Recent lack of Interesting Design Disclosure

I originally wrote this post in the most recent SFL suggestion thread, but then decided it is deserving of its own thread. I am not going to discuss SFL here, and as such I will be spoiler'ing the initial section that are only minor contributions to the main point I want to make.

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3) and the most important:

It is perceived as a last resort. Essentially, these people are getting restless. They are unhappy about the state of affairs, and compounding that is a lack of Interesting Design Disclosure on the forums. Chris' daily posts do not constitute Interesting Design Disclosure. Mark's skill clarifications do not constitute Interesting Design Disclosure. Rhys talking about a riddle, or merely saying "thanks" to a well-written feedback post does not constitute Interesting Design Disclosure. Qarl's posts would constiute Interesting Design Disclosure, but then he went ahead and added those ES nodes to the end of the CI branch, casting general-purpose doubt everywhere.

I'm not joking about the last point:

"

Qarl wrote:

This has been another case where we have gone back to the original intent. Chaos Inoculation has returned to being about immunity to Chaos damage. We have removed its association with Energy Shield that has developed over time.

Have a look at it yourself. This decision was reverted within a few months with nary a trace of Interesting Design Disclosure to go along with it. Just have these ES nodes and be on your way. What about the implication that Burning Damage's worth was discovered over time? No, it was discovered overnight -- the night of the Discharge buff.

Stuff like this does not inspire confidence in the game's future. While focusing on the game's release is a commendable goal, the lack of meaningful developer interaction has hamstrung people's ability to understand and comment intelligently on where the game's going. The SFL suggestion exists because GGG has not acknowledged this problem outside a very recent forum post.

The notion of solo play, among other subjects like psychographic-based item design, keystone passive design, etc. deserves more than a minor forum post, it deserves a dev diary. We've been having so few of those lately.

TL;DR GGG, you guys are smart as hell. We all know that. But it would be nice if you could demonsrate that intelligence -- at length -- right about now. I know you're busy with getting ready for release, but people are having the wrong ideas and are lead to rash suggestions, because they simply don't know better.

I will still cross-link your post in the former thread's 5th post, if you allow so.

For anyone more interested in discussing OP's Self-Found League points I redirect to this thread:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/510020/

Sorry for the hijack but maybe you'll be spared some spam this way. ;)
Thanks for this contribution!

"

Nightmare90 wrote:

I will still cross-link your post in the former thread's 5th post, if you allow so.

For anyone more interested in discussing OP's Self-Found League points I redirect to this thread:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/510020/

Sorry for the hijack but maybe you'll be spared some spam this way. ;)
Thanks for this contribution!

Yeah, that's helpful! Thanks :)

Totally agreed, current state of the game definitely needs dev diaries. Qarl's arguements against Self Found League personally dissapointed me.

I would love to read more well thought dev posts rather than

"

Qarl wrote:

[..]And if I look at the stats, if you want to die, wear a Shavronne's.

kind of approaches.

The main thing I realize after reading all of Qarl's post was that he really doesn't get what community asks for. (and considering his position probably this also applies to GGG) Otherwise I have no explanation why his arguements contained lack of 4L items in a Self Found League if ever existed and similar others.

"

ephetat wrote:

[...]
TL;DR GGG, you guys are smart as hell. We all know that. But it would be nice if you could demonsrate that intelligence -- at length -- right about now. I know you're busy with getting ready for release, but people are having the wrong ideas and are lead to rash suggestions, because they simply don't know better.

I believe that we are certainly spoilt with GGGs past communication behavior.
Considering that they are mainly Game Developers and should only in the second line be Nannies,
they do an amazing job communicating their thoughts generally.

However they dropped it a bit lately likely correlated with a deadline they need to pay attention to.
They really need a good pair of Community Managers which keep closer contact to the community,
communicate that the Devs are considering feedback given
and maybe even establish in-game events.

GGG does profit from close customer-interaction with their F2P
more than any pay2play model would allow.
Therefore I feel that they need to keep contact to their community.
Whether through a "we hear you and all" or a dev diary is not important, imo.

"

Nightmare90 wrote:

"

ephetat wrote:

[...]
TL;DR GGG, you guys are smart as hell. We all know that. But it would be nice if you could demonsrate that intelligence -- at length -- right about now. I know you're busy with getting ready for release, but people are having the wrong ideas and are lead to rash suggestions, because they simply don't know better.

I believe that we are certainly spoilt with GGGs past communication behavior.
Considering that they are mainly Game Developers and should only in the second line be Nannies,
they do an amazing job communicating their thoughts generally.

However they dropped it a bit lately likely correlated with a deadline they need to pay attention to.
They really need a good pair of Community Managers which keep closer contact to the community,
communicate that the Devs are considering feedback given
and maybe even establish in-game events.

