A couple of weeks ago we asked the community for questions for our developers to answer. We have already answered some of these questions, and today's answers extend that to the first 25 pages.

Hello GGG! I want to ask you, why do we have no place for perandus coins or for Breach fragments in the currency stash? Now we have 5 breach fragments and perandus coins as currency, as well as cartographer's seals and rhoa feathers, but we have only 5 misc slots in currency stash. It would be very good to see all these items in one place like the currency stash. Thanks for your time!

This is a very good point and it's possible that we will expand the currency tab in the future to hold more things. I'll see what I can do for 3.0.0.

Is the base structure for leagues changing with 3.0? I get the feeling that it may be, considering how major (and brilliant) a change leaguestones are, and the fact that it's been openly stated before that you don't want to clutter the game indefinitely with more and more league mechanics.

While it is true that we don't want to clutter the game, we aren't changing the base structure of leagues. There will still be leagues, they will still either be added to the game or not added to the game. Historic leagues may be added/removed from the core game, Zana mods, Flashback events, Legacy events, etc.

Are there any completely undiscovered/unknown recipes or vendor secrets? What about vendor recipes that only a select few have ever used and are not public knowledge?

Nowadays, the amount of secret information there is limited. In the past, it was fascinating to see what would happen as people found vendor recipes and kept the knowledge to a select few people. We will likely add more vendor recipes in the future so that people have a lot more to hunt for!

The Legacy league is a clever and more easily sustainable rework of the 1 to 4 (IIRC) week long Flashback events of the past. Considering the role of those events as the season filler in-between expansions, would this league also be a recurring thing once every 3-4 seasons or so?

It could well be. It does take work to create Leaguestone mods for the leagues added in the interim though.

Can we expect UI quality-of-life improvements? Even relatively small and obvious changes take months and years to appear. There are still no convenient character and friend list sorting, moving tabs around is a pain, I can't see who is in my ignore list (or remove particular people/see what I ignored them for), and so on, and so forth. I realize some of these require design considerations, but come on. Surely a fancy new act 2 chicken physics can share some of its budget allocation with more tangible improvements.

Instead of trying to justify the improvements we have made or to merely promise there are many more coming, I wanted to shed more light on the reasons why some of these improvements are slow to be finished.

In general, if an improvement only requires a UI programmer, then it can be made rather easily. In the past we had only one UI programmer, so there was a long backlog of such improvements that we found it hard to get to. Nowadays we have three, so we have had time to add features like adding item highlighting in stashes and item filters. The delay occurs when other types of programmers need to be involved. For example, for moving guild tabs, there's just no server-side support for this. A server-side programmer would need to add the ability for the tab locations to be changed and then expose this to the UI guys. While this wouldn't take incredibly long to do, the server-side guys are extremely busy working on very important issues like deployment, realm scaling, anticheat, and so on. To unblock this process, we need to hire and train more talented server-side programmers, and they're the hardest ones to find (dozens of applications per interview and dozens of interviews per hire). This is something we're actively working on.

Even though the dev team constantly implements performance improvements and is proud of it, I feel like the game's performance is actually becoming worse year after year on the same hardware configuration. Maybe it has to do with the general increase in enemy and effect density, but I can't even open a Breach or party up without it becoming a slideshow very quickly (sometimes actually slowing down the instance itself, as reflected by server-side lag). And I'm playing on HC—these sudden performance drops are deadly! I keep seeing this concern echoed by the owners of high-end graphics cards as well, so it's definitely not the case of me having a potato PC. What are the plans in this regard?

Our telemetry lets us see the actual performance values, and while they're improving when we make improvements, you're certainly right that there's more going on in the endgame these days with the amount of mods that people are running. This also affects the server, as you correctly point out, which is an entirely different area of optimisation.

I don't think the solution is to substantially reduce the amount going on in the Path of Exile endgame. While it can be hectic, that's what people enjoy playing, so a scorched earth policy of changing it to be much simpler would probably be negative overall. I think we can make some small tweaks to endgame content to modify the worst offenders and will of course continue to push on both clientside and serverside performance. There's plenty we can still improve in various places.

Are you or does the team feel that they're done developing maps with new terrain and bosses? I'm not referring to reworking old maps.

We're definitely not done developing maps with new terrain and bosses. We did a big pile of those for the last expansion (Atlas of Worlds) and there are a pile more new areas and bosses for The Fall of Oriath. Future expansions will continue to include new terrain, maps and bosses.

