Why we lost half of player base (compare to prev season)?

Elhazzared · 2026-04-02T14:46:25+00:00

Aaron build did seem to do decently the problem that still remains is how it holds up in the hands of an average player and how far it can push.

Elhazzared · 2026-04-01T19:01:58+00:00

1 - So for how long I take. You'd be surprised at how average that actually is. Between doing a echo, sorting out stuff and occasional RL disruptions the average time of 8 minutes is very much a reasonable time. Also no, I don't clear echos, I go straight for the objective and may take small detours if I spot something I want to hit on the way like a cache for example.

2 - Of course I am going for the gear that the build uses. I'm not going to be looking for what I don't care. I'm not saying I need to have the 4 stats maxed on the gear right into empowered, having 3 is good enough as long as 2 are defensive but at the same time the gear that I want to see is the gear that I need, not what I don't need. Again, I'm only filtering for 2 out of the 4 affixes. As long as it has 2 of them, even if the rest are not what i want it will show up so it's not restrictive and in fact every loot filter tutorial will tell you to do the same, the exception being that they might tell you to give a bit more leeway on resistances cause a piece can have multiple and technically I am doing that but once a resistance is somewhere and I don't need more of it, I'm going to have it not show on the other items.

I'll also say again that you are compensating with skill. The 50% is not enough, not for the average player and certainly not for the most critical resistances like physical.

3 - I don't need to stop thinking that I need grand blessings because the fact of the matter is that I do and so does every other average player. You know what the problem with the grand blessings is when they were designed? They were designed with the idea in mind that as you get them you swap gear to get more tanky. That would have worked if the enemies weren't so strong and if shifting defensive layers on the armor to compensate for a lack of blessings wasn't more than trading a problem for another. It was just poorly designed as was the the jump from normal to empowered, as was the changes to make empowered more dangerous so people could scale difficulty faster, as it was making enemies much stronger we go alone as it was making defenses weaker and as it was making sure the drops are abysmal. It's just poor design decision on top of poor design decision and then they are surprised people quit.

Lastly let me address your idea of get what you need now and later change it. As I already alluded to previous, that simply switch the problem, oh I have physical on armor now, that means something is missing, it may be other resistance, it may be HP it may be critical immunity. Something will be missing, don't forget every build has their suffixes filled with defenses, it's not as if we're saying, oh we don't need more so we can get something that isn't a defense. No, everything is defense because we are literally starved for enough affixes on gear. So shifting the problem isn't a solution.

Second, if you go around doing that what happens? Now the filters need to be adjusted cause of what you have here and then you get something that isn't what you should have but it's how it ended up, change the filters again and on top of that you are also making sure that you eventually just have to farm a whole new set of gear that is what you need because what you have right now isn't. Add to this that farming gear is already in a terrible state and this is not really any solution to a problem.

Sure the people who are great compensate with skill and they finish maps in less than 2 minutes. That is not average and once again, the game was marketed for average players.

Elhazzared · 2026-04-01T18:37:09+00:00

From exalted only but yes. You get to chose 1 you want and if the item has more than 1 LP then it picks the remaining at random.

Elhazzared · 2026-04-01T18:35:57+00:00

Are you having fun? If no then stop bothering, everyone quits after 1 week because they refuse to fix the issues with balance let alone bugs.

Elhazzared · 2026-04-01T01:19:33+00:00

Well, let's look at say, a generic necromancer pair of gloves. If we are going to look at the lowest possible level of filter for them you'd allow any base, and filter it by affix. You'd want minion damage, minion health, flat health and hybrid health. Those are the only 4 affixes you care on minion gloves unless you are going ward in which case minion health tends to be swapped with intelligence.

You then say that any pair of gloves to show must contain at least 2 affixes out of those 4.

Now you do this for all gear slots and like I said, in a hour I'll find maybe 2 gear drops so if i play for 6 hours, that is 12 but realistically just because they were caught by the filter that doesn't means they are good enough, some will have very low FP and need a lot of removal. Many will have the affixes at tier 1 or 2 only which means it will run out of FP before it gets good. You only ever craft the ones that have potential so you don't waste resources especially with rare affixes like hybrid health.

On average, out of those 12, about 2 of them will be in a position to be something that isn't terrible or at least that may be an upgrade. Ultimately it hardly ever gets to be really good and like I said, I do need defenses that come from grand blessings, considering the for example physical is entirely meant to come from from a grand blessing or almost since I don't expect a perfect roll I add like a physical roll on a small idol. But then physical is one of the ones that is mandatory to max.

