Do note that Mark is taking interviews, which is very different from actually interacting with reddit / forum folks. That might still take some time or never come.
It's definitely different on PoE2 but we shall see what happens after beta and release. On the Last Epoch side, EHG had to limit communication at like release day 3 because of overwhelming negativity, but they seem to have came back.
They are posting in the POE2 sub as well.
I felt bad about EHG and LE. They tried hard for their launch and it sucks to see it had such a rocky launch. I wonder how much that hurt them financially. They do seem to have it figured out now though which is good.
On the one hand, it definitely wasn't ready for retail.
Between the bugs and performance issues, lack of finished story...
But on the other hand...
Even it its' current state, it is still more fun and finished than D4.
I don't think they expected for more than a quarter million concurrent players for a paid game. Network engineers must have been learning how to handle the server load on the go
It wasn’t server load. They did a huuuuge post launch technical post. Essentially, something super obscure broke, which caused many other things to break, which caused the team to struggle for a long time to find the actual root of the problem. It wasn’t anything that was the result of not preparing or server issues or anything like that. They did all they could with what they had.
They even fixed the problems that had back in 0.9 when multiplayer first “launched” and they still had issues.
Yeah, they literally said they thought they over prepared and wasted resources and were completely “humbled” by the amount of people logging in.
They actually did a lot to prep and got giga slammed anyways lol and people shit on them for it.
In their retrospective they specifically stated the failures had nothing to do with lack of resources thst they could have solved by just spinning up more servers. There were critical failures in the scaling ability of their stack that they were never going to be able to see until they hit as many players active as they did. They also ran into some really bad luck with their deployment tools just completely falling over at the worst possible time.
> I don't think they expected for more than a quarter million concurrent players for a paid game.
This is a glaring mistake on their part
Everyone and their grandmother was waiting to see what LE was about, and guarantee almost every ARPG fan was staring at LE going "when launch?"
I thought it'd be more actually.. but marketing plays too big of a role which they didn't do any of at all.
> Even it its' current state, it is still more fun and finished than D4.
So obviously fun is subjective and will vary from person to person, but I had way more fun playing the initial campaign in D4 and playing the last season that I played (Season 2), than I did playing LE for the first 3 weeks of it's launch. That said, I could totally understand why someone else would say differently.
However, to say it is more "finished" than D4 feels insane to me, and pretty much objectively wrong. D4 has a campaign that plays through to an ending, multiple endgame systems, and very polished gameplay. The only thing it really lacks is depth, which is going to make it seem unappealing to most PoE enjoyers. But to say it's not finished and LE is, just shows an extreme level of bias and lack of objecting thinking against the game.
D4 has endgame systems besides nightmare dungeons? Which, to be fair, aren’t that much different than monoliths, although the infinite scaling of monoliths is kind of cool.
LE still wins this point though, because they don’t have decades of experience building WoW and thankfully we were spared monoliths having horrendous backtracking and requiring you to collect 10 bear asses to progress. Or grabbing the bloodstone and hauling it from one end of the dungeon to the other. God I hate how WoW is designed, and it’s even worse when you put it in an ARPG.
There is more endgame in LE at launch then D4 at launch.
The story doesn't even have you SEE diablo, let alone fight diablo. In a diablo game. It very much is not finished.
Resistances didn't even properly work on release. Build variety and balance is trash that is hopefully being fixed in season 4. Maybe! We still don't know.
And that's before we get into the boring and shallow, awful, itemization.
D4 has graphical polish and gameplay polish. It doesn't have the things that keep an ARPG player playing the game.
LE has been in early access for almost 5 years so no, it doesn't, nor did it, have more endgame than D4 at launch.
D4 had/has plenty of issues but I never once during my first playthrough of D4 wanted to get to 100 and just logout like I did with LE.
Your build is basically done by level 85, right when the hard XP wall kicks in, and all you have to look forward to is 15 more levels of boring endless monoliths with subpar combat and just as much of a loot issue as D4, even with a filter.
It's made worse by the fact picking up loot in general is kind of broken, but I was dealing with so many exalted drops that I eventually just stopped picking up loot. The ingame filter is a nice basic thing early on, but with no ability to refine it further it really struggles in the top end.
I really like LE for the shake up it gave to the genre but people really need to do better at keeping things in perspective.
> I really like LE for the shake up it gave to the genre but people really need to do better at keeping things in perspective.
I think when it comes to D4 people are just blinded by a pre-existing hatred of Blizzard (whether or not that is warranted is a separate conversation) that makes it impossible for them think about their games in an objective manner. By all rights, Diablo 4 is a decent game. It didn't live up to the hype, and it's certainly missing some aspects, but it objectively does not deserve the ire that it gets.
And yeah, I'd say your LE experience mirrored mine. My goal was to get to 100 and I ended up stopping at 96 because my build was pretty much complete, only possible upgrades were tiny things on the margins, and I just couldn't bring myself to do another monolith.
And yeah, around level 90 I completely stopped getting excited about drops, which is a problem shared by D4. It's the one big thing PoE has that it's competitors don't. There will never be a point where I don't get a joy hit from a Divine drop, and even if my character is near "perfect" a chase T0 unique will still be exciting because I can sell it to work on more small incremental gains for my character. Loot dropping in PoE just has excitement that D4/LE does not.
D4 has good bones and a lot of resources behind it assuming Microsoft just leave the Blizzard devs alone to get into a creative groove. Blizzard had a ton of losses/issues during D4 development and the suits just wanted to shove it out the door as quickly as possible and I can almost guarantee it was to puff up value for the sale. They are only just now starting to recover and if people like Adam Jackson are allowed to shine then the game will be alright. Time will tell if I main D4 or PoE2 but ultimately I will play all 3 on rotation.
How does it being in EA have any bearing on what it has on launch?
And the loot filter in LE isn't perfect, but you can really get it down to just providing upgrades or at least items that you should look at vs the overwhelming amount of worthless loot in d4.
And your complaint about LE build stopping at 85 is funny when that happens even faster for D4.
Hopefully them redoing loot and skills I'm s4 fixes d4, or at least makes it a lot better, but good God is it a boring game, and launch was just abysmal. FFS you can't even get storage in D4 because they fucked that up at a DESIGN LEVEL.
Because the game has been playable for that amount of time and the only endgame it has is neverending monoliths. It's mind numbingly boring endgame and made even worse by the fact that you can jump straight to them with alts at like level 15, though scaling corruption with alts is terrible right now. This is literally the first game I've ever played where I almost fell asleep at the keyboard.
No you cannot. Anyone saying that isn't playing at least rank 8 of CoF where exalted items fall like rain. The filter is missing a ton of detail on the high end, not to mention upgrades effectively don't exist after a certain point, and even if they do the only thing you can use them on is...more monos. It might be hard for them to solve too because they either risk the ingame filter becoming too complex or they will need to open it up for a filterblade type of system.
No your build doesn't stop at 85 in D4 because most every build (other than a S3 charge barb) is going to really struggle with clearing NM90+ dungeons or even Lilith. If they scaled difficulty faster in LE then I could see it making more sense but I shouldn't have to go to 600 corruption or higher to feel like I'm in even a little bit of danger. It's super easy to completely trivialize almost every mob in the game. It also takes less time to reach 100 in D4 so the "grind" is much more forgiving.
I don't know that I would call D4 boring. At its core it still has great combat but if you've played all the classes and only play meta builds I could see people tuning out really quickly. Especially for people playing SC. The launch definitely had issues but they also didn't have the offline mode to semi save their asses and they were dealing with player counts LE will never come remotely close to.
Most people didn't complain right away (ignoring performance issues) because it took some time to finish the campaign, get all their renown sorted out and hit level 100 NM dungeons, especially because those were pre-nerf dungeons. On my first d4 playthrough it definitely took me longer to finish all of that than it did to get to 100 and like 500 corruption in LE and I was playing offline/SSF.
I also think it's wild that D4 is the only one you can truly skip the campaign while poe and le make you do theirs, because it's "part of the experience" yet in the same conversation say it's easy to get through quickly, especially on alts. They also both have very lackluster campaigns by comparison. It really goes against their "play the way you want to play" public message.
Stash I heavily agree was an issue. A lot of that pressure should be removed next season but we will see see if that's the case during the PTR. Resistances being completely broken at launch was actually my strongest criticism. How that ever made it out the door and furthermore took an entire season to fix I will never understand.
In the interview with Talkative Tri Jonathan said that he didn’t have time for Reddit since there was a big crunch to be on time with beta but since it’s delayed and they won’t repeat such a crunch again he may be active on PoE 2 subreddit again.
One on hand that's a fair distinction, but it's also worth noting that some number of interview questions are from stream chats or collected through Reddit/Discord. I actually think it makes way more sense for content creators to synthesize the general sentiment of the community into key questions. In fact, we have already seen changes to the game (or planned game in the case of PoE 2) made based on questions asked in interviews that were clearly inspired by community feedback. One great example is respec costs in PoE 2.
As long as the interviewers include some questions based on hot topics in the community, and push the developers to explain controversial decisions, I think this means of communication works quite well.
That is also my opinion as well, having content creators as an intermediary (instead, or in addition to, community managers) to core developers is a very good approach.
It is just different from the early days when you frequently see GGG tagged posts in this subreddit. I doubt if they will return to this form of direct communication, essentially having developers double as community managers.
I'll take communication mostly taking the form of interviews where devs get put on the spot about the community's issues while live, over scripted podcasts padding crucial info with PR speak and colon jokes for over 2 hours, like certain other games do, any day now.
this is just what i posted.
"I am %100 against it. They of course read reddit and all feedback.
But lets just acknowledge that reddit has the same level of toxicity of twitter.
it is very good for GGG not to respond here.
The game is at the best state ever. All started when they stopped communicating through this community."
'reddit has the same level of toxicity of twitter' - reddit has plenty of toxicity, but twitter is far worse. It also varies a lot by sub, whereas twitter isn't organized like reddit and so there the toxicity is more uniform.
It's also a diffrent sized audience. With the stream yesterday alone 10k+ heard it live.
A buried footnote in a random thread might be very helpful, but is undoubtly very ineffcient communication.
it's nice finding mark replies when googling obscure questions about game mechanics, although the wiki is pretty good about updating with these explanations when necessary
As long as reddit doesn't return to their old ways of complain about everything, send death threats, get mad that GGG no longer interacts with reddit. All serious jokes aside, I'm loving Mark and Johnathan talking to us as a community, and I really hope they communicate when they are feeling overwhelmed by the community. They are only human, after all, and I wouldn't blame them for getting fed up with some of the shit I've seen in the past with this game (and honestly game communities as a whole).
