Action RPGs

In part, I blame the “D4 Bad” meme that became so prevalent that there are entire AI-generated meme channels about it, but recently I’ve come across a number of think pieces diving into whether or not 3.24 aka the Necropolis League was good or not. Technically Necropolis is not over and won’t be officially finished for another month or more, but it is essentially done as evidenced by the player numbers and how the prices of everything are increasing as they do when the availability of items dries up. Let’s look at just the facts first, which is that Necropolis had the highest day-two falloff in player numbers of any league in certainly recent memory, but technically any league in the history of the game. That same trend largely continued throughout the league eventually stabilizing to having better retention than Kalandra in percentage of peak players vs percentage of current players. I figured this morning I would dive into this fact and share some of my thoughts surrounding it.

Player retention numbers are always challenging when taken out of context as compared to what a baseline trend looks like for any given game. As an outsider, I have limited data with which to draw conclusions but probably the two that I use most often are the Concurrent Numbers page on POEDB and the data kept by SteamCharts. It has been estimated that Steam represents roughly 60% of the Path of Exile player base, so you can use that to extrapolate the total picture. So if you look at the points I have marked A and B that represents the launch of the Ancestor and Affliction leagues respectively. That is what normal player patterns look like… a brief ramp-up to a spike at the league launch and then a slow tapering off of player interest as the weeks pass by. This is pretty much what ANY seasonal model looks for all games that subscribe to that methodology.

Where things get really weird is when you get to C, D, and E and I have zoomed this section in for the sake of exploring that specifically. The dates here don’t make a ton of sense, especially when you consider that the spike starts on February 26th, a little over a month before the start of the Necropolis League which began on March 29th. I pondered this for a bit and then it dawned on me what we were seeing. Last Epoch launched on February 21st and has what one can only charitably call… a rough launch. The servers were largely in a barely playable state for most of that first week. So my theory is that you had a lot of players who got hyped to play an ARPG and could not play Last Epoch, so they popped in to see how things were going in Path of Exile. Similarly, you see the numbers bottom out once again to the residual background noise of a league in week two when the servers were largely fixed and continued on in that fashion until right before the launch of the Necropolis league. While that does not necessarily explain the rapid drop-off after the launch at point E… it does show that the POE community and Last Epoch community… are essentially the same player base.

Necropolis is what is often referred to as a “spreadsheet” league where there is a lot of micromanagement of resources intended to set up specific ideal situations for crafting phenomenal items. In the leagues that I have played the one that feels the most similar was Crucible league where you spent a lot of time “fishing” for items with good trees on them, that you could then use to attempt to manipulate them onto other items. Necropolis brought us Graveyard crafting where in theory you have the ability to set up some very deterministic crafts but it requires you to gather large amounts of individually itemized corpses in order to pull it off. Most of the times I played with this system I would pour 30 or so corpses into a single item craft and end up with something that is not even useable as a final outcome. I think this was for the most part the experience of the majority of players.

Craft of Exile came to the rescue in creating a calculator that would attempt to calculate the corpses needed for the best odds of crafting a specific item. For example, I set up what I would want as an ideal Righteous Fire Sceptre and their calculation uses 86 of 88 corpses and even then only has a 63% chance of creating the final desired output. This becomes a system where those who really know what they are doing can print out mirror-tier items… and those who have no clue get something as a result that is on average going to get hidden by your item filter. In Crucible the act of fishing for items was way more enjoyable and there was a pretty low opportunity cost. You picked up a trash item up off the floor and then ran it through the Crucible Altar that appeared on your map. If you hit a good tree you kept it, if not you threw it back on the floor.

Necropolis Graveyard crafting on the other hand required you to hold onto entire inventories full of individually itemized and non-stacking coffins. You can only have 64 corpses in your Necropolis Morgue, so in order to do that 86 coffin craft above I would need to fill my morgue a few times with corpses out of the bank just to complete the craft. Even worse is trying to purchase specific types of coffins that you might be missing for your craft. The vast majority of corpses are only worth a few chaos, meaning that it is exceptionally hard to find anyone willing to stop what they are doing to sell you a single corpse. Bulk buying options were created by the community but for the most part to get what you wanted you had to buy out an entire stash tab worth of corpses. The above image represents all of the corpses that I held onto which are spread across four quad tabs. For the average player… the system just was not worth interacting with at all.

The other part of the Necropolis was the Lantern of Arimor which gives every campaign zone and atlas map in the game a number of unskippable modifiers that crank up the potential difficulty while in certain cases giving you some hefty rewards. This was a deal breaker for a number of players because it is a system that could not be skipped and before it was nerfed, could legitimately end your hardcore run if you happened to get a bad affix. This drove away a lot of players early, most famous of which is Kripparian who is a huge Ruthless game mode enjoyer who posted this video on day three of the league indicating that he was quitting early. Kalandra and Crucible both had similarly poorly received in map mechanics, but you could just ignore them if you did not want to engage. There was no way to remove the Lantern of Arimor modifiers from a map, nor any way to re-roll them save for trashing the map.

Allflames were another mechanic that allowed you to modify the Lantern of Arimor modifiers and could in theory make some of the downsides of running a particular map mod less severe. However this also represented the first league where there were nodes for that league on the Atlas Passives, and for you to get reliable drops you had to spec heavily into that mechanic. Several Allflames also had unintended consequences which will come into effect when I talk about some later changes. However, one that I used regularly was Allflame Ember of Sulphite which added packs of mobs to your map that dropped large amounts of sulphite to your map, so much so that if I combined this with a modifier that increased pack density I could pretty much fill up all 65,000 of my Sulphite reserve on a single map. Unfortunately, this also interacted with the Atlas Passive that gave you Azerite every time you gained Sulphite meaning that it pretty much destroyed any value in the Delve Resonator market. I have to say though for the most part I enjoyed the Allflames and would love to see something like this stick around in the game permanently.