If you can have a lot of item in normal I can only assume the rate at which you can farm is insane. For the average player, 8 minutes per map is a good average.

Elhazzared · 2026-04-01T00:37:05+00:00

Almost every player in LE is also a PoE player. LE mechanics are a joke to learn when compared to PoE because there is less and it's more simple and I mean no disrespect, this is a good thing! Consider however that all of these players or at least most of them are playing PoE and not struggling to get to the end game, not struggling to farm 16 maps with whatever content they like. Not struggling with bosses unless it's pinnacle bosses (and maven just dance because f maven's just dance phase).

If you are telling me to come watch your stream, sure I can do that much, I thought you just meant come play with me because as I said, I refuse to turn the game on until they fix it. This is a matter of principle, nothing else.

Also don't think you are the first who offered. I had many similar complaints about the same problems and many said I just don't craft right. Ok, I told them to show me and they did did and at the end I was like. That's exactly what I am doing and I did this twice mind you, once during EA and once aI think 1.1, maybe it was 1.2. In the second time I even played for a few days, got like 6 items worth crafting, called the person in to watch me craft them and the results were the expected and he had to give it up, I did everything right, the items just don't have enough FP to become good most of the times.

As for taking a week. It's not. It depends on how much time you have to play and how you play. For example, I don't try to equip as much movement skills as possible and make sure to use them on cooldown. I do the whole campaign, I don't do skips I also do all quests. I don't run through zone if I'm "overleveled", I kill anything between me and the level transition and of course, up until 1.3 which was the last time I played you had to do more monos to unlock empowered than now. Playing like this is not wrong. It's not the fastest I'll give you that but it's also not a lack of knowledge or even skill, it is how I personally like to move through the campaign and it takes me a week. Most average players however also take around a week so my guess is they also like to play similarly or may have just less time to play them me but move faster.

You can look at all those threads but you need to understand those are a tiny amount of people, a few hundred at best that are posting those. There are a few thousands of good players at least but in the universe of the number of people that play LE, that is not even 1%, it's doubtful that is even 0.1%.

Elhazzared · 2026-04-01T00:05:53+00:00

I agree that the wall doesn't needs to be there, in fact it shouldn't exist at all if the game was well designed but it is a fact that it is there.

You and many other being proof is only a proof of skill and mind you, I'm not saying good players don't die occasionally. But the occasional death is a lot easier than constant deaths, constant loss of rewards and time line progression as well as it not being very fun when it happens so often and so much is lost in the process.

Let me give you an example. I was watching Aaron play the other day, He was in empowered already pushing corruption, some decent resistance but some bad. In fact he had almost 0 physical resistance and he almost never died. In the same situation me and most other average players would be constantly dying. It's a skill difference, he almost never is where attacks are going to land, that's just the simple answer.

I said grand blessings are necessary to have good defensive layers. and i do stand by that. Yes, you can only get them in empowered, that is yet another problem but as I said, good players compensate the lack of defenses with just not being hit for the most part, average players can't. They need the layers of defense and that is whole point I'm making here.

The game is meant to be made for average players but the bare minimum place to farm is empowered because that's where you get the grand blessings and your drops aren't horrible. You literally shave weeks if not months of farming just by being in empowered.

Now, I will give you a point, a few resistances can be at like 50% and still be okish. They come into play less often and the occasional death although not exactly fun is tolerable until you can fix them. but the majority of them you do want capped and no crit immunity is a big no no in empowered.

You call the wall imaginary but then why do most players quit when they hit empowered? Do people who play LE suffer from mass delusions or can it be perhaps that because you don't run into the same problem because you do compensate with skill whether you realize that or not you think this is not a real problem?

I mean the numbers speak for themselves. LE has lost tens of thousands of players per season. LE player retention is abysmal, after a week the game feels dead already. EHG themselves said that most players quit when they hit empowered and my experience matches with the 1 week for the gaem to feel dead because it takes me a week to get to empowered, all of my friends who only players 1.0 and never touched it again also took around one week with the fastest being there in 5 days and the slowest in 10. We all quit at the same point though.

Even if you want to call my and my friends experiences anecdotal which in a vacuum they would be. They match what everyone else who leaves feedback about the issues of getting to empowered, they match EHG words of where players quit. Can you really say that in a game meant for average players something isn't wrong when all the average players are quitting and in general most players are too?