What's something the entire development team didn't expect people to do in Legacy league, or something nonsensical you don't understand why people do?

What's with the "Ethical" SSF thing? I think I missed the start of that meme and now I'm really confused. Is this a serious thing or a joke? Can someone please explain it to me? Thanks.

I do not fully know the profit you have made or plan to make, however have y'all considered directing a poe movie or even tv show?

That'd be pretty cool, but I suspect it'd be a big distraction away from making the game. The only projects that we've been invited to participate in haven't had the budget we'd require to do our game world justice.

As someone who also develops software for a living, i was curious what the dev setups are like: hardware or software, vim vs emacs, vs IDE, etc.

Most of our team use regular desktop computers with a wide variety of hardware (so that we encounter real-world problems before it gets to QA). I personally use a Razer Blade 14" laptop as of February.

In terms of development IDE, the programmers use Visual Studio 2015 (moving to 2017 soon). Those that use linux prefer vim, I hear.

Are there are any plans to make older supporter packs available again?

Definitely not. We told customers that they were exclusive.

Will we ever get 3d art for the race version of whispering ice, or lightning coil, or even voltaxic rift? There are a lot of old uniques that just don't get 3d art.

We're systematically adding 3d art for old uniques and old race rewards, but the amount of resources we can allocate to this is limited. Sometimes supporters have generously contributed to accelerating a particular item that they feel strongly about, but for the most part we just try to assign this project as much budget as we can afford alongside our other commitments.

Realizing that the logistics of such a thing are at least somewhat more complex, have you guys given any thought to (or are there plans for) attending gaming conventions, etc. closer to the Atlantic Ocean?

We'd love to attend a gaming convention on the East coast of America or in Europe, but haven't been able to make it work yet. Travel time is really difficult, and we're somewhat tethered to our office for almost all of the year as there's always something urgent happening. The West coast of America is easier for us normally because most of the journalists are there and because we can travel while we would be sleeping, losing very little of the workday.

Any plans to give us the chance to rotate the camera? At least in the hideout?

The normal answer is "The terrain art is designed to only be viewed from the normal game angle" or "We want people to focus on playing the game rather than fiddling with camera controls". However, it may be worth considering the merit of custom camera controls in certain situations (like the hideout example you gave). The community could certainly do interesting stuff with it.

Suggestion for multi-language: Would be a nice idea to copy the language style of Guild Wars 2. On it, you can play in your language and while pressing the Left-Ctrl key, game looks entirely in english, to see the names of objects in this language to help players on trading pages.

This sounds like a very cool system, but the way we've designed our language stuff is that English is replaced by the foreign language. We'd have to significantly change the system to support this, but I think there would probably be value in that .

A lot of players would wish to create their own unique items or divination cards but can't fork out 1k because they have financial reasons or they are just too young. Do you plan to do competitions for example "a fan art competition" and let winners create and put a pair of them into poe without paying the hefty fee of 1k?

I think that's a good idea for the future. Unique items cost $2.5k now rather than $1k, btw.

Have any of you had to swim to work recently?

Almost. It got pretty bad for some of our staff a few weeks ago.

Will GGG add a button to Reclaim All microtransactions from a character or a way to locate them?

We are trying to design this kind of functionality into our new microtransaction system for 3.0.0.

What is going to happen in Standard with regards to past leagues? Right now, we can't get any league-specific items any more since Zana was changed. Is this how it will stay, and we will only get them through divination cards, or will there be something different?

The currently-running Zana mods are for the duration of the Legacy league because we don't support stacking Leaguestones with the traditional Zana mods. The team see it as a great opportunity to experiment with different mods for Zana. The plan for standard in the future hasn't been fully decided, but the intention isn't to get rid of the old-style Zana mods.

With the recent SSF support, is there ever going to be a mode with boosted drop-rates for people who don't want to trade? The only reason I don't play SSF is because I hate the scarcity of 5/6 links, uniques, and currency more than I hate having to trade for every single gear piece past level 60.

This is unlikely. The game is designed around its current drop rates and SSF mode is meant to be more challenging due to the inability to trade. Even in SSF, people are reaching top-tier content quite quickly.

Why are you withholding the option to create a Custom League with a player's own set of modes?

This isn't a case of withholding an option - it's a system we haven't implemented yet. There's quite a lot of player demand for custom leagues, so we're likely to assign it to an update in the future. As I'm sure you can imagine, there's quite a lot of work that would need to go into the interface for creating and managing these leagues.

That's our third set of questions complete. We may do another set in a follow-up post!