0.9.3 Updated Progress Report (final update Nov 13)

I'm going to keep this thread stickied and update the initial post each day as we get closer to the Beta deployment of 0.9.3.

November 1:
We are currently working on the 0.9.3alpha10 update which will hopefully be deployed to the Alpha realm tomorrow. It should finalise monster balance, restore some difficulty to the Maelstrom of Chaos areas and introduce the remaining portion of the new passive skills tree. If that patch goes well, then we anticipate that we'll be able to get 0.9.3 onto Beta within one more week of testing and fixing the growing backlog of polish issues.

Today we posted two screenshots from 0.9.3 and intend to upload more over the course of the week.

At this stage I expect that we can post preliminary 0.9.3 patch notes with a few days.

Edit: It appears the new passive skill tree has 1500+ nodes!

November 2:
We've just deployed 0.9.3alpha10 to the Alpha realm. It includes a much more complete version of the new passive skill tree. I'm intending to get a screenshot of that tree posted (publicly) in the next few days once we've tidied it up a bit and made some more changes based on Alpha feedback.

At this stage it's looking like 0.9.3 is getting pretty close to being ready for a wider set of testing (i.e. Beta). There are a bunch of issues such as boss balance, experience progression and some skill fine-tuning that we have to do first, but I don't see that taking too long. I think an estimate of one week is still reasonable, but of course it may vary by a few days if we encounter critical last minute problems.

Will talk to you again in tomorrow's update!

We also posted a new screenshot today.

November 3:
In addition to a very productive day working on the alpha11 update (which will probably be deployed tomorrow), we finalised an exact timeline of when we can deploy 0.9.3 to Beta. That day will be Monday, November 14 (New Zealand time).

It's important to understand that although we expect the patch to be ready within three workdays of today, it's necessary to schedule time for Quality Assurance and last minute fixes as testers find important issues.

Our planned schedule is as follows (all in New Zealand time):
Friday Nov 4: Continued development
Weekend of Nov 5-6: All balance finished
Monday Nov 7: Stable copy tagged for Quality Assurance
Tuesday Nov 8 - Friday Nov 11: Quality Assurance/continued Alpha testing (high level content) with small fixes merged.
Weekend of Nov 12-13: Time for last minute emergency fixes as required.
Monday Nov 14: Deploy to Beta, wipe all characters
Tuesday Nov 15: First patch to fix any Beta issues found

This may seem like a lot of polishing prior to a Beta release, but this is necessary to get major crashes and other easily fixable issues out of the way. The purpose of Beta is to get actual gameplay/economic feedback from a large group of players, which is impossible if we deployed rough Alpha-quality versions of the game. We want to avoid wasting time dealing with stability problems when ten thousand players have access, so that's why we fix those with less than a hundred Alpha testers.

Once Beta is deployed, we'll be iterating rapidly to take feedback into account. I expect we'll deploy balance patches very frequently in response to player feedback. New features (better vendors, finally?) will be added as soon as they are ready. There is no further need for super long patch development cycles after this one.

We will also substantially ramp up the rate at which people are added to the Beta. I'd like to see a concurrent player count of 500+ at this stage of the Beta, if we can!

November 4:
We're deploying the alpha11 update to the Alpha realm today. We're pretty happy with the first few hours of gameplay now, so tester focus will shift to higher level areas. With the 0.9.3 changes, a lot of the difficulty of higher areas comes from the increased rate (and danger) of boss monsters, so it should be interesting to hear stories of how testers got obliterated by combinations of hard boss mods :)

We're going to post preliminary 0.9.3 patch notes on Monday, one week before the patch goes live on Beta. These notes may change over time as we continue to tweak stuff.

November 5:
The alpha11 deploy went well yesterday and we're getting some great feedback to tweak balance before opening the floodgates in a week!

It's a nice quiet weekend here at the office where a few of our developers are fixing stuff up in preparation for next week. I've been working on balancing skills for high level play (making sure they're pretty fair in difficulty 4).

Erik and I spent an hour or so revamping the implicit (built-in) mods on the rings/amulets/belts in the game. We have a new philosophy for how we want those to work and it should help make them more flavourful while presenting more interesting choices to the player when they encounter new base types of these items.

If all goes well, we'll be able to deploy these changes to alpha later today.

November 6:
We sucessfully deployed 0.9.3alpha12 yesterday and alpha13 today with many incremental balance changes. Now all of the skills except for one (Blood Rage) are balanced according to my notes. It'll be interesting to see how much more they change based on player feedback over the next week.

A lot of my day was spent building and testing minion Witches to make sure that it was fun to play with a big horde of minions. I notice that we're going to have to make some changes to monster AI so that they are more inclined to attack your minions (this was of course reported many times in the 0.9.2 beta feedback forum of course).

