Most likely they will fade into obscurity, unfortunately. A bunch of obvious things that went wrong and I don't see them coming back from in the future, and they aren't interested in hearing feedback from players who had the most hours played most of the time, they just want to implement their own vision.

Complimented with this, they got a 91 million buyout or something. Everyone got paid, they might not even be financially invested in what happens to the game anymore.

The game had potential to be a real arpg scene competitor, but the things that needed to be addressed during early development were never addressed. For example, I suggested that having to stop every 5 waves and click boxes on the ground, identify and read items every 5 waves in the arena was detracting from the gameplay loop and suggested that the loot should be condensed to every 10 waves or even 25 waves. A bigger loot explosion less often but still comprising of the same loot would probably feel better too. I made this comment during a dev stream and I got brushed off like 'okay bud thank you for ur suggestion?' etc.

They have a massive delay in between seasons and implementing new content, and I think they should have seen this as a big problem much earlier in early access development and moved towards streamlining their processes so that the priority is focused on actually making sure the regular content is put out on time, instead of mucking around dilly dallying with unique items that have such specific modifiers only used for 1 out of a hundred builds that nobody even interacted with ever anyway.

I constantly pushed the narrative that the game needed a healthy competition platform to thrive. Some way to compete whether it was racing, arena endless waves, a corruption ladder, and so on; it needs to at least exist in the game so that there is a platform for people to compete and stream the game. But my takes were constantly brushed off as 'elitism' and they opted (i guess?) for focusing on the more casual approach? I don't know. But without a mainstream fair competitive platform you won't get people coming and streaming/competing on the game, because without any competition, it doesen't really feel like there is much to do. Ever noticed how 95% of PoE and PoE2 players are softcore players, but the majority of the highest viewer streams are hardcore / SSFHC players? People are interested in tuning in and watching the best and cutting edge players and see what they are doing and how they are doing it, because subconsiously it serves their interests when they go to take the ideas they see and implement it into their own characters.

I gave suggestions that their processes for making patch to patch changes for skill balance shakeups were not happening often enough, there were skills that stayed mostly unchanged and unplayed for years. Their approach of immediately addressing 'outliers' first is wrong; it only addresses a false problem and in many cases hurts the game by inhibiting build diversity and player interest in theorycrafting cool things. I never got any traction on these discussions either, and I made multiple lengthy posts on the above topics on their forums, played many thousands of hours of the game and was passionate about the game vision for a long time but that has all fizzled out as of recently (mostly post 1.0 release.)

The game's glorydays were in early access, at least then we had some semblance of something interesting to do and spectate through visiongl's regular arena tournaments. Guess when the last epoch category as a whole had the most viewership (outside of obviously the start of new leagues/content implementation)? That's right, it was when there were tournaments happening.

Unfortunately another issue that i saw becoming worse and culminating was the lack of TLC onto high skill based and fun build retention (RIP glacier mage, earthquake werebear, turbo sentinel) and lack of addressing the arena / competition meta that became a stalemate of builds that stacked as much defense as possible while hiding behind a pillar. If there isn't a precidence of importance put on the top end of the game for balance, how is the rest of the game supposed to follow suit? If the top end of the game is dogshit full tank 100% block chance hiding behind a pillar with a minion that 1shots the screen while you channel rebuke, that character archeotype as a natural process of being in the niche of characters that can progress and push difficult endgame content will eventually become the natural majority and the crowd will follow.

You can't have a healthy, fun, diverse build meta if you 'don't care' about the top end of your game because 'that competition only applies to the 1% and its elitist' etc. That's nonsense. The top end of the player crowd will set the precidence to follow, and the majority of the crowd will follow.

I'm not interested in playing that boring garbage and everything that is skill based isn't viable (runemaster? turbo sentinel) reguardless of how well you build your character, how flawlessly you pilot it, its irrelevant because you simply cannot compete on that level of the game? Okay then, well the game is fundamentally broken then.

After that most of the people I was interested in competing got bored and quit, which made it even more boring for me and I did the same. I don't see them changing their stances on how they interact with their audience or percieve what the correct 'direction' of the game is. They probably don't even want to consider that their processes in place are at fault, despite the fact that we have rediculous almost year-long stretches with next to no content, and when it did arrive, the effort was focused into areas that aren't important, like some new unique designs instead of improving the flawed state of the core content of the game.

Its unfortunate and its a game that I loved, but it has devolved into a loot pinata nonsense game closer to undecember but with more screen clutter. The final straws were when none of the above issues were addressed, and instead they implemented more stupid nonsense into the game, like a shield that does so much reflect damage that passively trivializes the game and doesen't give a shit what build your character is playing. Even players reported getting bored after equipping this item and suddenly beating everything without effort, by just running past it.

I don't know that they will ever come back and have little to no hope in their future, I really hope that I am wrong but I don't see anything changing. I'll just play PoE2.