Thoughts from a game dev in the industry ...

Alright,

I have given PoE a second whirl. I have some feedback to give, take it for what it is worth.

I will get the good out of the way immediately:

Your game play, the skill system is phenomenal. I go so far as to say gameplay wise it does surpass D2/D3. Your skill system is why I keep coming back.

Balance is much better than it was two years ago when launched. This was badly needed. I originally tried for the first 30 days or after launch and quit at level 32 because it was too frustrating. This has been fixed I'd say 90%. The other 10% I will discuss in the bad below.

Now with the not-so-good.

After two years, there are some glaring things still wrong since launch that you have not corrected.

Gender barriers are horrible lines that went out with D2 back when D2 was popular. While I understand you wanted to make a much better D2 this was an arbitrary line that should never have existed in 2010+

No SCT still. SCT is satisfying feedback that makes the player feel good about how they are doing. You are literally robbing players of joy.

NOTE: I have edited this post to reflect my incorrectness in the release of maps vs nephilim rifts.

The Maps system while robust in their own way could borrow from Nephilim rifts. While I don't think they should be random drops, I would be willing to live with that if ...

you should allow maps to drop from normal level on.

Normal difficulty should drop maps from Normal Max Level +1 to Cruel Min Level + 5
Cruel difficulty should drop maps from Cruel Max Level +1 to Merciless Min Level + 5
Merciless should stay the way it is.

Part of the reason for this is because Maps are what will keep your game fresh for years to come. Playing the same story-based zones mandatorily for cruel and merciless is a lesson D3 learned and why Adventure mode + Nephilim rifts began to start with. Your maps system is fantastic. You should make it more accessible.

There is no satisfying feedback or fanfare when a map systems map is finished. There is no guaranteed legendary drop, there is nothing that makes me want to get to the end of the map.

The idea that you only get fix attempts to finish a maps system map is laughable at best.

Boss battles are a mess. Especially end of Act3 and end of Act 4. You decided to drop all possible good battle design ideas and make it insane. You went for insane because it was easier to do than trying to craft a smart and difficult boss battle. There is no strategy with either of those fights, it is pray to God and see what works, or grind so much until you are so high you can tank it. There is a middle ground there you missed entirely. The way some of your elite bosses are are how your actual bosses should be.

Path Of Exile is a perfect game battle wise if you remove the bosses, because Elites are great bosses. With bosses in, it is quite over-the-top silly really.

The RNG is too R and also too verbose. It is exactly what D3 was when they had their trading house and it was mandatory to find what you needed there. There is no way in your game to be self sufficient 100%. Blizzard has a mechanic in their RNG where you are guaranteed one legendary an hour if one hasn't dropped in the last 60 minutes and further, they allow legendaries to drop from level 10ish. This is another example of where you are all punish all the time. The verbosity comment comes from the vomit of random drop crap. If I am in a dense mob at high level there can be 100 items on screen and I am unable to click on a mob to attack it because it keeps wanting to pick up item. The z ordering of your UI causes this and it is awful. The same happens when I click on a 3 monster pack strong box. If there is a monster under the text of the strongbox I cannot click the monster to kill it because the default action is open the box. How UX friendly is that?

Further, blizzard's loot drop is 85% smart. Meaning you get an 85% chance of getting an item that is geared toward your class/build. Your loot vomit would not need to be so prolific and noisy if you made it even a 50% smart drop rate.

Your story tries so hard to be smarter and deeper than Diablo's story that it is long, rambling, winding, boring mess. I end up having to skip your story.

You make no attempt to hide the Master Piece Theatre voice acting because you can mentally see them next to the fire place in their French chair, with their smoking coat, cigar and a glass of scotch implementing a fake aristocratic import accent to record all the lines.
Because I skip your story I don't I care one bit for the characters you placed in the world. Not caring for the story means there nothing emotionally to tie me to your world.

Ascendency is not an expansion. It is an add-on. An expansion is more than a single random dungeon and 6 new puzzles. An expansion is a new act, almost like act 4, but it was too short. act 4 was 50% shorter than it should have been.

Especially for end game when you want people to hang around to have fun, you are too stingy with skill points. After the game is over, you either need to not have a limit cap, or provide a mechanic for continuing to grab skill points (paragon system)

I realize you want to make a hardcore, deep game, and you have. There is plenty of room to make it more accessible and more popular for other levels of players, and still keep PoE challenging. You could even implement a casual mode people could turn on if they wanted to.

