Exploring Path of Exile2: Pay for Convenience & Comfort

the stake size, it says

40, but it's pretty much unlimited. So I can now have 5,000 of these or whatever.
Stuff like that. Sheets.
Sheets. Then what they basically did at some point it started to be like a pattern that every league they added a shit ton of new currencies that would be around the deal, like for instance, Essence, and they would add an Essence tab.
So you want to interact with the newly currency, like kind of, you know, in order and properly by a new stash tab that's kind of specifically custom designed for that currency. Wow.
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My name is Matija Lančaric.

And I'm Jakub Remior.

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So we are covered.

We don't have Felix though.

He's in Seoul.

And we're going to be in Seoul in a few days as well

because we have an interesting event happening with Molokov, Sensor Tower, and Airbridge. So, what are we talking about today? PC game.
PC game. Okay, good.
Because before we go there, I mean, it's not really relevant to PC. I just want to announce we partnered with PVX Partners.
They're becoming a sponsor of our podcast because they're dear friends. I'm an investor in the company as well, and they're good guys.
And what they do is basically they want to be known as the folks that can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once your game have the metrics to back it out, actually. So it's non-dilutive and the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing.
So you don't really need to sell your soul and sell your shares. They actually scale your game, which is great.
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And, you know, you can work with a team that's entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors and some gaming folks as well. And they take the risk with you and, you know, you can scale fast, but you need to have the game to make it up.
So, you know, they don't give money to everyone. They actually pick their battles.
So that's, you know, they're looking into the metrics as well. So that's what I want to say.
These are the guys that can help fund your UAE. So me screaming at people that are telling me they have like inside metrics and I'm telling them, why don't you get the mortgage? Yeah, exactly.
This is the thing which is more practical than getting the mortgage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Go to pbxpartners.com. It's going to be in the show notes as well.
Don't get the mortgage, but get funding from pbxpartners rather than just the mortgage. So yeah, but this is exactly it I'm actually an investor in a few other companies and one of that company is signing with PVX partners and I just kind of found out about it so I didn't you know put any words behind yeah but the worlds collide I mean it makes sense because it's a great game with great metrics and this seems like a good match.
Of course, and they didn't get the mortgage. They didn't get the mortgage.
Yeah. Anyway, thank you very much PVX partners for parting up with us and it's going to be a lot of fun and great ride.

Back to the episode.

PC, as usual,

everybody knows what I want to talk about.

Of course, for some months.

Yeah, and now we're going to finally talk about Biggles

because one very interesting thing happened

which is quite important. I finally got to the endgame.

You, endgame, okay.

Yes, so we're talking about

Pet of Exile 2.

Matej's noises.

I fell asleep.

Sorry.

Jesus, guys.

This looks like Diablo.

I would say it's much darker, especially with the two submarines rotating around my character yeah oh submarine nice look so I I think I download dark and darker first but I already bought PetalExile to the first early access whatever noob version for 30 for 30 dollars no 200 or whatever was there yeah we're gonna talk about it more definitely as it kind of unfolds but uh yeah to give people a little bit of a background here or like i'm gonna do a little bit of history episode because i think a lot of time where people are talking about this game, they just don't understand the context of what these guys achieved and how they got here.

So we're going to go to memory lane.

At some point, I'm going to log in even part of Excel 1.

Of course.

Show some important things here.

Before we start, I want to stress, this is not a game for everyone.

It's super, super hardcore.

That's what I think.

But it's very popular.

It's super, super hardcore. That's what I think.

But it's very popular.

It is. It is.

The heads off.

It's definitely popular and

I want to

find time to play this, but that's the thing.

If this is

as complex as Bed of Exile 1,

I'm just not going to do it I would say like 10% less complex as much as they can do you were pitching this as a very streamlined version like this is going to be super easy and I was like okay they just shave off like 10% of complexity that's it it. Okay, well, in that case,

in that case, I just

threw $30 out of the

window. Okay, thank you very much.

I should

just put this after the episode,

not before the episode.

Okay, so guys,

yeah, the listeners, this should...

Why are we even talking about

this? So we're talking about

this because of this, of course,

which is the Steam Charts graph

Thank you. The listeners, this should...
Why are we even talking about this? So we're talking about this because of this, of course,

which is the Steam Charts graph of FedExcel 2.

So if you look at it,

the early access started December 6th, if I understand correctly, or 7th, I don't know.

And from there, we hit this kind of all-time peak

of 578k

players online.

