[Feedback] Revert Campaign Difficulty to Patch 0.1, Campaign Is Too Easy Now

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600lbpanther#3839 wrote:

On Inversion and Who Actually Needs Whom[

Interesting argument, not sure it follows logically or applies though. Correct me where I'm wrong but from reading a few of your other posts you seem to think that hardcore players are those who devote hundreds of hours to play and that it is only the 'hardcore' players asking for the game to be more difficult.

I dumped a lot of hours into this game this season, but only because the timing was right and I hadn't played it before. 100% consider myself a casual player, will do a few hours a night for some but not all new seasons, in between other games, or when time permits between work and family obligations, but would like to see the promise of more difficult challenging (not POE1 style) gameplay fulfilled.

In my opinion, which I'll admit is only shaped by playing this season of PoE2 and what I've long read about PoE1, it seems like PoE1s true 'hardcore' devotees are those who keep coming back indefinitely despite the same boring 1 click game play that gets seasonally dressed up in a new colors, but is still fundamentally the same thing over and over (correct me if I'm wrong about PoE1).

I think these 50,000 you mentioned are the true Hardcore base and quite possibly the ones clamoring for PoE2 to be made into PoE1 but with better graphics.

If GGG does this all they'll succeed in is pulling these people, already effectively married and eternally bound to PoE1, into PoE2. They'll just cannibalize their own player base for no gain.

The only way for GGG to bring in new players, casual or hardcore, is to offer something different from PoE1. Not just the same thing with better graphics. If PoE2's numbers are dropping, and people are quitting after 4 hours, how do you know that isn't happening because people are feeling like this is just the same thing as PoE1?

Totally agree when it comes to bosses, they are a joke now.

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Skutz123#5377 wrote:

Correct me where I'm wrong but from reading a few of your other posts you seem to think that hardcore players are those who devote hundreds of hours to play and that it is only the 'hardcore' players asking for the game to be more difficult.

I dumped a lot of hours into this game this season, but only because the timing was right and I hadn't played it before. 100% consider myself a casual player, will do a few hours a night for some but not all new seasons, in between other games, or when time permits between work and family obligations, but would like to see the promise of more difficult challenging (not POE1 style) gameplay fulfilled.

In my opinion, which I'll admit is only shaped by playing this season of PoE2 and what I've long read about PoE1, it seems like PoE1s true 'hardcore' devotees are those who keep coming back indefinitely despite the same boring 1 click game play that gets seasonally dressed up in a new colors, but is still fundamentally the same thing over and over (correct me if I'm wrong about PoE1).

I think these 50,000 you mentioned are the true Hardcore base and quite possibly the ones clamoring for PoE2 to be made into PoE1 but with better graphics.

If GGG does this all they'll succeed in is pulling these people, already effectively married and eternally bound to PoE1, into PoE2. They'll just cannibalize their own player base for no gain.

The only way for GGG to bring in new players, casual or hardcore, is to offer something different from PoE1. Not just the same thing with better graphics. If PoE2's numbers are dropping, and people are quitting after 4 hours, how do you know that isn't happening because people are feeling like this is just the same thing as PoE1?

Hey Skutz123!

Appreciate the thoughtful pushback — and you've actually sharpened the argument rather than undermined it, which is worth acknowledging.

You're right that I'm not advocating for PoE2 to become PoE1 with better graphics. That would be commercially pointless for exactly the reason you identified — cannibalization of an existing player base with no net gain. The PoE1 faithful are already, as you put it, married. Pulling them across solves nothing.

What I'm arguing is different: PoE2 needs to convert curious newcomers into *retained* players — people who try it, find it rewarding, and come back next season. That's a separate population from both the PoE1 faithful and the PoE2 hardcore.

Now here's where the numbers become important:

PoE1's all-time peak on Steam was 229,337 concurrent players — achieved July 2024, its absolute best moment after 11 years of development. PoE2 launched five months later and hit 578,569 — 2.5 times higher than anything PoE1 ever achieved. That audience wasn't the PoE1 base migrating over. That was a massive wave of new and returning players genuinely excited about what PoE2 promised.

The question is what happened to them. League concurrent player data from poe2db.tw tells the story clearly across all four leagues to date:

- Early Access (Dec 2024) — peak ~578,000
- Dawn of the Hunt (Apr 2025) — peak ~230,000
- Rise of the Abyssal (Aug 2025) — peak ~350,000
- Fate of the Vaal (Dec 2025) — peak ~280,000

Two things stand out from the chart. First, every single league curve trends toward near-zero by Day 60-70 regardless of how many players showed up on Day 1 — the game cannot sustain engagement beyond roughly six weeks. Second, and more damning — Dawn of the Hunt and Fate of the Vaal sit almost directly on top of each other for their entire retention curve. Despite GGG making significant changes between those two leagues specifically in response to player feedback, the retention pattern didn't improve at all.

The 50,000 PoE1 players you're concerned about cannibalizing? PoE2 already had 570,000+ and lost most of them — not to PoE1... They simply stopped playing. Converting even a fraction of that lost audience into retained players would dwarf any cannibalization concern entirely.

Your self-description as a casual player who wants challenging but fair and rewarding gameplay is exactly the profile that 570,000 peak represents. The question was never whether PoE2 should be hard. It's whether the difficulty is currently rewarding enough to keep that audience coming back — and four consecutive leagues converging toward zero by week six gives us a pretty honest answer.