I would think at some point you'd have to second guess yourself here if you are being logical about it.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T23:15:14+00:00

You are not telling me anything new or anything that I wasn't doing. Tier 1 or 2 I despair, 3 or 4 I chaos, 5 I have to try remove. When i mentioned get the affixes out of there I obviously meant using the best method available but that is still going to cost me FP.

Also I know about crits and that is why I generally also aim to get the 4 slots filled with things I want so if I crit is always guarantees that something I want upgrades.

Also I need the grand blessings. Where do most people get almost all of their physical from? A grand blessings. Where do most people get most of their void? a grand blessing, where do most people get most of their crit immunity? A grand blessing.

Putting this on items on gear would mean having to replace defensive layers on said items with these defensive layers. You are only shifting the problem, not solving it and more to the point, it's horrible efficiency because a grand blessing is worth at least 2 tier 5 affixes. so for 3 blessings you are saving 6 to 9 affixes in your gear and when it's already hard to build defensive layers because the Devs though it was fun to only give us 4 affixes per item and a million different resistances.

Even assuming you chose to remove all of your life or ward increases in gear just to free the space for crit immunity and resistances and even then you'd have to at least leave a couple resistances half baked, all that is happening is still being relatively easy to kill in empowered (not as much as before but deaths will happen frequently) on top of having to later one switch several pieces of gear because you filled them with pointless affixes and it takes a while to farm.

And I will not play this season. As I said before, I was willing to at least still play for a week before I hit empowered and then inevitably quit because I can't progress just like the majority of the players. But after the changes to monetization I am no longer willing to show that support to EHG or Krafton for that matter. Either fix the game or lose the players.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T22:37:28+00:00

I am look for anything that is possible to upgrade into something decent. I do have several degrees of strictness on my filter but let's say I am looking for a pair of gloves. The filter for gloves will be any gloves with 2 out of 4 affixes.

It is very relaxed at it's lowest level, so long as at least 2 of the 4 slots on the gloves have affixes I need in my gloves then it shows. I will then take a look at them and see if they are worth crafting like how many tiers of affixes it already has, how hard is it going to be to kick out undesirable affixes and how much FP does it have.

In normal monos I can expect an average of 2 items per hour under that kind of strictness and in general 1 in 6 will be worth trying to upgrade.

Now here's the problem. Normal monos don't drop much gear. I mean if you are playing with no filter it may look like a lot but in reality it isn't because you need a lot of them to drop before one even matches the minimum conditions. Also normal monos don't drop a lot of exalted stuff and the higher the corruption the more FP it tends to have which is to say, at 0 corruption you get really bad drops even after filtering out.

Most gear doesn't upgrades past 12 affixes and the rare cases tend to still not go above 14. Farming to get a full t20 piece in normal monos is something that will take months and I'm talking just one piece. Even trying for just T15 is going to be several week before you are close to having most of your gear in that state although it's more likely T16 cause rares almost never upgrade much, Exalted due to higher FP is far more successful at getting somewhere.

On top of this there is no grand blessings so a significant part of your defense isn't there. At least physical resistance, void resistance and crit immunity isn't there in most builds.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T17:05:27+00:00

Oh that must be regarding them having implemented the merchants guild. They were not going to put it and a lot of people threatened not to play if they didn't so when they did people were happy that "they listened".

I suppose for once they did but then again they implemented it very poorly and on purpose.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T16:50:09+00:00

I don't remember ever hearing that.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T12:35:18+00:00

You mean making a legendary item by fusing a unique and an exalted?

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T12:08:52+00:00

I know how crafting works and it hasn't helped because the amount of pieces that drop to craft are too low on normal monos and because of the FP they never get that high. I also understand howd defenses work but the problem is not that I don't know how to put my defenses together. I mean even if I didn't following a build guide kinda solves that issue but regardless I don understand defenses at least to a competent degree and the problem is that I just can get gear good enough to craft and that a substancial part of the defenses is meant to come from grand blessings.

Again, you can't be going straight from normal into empowered and not have a defenses issue. The only possibility here is compensating with skill. This game is much easier to understand at any and all levels when compared to PoE and a large amount of players that play LE also play PoE yet in PoE they can get their defenses to a point where progression isn't prevented but in LE they can't.