It went a little bit on

decline, but that's normal in Bed of Exile

lifecycle, so that's nothing new

here. But especially because

this is early access, and I'm going to talk

about it a little bit more. The important

thing when you're looking at these numbers, you need

to keep in mind that this is just Steam numbers. The company is, I would say, not pretty big.
It's not like thousands of people. It's still hundreds of people.
Guys are based from New Zealand. And I remember playing beta for Pet of Xelan when launched in 2013, actually.
So it's very, very kind of old and crafty. And what they're doing here is that it's one of those, like, we mastered the category, mastered the genre, mastered the game, and you just see the end result of it.
Similar what we've seen with Helldiver, similar what we've seen with Baldur's Gate 3, so on and so forth. If we look at the charts, actually, of Fed of Exile 1, and this is even more interesting here, you can see that they pretty much hit their all-time peak in July this year after being online for literally 11 years.
And they were still going up. Because Path of Exile, and their RPG system lives in these three-month cycles that they kind of invented here, where each three months, there's a new league, which resets the whole economy of the current game.
If you're playing the new league, you can still play in standard, where the economy is completely fucked. Nobody cares about that, to be honest.
Everybody starts from fresh, because three months league goes on, everybody needs to build their new characters, so on and so forth, and there's usually a new mechanic. You can only play the mechanic in the league, you can't play in the standard.
It gets put into

standard if it's good

later down the line after the league. Sometimes it

doesn't because it's shit.

Could be shit. Yeah, they killed

some of these mechanics. It's like, you know,

they're not geniuses.

They're very good, but sometimes they

can do mistakes.

But what this thing does, as

you see these peaks, so

it's what, I don't think so

they always try this thing because

Thank you. They can do mistakes.
But what this thing does, as you see these peaks, so it's what... I don't think so.
They always try this thing because from beta, I remember we were doing like act one to act three in three difficulties for like two years or three years. I don't know how much.
My head was blown off by running the same content all over the game back then in the dog runs. But the game got built up.
That happened to us with Diablo 4 because we played beta and that was amazing. When I played the real game I was like fucking hell.
No, Diablo 4. We, both of us.
We played the beta for like both weekends and it's like oh this is

great and then the game came

out like fuck this is terrible

the content is

not yeah it's bad

same happened

with Diablo 3 by the way the beta was great

the content was definitely not that good

yeah

anyway so

just saying that this model kind of works

very well and keep in mind

Thank you. the content was definitely not that good.
Yeah, anyway, so just saying that this model kind of works very well, and keep in mind, they are free to play. Path of Exile 1 is free to play.
Path of Exile 2 will be free to play. It's not free to play yet.
I mean, it's like, it is free to play. You can, you know, you can wait until it's...
Yeah, you can wait until it's free to play, but it's not free to play now, just stating the obvious here. You need to buy into it through the packages on the website, which are, we can go over those, by the way, here.
So if we go literally into the shop and then like buy packs then yeah you see that you can buy these like access packs and stuff like that that's me 30 dollars yeah so just the base 30 dollar kind of pack can give you access and of course you get still the points that you can use for micro transactions andactions. We cover those.
But this can go all the way into something like, if I just zoom here. Yeah, what's that? No, there's a previous extension.
Yeah, here we go. It's like 500 something.
Yeah, 450, which gives you also a t-shirt, hoodie, a book, and I don't know what, basically. It used to be like you could design a unique item with the team and stuff like that.
So a lot of kind of perks, basically. So, but back to the numbers.
So these guys pretty much developed this system in their very specific unique version of free-to-play. And they've been running it for many, many years now.
And what they they're achieved also and you need to kind of keep this in mind is that they've been building content and so much content because each three months they basically release a diablo like expansion onto the game with like new stuff new skills new content new bosses new everything new mechanics then it gets tested for three months they fine-tune it then they decide if it was good or bad usually the community sentiment is pretty strong about this if it's good or bad and then they put it into the main game and it upgrades the main game and then the cycle repeats so what happened with pad of excel 2 is their shit ton of content already because it was taken from pedo excel 1 which they already tested and know that it's very good so if you look at the structure of the game actually what happened here and this was talking their video is that um they know that the campaign and like the initial, let's say, single player experience, the story and everything. Like currently, for instance, Act 1 to Act 3 takes like 25 hours and they know the end game takes like hundreds of hours and everybody just wants to play that.
And they had this very, very smart decision with the team that for early access, instead of fully the campaign they rather fleshed out the end game talk about the end game and they just said okay we won't build act four five six for the early access we'll build it only for the release yeah we rather put you through act one two and three again on just a higher difficulty and that's it because you fly through it anyway and

another focus on endgame which I think is a very

good decision. That is because

you want to play the endgame which

should be the most time

you spend afterwards because you've

run through the campaign. This happened

with Diablo 4. Exactly.

Which didn't have any endgame. Yeah, there's no endgame.