November 7:
I've posted the current 0.9.3 patch notes here. Please post any questions about the changes in that thread.

Things are very hectic at the office trying to get a 0.9.3 candidate ready today for heavy Quality Assurance over the rest of the week.

Edit: this does not mean that 0.9.3 will be deployed today - the plan is still for deployment on November 14.

November 8:
Thanks for your feedback on the patch notes that I posted yesterday. It's great to hear people appreciating the progress that has been made and anticipating the new version. We've tried to answer as many questions as we can about the new patch and will keep doing so.

We deployed the alpha14 update today and are preparing alpha15 for tomorrow. It's getting pretty close to done. Only a few major balance issues remain such as Unique Boss balance, item requirements and item acquisition balance.

I'm going to update the patch notes when I get a chance to talk about some more changes we've been making to add identity to base items. I'll post to let you know when it's done.

Edit: It's done - I added this patch note:

• Rebalanced every single weapon in the game so that they have a hand-crafted progression of median damage, damage range, speed, requirements and variations on their implicit mod.

Also, 0.9.3alpha15 was just deployed to Alpha with more changes from this evening. We're trying to get the deploys fast and frequent so that we can iterate fast before it's posted to Beta next Monday. Hopefully we'll keep a similar speed up with regard to Beta fixes after that!

November 9:
Things are looking a lot more finished! We're preparing Alpha16 which is likely to be one of the last few alpha patches before we get this onto the Beta realm on Monday. Work at the moment is focussing on tweaking small balance values, balancing bosses/progression, fixing up the Bandit quests and starting to prepare the content updates that will occur once 0.9.3 is deployed.

November 10:
Alpha16 is now being uploaded to the Alpha realm for feedback. I've also updated the patch notes with a bunch more changes:

• Added PvP damage multiplier of 1/(1+(attacker_level/8)) for now.
• Completely rebalanced the drop rates of all the currency items.
• Doubled the currency item drop rate, but added a penalty to the rate of currency item drops if you're playing in areas far under your level.
• Changed the experience split in parties so that it more strongly favours playing with people near your level
• Changed the experience penalties for killing monsters far above/below your level. There's still a large safe zone of full experience near your level.
• Added new amulet/ring artwork.
• We added a warning for users with the recent Nvidia 285 series of drivers explaining that there are display issues we are working with Nvidia on fixing.
• Fixed a bug with amulet inventory positioning.
• Fixed a problem where Templar footsteps were 60% louder than other classes.
• Fixed a client crash that would occur if you die to damage reflection

Edit: Alpha17 is now being deployed. If we're lucky, there aren't many more of these to go...

November 11:
Deadlines are horrible - I can't write much because there are precious few hours left before the weekend. We deployed Alpha18 and are preparing Alpha19. It's all mostly done, but there are a lot of things we still have to prepare for Monday's deploy. Soon I will update the patch notes with some more changes that we've made recently.

Edit: No one in the office is playing Skyrim (I'm not kidding).

November 12:
It's basically done. We're making some minor tweaks and trying to fix performance issues. I need to playtest this game now. Alpha23 should be ready soon.

November 13:
We're trying out some experimental last minute changes that should greatly improve the performance of the game. Erik, Jonathan and I are about to do a playtest through the final 0.9.3 candidate to make sure that it all works properly. If so, that's the version you'll be playing tomorrow!

Here are the modifications to the patch notes:

• Revamped the character screen. It's not completely finished yet, but it's a lot more useful than before. The DPS displays are now pretty accurate and it lets you see your stats with regard to specific skills.
• Disabled ground tile tesselation for now as a workaround to problems with the nVidia 285 series of drivers. We'll re-enable it in the future.
• Updated and added pages on the official Path of Exile site that describe skills, support gems, monster auras and advanced item mod information.
• Added a new level-up effect and sound.
• Improved almost all sounds in the game.
• Rebalanced all the shields to have an interesting progression. They all have different amounts of block chance, armour (or evasion, or energy shield) bonus, or implicit mods specific to each type of shield.
• Disabled the item mods that added three stats related to a single weapon type.
• Added some new Unique items. More will be added in subsequent patches.
• Added the "Culling Strike" mod (for some uniques). It causes monsters to die if you strike them down to 10% or less life.
• Blood Rage now gives increased attack speed that only comes into effect when the character is on low life (35% or less).

Well, now that it's all done, I'm going to unsticky this progress thread. See you guys in game!

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Deathtiny2266 wrote:

Nice work and updates - tnx!

Is there something we beta-only testers could do for the devs ?
Does GGG need more feedback from any specific part of .92 ?

Currently we're okay, thanks, but are trying to get it up as fast as possible so you guys can get us valuable feedback again!