Replay-ability / season longevity

The more I look at it, the more I think that the only way to make the season last longer is to attract more players.

Blizzard is very protective of their player count numbers after WoW started going downhill, but PoE and Median both have 3-month ladders and you see the exact same thing happening: half the playerbase drops out every month until the next ladder starts. But when Median has 1k concurrent players at peak (except for 2.0) and PoE has 15x that, naturally one will feel way more dead than the other a month in when it's 500 vs 70,000.

Most of the other ARPGs I can think of like Grim Dawn, Chronicon, and Last Epoch don't have seasons so you can't really compare - you see more like 20% dropoff per month after a patch, but it's super variable rather than the consistent dropoff from seasonal games.

Now, to the end of attracting more players, the problems that I feel have the biggest impact: early game balance is out of whack, Fauzt farming gets boring without any good alternatives and feels unrewarding compared to Dunc, UMOs don't feel achievable for most of the playerbase. Honorable mention to the wide disparity in SU stats making it feel like it's only worth using the best items - are any 1h swords used at all, outside of Aeterna and Astral Blade?

My addition:

Add a new class of build-enabling items, similar to Samael drops, that give cool oskills and such but have an extremely low drop rate.

Incentivize long term farming of high end areas (135+) that can actually drop them and add a bunch of the aforementioned items to the loot table so you at least have a decent chance of getting one over a 1-3 month period.

Siosilvar wrote:
Now, to the end of attracting more players, the problems that I feel have the biggest impact: early game balance is out of whack, Fauzt farming gets boring without any good alternatives and feels unrewarding compared to Dunc, UMOs don't feel achievable for most of the playerbase. Honorable mention to the wide disparity in SU stats making it feel like it's only worth using the best items - are any 1h swords used at all, outside of Aeterna and Astral Blade?

Truth. And, I remember being overwhelmed my first couple characters. A lot of information is in game guide and forums/discord; but if there was some better “hand holding” in-game, I bet there would be a lot better retention. Some QOL things like in-game cube recipe’s, and in-game charm/Uber quest log would be HUGE help to hold onto some new people.

Speaking of QOL, something like “charm inventory” would be nice. A dedicated inventory with a specific slot for every attainable charm. And, if you don’t have the charm, if you hover over the empty charm slot it can tell you where to get it.

My biggest issue with ARPGs like Median and PoE is just how boring the early game is. I used to enjoy them when they were new to me but after playing the same campaign over and over I never make it to mid-game before quitting anymore. There's a lot of endgame improvements to both games every patch/season but if the early game isn't fun, I'm not going to stick around to actually play the endgame. Myself and others suggested improvements many times, to rollback decisions on specific patches to no avail so I won't reiterate here. I do think however that to continue building the playerbase early game needs a good looking at.

I mean very early game. As in between levels 1-30.

Zennith wrote:I mean very early game. As in between levels 1-30.

And what exactly is your problem with 1-30? They added free respecs which helps a lot there.

Istaryu wrote:
Zennith wrote:I mean very early game. As in between levels 1-30.

And what exactly is your problem with 1-30? They added free respecs which helps a lot there.

From 1-30 I dont think any build should be required to be respec'ed imo. 1-30 should be about learning the skills and playing style not deleting content or having underwhelming damage imo. Right now there is such great disparity in builds early game some builds just steamroll content whilst other builds need the merc to do the killing.

Siosilvar wrote:The more I look at it, the more I think that the only way to make the season last longer is to attract more players.

Blizzard is very protective of their player count numbers after WoW started going downhill, but PoE and Median both have 3-month ladders and you see the exact same thing happening: half the playerbase drops out every month until the next ladder starts. But when Median has 1k concurrent players at peak (except for 2.0) and PoE has 15x that, naturally one will feel way more dead than the other a month in when it's 500 vs 70,000.

Most of the other ARPGs I can think of like Grim Dawn, Chronicon, and Last Epoch don't have seasons so you can't really compare - you see more like 20% dropoff per month after a patch, but it's super variable rather than the consistent dropoff from seasonal games.

Now, to the end of attracting more players, the problems that I feel have the biggest impact: early game balance is out of whack, Fauzt farming gets boring without any good alternatives and feels unrewarding compared to Dunc, UMOs don't feel achievable for most of the playerbase. Honorable mention to the wide disparity in SU stats making it feel like it's only worth using the best items - are any 1h swords used at all, outside of Aeterna and Astral Blade?

The thing that really accelerates early game on tsw is trade gold. Since the pros here know that investing in tg early game means they can easily farm scosglen and phoboss and make the tg back pretty fast early ladder. In turn they will sell the umos to other people who will then also be able to farm phoboss/scosglen consistently fast. Right now with the strength of the javazon in labs this happens at an accelerated pace so people will get most of their gear pretty fast.