Just traditional endgame. Exactly the opposite direction as Diablo 4 was doing, basically.
Now they're fixing the endgame. Before it was just broken.
Yeah, so we have this and yeah, let's talk about the game, actually. So about the endgame, we can look through it.
Now they have this kind of very, very nice world fleshed out in these kind of nice maps. So you start in Act 1.
There are these, don't want to spoil the story that much. I think the story is kind of pretty good.
But it's much more boss-driven these times. So there's many, many, many more bosses.
The game, as everybody is talking about it, is like the Dark Souls or ARPGs which isn't really the best comparison but it is let's say if you want to have like a surface level understanding of this yes it can be said like that so it's kind of hard and you need to because there was this one mechanic added which is the dodge roll thing which is very very iconic for these Souls games where your character just needs to dodge a lot of attacks which can one shot you and insta kill you during the boss fights that's how they balance around this game isn't balanced like Pet of Exile 1 where you just face tank the laser beams and whatever and stuff like because i have so much armor and whatever yeah here it's like if you stand and shit you'll die if you wait for somebody to swing a giant hammer on you you'll die it's very simple so uh yeah it's not i would say it's not that hard as the usual kind of masochistic core version of dark souls where it's like you really like the pain of you dying all the time nonstop until you learn completely perfect post mechanics and everything. And you can kind of get there, like Eldering stuff.
But it's still much more harder. It's much more punishing, definitely much more punishing.
We'll talk about that later. But yeah, and people like it, by the way.
That's also why people like the dark souls games and why dark souls is like even the eldering game is one of the most popular games and there is hard it's hard exactly it's hard people like difficulty if it's done properly people like difficulty they don't really like steamroll through content yeah where did we where did we see that oh wait a second we are warriors exactly same thing same fucking thing because it's hard it's challenging and i just want to play and get better just until i figure it out that's exactly challenging stuff in that properly is very important to do and it's popular it's it's not that like as you see there like it's 400 it's what like top 10 was it on steam what was it on steam i think like we will have like eu numbers which is like lower because america is sleeping but yeah even now it's like top three on steam currently after america is sleeping it's middle of the day for you guys what are you talking about well dear listeners this is a night show late night show for yeah for a discussion live it's definitely not like america sleeping but it's still like top three game on steam and as i said even counting the steam numbers i still think they're like less than half for what the actual numbers are because there's consoles and there's a native client that people are used to play this game through native client not steam so still uh and also epic epic yeah i bought it through epic yeah so i'm guessing like i think they said already that during launch there were more than 1 million ccu so definitely the the numbers are just much higher yeah anyway moving on and why this game even makes money and what's the free to play part of it and why are we talking about this so disregarding the difficulty we can like finish the mechanics a little bit so we play through these act one act two which is a desert area act three which is a jungle area they're kind of continuing their nice uh kind of team from the first game where you have these like Val civilizations which are these like corrupted whatever like basically Maya team stuff Corrupted whatever sounds really good because it's all about this kind of corruption thing and then you're chasing these bees of corruption whatever after you play through it you see Act 1 is pretty much through the cruel difficulty which is the big one and all these things will be basically removed so you will have Act 1 to Act 7 and then you hit the end game and this is really important. Jesus looks like a 4x map.
Exactly fucking hell like 4x map of Heroes of Mind and Magic, basically. Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's true. That's true, yeah.
So what's happening here, the guys really fleshed out their endgame, and I mean like really fleshed out. I think it's much more interesting, at least.
What did you do here? What did you do here? In the previous game, the game would end up in endgame, which would be the Atlas of Maps.

And it's a mechanic where you want to run through content all the time, and there needs to be some kind of additional progressions.

So, because they have, by the way, they have their own skill tree, as usual, the player skill tree, which is this, our favorite skill tree.

Jesus Christ. It, by the way, got simplified a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely.

Life got removed from it,

so it's much more simpler, but

yeah, not for

the usual player.

But why not?

There's also a skill tree

for the Atlas.

So what's happening here

that also your Atlas has a skill tree tree which is much much less uh complex but still you have it so atlas is this end game uh it is basically this atlas of maps which is the end game area so it's the it's it's what you play in the end game yeah the world so your quest line ends basically here ends basically here, and the guy tells you, like, run maps and stuff like that. And this is how you pretty much get to the endgame boss fights, the final content of the game, and, like, the hardest part of the game, whatever, you kind of get there.
Yeah. So how do you run this thing is basically you start here in your Ziggurat Refuge, which is basically end of campaign.
The story kind of switches into switches into whatever. And then you have these maps around you.
So let's say I completed this one, I completed this one, and you can see that I can only go to connecting once. So from this one, I can go here, here, here.
I cannot go here because I need to complete this map. So you need to pretty much eat your way through it.
So for instance, I see here there's a boss here in Sump, which I can go through. Which I can find through.
So I go here, I pick, let's say, I don't know, Tier 2 Wainstones here. I go to Map Device.
And here I insert it and I could go into the map and pretty much area has plus one two-level monsters. Area contains a deadly map boss.
And now you start to see that like some of these maps are different than the others. Because let's say the map here has boss.
The map here has Lyrium. The map here has nothing.
And so on and so forth. There are these like bigger fortresses.
Let's say the Lost Towers are the ones if I understand correctly you complete the map and it reveals an area around it literally like in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 looks exactly the same and then you have these like special buildings which are containing like keys to the big bosses and stuff like that for instance here I have the realm gate If I would have the keys, I can go to big bosses from there. And you can have like whatever kind of different things spawn these maps.
The important part is it's infinite. This goes infinite.
So if I go, for instance, here at the end of the screen, you see this goes infinite. What? Yes.
How? How and why? Why? Because you have all these different modifiers and if you would say if i but i don't have the life to complete this game you don't complete it ever okay yeah okay thank you very much for listening guys this is it yeah you don't come very simple but but the thing is that they have different rewards to kind of complete your character that's maybe the thing because my character for instance is level 69 infernalist

