so big Exile Road There are some “tough times”. The game’s newest expansion/league, called Ultimatum, released in April, hasn’t had the same success as the game’s other expansions. According to reports, Path of Exile, with its Ultimatum expansion, saw its biggest drop in player numbers since 2016. The expansion’s launch peaked at over 155,000 players connected simultaneously on Steam (just 2,000 below its historical peak).
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However, in the three months following the expansion’s release, interest has been far less than Grinding Gear Games had anticipated. Normally, in the third month of the league, Path of Exile’s player count drops to 25,000 to 40,000 players online, and it grows again to amazing results with the launch of the next expansion. However, the story was different with Ultimatum, which recorded a 93% drop in its player base. Over the past 30 days, the average number of PoE players online has been under 10,000.
Chris Wilson, General Manager at GGG, explains what may have gone wrong. “The result for the first day of the alert, plus the number of players who attended the launch day, was 99% of the previous record. The reason it was only 99% was because we had a day full of terrible server issues,” Wilson said in an interview. We’d hit about 104% of the previous record for release day if we didn’t have these server issues.
It also seems that the mechanics of the league did not really appeal to the players. “Retention during the league was poor,” Wilson explains. This was largely caused by the fact that the League fight and its rewards were “without salt”. This means that there is no flowery news. Overall, the expansion brought several gems, skill improvements, a large amount of skills, tweaks to the reward system, credits and many more fixes. The highlight was the arrival of a feature called Trialmaster, which gives players access to some interesting challenges.
In case you missed it, this weekend Grinding Gear Games unveiled the next Path of Exile expansion. The expansion, dubbed Expedition, will be available on July 23 for PC and July 28 for consoles. This time, missions are highlighted, which will be marked with excavation actions, that is, players will hunt for special relics in order to trade with merchants. Also, starting today, the game’s Battle Royale mode returns, but it will only be available on weekends. You can check more informationtion Here.