60% reduced element resistance on merciless is too much. It should have been 40-45%

Your client performance right now is in the toilet. I lag everywhere all the time, and I crashed in the middle of end of act 3 boss fight last night. WTF? Given how much I lag and crash and die of lag, the way you have the labyrinth configured is laughable because I am not going to be able to reliably get to the end without suffering catastrophic loss due to circumstances beyond my control.

In the end, your game is very brutal and punishing, and there is never really any reward. There is no reason for people to *want* to come back. All we get out of playing your game is self satisfaction a sense of accomplishment, which long term is not enough to keep enough people playing for you to keep the lights on.

If you bring in more players to your game, you will be able to reduce prices in your MTX store and make far more money than the way you currently do.

I am a victim of Stockholm syndrome. As many flaws as there are for this game, I cannot stop playing you. I even gave you money.
I just wish I wanted to play your game. I don't want to, there are too many egregious flaws listed above. I play it because right now I am compelled to. What compels me now is strong, but when it fades I will forget the world, Exile.

I look forward one day to all these issues being addressed so I can want to live in your world.

You have a lot of potential. Your game is a great foundation to build what i would call the first ARPG MMO. I would like to see you do that and be very successful.

"

Further, blizzard's loot drop is 85% smart. Meaning you get an 85% chance of getting an item that is geared toward your class/build. Your loot vomit would not need to be so prolific and noisy if you made it even a 50% smart drop rate.

The difference here though is in D3 making new characters is not really part of the design. In PoE, finding something and saying "I want to make a build using that" is a thing. You're not just looking for upgrades (ie the same legendary or set item with bigger numbers in D3). There really isn't any rerolling In D3. You make 1 character in each class and then just respec whenever you want. Smart loot works for that game because of the design of that game. It doesn't work in PoE. In PoE, if you find a good item that doesn't fit your build, you trade it for something that does. The player is the smart thing in PoE, not the loot.

Interesting read.

I agree on most points though I don't think making some of these changes would integrate well with the focus on trade the game has now.

A difficulty with smart drops for PoE is the fact that all classes share the same Passive tree. That means that there is great flexibility and no good way to generally know what kind of drops would be good or useful for a character. I guess it could be based off what the character is currently using? For example, if using a bow and evasion armour then drop more bows and evasion armour? Anyway, it may be more difficult to design a good scheme for this?

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jcannonb wrote:

The Maps system was a near-miss copy from Nephilim rifts. While I don't think they should be random drops, I would be willing to live with that if ...

You actually have this backwards. PoE had maps before D3 implemented rifting and their Paragon system.

What's the problem with the story? It's great here, nice dark and gritty, interesting characters. Love to read about the lore in-game. D3 story actually bores me personally :/

I also like the Dominus and Malachai Boss-fights (in normal, didn't finish cruel yet..).
Especially Malachai is extremely epic with all that stuff going on... you need to focus to dodge it all.

Is the size of an expansion or add-on (there's a difference?) really relevant if it's for free? :)

Definitely agreed, particularly on boss design. Kaom, Daresso, and Malachi seriously feel like a parody. I compare them to sadistic "impossible" rom hacks, but lacking the self awareness. I'm also an advocate for a casual mode. Games have had difficulty options since the 8-bit era, and I hate that the attitude around here is that somehow having a lower difficulty would diminish the hardcore experience. Different gamers play for different reasons. I'm like you, I play this game because I love the skill system, but I can't fully explore that system because I feel forced to use specific optimal builds just to survive.

Considering that HC players abuse Alt-F4 anyways, there is functionally no difference between Hardcore and Standard. The addition of a real softcore difficulty can only increase the playerbase and thus profits.

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Balance is much better than it was two years ago when launched. This was badly needed. I originally tried for the first 30 days or after launch and quit at level 32 because it was too frustrating. This has been fixed I'd say 90%. The other 10% I will discuss in the bad below.

Overall I actually think the balance is worst now then before, however the balance of making your power stronger earlier and streamlining that process has gotten much better.