and I'm going to but the thing is that they have different rewards to kind of complete your character that's maybe the thing because my character for instance is level 69 infernalist you hit a level 100 kind of level ceiling that's it, you can go over level 100 but it gets very very hard afterwards because if you die in this game you lose experience actually so if you keep you stop leveling, which means the content will be just always stronger than you, and you need to change your build, get better items, blah, blah, blah. Stuff like that.
But the system is just great because, and that's why I'm talking about this, because there are these mechanics like breach, like delirium, like bosses, like, what's that? Precursor tablets or whatever that you see here, Simulacrum. What I'm saying is that each of these different mechanics that they built are previous leaks compared to Excel 1.
So this is three months of content, three months of content, three months of content, three months of content, three months of content already. Already, yeah.
That they translated into this game that they worked into. And there's also the Ultimatum and Sanctum League.
So they basically took like content from something like 10 leagues, which is like 30 months of work, basically, I would say. And then the base game, of course.
Okay. So this game has a giant head start against everybody else, basically, in the ARPG genre, because it took everything good from Path of Exile 1 and put it into Path of Exile 2.
That's what's happening. It's not perfect.
There are giant problems, which still are are i mean like community-wise giant like not that like people are kind of freaking over but end game players are freaking over i'm also freaking over because armor is kind of useless here and i'm completely useless and everybody is now switching to energy shield and yeah don't really want to get into specifics but everybody thought that they could play their character with life and And armor-based builds, no, they can't because armor is shit. And everybody's now switching to energy shield, which literally, like this one armor here that I have in my thing, which is like, cost nothing, can just give me instantly like 1,000 energy shield, which is just much more efficient.
If I would have spagged into energy shield, like 6,000, basically. So why.
So why bother with armor at least? Whatever. If you want more, go watch Crips videos basically.
He explains stuff here. So that's one big problem.
The other big problem is magic find stat on gear, like rarity basically. So everybody is now specking into rarity, which means that you have stuff like increased rarity of items, which concerns the currencies.
And you can get observed levels of these, like 500% increase on your gear, which means that somebody is basically playing a piñata simulator and you are doing like desert. Like, where's the loot? Where's the loot? Yeah, where's the loot? and yeah people are doing absurd levels and economy is kind of

being in desert like where's the loot where's the loot and yeah people are doing absurd levels and economy is kind of being inflated very heavily now like if you go to currency exchange now just to kind of give you an example the divine orbs are the currency to trade to these days and they cost 126 for like exalted orbs to one divine or when i started league and like kind of looking it was 60 it was like seven days ago okay that tells you about the speed of inflation yeah so uh everybody is basically waiting for the developers to return after holiday break and they'll like nerf stuff heavily.

So that's probably going to happen.

It says early access for a reason.

For a reason.

What did you expect?

I mean, I'm really surprised sometimes when I read the reviews in early access or beta, I was like, oh, this doesn't work.

Like, oh, no, no.

That's the thing that in the current age, if you early access on Steam, that's your global release date, basically. And everybody take it as that.
Like, that's how it works. Yeah, okay, fair.
The number of impressions you get from Steam, the hype and everything, like, that's it. I know, yeah.
That's how, unfortunately, it works. But the good thing is that these guys still have a lot of content.

So you won't get, they are definitely not content starved.

Because even if you look this, they still have like half of the classes in.

There will be like two times more classes, two times more sentences.

I don't know how many more skills, basically.

