January Development Update

good to hear

Please hire 3D-artists and animators!

Get unique 3D arts done and overhaul all the player character animations. They are horribly basic and as soon as you get to the point where they are noticeably sped up or slowed down they are downright ugly.

Great news.
Ascendancy's spoilers, I really would like to see the others Witch's ascensions.

Awesome!

I do like the overall direction, and hopefully GGG will keep focused on the right things; there HAVE been mixed signals.

One big thing I'd like to point out is how well Lockstep Mode was received. Chris (and everyone else) PLEASE remember how ecstatic we were over it! For most of us longtime-players, we couldn't care less about Act 4, or Jewels, or Divination Cards, or the character lore, let alone the tedium of Warbands... It was an end to (almost) all desync that made 2.0 for us!

So the moral is: don't underestimate the returns you'll see on the fixes that aren't "sexy." You're not a AAA studio spending 8-9 figure sums on marketing annually to capture casuals... You're working on a serious, deep game that actually appeals to intensive and hardcore gamers, who will appreciate things others don't. Please don't forget that!

As for everything else...

• Trade System - I WOULD like to see, say, the API allow for searching of iLvl. Given how important this is for, say, talismans, that would've been VERY helpful to have this league! Add on a better system for marking "online," since right now it divides into two categories: Either they're a ladder-player who's too busy to respond, or using Procurement/Acquisition to mark themselves perma-online even when they're AFK. Where's the mark for "AFK/DnD/idle"?
• Security - I know it'll be a while before GGG feels comfortable attempting a system for offline trading. For (semi-justifiable) reason, they'll want to fix their bot and spam problem first. GRANTED, they have less to fear from bot-automated trade than, say, D3. But still, I'd like to see them devote a lot of resources towards fixing things like the daily RMT spam, or any other bots/spam issues I see. I'm surprised that GGG doesn't list this as a major thing they're working on.
• Performance - On the networking side (which gets brought up every patch) I dunno if you can help much: Western Europe's Internet seems to just plain suck for gaming. (this reflects in other games) Beyond that, the lag from layered special effects is probably problem #1 in the game's engine. A shorter fix? Offer the option for "Simplified" graphics effects, that reduce particle counts drastically. Some examples for OPTIONS:
  • Burning/Chilled/Shocking/Desecrated Ground: replace FPS-killing particle effects with a flat surface texture. Yes, it won't be as noticeable, but the tradeoff will be FAR higher performance.
  • Discharge: Simplified generation method, simpler structure, with fewer/no particles.
  • Most Particle effects: drastically simplified lighting... Either rely much more on pre-baked lighting, or simply reduce the number of light sources per skill to just one, or both.
• Custom Uniques - Mostly, I just wonder how big that backlog is. I'm getting the impression that even WITHOUT it being in any supporter pack sold... That enough people are still emailing to buy 'em that the backlog isn't shrinking!

Not at all hyped about the trade "improvement". Having a better online flag on a 3rd party website is really going to improve our trading experiences... And yes an AH(ingame) would improve your trading system, cause you know, we already have it(poe.trade) but it's out of game.

Couldn't agree more with ACGIFT's post here. Not sure how many hours you poured into Act4, but as far as I see it, the vast majority of the playerbase doesn't care about it in the slightest and just uses Dried Lake to level a bit and then switches over to maps. The level layout and visual design is lackluster and the asian-/ eastern-themed hub feels completely disconnected from the rest of the content.

Please don't waste your time on stuff like that, rather improve and fine-tune the core mechanics of the game and fix skills that are either completely useless or way too powerful at the moment.

And we *need* an auction house, any other solution will just be a mediocre workaround and players will still have to use external websites for basic stuff that your game should provide by now. The immersion argument against it doesn't hold up anymore, with all the crazy MTX effects and armour this game has turned from survival game to theme park a good while ago. So might as well provide us with the amenities of one then.

Now that would be something I could get hyped about.

Excellent news guys. Glad to see you're sticking to your guns on no auction-house. I agree with GGG that offline players shouldn't be able to trade.

69 staff members? Holy shit that's pretty large. A lot larger than I thought.

Really cool to see you guys progressing this way. I can't help but wonder when you're next game is going to come out at this rate.

Yeah, I appreciate all these work and your ongoing and outstanding engagement in this game. Thats why I keep buying supporter packs and spread the word about POE since the game came to me in Open Beta stage and got me hard. Good job, thumbs up!!!


So, my hopes are high issues with lighting/shadowing/distances in your personal hideout will get an overhaul for good, Discharge will be playable for a party (!) and trading gets less awkward. So, hence, I am looking forward to the work of the new graphic programmers work and the performance re -(re-)designing.

The last performance updates introduced in 2.1 killed a lot of nasty DCs and LAG for me, my usual latency went down from 300-400 ms in guild party (EU-US party) to 65-120 ms and a quiet 35ms soloing. The FPS drops even on performant machines (I5-@4,5 GHz/8GB/256 SSD/GTX 970 G1) to 0 while GPU-Z is showing up an average GPU usage of 28% has been a puzzling riddle to me. Compared to my gamefeel in games like Witcher 3/GTA 5 it's just freaking me out. But I will stick to my love for Cast on Crit characters (addicts argument) and hope u will fix that. Once. Soon. Hopefully. And the light and shadows, please.

Thank you and greetings from Europe