Recent Topics from Community Podcasts

On the entire topic of balance, the only comments are about nerfs. It seems a little tone deaf to the majority of players looking for restoration of previous fun builds and playstyles, or who want to experiment more with builds without 99% dead end paths (existing junk, no diversity meta).

No mention of one-shot meta, but at least defense options are being highlighted and hopefully improved.

As mentioned in the GGG post, existing balance in PoE is the least attractive part of the game for seasoned and new players. It would be nice to get more communication earlier on this, and changes implemented faster & more frequently to keep the game fun.

gg GGG <3

Considering that nobody uses some delve link crafts, you could also implement the new gem mechanic from PoE2, which gems will have links.

There's no reason any more to keep gems in this state.

Nobody has any idea what your "vision" is because you've spent the better part of a decade showing us nothing but contradictions.

You want to "slow the game down" but damn near EVERY mechanic since I started playing is about timers and forced high speed/high kill speed.. some examples are Breaches, Incursions, Betrayal, Legion, Rampage, Abyss, Synthesis, Blight, Delirum, Ritual etc.. and that's in addition to the pure mechanic of not being able to survive encounters so kill fast is the ONLY option.

You take away defenses, add invulnerable phases to bosses, increase monster damage and life.. why?
Also why is so much of the defense GATED behind content that you can only get in high tier maps? You have to already have a good character to be able to do the content in order to have the highly theorethical chance of getting the items you need for defenses. Crafts found in deep dangerous delve that already requires a silly amount of playtime to get to. Yes you can buff it with the "atlas passives" but most people never get to that because guess what? It's gated behind an unreasonably large amount of playtime required. You also need quite a good build and good expensive gear to do a lot of that.

You want people to trade but most content in the game is now in such a state that you're "locked into" whatever you're doing and trying to leave for a trade will cause you, the seller, a loss.. so you ignore anything but extremely high value trades unless you happen to be idling in hideout.

Yes I heard you're going to change the map to have only 100 maps and split it into 4 regions next league or at some point.. I think you should keep all the maps but split it into 4 regions and simply have the bonus reach max after 100 maps.. that way there is no NEED to do more than 100 maps as you gain nothing but variation, but you have the variation if you want to.

You say you're going to "fix things" well.. in the next couple of years.. unless you RESTORE some balance instead of making the game even more unbalanced than it is this league.. you won't have any players left by the time PoE 2 comes out.. if ever. Saying that "loot 2.0" is a few years away doesn't help to do anything but piss off players. Don't NERF ANYTHING unless you have a replacement ready to go. The upcoming "fortify" nerf is a good example.. doin't bloody implement it UNTIL casters have an alternative.

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I don't agree with everyone that you broke your own game, I like some of the "vision" even, but sometimes you guys just seem to say one thing and do another, it is VERY confusing, basically:

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Xzorn wrote:

Fortify? Again?

That's 4 times now? What is even the mindset behind this? Fortify is one of the few dependable Defense layers Quasi melee has for early-late game since you crucified Second Wind + Enduring Cry.

Flesh/Stone 35% Reserved, Granite Flask, Hardened Scars, Immortal Call 100+ Mana, Most Reduced damage stats removed from Ascendancies. You're the ones making the player defense problems.

You want players to pick Defense nodes. Been doing that forever but reducing the value of defensive options will hit the bar of "why bother" which is what your double down nerfs are doing.

And also:

Why "nerf everything" (all support gems) without buffing unused skills? Anyone could see what the result of that sort of balance pass would be! Any player would naturally think, "I'm going to have to play some super strong build to compete this season". Then you tell everyone you just shook up the meta? Do you even understand what that means? My suspicion is that the motivation to nerf was purely just player power creep, and the line, "we're shaking up the meta" was/is just marketing, but honestly, I was hoping for a real balance pass, where you take bad skills and make them good for once. All these great new skills people are scared to play them because of your track record of releasing skills in a bad state. Meanwhile there are so many skills that I've never even seen in a build... ever. Please fix the bad skills! Then you can nerf power creep if you want, and no one will care!

Honestly a buff to failed skills seems so easy to do... you guys have the stats, you know which skills are being played by like only 2 players in the whole league, I don't have to make a list. There are literally thousands of items/skills in this game that NEVER get used, and the last patch just made it 10 times more unlikely that you will ever even try to use them. They are basically dead weight, like 80% of the game feels like dead weight at this point because you can't balance right. Like for example: Chris said no one cares about picking up chayula shards because they're worth something. EXACTLY! Now make all the other shards worthwhile to pick up! Like I don't even use engineering orbs, why would we need SHARDS for that? Give me a reason to want to pick up an engineering orb shard, and I will do it.

