Oh man i used to love wheres waldo as a kid! I had the book this was in! I loved looking all over at what everyone was doing.
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The forum had activity in 40 threads in the last 24 hours (not counting the amount of replies in each one), so I dunno, the community seems pretty active to me. And we’re not even counting Discord, Reddit or Facebook groups.
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Wait, you devs are making personal builds of your own? Sounds logic, but never came to my mind. Hey Zantai, why don´t you post a build of your own some time, won´t you? 
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Chris Wilson of GGG (Path of Exile) claims that of all the players who DL the game and launch it something like 70% of players quit the game before they get past Hillock… The first little boss before you go into the first town in the starting area… So theres definitely something to players DLin games, checking them out for only a couple minutes, only to never touch it again.
As far as balance goes ive always thought that was one of Grim Dawns greatest Strengths at least in comparison to other ARPGs such as Diablo or POE. Grim Dawn has always been pretty good about Smaller changes and in BOTH directions. Hell a buff in POE for example only comes in the form of new shit being released OP. Otherwise if its powerful and too many people are doing too well with it? Its going to not only take a hit via nerf it typically ends up taking multiples hits essentially killing the skill/build. POE is the worst in this case they actually balance the game around rotating the meta around where what skills are good today most likely will get killed, left dead for while, then resurrected later on down the line to make it fresh again.
Grim Dawn is one of the few games i can walk away from for a year or more and come back and my builds still function about the same if not Better. I can NEVER say that about other ARPGs out there…
I don’t know if this is relevant but I’ll say why I quit. I used to post builds and do runs and contribute to the discourse leading to some of the nicest achievements in GD around the release and post FG.
Why I quit is simple. Game engine. Despite being able to run games like Doom Eternal on my PC, I couldn’t hope to compete with world class Crucible performance of the best builders/runners at the time because I was losing close to a second on the start of every wave due to weird performance hiccups. (Also because some real hardcore players came after my time…;))
But I’m writing this because this suggests another thing. In order for a game to be truly long lived, players MUST be given things to achieve/compete over. Why isn’t Crucible speedrunning standardized yet? Like there isn’t even an in-game timer yet. Or why isn’t there an official leader board?
In order for a game to achieve true longevity, endgame must get deeper and expand toward the dimension of competitive play and achievement, and community must have something to do TOGETHER. Single player focus is no excuse for failing to provide that.
Another reason I quit is endgame RNG. I used the word “achievement” in the last paragraph but what does it even mean in GD reality? Truth be told, I was getting kinda sick of some of the elite builders trying to argue that their solutions were better because they got this many seconds off crucible times. Everyone knows it’s all about mutators and enemy combos. Why was there no introduction of new official game modes where RNG impact is minimized, and pure build performance and piloting skills come to play? Because endgame is mostly about perfecting builds. The mechanisms of measuring that perfection must also evolve.
Another thing I didn’t like about GD balancing is the constant reprisal against glass cannon play style. But that’s a side thing.
Respectfully (really), this is something you should have made up your mind about long ago. Is SR a mode where bosses are to be fought one on one? Or is it about surviving the bumrush? Trying to combine both by making it 100% RNG dependent - in my opinion this is not entirely a “mature” solution. Obviously, and as was mentioned a million times already, because the difficulty spike from fighting an SR 90 boss one on one to fighting two of them (let alone all four of them) is just ridiculously high. SR design promotes the camera thing. From balance and playability perspective (my personal perspective ofc), SR is simply unplayable otherwise.
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Why would you have an official leaderboard for a single player offline game? And no, players mustn’t be given things to achieve/compete over. You set your own achievements, whatever they may be, but GD isn’t a competitive game no matter how hard you try and make it out to be. Crucible was never designed to be a speedrunner’s paradise; it’s a survival mode - can your build beat wave after wave after wave of foes to earn loot and glory. As said earlier in the thread only a small number of players even play Crucible/SR, most are exploring the main campaign, making new builds, just having fun overall.
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You return with a boom!
I am not certain about that paragraph though. There are lots of competitive games around, which revolves around results only. GD is very different in that regard. It’s more casual and being single player oriented, means you set the goals yourself. Some players like HC, some classless, weaponless, Crucible, superbosses or role playing. It’s not universal standard. I like of course to see more players interested in Crucible but not if that’s gonna change the core of the game. Also imagine the balancing and the flame wars after new patches in a competitive game. It will be a nightmare!