"

Gender barriers are horrible lines that went out with D2 back when D2 was popular. While I understand you wanted to make a much better D2 this was an arbitrary line that should never have existed in 2010+

They voice things that isn't really a think in D3. D3 just refers to everything and everyone as nephalem, now they have some lines for each of the classes but they don't really interact with enemies with lines they just have generic stuff they say and interact with followers a little bit. In terms of having a ranger specifically be a female and not allowing for selection is because of the voice lines that are made throughout the game that interact with various bosses\ect and because it requires another character to model and fit the mtx's and armors for.

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No SCT still. SCT is satisfying feedback that makes the player feel good about how they are doing. You are literally robbing players of joy.

I'm assuming this is player DPS numbers, like in WoW and D3. If not I apologize I haven't seen this term used at all. IMO this isn't necessary and just further clutters the screen, you can enable monster HP bars and see feedback that way without putting numbers all over and cluttering the screen, in PoE seeing what is one the screen is MUCH more important then other games. Bearers, volatile, ect.

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The Maps system was a near-miss copy from Nephilim rifts. While I don't think they should be random drops, I would be willing to live with that if ...

Just so you know maps came out LONG before rifts did. It takes a great bit of knowledge to try and understand the mapping system in PoE.




This is something people talked about, it doesn't specifically have to be maps, but after years of leveling through the campaign some people don't want to do that anymore and its understandable. The issues really star stacking up because unlike D3, PoE has rewards and choices attached to various zones and mobs, having an alternative way to level I suppose is fine, but if you still have to go thru parts of the campaign in order to get the side points and things what is the point when they did streamline the leveling process a lot.

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There is no satisfying feedback or fanfare when a map systems map is finished. There is no guaranteed legendary drop, there is nothing that makes me want to get to the end of the map.

I mean clearing a map doesn't take very long depending on build, actually clearing it means that you've gotten the most out of the map that you can, as you invest more and more currency in maps (which you do in higher tier maps) you WANT TO kill everything to ensure you get more maps and loot. You can type /remaining in order to see how many mobs are left, typically if more then 20 you find and kill. Having anything "guaranteed" doesn't fit the theme of PoE because it wasn't (although this league looks to be different) designed to be a loot fest where your a special snowflake like you are in D3.

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The idea that you only get fix attempts to finish a maps system map is laughable at best.

Again, this takes much more knowledge to understand the goal they have. You get 6 portals because that is the max party size, maps are designed to be beatable in 1 go and deathless depending on the mods you roll. Having limited portals means you need to choose what to remove from the map, lets say on average a map drops 40 rare items, you can't take all 40 out you must pick and choose, pair that with chromatic recipes, currency drops, ect means you must make decisions on what to loot. If you don't party that means you can loot more items, but it might be more difficult because the mobs will always target you instead of possibly targeting a party member.

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Boss battles are a mess. Especially end of Act3 and end of Act 4. You decided to drop all possible good battle design ideas and make it insane. You went for insane because it was easier to do than trying to craft a smart and difficult boss battle. There is no strategy with either of those fights, it is pray to God and see what works, or grind so much until you are so high you can tank it. There is a middle ground there you missed entirely. The way some of your elite bosses are are how your actual bosses should be.

Compared to what boss battles? PoE boss battles are actually quite good, dominus for example has various mini things to fight before him and 2 forms 1 which requires positioning and avoiding a powerful melee attack and the other which requires you to either leech or heal up because he bleeds you and forces you into melee range during the "rain", he was designed and added in such a time that ranged builds would just offscreen things and with this particular encounter you can't really.

I'll add that dominus for example has that hard hitting telegraphed attack that can be avoided. In his second form having a remove bleed pot is advisable. You are saying there is no strategy, you are extremely mistaken. Your ignorance is why you think the fight is insane.

Skip to malachai because you said end of act 4, maybe you think others are insane or have no strategy as well, but I rather not write a book on each boss. He requires you to take down the 3 mini bosses (and piety) before hand his 1st stage fight is really just avoiding the teleport damage, where he comes up from the ground, he does have a wind up attack as well but that is a very slow animation, both can be avoided with any sort of movement skill or speed. Obviously you damage piety in that fight when you can and he is invuln. The second form fight consists of hearts which is similar principle as the first stage, with the destruction of each heart he adds more things for you to dodge or avoid. He still does his tp under ground thing, which again is pretty easy to avoid.

