Developer Q&A - Answers Part 2

If there aren't enough comments about Labyrinth already, I'll add my own.

I personally highly dislike Labyrinth for three reasons:
1) It is too punishing for something that takes so much time. The normal mechanics of losing exp or what not should be enough. I don't know why Labyrinth is the only thing you have to start all over if you die once. I would be fine with even just the map mechanics of having limited portals. And if this is going to be precedent for other content (besides the occasional Zana quest) I beseech you guys to reconsider for the sake of all those who aren't both hardcore gaming masochists and POE experts. No matter your market philosophy I highly doubt you want to narrow your market that much.

2) A lot of builds don't handle traps very well. Ideally you'd have high regen and high movement speed, but this really screws over leech builds and builds that depend on potions for heals but aren't pathfinder. When you're stuck in a place with a bunch of traps and no monsters and thus have no way to heal except for regen (you can't portal, you can't use flasks, you can't leech) it really makes you hate the game. Traps also have little to no mitigation so gearing for labyrinth is quite different to gearing for the rest of the game. Resists and armor and evasion don't matter anymore and you need move speed, regen, and bleed/stun/freeze immunity. At the same time you still have to deal with some pretty strong monsters. Gearing for both is immensely difficult and the builds that can run labyrinth without proper gearing are rather restricted. I like that new mechanics are added to the game, but I can't bring myself to like something that hampers build diversity by wrecking a majority of builds by severely narrowing your recovery methods. We can choose to not run no regen maps or no leech maps or reduced flask charge maps, but we can't choose to not run labyrinth if we want ascendancy classes.

3) You have to run the labyrinth content again if you want to respec your ascendancies. Insult to injury basically for someone who already wasn't a fan. For something as build defining as the ascendancy classes, this is a pain for anyone trying to tweak their character. Having ascendancies respec cost more regret orbs should have been punishing enough.

I personally haven't ever run a deathless Merciless Lab character on any ascendancy but Occultist (with the damage doesn't stop energy shield recharge node) and Guardian (with time of need node). Everyone else has died horrible deaths trying to complete their builds. Granted dying is part of the game (unless you're on HC), skill is important, and I'm slowly getting used to Labyrinth anyways such that I've gotten really close to deathless with an Elementalist recently, but spending 2 or more hours with little rewards just to get a build set up was not what I had in mind when I started playing the game touted as the most flexible character building ARPG out there.

P.S. I second, third, or one hundredth the massive rejection of the durability concept for too many reasons not the least of which includes
1) good rares take too much crafting investment for a durability system and you're basically killing mirror service entirely, which might not be an entirely bad thing but some people will really hate that
2) if you don't like how much trade is going on now this is going to drive trade up the wall because self-found good gear will now expire, tada!
3) Legacy gear would be destroyed or relegated to eye candy, so screw that...

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Midkraft wrote:

so basically we wont be getting any major trade improvements due to the fact that it would make it smoother and more enjoyable to trade so more people would do it, and due to imbalance in the game

The fact that items and affixes get more and more rare the higher their level is, is not an imbalance, its a fundamental need in the design of any game in this genre (if taken seriously). And obviously, combining both parameters together (high/rare item with !multiple! high/rare affixes) shouldmust quadrupel its rarity. Otherwise (the real 'imbalance') you create a single-pass economy in a throw-away game.

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sarannah101 wrote:

Awesome to see that you guys do not want to make trading too easy. I do have to ask though, to allow people to trade without being in each other's party and/or hideout.

Then let's not make playing PoE easy. Let's force users to compile the client code on their own systems with a command-line driven C compiler. And the forum is way too easy to use. Let's move the forums over to usenet groups from the 80s and 90s. In fact, let's remove all of this easy GUI for inventory management. Let's make users type commands to move items between inventory and stash tabs.

Because that's exactly what you and GGG sound like to me: illogical.

There are a myriad of ways to balance the market, item value, item rarity, and more if we have an easier way to trade.

Right now I'm f'ing sick and tired of dealing with idiots in PMs to trade: no response, awkward responses, haggling over fixed prices, delays in party invites, delays in showing up in hideout, entering your portals in hideout, and just generally being d**ks. So no, it's not about being "easier", it's about making the process less f'ing retarded. On that note, my frustration is not directed at you, it's directed at GGG and the mentality of accepting their excuses as facts.

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Coal48 wrote:

"

Being able to trade items is critical to the success of an Action RPG.

I Disagree

thats up to you, but your limited view 'may' not matter here ^^

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Coal48 wrote:

When I first started playing the game, I wanted to play 100% singleplayer but I felt forced to trade as its too powerful a feature to ignore, hence I wanted a game mode where the game was balanced around singleplayer, you've made clear you don't want to implement that.

