More of Your Questions Answered!

Do you have any plans for adding different skins to the UI? Or adding a MTX just for the UI so that we could change back and forth?

This is a possibility in the future but we don't plan to do it soon. Would it be popular? Does anyone else want this?

Would it be possible for players to pay for the design costs of an item's 3D art?

Yes… though the ones that are not done yet are often the expensive ones. Email me if serious about this.

What tools do you use to profile the game's performance? Development on Windows gives you access to tools like Windows Performance Analyzer and Visual Studio's built-in performance tools. Do you leverage anything like that?

We have built-in profiling tools in our development and testing copies of the game. They're getting pretty advanced these days. Server profiling is becoming a bigger deal to reduce lockstep stuttering and our bandwidth costs.

Whatever happened to forum trading?

It's one of the later trading improvements in the plan. We'll go into the plan in more detail once we have a firmer timeline. Forum trading, for example, is a remarkably hard feature to implement.

Are custom (paid) leagues still something you'd like to see done?

Yes. It hasn't been prioritised yet as it doesn't add content to the core game itself. Now that the core game is looking pretty meaty, this is the type of thing we can investigate in the future. Do people still want to pay for custom private leagues?

Can you tell us what kind of new skills gems and support gems are coming for this expansion?

We're trying to announce them each week or so. Keep an eye on the news! Here are the reveals of Ice Trap/Cluster Trap and Earthquake.

Are you opposed to adding a Default Attack gem to the game? It could be white like the portal gem and cost no mana to use. This would make it possible to add support gems to the Default/Normal Attack skill.

I am opposed to this, because it breaks the fourth wall a bit. It's a gem that you wouldn't find in a real life version of the game, if you see what I mean.

When ascendancy comes out, what kind of League will be there?

There will be a new challenge league (with a standard and hardcore version). Because this league is alongside an expansion rather than standalone, it's designed a bit differently to Talisman.

Any plans on making it so we can CTRL + Click items in and out of Guild Stash Tabs?

Yes, this is being worked on. It's a bit tricky because changes to the guild stash have to be distributed between instances (when multiple people are watching), so that's why this hasn't been trivial to do.

Will Ascendency feature a snow tileset?

No. It features the two new tilesets described here.

When will you release more unique items to see?

Ascendancy includes a whole pile of unannounced unique items. We'll probably preview some in the news beforehand also!

Have you guys ever seen/pet a kiwi in real life?

You can see them in zoos in New Zealand. They're way too rare to actually encounter in the wild near cities though.

Can you please put the nerf bat away? I understand the need to fix bugs, but after that just let us have fun.

Almost every suggested change is shot down internally because it would ruin fun. The nerf bat is very rarely used compared to how often it is considered. I specifically went through the list of nerfs in 2.1.0 and vetoed many. We care a lot about people's characters being consistent and powerful. (Any nerfs in 2.2.0 were very carefully considered and are deemed critical to fix important problems.)

What major changes can players expect to see to the Map System in Ascendancy? New tile sets? New maps? New system changes?

There are new maps based on the Ascendancy tilesets. We haven't got any other map changes to discuss at this time. We expect to release one of these new maps alongside the Ascendancy expansion and the others later as they are ready.

Is there a more accurate ETA for Ascendancy?

Very soon after the Talisman leagues end.

What's the highest number of character slots on a single account?

Around 255. We recently hit this limit on one of our internal customer support accounts!

What about a Linux build of the game? I know this is frequently asked, and I also know you use a full Microsoft stack, but I'd like to know how this has changed on the last year - are we closer or farther from a Linux build comparing with January 2015?

This would be cool, but we don't have a business case for it. We need to put these senior resources toward systems like trade.

What about a mobile-friendly version of the web site? Seriously, having to zoom in and out when reading the forum posts on the phone is painful.

Absolutely agreed.

Will improvements to the trade system make it into the next patch? Please please put this as priority.

Definitely not the next patch (which is tomorrow or something), but we're working on it.

Will it be possible to have for a special occasion the possibility to purchase the awesome "Exalted weapon effect", or, at least, the "eternal" one? Like a daily sale? That weapon effect is something beautiful. I would buy it 10/10.

We can't sell these old effects because they were exclusive to those packs. If we sold stuff as exclusive and then turned around and sold them again to other people, then no one would trust us any more. I get mails weekly trying to bribe us thousands of dollars for access to exclusive effects, packs and pets. They get denied. Sorry :-(

If we could sort the forums by "Last Edited Time" anyone using the open source ExileTools indexer can get accurate data with simply a URL change. A very simple change, unlike rebuilding everything for a new API. ;)

I will make sure our web team sees this.

Has there ever been inspiration for people at GGG to try to make another game of a different genre?

Some staff members are working on their own games in their spare time, but GGG needs to put its resources 100% towards Path of Exile.

Will you give radius back to elemental proliferation?

This is unlikely.

Are there 'really good vendor recipes' that haven't been discovered yet? Asides the whole trollish fishing and albino rhoa feather shit…

As an example, there's one that yields a very powerful sword.

I find sorting out items in my inventory a tad annoying at times. Is there any possibility you guys could include an inventory auto-sort button? I think this would make for a great QoL improvement.

No promises, and I don't personally like this feature, but it's more likely than it was this time last year.