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Path Of Exile is a perfect game battle wise if you remove the bosses, because Elites are great bosses. With bosses in, it is quite over-the-top silly really.

It absolutely would be a shit game without the bosses, you see in D3 the difficulty is determined really based on the elite affix system. You have different mechanics to avoid and different things you can use to counter those, like waller, you can use the pot to allow you to move thru walls or an ability that allows you to break free of jailer.

But elites in d3 are more closer aligned to nemeses\bloodlines packs in PoE. Without the bosses in PoE it loses its charm.

If you take the time to learn the various boss mechanics most can easily be overcame with skill, some require specific planning and possibly different flask combinations or items to do it safely, but with all boss like encounters skill will play the largest factor IMO.

"

The RNG is too R and also too verbose. It is exactly what D3 was when they had their trading house and it was mandatory to find what you needed there. There is no way in your game to be self sufficient 100%. Blizzard has a mechanic in their RNG where you are guaranteed one legendary an hour if one hasn't dropped in the last 60 minutes and further, they allow legendaries to drop from level 10ish. This is another example of where you are all punish all the time. The verbosity comment comes from the vomit of random drop crap. If I am in a dense mob at high level there can be 100 items on screen and I am unable to click on a mob to attack it because it keeps wanting to pick up item. The z ordering of your UI causes this and it is awful. The same happens when I click on a 3 monster pack strong box. If there is a monster under the text of the strongbox I cannot click the monster to kill it because the default action is open the box. How UX friendly is that?

I feel like this is 2 points in 1. RNG is a bitch, but recently they have buffed the chances of getting the good T1 unqiues by a LOT. If you play a lot you likely will get a T1 unique, whereas before you just might not get lucky enough.

In terms of clicking on items to pickup you can shift + right mouse button\ect to attack or cast in place, this mainly works with ranged\spells and some melee aoe abilities, but nothing that uses melee splash, this may change in the future.

You can also use a loot filter which allows for you to only see items worth picking up, its highly recommended and go search it out.

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Further, blizzard's loot drop is 85% smart. Meaning you get an 85% chance of getting an item that is geared toward your class/build. Your loot vomit would not need to be so prolific and noisy if you made it even a 50% smart drop rate.

Smart loot doesn't work at all in PoE because (even with asencdancy classes) and class can do any build. What if I am playing a bow duelist, I mean he has nodes in his area for proj damage, are you saying I should only be getting melee stuff because that is what the class is traditionally used for? Not only that PoE doesn't really have primary stats and requires dex\int\ect stats are only really used for meeting the requirements to use the abilities in some cases yes it is stacked and scaled, but gearing is absolutely nothing like D3, you can't even begin to push that here, it simply doesn't work.

The loot vomit can be filtered, unlike in D3, white items have the potential of becoming the most amazing items with very little (or very lot) investment. People craft on white bases all the time. I suggest you use a loot filter and try to understand that the prolific mess is necessary, even if you don't know why it is.

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Your story tries so hard to be smarter and deeper than Diablo's story that it is long, rambling, winding, boring mess. I end up having to skip your story.

I mean no issues with people skipping the story, they made it in such a way that you can, unlike D3 which forces the story down your throat.

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Ascendency is not an expansion. It is an add-on. An expansion is more than a single random dungeon and 6 new puzzles. An expansion is a new act, almost like act 4, but it was too short. act 4 was 50% shorter than it should have been.

An expansion doesn't have to be a new act. Some of the previous expansions, which were successful didn't add acts. The vaal expansion for example added the vaal orb, atziri, uber atziri and the corrupted mods being able to roll. The masters expansion for example added masters of various power and purpose, this added no additional endgame zones or anything related to the sorts.

Just so you know Ascendancy also you know added the 19 ascendancy classes, in which the scion has the ability to mix and match various aspects in her own special tree. It added enchantments, which are similar to vaal corruptions, but less punishing and only useful on gloves, boots and helms.

So yeah its an expansion, you actually don't get to come in here and define it as an addon, when it clearly adds more then just the lab, clearly you missed that point. Expansions in PoE are defined as stuff that adds to the core of the game like all the previous stuff mentioned above.

