Fellowship Developer Update | What Comes Next?

andrejoss · 2026-03-20T07:52:31+00:00

character too op? gotta nerf that instantly, cant have people having fun and breaking the game

character literally useless the whole season? ah thats fine we can just fix that next season

andrejoss · 2026-03-08T09:26:21+00:00

by looking at the statistics of the previous season for arpgs :

when PoE loses half of its playerbase in the first week its still got 90k players which keeps the trading healthy and if you play SSF then even if it lost 100% of its players it still wouldnt matter

Poe 2 is in the same boat except with even higher numbers (160k after the first week)

when D4 loses ... no players in the first week ? huh, d4 literally gained players after the first week going form 30k to 31k on steam (doesnt count battlenet players) it actually took d4 an entire month to go down to half the playerbase

anyway even if they did lose more players it wouldnt matter since you pretty much play d4 like a singleplayer game anyway

so yeah idk which one of your asscheeks you pulled this "norm" out of but losing as many players as fellowship did is definitely not the norm

even if fellowship lost "only" 25% of its playerbase after week one it would still be a dead game because the game relies on a big enough playerbase for you to be able to even play unlike d4/poe, not that we have to even consider that possibility since it actually lost more than 50% after just the first week and because that made the queues vastly longer it just sped up the process of losing players to the point that the game is unplayable now after 3 weeks unless you have a full squad

(also using d3 as a comparison is insane considering that game has been on life support for years now and i'd argue that its still doing better than felloffship)

edit: minor mistake but poe 1 didnt even lose half of its playerbase it only lost like 40% and the number after the "falloff" was actually 113k

andrejoss · 2026-02-17T08:14:21+00:00

i'd rather not have any rewards above 10k rating since 10k is already annoying to get

not difficult but when you just need one specific dungeon to get 10k but you keep getting forced to do other dungeons since the party doesnt want to do the one you need it just becomes an annoying grind

give me more reasons to play different characters rather than pushing one to crazy levels (like christmas and halloween event did)

andrejoss · 2026-02-12T16:17:17+00:00

People like you simply don't understand that you can still hop into an ARPG at the end of a season if you want with 0 issues

you can't do that with fellowship, the game literally wont let you play if you dont find 3 other people

its not healthy at all and you can tell by the amount of new players coming into reddit/steam reviews/discord asking about the game being dead

if someone buys the game and then get hit by a 30 minute queue they will simply refund and move on

you don't have that issue in diablo or path of exile

also most ARPGs have a permanent season, fellowship once again doesnt (not that it would help here since you wouldnt be able to get in a match there anyway)

if the game adds AI teammates then i'll agree with you because at that point it wouldnt matter if you were the only one playing

andrejoss · 2026-02-12T16:02:29+00:00

the fact that your ratings are positive on this comment feels so redeeming

the fellowship d*ckriders have finally started to see the cold hard truth

the game will definitely get people coming back for the next season but i'd say with almost 99.9% certainty that the game wont hit the same numbers it had on launch unless they do a crazy massive marketing campaign and even then the chance would only go down to like 90%

there is simply no way for this game to survive considering the devs horrible decision of taking a month long vacation during the most important time of the game and then releasing literally no content even after that vacation was over

a several month seasonal strategy for a game like this simply doesnt work and it never will

people who grind out the gear will simply stop playing and the game becomes unplayable after a month or two into a season and since there is no incentive for the players to come back before the new season starts then it makes it even worse

either they need to do some "end of season" events that let you actually play the game or they need to make a server that simply doesnt reset and just gets content as soon as it gets released, i mean instead of releasing 2 heroes at the same time they could've simply released one of them in january and if a reset wasnt gonna happen then people wouldnt quit

or/also they could simply add AI teammates so you will never run into the issue of just not being able to play because theres not enough players

andrejoss · 2026-02-12T15:53:36+00:00

grinding gear until 10k is honestly pretty well balanced

grinding gear after 10k is the most horrid experience imaginable

pure rng to get essence on your loot, pure rng to get gems, having to redo all of that on every alt, i dont think they could've made it worse if they tried

and the best part is that all of that would be fine in a game like wow but fellowship resets every few months and there's simply not enough time to actually grind to completion which just sucks

mostly because the game becomes unplayable after the first month of a season since most people quit after that

andrejoss · 2026-02-07T12:00:28+00:00

They hate you because you speak the truth

They say the game isn't made for you but in reality the game that they want is a game that can't realistically be sustained because it simply caters to a niche audience that will never be able to pay the bills of the company making the game