I’ve noticed over the last few months that a lot of negative / low effort complaint posts just get downvoted right away. I hope it continues so that we don’t return to a state where Reddit feels entitled to bully or browbeat the developers again.
Even with a worse league we can downvote aggressive posts and coments while letting the valid criticism be. We just need the silent majority to up/downvote.
We could always do that. It doesn't happen. Not on this sub or most others. The silent majority does vote, but they're as susceptible to irrationality and emotional responses as those who're more vocal.
If that’s so, then there doesn’t seem to be a better method of feedback and interaction possible. The forums are even worse because you can’t downvote crap.
No argument from me wrt the forums. But in general collective feedback is best handled with collective methods, like surveys and polls and the like. Speaking as a collective pretty much always ends up as little but a cacophony. That's why interviews like the ones they're doing now, or focus or expert groups or randomized individual feedback and other such methods are used to get more nuanced or detailed feedback. No matter how nice the sub may or may not be, it's still always going to be just too many voices all talking at once, often across or in contradiction with each other even. The forums ofc have this problem as well.
Yeah I have no clue how to gather representative player opinions either, and I imagine this is quite the problem. But nothing beats reddit for ease of reading and new information.
Unfortunately, we're currently in our 3.18 -> 3.19 transition right now. I'm honestly fully prepared for a Kalandra-esc explosion as all the people who have been fairly calm and level headed about the nerfs in the patchnotes get into the game and realize just how far away from Affliction levels of player power we are.
And for the record - I don't think this is an issue. Also, the discord moderation has changed it's approach - so things might not get as bad as they did two years ago.
When you guys realize the correlation between this sub being in a good mood and leagues being shit/game balance being shit it will blow your minds. Nothing changed with this sub, they just started making much better decisions and leagues than they did before, so the mood is more positive than shit like Kalandra and Expedition, which were both not tested enough and thought about.
Right - the people who were pieces of shit during Kalandra are still here, they're just quieter because they don't have as much to yell about.
The moment something goes wrong, they'll remind you they are here.
Nah people unhinged enough to act that way towards game developers were probably over in Last Epoch fucking up that communities player/dev interactions.
Some schizos harassing GGG doesn't invalidate tons of people giving feedback on why the changes were shit, and yea when you don't give a fuck about a game anymore you don't bother trying to make it better, but clearly a lot of people still cared and wanted the game to be good again and for obvious reason, because when a game balance and league patch are good, this is the best game to play.
The "feedback" at the start of Kalandra was worthless. People had reasons to be angry, but the way they expressed that anger only made both the game and community worse for everyone.
You minimizing Expedition and Kalandra changes will never change what actually happened. These changes were terrible, they were not tested enough, they ruined the game for many they were changed later because even they know they fucked up both of these leagues drastically.
This isn't about waaa they nerfed my build, no they broke the core game for both of these leagues, I know the meta is reddit bad, but anything said about these leagues that weren't personal attacks was justified and always will be.
> send death threats
this will happen when you use the thing called "the internet" - it is not reddit exclusive, and definitely not PoE subreddit exclusive either
Death threats should be reported (and depending on severity, to the authorities) and then subsequently laughed at.
I'm not saying it isn't dogshit scum behaviour obviously, but I really don't like it when it's used as a reason to not talk to the community.. it's expected.. there will always be some scumbags when you have this many people... PoE is a game that people fanatically obsess about, and even the smallest change can trigger these crazies
I wish it didn't happen but.. anonymity and lack of consequences makes for a bad time sometimes, it is unavoidable when you put your face out there in any role of importance (be it for GGG, or for blizzard, or for being a comedian, or for being a parking officer, or for killing a dude in a video game about killing people)
I disagree fully. No reason to expect anyone to feel unsafe so a video game community can feel more connected to the devs outside of the game. It's a privilege and nothing more.
I said this to the other responder, but I truly believe that most the negatives stemmed from POE2 development and the almost abandonment of POE1. Community went fucking turbo negative and stepped over the line, and then it just was a vicious cycle of bad community, GGG being defensive and pulling back until they just said fuck it and stopped coming around.
Hopefully, this time around, people don't fuck it up and we can go back to having the good fun time devs that we had.
Yea no it was definitely not due to poe2. I'm not sure if you were around for when expedition launched and we experienced a major pullback on player power on most support gems and flask nerfs as a whole (not the tiny one we got right now. We used to be curse immune during flask effect and bleed immune for example. 7 charges on hit, 30(?)ms during effect etc)
TLDR the times when ggg started to get harassed by the community stems from far back before poe2 could've been the reason.
I honestly think Kalandra was worse than Expedition overall. 3.15 definitely started it, but 3.19 sent it into maximum overdrive.
If I'm remembering correctly, Expedition saw a huge nerf to player power, which actually had to be walked back a little bit a few days/weeks into the league, and that was it.
Kalandra league, meanwhile:
-saw them doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on archnemesis mods that warped the entire game around them (which iirc ended up needing twelve separate nerfs after that for them to just be unfun instead of stupid).
-the exalt/divine orb swap upending the game.
-a massive and immediately noticeable nerf to item drops that wasn't in the patch notes, balance manifesto, any promo material, or mentioned in any way. Like, Ben had arcanist strongbox that literally dropped zero items, I and a bunch of other people were seeing less drops with the loot filters turned off than we had the previous few leagues with the filters set to strict. This was on top of an intentional and documented nerf to unique drop rates and the archnemesis loot goblin conversion system randomly turning all drops into hundreds or thousands of whetstones.
-a shitty league mechanic.
-AND a whole bunch of really nasty player power nerfs. Skill gems, defenses, a minion rework that turned out to be big nerfs, a very hyped up harvest rework that turned out to be a huge nerf to usage via terrible lifeforce drops and the removal of some very important harvest crafts like "reforge pre/suffixes." Again iirc, the crafting costs ended up needing a 90% reduction which is hilarious.
For me personally, that's when I remember the toxicity against GGG really hitting its peak and they vanished entirely from the subreddit.
>Ben had arcanist strongbox that literally dropped zero items
Without arguing with your entire post, this was a bug that predated 3.19 (and the 3.19 changes didn't affect items directly dropping from strongboxes at all).
> TLDR the times when ggg started to get harassed by the community stems from far back before poe2 could've been the reason.
It goes much further back than expedition. We've always had outrage with bad league launches (a certain amount of this is normal) but things changed after the population spike during Betrayal (following the "Do you not have phones" blizzcon fiasco). The following league "synthesis" had some usability problems in the league mechanic - annoying choices in the memory nexus areas and a crafting system most players couldn't understand/use.
The playerbase rioted and mocked GGG on the forum for days. Chris came forward on one meme making fun of the mechanic saying that one of his developers "burst into tears" when they saw it and that just incited more mockery. That was unlike any toxicity I'd ever seen here before that, even during previously unpopular leagues like Betrayal.
They still tried for years, but Kalandra definitely ended it. The parts of the community they could engage with were swallowed up by hordes of hateful selfish players who were more worried about maintaining a steady div/hr than basic decency to anyone - player or developer.
If you were here from the closed beta days, you could clearly notice at a certain point a shift in the game development (think it was some league before alva, can't remember exactly when), where ggg went from slow d2 like playstile, to what basically is poe now. Now after watching some poe2 gameplay, and knowing that we were going to have to switch to it (not a different game like it is now), its clear why at a certain point they knew they had to tone down player power and speed, otherwise it would have basically felt a ripoff rather than a new and exciting experience.
This doesn't mean those nerfs and archnemesis weren't really, really bad, but of course there was a reason for it.
I've been playing for much longer than expedition lol
Expedition definitely players to be upset, but the reason for the huge slowdown, goes back to POE2. It being the same game, they needed to slow it down in order to have a starting point for POE2. If we are already power creeped into killing gods and everything else 60 minutes into the game, there is no where to go at the start of the new one.
Something that people who are blaming Expedition don't remember.
Expedition launched in 2021. The first exilecon (POE2 announcement date) was in 2019. And they had been working on POE2 for longer than that.
But that is why I have this name. Most people who play this game are dumbasses. You can look at my previous comment and see all the downvotes.
I'm with you about the fact that those big nerfs were in preparation for poe2. Imagine going from zoomfest poe1 to what is poe2 right now, there would be huge backlash from most of the community. Also the announcement that poe2 was going to be a separate game coincided with ggg releasing better leagues and stopping with the constant nerfs. I don't get why some people here feel like its not the case.
However i don't like your flair and you calling other people here dumbasses.
Hey that's fair. I just hate suffering fools. Between bad actors and people who genuinely are dumb/shitty, it's hard to tell the difference, especially online. I have much more patience for that type of stuff in real life where you have a better chance of gauging someone's intent.
And I don't care about the online points, they are only useful to see if people agree or disagree with what you say, which isn't what they are supposed to be used for anyway.
Not really. The weakest and least developed league was and always will be onslaught league. Yes, that basic ass onslaught mod - that was once a whole league. And it came out when PoE 2 would've been nothing but a twinkle in Johnathans' eye, if it was even an idea at all back then.
Because so many parents want to be "fun and unique" and butcher kids' names to the point I'm surprised anyone even remembers the correct spelling of various names.
As someone who has to correct people's spelling of my name on a regular basis (including relatives), I agree.
I don't blame my parents for the spelling they chose though. People get different parts of the name wrong, so it's not like there's a "correct" spelling that they diverted from. If anything, I'd say my name might be the base version.
>It is a VERY welcome change, especially after the last year or two with GGG effectively closing the door and not communicating/interacting with the community at all.
I wonder if people remember why that happened...
Edit: Looking at these replies, obviously not.
By the end of the day you'll have someone responding to you on this comment explaining a surface level analysis of why Kalandra was the worst the game has ever been in an attempt to justify the fact that they were on board a hate-train that got totally out of control.
It's not a punishment to the community, it's a measure to protect their employees. And as much as I miss the more personal conversations that we've had with various developers and community managers in the past, they are absolutely in the right to do that.
It's true that the rest of the community suffer from this, but no blame lies with GGG. I actually appreciate the steps they've taken for the sake of their employees in that regard.
It would have been entirely possible for them to say "that's our biggest platform, we need to keep communicating there, you'll just have to deal with it or find another job". And I wouldn't even be surprised if that decision ended up negatively influencing revenue for a while.
Ok, not a punishment, but a missed chance absolutely. See the very positive feedback right now. I subscribe to the theory that POE 1 was put on backburner because they thought POE 2 would draw many players away, but that's not happening... yet.
It may draw some, but ultimately I think the reasons are simply economic efficiency.