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Because the competitive side in the Crucible is something created by the players, the devs never intended the mode itself to be competitive. So expecting any type of online leaderboard is ridiculous in my opinion.
Honestly, i hate how much competitive this game got because this game was made purposely to avoid competition of that size since it’s single player focused. Some friendly competition here and here, mainly comparing builds to see how different they can be? Sure, it doesn’t hurt. But to the size it got? It was unnecessary in my opinion.
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I agree with all the replies. But that’s also the reason why after some time, some people realize there is not much left to do in the game. Competitiveness and achievement are a part of the definition of the word game. There is a point where the game environment itself stops being competitive itself, and players look to the community to find new dimension of competitiveness.
Uh, we did make up our minds long ago, and then the community asked us to leave the exploit alone, so we did.
Yeah, um, that’s kind of the point. Nobody was supposed to get that far, but the camera exploit allows it to happen.
It’s not a coincidence that loot stopped scaling past Shard 83.
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Seriously before banana and plasmo appeared I thought you were the best cruci runner along with john smith.
@Zantai, correct me if I’m wrong but the way I see it Crate is very pragmatic in terms of decision making that once they saw the patterns in sales dropping, they decided to support GD less (i.e. no more expansions) and start developing the new game instead. I think Crate has already achieved the goal of having loyal (can’t find the right word) fans of GD that if ever GD2 comes, we’ll be there waiting for it.
We could probably realistically make a reasonable profit on a third expansion, but felt the game was best served by stopping at two, both for the sake of not bloating GD to unreasonable levels and for the team to get a break.
We want to make products we are proud of, not churn stuff out cause it means more money.
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Make up your mind not about the camera exploit but about the reason why it is necessary: the super binary character of SR runs. Either manage aggro and win or fail to do so and lose. This single dimension of SR overshadows everything else: building, piloting, everything. The difference between dealing with one boss and four is too huge to be governed by RNG.
Uh, the difference is we never intended for you to pull one boss at a time, but to deal with all of them at once, which becomes unrealistic much sooner than what players are pushing now with the exploit. I’m not sure how to make this any more clear.
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The competitive community could lower the impact of RNG in Crucible or SR by doing multiple runs and taking averages.
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Well, it seems like most of people who play legit are using this exploit, cause it lowers build requirements and allow you to pass deeper shards with more, let’s say, available gear. so only a truly “”“moral”"" person would lower their farm potential and increase time to get end game gear by refusing to use the exploit. moreover, SR is very RNG-based and at the same time very repetative, so simply using exploit to decrease the time you have to spend on the thing you don’t really enjoy sounds kind-a reasonable
(actually, i was that “”“moral”"" guy who refused to use exploited, but that was after i discovered wonderful crafting aspect of GDStash, so i’d been doing it “the proper way” just to show that things that i’d made don’t need any glitches to be good, lol.)
Camera exploit shouldn’t be deleted, it makes sr more fun, less rng, faster. It’s either to possible to play without but player must die on opposite side of the room, it reposition bosses from the start and they will not gangbang. However it can makes it much longer, sometimes multiple deaths are necessary so room will take 30 min instead of 10.
Deleting whole agro abuse mechanic is not good either, it kills variety. I can do 80-90 without it with some builds, over 100 with warlord but some builds can go deep just fighting 1vs1 with proper piloting.
Monsters luring exists in many many games, from some MMOs to TQ to soulslikes, it’s not bad, it’s part of strategy.
With agro abuse delete we can as well delete death waystones.
Not to mention I’ve said repeatedly that difficulty scales rapidly after SR60 and it turns into an RNG fest we do not intend to balance for, but that’s fallen on deaf ears.
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FINALLY A THREAD TO FLEX MY NO CAMERA ABUSE ALLOWED SR75-76 TESTING EBUSHIDO!
(which means, yes, even complete builds sometimes get their shit pushed in and fail)
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I don’t know… I can easily do SR75 with all bosses at once, on normal difficulty…
Wait, it this not how you play SR? 