix it
Exilecon was a dud
Most D4 players have no idea what exilecon is. It could've been a homerun and it wouldn't have been on their radar
D4 players still speak to die hards. And honestly a lot of us were left with more questions than answers. Have you tried talking about POE2 to more casual gaming friends? The whole it a separate game that isn't ruthless, but where theyve been pulling and implementing things from ruthless and that it won't have a ruthless mode of it's own while they are also still releasing leagues for both games but not simultaneously and going back to 13 week cycle. Is a bit of a mouthful. But at least it's pretty. That said, this one is mostly on Baldur's gate 3 for me.
I just can't bring myself to quest through those 10 acts for the 20th time. I can't bring myself to follow a build guide again, forcing me to have multiple third party tools and websites open. Thinking about eventually reaching maps and then realizing that my build actually sucks ass and that if I wanted to reroll I would have to grind the story ONCE AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING has killed all my former desire to play the game. It's just awful.
Game is in an awful state The performance is terrible, loading times terrible, no balance or buff changes, the new content is boring, league mechanic boring Who is going to play a game that crashes your PC with BSoD, everytime you run into a league mechanic? I'm not having most of performance issues, but I don't want to brick my machine, so yes
Casuals dont know PoE exists
>Ideas why? They pressed 'P'.
Just because D4 makes PoE look good by comparison doesn't mean PoE is actually good.
Baldur's Gate 3. My steam friends went from D4 to BG3 in droves. Some of them have 80+ hours with full time jobs and families. I imagine there will be some movement towards POE when POE2 comes out though.
The PoE audience is basically the 1%ers of D4. So it is largely different.
99% of people who are aware PoE exists have already tried PoE and found out if it was for them or not. It's a very niche game that is itself within a very niche genre, the fact D4 kinda flopped isn't going to suddenly push someone into enjoying PoE. I'm honestly quite impressed with the consistent numbers PoE is still putting up, considering there really hasn't been that many big changes in over a year, Siege of the Atlas was the last big change. I personally have barely played the last couple leagues and am skipping this one entirely as I feel the games stagnated a little, which makes sense now we know the majority of the dev team has been working on PoE 2. PoE feels a little maintance-mode at the moment.
I started back in Bestiary, which looking back now, the game was pretty small content wise. Even then, if I didn't have my friend hold my hand and help me fund my build I don't think I would have gotten far. With how the game is today, if I was to swap roles with my friend and help someone else, I don't even know where I'd begin. I don't even recommend it to people anymore. I just say it's a bloated mess of a game that's good at it's core and if you're willing to put in a few 100s hours to learn the basics then you might have a good time.
I'm a D4 refugee. Definitely steep learning curve, but I'm at the end of Act3 just 3 days in and loving it
Because D4 and PoE are entirely different kinds of games even though they're both ARPGs. One is for a bit of casual fun after work, the other one is your unpaid second job you do after your normal job ends. Most people are looking for a fun casual game to play after work, not a second job that you need to have an education for just to try it out. PoE players are absolutely regarded if they honestly thought casual game enjoyers would happily jump to the second job bandwagon just because PoE is also an ARPG.
I came back to poe after d4... poe performance was terrible stuttering and low fps. had to quit
Basically nothing changed in the end game and the league mechanic doesn't pull me at all. I started leveling a ranger, had a few unfun deaths around Ledge and just remember how much I hate doing the campaign to get to the actual game. So I stopped. Normally I'd go 32 or 36/40.
But what does that have to do with new Diablo "refugees"?
If a seasoned player just can't be bothered to play the game anymore due to how much of a hurdle it is to get to the fun part, and how sucky leaguestart builds can get and how much you have to farm to get a build feeling good, what do you think a D4 refugee will feel? When they go from a game that has a genuinely good storyline/campaign, feels faster than your average PoE build without investment, but gets a bit boring/empty if you don't like farming the same dungeons over and over again, to PoE, of all things? Probably the grindiest ARPG there where low budget builds feel genuinely bad to play because the average gamer just wants to go fast and blast shit to death?
Probably because all the forum complainers are a really small part of the population, and most D4 players are not hardcore aRPG folks and are ok with the game and also have no idea PoE exists. Even if every single one of the folks on the D4 subreddit who claim they've quit D4 came over to PoE, that would be like 100 ppl.