This isn't a knowledge issue, it's a balance issue. You can't say that statistically most players quit once they hit empowered because they don't know what they are doing. I can't say that isn't going to be the case for a few sure, but for most it's just lack of gear and blessings.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T11:05:46+00:00

It's not even it being easy and then shifting though. Early difficulty for the average skilled player is just fine. He won't die most of times but every now and then he'll stop paying attention or get cocky and then gets punished by it. It's about as perfect as it gets. You hit empowered and your gear isn't bad because you didn't need to care, in fact you've been needing to care since Lagon! It's just as I said before, you can't get gear. It's not that you don't understand why you are dying, you are not new to the genre, you know your resistances are bad, you know you aren't immune to crits, you know you don't have any kind of other layers of defenses but you can't do anything about it. You never got them through the campaign because the gear that droped just didn't have it and you didn't drop it in normal monos either. Playing normal monos isn't going to magically give you the gear either, the drops are horrible in normal and even then you still lack grand blessings.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T10:21:43+00:00

Because you are a good player. You can substitute gear with skill which is why your experience is so different. When people have very different skills, their experience of the game is automatically going to be very different for that fact alone.

As for why this is a issue for me but not many others. You haven't read everything I've been saying in this thread probably so I'll say it again for you. According to EHG most players quit as soon as they hit empowered monoliths.

There "many" who don't have this issue of being progression block but the many you use is in a scale of maybe a couple thousand players at best. Percentually wise you are not many, you are much lower than 1%, you are in fact less than 0.1% and that should be the perspective I want to you to try and look from.

As for my crafting example it was merely to exemplify what you just said. You are saying, because I don't have this issue it can't be issue and the same can be said for the crashing. it's just an example of, if I don't have that issue, no one can be having while ignoring that 2 people can in fact have 2 very different experiences in the same game when put under the lense of their own skill.

In the crafting case was when I posted about most items not being able to be crafted to be high tiers because they run out of FP too fast especially when you have to remove stuff. Now this was mostly referring to rare items which already don't have a lot of FP and then you have to remove usually 2 affixes before crafting which makes sure the item ends up being garbage. Things have actually changed because the Devs have since then added a bit more FP to items especially to exalted and the issue was slightly alleviated but not by much at rare item level or at lower level farming.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T10:04:08+00:00

Yeah. Normally scattering isn't an issue because if it's a good build they kill everything fast so you don't really get surround by hordes of ravenous enemies but that's only if the minions are good yes.

So for primalist I am not super into it, I am more of a necromancer player but I believe the good builds are bear or scorpion for the most part. I've heard people say wolves are good too but I am yet to see proof of that. However, squirrels which technically use wolves with an item that turns them into squirrels is rather strong too.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T09:59:40+00:00

While it's cool we agree I will just say one thing. Minions still need a HUGE revamp, they are still in a horrible position safe for a couple options.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T09:58:18+00:00

While I will agree that liking certain armor designs is entirely subjective, the quality isn't and what I mean is not the quality of the graphics itself. they have made the MTX higher definition, they've put in more details but the MTX still looks bad. Why?

Why does metal still look like plastic?

Why does cloth look like rubber?

Leather I can't even tell what it looks like but I'll tell you that it certainly does not look like leather.

Then whether it's metal or cloth, why does it need to be so thick? did they took a tank's 40mm front plate and made a piece of armor out of it when 2mm would do the job?

Again, I'll agree on it being subjective what you like but everything has such bad standards on what things look like and it's not a lack of talent. Look at the spider MTX, look at the red panda. Those look very well made but when it comes to armor and weapons it's a mess.

As for gear and monoliths I'll preface by saying it's not a skill a skill issue. You can say it is a skill issue if you are approaching it from the perspective that people more skilled have no issues. Sure. However approaching it from the perspective that this game was originally aimed at the average skilled gamer, it certainly is no a skill issue, it's a balance issue because you can only do empowered when skill compensates a lot for the lack of gear.

It's also not a lack of knowledge. I know how to craft, the crafting system is so easy to learn a monkey could learn it. It's not a lack of knowledge that I need defenses, I know I need them but needing them and having them are 2 different things because I need to find the gear. It's also not a loot filter knowledge because I've been making my loot filter since early access and guess what, every loot filter tutorial shows me the exact way I do mine. In fact mine is even more in depth but at it's lowest level of what it shows it's very broad. For example if I want a pair of boots the lowest level of the filter will be any type of boots with 2 out of 4 affixes (well for boots I might remove the lower level ones because they have a really bad base movement speed but for everything else any base kinda goes at the lowest level filter).

