Delving into Path of Exile's Twitch stats

A few days ago, Grinding Gear Games (GGG) released their latest league/expansion/thing for Path of Exile, Delve. And, I'll admit, I've been enjoying this league a lot more than I enjoyed the previous league, Incursion, which GGG proclaimed to be a resounding success, even as they announced that they weren't adding Incursion's mechanics to the game until December... in some form (details TBA).

Incursion was plagued with rapid player burn-out, basically extending the end-game clear-speed meta into the early game, while adding very little that seemed new or exciting after your third or fourth Temple. That burn-out was evident in the game's Twitch viewership; streamers switched to streaming other games, both to preserve their own sanity, and to hold onto audiences who were just as bored with Incursion as they were. While interest in Incursion was initially high, it dropped off quickly, and left many players disillusioned with GGG who were seeming increasingly out of touch with their player base.

So, how is Delve faring, by comparison?

According to SullyGnome's numbers, Delve's launch was 20.68% less-watched than Incursion at peak, and 13.00% lower on average, on launch day (84,219 peak/16,607 avg. for Incursion, compared to 66,801 peak/14,448 avg. for Delve). It's not for lack of trying, either; Delve got a significant media push, but seemed to generate less buzz among burned-out PoE fans, many of whom seem to have moved on to other games.

The forum community is, once again, bitterly divided, between those who are proclaiming Delve to be the best thing GGG has ever made, and those who are denouncing it as a horrible, broken, unfinished mess. Shades of the D3 forums again, for sure.

(I've come to hate the over-used term "aids" to deride anything that's even slightly negative. Are memories really so short that AIDS has become a trivial thing? Don't answer that...)

Now, for the record, I actually like Delve. Much like Bestiary, many of the league's mechanics seem to have suffered from a lack of outside testing, and needed quite a bit of polishing and revision, but a slower-paced league that provides something to do, which isn't just more or the same late-game-meta gameplay extended into the early game, is just fine by me. Lovers of the AoE, speed-clear, mapping-all-the-time meta, however, seem to hate it.

(They especially seem to hate the fact that monsters in the darkness of a Delve can't be killed in spite of not being visible; apparently, being able to off-screen enemies they can't even see, watching their XP bars fill while interacting with essentially nothing at all, is apparently some people's idea of fun.)

I'm not wild about the D3-like precedent that's been established by GGG in which Ascendancies like Guardian and Pathfinder got completely reworked to dovetail with new skill gems; again, the appeal of PoE used to be the ability of any "class" to create a viable build around any of the game's mechanics. But the results are enjoyable enough, if slightly over-powered. I don't know that it's a recipe for long-term health of the game, but it's injected enough fun back into the proceedings to get me playing again.

(Although not enough to inspire a supporter-pack purchase. Sorry, GGG, Delve is good, but it isn't that good. Also, Delve's supporter packs suck.)

None of that has any bearing on the game's ability to sustain the interest of its audience, however. Just looking at the numbers, it's pretty clear that Delve is not nearly as successful as Incursion was. Were players (and viewers) just thoroughly burned-out by Incursion that Delve wasn't exciting enough to lure them back? Or is PoE suffering from chronic balance issues that make certain playstyles so un-fun that it's just losing it's audience, slowly but surely, and with lasting effect?

Because make no mistake: the new skill gems and mechanics are just more of the same AoE, but with bigger numbers. Smite is tagged as a melee skill, but it's an AoE ground slam that doesn't even have to connect with an enemy to damage them (and buff you and your minions); Consecrated Path feels powerful, and creates a nice, visceral "boom" when it goes off, but it's just another AoE skill, melee tag notwithstanding. Some of the game's older melee skills got tweaked slightly, but melee hasn't been fixed; playing a "melee" character in PoE is still just the same as playing an AoE spell-caster, except with a shorter range.

I've spent a lot of time playing AoE PoE over the years, but it's definitely not the wide-open game of exploration and experimentation that I first fell in love with. That strike-through isn't sarcasm, BTW; I literally typed AoE by mistake, when I meant to type PoE, which feels like a subconscious indicator of the state of the game's meta. PoE has become so meta-heavy as to be daunting to any new players who pick it up, and so restrictive to be discouraging to a lot of its veterans, and that seems to me like the recipe for a slow downward spiral into oblivion.

Maybe it's still early days; maybe GGG can recapture the magic that made this game so appealing in its earlier incarnations, restart the growth which seems, for now anyway, to have stalled. I hope they can; I'd hate to see the game slowly decay into irrelevancy, just when it seemed to be peaking. But the numbers don't lie, and GGG has to be seeing the same thing internally. What conclusions they're drawing from their internal player statistics, though, remains to be seen.