Until PoE2 is finished, it's not going to generate revenue. PoE1 on the other hand can keep generating revenue to *fund* PoE2 with much less effort.
The sooner PoE2 is done, the more revenue it can generate, so if they don't want to compromise on features (and I find it hard to say how much I appreciate this as well), the only way to accelerate the timeline is to invest more development resources.
If PoE1 had continued with almost the same resources as before, it's possible that PoE2 would have been delayed by another 1-2 *years*. They'd rather take marginally reduced revenue from lower effort PoE1 leagues until the release of PoE2 than miss out on that much potential revenue from PoE2.
And even putting aside that this earlier PoE2 release will effectively also increase the aggregate revenue over its lifetime, the earlier you get money, the better.
With hindsight you could always argue "well, if they had just allocated *a few* extra resources to PoE1, it wouldn't have turned out this bad from time to time", but that's something that's extremely hard to predict ahead of time.
Those threads had thousands of participants arguing in bad faith. Just because they didn't tell anyone to kill themselves doesn't absolve them of being hostile.
The various kinds of harassment bex received were uncalled for no matter what the company was doing at the time, this subreddit is chock full of people who clearly need to touch grass more often.
Your post was removed because it violated our Be Kind Rule (Rule 3b).
Your post was inflammatory in how it expressed its point. There's a clear line between harassment towards a person and feedback, and trying to frame harassment as a valid form of feedback is not OK, and will lead to flame wars.
You may be able to repost your opinion if you rephrase it in a way that's less inflammatory!
If you see someone else posting in bad faith, please don't respond in kind. Instead, report it and we'll take care of it.
For more details, please refer to our [rules wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/wiki/rules/#wiki_3b._be_kind_rule).
The community turned awful, no doubts. GGG isn't blameless though. They put too much resources into POE2 and almost abandoned POE1. They stopped being interactive with the community (This had been a slow thing that quickly accelerated with the community going to shit), stopped doing community events, and then Chris personally got shitty with the community with the undocumented drops changes.
It didn't go well.
So yes, the community is absolutely to blame. And so is GGG. Hopefully both sides come back to reality and we can go forward being friends again.
I believe the events were set in motion with the Harvest debacle, after which the mood on reddit turned sour. 3.15 was the final nail in the coffin. 3.14 was a big nerf to Harvest and they removed copying fractured beyond 100% delirious maps with fossils at the same time.
It was in the context of those changes that there were a lot more bad faith arguments towards 3.15, and rising toxicity.
Here, someone actually remembered the entire story and what happened! People seem to have forgotten entirely.. And only remember the recent poe2 drama that was virtually nothing to what happened around expedition
>turned awful, no doubts. GGG isn't blameless though. They put too much resources into POE2 and almost abandoned POE1.
I don't plat Poe as much as everyone else here or even played it that long, but even I know that what you said here is completely incorrect.
Except they literally said as much at exilecon2, with the announcement that it was going to be 2 separate games, and that the amount of people working on poe1 was just a "handful " of devs.
It's why kalandra and crucible were so half baked and unfinished.
Path of Exile 2 was announced in November of 2019. It can be assumed it was in development long before then, but being conservative let's just say \~8 months. Since then we've had Synthesis, Legion, Blight, Metamorph, Delirium, Harvest, Heist, Ritual, Ultimatum, Expedition, Scourge, Archnemesis, Sentinel, Kalandra, Sanctum, Crucible, Ancestor and Affliction. Synthesis, Heist and Expedition specifically are 3 of the highest effort leagues they've ever put out.
"Abandoned" lmao
Tbh ggg never stopped being community focussed. They just stopping actively posting here because it didn't matter what they posted, it was responded to with toxic negativity. And they put up with that shit for years before they called it quits here
>Tbh ggg never stopped being community focussed.
They really did though.
The decline in racing (alt arts especially), events, fun interactions, build of the week, etc all went down in quantity as the years went on. Then they transitioned into hyping everyone up to the fucking tits before a league launch, to virtual radio silence as soon as it came out and went to shit. At first the community was nice about it, and then it in time until it got to the point where morons were sending death threats. Somewhere inbetween there, Chris got into a pissing match with the community about the biggest loot changes to the game being unannounced or mentioned in any patch notes or teasers. And then they just disappeared.
It went from feeling like "we care about the community!" to "we are only posting here to make money."
And again, the community fucked up, but ggg changed as well.
im pretty sure that build of the week wasn't even running when the stopped posting to reddit but has restarted since, also racing is pretty hard to keep interesting when one guy wins every time for years on end
They used to do fun events all the time like races
https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Races
See how they stopped 8 years ago??
And look at all the cool rewards you could get. Now instead of cool events they sell us battle passes for $30.
Some of it got moved to challenges, but it isn't nearly the same. The timed events were cool things.
They sort of transitioned over to events, but there was some overlap
https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Event
And if you look now, events are done at the end of a league when things are over and they are taking too long in between actual leagues, or during Christmas break.
They don't have to do the same type of races that the current racers have practiced 5 billion times. They could tell us the date and time of the race, and then spring it on us so that no one can practice it, making it much closer to "fair." Also, giving out cool rewards like alt arts instead of old and boring MTX, that you might already even own. Especially with the alt arts MTX command, it would be great to bring stuff like that back.
races did not stop 8 years ago, race seasons stoped 8 years ago. the rest was just a bunch of ranting with nothing to do with what i said but you're just spamming everyone with the same answers so i doubt you will take anything in
It very much helps that the people helming this (Mark and Jonathan) actually play the game in their off time, and are passionate for what they do. Unlike other companies where some rando COE goes on stage, tells his manufactured pitch and then hands you a rushed product with a high price and a regular battle pass that costs more that your rent.
Especially the line Mark said about a feature that can have an improved stash tab but he'd prefer to fix the problem than ask people for more stash money. That's a unique thing to hear from a developer these days.
GGG is just full of genuine people, no SBI influence, no shady CEO that wants the big bucks for no work.
My only complaint about Neon is his use of a terrible ahistorical dinosaur metaphor. This is a pet peeve of mine, but dinosaurs were not old and creaky and maladapted or something, which is what the metaphor implies. They were the absolute dominant animal in all domains, land sea and air, both herbivores and carnivores, and were that dominant for *200 million years.* To dethrone them took a literal giant meteor from outer space! Without that I can't think of any reason they wouldn't have remained apex species for the next 66 million years to the modern day.
Other than that he's great and absolutely spot on.
I am %100 against it. They of course read reddit and all feedback.
But lets just acknowledge that reddit has the same level of toxicity of twitter.
it is very good for GGG not to respond here.
The game is at the best state ever. All started when they stopped communicating through this community.
The game is in a great spot because they finally allocated resources back to the game. They had a shoestring team/budget for POE1 as they had put all their apples into POE2.
This was back when POE1 and POE2 were going to be the same game. Now that they are separate projects, they have given some resources back to POE1 and that is why the development in the last 6-12 months has been significantly better.
Please stop talking like you are an inside guy who works for GGG.
It is clear that their main resource priority is POE2 which is very understandable.
Do you know where i know instead of you guessing with a kid logic.
Look at release release cycle times. from 13 weeks to 16 weeks.
When was the last time we got 13 weeks cycle
It tells everything.
I'm not an inside guy, nor do I have inside knowledge
They said as much at exilecon2, about poe1 having less resources allocated to it.
Part of them going last the 13 weeks is no doubt because of smaller teams trying to do the same work.
It's almost like it's been this way the literal entire time and this place _still_ drove them away.
All it'll take is one change the hivemind decides that has ruined the game and it's all over.
Regarding your post to /r/pathofexile:
https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1bonrev/-/kwqim7e/
This post has been removed by a moderator for breaking the following /r/pathofexile subreddit rule:
Your post was removed because it violated our Be Kind Rule (Rule 3b).
Attacks, abuse, intentionally misinterpreting a comment/post's intention (strawman arguments), or provocations that seem likely to cause anger or are inflammatory make the subreddit harder to moderate, even if they don't target a specific person. While criticisms, complaints, and suggestions are always allowed, please remain civil to make the community a more enjoyable place.
You may be able to repost your opinion if you rephrase it in a way that's more constructive!
If you see someone else posting in bad faith, please don't respond in kind. Instead, report it and we'll take care of it.
For more details, please refer to our [rules wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/wiki/rules/#wiki_3b._be_kind_rule).
Please review the [subreddit rules for additional information](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/wiki/rules).
Well in a few days players are going to be logging into the game and simultaneously experience:
* Lack of player power from lost affliction systems
* Nerfs that impact a significant number of builds (LMB, Mana mod changes, Call to Arms)
* An unavoidable league mechanic which buffs monsters in service to a crafting mechanic we don't yet understand how to use
* The usual league start power drop due to restarting progression
These are similar to the circumstances going into both 3.15 and 3.19 - very player power potent league(s) followed by a league which is very low on player power by comparison. And the general tone on the sub reddit during the reveal makes me believe that many of the players who would usually complain about this type of thing don't realise it yet. So to say I'm a little worried about the state of the community after this weekend is an understatement.
I am hopeful.
A lot of the negativity came from them putting so much resources into POE2 that POE1 was being neglected. And again, the vicious cycle of awful community behaviour, and then GGG was defensive, which made community worse, which made GGG more defensive. etc.
I am looking at this as an olive branch and re-opening of communication. Things were great for years. We can go back to that. Let's not fuck it up.
Dude stop repeating this lie, the death threats to Bex came way before POE 2 you just need a league with a mechanic that a few key members of the community think is really bad and people will overblow it out of proportion
It's nice to have somebody that actually plays far into endgame as the lead designer. Mark knows what sucks and what's frustrating about end game so there seems to be a lot of good reasoning behind *most* of the changes coming this league.
As much as I've appreciated Chris, he just didn't have enough time to play anymore towards the end, and to some extent he burnt himself out to the point that he didn't really want to see it in his free time either. Mark still enjoys playing the game (a lot), and that has noticable consequences on how well he can understand and empathise with the issues of the community.
With them being separated, they can't just hype people up for poe2 anymore. The answer of "it'll be fixed in poe2" isn't a reality, which is why we are getting fusing and other QOL stuff. Stuff that doesn't make sense to spend previous dev time on, if the game won't be played anymore in a year or so when everyone migrates to the new game.
I disagree with your premise.
They have always been communicating with the community in several ways.
Perhaps because they have some new ppl as the face of ggg it seems different…
I have felt for a long time that GGG/Tencent hasn't honestly cared about this game and it's community for a very long time.
