ditto. Probably not to the same extent but I have consistently gifted this game to people every year since its release.
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I also have gifted copies of the game / expansions to people in need of them at certain times. Its always fun watching the achievement scroll for someone gifted the expansions that really is diving into the game for the first time.
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People misread the username and thought it was you 
I blame medea’s initial title tho.
20k hours of learning sounds more like 500 hours learning and 19.5k hours grinding for gear…
People playing a game for > 1K hours are a tiny fraction of overall players. So for anyone of those whose journey GD Stash arguably shortens, there are probably a dozen whose journey got extended by 10s to 100s of hours because they now get to try builds they never would have bothered farming the gear for.
So I am not at all sure GD Stash has a negative effect on combined (i.e. across all players) total hours of GD played. I am however absolutely sure that neither of us knows with any level of confidence.
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That’s a subjective question. It’s going to depend on the individual.
Personally, if I gave myself all the items, I would lose interest pretty fast, which is why all my non-testing characters are geared self-found (across all my non-testing characters).
For someone else, the allure of putting the loot puzzle together is more exciting than hunting for loot itself.
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I meant across all players, not per person, there the answer will differ widely (edited the OP to make this more clear 
)
fair enough, that still means it condenses the grind down that you otherwise would need for your learning journey, but it does so in more ways than just item farming
I just looked at that thread and searched for ‘stash’. I did not find a single occurrence, so not sure how you pieced this together - unless there is another thread I should have looked at instead.
Also, I do not understand those numbers to be a final tally but simply the current number of hours at that time, see e.g. “192 hours and counting!”, “680 hours and rising”, “about 200 and still going strong” and others. So not sure you can really derive anything from this.
I got feedback from a few players saying they would have quit GD a long time ago if not for GD Stash, whether it allows them to try builds or because they could recreate their collection after they somehow lost it, obviously this is anecdotal, but that is still more than what I found in that thread
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Depends on the situation you’re in. I’ve played strictly campaign SF for long time and would’ve quit long time, before FG if I didn’t started to use GD stash and post my builds in the forum.
But GD stash does feel like you’re skipping grades in school, you went to your prime earlier at move to something else. Cause after you’ve seen it all, you have less incentive to continue playing. While playing SF only can get you the thrill of finding new rare item or defeating boss, you haven’t before.
I guess it’s part of the cycle. You start as noob, you get better understanding mechanics. Then start to make builds, initially you’re purist, only legit items, you disregard advices to use it and stash double rare greens or Alkamos rings. Then you start making these purple only builds or with attainable affixes for legit players only. After some struggles and the idea you have to level every class combo you don’t posses, lack of certain valuable items pushing you to GD stash. You start experimenting first, making characters with double rare greens only, which suck big time. Then you get better and join the “elitist” club. Your new responsibility is to patronize others or simply to aggravate them. Start posting feedbacks and claiming your builds are target nerfed. Then after while decide to disengage from all that process. But cycle continues for long period. Someone else will replace you. Someone better or worse? Only time will tell!
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And returning players who have recovered from burnout. 
+1 to this. I’ve only used GD Stash as a workaround for the painfully low drop rate of warrants. Grinding Val, Ben, and Moose over and over and over and over again, every night, very rarely getting a precious warrant (or anything else of any use - but tons of MI shoulders I don’t care about, because that’s a guaranteed drop… 
) was getting exceptionally tedious. I can’t be certain I would have burned out again if I hadn’t used GD Stash, but it’s very possible.
Regarding this topic as a whole, honestly, I’m amused. I normally start playing games when they’re “dead” in the sense that certain posters in this thread mean. GD is a rare exception because a friend of mine was so full of praise for it, and I’m glad I listened to her. But if I hadn’t I’d likely have picked up the game later this year or early next year, long after this alleged “death” of the game and/or community… 
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Tomorrow it’ll be 3 years since Ashes was released on 11th October 2017. Time does fly when you’re having fun.
Yeah, I said in the discord that I gave it a crap title because I couldn’t think of a better one. I suck at forum titles. 
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I cant be the only one who finds the humor in builds.
I’ve played with one guy in particular for hundreds of hours. When we play with a random who was following a build we’d chuckle on comms.
Builders like to create and share their creation. It’s a good thing. Not mandatory to get the full experience of this game, though.
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okay, so thread had been derailed a bit, so i’m gonna remind (or explain, cause i might have done it poorly at the first place) my points and why i believe in them:
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There’re very few crucible players left. By that i mean vocal ones, because they’re the only one we can hear, see and all the stuff related. Moreover, i highly doubt that people, who don’t paricipate (at least to some degree) in forum’s life, care about crucible speedruns. And by saying 12 people, i actually mean around 12 people. Let’s count the ones, that are speedrunning crucible till today. We have - Nery, Slev1n, Roman, Crit, me, Valinov, one guy from russian discord, Eard, Firozo, Kos9k, RetalAbuser, AlkamosHater (not sure about him though) and …? i might have forgotten someone, so feel free to prolong this list.
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Also, and it’s imo is important here, i was replying to this comment:
- which represents not the attitude of developers, but community’s one. Some amount of people (i’m generalising here) still think that due to extraordinary CR performace balance will alter. But they believe it’s unjust (or it seems like it), not because CR-metric is irrelevant, but because items there are not fair. Thus, they are concerned that devs cannot find a difference between legal and stashered build. At the end of the day, both will be affected by this “alteration”. moreover, we see word “again”, which means that the very same thing happened it the past. So even if devs actually don’t balance solely around CR, community (yet again i’m generalising, but look what Ceno wrote) see it the other way around.
