The current concurrent players chart looks crazy
 from poe2db Looks like we all feel boring about Druid and the league. Last bumped on Dec 18, 2025, 7:27:12 PM
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" People who don't play druid are playing worse game than 0.3 You can log in to standard and lose literally nothing. On Probation Any%
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the major content update people were going to keep playing for was cut and pushed to 0.5
There's just not enough new content to make this league worth a lot of peoples' time. if next league gets the major end-game overhaul *and* has a similar or worse dropoff than this league, then I would be concerned. this time... I'll give ggg a pass... but i don't think they have the resource (management) to make split-dev work. Don't get lost by being so focused on the target that you forget to enjoy your surroundings.
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" I've been saying it for months: removing homogenizing omens = removing cheap crafting. I hope no lifers and streamers will enjoy the league. Oh, wait, they won't because for them to do so, the game must accelerate into infinity, which means infinitely hard bosses, fast mapping, and so on. Basically, GGG listened to an extremely vocal minority and removed the affordable crafting from the game again. It means 90+ percent of players will drop the league within 2 weeks or so, as they hit the EXTREME grindwall. The main point is simple - an average player AGAIN is put into a position where he has to grind for an item for 20-50 hours. But because the game balance at the moment is extremely dependent on items, which means if you didn't get lucky (with the gear or currency), it's over. And if a streamer/no-lifer can grind for 2-5 days, the majority of the people will do it ONLY if the gear they will get will be enough until the end of the league (read it as sorta mirror-tier). The ONLY reason I still play this league is that my brother gave me a crazy good Talisman he bought for 2 exalts (it should be a couple of divs). Because I just couldn't get any currency (after 60 hours, STILL 0 divs from the ground, lol), and I can't afford to buy anything decent to farm T15. And because of the extremely cheap crafting in 0.3, it was actually possible to buy a really good item for a div or so. I don't really care about items being "too strong and cheap to craft", or how "legal/illegal" it feels for ZiggyD. I want to have fun, and the only way to guarantee it is cheap crafting. You just can't rely on random loot from the ground, sorry. Maybe if you had 30 or so percent of power from the gear, it would be different. Or if you could actually live in the game and didn't have to one-shot 2 screens away if you wanted to not die... Sorry, but saying things like "ES is too strong" is insane to me. ES is not too strong; everything else is too weak! I'm not really against removing homogonozing orbs per se. But the in-game crafting system IS JUST NOT THERE YET. If we could swap weapon bases easily and/or when we get harvest crafting in PoE2, then sure, remove them. But not now! Last edited by golanov#0674 on Dec 18, 2025, 12:57:07 PM
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What is the retention graph supposed to look like?
It is the 4th big patch for an early access game where most of the stuff we've seen already. Only new big ticket item is the druid. To me this graph looks correct and there is nothing special about it. |
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- Campaign is not good when you have to complete it so often. Thats a frequent Feedback.
- Low amount of changes compared to 0.2 to 0.3 - Endgame basically stayed the same - League Mechanic isnt good - Druid isnt enough to keep people The biggest factor considering what i see on reddit is the Campaign and the Legaue Mechanic. The 2 biggest upvoted comments are about those 2 topics. https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/ check the top comments for this week " The biggest Comparison you can make is 0.2 and my god that already had b ad Player Retention but 0.4 is just really bad. “The bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame.” Last edited by Alzucard#2422 on Dec 18, 2025, 1:32:55 PM
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0.2 didn't have timing behind it. 0.4 has the holidays so retention should be higher than ever due to the amount of time folks have. Yet it is even worse despite this factor.
Doesn't matter. We have streamers still glazing them for the most part and that's the only feedback they listen to. I can't really give feedback on the Abyss tree because there is no reason to actually play. You login and just waste time right now. Vaal gives no rewards, and from the announcement it looks like it'll still be bad. Economy is already completely wrecked so trading is mostly out of reach for 99% of us. What's the point? |
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As someone that is very much enjoying , I have to disagree, not everyone agrees that this league is a bust.
There are definitely some major hurdles but the druid class is actually a huge thing for some of us. |
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0.4 was DoA with the removal of crafting.
In 0.3 you would do a session of whatever your preferred mechanic was, look at the gear you collected, craft on it (and no, it was not fully deterministic except for some specific pieces), put it up for sale, and go back to blasting while it sold. Right now you barely find anything worth picking up, let alone crafting on. If you didn't exploit abyss early you're sol because basic crafting currencies are >1 div each. The game play loop just isn't there, you can "blast" for hours if you want but it gets boring very quickly since you're not progressing towards anything. "We want ground loot to be valuable" they said, yet you find tier 5 rares with light radious or -req%. No loot + no crafting = purposeless grind. Last edited by Tommo26#1554 on Dec 18, 2025, 2:06:17 PM
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" We need to dissect this, there are a few harsh truth's here that deserve attention. - streamers: streamers should be split into two categories, one for those which trully enjoy the game, and the ones which are only concerned with engagement farming (= revenue). A lot of content on platforms like youtube paints a very sugarcoated reality that only works for short term revenue to GGG, as people will jump in, and then never return because, well, loot explosions on group farming arent the stuff of everyday player. Then there are other issues, which I will touch bellow. - Game Balance: balancing PvE content because a few builds are super potent is hard. The path GGG is taking on this, appears that they were trashing lower/mid range builds rendering them useless by balancing content to hyper performing builds. Streamers have their share of guilt here, probably more than Jonathan, that seems to the preferred target of the community. - Vocal Minority vs Silent Majority: well said. Concord by Firewalk Studios is the perfect example of falling into this fallacy, specially when social networks revolve around internet personas and not real people. GGG has a degree of resilience here, but they still need to show results to shareholders. This means, they are in a tough spot. " This is where it hits harder... The current game design and implementation is leaning heavilly for a hyper performing build for league start, gather currency, hyper inflating the market and then experiment. Much of this experiments, which are utterly by mechnical fails from an analytical point of view, only perform at very high end. This means that if someone sees a video or likes the playstyle and goes with that build as a league started, they will be in trouble, specially if the game dificculty was modeled after hyper performing builds. In other words, most players will refuse to adapt to a two stage approach, league start and then living the fantasy they want. This falls back on poor game design, including being afraid to nerf to the ground when needed since it's clear they can't balance the existing content for all the builds around... And streamers purchasing blindly engagement sabotaging the own community they claim to defend. " I quit day 4, after bricking my character day 2 running out of gold and resources. Leveled another character, to find out I picked another build that with some investment can be nice, but required at the current market inflation heavy investment in time. I dont particularly like the new incursion mechanic, I dont like broken characters like druid... So I will just quit :) Meanwhile gonna work my campaign progression and optimize what I can for next league. " I can speculate it was done in order to keep people playing for longer periods, if this was the case, they sent a huge shot in their own feet... Because it was the perfect aspirational content for players, to seek that perfect deterministic roll. Also something very weird happened in this league, inflation skyrocketed like crazy compared to last league. This made very explicit that early endgame stage became brutally punishing. I feel sorry for anyone who hasnt rolled Druid or any other Meta build (like I did). That said, only only thing needs to be added: I find more guilty the people that take a beta/early access as serious as a finished product and which keep demanding content, this is a direct shot to streamers. Before content should be implemented the basic stuff around the engine should be fixed, this goes from SMP schedulers (and this is no joke) to motion vectors so that implementations of spatial renderers can work good. This would be a big win in the performance field. Most people would rather play a stable game than a game filled with half backed content that crashes too much. That said... Blame the right people, dont sponsor witch hunts. |
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