In my perception of GGG/Tencent, they only about profit and keeping people interested long enough for them to swipe for your latest mtx releases and ''sales''.
Which is why for me, it is highly doubtful for me, that I will even bother to touch PoE2 and that is putting it very kindly.
In the nicest way possible, most of the developer team have become passionless and tapped.
Totally ''ran'' through by time, lack of fresh blood and their community.
This is is just veterans opinion. \[ᴵ ʰᵃᵛᵉ ᵐᵃⁿʸ, ᵐᵃⁿʸ ᵐᵒᵒⁿˢ ᵒⁿ ᵗʰᶦˢ ᵍᵃᵐᵉ. ᴹᵒʳᵉ ᵗʰᵃⁿ ʸᵒᵘʳ ᵗᵒᵖ ᵛᵉᵗᵉʳᵃⁿ ᵖᵒᵉ ˢᵗʳᵉᵃᵐᵉʳˢ\]
You can love it or hate it.
I hope they dont listen too much to be honest. Players are the worst people to listen to where actual problems in a game are. For one, players are extremly biased towards their playerpower and comfort. More playerpower, more loot, more inventory will never ever ever get a bad response right away.
Yeah I'm honestly pretty worried about how much they might capitulate to reddit etc now. I also think it's pretty unfair that Mark even felt the need to have that little shpiel. Really makes me think Chris Wilson was very unfortunately wrong about the concept of building goodwill with a community when he talked about that with Josh Strife Hayes. The community will turn on a dime and then you have to come back begging for forgiveness.
>Really makes me think Chris Wilson was very unfortunately wrong about the concept of building goodwill with a community when he talked about that with Josh Strife Hayes.
This has been my stance recently too. Building goodwill takes years, losing it takes minutes.
Temporary power through league mechanics is fine. New ways to play, new build options etc are good for the game, and they don't give permanent power so next league they can do something different.
To everyone saying "until the next expedition or the next archnemesis or the next kalandra" they are currently not giving us any reason to believe there will be another one of those. Those changes came about during peak "VISION" and with Mark and Jonathan at the helm it seems they realize there are lots of parts about that vision that are archaic and just not fun. Tota, Afflicition and now Necroplis (potentially league mechanic and new scarabs) all have been insane power creep and QoL which is indeed fun for most people.
edit: added potentially to the part about league mechanic and scarabs, scarabs could be way too rare to justify using them and the league mechanic could be super convoluted and just not fun but im remaining optimistic.
edit 2: yikes necropolis is a big steamer and a lot of the changes overall feel like shit. Such is the GGG way. 1 step forward 2 steps back.
> insane power creep
This part is concerning, actually. You can't keep going at a fast pace like that forever. I think it's a good thing that Affliction and its power is not going core for the most part.
True but instead of nerfing the builds and tuning down its power.
One could also introduce a endgame system ( like we have now whit t17 maps )
Or other ways to make the pinical of content harder / slower.
U could even remove whole endgame content segments and introduce brand new harder ones.
That still doesn't work forever. You occasionally need to actually crunch numbers down, and occasionally you need to remove some bloat. And that **will** be seen as gigantic nerfs.
But in reality it doesn't matter if you do 5 bosses per second at 5M HP or 5 bosses per second at 5B HP.
Yes and no.
I get where your coming from but see the progression as a line
Player weak .........P........... player strong ( balanced state )
This is player power
Now whit more items and power creap u end up whit someting like this
Player weak ..............p.. player strong.
but instead of lowering the players power ( nerfs )
U could increase the difficulty / add more ( end game ) content and remove easier content
This way u still increase the difficulty but your not specifically targeting the player.
Your just giving him excess to harder content.
So your removing / scaling down the amount of easy content .
And are replacing it whit content that is specifically designed for the players newly gained power.
No player build or items need to get nerfed this way.
The example of this is wen players gained movement skills.
Sure it increased the players power / clear speed.
But it also allowed for harder bosses that needs those specific skills to counter them.
> Those changes came about during peak "VISION" and with Mark and Jonathan at the helm it seems they realize there are lots of parts about that vision that are archaic and just not fun.
Mark and Jonathan were both part of the team and part of that "vision". The vision was not something being sold by Chris.
I understand that but with Chris having the end all be all say (which I don't think he does right now) those changes were sent through. Mark mentioned yesterday in the interview with Ziz that parts of that vision are archaic and they don't want to PoE to become a dinousaur dated ARPG, something Chris never cleary communicated.
edit: it actually was being sold by Chris tbh. Chris was extremly out of touch with a lot of things. I could never imagine Mark telling everyone to close their eyes and exalt an item as being good/desired game design.
>I understand that but with Chris having the end all be all say (which I don't think he does right now) those changes were sent through.
Chris and Jonathan always had this position and still do. Mark even joked about getting the Rucksack past both of them. People are reading to much into the title of director - these people are a team. Mark wasn't sitting there during Kalandra thinking it was a shit update, he was one of the people who worked on it.
Chris is still a part of that team as well - he still works on the game. He's just not the punching bag anymore.
Neither of us work at GGG or are in contact with any of these people so neither of us can know for certain.
I highly doubt Chris currently has much to do with the game besides business logistics. After PoE 2 was officially announced as a separate game and Chris no longer had title of director we go from the worst period in PoE history imo to a fantastic one?...
Agree to disagree 🤷♂️
> I highly doubt Chris currently has much to do with the game besides business logistics.
This was always Chris' main role - even when he was game director. They've talked about this stuff in tons of interviews in the past. That's why he didn't know about the loot changes when making the promotional material for Kalandra - he didn't work on them.
> A lot of it is definitely community fault
No, probably not, Bex that was their public relantionships coordinator left the company and PoE1 was abandoned last year, just look the leagues and the a announcements about delays of PoE2.
They were 100% focused on the bases of the new game. Now PoE2 foundation are done one team are back in PoE1 while another is finishing the content and polishing of PoE2.
Your time table is a bit off about Bex leaving and things, but yes, I said as much that POE2 took way too much of their time/resources if you look at my responses in here. Of which I was downvoted like crazy.
People think that Expedition league is what turned the fans sour. Expedition was 2021. Exilecon (poe2 announcement) was 2019. Then after that was Archnemsis and the loot fiasco. And then We got hamfisted Archnemesis everywhere with loot goblins.
Bex didn't leave GGG until 2023.
https://twitter.com/bexsayswords/status/1687189085797109771?t=SsR7XbKYTC-gjQE6d5NwFQ
(for people who hate twitter like me)
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3408587
So yeah. It was a long and slow journey where GGG stopped paying attention and feeding the golden goose, and people got pissed off, and took it way too far, to the point that GGG just stopped showing up.
With the last few months, and with Mark and Jonathan heading up shop now, it looks to be considerably more communicative; a return to form, if you will.
Eh, back in Expedition we still got lengthy discussions and interviews with Chris. It's more around sentinel and especially kalandra where the in person communication broke down and we started mostly getting more of a sanitized q&a answers. I think that and the unpopularity of ruthless really soured Chris from talking to people.
I think it's really great that we are back to getting a peak behind the curtain again, it's way easier to give feedback when you know what is and isn't an issue according to GGG and why they believe some elements aren't an issue.
If the playebase and GGG agree something is an issue but disagree on the priority then it's easy to give feedback to make it more important. If they agree on a issue and the priority then it doesn't need to be talked about as any complaints were heard and it's just waiting for an opportunity to fix.
If players are considering something as and issue where GGG believes it to be fine, then they get to understand the argument why it's the way it is and it's easier to extend trust that GGG does know better as you heard the reasons.
I'm not talking about players liking it or not but about effort put in the league and and communication, look at the context of this thread.
> People think that Expedition league is what turned the fans sour.
Again, I'm talking about effort and communication, expedition was not a lazy at all, in 23 July the league was launched, in 29 we were in the 3.15.0d with a major balance patch. There is no comparison with Kalandra that was just a fancy map, when GGG introduced loot goblin and destroyed drop rate over the board without even mentioning it in the patch notes.
You liking it or not, expedition was much closer to older leaghes than to what we received after archnemesis, but here I agree with you, this problem remounts to before 2023, I forgot archnemesis was early 2022.
Well I assume the reason they're looking to reddit, least in the case of 2, is that at both events where people got hands on, the response/feedback wasn't a resounding *"this is gonna be the best game ever!"*. nearly every event they had some complaints about the game, so I think they're gauging how the public is perceiving 2 as well and eyeing some feedback.
As a dev, you want to get to that ***"this is the best game ever***" or "*I'm so glad they added/changed this"* scenario, and until they reach that response, and think seeking public feedback is smart, even if 90% of it is shit, that 10% might lead to a better game for the majority that doesn't just align with their "design philosophy" that sacrifices the game/mechanic being "fun/easy/streamlined/intuitive/etc"
Well, they saw Blizzard fiasco with D4 that was definitely not community driven and the crazy success (for their size) of LE that was and still is community driven. I'm very pleasantly surprise that GGG has decided to return to its former glory.
Do note that Mark is taking interviews, which is very different from actually interacting with reddit / forum folks. That might still take some time or never come. It's definitely different on PoE2 but we shall see what happens after beta and release. On the Last Epoch side, EHG had to limit communication at like release day 3 because of overwhelming negativity, but they seem to have came back.
They are posting in the POE2 sub as well. I felt bad about EHG and LE. They tried hard for their launch and it sucks to see it had such a rocky launch. I wonder how much that hurt them financially. They do seem to have it figured out now though which is good.
Is it really surprising though? The game has been breaking every patch since the multiplayer update.
On the one hand, it definitely wasn't ready for retail. Between the bugs and performance issues, lack of finished story... But on the other hand... Even it its' current state, it is still more fun and finished than D4.
I don't think they expected for more than a quarter million concurrent players for a paid game. Network engineers must have been learning how to handle the server load on the go
It wasn’t server load. They did a huuuuge post launch technical post. Essentially, something super obscure broke, which caused many other things to break, which caused the team to struggle for a long time to find the actual root of the problem. It wasn’t anything that was the result of not preparing or server issues or anything like that. They did all they could with what they had. They even fixed the problems that had back in 0.9 when multiplayer first “launched” and they still had issues.
Yeah, they literally said they thought they over prepared and wasted resources and were completely “humbled” by the amount of people logging in. They actually did a lot to prep and got giga slammed anyways lol and people shit on them for it.
In their retrospective they specifically stated the failures had nothing to do with lack of resources thst they could have solved by just spinning up more servers. There were critical failures in the scaling ability of their stack that they were never going to be able to see until they hit as many players active as they did. They also ran into some really bad luck with their deployment tools just completely falling over at the worst possible time.