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I’ve never said that the game is dead - it’s clealy not. I’ve seen a lot of new player here, in discord and in Saf’s discord. However, i’m not the only one who says that the forum
is a ghost town. Previosly, even 4 months ago, forum was alive. -
People do not understand what timings/depth means, and why they make sense only being comparative. If all clear times will be increase/decrease by a minute or two - nothing will change.
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It’s hard to propose any change, when you’ve achieved some results. People see you as an egoistick prick, who just wants bigger numbers. It’s not even about devs not reacting to this, but rather about community’s reaction. You are sort-a being stigmatized. Zantai said about all recent QoL changes been forced by community’s feedback, however, if you checked those threads, you would see a war, between egotoxicelitists and other forum members, where lattest acuse the first of wanting buffs solely to their builds to infale their ego even further (or smtg like that). which might be true for some cases, but definitely not always. And every time you think about proposing any change, you imagine this same dialogue in your head and just give up trying to do something. For me that always the case.
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And lastly - endgame. I’d say that nearly every build (close to 100%), can beat engame if it has all resistances covered up, good amount of armor, and at least some amount of damage. MC is not a challenge, and saying that if build can beat MC - everything’s fine is a deadend. It’s good that every mastery combination can complete MC, but that doesn’t mean that balance is perfect or that nothing should be done about it. DEE is a good example - people been saying that’s it far behind any other skill in the game in terms of… well, everything (it’s really bad), but nothing really changers because: “it can beat MC, therefore everything is fine, you just want more numbers to whatever” . Time passes, DEE continuing being a lackluster. Someone will definitely bring up homogeneity argument here, but when 99 skills performs at a certain relatively close level and one skill is far behind them all - it’s not a variety, it’s just a bad skill.
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This is a good point, i owned and played the game for about 2 years before i found and joined these forums.
Let’s see :
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12 people openly speedrunning an optional endgame mode seems healthy to me. I mean, that’s rougly the number I would expect from other speedrunning scenes for games of the same reach as Grim Dawn (we’re not talking Dark Souls, here).
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So the problem would be community’s perception of balance changes…Honestly, each time there is an update, I see much more positivity than negativity (probably because more things are buffed than nerfed overall). Thing is, negative people are much more vocal about #deadbuild. Positive posts go like “awesome, Crate, for still updating the game and introducing cool new options” while negative tend to go “what? You change X! My build revolved around X! It was my only build/you’re targeting my build! I will now explain in great detail why you’re wrong and should reverse the change.”
I do think it’s a problem of community’s perception’s perception more than anything.
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Z just said forum flux has stayed stable for a long time, and I suspect he meant much more than 4 months.
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Probably because most people do not experience the ultimate challenges, so they lack experience to understand. That being said, they also aren’t as impacted by potential nerfs, since they don’t play content where it would really matter.
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In response to your point, I’m always amazed at how suggestions by occasional players will be listened to by Crate. I’m a very occasional player, in the grand scheme of things, and I have made a few suggestions here and there to the best of my abilities, one or two posts that got almost no public traction whatsoever. And changes were made that reflected the fact the devs are reading everything. And I mean everything. But I feel suggestions are better made when you point out what needs changing, but not how you think it should be changed mechanically. Not only do I suspect it’s more useful for Crate (something along the line of establishing a watchlist whitout having preconceptions thrown at you), but I’d argue it’s less frustrating as the one making the suggestion : if the exact change you’re suggesting is not happening, it’s more frustrating than seeing something you pointed out being changed, if not how you would have imagined it. They listen. They’re not you, they don’t think like you, they don’t have the same info as you do, but they always listen.
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It’s not exactly a deadend. The Endgame cannot be easily defined. In fact, Crate has always tried to discourage a precise endgame definition. What is the Endgame? MC? Nemesis hunting? Rogue-like dungeons? Crucible 150-170? SR 50?60?65?75?
About your example of DDE. Yes, it’s considered in the low tier of damaging skills. I struggled to find a guide of high SR DDE spam clearer. But I did find it. So DDE being a bad skill is not that clear-cut. Support exist to make it shine. Maybe not as shiny as other options, but still, largely enough for the immense majority of players, and no, I’m not talking about just finishing the MC.
Do you mind sharing the link to the high SR DEE spam clearer you found?
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Which is why this exists:
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I am still here but less active due to few games to finish and some mobas in free time. I should be more active after some time, altough currently I am too lazy to make more detailed tests on few unposted builds with potential - it takes a lot of time to run crucible over and over with testing many options, then some superbosses, deeper sr (altough it’s fastest for me now), recording everything, uploading to youtube, writing thread.
About thread:
It’s kinda natural for single-player focused games, lack of real competetives do not motivate most people to play “real” endgame like crucible or deep sr and they do prefer just to chill on 65-75 shards with various builds or play campaign. It’s either normal to have like 99% community playing casualy and only few dedicated “try hards” wanted to reach maximum possible potential.
However I would like to see more players playing high sr or speedrunning crucible.
The next problem is that community is splited. There is official forum, reddit, discord (Crittain and Roman post many great builds here but seems less active on forum) and asians community with language barrier (chinese and japanese what I saw on youtube).
Personally I do not care much about nerfs, I threat patches as seasons. Next thing is that even with new items or modifiers introduced most builds with it are posted in few days after - and what then?
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DMT, you’re good. I thought they killed your character in this topic… multiple times.
And since we’re on pictures, here’s the big mystery, where are the builders/Waldo?
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Probably those 5 boys speedrunning the beach in 4 minutes in the right lower corner.
They have just run over some noobs that are on the beach for the first time.
The real question is where’s the lifeguard who’s about to ban them for a couple of weeks.
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