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Especially for end game when you want people to hang around to have fun, you are too stingy with skill points. After the game is over, you either need to not have a limit cap, or provide a mechanic for continuing to grab skill points (paragon system)

Very few people get level 100, but having an ever increasing investment into power past that level just encourages 1 character playthrus, which doesn't promote the ideals of the way GGG wants the game to be played. They want people to do many different builds and ideas because that promotes a healthy economy. Not only that in a system like D3's paragon it trivializes the investment in gear and only promotes mass play in order to get power. Its actually a terrible decision by blizzard to have the paragon system with primary stat, hell its terrible to have everything in that game scale off of primary stat.

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I realize you want to make a hardcore, deep game, and you have. There is plenty of room to make it more accessible and more popular for other levels of players, and still keep PoE challenging. You could even implement a casual mode people could turn on if they wanted to.

Its called standard and many people do play there. They have done nothing but make the game more accessible over time, IMO this temp league is over the top. It won't stop me from trying to have fun but if this gets added to the core of the game in really any form or fashion I think its more or less the downward spiral from me and my further investments.

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60% reduced element resistance on merciless is too much. It should have been 40-45%

It really isn't. You can get res on so many different pieces of gear, in addition to the passive tree if necessary. My build for example uses a Lightning Coil chest, which has no res of its own and further reduces your lightning res by -60 and I STILL can not only cap my res at 75, but get the necessary res to be ele weakness cursed cap even for higher tier maps. With the addition of masters, you can bench res on gloves, boots, helm, basically anything if you level them up for a cost.

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Your client performance right now is in the toilet. I lag everywhere all the time, and I crashed in the middle of end of act 3 boss fight last night. WTF? Given how much I lag and crash and die of lag, the way you have the labyrinth configured is laughable because I am not going to be able to reliably get to the end without suffering catastrophic loss due to circumstances beyond my control.

It can be yes. They are working on it, but I do believe part of the issue is them switching to something a bit different in this last patch that created issues that couldn't be massively tested before hand.

As for DCing in the lab, it hasn't happen to me in-between the zones only when attempting to initially going in or if there is server issues, which luckly were none during my multiple runs I did.

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In the end, your game is very brutal and punishing, and there is never really any reward. There is no reason for people to *want* to come back. All we get out of playing your game is self satisfaction a sense of accomplishment, which long term is not enough to keep enough people playing for you to keep the lights on.

Its enough for me. I like PoE because it isn't the D3 hand you everything design. I do enjoy playing D3 for about 1 week after the new season comes out but that is about it.

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If you bring in more players to your game, you will be able to reduce prices in your MTX store and make far more money than the way you currently do.

This is a known fact that it isn't always the case, the MTX's are on a randomish rotation and one goes on sale every day. The price point being higher encourages players to purchase supporter packs, which provide a higher value then just purchasing raw points to buy something specific.

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I am a victim of Stockholm syndrome. As many flaws as there are for this game, I cannot stop playing you. I even gave you money.
I just wish I wanted to play your game. I don't want to, there are too many egregious flaws listed above. I play it because right now I am compelled to. What compels me now is strong, but when it fades I will forget the world, Exile.

The flaws IMO is the direction people like you are trying to push the game. It didn't establish itself as a "casual friendly" easy to play game. Nor should it, can it be good to play for less hardcore players, sure but GGG needs to remember how it got here and it most definitely wasn't catering to a casual market.

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You have a lot of potential. Your game is a great foundation to build what i would call the first ARPG MMO. I would like to see you do that and be very successful.

Yeah, absolutely not. I didn't support this game to be that and I most definitely won't support it going forward if it becomes that.

Your post is basically "lets make PoE into D3" which I don't understand why you just don't play d3 then.

As someone who is an actual player and not a game dev: You are the reason why modern arpgs are shit and PoE isn't. Every single point you made was to trivialize the gameplay and make it more accessible to casual players who need "satisfying feedback".
Gender roles, seriously? They're characters, you are playing a character with a story. I don't want to play some no-name customized "me", I want to ROLE PLAY a fleshed out character. You know, as you do in a ROLE PLAYING GAME.
The only thing I can agree on is the map, it's horrible and it has been since day one lol

Didn't want to be too harsh, beeing new here myself, but thx goetzjam + Elektroll.
Seems i'm right in choosing PoE because it is how it is :D