GGG does profit from close customer-interaction with their F2P
more than any pay2play model would allow.
Therefore I feel that they need to keep contact to their community.
Whether through a "we hear you and all" or a dev diary is not important, imo.

I guess what he was trying to say by mentioning the word dev diary was not the GGG's interaction with the community.

Look at these examples:

• Dev Diary: What's in Patch 0.9.3?
• Dev Diary: Creating Tile-Based Texture Maps for Games

Those were not the usual community interactions, dev diaries contained extremely valuable information and included GGG's thought process behind their decisions.

Personally I would prefer weekly dev diaries over current mini daily updates anyday.

+1 to dev diaries and more communication , GGG is bussy atm and i think we all understand that but i would love to taste a bit more of GGG pie. Build of the week , dev diaries , development manifesto all of those are really awsome ways to communicate with your community and they shouldnt be throwed in the can :D

Disclaimer: this is all speculative. I am not a psychologist and not intent on pissing a whole bunch of people off.

Part of the lack of Interesting Design Disclosure is probably because they are busy gearing up for release. The other part is probably trying to figure out their playerbase. GGG is a small company and there is probably a predominant ideology about psychographic player profiles based on http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr220b . I believe somewhere, developers stated that they actively used these profiles when designing the game. I mean they even put in a mechanism for griefing, other than the trading system.

It is easier to understand the stereotypical profiles, but given some of this games unique features, it has probably pulled some of the less typical personalities in, or at least made them more vocal, which probably in turn has led to confusion about the playerbase. If you put what looks like choices in front of players, they will start asking for them. Speculatively, I think they may be re-evaluating some of their assumptions about design before posting more Dev Diaries. GGG cares about the game, so putting out more design disclosure and then maybe changing something would be more damaging than not saying anything (I know this point has been espoused in other threads).

Using the SFL as an example, I don't think Qarl understands why many (most?) players would want a SFL. My belief is a lot of SF players are "Adrenalin Timmies" that don't plan a build but adapt to one as they go along or "Nuts and Bolts" spikes who like the challenge. Probably not typical ARPGers, but probably more common among long-term Dos rogue variant players who seems to be fairly common here.

More interesting to me, though, is the argument Qarl uses works against hardcore. There is a much greater difference between SFL and Standard than between Hardcore and Standard. It would be far easier to play hardcore in the standard league than self-found. Just limit trade to other players whose characters have 0 deaths. What is comes down to is a view on how the game should be played.

"

Qarl wrote:

I can give my current thoughts on self found.

In the existing leagues, there is nothing stopping anyone from playing self-found, and we know many of our players do. We also have players that only engage rarely with other players, trading and partying occasionally.

So, as you can play self found in an existing league, I doubt we need to separate out the leagues. The question then is, are there progression problems with self found. I think there are two parts to this:

Can you play through self found? Currently there are issues with this, especially around the 40s. One of the main problems here is the availability of 4-linked items. Gear progression gets hard here, as replacement gear requires both beating existing gear in stats, and in skill support. This isn't usually an issue earlier, as you aren't needing full skill sets, and can skimp on stats and still progress quickly.

If we are going to make changes, it will likely be on the ability to make or the availability of 4 linked items.


The second issue is, what is the player expectation of self-found play. In general the main issue comes when players look to the top of ladders and to streamers to direct what their play experience would be like. This gives players a very distorted view of what they should be able to achieve. In general these players are pushing every advantage they can from trade, long play, group play.

I agree with the OP. Like many of us I get "we're busy". But I also agree that player frustration (on several different scores) is reaching "I quit" proportions and much as the fan base likes to wave that off with a "QQ" response I somehow doubt the folks hoping to earn a livelihood on this game are so cavalier about it. In more corporate terms we would call that "failing acceptance test" and it's a big hairy deal.

My personal pet peeve is self-found and without tangenting to that yeah, I would be thrilled to see a real and detailed discussion of what GGG thinks about it all. I have little confidence that GGG's viewpoints in any way correlate to the fan base viewpoints. If GGG would just clue me in then I could make a decision and either walk away from this game clean or be thrilled that the game would, eventually, fit my play style. Either way is better than *crickets*

I agree with the OP. Like many of us I get "we're busy". But I also agree that player frustration (on several different scores) is reaching "I quit" proportions and much as the fan base likes to wave that off with a "QQ" response I somehow doubt the folks hoping to earn a livelihood on this game are so cavalier about it. In more corporate terms we would call that "failing acceptance test" and it's a big hairy deal.

My personal pet peeve is self-found and without tangenting to that yeah, I would be thrilled to see a real and detailed discussion of what GGG thinks about it all. I have little confidence that GGG's viewpoints in any way correlate to the fan base viewpoints. If GGG would just clue me in then I could make a decision and either walk away from this game clean or be thrilled that the game would, eventually, fit my play style. Either way is better than *crickets*