Like if I go into skills, you could see that, for instance, here, that all of these skills, for instance, like X skills go into skills you could see it yeah that but for instance here that all these skills for instance like x skills sword skills uh spear skills they're just like basically half of the skills are not even here so they're still like have a shit ton of stuff to add in so content's not the problem they will be adding loads of content the game will be by the way going into free-to-play global release this year. They said basically between 6 to 12 months of early access.
So it could be somewhere between June and December, which my guess will be December. Most probably.
Before Christmas. As usual.
You don't want to rush these things and you can fine-tune forever. Why they just got some some interesting money from the early access.
I'm pretty sure. Yeah, they got very interesting money from the early access.
Based on the concurrent users. Yeah.
So in my opinion, the game's great. Still, it's very great for normal players.
Like a lot of people are playing this in this kind of solo self-found mode where basically it disables trading. So you cannot trade with other players.
You can only use stuff, what you find. It's still a very enjoyable experience.
I want to play this as a single player. I don't really want to play it.
You can. Literally, if you go and let me show you.
So in the character creation screen, you can literally create a new character. And you see, like, solo cell phone.
So hardcore means only one dead per character. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Don't do this. No, right.
Yeah, but if you click solo cell phone, this option disables trade and party play for this character. So you literally, like, make this game single player.
They have this option for people like you. Yeah, yeah, this streamers are playing this.
This is absolutely me. I don't want to play with anyone else.
I started playing Pedal Vex 1 and there was always a shit ton of people. Guys, get rid of my...
No. Just no.
I don't want you here. I really don't want you here.
Yeah, so they have this option here. It's not a problem.
Let's talk about the microtransaction, how this actually works, and I can showcase how and why it actually works. I think this is the first game we can say you actually spend money because you had to buy.
I spent big money, this. buy what you mean on microtransaction? of course, I have like $200 here oh really nice so you actually spend money it's just not on mobile I choose what I spend on okay research purposes Whatever.
Yeah. So if we go to the cosmetic screen, basically, and this is the very important thing that a lot of people don't get because on the surface, it looks like, oh, this game is just pure cosmetics only.
It's not. And it's definitely not.
It's done very, very, like, smartly, cleverly, and they know what they're doing now after all those 11 years they very well know what they're doing and it's definitely not cosmetics only i know what you mentioned on the previous podcast that pay for comfort and just extending the stash and uh but not not only that there's like two major things that you can do which gives utility that the game can support through microtransactions. So cosmetics is just cosmetics.
They are, by the way, I would call them the masters of the skin economy. Because what Pet of Exile did is basically, in the beginning, when my character was just this, they would just double the inventory.
Maybe I can... Give me a second.
I can load in Pet of Excel 1. I'll show you.
Yeah, okay. Because what they did, they started the game with the same cosmetic slots as your normal game.
So if we have... Yeah, it's loading.
If we have our normal character here, of course you can change like, where we are, yeah. So you can change your whatever head, shield, whatever, stuff like that.
So it started like that. And then this is the cosmetic screen now.
So there's skins for stuff you don't even know it exists. So this started as the originally this thing, and then it ended up in this monster.
Just check how many slots there are. And this is the main number one problem with cosmetic economies, that when you have limited amount of slots, you can only add so much cosmetics into one slot that it makes any impact.
Because if I have, let's say, an armor skin or whatever, helmet skin,

and I will have now 300 helmet skins, does it make any sense?

It doesn't.

Like, why should I, if I have like five or three that are like my favorite.

But if you add another slot, suddenly I'll need to put something there

and I'm going to buy it.

So that's what they're doing, basically. so they don't have just the basic inventory things they have like weapon effects which is literally like particle effects they have uh like charred skin what they were footprints literally like the footprints you leave behind they have hip attachment character effects effects, literally like stuff just flowing around you.
That's it. Then they have flaskings.
So literally these flasks will have different colors. They have like so much pads, like where we are.
Yeah, let's say my wetas here. There we go.
You have pads. You have even your cursor has a skin, literally.
Of course. Your portrait, your frame, your belt, your I don't know what.
Everything, yeah, nice. I even have apparition, which is this thing that literally if you stand in place for a while, it can, like this kind of ghost goes from you, which I think should be triggered basically in a second.
Yeah, there we go. See? So they're literally creating these slots as they go, and they're like, you never heard of these.
And they have so many of these. This is one of the main strength of their cosmetic economy, by the way, also, that they have just so many slots that you didn't even heard of, and you need to have

something for them, because it makes sense.

And also, this is the other

important thing, each one of

the skill effects that

are in the game have their own skins, of course.

Like, you can have, like, I don't know,

instead of fireballs, you can throw cats

and stuff like that.

They literally have a skin for it.