(nearly) impossible.
1) their statement is correct from developers view, because a very huge and important part of the community and the game itself is based and relying on player interaction.
Even their business model (selling MTX) 'needs' to be able to show your creations... (even as this also happens without any interactions while in town, to some degree)
2) if we take SSF (like we have now) as a possible solution: it obviously disables your guild options (shared stash) - do we want this? If we add "non-trading" guilds: all members and chars(!) must be SSF then.
3) most important: if this 'new' SSF mode would have increased drop rates (the one and only reason the majority of 'criers' want SSF): there CAN be no option/way to move anything down and out from this SSF - it explicitly HAD to have no way to influence the economy in the 'regular' game.

TL,DR: its not about what you (or any other single player/not development-related person) think and want.

woohoo my question was on this list!

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cipher_nemo wrote:

They don't have a plan, nor do they have a clue

I'm sure they have a lot more 'plan' as they announce now. Does anybody had expected that they go from 4 acts straight to 10? ^^
Beside this little comparison, their plan maybe is (as neccessary and useful, and mostly already the way it goes) to develop the game continously, based on gathering live data and then adapt. Many aspects of this CANT be announced month in advance IMHO, but only ongoing step by step.

This even may include that they indeed 'have no clue' what's needed on point X in 3 or 5 month ago (while for real: nobody has).

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Mr_Cee wrote:

thats up to you, but your limited view 'may' not matter here ^^

(nearly) impossible.
1) their statement is correct from developers view, because a very huge and important part of the community and the game itself is based and relying on player interaction.
Even their business model (selling MTX) 'needs' to be able to show your creations... (even as this also happens without any interactions while in town, to some degree)
2) if we take SSF (like we have now) as a possible solution: it obviously disables your guild options (shared stash) - do we want this? If we add "non-trading" guilds: all members and chars(!) must be SSF then.
3) most important: if this 'new' SSF mode would have increased drop rates (the one and only reason the majority of 'criers' want SSF): there CAN be no option/way to move anything down and out from this SSF - it explicitly HAD to have no way to influence the economy in the 'regular' game.

TL,DR: its not about what you (or any other single player/not development-related person) think and want.

Why do you think my view is limited?

I'm not good at arguing and I don't know what to answer to most of what you wrote...

1) I didn't explain why I disagreed to the statement because I would have to go so far explaining what makes a action rpg good in my opinion. I know why people play this game, partying, pvp, grinding, farming, trading, I know the game is designed with this goal.

2) you lost me completely, I have no idea what you're saying. The SSF we have now is just for display, it doesn't change anything from the game, so I don't understand when you say "if we take SSF as a possible solution", "it obviously disables your guild options" "If we add "non-trading" guilds", what are you talking about? What I'm asking to GGG is rather a "league" like standard and harcore, a league were the game is balance around singleplayer only.

3) It probably would go beyond just changing droprates but that's another story. I'm not crying about anything, just bored and giving my 2 cents, don't have much to do so I post on forums. What you said is true, so? doesn't sound like a problem if nothing goes to standard league.

Of course I know that, it's the main reason I stopped creating threads in the feedback forums years ago, that won't stop me from posting from time to time

I can see you think very lowly of me, those "^^" eyes at the beginning of your post already showed that

Also really disappointed to hear that we will not be able to migrate our MTX to console when it releases. I guess I will buy a few stash tabs when it comes out but im not going to be spending money on costumes/skill effects/boxes in the future. I've played so many games that made their way from PC that offered a 1 time account linking option to retain our goodies from PC. I think that is what most people are upset about is that we know it is possible. Why it is not being done without any explanation thus far just leads us to assume there is a greed factor at work here..

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Mr_Cee wrote:

I'm sure they have a lot more 'plan' as they announce now.

(...)

This even may include that they indeed 'have no clue' what's needed on point X in 3 or 5 month ago (while for real: nobody has).

They have demonstrated that they're not interested in implementing anything else for trade. Premium Stash tabs with trade listings were supposed to be one phase out of who-knows-how-many in the future, but that was either redacted or dropped. So we were sold on an empty promise, or at the very least an effort that simply died at GGG.

So, no, there is "no plan" for trade at the moment. And if they do secretly have a plan, then they're already misleading all of us by talking about how horrible they think the concept of poe.trade is. It reminds me of a country who sells its weapons to 3rd party arms dealers, then decries their disgust when those arms are being used in illicit activities.

When Chris said...

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Chris wrote:

The existing community tools (combined with our public stash tab API) already put us pretty far down this spectrum, compared to the old days of trade chat. We already view this as a crisis. That is why we are hesitant to add more convenience features.

If I was xyz, I'd had pulled the plug on poe.trade right then and there and let GGG pick up the pieces. Why continue to provide a free resource for a developer who considers you part of a "crisis"?

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cipher_nemo wrote:

If I was xyz, I'd had pulled the plug on poe.trade right then and there and let GGG pick up the pieces. Why continue to provide a free resource for a developer who considers you part of a "crisis"?

GGG would backpedal so fast they'd be a contender for the Olympics. Though they'd have to compete in the Special Olympics.