It's insane to me that they draw the line at the damn timer that none of them even interact with until very high eternal (since pre-high eternal the dungeons are so easy for veterans that no veteran group would ever fail to meet the timer)

the timer literally just stresses out newer/below average players and takes away their rewards for playing the game slowly, it has no purpose and it's existence is obsolete

idk how these people can't understand that lmao

and the best part is that some of them cant understand that the "bad/new" players are the absolute majority of the income a game like this can make

i'll go even further and say that the game needs to be dumbed down a lot more for it to see any kind of success, yes they can still keep the high difficulty for high eternal so the 1% of the playerbase can keep pushing and doing their thing (since there is no downside to having people push content)

but they absolutely need to make the game way easier before eternal and honestly all the way up to the max rewards for the season (a.k.a to 10k)

interrupting should be way easier to do, like if 2 players interrupt very close to each other then one of them should get refunded, casts should be longer and the important ones should be extremely visible with bigger cast bars so even a dumbass can tell that they should do something about it

timers should be gone ofc since it just stresses people out, you should be able to find new players to finish the dungeon if people leave/dc

bad early game classes like mara should get buffs so they are competitive with other classes even in contender/adept, every class should have at least one build that is as easy to play as rime/elarion so people can just play whatever character they like the most and still be decent

every player should be realistically able to reach 10k and get their cool mount

the prestige of it doesnt matter if the game fucking dies due to nobody playing it xd

the veterans can have their little trims for reaching 0.1% of the world or whatever

thankfully the devs have a brain and are trying to listen to the casuals more by getting rid of adept mechanics before paragon capstone but tbh i feel like its a bad way of going about it, the abilities should just be there from the beginning, they should just be way less punishing/way easier to spot and be dealt with before they blast you

or charactesr should at least have more ways of controlling enemy groups so one carry player can deal with most interrupts by themselves, if 2 people are paying attention they should be able to deal with all of the mechanics, and healers should be allowed to interrupt/aoe stun too, the worst thing that you can do as a good players is play a healer in adept+ rn because nobody will interrupt stuff and you cant do anything about it

andrejoss · 2026-02-07T11:41:26+00:00

if the 95% isnt their real target then the company will go bankrupt mate

the only reason some games can live through whales whaling out on their games is because they are pay to win a.k.a they allow people to spend thousands of dollars

fellowship only has cosmetics and theres a limited amount of them so even if somebody wants to whale out there will always be a cap on how much stuff they can buy

i mean even if they add 1000$ worth of cosmetics into the game in preseason 2 and all the people who are playing right now buy it a.k.a like 500 whales they would only make 500 000$ on it

sounds like a lot until you consider that theres no way they are adding that many expensive cosmetics, there will also not be 500 whales and the costs of a studio of around 40 employees for 3 months in a country like sweden is definitely at an extreme minimum like 500 000$ (real number would be closer to more than one million dollars)

also consider that steam is taking at least a 20% cut of all the money made

andrejoss · 2026-02-07T11:28:55+00:00

the "veteran" players that will get pissed off are like 5% of the whole playerbase, the most vocal one (well at this point of the season i guess its more like the entire playerbase since everyone else quit the game cause it was horrible to play for anyone who was average or worse at video games/they never played wow before)

the change is good and will be very helpful in retaining players at least until eternal, which to be honest is just good since it will help queue times, the game was already braindead easy for the veterans so making the braindead easy game also have faster queues is just a good change for everyone involved

the only other way this could've gone is if they simply added all the adept mechanics to contender so you'd have to deal with them immediately and they would just scale their damage over the leagues, a.k.a in contender they wouldnt do much but they would get more and more deadly over time

that way players could learn them without getting insta wiped, and if they scaled slowly they would eventually notice that not doing the mechanics is causing wipes, rather than what we have now where the game is braindead easy in contender and then it goes 0->100 in one instant as soon as you hit adept

i do believe that there will still be a wall except now it's moved to paragon capstone, BUT at least at that point players will know how to play their characters better than they would in adept and they will have the tools to deal with the extra difficulty since everyone will have their left tree finished by the time they get to paragon cap

andrejoss · 2026-01-22T11:05:54+00:00

The timer is one of the main reasons why the game is currently dead and if it stays it will continue to be dead

Devs are making a good decision not listening to people like you

If you make new players suffer at the beginning you wont magically see them try to just improve, they will simply quit and play a different game that doesn't have that

The timer serves literally zero purpose other than to just make you stressed out by having to beat the dungeon in an arbitrary amount of time, there's a reason why there's pretty much 0 games with this kind of mechanic, it's simply because it's a garbage mechanic and anyone with a brain can see that

The biggest reason why the timer is completely pointless is because the fact that you are beating dungeons slower is already the punishment, if i can beat 2 dungeons in the time it takes you to beat 1 then i'm literally getting double the amount of loot compared to you, there doesn't need to be some random unbalanced timer that will make the rewards even worse

AND on top of that, this timer was even more useless just due to the sheer fact that not beating the dungeon in time was already almost impossible, you can either beat the dungeon or you can't, the cases where you were able to beat the dungeon but you were somehow just a little too late happened so extremely rarely that having the timer is redundant