Used to have it. And yeah, it's just, like, done very cleverly.
After like 11 years, you get wild ideas and you need to get them because you run out of space. So that's seller number one.
Seller number two is the convenience part. So if you look here and we go to the where we are to the not the featured but let's say yeah the shop so there are stash tabs and this is the convenience part so there's gem stash tab flask stash tab currency stash tab premium stash tab whatever stash tab, flask stash tab, currency stash tab, premium stash tab, whatever stash tab.
It's also fractured in different stuff. Yeah.
So if you look at it, this is, for instance, the currency stash tab. If I wouldn't have this, I can demonstrate right now.
Like this thing, it doesn't even let me put into different tabs. So you see, it's like stacks by 40.
So if I would want to pull this, I can't on top of each other. Because in the normal free-to-play shit tabs, the max stack size is 40.
If I go to currency the stake size

it says 40 but it's pretty much unlimited

so I can now have

5,000 of these or whatever

stuff like that

then

what they basically did

at some point it started to be like a pattern

that every league they added a shit ton of new currencies that would be around the day, like, for instance, Essence, and they would add an Essence tab. So you want to interact with the newly currency, like kind of, you know, in order and properly, buy a new stash tab that's kind of specifically custom designed for that currency.
Even not a lot, all of these are here, basically, And they have a lot of them. I think just a few of them are here translated into Path of Exile 2, but I think there's 15 of these basically in the main game.
There are also these, where is it? Quad tab is basically a tab and a size of four tabs in one. These guys are super creative at this thing.
And then, so you see the utility here. It's just much, much more better to do everything basically.
Way better. And now comes the kicker.
There are these premium tabs. Why premium? Because if I click here, you see you can still sort some stuff or like do things here but you cannot do this which is public so what i can do is basically i can put items here and sell them to other players so if i go here let's say on pedo excel trade and I search for an item, I can pretty much directly whisper to a player to kind of get this item from him.
Like, I want to buy an item for this price because it's basically an auction house. Yeah.
And for me to be able to list items here, I would need to buy this premium stash taps. And this is a big difference where Diablo 3 basically failed horribly when they're trying to add auction housing to the economy, where these guys are basically locking the functionality of you selling, not buying.
Anyone can go there and buy it. Even if I'm free to play, I can just go there.
But you can't sell. But you can't sell.
You can go on forums and Discord and sell manually, basically. Yeah, yeah.
But everybody knows how well that goes. Yeah.
Or you can't sell but you can't sell you can go on forums and discord and sell manually basically yeah but everybody knows how well that goes yeah or you can buy premium stash traps and then you can then index your items here and pretty much like as you said like exact price negotiable don't blah blah blah and you you know pick the price of it that's it and then in then in like 10 seconds, pretty much the API takes it

and it's on the side on the auction house.

Because auction houses kind of destroy the ARPG loop

in a way that you just go and buy the items

and then what do you do?

And by the way, everything's tradable in PEDAWX.

There's nothing that's not tradable.

Like in Diablo, nothing's tradable.

In PEDAWX, everything's tradable.

Because the whole game is basically based a lot around the economy and trading.

So still a lot of people just don't trade at all.

And I mean like they won't.

But there's this, the power players and like the top end of the players, they engage a lot with the economy.

Even with these like inflation cycles and stuff like that. Usually, currently, it's not done for Ped of Exile 1.
Sorry, Ped of Exile 2, basically. But there's this site that we would always use where you have like...
Boy Ninja. Boy Ninja, where you would see like what's the basically...
It's like a stock trading index, basically. But you will see which item costs how much in the