Things I'll say have all been written before, but I'll mention them anyway. Speed, time length for "seasons" these things are important for those interested in hoarding maximum TG and encouraging such behavior is in the developer's interest. For those interested in a more quality experience, the realm experience is hostile to that for numerous reasons that have been mentione. They have seen TG is a way to make money and monetize their mod. So they created a system which unbalances the multiplayer in-game party and allows certain players to spend real money to obtain in-game currency for items they never earned. Obviously, balance is not their priority in that regard (rather, the opposite). This has the added effect of increasing miserly behavior and discouraging communal attitudes (ie. gift giving / sharing). 2) Few multiplayer incentives. Mobs are harder in many player games, but this often feels terrible unless you are maxed out and at the end game anyway. Bosses are harder. No loot splitting, few cooperative incentives. More like, "Hey, do you need a rush/help with this boss?" Or "Can I get Trav WP?"

Nothing purposefully oriented towards group play (Labyrinths could be said to be an exception to this, but in Labyrinths, often they too are much more difficult in many-player party, and one or two people does most of the work). Lack of movement speed and very limited stamina in early game, limited base re rolling to once again, prolong the game, but not in a way that increases enjoyment for the player. I don't know about you, but the oil of renewal used to be useful. Now it's nominally useful in certain cases but not nearly as useful as it was. That being said, some areas which were added to the end-game show that there's still creative juices flowing, but it seems like there is a lot of inertia with the direction of Median XL. Personally, I think a lot of bosses are too spread out, and mobs are too spread out in midgame areas. Again, punishing to the player's enjoyment unless you have more than 40 movement speed with RW, jewelry, skills, etc (not so easy to obtain). I like to go fast when I play, and going slow feels awful. Particularly as a melee char, it feels pretty boring to run from mob to mob trying to hack them down (a reason why I often avoid melee builds). Shrine crafts got a boost with effigies and oil of intensity but they still feel underwhelming compared to a lot of sacred uniques (which might be the intention, but I would prefer the opposite, a slight boost to shrine crafts, means more player choice, less emphasis placed on farming) without the effigies.

Caldeum is an improvement in that regard, but certain bosses you still have to run ways to get to, and that's quite annoying, especially if you want to rerun. Making running part of the quest makes it a chore. Wanna get a trophy? Enjoy running across the map a thousand times for that Kabraxis trophy, or Atanna trophy, or whatever else. I think there should be boss waypoints at the very least. Having them easy to access to would make re-running areas more time efficient. There's no obvious purpose to the early game, so the choice to include it is perplexing to say the least. Prolongs the experience, but limits the time available to rerun end game areas, roll multiple chars, etc. Particularly when you are a limited by a "season." This is part of the reason I vasilate between single player and multiplayer. Singleplayer you can take your time and fine-tune your player, experience end-game areas without shelling out or spending as much time farming to make artificial in game money to buy gear. On the other hand, I do enjoy playing with others online, so I do both. Level gating bosses punishes veteran players who want to rerun bosses many times on multiple chars at the expense of catering to the brand new players to prevent them from running into the wrong area (demands more time investment from the player). The theme here is to push everything out and extend the time to achieve everything but I would argue much of this extension is artificial and feels counter-productive to having fun (fortunately, this can be countered to some degree with XP crafts and stacking XP gear, but it's still cumbersome). Even regardless of all these criticisms, I think no matter what things would get stale eventually so there's only so much that can be done from the developers to keep the game fresh.

Calaquendi wrote:They have seen TG is a way to make money and monetize their mod.

Here we go again... Do you really think they spend the money on hookers and cocaine? Look at how many gameservers they have, they dont run on kindness or whatever. And the infrastructure they have to make tsw work is also not 10$. TG is a necessary evil.

Calaquendi wrote: They have seen TG is a way to make money and monetize their mod. So they created a system which unbalances the multiplayer in-game party and allows certain players to spend real money to obtain in-game currency for items they never earned. Obviously, balance is not their priority in that regard (rather, the opposite). This has the added effect of increasing miserly behavior and discouraging communal attitudes (ie. gift giving / sharing). 2) Few multiplayer incentives. Mobs are harder in many player games, but this often feels terrible unless you are maxed out and at the end game anyway. Bosses are harder. No loot splitting, few cooperative incentives. More like, "Hey, do you need a rush/help with this boss?" Or "Can I get Trav WP?"

The irony is tg doesnt really help the server much at all the people who are mainly support the server are riftwalker and patrons according to siosilvar. I would be curious to see what the economy would like if in the first three weeks you couldnt use existing tg only bought tg to trade. In that sense tg would be at a more level playing field for all players. People who wanted to spend money to buy items and support the server would gain an advantage as oppose to right now where those with existing tg hold such a big advantage.

If you check in groups on discord or in game chats there are people who are really nice and willing to help.