I searched and I only found mentions of PoE in posts about D3 and two posts from 2013 about it, anyone playing it again? There's a ton of poeple (c wut i did thar?) playing it on my steam friends list so I asked what was up and I was informed that Breach, a new season, started on the 3rd. I heard about it kinda from before, obviously the big news was Brevik joining GGG which is kinda a big thing. David Brevik, for anyone who didn't know, was one of the original founders of Condor Inc which eventually became Blizzard North. In his time at Blizzard he basically created Diablo and even after he left in 2003 he still went on to do amazing things for the ARPG genre. He was one of the founders of Flagship Studios which made Hellgate: London, he then worked for Turbine during the time when the plans were set in place to make DDO f2p, I don't know how much of a hand in it he had but for such a legend in the industry you'd think he did something there for the year he spent working there. In 2009 he joined Gazillion because in 2010 they released Marvel Heroes, another arpg if you weren't familiar with it. According to his linked in he "Championed the selection of Brian Michael Bendis as writer..." which was the best writer they could get for that game since Bendis is a god amongst comic fans. The statistics also leads me to believe that POE is doing amazingly right now, POE had a peak of 10-20k users before the release of Breach, the last high they had was Aug 31st with 33,220 peak concurrent players. On Dec 4th they hit 46,907 and the current 24 hour peak is 39,219. Generally, POE see's a peak like this once a year, on steam release in 2013 it peaked at 32,066, in 2014 it peaked at 24.493 and in 2015 it peaked at 32,284. 2016 has been unique though, it's peaked 4 times already, first in Feb at 37, 266 then in May at 26,111, then Aug at 33,220 and now they've hit 46,907. Statistically, this is a huge uptrend and it might be favorable for us as a community to take a fresh look at this game since it's looking so positive this year. I know I've been talking about a lot of games lately but this is probably the only one (besides TESO) out of my 'short list' that has me thinking it I need to look at it again. It's sitting at 8th on the Top Players list on steam currently, just under ARK and Rocket League.
Had a ton of fun playing this with my friends, I remember it being hugely gear dependent though. then we dropped off when a new diablo 3 season or something came out and never went back (or maybe we were playing smite)
I imagine it spikes each time there is a new season. Fun game, but I haven't picked it up in awhile. Too grind intensive for the amount of time I have available, and no real PvP unless they made a patch (the 1v1 arena is poop).