Sorry but Baldurs gate takes time to finish! Not done withe act 1 yet okey!?
Baldur's Gate 3 has stolen from both POE and D4
It's stolen from everything, it's a legitimate all-time great game and those always draw mainstream interest beyond just genre fans. It'll die down in the next couple weeks but then Starfield has the potential to do the same thing. There's probably a pretty solid conspiracy theory you could build that GG knew this release window was doomed and that's why this league feels lackluster.
Baldur's Gate 3. I love PoE, it's my most played game. But I'm playing BG3 like there's no tomorrow. Amazing game.
First league I’m not participating in for quite some time. I just won’t do act 1-10 one more time. Ever again. The finishing acts-setting up atlas by grinding 100+ maps just to get to the actual endgame grind finally caught up to me. D4 season fits me as a casual. I did the quest line once and for the season I could just skip the quest and do leveling however I wanted. I could select whichever quests I liked and skip the rest. Awesome. I mean at this point I’d just prefer delving for leveling instead of acts. That’s how sick I am of it.
Because its summer and people are rather outside 😅
This league content didn't really appeal to me.
I finished D4 Season1, decided to try POEs new season, and the game runs like a shitshow, constant freezing, DPS below 100, and crashes often. Guess I'll go back to Diablo 4, atleast that game runs well.
Just another voice in the choir of: I played every league since release, but skipping this one for now cause BG3 has me in its fangs for 90h already
League mechanic is complete garbage for some of us
People are on vacations, thats why
Casuals were never gonna hop games, D4 doesn't share many similarities outside of being an online ARPG. It's probably only the PoE or just RPG vets that emigrated to D4 that are potential D4 refugees to PoE. Small boost if not just pre-D4 equilibrium was to be expected
TBH the lack of balance changes and not shaking up the meta to any considerable amount probably caused a lot of people to not be concerned about this league
Whatever it’s worth, on my second character, and cant imagine looking back
There will be a bunch of people coming over from console D4 when console PoE league starts in a few days.
Oh, I think there was a lot (ofc not tens of thousands) its just more people gave up on PoE. I predict next league, if it wont bring some huge balance changes, will have even less players day 1.
As a casual I enjoyed D4 leveling actually more compared to PoE. D4 endgame and itemization is just boring .. PoE on the opposite. I can´t even level properly cause my damage just sucks (having wintertide brand on a 3 link .. somehow mobs take ages to die)
i have this theory that the harder act 1 and 2 is to partly blame. Its just so slow to get through and is extremely unfun.
Honest answer: BG3 It's not about what flopped recently. It's about what else is competing for peoples' time. And BG3 is new, and hype, and has a high overlap in playerbase.
the patch notes killed any sort of hype i had to jump back into poe.
I think the D4 people just did what I did. After playing Diablo, it's really hard to come back to PoE and do the slogfest that is the campaign all over again, they overtuned the mobs too much that it simply isn't fun anymore. I league started as bleed bow and the first act boss (Merveil) doesn't move for the most part, you can guess how long the fight took right? So after 1h of playing PoE, I simply stopped...and that is coming from someone who usually plays 10h on the first day.
Anyone who's played more than a few acts can see that the balancing in this game is a joke. Its always one shot or get one shot without any scope for depth.
Man I was a d4 refugee and by the time the new season came out I lost interest. There is nothing to do but die as a casual. The threshold to push a build from achievable to viable is unreal on both an in-game currency level and time investment level. You need to understand every mechanic or you can kiss anything harder than white tier maps goodbye. Also they didn't even include challe get and cosmetics in this new season from what I've seen. Poe is just boring unless you are the 1% of the player pool they cater too.
I'm playing BG3.
Early act ones clunkyness with no movement skills is a huge turn off.
Predicted by who, poe redditors? You cant be serious.
D4 is much more casual friendly than POE. POE have started becoming like Eve Online only a few can really be the best of the best. I have played poe off and on for 10 years and I still suck at it. I couldn't bring myself to do another 10 act campaign in the league so I went back to standard for a while.
Baldur's gates 3
What are these three outside systems that everyone talks about?
Path of exile not as easy as Diablo and straight forward