I'm all for having the game difficulties/options as hard as needed for specific temperaments, playing styles, and experience. Although, and I may have missed it, I do not see anyone posting playing HC SSF in POE2. My assumption would be it's "too hard" especially with "one shotting" bosses (with "too hard perhaps being restated as "too unfair").

Perhaps a "Merciless" league option is needed where it mirrors 0.1. Not Standard and not HC SSF: Something in between.

Incase anyone was curious what ChatGPT had to say about all this.

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default_mp3#9394 wrote:

No. Thank you. They understood it well before that ppl dont want Ruthless 2.0 here

I do.

I wish PoE2 was the slower, more tactical and methodical game they originally promised. The original vision was great; trying to appease PoE1 players when they already have an entire game ruined it.

Just wait till the 1.0 at this point, but from my perspective nothing is going to happen. Campaign is gonna stay as it is for the entirety of POE2's lifespan. It's a live-service game and they need to retain the playerbase you like it or not.

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karsey#2995 wrote:

Spoiler

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600lbpanther#3839 wrote:

On Inversion and Who Actually Needs Whom

There's a useful mental model from Charlie Munger, who borrowed it from the mathematician Carl Jacobi: *"Invert, always invert."* When a problem seems intractable from one direction, flip it and approach from the other side.

So let's invert the usual argument.

The passionate minority often frames this as: *"If you make the game more accessible you'll ruin it — we'll leave and the game will die."*

Here's where the inversion becomes interesting. The question worth asking isn't "will hardcore players leave if the game becomes more accessible?" — it's "where would you go?"

This isn't meant unkindly. It's a genuine question. The investment the hardcore community has made in PoE2 — the builds, the knowledge, the identity, the forum presence, the thousands of hours — that investment doesn't transfer. Last Epoch is a different game. PoE1 is increasingly dated by GGG's own admission. The passionate minority isn't holding leverage over GGG. In many cases, GGG holds the leverage over them.

Meanwhile GGG has a commercial reality to operate within. A game that retains only its most hardcore players between patches — as the declining floor numbers between each content spike clearly show — is not a growing business. It's a slowly shrinking one dressed up in launch-week enthusiasm.

The players who left after 4 hours weren't unskilled. They were rational. They made a reasonable judgment that the return on their leisure time wasn't there. That's not a skill problem. That's a design problem.

GGG's long term success depends on converting curious newcomers into retained players — not on preserving the comfort of those already converted. The hardcore community is the foundation, not the ceiling.

Inverting the whole argument: the passionate minority may be the least likely to actually leave, and the casual majority are the ones GGG genuinely cannot afford to keep losing.

Incase anyone was curious what ChatGPT had to say about all this.

I use Claude and the initial prompt and back-and-forth to get to the right answer dwarfs the above LOL

But setting the tools aside — I notice the core question from my original post still hasn't been addressed:

Where exactly would the passionate minority go?

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600lbpanther#3839 wrote:

I'm all for having the game difficulties/options as hard as needed for specific temperaments, playing styles, and experience. Although, and I may have missed it, I do not see anyone posting playing HC SSF in POE2. My assumption would be it's "too hard" especially with "one shotting" bosses (with "too hard perhaps being restated as "too unfair").

Perhaps a "Merciless" league option is needed where it mirrors 0.1. Not Standard and not HC SSF: Something in between.

I may not be fully understanding your point or what you're asking for I guess. My observation from comments, and my limited experience, is that the game is devolving and becoming easier and more PoE1 like than people had expected. If this coincides with a decline in peak players and retention, it's not hard to argue that it's because people don't like that it's getting too easy... leading to posts like this one asking for a return to the more difficult state.

They player retention numbers are interesting, but given the myriad of things that could affect them I'd say the player base from the peaks at least looks relatively consistent for 0.2, 0.3, 0.4.

Yes 0.1 was big, but likely not to be repeated after curious players old and new got a taste of the game, and some decided it's not for them. Maybe what you're seeing in 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 is that roughly the same number of people are coming back to test out each new season, but they're not playing as long because they've already mastered the game and now they're beating it even faster, and the endgame not really fun

There's all kinda of data that would be fun to see and useful to ponder that the company would never release anyway, so this is fun but pointless analysis. It's probably more important how much money each player spends each season on mtx, and what can they do to retain those players. It's also sorta important that this is early access, and many people myself included almost never play early access games...this is in fact my first early access purchase because there was nothing that looked terribly interesting in early December. They might do well to listen to the people bothering to put opinions on this forum, though it is pretty wild to see that there are

Anywayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, GGG my 2 cents... yeah this game's too easy, please make it more challenging, or I, the coveted new player, won't keep playing. And don't think you can pretend that hardcore, or SSF modes = more challenging. Nope that's just pointless punishment mode. I want better mob AI and combat in general, not mindless bullet hell where the bullets can't even reach you anyway.

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Skutz123#5377 wrote:

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600lbpanther#3839 wrote:

I'm all for having the game difficulties/options as hard as needed for specific temperaments, playing styles, and experience. Although, and I may have missed it, I do not see anyone posting playing HC SSF in POE2. My assumption would be it's "too hard" especially with "one shotting" bosses (with "too hard perhaps being restated as "too unfair").

Perhaps a "Merciless" league option is needed where it mirrors 0.1. Not Standard and not HC SSF: Something in between.

I may not be fully understanding your point or what you're asking for I guess.

Correct.

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600lbpanther#3839 wrote:

Correct.

Excellent, we can end with this snippet and be left to ponder whether it was my failure in understanding or yours in getting a point across. Cheers.