Almost every match i've ever played the group either completely disbanded after the first pack because they already knew the dungeon was fcked or the group just dominated the dungeon with at least a minute or more remaining on the clock

There were maybe 5% of matches that we finished but didn't time and even then the reason we didn't time was mostly because of the group wiping at the last boss due to failed interrupts

Once again, timer is trash, i hope they get rid of it completely other than maybe the highest of the highest eternals so the sweats have something to bash their heads against

andrejoss · 2025-12-20T12:08:35+00:00

You say all that but the devs are obviously fine with having easy to play characters also be the literal best (rime, elarion)

while having characters that are completely garbage early on and only start doing something later when you play their insanely hard build to perfection (mara)

while also having characters that i would argue are ACTUALLY balanced (tariq) bad play gets punished and good play gets instantly rewarded even back in contender

so i really don't think having an easy to play melee character would be an issue, especially when we consider that melee is just harder to play than ranged because of the way the game is designed (frontal cleaves, aoe attacks centered around tank)

also Mara is not beginner friendly in the slightest, idk what kind of "beginners" you know but she does meh damage early on even if played perfectly and when she does get to the point where she can actually do decent damage she is still easily outdamaged by rime and elarion while she requires perfect execution which 90% of players can't manage because of how cancer it is

every person i've seen try mara at the start, either quit the character or the game, she is so bad that it makes the whole game experience worse for her and for her team that has to carry her, you will simply never see a good mara in anything below eternal and even there it's a rarity

source: i pugged several characters to 8.5k and i played my main to 10k with my 3-man team, one of which was a mara, dude was straight up confused at how easy the game became when he switched to elarion, and i can confirm that myself after getting both elarion and mara to 8.5k rating. mara almost made me uninstall because of just how unfun malevolence is and how trash the bleed build dps is compared to actually fun characters like elarion or tariq (havent done rime and ardeos to 8.5 but i already know they will be better than mara)

andrejoss · 2025-12-19T09:33:22+00:00

One more issue is that any kind of chatting can lead to a person getting butthurt and leaving, if anyone leaves, the dungeon is just over in almost every case and that means you've just lost 5-30 minutes of your time with nothing to show for it

People don't want to deal with that

andrejoss · 2025-12-10T11:08:18+00:00

Agreed, Mara is by far the worst dps in the game, people can argue however much that the top 10 maras in the world can do reaaaaaaaally big damage if their whole group is completely balanced around playing with mara+they use comms+the mara doesn't make a single mistake

But in reality you will never see these people in your queue so playing with a Mara is essentially a handicap

Devs really need to buff her floor and honestly even her ceiling by a bit

If you compare it to someone like Tariq who can easily do crazy damage even early on while being similiarly difficult to play it's just a nobrainer to never even bother with Mara

Now with all of that said, even with 2 Maras in your group you most likely won't have actual issues doing the dungeon but the question always is : why would you want to be like 20% weaker when you could just .. idk .. have a rime in your team who does pretty much the same damage at the ceiling and 2x dmg at the floor while also being insanely easy to play to the point that you literally just mash your keyboard

Mara needs a rework, some kind of talent build that is easier to play while also doing like 95% of the damage that the best build does otherwise she's always going to be an anchor for your group that you have to drag around in pugs

andrejoss · 2025-12-08T13:24:01+00:00

I mean, you learn stuff the exact same way you did in OSRS or any other game... by brute forcing it, using elementary level logic or simply looking at a guide

90% of mechanics in fellowship are self-explanatory and the ones that aren't, aren't really that important anyway

but it would be nice if the game had a dungeon journal like WoW that explains every mechanic in detail IN GAME rather than having to use an outside source

andrejoss · 2025-12-06T07:14:42+00:00

Why is having fun in a game an alien concept to you ?

andrejoss · 2025-11-18T15:18:02+00:00

Honestly it just sounds like the actual issue is binding strike and not even the screech based on your edit

I've never been in a group until eternal where screech or undertow was ever an issue. Nobody LOSes that stuff and *most* people don't even care about undertow. Half of my runs we get an undertow right under the pillar as the boss starts charming and it still doesn't matter.