league and you can see for instance

let's me pick like

whatever divine orb

and you see how it inflates you see

yeah

so that's how it goes basically

in the beginning of the league because there's scarcity

it's nobody has anything

and then like as the currency accumulates

in the economy it inflates away

and so on so forth that's why they're resetting the economy

every three months that's why it works

Thank you. nobody has anything and then as the currency accumulates in the economy it inflates away and so on and so forth that's why they're resetting the economy every 3 months that's why it works if we go here again same thing 3 months is enough time to actually play and get somewhere usually complete all the goals that they do set up within these progressions because they have usually some kind of skin progression that you can unlock through the three-month period, like kill these bosses, even some kind of achievements, like kill it without whatever, dying, kill it without using any potions, blah, blah, blah, stuff like that.
So they have it here. But as you saw here, trading is an important part of the game if you play the trade league.
If you don't play the trade league, of course, if you don't. But for big players and like the ones, especially the ones on the ladder, they are.
So if we go to ladder, for instance, so these are the people you see that are pretty much on the ladder, like the top, top of the top. So there's one guy in the whole game that's basically level 100.
And there's like a lot of other guys level 99 behind me, but only one guy on level 100 in the whole game basically in 3D. Okay.
That's how hard it is, by the way. These are more hardcore than streamer level guys.
These are people that are literally two people playing ground character, one plays while the the other sleeps and so on and so forth that is normal if you're going for like world first 100 like you do this cycle one guy is sleeping the other guy is playing of course you don't have time to waste yeah yeah waste yeah, yeah. Waste time.
Yeah. So that's what you do.
Yeah. So that's basically like how these guys kind of make the systems here and why they have this kind of currency and everything.
It's like how it works great for them. Because also every currency, I think this is the first time they introduced gold, like this kind of a soft currency in Pedavex L2.
In Pedavex L1 one there's nothing like it because all these currencies are basically consumable and they help you to craft like items here for instance if i would let's say whatever put something here and like put this item it would add one more rare modifier into it because it can have six mods so on so forth blah blah blah so all these things you pretty much slam into the items and craft them the the big differences of course between pedo x01 and two is the skill system as you saw on the previous image when i log in pedo x01 my skills are no longer on the gear and i don't need to match their colors and stuff like that this is the 10% yeah thank you thank you very much which i think is great from design standpoint because it unlocks more build diversity and more kind of easier kind of building your gear. So you don't need to kind of be stressed about like, I'm going to break my character because I can't use my skills properly now.
So the skills are now here and all of them can be six linked. You just need to find the currency for it.
But yeah, as I said. Okay.
So you still need to find the currency. Yeah.
but even previously you okay so you still need to find the currency yeah but i even previously you would need to but it's just like easier but the skill tree is a little bit streamlined the atlas skill tree is definitely streamlined is like one third of it basically on skills so that's there but still the i think the where we are the end game system like these like this thing is is just genius because it's just a base version of it. I can't imagine what they will do when they get leak mechanics into it because I remember when Atlas was first-time devising Pedagogical 1, it was literally, at some point later down the line, it was this fight between these two entities, Shaper and the Elder.
So you would literally need to join forces with one against the other or whatever to kind of spawn it. So you would have, like, I don't know how many mathematical combinations of, like, running this map or that map or really do this.
And it's, like, super engaging. And so this is their pretty much metagame layer they put on top of running the maps or running dungeons, basically.
Because in Diablo, you have just, like're running the dungeons. You get some points, whatever stuff like that.
You unlock something in this progression. This is much more complex.
And as you saw, like this is years of content locked behind these. All of these, like the breach mechanic here, the hand that you see here, the bosses, the corruption, the delirium mechanic, the expedition mechanic, the ritual mechanic, all of these have their own kind of like setups, own currency, own progression.
There's like 10 or 15 progressions basically that you're pretty much going on at one time. So that works perfectly.
And I think once like all of these things will get patched and addressed,

and they will, because they already started doing patches like day two, day three of early access to kind of...

You have to.

Yeah, you have to.

You have to, especially with this giant DAU.

But I'm guessing that somewhere close, like middle of January,

when the team returns from Holidays, there will be a massive patch.

Mid-January when the team returns from Holidays,

what are you talking about? What do you mean? You need to work hard as fuck. I know but you need to return from holiday first and then you need to work on it and then you're actually...
The studio is owned by Tencent but it's not Chinese. Yeah that's what I...
Exactly. That was my point.
Yeah, so in my opinion, they just don't have currently a competition in the ARPG genre from design standpoint. And yeah, my guess is this is still bigger DAU than Diablo 4 itself.
Like Steam numbers, Diablo 4 is like 15, 20K DAU or something, but most of their numbers is on Battle.net it's not on Steam it's not their platform at all so it's not that

low of course but my guess is it's still

lower than Pet of Exile

everybody's bitching about it honestly

and like dropping like flies

basically right after

there wasn't any update

that's worth

playing or returning

back to Diablo 4 yet

and the thing is that this DAU

like as I said

Thank you. it's worth playing or returning back to Diablo 4 yet.
And the thing is that this DAU, like, as I said, this DAU is, if somebody tells you, like, oh, this is dropping, you do that, it won't. Pet of Exile players are pretty much trained that they will go, play the content for, like, one to two months, and then they return back when the new league hits.
And this has been happening for 15, sorry, 11 years in Battle of Exile 1. And it's all time high just this summer.

So last summer.

So it's not that like, oh, it's good.

No, it's not going down.

It's just taking on more people, actually.

Because in this game, you're not rushed to kind of play all the time live ops wise.

You need to be here. It's like

much more closer to something like World of Tanks

World of Battleships

still the complexity

you actually

you don't need to play but you need to read

all the fucking builds and everything

on the internet which takes a long

time. You don't need to read the build but

you'll fail hard then. Yeah exactly

So come on

They actually made it a little

bit better here if I go here and

Thank you. So let's say you're here.
And these are the recommended skills. I can go to all gems and these are all the skills.
But if, let's say, I'm going whatever. Occultist.
are the recommended skills for you at each level. Okay.
So they're putting some card rails here. My guess is that they will put more and more, but this is not the main problem for the game they need to solve.
So because, you know, there's like more than 500k daily people playing it.

So they're solving much bigger problems,

which are systemic problems within the design of the RPG.

As I said, the ARM problem,

the eternal problem of melee characters being worse than caster and ranged characters

because they just need to get to the mobs,

which means they hit much more often by the mobs

than the other characters.

So a lot of the other characters.

So a lot of these other issues.

You have to dodge, so you need to dodge the attacks. Yeah, you have to dodge and then you die.

If you don't, yeah.

Yeah, so a lot of things.