At this point you might be getting the impression that there were a lot of moving parts to the Necropolis league… and honestly, we have yet to really even begin to discuss the biggest changes. Scarabs have traditionally been an item that you could include in your map device in order to force a specific mechanic onto the map you were running. Necropolis League threw out everything about how that system worked as well as removing the Sextant system and instead created over two hundred individual scarabs that all have a wide array of effects on your map. At face value, this was a brilliant change and has honestly made running maps so much more enjoyable than it ever was previously. In past leagues I ran enough maps to keep myself outfitting in Sulphite so I could do more Delves… but this is the league where I got legitimate enjoyment out of chain running maps and it was in large part due to the availability and variety of Scarab options.

On top of this, the entire way we interacted with the Atlas of Worlds changed because no longer needed to create one largely utilitarian Passive Tree to do 99% of your mapping. Instead, we got 3 different trees with the second unlocking after 50 maps, and the third unlocking after 100 maps. This allowed folks to set up and run multiple highly specialized strategies at the same time. I had one map that was largely for Sulphite gains, another for going super hard into Einhar and Beyond, and a third where I was mostly doing Legion/Breach. The variety of Scarabs allowed you to really custom tailor and buff those strategies to support even wilder things.

Changing so many systems that overlapped in functionality created a slew of unintended consequences. For example, it was possible to add around 200 Unique Monsters to your map and guarantee that every single one of them would drop at least one Unique item. While this was ultimately nerfed… other strategies sprung up equally quickly generating dump trucks full of unique items easily. Essentially every T0 Unique was selling more cheaply during this league than it ever had been at any given time in the past. I think at its lowest you could pick up a Headhunter for 2 Divine Orbs, and I got a Squire for I believe 80 Chaos. While there was fun to be had at creating stupidly profitable maps… that fun sort of has a very limited window of enjoyment when you realize that none of the things that are dropping hold any value. There is in fact such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Then there is the problem of T17 maps. They were advertised as a way of bridging the gap between normal boss encounters and uber bosses, but in truth are largely regarded as some of the hardest content in the game currently. One of the biggest problems with T17 maps is that they have some really wild modifiers on them that can completely brick builds. When they first launched you could not reroll them and even now the only modification you can make to a map is throwing a chaos orb at it and hoping for better options. The biggest challenge with these is that traditionally you have had characters that were good at mapping and characters that were good at bossing… as each type of encounter really wanted something different out of a build. T17s require you to be able to do both fluently which means that there are only a handful of builds that can truly dominate this content.

The loot table for every Pinnacle boss in the game was reworked with a number of items shifting to only dropping from the Uber version. The way Uber versions were summoned changed as well so that it requires 5 fragments that only drop in T17 maps, with each of the five maps having a fixed pool of fragments that can drop from it. Probably the change that personally annoyed me the most is that your 5 Way Map Device is no longer unlocked by running a Legion 4 Way… aka the league content that created the 5 Way Device in the first place… it now comes from clearing a T17. Uber Bosses are now required to either farm up or buy T17 maps… to run in order to get Fragments to then finally fight the Boss. This creates the challenge that most bossing builds are not designed in a way to be able to handle mapping… which has somewhat thrown the whole structure of what makes a good build into turmoil.

So taking all of this into account… do I consider Necropolis to be a failure? It is hard not say something as a strict yes or no answer. You almost have to slice up Necropolis into a bunch of individual features and then judge them separately. Collectively I think Necropolis is a mixed bag, but one that I largely enjoyed and I made it far further into the league challenges than I have in any previous league. That is like more about my personal growth as a League Enjoyer and less a reflection of this specific league. I think Grave Crafting as a whole was a bad idea because unlike Crucible the cost of interacting with it was far too high and left folks to either go all in on it or not touch it at all. I think the Lantern of Arimor and the Allflames were largely successful but they should have been a purely opt-in mechanic that you could ignore if you so desired. The best leagues are something you can choose to engage with if it is your jam, but ignore if it is not.

The Atlas Passive and Scarab changes were a universal success and have greatly improved how it feels to play this game. I feel like there are a lot of things that probably should have been tested a bit more before rolling out… but I enjoyed myself and it was a heck of a lot of fun trying to figure out how to break the system with them. T17s and the Uber Boss changes… this is a system I would normally not care about at all save for it is crossing the streams. Mapping, Heist, Delve Blight, Sanctum, and Bossing should be individual largely self-contained game modes. They all are tailored to a specific player’s fantasy and it is perfectly reasonable if you like one thing but not like other things. I feel like GGG wants every player to do every piece of content in the game and sets up scenarios where you are at least in theory forced to. This is a bad call and as a result, T17s in their current iteration are poorly designed. Embrace the diversity of game modes and create more content that plays into the already-defined niches that players have carved out within your community.

I spent roughly 47 days actively playing the Necropolis League and that seems like a pretty reasonable amount of time. Were it not for the launch of Season 4 in Diablo IV and then finally straightening out systems in that game… I would probably still be poking at it occasionally. I enjoyed myself but there were a lot of times that it felt like I was enjoying myself despite the league rather than because of it. So I think I would have to admit that Necropolis was a bad league, that just so happened to be occurring during a time when the game itself was in a pretty solid state. I don’t think Necropolis will be looked back upon with the same levels of Infamy that Lake of Kalandra has been, because the game is just more enjoyable to play right now than it was at that point.

So yeah I guess I will have to admit… Necropolis Bad. Here is hoping that GGG adjusts and gives us a more widely approachable league for 3.25.