I'd love to create a new hideout on standard, but put too much time and effort into creating my current hideout, and can't bring myself to destroying it. Being able to save it as a template I can revert back to would be really great! There are additional benefits to having such a feature, as it would also allow players to perhaps import hideout of the week templates (provided they are made available by the creator of the HO in a .hot format). GGG could also create HO templates for players that aren't that creative but have enough mtx points to purchase them, or perhaps include them in new supporter packs. Would all of this be possible? Yes or no and why?

This would be very cool, but unfortunately there isn't enough revenue from hideouts to justify the massive amount of work needed for this plan. I'd like to see it eventually, but systems like trade are a clear winner here when it comes to resources that would be spent on this system. (The revenue from trade improvements is that more people play the game.)

I'm a casual player and I don't have too much time for trading, please do something for people like me in order to enjoy the experience of trading, I beg you.

It's worth noting that improvements to trading may benefit you a bit, but they benefit the non-casual players a LOT. This probably works against the casual players, rather than for it. People complain about flippers now, but imagine how bad it's going to be when that process is easier :P

Are there any sweet new Vaal skills in the works? Would really love to see Vaal Determination at some point.

The team do have some cool Vaal skills underway!

The idea of having a 2-6 slot currency satchel was a popular recommendation recently. Are you considering adding this in the future? Maybe even adding the satchel slots as quest rewards?

Individual team members have commented that they like this idea, but we haven't had an actual meeting to discuss it with two or more people yet.

How many acts do you plan in the future? How many expansions? Is there any work in progress in mind after Ascendancy? :D

Many. There are three expansions at least partially in progress at the moment.

Right now ground effects hit performance too hard on specific configurations. Why you just don't disable them from appearing in the game temporary (and enable later, after working fix will be released)?

The specific reason for not disabling them is that they only impact a tiny subset of users, but are used extensively by many game mechanics.

How many years should we ask for PERMANENT SELF FOUND LEAGUEs? Is it really so complicated to create self found leagues or self found characters on standard leagues?

In the latter case, are you asking for the ability to mark your permanent league character as self-found and not be able to interact with other players (i.e. party/trade/etc), and to have it as bragging rights that you played the game in a harder way than them?

Are you planing some kind of 'mapwords' like runewords? It was announced a long time ago... just wondering if you are still chasing the same goals?

This wasn't really announced, it was just a joke or speculation. It isn't something we're planning currently, but is exactly the type of thing that suddenly gets planned and then done once we work out a cool system. So you either won't see it, or it'll be awesome.

Will you improve the ignore-list with 1) list of the ignored names 2) make a note editable (like on the friends list) where I can write why I ignored the player 3) let a player get a response from the system if he whispers a player that ignored him/her (like: "you have been ignored by this player")

This is a very reasonable request and I am sorry that it hasn't been done yet.

Auction House - can we expect one any time soon? I am a completely new player to PoE. Having to use third-party tools to search for items for sale is painful. Not having an automated way for something I post for sale to be bought and delivered to a customer means I will never sell anything, as I play the game to play the game, not to be a merchant.

The trade improvements will never be in the form of an auction house that has automated buyouts. There are many reasons for this, but the short answer is that trivial trading has a very negative impact on games. There are other trading improvements coming. Just no automatic buyouts.

I know a while back you guys talked about a way to get deleted characters back. I was curious if that might still be a possibility?

This soft-deletion stuff requires more tech than we have implemented yet. Sorry.

Will the passive previews for ascendant classes be the same on release date or subject to dramatic change?

They're being tweaked over time, and will be different, but not gigantically so.

There is a big lack of skill effect MTX. Especially on new/popular skills. Is that limitation (artists too busy elsewhere) or do you feel like it would be considered "milking" and not taken well? Seems like when introducing such skills like Bladefall / Blade Vortex / Blast Rain - all very fun, satisfying and strong and not adding 1-2 alternative effects you just fail to capitalize on a decent amount of $ from the community.

It's mostly that artists are busy elsewhere and also that individual skills don't make as much money as other microtransactions. This is because each one can only be sold to say 5% of the community. We could make effects for flavour of the month skills and milk it, I guess.

Why do you lie and omit important things to report on the patch notes?

The patch notes are assembled from cryptic commit notes of tens of thousands of small changes that often contradict each other. It takes over a week (literally) to put them together. We have half a dozen team members read them and check for accuracy. Some small mistakes get through. This is a process we are improving with each patch.

Any plans in mind to add capes/cloak MTX? It already kinda exists as the back attachments, are there any sort of limitations stopping this from happening?

This would be cool, but has clipping and physics issues. It's hard, in other words.

I know a lot of people don't like the idea of a auction house but -- What about an auction house that you can only put one item on, so people will still use trade chat, etc. People would try to sell their highest item on auction.

The general response to suggestions like this is that people will use multiple accounts to list many items.

Jonathan told me on reddit that PoE supports UTF16 already, can you tell us why we are not allowed to use characters like Ö,Ä,Ü for our alter egos?

Certain characters that are present in Brazilian names are now allowed but are equivalent to their English equivalents. We may expand this for the characters you listed.

How is it going with your marauder in Talisman HC Chris? Still alive? :) Are you playing 2h or 1h with shield? What skill gems are you using?

I'm still alive at 82, playing Cyclone with a mace and shield. Highlight of this league was Cycloning into the middle of a pack of Shared Boon dischargers. Also, Bameth was a surprise.

How does the game manage to connect people from different gateways?

There are shared "Master" servers in Texas that all the gateways talk to. That's where accounts sleep when you're not logged into them.

When will the full comic book be available for purchase?

Here you go!

Tutaj jest tłumaczenie tego Q&A na język polski (we also have a Polish version of this Q&A available).