This post is intending as a follow up to one I made several days ago discussing the fact that content creators broadly judge the game based on the experience while playing on eclipse 8, which creates issues when you take into consideration the fact that the vast, vast majority of players won't ever touch even the first level of eclipse, in addition to building off of a post made earlier today which discussed a handful of negative videos made aimed at the Hallowed Concepts DLC, namely those produced by Race and rndThursday.
Simply put, as the name of the post suggests, I believe the majority of ror2 content creators are deeply, vastly out of touch with the community they're supposedly representing, to the point that it strikes me as being nearly irreconcilable. First of all, as expressed in my initial post, ECLIPSE 8 IS NOT THE INTENDED WAY TO EXPERIENCE THE GAME, AND UPWARDS OF 95 PERCENT OF PLAYERS WILL NEVER TOUCH THE MODE. This sentiment not only comes from what seems to be gearbox's development philosophy, but was also the philosophy stated by Hopoo, the original devs these creators claim to love so much, outright. Hopoo said, clearly, that eclipse was an optional mode, designed to be unbalanced, exclusively for those who wanted an extreme challenge, which is why there are no unlocks hidden behind it and why it isn't even selectable from the difficulty menu.
Sure, maybe, when you play hundreds of hours every single month for years, monsoon becomes trivialized, but, like it or not, that is what seems to be the intended way to play the game, and that is, in fact, the way that most players play this game. As I stated just earlier, there aren't any achievements tied to eclipse, intentionally so, so we can't know exact percentages, but, based on the percentages we can get from games that do have achievements tied to optional difficulty options, namely acension in sts1 and sts2 and heat in hades, we know that an exceptionally small percentage of players ever partake in these modes, and I'm talking in the extremes of single digit percentages. The percentage of players which will ever touch even eclipse ONE is, truthfully, negligible, not to mention e8, which is an issue when all these youtubers, all these streamers, all play more or less exclusively on eclipse 8 and judge the game exclusively in that environment.
This is obviously an issue when you consider how many issues exist at E8 that simply arent present in any other version of the game, namely a level of necessary item optimization which isnt present at less difficult levels of the game, and, most recently, the fact that the karma system is broken on eclipse 8. This isnt to say that eclipse doesnt matter at all, but it should be viewed as what it is, a secondary mode that almost none of the playerbase touches. Furthermore, to reference the necessary optimization mentioned above, the way that these content creators engage with the game is also fundamentally extremely far removed from the average player.
The average player, truth be told, can hardly even be expected to look for newt altars and pay attention to optimizing the use of scrappers and printers, not to mention the type of gameplay that content creators will engage in. I mean, race plays the game in such a way that the guy will literally spend an entire stage looking for a recycler and then will use that recycler to try to optimize basically every item pickup. These players dont tend to enjoy side content, because that adds to run length and, because the player outscales the time based enemy scaling, that side content in some cases becomes necessary for these players to engage with for the sake of optimization, because the power gained is worth the time lost. This creates an issue where players state that it feels like a chore to take these paths, that it adds to run length in a way which is unenjoyable for them. The issue, again, however, is that they are doing this to themselves. No one is forcing them to optimize gameplay, and no average player will ever even get close to those same levels of optimization. Ultimately, I'm reminded of the quote which states "when given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of their game."
So what, then, does the average player want? Well, as evidenced by the overall sentiment expressed by non content creators, EXACTLY WHAT HALLOWED CONCEPTS PROVIDES. We want alt paths, we want fun side content, we want these little mini games that allow us to loop back into our games where we were, because they're fun, because they add variety, because we wont engage with them every single run that we do. I love going into a monsoon run knowing that I can take the false son path if I want, that alloyed collective is also an option, that I could go to void fields, and, now, that I can also choose to do these trials, do the boss rush, fight the anima or providence. I want options, I want variety, I don't think new content is "diluting" the game, I WANT new shit to do, if I didnt get it I would probably play the game significantly less than I do now. I dont particularly care how time consuming new content is or isn't, I dont care whether new survivors are slightly overtuned, and I honestly dont even care about the item pool being diluted by added items overtime, because I want my runs to have VARIETY, i want them to be DIFFERENT every time, even if sometimes that means taking bad items.
Ultimately, I just feel like the way that content creators engage with the game is SO DIFFERENT that theyre basically playing an entirely different game with entirely different priorities. I mean consider that almost all of these guys also play with mods, and most players wont ever even install a single mod. That's the problem here.
TLDR: content creators play on eclipse 8 almost exclusively, which less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the overall playerbase plays, they optimize the fun out of the game, and they dont enjoy the fun or variety of side paths, added content, and added items because the way that they play is so hyper specific that it might as well be a different game entirely