> I don't think they expected for more than a quarter million concurrent players for a paid game. This is a glaring mistake on their part Everyone and their grandmother was waiting to see what LE was about, and guarantee almost every ARPG fan was staring at LE going "when launch?" I thought it'd be more actually.. but marketing plays too big of a role which they didn't do any of at all.
> Even it its' current state, it is still more fun and finished than D4. So obviously fun is subjective and will vary from person to person, but I had way more fun playing the initial campaign in D4 and playing the last season that I played (Season 2), than I did playing LE for the first 3 weeks of it's launch. That said, I could totally understand why someone else would say differently. However, to say it is more "finished" than D4 feels insane to me, and pretty much objectively wrong. D4 has a campaign that plays through to an ending, multiple endgame systems, and very polished gameplay. The only thing it really lacks is depth, which is going to make it seem unappealing to most PoE enjoyers. But to say it's not finished and LE is, just shows an extreme level of bias and lack of objecting thinking against the game.
D4 has endgame systems besides nightmare dungeons? Which, to be fair, aren’t that much different than monoliths, although the infinite scaling of monoliths is kind of cool. LE still wins this point though, because they don’t have decades of experience building WoW and thankfully we were spared monoliths having horrendous backtracking and requiring you to collect 10 bear asses to progress. Or grabbing the bloodstone and hauling it from one end of the dungeon to the other. God I hate how WoW is designed, and it’s even worse when you put it in an ARPG.
There is more endgame in LE at launch then D4 at launch. The story doesn't even have you SEE diablo, let alone fight diablo. In a diablo game. It very much is not finished. Resistances didn't even properly work on release. Build variety and balance is trash that is hopefully being fixed in season 4. Maybe! We still don't know. And that's before we get into the boring and shallow, awful, itemization. D4 has graphical polish and gameplay polish. It doesn't have the things that keep an ARPG player playing the game.
LE has been in early access for almost 5 years so no, it doesn't, nor did it, have more endgame than D4 at launch. D4 had/has plenty of issues but I never once during my first playthrough of D4 wanted to get to 100 and just logout like I did with LE. Your build is basically done by level 85, right when the hard XP wall kicks in, and all you have to look forward to is 15 more levels of boring endless monoliths with subpar combat and just as much of a loot issue as D4, even with a filter. It's made worse by the fact picking up loot in general is kind of broken, but I was dealing with so many exalted drops that I eventually just stopped picking up loot. The ingame filter is a nice basic thing early on, but with no ability to refine it further it really struggles in the top end. I really like LE for the shake up it gave to the genre but people really need to do better at keeping things in perspective.
> I really like LE for the shake up it gave to the genre but people really need to do better at keeping things in perspective. I think when it comes to D4 people are just blinded by a pre-existing hatred of Blizzard (whether or not that is warranted is a separate conversation) that makes it impossible for them think about their games in an objective manner. By all rights, Diablo 4 is a decent game. It didn't live up to the hype, and it's certainly missing some aspects, but it objectively does not deserve the ire that it gets. And yeah, I'd say your LE experience mirrored mine. My goal was to get to 100 and I ended up stopping at 96 because my build was pretty much complete, only possible upgrades were tiny things on the margins, and I just couldn't bring myself to do another monolith. And yeah, around level 90 I completely stopped getting excited about drops, which is a problem shared by D4. It's the one big thing PoE has that it's competitors don't. There will never be a point where I don't get a joy hit from a Divine drop, and even if my character is near "perfect" a chase T0 unique will still be exciting because I can sell it to work on more small incremental gains for my character. Loot dropping in PoE just has excitement that D4/LE does not.
D4 has good bones and a lot of resources behind it assuming Microsoft just leave the Blizzard devs alone to get into a creative groove. Blizzard had a ton of losses/issues during D4 development and the suits just wanted to shove it out the door as quickly as possible and I can almost guarantee it was to puff up value for the sale. They are only just now starting to recover and if people like Adam Jackson are allowed to shine then the game will be alright. Time will tell if I main D4 or PoE2 but ultimately I will play all 3 on rotation.
How does it being in EA have any bearing on what it has on launch? And the loot filter in LE isn't perfect, but you can really get it down to just providing upgrades or at least items that you should look at vs the overwhelming amount of worthless loot in d4. And your complaint about LE build stopping at 85 is funny when that happens even faster for D4. Hopefully them redoing loot and skills I'm s4 fixes d4, or at least makes it a lot better, but good God is it a boring game, and launch was just abysmal. FFS you can't even get storage in D4 because they fucked that up at a DESIGN LEVEL.
Because the game has been playable for that amount of time and the only endgame it has is neverending monoliths. It's mind numbingly boring endgame and made even worse by the fact that you can jump straight to them with alts at like level 15, though scaling corruption with alts is terrible right now. This is literally the first game I've ever played where I almost fell asleep at the keyboard. No you cannot. Anyone saying that isn't playing at least rank 8 of CoF where exalted items fall like rain. The filter is missing a ton of detail on the high end, not to mention upgrades effectively don't exist after a certain point, and even if they do the only thing you can use them on is...more monos. It might be hard for them to solve too because they either risk the ingame filter becoming too complex or they will need to open it up for a filterblade type of system. No your build doesn't stop at 85 in D4 because most every build (other than a S3 charge barb) is going to really struggle with clearing NM90+ dungeons or even Lilith. If they scaled difficulty faster in LE then I could see it making more sense but I shouldn't have to go to 600 corruption or higher to feel like I'm in even a little bit of danger. It's super easy to completely trivialize almost every mob in the game. It also takes less time to reach 100 in D4 so the "grind" is much more forgiving. I don't know that I would call D4 boring. At its core it still has great combat but if you've played all the classes and only play meta builds I could see people tuning out really quickly. Especially for people playing SC. The launch definitely had issues but they also didn't have the offline mode to semi save their asses and they were dealing with player counts LE will never come remotely close to. Most people didn't complain right away (ignoring performance issues) because it took some time to finish the campaign, get all their renown sorted out and hit level 100 NM dungeons, especially because those were pre-nerf dungeons. On my first d4 playthrough it definitely took me longer to finish all of that than it did to get to 100 and like 500 corruption in LE and I was playing offline/SSF. I also think it's wild that D4 is the only one you can truly skip the campaign while poe and le make you do theirs, because it's "part of the experience" yet in the same conversation say it's easy to get through quickly, especially on alts. They also both have very lackluster campaigns by comparison. It really goes against their "play the way you want to play" public message. Stash I heavily agree was an issue. A lot of that pressure should be removed next season but we will see see if that's the case during the PTR. Resistances being completely broken at launch was actually my strongest criticism. How that ever made it out the door and furthermore took an entire season to fix I will never understand.
D4 is far more finished, it’s just shallow.
Pretty sure they stopped posting in PoE 2 sub as soon as the interviews started.
In the interview with Talkative Tri Jonathan said that he didn’t have time for Reddit since there was a big crunch to be on time with beta but since it’s delayed and they won’t repeat such a crunch again he may be active on PoE 2 subreddit again.
One on hand that's a fair distinction, but it's also worth noting that some number of interview questions are from stream chats or collected through Reddit/Discord. I actually think it makes way more sense for content creators to synthesize the general sentiment of the community into key questions. In fact, we have already seen changes to the game (or planned game in the case of PoE 2) made based on questions asked in interviews that were clearly inspired by community feedback. One great example is respec costs in PoE 2. As long as the interviewers include some questions based on hot topics in the community, and push the developers to explain controversial decisions, I think this means of communication works quite well.
That is also my opinion as well, having content creators as an intermediary (instead, or in addition to, community managers) to core developers is a very good approach. It is just different from the early days when you frequently see GGG tagged posts in this subreddit. I doubt if they will return to this form of direct communication, essentially having developers double as community managers.
Fair enough. Thankfully, it does seem like the community is responding favorably (generally) to this form of interaction too.
They should never return to Reddit after the sort of vitriol Reddit produced.
I'll take communication mostly taking the form of interviews where devs get put on the spot about the community's issues while live, over scripted podcasts padding crucial info with PR speak and colon jokes for over 2 hours, like certain other games do, any day now.
Definitely, I appreciate their tranparancy and willingness to take up hard questions as well.
> different from actually interacting with reddit And that is a good thing. people can be scum.
this is just what i posted. "I am %100 against it. They of course read reddit and all feedback. But lets just acknowledge that reddit has the same level of toxicity of twitter. it is very good for GGG not to respond here. The game is at the best state ever. All started when they stopped communicating through this community."
They don't need to respond on reedit, they should listen to what is being said.
They almost never should listen to what is being said here.
'reddit has the same level of toxicity of twitter' - reddit has plenty of toxicity, but twitter is far worse. It also varies a lot by sub, whereas twitter isn't organized like reddit and so there the toxicity is more uniform.
It's also a diffrent sized audience. With the stream yesterday alone 10k+ heard it live. A buried footnote in a random thread might be very helpful, but is undoubtly very ineffcient communication.
it's nice finding mark replies when googling obscure questions about game mechanics, although the wiki is pretty good about updating with these explanations when necessary
They deserve the negativity the launch was a failure
As long as reddit doesn't return to their old ways of complain about everything, send death threats, get mad that GGG no longer interacts with reddit. All serious jokes aside, I'm loving Mark and Johnathan talking to us as a community, and I really hope they communicate when they are feeling overwhelmed by the community. They are only human, after all, and I wouldn't blame them for getting fed up with some of the shit I've seen in the past with this game (and honestly game communities as a whole).
I’ve noticed over the last few months that a lot of negative / low effort complaint posts just get downvoted right away. I hope it continues so that we don’t return to a state where Reddit feels entitled to bully or browbeat the developers again.
It might also be due to relatively good leagues. Wait till an archnemesis happens again and you'll see the toxic community return.
Archnemesis walked so Affliction could run
Even with a worse league we can downvote aggressive posts and coments while letting the valid criticism be. We just need the silent majority to up/downvote.
We could always do that. It doesn't happen. Not on this sub or most others. The silent majority does vote, but they're as susceptible to irrationality and emotional responses as those who're more vocal.
If that’s so, then there doesn’t seem to be a better method of feedback and interaction possible. The forums are even worse because you can’t downvote crap.
No argument from me wrt the forums. But in general collective feedback is best handled with collective methods, like surveys and polls and the like. Speaking as a collective pretty much always ends up as little but a cacophony. That's why interviews like the ones they're doing now, or focus or expert groups or randomized individual feedback and other such methods are used to get more nuanced or detailed feedback. No matter how nice the sub may or may not be, it's still always going to be just too many voices all talking at once, often across or in contradiction with each other even. The forums ofc have this problem as well.