And I'm really looking forward to how they will kind of move from this

because my guess is they will need to probably ramp up the team a little bit

to kind of run all the things.

Because there are two teams, actually.

Because originally, by the way,

whilst history piece here,

originally this was meant to be upgrade of Battle of Exile 1.

Battle of Exile 1 was supposed to cease to exist.

Really?

This was supposed to be the Clash of Clans second world?

Counter-Strike.

Counter-Strike 2.

Okay, Counter-Strike.

So Counter-Strike is Counter-Strike, and everything else was pretty much just patched out and there's the new Counter Strike it was supposed to be like it, it's not and I think in the end it was a very very good decision because a lot of time this is not for everyone and because they slowed the game so much with this kind of Dark Souls rolling and everything mechanic and and people were used to Bed of Exile 1 gameplay of Zoom Zoom, where you would literally do 30 seconds, and then you would kill the whole map. That's how fast it can get.
It can get super fast. So people are used to it, and people like this play style, so they can stay and play Bed of Exile 1 still, which is still supported.
That's what I wanted to ask. Are you going to play one game of course i'm gonna play two i'm just gonna play two no no no okay the second i just played the first one for like 10 years and i'm like yeah it's enough it's enough like i don't know i just like i want to play the upgrade because i know that this one eventually will get better.
Like the thing that I really like about the second one now is that it doesn't have actually 11 years of content in it that I need to care about because at some point, PDFXL1 has so much content in it that you literally, as I said, it turned from university to PhD actually now. Yeah.
You need to kind of like just learn what you need to progress and where. Now it's like no way.
No way for me to enter. Yeah, exactly.
So now it's, Bed of Exile 2 is actually streamlined for me. For you, it's still like shaving of just 10%.
But for me, it's easy because I don't need to care about that much stuff. I can just care about the mechanics that I have now in the Atlas 3.
I'm really looking forward to how they're going to run the live ops for this,

the leaks and everything, even the root boxes.

You can see that most of my micro...

By the way, another important thing they said,

that all of these cosmetics you see here are from PedoVexcel 1.

So whatever you bought in PedoVexcel 1, it transferred to Ped everything one to one so all my things like you see here like like it's still not yet available because it was implemented into game but it will be it will be so all of your skins everything translates into this one to one for instance footprints now i have like these submarines don't know why they're... I have it from, I don't know which league was this.
So they're there. So everything translates.
It's very nice of them. So it really helps.
Like so much, you know, so much. Invest the time.
Interoperability. There you go.
That's your interoperability. Finally.
Once in a lifetime.ability finally finally yeah there you go shit it doesn't need to be web3 game exactly nice so yeah i'm i'm looking forward how this will end up because it's definitely like not saying it's going to be easy right it's going to be very rough especially on the system side it's going to be rough on like cannibalization front if they were going to cannibalize one and two and stuff like that uh competition wise there's not that much competition there always is competition there's always it's not even diablo it's like last and like all these other like arpg games that are catching on the day like saw what pedo exile was doing from throughout the years and and they're tying a new spin on it. Why not? That's great.
Competition is always great. Exactly.
Yeah, they need to step up a little bit, I would say, after this kind of hype thing runs down and people start to see the problems that are starting to be very obvious now and just patch them out because they know what they're doing. For instance, instance the rarity problem that we talk about they actually completely removed it from the first game i i don't even know why they put it into the second game because it's like like you like rarity we got the same shit again for you and people are bitching about it already like it's like everything is being inflated away like it's mandatory to have it on your gear otherwise you're not effective blah blah blah so and they explicitly said that they don't want to have stuff that's mandatory on your gear so we'll see yeah but for me uh i think now finally after all these years people will take notice and people will now start to at of at least you mean no i'm talking about the free-to-play model and the uniqueness okay like at some point i think people will start to think about this maybe even on mobile not only on pc that there are different ways how to do free-to-play and you can even have big spenders in this game like the spend, the skin economy and the utility economy still have a lot of spend.
Like just, if you just take how much, let's just do a simple example here for last thing. So let's say...
Never seen play example in Path of Exile. Let's see.
So points, 100 points is $10. 200 points is $20, whatever.
So if we go here, and let's say the currency tab, the currency tab is 75 points. So it's $10 just for the one tab.
Just saying. If you want the quad tab, it's double that.
Easy. So spend depth for this game isn't that low as it could seem.
That it's just, oh, it's just cosmetics. No, it's not.
So you can do pay for comfort, free to play kind of for PC. Because this is every PC player accepts this.
There's no power selling, nothing. Even though we locked auction house and utility behind the paywall, it's still very acceptable.
So you can do free-to-play also in this sense. That's not a problem.
Nice. Okay, that's it.
We'll return it to it definitely later when an expansion or some major stuff can come. No, when I start playing and then we can talk about it a little bit more.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. It'll be in the future.

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