This is no joke, you need to make a team of people who's job it is to just look for things to buff, because if all you ever do is nerf, then every patch you will just keep adding dead weight to the game, making build diversity even worse. You can add 10 new items every patch but if you make 20 old ones no good at the same time, you are still making the game worse over time. This is the one biggest problem with any older game that tries to patch constantly, and no one has yet figured out that simple buffs to old items that have been in the game 10 years, and are no longer even used, could save the whole system from collapse. I mean if you're going to rework boss drops, or skills, then why not rework the loot too? As designer's you seem so worried that you will mess up your perfect loot pool, but is it really that perfect right now? You're really happy with the current state of things being that almost all uniques will get vendored? Then in the same breath you say it's too bad none of the items on the ground are going to be upgrades? Jeez guys, fix your items. Start with the maven drops! What the hell is left to kill after maven, the feared? What does she drop that will help me kill the feared? The unique items she drops I can barely even sell on trade, much less use... how is that good game design?

This leads me right into this idea of uber modes for things. For most players the difficulty of the endgame is already very high. So again, this sounds confusing to a lot of people. I mean I already almost quit this game once because I thought sirus was a terribly designed boss (invulnerable mode with off screen one shots) with like a less than one percent chance of getting an upgrade for my build. Now what are you going to do: an Uber Sirus who just rolls to hit you before you even enter the arena or something? After you kill him, he just laughs at you, and says "what you thought I'd drop loot? Hah! I am Pointless!" I have no idea how you buff that boss without making him ridiculous. My fear is that once again you have totally misheard the complaint, which is that these bosses don't drop upgrades, and instead thought, "this is a great way to make the game even more punishing and less rewarding". Please just remember there are humans playing your game, and we have real lives, and we don't want to waste them on an endless treadmill. If we put in the time to get to a boss, and kill it, and we get some power creep because of it, THAT IS ONLY FAIR! Please consider this when reworking rewards for bosses, you know a little stack of chaos orbs would be nice, compared to getting absolutely nothing from a boss kill that took you all day to get to.

One last thing I have to say: I'm old. I played D2 when it first came out, all day every day for about 5 years. That game was amazing. But it is sooooooooooo old now. We've reinvented the wheels since then. You can't hold on to D2 like it is a design masterpiece when in reality it was simply the best "loot Piñata" we could get at the time. Meanwhile POE is what D2 dreamed it could be, so quit trying to turn POE into D2. It is time to realize over there at GGG that you have a far better game and that is because you've been working at it for 10 years. Stop using D2 as a benchmark, POE is the benchmark... please adjust your dials and embrace your position. Then, start making decisions based on HOW TO MAKE THE BEST GAME YOU CAN, not how to make a D2 killer. I cringe now when Chris mentions D2. It is almost like Chris is saying "No one complained to the wright brothers that there wasn't an inflight movie on the first flight at kitty hawk..."

Thanks for everything you do, I just want you to do better for all of us, will be watching to see how this all plays out, Hopefully you can make an even better game now that you are truly engaging with your playerbase.

Can we have a “soft mode” as well, something like 3.13 with full harvest? I could be motivated to re-install this game.

Funny how all the South Africans are so excited to finally get a server. And everyone else is complaining about something

Glad to see there's a bit of communication going again with the podcasts.

Especially with our heroes organizing those things filtering out the bad toxic stuff and distilling some constructive points from it that's really helpful but also just to see GGG actively sitting down and considering our ideas again is a comforting sight.

Who knows one day we can even steal a dev like Jonathan or Rory again for some of these so there'd be more concise answers to the technicalities and the why and how some stuff is or isn't possible when they aren't being implemented.

I always enjoyed having the devs on and while I understand they've got busy lives trying to fix the game for us I'd love to see them back one day on those podcasts because their presence is being missed when it comes to the more technical questions.

Chris is perfect to tell us about game vision and future directions and design philosophies but whenever we want to know how and why we do always get the 'we'll answer that later maybe I don't have an answer prepared for that.' response which can be at times a bit frustrating I guess. Partly this is of course solved by submitting questions ahead of time but you can never account for follow-up questions and those do matter as well.

Either way, the effort is much appreciated and a lot of the changes considered at the time are looking very good. I don't think having item drops be exciting upgrades again is realistic in today's softcore environment, that'd require a severe overhaul of how the game works right now, and an overhaul I don't think most people would be happy about either. We'll pray for hard-mode to hit live clients to have that dream come true anyway. But the other points do very much hit the mark and I can't wait to hear back on the solutions the team finds to those.

My questions is :

How often will we see update info about poe 2, did like the info we did see in the 3.14 reveal.

and any news about poe mobile? or when will we see updates about it?

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Aspirational Content

To be honest, nothing from the list seems to be like anything interesting for anyone but the top percentile who will trivialize the content anyway so what's the point of the content, other than making even more currency per encounter than before?

Sure, even players who do not farm these contents benefit in the economy which has access to everything, but still. It's another unreachable layer to cause economical dominance of few.