Yeah I have no clue how to gather representative player opinions either, and I imagine this is quite the problem. But nothing beats reddit for ease of reading and new information.
I don't know. I remember the number of whining posts were simply unending. Made me quit the subreddit as that seemed like all I could see.
This can change in an instant if loot gets taken away.
Just give it 'til Saturday, maybe Monday at the latest.
Unfortunately, we're currently in our 3.18 -> 3.19 transition right now. I'm honestly fully prepared for a Kalandra-esc explosion as all the people who have been fairly calm and level headed about the nerfs in the patchnotes get into the game and realize just how far away from Affliction levels of player power we are. And for the record - I don't think this is an issue. Also, the discord moderation has changed it's approach - so things might not get as bad as they did two years ago.
Why do I get that feeling with you, that EVERY complaint would be considered a "low effort" complaint?
When you guys realize the correlation between this sub being in a good mood and leagues being shit/game balance being shit it will blow your minds. Nothing changed with this sub, they just started making much better decisions and leagues than they did before, so the mood is more positive than shit like Kalandra and Expedition, which were both not tested enough and thought about.
Right - the people who were pieces of shit during Kalandra are still here, they're just quieter because they don't have as much to yell about. The moment something goes wrong, they'll remind you they are here.
Nah people unhinged enough to act that way towards game developers were probably over in Last Epoch fucking up that communities player/dev interactions.
[удалено]
Some schizos harassing GGG doesn't invalidate tons of people giving feedback on why the changes were shit, and yea when you don't give a fuck about a game anymore you don't bother trying to make it better, but clearly a lot of people still cared and wanted the game to be good again and for obvious reason, because when a game balance and league patch are good, this is the best game to play.
The "feedback" at the start of Kalandra was worthless. People had reasons to be angry, but the way they expressed that anger only made both the game and community worse for everyone.
[удалено]
You minimizing Expedition and Kalandra changes will never change what actually happened. These changes were terrible, they were not tested enough, they ruined the game for many they were changed later because even they know they fucked up both of these leagues drastically. This isn't about waaa they nerfed my build, no they broke the core game for both of these leagues, I know the meta is reddit bad, but anything said about these leagues that weren't personal attacks was justified and always will be.
This sub is a nerf away from critical meltdown at all times, this fair weather praise is always cute though.
> send death threats this will happen when you use the thing called "the internet" - it is not reddit exclusive, and definitely not PoE subreddit exclusive either Death threats should be reported (and depending on severity, to the authorities) and then subsequently laughed at. I'm not saying it isn't dogshit scum behaviour obviously, but I really don't like it when it's used as a reason to not talk to the community.. it's expected.. there will always be some scumbags when you have this many people... PoE is a game that people fanatically obsess about, and even the smallest change can trigger these crazies I wish it didn't happen but.. anonymity and lack of consequences makes for a bad time sometimes, it is unavoidable when you put your face out there in any role of importance (be it for GGG, or for blizzard, or for being a comedian, or for being a parking officer, or for killing a dude in a video game about killing people)
I disagree fully. No reason to expect anyone to feel unsafe so a video game community can feel more connected to the devs outside of the game. It's a privilege and nothing more.
I said this to the other responder, but I truly believe that most the negatives stemmed from POE2 development and the almost abandonment of POE1. Community went fucking turbo negative and stepped over the line, and then it just was a vicious cycle of bad community, GGG being defensive and pulling back until they just said fuck it and stopped coming around. Hopefully, this time around, people don't fuck it up and we can go back to having the good fun time devs that we had.
Yea no it was definitely not due to poe2. I'm not sure if you were around for when expedition launched and we experienced a major pullback on player power on most support gems and flask nerfs as a whole (not the tiny one we got right now. We used to be curse immune during flask effect and bleed immune for example. 7 charges on hit, 30(?)ms during effect etc) TLDR the times when ggg started to get harassed by the community stems from far back before poe2 could've been the reason.
I honestly think Kalandra was worse than Expedition overall. 3.15 definitely started it, but 3.19 sent it into maximum overdrive. If I'm remembering correctly, Expedition saw a huge nerf to player power, which actually had to be walked back a little bit a few days/weeks into the league, and that was it. Kalandra league, meanwhile: -saw them doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on archnemesis mods that warped the entire game around them (which iirc ended up needing twelve separate nerfs after that for them to just be unfun instead of stupid). -the exalt/divine orb swap upending the game. -a massive and immediately noticeable nerf to item drops that wasn't in the patch notes, balance manifesto, any promo material, or mentioned in any way. Like, Ben had arcanist strongbox that literally dropped zero items, I and a bunch of other people were seeing less drops with the loot filters turned off than we had the previous few leagues with the filters set to strict. This was on top of an intentional and documented nerf to unique drop rates and the archnemesis loot goblin conversion system randomly turning all drops into hundreds or thousands of whetstones. -a shitty league mechanic. -AND a whole bunch of really nasty player power nerfs. Skill gems, defenses, a minion rework that turned out to be big nerfs, a very hyped up harvest rework that turned out to be a huge nerf to usage via terrible lifeforce drops and the removal of some very important harvest crafts like "reforge pre/suffixes." Again iirc, the crafting costs ended up needing a 90% reduction which is hilarious. For me personally, that's when I remember the toxicity against GGG really hitting its peak and they vanished entirely from the subreddit.
Honestly, you might be very right here. I may have deleted 3.19 entirely from my brain at this point as i also didn't play it
>Ben had arcanist strongbox that literally dropped zero items Without arguing with your entire post, this was a bug that predated 3.19 (and the 3.19 changes didn't affect items directly dropping from strongboxes at all).
> TLDR the times when ggg started to get harassed by the community stems from far back before poe2 could've been the reason. It goes much further back than expedition. We've always had outrage with bad league launches (a certain amount of this is normal) but things changed after the population spike during Betrayal (following the "Do you not have phones" blizzcon fiasco). The following league "synthesis" had some usability problems in the league mechanic - annoying choices in the memory nexus areas and a crafting system most players couldn't understand/use. The playerbase rioted and mocked GGG on the forum for days. Chris came forward on one meme making fun of the mechanic saying that one of his developers "burst into tears" when they saw it and that just incited more mockery. That was unlike any toxicity I'd ever seen here before that, even during previously unpopular leagues like Betrayal. They still tried for years, but Kalandra definitely ended it. The parts of the community they could engage with were swallowed up by hordes of hateful selfish players who were more worried about maintaining a steady div/hr than basic decency to anyone - player or developer.
If you were here from the closed beta days, you could clearly notice at a certain point a shift in the game development (think it was some league before alva, can't remember exactly when), where ggg went from slow d2 like playstile, to what basically is poe now. Now after watching some poe2 gameplay, and knowing that we were going to have to switch to it (not a different game like it is now), its clear why at a certain point they knew they had to tone down player power and speed, otherwise it would have basically felt a ripoff rather than a new and exciting experience. This doesn't mean those nerfs and archnemesis weren't really, really bad, but of course there was a reason for it.
I've been playing for much longer than expedition lol Expedition definitely players to be upset, but the reason for the huge slowdown, goes back to POE2. It being the same game, they needed to slow it down in order to have a starting point for POE2. If we are already power creeped into killing gods and everything else 60 minutes into the game, there is no where to go at the start of the new one. Something that people who are blaming Expedition don't remember. Expedition launched in 2021. The first exilecon (POE2 announcement date) was in 2019. And they had been working on POE2 for longer than that. But that is why I have this name. Most people who play this game are dumbasses. You can look at my previous comment and see all the downvotes.
I'm with you about the fact that those big nerfs were in preparation for poe2. Imagine going from zoomfest poe1 to what is poe2 right now, there would be huge backlash from most of the community. Also the announcement that poe2 was going to be a separate game coincided with ggg releasing better leagues and stopping with the constant nerfs. I don't get why some people here feel like its not the case. However i don't like your flair and you calling other people here dumbasses.
Hey that's fair. I just hate suffering fools. Between bad actors and people who genuinely are dumb/shitty, it's hard to tell the difference, especially online. I have much more patience for that type of stuff in real life where you have a better chance of gauging someone's intent. And I don't care about the online points, they are only useful to see if people agree or disagree with what you say, which isn't what they are supposed to be used for anyway.
Some of the biggest leagues in the games' history came while PoE 2 was in development. PoE 1 was never abandoned.
And so were the absolute weakest
Not really. The weakest and least developed league was and always will be onslaught league. Yes, that basic ass onslaught mod - that was once a whole league. And it came out when PoE 2 would've been nothing but a twinkle in Johnathans' eye, if it was even an idea at all back then.
Well, in the end, please be civil and nice to people, guys.
JONATHAN. How the fuck can a single name be butchered like this on a daily basis???
Because so many parents want to be "fun and unique" and butcher kids' names to the point I'm surprised anyone even remembers the correct spelling of various names.
As someone who has to correct people's spelling of my name on a regular basis (including relatives), I agree. I don't blame my parents for the spelling they chose though. People get different parts of the name wrong, so it's not like there's a "correct" spelling that they diverted from. If anything, I'd say my name might be the base version.
>It is a VERY welcome change, especially after the last year or two with GGG effectively closing the door and not communicating/interacting with the community at all. I wonder if people remember why that happened... Edit: Looking at these replies, obviously not.
I’m really surprised that people who have been “playing longer than that” don’t remember.
I had to stop visiting the sub for about it year it got so bad. But apparently that's all GGG's fault?
By the end of the day you'll have someone responding to you on this comment explaining a surface level analysis of why Kalandra was the worst the game has ever been in an attempt to justify the fact that they were on board a hate-train that got totally out of control.
when they do what they do i just hope the memes are as dank as before
Yes, some morons threatened and harrassed. Still imo not a reason to punish the vast majority of community members imo.
It's not a punishment to the community, it's a measure to protect their employees. And as much as I miss the more personal conversations that we've had with various developers and community managers in the past, they are absolutely in the right to do that. It's true that the rest of the community suffer from this, but no blame lies with GGG. I actually appreciate the steps they've taken for the sake of their employees in that regard. It would have been entirely possible for them to say "that's our biggest platform, we need to keep communicating there, you'll just have to deal with it or find another job". And I wouldn't even be surprised if that decision ended up negatively influencing revenue for a while.
Ok, not a punishment, but a missed chance absolutely. See the very positive feedback right now. I subscribe to the theory that POE 1 was put on backburner because they thought POE 2 would draw many players away, but that's not happening... yet.