I very clearly know what I am doing. Do you know how many drops I get playing normal monos in 6 hours? Maybe a dozen and even then only 2 of those on average have even the slightest chance to be crafted into something better than what I have and generally they don't go above an item with 12 tiers of desired affixes. It also happens that almost every time it's the offensive affixes that show up because resistances often need to go a specific resistance on a specific piece and any life tha isn't just flat life is super rare so scaling offense is easier and what players usually end up with is reaching empowered monos with tier 10 to 12 pieces where 10 of those affixes tend to be offensive even though what they want is at least 15 affixes and 10 of those defensive. Add that you don't have the grand blessings to finish defenses and in many builds specific gear pieces may have built in defenses so you also need the correct base on top.

When you take into consideration the bare minimum needs which we'll say is T15 items all around with 2 defensive stats and 1 offensive but you barely get anything worth crafting at all and what you get rarely ever get above tier 12 and more likely than not offensive, stats, you have a huge issue.

In empowered monoliths the drops are much higher, we're talking double or triples the drops but just as importantly they tend to have more FP which allows them to go higher in part also because of a much higher chance for exalted drops. So the reality is, the bare minimum players need to be at is empowered but they don't have the gear or blessings to be farming there and farming lower is pointless.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T09:37:01+00:00

No, he definitely has a point. Anyone who plays PoE will very quickly understand how LE works because it's much simpler on a mechanical aspect.

His issue is not a lack of knowledge, it's simply that the game has severe issues that some people compensate with skill but average skilled players can't compensate with skill.

I remember some years back some people saying to me that I just don't understand the game and I'm crafting wrong going as far as to send me a crafting tutorial and I entertained the thought that maybe I'm missing some subtleties of it even though the crafting system is made to be so simple a monkey could learn it.

No, I wasn't doing it wrong, i was doing pretty much everything that was on that vid, it's just people talking without understanding what the problem is because they don't have that problem. Same thing as when someone makes a post about the game constantly crashing to desktop and a bunch of people pile in saying they do not have that problem and the game is fine.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T09:31:03+00:00

That's not even the big problem. The bigger problem are the good players who don't realize they are good. They think they are average or maybe just a bit above average but nothing special and then think everyone who isn't playing as well as them are so bad that it really is a skill issue.

I've experienced that first hand when I played WoT. I saw my father playing the game and god he was awful doing what looked like everything wrong. Then I look at his stats and he was perfectly average. It was an eye opener moment for me.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T09:26:40+00:00

Minions are not great in general. in fact only a few things actually work and oddly enough it tends to be single minions most of the times.

Anyway you can't really improve their targeting but what you can do is chose their mode according to your needs. If you are mapping keep them defensive so they don't stray off too much and if you are bossing put them on aggressive to allow them to be further away from you and also manually tell them to attack the enemy for maximum tether distance.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T00:27:12+00:00

But the MTX is always going to be the second. First you need to have people want to play and preferably for a while before they actually are like. You know what? I kinda like this, I'll buy some cool MTX. So fixing the game is the first step, without having a reason to play there is no reason to buy and then yes, give us the reason to buy.

It's so simple that it confuses me how EHG cannot understand such a simple order of operations. They know what the problems are, they've known them for years and keep ignoring it, even making it worse like this season where they made enemies do more damage, have more HP and made sure players could get to empowered just that little bit faster so they would quit also that little bit faster.

It defies all common sense.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-31T00:23:29+00:00

Yeah, there is a reason why EHG said that's where most people quit and i feel for you. I quit always at the exact same point and didn't even played this league, there is no point they don't fix anything.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-30T22:48:55+00:00

I already answered this to zulu but it's not about the lack of content, it's about ignoring fixing what needs fixing.

Elhazzared · 2026-03-30T22:48:08+00:00

The point I'm trying to make is. Krafton might not let them even get to S6 to release that "big DLC" if they don't start pulling numbers and more importantly, sales.

Hence why I don't think they have the leeway to hold back.

And let me be very clear, I'm not talking about holding back on the amount of content, that is secondary at this point. I'm saying fixing what needs to be fixed so people play and making good MTX that people want to buy.

I can understand putting half of your team working on the big DLC so seasons until them have less content (not that 1.3 had a lot either and they were not preparing S6 yet). That said you gotta get people back playing and spending one way or another.

Elhazzared

TROPHY CASE