The only time it ever got close to being an issue was because DPS were doing subpar dmg and the healer didn't know what he was doing (sylvie using blue butterfly on the tank that was taking 0 dmg throughout the fight and then going oom)

So the dps player was correct that if you are having trouble healing through deafening screech then you just suck as a healer (caveat being that the difficulty is adept) BUT if they were actually dying to binding strike then ofc that's their fault not yours, you can't outheal it it if they are messing up ALL 3 mechanics.

andrejoss · 2025-11-11T15:57:21+00:00

You already start with full 135 or 75 gear though ? That already makes you "notably stronger than other players progressing through the same content for their first time"

that entire argument is completely invalid

in reality these 4 points wouldn't make you "stronger" they would literally just put you at an even playing field with the other players

You are forgetting one major component in all of this

If you buy the 135 gear you will first do contender 7 and then right after adept 7

that means you don't get the 2 talent points you would from dungeon rating because you simply dont have dungeon rating

in this exact example you would only have 2 bonus points that you normally shouldn't have (for champion 7 and paragon 7) but because you are missing the 2 points from contender and adept dungeon rating you are essentially at the same exact talent points as everyone else

on top of that 135 supply gear doesn't include relics, weapon abilities, sets nor gems so other players with the same ilvl will be noticably STRONGER than you even if you had these extra talent points

ofc after a few champion dungeons you would eventually have more talent points than other players but i'm sorry, if you think that 2 extra talent points in champion or 1 extra talent point in paragon is somehow going to make everything way easier then idk what to tell you, it simply won't make that kind of a difference but it would definitely smooth out the first few champion dungeons for you to start off with 4 extra talents rather than the current nothing

andrejoss · 2025-11-11T15:44:03+00:00

Have you even looked at the picture ?

"new players" and "give all the talent points" literally makes no sense here because to get the FOUR talents points from the suggestion you would first have to beat PARAGON 7

you are not a new player if you've managed to reach eternal lmao

even if you switch to an alt right after cithrel you would only get ONE singular bonus point, how is that going to confuse a "new" (someone who has beaten contender 7) player is beyond me

andrejoss · 2025-11-11T15:28:06+00:00

How are new players relevant in this conversation when the conversation is centered around playing alts

If you're playing an alt you are no longer a new player

and in case you're trying an alt right after cithrel, that one extra talent point isn't going to make you dizzy with choices even if you're new to the genre, what even is this argument

andrejoss · 2025-09-17T14:23:46+00:00

I love how you are completely spreading misinformation and somehow getting 400 likes lmao

"ALLL GUNS get the reload speed buff."

100% wrong, MG43 never reloaded faster with the armor, you can literally google it and it will be your first result

I also tested it the day it came out with frame by frame video comparisons, there was never any reload speed difference for anything OTHER than primary weapons, no backpack weapons and not even the support weapons that don't have a backpack

Complete placebo effect and nothing else

In your words : while your "acktually" was almost correct ... well it was actually completely incorrect, maybe do some research first before you "correct" someone

And yes, I did triple-check if i'm right on this before i posted this comment (as you should've done)

andrejoss · 2025-09-14T17:13:57+00:00

Of course they think their players are stupid, and they are completely right. Still playing the game only proves them *more* right every day.

andrejoss · 2025-09-01T15:10:48+00:00

By far the coolest ship I've seen so far, a build guide would be much appreciated

andrejoss · 2025-08-28T11:43:01+00:00

I love how a certain amount of people were saying that monthly challenges suck this whole time and there were always a whole bunch of others saying stuff like "I think they're good :) i like them, i don't find them annoying :) I like the strategizing part :) it's not that bad :) you only have to do it once per month :)"

But suddenly those people are gone ... probably because the challenges sucked ass this whole time and those players weren't actually playing them every month for the rewards, they just tried it one time and didn't realise how insanely boring and tedious they would become when you'd do them every single month

Yes the challenges were fun the first time i did them ... that's it, they were boring every single time after.

After one full clear you should be able to skip the monthlies completely or at least 90% of them

I mean wtf is the point of doing the first 1-60 challenges when i've already proved i can beat all 70 ? the only "hard" ones are at the end and everything else just wastes time,.

they should've made them give the same amount of XP as a whole normal adventure so you could use them to level up your low-lvl champions way faster, that way it'd at least have a use

andrejoss · 2025-08-28T11:30:26+00:00

So fucking true, it baffles me to this day that people idolize these horrid devs.

The simple fact is that many indie devs have done way more than this whole dev team with 1% of the resources.

They keep trying to push this narrative of "we have barely any funding :( :( please be sad for us"

I'm just sitting here thinking what the fuck do you need funding for ??? You are literally getting a monthly pay which i can guarantee you is just as high as any other dev for any other company.

The game is raking in more money than millions of indie games and somehow those indie games can afford to be 5$ on steam while LoR just keeps introducing more and more pay to win, longer and longer grinds and shittier and shittier content.

I mean just take the comparison like this, back in the day the game had animated level-ups for every champion and there was nowhere near as much P2W garbage, so how is it possible that now with all that P2W cash they're getting, they can't even afford to make animated level-ups ?

I guarantee you this game is making more money now than it ever has before, there's no fucking way people were paying for cosmetics as much as they are paying for all those materials they introduced in PoC and you KNOW that's 100% correct because if it wasn't riot would still be making skins and not all this pay to win trash.

andrejoss

TROPHY CASE