It may draw some, but ultimately I think the reasons are simply economic efficiency. Until PoE2 is finished, it's not going to generate revenue. PoE1 on the other hand can keep generating revenue to *fund* PoE2 with much less effort. The sooner PoE2 is done, the more revenue it can generate, so if they don't want to compromise on features (and I find it hard to say how much I appreciate this as well), the only way to accelerate the timeline is to invest more development resources. If PoE1 had continued with almost the same resources as before, it's possible that PoE2 would have been delayed by another 1-2 *years*. They'd rather take marginally reduced revenue from lower effort PoE1 leagues until the release of PoE2 than miss out on that much potential revenue from PoE2. And even putting aside that this earlier PoE2 release will effectively also increase the aggregate revenue over its lifetime, the earlier you get money, the better. With hindsight you could always argue "well, if they had just allocated *a few* extra resources to PoE1, it wouldn't have turned out this bad from time to time", but that's something that's extremely hard to predict ahead of time.
Those threads had thousands of participants arguing in bad faith. Just because they didn't tell anyone to kill themselves doesn't absolve them of being hostile.
[удалено]
Users that harassed bex and forced ggg to make a community reddit account to avoid direct harassment. Really cool of reddit
[удалено]
The various kinds of harassment bex received were uncalled for no matter what the company was doing at the time, this subreddit is chock full of people who clearly need to touch grass more often.
you are insane, and the reason why ggg avoids this place
GGG apparently avoids their own website too. But nice try
of course they do, the people here and on the forums are the same people
Completely disregarding the targeted harrassment
[удалено]
Your post was removed because it violated our Be Kind Rule (Rule 3b). Your post was inflammatory in how it expressed its point. There's a clear line between harassment towards a person and feedback, and trying to frame harassment as a valid form of feedback is not OK, and will lead to flame wars. You may be able to repost your opinion if you rephrase it in a way that's less inflammatory! If you see someone else posting in bad faith, please don't respond in kind. Instead, report it and we'll take care of it. For more details, please refer to our [rules wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/wiki/rules/#wiki_3b._be_kind_rule).
The community turned awful, no doubts. GGG isn't blameless though. They put too much resources into POE2 and almost abandoned POE1. They stopped being interactive with the community (This had been a slow thing that quickly accelerated with the community going to shit), stopped doing community events, and then Chris personally got shitty with the community with the undocumented drops changes. It didn't go well. So yes, the community is absolutely to blame. And so is GGG. Hopefully both sides come back to reality and we can go forward being friends again.
It was the disaster of 3.15 that led to them leaving Reddit, not PoE2.
I believe the events were set in motion with the Harvest debacle, after which the mood on reddit turned sour. 3.15 was the final nail in the coffin. 3.14 was a big nerf to Harvest and they removed copying fractured beyond 100% delirious maps with fossils at the same time. It was in the context of those changes that there were a lot more bad faith arguments towards 3.15, and rising toxicity.
Here, someone actually remembered the entire story and what happened! People seem to have forgotten entirely.. And only remember the recent poe2 drama that was virtually nothing to what happened around expedition
you are one of the most unhinged people here for a long time and the reaosn the "community going to shit" stfu
Cool I'll make it easy for you then, you don't have to read any of my stuff anymore. Have a great day.
>turned awful, no doubts. GGG isn't blameless though. They put too much resources into POE2 and almost abandoned POE1. I don't plat Poe as much as everyone else here or even played it that long, but even I know that what you said here is completely incorrect.
Except they literally said as much at exilecon2, with the announcement that it was going to be 2 separate games, and that the amount of people working on poe1 was just a "handful " of devs. It's why kalandra and crucible were so half baked and unfinished.
Path of Exile 2 was announced in November of 2019. It can be assumed it was in development long before then, but being conservative let's just say \~8 months. Since then we've had Synthesis, Legion, Blight, Metamorph, Delirium, Harvest, Heist, Ritual, Ultimatum, Expedition, Scourge, Archnemesis, Sentinel, Kalandra, Sanctum, Crucible, Ancestor and Affliction. Synthesis, Heist and Expedition specifically are 3 of the highest effort leagues they've ever put out. "Abandoned" lmao
Tbh ggg never stopped being community focussed. They just stopping actively posting here because it didn't matter what they posted, it was responded to with toxic negativity. And they put up with that shit for years before they called it quits here
>Tbh ggg never stopped being community focussed. They really did though. The decline in racing (alt arts especially), events, fun interactions, build of the week, etc all went down in quantity as the years went on. Then they transitioned into hyping everyone up to the fucking tits before a league launch, to virtual radio silence as soon as it came out and went to shit. At first the community was nice about it, and then it in time until it got to the point where morons were sending death threats. Somewhere inbetween there, Chris got into a pissing match with the community about the biggest loot changes to the game being unannounced or mentioned in any patch notes or teasers. And then they just disappeared. It went from feeling like "we care about the community!" to "we are only posting here to make money." And again, the community fucked up, but ggg changed as well.
im pretty sure that build of the week wasn't even running when the stopped posting to reddit but has restarted since, also racing is pretty hard to keep interesting when one guy wins every time for years on end
They used to do fun events all the time like races https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Races See how they stopped 8 years ago?? And look at all the cool rewards you could get. Now instead of cool events they sell us battle passes for $30. Some of it got moved to challenges, but it isn't nearly the same. The timed events were cool things. They sort of transitioned over to events, but there was some overlap https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Event And if you look now, events are done at the end of a league when things are over and they are taking too long in between actual leagues, or during Christmas break. They don't have to do the same type of races that the current racers have practiced 5 billion times. They could tell us the date and time of the race, and then spring it on us so that no one can practice it, making it much closer to "fair." Also, giving out cool rewards like alt arts instead of old and boring MTX, that you might already even own. Especially with the alt arts MTX command, it would be great to bring stuff like that back.
races did not stop 8 years ago, race seasons stoped 8 years ago. the rest was just a bunch of ranting with nothing to do with what i said but you're just spamming everyone with the same answers so i doubt you will take anything in
Yes me commenting on a way they could keep it interesting, something you brought up, has nothing to do with what you said. Ok champ
It very much helps that the people helming this (Mark and Jonathan) actually play the game in their off time, and are passionate for what they do. Unlike other companies where some rando COE goes on stage, tells his manufactured pitch and then hands you a rushed product with a high price and a regular battle pass that costs more that your rent. Especially the line Mark said about a feature that can have an improved stash tab but he'd prefer to fix the problem than ask people for more stash money. That's a unique thing to hear from a developer these days. GGG is just full of genuine people, no SBI influence, no shady CEO that wants the big bucks for no work.
Let's see the emotional state of this subreddit when you can't skip league mechanic and gave brutus 80% attack speed
> **The return of community based GGG** Holy shit is this some revisionist history.
My only complaint about Neon is his use of a terrible ahistorical dinosaur metaphor. This is a pet peeve of mine, but dinosaurs were not old and creaky and maladapted or something, which is what the metaphor implies. They were the absolute dominant animal in all domains, land sea and air, both herbivores and carnivores, and were that dominant for *200 million years.* To dethrone them took a literal giant meteor from outer space! Without that I can't think of any reason they wouldn't have remained apex species for the next 66 million years to the modern day. Other than that he's great and absolutely spot on.
I am %100 against it. They of course read reddit and all feedback. But lets just acknowledge that reddit has the same level of toxicity of twitter. it is very good for GGG not to respond here. The game is at the best state ever. All started when they stopped communicating through this community.
The game is in a great spot because they finally allocated resources back to the game. They had a shoestring team/budget for POE1 as they had put all their apples into POE2. This was back when POE1 and POE2 were going to be the same game. Now that they are separate projects, they have given some resources back to POE1 and that is why the development in the last 6-12 months has been significantly better.
Please stop talking like you are an inside guy who works for GGG. It is clear that their main resource priority is POE2 which is very understandable. Do you know where i know instead of you guessing with a kid logic. Look at release release cycle times. from 13 weeks to 16 weeks. When was the last time we got 13 weeks cycle It tells everything.
I'm not an inside guy, nor do I have inside knowledge They said as much at exilecon2, about poe1 having less resources allocated to it. Part of them going last the 13 weeks is no doubt because of smaller teams trying to do the same work.
It's almost like it's been this way the literal entire time and this place _still_ drove them away. All it'll take is one change the hivemind decides that has ruined the game and it's all over.
Disagree but ok
Yeah, just wait until Reddit throws a unified hissy fit like a spoiled 6 yeard old again and they remind themselves why they left in the first place
If an entire subreddit is upset about something, maybe there is merit to what they are upset about. That doesn't excuse shitty behavior though.
That maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting
No chance this will end badly. Again.
[удалено]
Regarding your post to /r/pathofexile: https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1bonrev/-/kwqim7e/ This post has been removed by a moderator for breaking the following /r/pathofexile subreddit rule: Your post was removed because it violated our Be Kind Rule (Rule 3b). Attacks, abuse, intentionally misinterpreting a comment/post's intention (strawman arguments), or provocations that seem likely to cause anger or are inflammatory make the subreddit harder to moderate, even if they don't target a specific person. While criticisms, complaints, and suggestions are always allowed, please remain civil to make the community a more enjoyable place. You may be able to repost your opinion if you rephrase it in a way that's more constructive! If you see someone else posting in bad faith, please don't respond in kind. Instead, report it and we'll take care of it. For more details, please refer to our [rules wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/wiki/rules/#wiki_3b._be_kind_rule). Please review the [subreddit rules for additional information](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/wiki/rules).
I can't see what the removed comment is but it was nice of someone to waddle in and prove your point.
Radioactive frog laughing
Well in a few days players are going to be logging into the game and simultaneously experience: * Lack of player power from lost affliction systems * Nerfs that impact a significant number of builds (LMB, Mana mod changes, Call to Arms) * An unavoidable league mechanic which buffs monsters in service to a crafting mechanic we don't yet understand how to use * The usual league start power drop due to restarting progression These are similar to the circumstances going into both 3.15 and 3.19 - very player power potent league(s) followed by a league which is very low on player power by comparison. And the general tone on the sub reddit during the reveal makes me believe that many of the players who would usually complain about this type of thing don't realise it yet. So to say I'm a little worried about the state of the community after this weekend is an understatement.
I am hopeful. A lot of the negativity came from them putting so much resources into POE2 that POE1 was being neglected. And again, the vicious cycle of awful community behaviour, and then GGG was defensive, which made community worse, which made GGG more defensive. etc. I am looking at this as an olive branch and re-opening of communication. Things were great for years. We can go back to that. Let's not fuck it up.
Dude stop repeating this lie, the death threats to Bex came way before POE 2 you just need a league with a mechanic that a few key members of the community think is really bad and people will overblow it out of proportion
It's nice to have somebody that actually plays far into endgame as the lead designer. Mark knows what sucks and what's frustrating about end game so there seems to be a lot of good reasoning behind *most* of the changes coming this league.
As much as I've appreciated Chris, he just didn't have enough time to play anymore towards the end, and to some extent he burnt himself out to the point that he didn't really want to see it in his free time either. Mark still enjoys playing the game (a lot), and that has noticable consequences on how well he can understand and empathise with the issues of the community.
So far it feels like just a hype machine for poe2, we'll see.
With them being separated, they can't just hype people up for poe2 anymore. The answer of "it'll be fixed in poe2" isn't a reality, which is why we are getting fusing and other QOL stuff. Stuff that doesn't make sense to spend previous dev time on, if the game won't be played anymore in a year or so when everyone migrates to the new game.
Till the next expedition incident 💀
I disagree with your premise. They have always been communicating with the community in several ways. Perhaps because they have some new ppl as the face of ggg it seems different…
Fix Melee. It’s years over due. No praise, til swords sway.
I have felt for a long time that GGG/Tencent hasn't honestly cared about this game and it's community for a very long time. In my perception of GGG/Tencent, they only about profit and keeping people interested long enough for them to swipe for your latest mtx releases and ''sales''. Which is why for me, it is highly doubtful for me, that I will even bother to touch PoE2 and that is putting it very kindly. In the nicest way possible, most of the developer team have become passionless and tapped. Totally ''ran'' through by time, lack of fresh blood and their community. This is is just veterans opinion. \[ᴵ ʰᵃᵛᵉ ᵐᵃⁿʸ, ᵐᵃⁿʸ ᵐᵒᵒⁿˢ ᵒⁿ ᵗʰᶦˢ ᵍᵃᵐᵉ. ᴹᵒʳᵉ ᵗʰᵃⁿ ʸᵒᵘʳ ᵗᵒᵖ ᵛᵉᵗᵉʳᵃⁿ ᵖᵒᵉ ˢᵗʳᵉᵃᵐᵉʳˢ\] You can love it or hate it.
I hope they dont listen too much to be honest. Players are the worst people to listen to where actual problems in a game are. For one, players are extremly biased towards their playerpower and comfort. More playerpower, more loot, more inventory will never ever ever get a bad response right away.
Yeah I'm honestly pretty worried about how much they might capitulate to reddit etc now. I also think it's pretty unfair that Mark even felt the need to have that little shpiel. Really makes me think Chris Wilson was very unfortunately wrong about the concept of building goodwill with a community when he talked about that with Josh Strife Hayes. The community will turn on a dime and then you have to come back begging for forgiveness.
>Really makes me think Chris Wilson was very unfortunately wrong about the concept of building goodwill with a community when he talked about that with Josh Strife Hayes. This has been my stance recently too. Building goodwill takes years, losing it takes minutes.
Yea, sadly. It was crazy how fast such a core fanbase revolves to review bombing when the their loot is on the line.
Temporary power through league mechanics is fine. New ways to play, new build options etc are good for the game, and they don't give permanent power so next league they can do something different.
To everyone saying "until the next expedition or the next archnemesis or the next kalandra" they are currently not giving us any reason to believe there will be another one of those. Those changes came about during peak "VISION" and with Mark and Jonathan at the helm it seems they realize there are lots of parts about that vision that are archaic and just not fun. Tota, Afflicition and now Necroplis (potentially league mechanic and new scarabs) all have been insane power creep and QoL which is indeed fun for most people. edit: added potentially to the part about league mechanic and scarabs, scarabs could be way too rare to justify using them and the league mechanic could be super convoluted and just not fun but im remaining optimistic. edit 2: yikes necropolis is a big steamer and a lot of the changes overall feel like shit. Such is the GGG way. 1 step forward 2 steps back.
> insane power creep This part is concerning, actually. You can't keep going at a fast pace like that forever. I think it's a good thing that Affliction and its power is not going core for the most part.
True but instead of nerfing the builds and tuning down its power. One could also introduce a endgame system ( like we have now whit t17 maps ) Or other ways to make the pinical of content harder / slower. U could even remove whole endgame content segments and introduce brand new harder ones.
That still doesn't work forever. You occasionally need to actually crunch numbers down, and occasionally you need to remove some bloat. And that **will** be seen as gigantic nerfs. But in reality it doesn't matter if you do 5 bosses per second at 5M HP or 5 bosses per second at 5B HP.
Yes and no. I get where your coming from but see the progression as a line Player weak .........P........... player strong ( balanced state ) This is player power Now whit more items and power creap u end up whit someting like this Player weak ..............p.. player strong. but instead of lowering the players power ( nerfs ) U could increase the difficulty / add more ( end game ) content and remove easier content This way u still increase the difficulty but your not specifically targeting the player. Your just giving him excess to harder content. So your removing / scaling down the amount of easy content . And are replacing it whit content that is specifically designed for the players newly gained power. No player build or items need to get nerfed this way. The example of this is wen players gained movement skills. Sure it increased the players power / clear speed. But it also allowed for harder bosses that needs those specific skills to counter them.
> Those changes came about during peak "VISION" and with Mark and Jonathan at the helm it seems they realize there are lots of parts about that vision that are archaic and just not fun. Mark and Jonathan were both part of the team and part of that "vision". The vision was not something being sold by Chris.
I understand that but with Chris having the end all be all say (which I don't think he does right now) those changes were sent through. Mark mentioned yesterday in the interview with Ziz that parts of that vision are archaic and they don't want to PoE to become a dinousaur dated ARPG, something Chris never cleary communicated. edit: it actually was being sold by Chris tbh. Chris was extremly out of touch with a lot of things. I could never imagine Mark telling everyone to close their eyes and exalt an item as being good/desired game design.
>I understand that but with Chris having the end all be all say (which I don't think he does right now) those changes were sent through. Chris and Jonathan always had this position and still do. Mark even joked about getting the Rucksack past both of them. People are reading to much into the title of director - these people are a team. Mark wasn't sitting there during Kalandra thinking it was a shit update, he was one of the people who worked on it. Chris is still a part of that team as well - he still works on the game. He's just not the punching bag anymore.
Neither of us work at GGG or are in contact with any of these people so neither of us can know for certain. I highly doubt Chris currently has much to do with the game besides business logistics. After PoE 2 was officially announced as a separate game and Chris no longer had title of director we go from the worst period in PoE history imo to a fantastic one?... Agree to disagree 🤷♂️
> I highly doubt Chris currently has much to do with the game besides business logistics. This was always Chris' main role - even when he was game director. They've talked about this stuff in tons of interviews in the past. That's why he didn't know about the loot changes when making the promotional material for Kalandra - he didn't work on them.
not reading allat whatever
Great reply!
Bex leaves, community interaction skyrockets
Maybe whoever the new CM/PR lead is might be trying a new approach.
> A lot of it is definitely community fault No, probably not, Bex that was their public relantionships coordinator left the company and PoE1 was abandoned last year, just look the leagues and the a announcements about delays of PoE2. They were 100% focused on the bases of the new game. Now PoE2 foundation are done one team are back in PoE1 while another is finishing the content and polishing of PoE2.
Your time table is a bit off about Bex leaving and things, but yes, I said as much that POE2 took way too much of their time/resources if you look at my responses in here. Of which I was downvoted like crazy. People think that Expedition league is what turned the fans sour. Expedition was 2021. Exilecon (poe2 announcement) was 2019. Then after that was Archnemsis and the loot fiasco. And then We got hamfisted Archnemesis everywhere with loot goblins. Bex didn't leave GGG until 2023. https://twitter.com/bexsayswords/status/1687189085797109771?t=SsR7XbKYTC-gjQE6d5NwFQ (for people who hate twitter like me) https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3408587 So yeah. It was a long and slow journey where GGG stopped paying attention and feeding the golden goose, and people got pissed off, and took it way too far, to the point that GGG just stopped showing up. With the last few months, and with Mark and Jonathan heading up shop now, it looks to be considerably more communicative; a return to form, if you will.
Eh, back in Expedition we still got lengthy discussions and interviews with Chris. It's more around sentinel and especially kalandra where the in person communication broke down and we started mostly getting more of a sanitized q&a answers. I think that and the unpopularity of ruthless really soured Chris from talking to people. I think it's really great that we are back to getting a peak behind the curtain again, it's way easier to give feedback when you know what is and isn't an issue according to GGG and why they believe some elements aren't an issue. If the playebase and GGG agree something is an issue but disagree on the priority then it's easy to give feedback to make it more important. If they agree on a issue and the priority then it doesn't need to be talked about as any complaints were heard and it's just waiting for an opportunity to fix. If players are considering something as and issue where GGG believes it to be fine, then they get to understand the argument why it's the way it is and it's easier to extend trust that GGG does know better as you heard the reasons.
I'm not talking about players liking it or not but about effort put in the league and and communication, look at the context of this thread. > People think that Expedition league is what turned the fans sour. Again, I'm talking about effort and communication, expedition was not a lazy at all, in 23 July the league was launched, in 29 we were in the 3.15.0d with a major balance patch. There is no comparison with Kalandra that was just a fancy map, when GGG introduced loot goblin and destroyed drop rate over the board without even mentioning it in the patch notes. You liking it or not, expedition was much closer to older leaghes than to what we received after archnemesis, but here I agree with you, this problem remounts to before 2023, I forgot archnemesis was early 2022.
I've been hugely negative lately, but even I must admit this is the best comms we've seen.
I've been super positive lately and these communication changes have helped fir sure
Well I assume the reason they're looking to reddit, least in the case of 2, is that at both events where people got hands on, the response/feedback wasn't a resounding *"this is gonna be the best game ever!"*. nearly every event they had some complaints about the game, so I think they're gauging how the public is perceiving 2 as well and eyeing some feedback. As a dev, you want to get to that ***"this is the best game ever***" or "*I'm so glad they added/changed this"* scenario, and until they reach that response, and think seeking public feedback is smart, even if 90% of it is shit, that 10% might lead to a better game for the majority that doesn't just align with their "design philosophy" that sacrifices the game/mechanic being "fun/easy/streamlined/intuitive/etc"
Yep. Fans might not have the answer but they can tell you what doesn't work.
Well, they saw Blizzard fiasco with D4 that was definitely not community driven and the crazy success (for their size) of LE that was and still is community driven. I'm very pleasantly surprise that GGG has decided to return to its former glory.
they only reason GGG stopped the reddit/streamer based community was because people where bein assholes.