Thoughts from a game dev in the industry ...

knowing a player's background doesn't really alter the argument. it's sometimes just useful to know where it comes from.

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jcannonb wrote:

Mindless drivel.

You seem to be very young. Or just not very smart.

So much dick measuring going on in here, goddamn.
What is this? A GOP debate?

"I don't want to say anything bad about people with notebooks. Great people. Just great. I got a lot of friends with notebooks. But this is America, and you either have freedom or you don't. I've sold thousands of notebooks, without ever listing any specs, because I'm a deal maker. I make deals. I'm also an entrepreneur and a game dev. I make games. I've made so many games. Great games. Just great. Ask me about my games and I'll tell you. Just ask me about my games. So many games. I've you knew how many games I've made you'd be sick of hearing about great games. That's how many great games I've made. I'm an expert on games. I'm the only expert on games here tonight. You ask these other guys about games and they'll choke because they don't know games like I know games. I know games. All the games. On max settings too. 1080p. Frames. Latency. CPM. Games. Everything. I can tell you everything. Just ask me."

I think that you are quite misguided with your game developing mindset. Try to think out of the box and lure people in a more clever way instead of thinking ways to give them instant gratification. If PoE was a "diablo 3 clone" it would have failed miserably and it would have been abandoned by now.

A reason would be having to compete with D3 (which is the biggest uncreative failure of a game) and D3 winning because of its name and production values. But hey, PoE has survived because it is what it is.

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jcannonb wrote:

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.
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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.

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.

Blizzard's loot system is anything but smart. If anything, personally, it manages to bore me to death and has no real RNG. There is a reason RNG is for games, what spices are for meals. If I wanted to play a "pseudo-RNG" that "guarantees" something, I would be playing a facebook browser game. An RNG that guarantees

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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)

The paragon system btw is something that a lot of fans asked for before D3's release but its developers were not clever enough to implement it from the start (or just used it as an additional bait afterwards) and something that wouldn't be needed if D3 was anything like D2.

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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.

Even casuals have started despising the "casual mode" in games. Might as well implement a button - press to "win". The ones who want challenge won't press it and the ones who don't, will. And everyone will be happy, right? Wrong. If you can't understand why, I don't recommend following a career working on online games.

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Mordad wrote:

POE requires a good network connection, thats all.

Incorrect.

Lag is a noticeable delay between the action of players and the reaction of the server in a video game.

Although lag may be caused by high latency, it may also occur due to insufficient processing power in the client (screen-lag).

POE has shown several incidents of screen-lag regardless of your connection, even when playing solo.

Type 1) Latency. The time it takes for data to get to and from the server and your PC. If it's too high, you'll lag.

Type 2) Wooden PC. If you are playing PoE on a ti-83, you'll lag.

Type 3) Server overload. Too many people connected to the same server, it can't process the ones and zeros and get them out to the players fast enough. You'll lag.

Type 4) Poor optimization. The game loads certain assets in an inefficient manner. You need the game to display X, the game left loading X until it was too late, and you have to wait. This is lag. An example being strong boxes before they were (mostly) fixed.


Next. All of the "If the game was more like Diablo 3 it would be more popular, because Diablo 3 is popular!" Bullshit needs to stop. It's just not true. For the simple fact that Diablo 3 exists, people don't want another Diablo 3. The same shit happened for years with World of Warcraft. "Oh, all you have to do is copy WoW and print money!" No. No you don't. Because the world only needs one World of Warcraft. Same thing with Diablo 3. PoE is as successful as it is because it's not like Diablo 3. If we wanted to play a game like Diablo 3, we'd go play Diablo 3.

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scale_e wrote:

Type 2) Wooden PC. If you are playing PoE on a ti-83, you'll lag.

Okay, again, I feel like I need to slap some reality into this community. Does anyone here actually believe that people are playing on a PC that can't handle PoE? Have you actually looked at the models in this game? They are laughably bad. Short of the shadows (which I am convinced are broken on the highest setting) there is little to no actual demand on your PC. At worst, you can possibly blame connection, but frankly even the cheapest internet packages can handle a game like this.

Specific scenarios cause lag (loading a Rogue Exile or Prandus mobs). These are events when the game has to load things that aren't part of the zone by default, and the more complex the entity the worse it gets (Rogue Exiles are essentially an AI controlled player character, complete with gear and gems. That's a shitload of stuff to load n a split second).

I'm sure some super-high-end PCs can compensate for the game choking, but you shouldn't need a supercomputer to serve as a crutch for a game that looks like it could have been an XBox title.

Only 4 really big things that need actual fixing using your list would be:

1. Optimization of the game is atrocious, fix it please GGG.

2. Much less backtracking/alternative way of leveling then doing the story 3x over.

3. More effort in end-game content in addition to maps

4. Also please make map farming less annoying. It is unbelievably annoying to hunt down every single monster in the map. Might as well do D3 where we kill the majority of the monsters on the map and then kill the boss that just spawned for all of the loot. Kicking down every single barrel + little nook and cranny to try to get another map is annoying compared to challenging.

Rest of the list can be good depending the opinion of the person.

I sort of agree with the OP remarks on Dominus and Malachai. *shrugs*

My problem with them is that so much effort is put into making large, flashy animations and background effects that absolutely kill my computer's ability to handle what is going on. The rain atop The Sceptre of God, the blood pool and bleeding hearts within the Black Heart, and larger attack animations (like Malachai's tentacle portal attack) really make it difficult to get through deathless.

After Normal, where I have to worry about XP-loss for dying, I *have* to make sure I've just leveled before fighting Dominus and Malachai because I'm guaranteed to die at least four times, it seems; especially my melee characters. :/

I bought my PC half a year ago. I know game devs, proffesional streamers and gamers like me who play video games for at least 15 years.

My rig in specs comparing to those people is like 50% of their power in everything (or even less). My PC doesnt have smallest problem to run this game, no crashes, no latency issues, no graphic related problems with include artifacts, missings assets or low fps.

I am not saying that the game is perfectly optimized, but I know GGG is working hard for it to be. The biggest issues POE currently and always had is RAM usage, where current update made it much worse. It also drops FPS radiculously when played on non-full-screen mode.

In terms of perfomance, I could play this game on my 7 years old rig few months ago and the only issue I had was the usage of RAM.

I know that every game can run differently on even similar in power computers, because the software interaction might work differently each time. I had such problem when POE went out of closed beta. GGG fixed it fast after few raports of what is going on.

Remember that without feedback and your computer spec or your own knowledge of what is runing on your computer, GGG wont optimize the game well to run on your PC with is different than standard for some reasons.

Also dont think that I am the only one or belong to small % of community who have no problem with game perfomance. You see most posts on forum that are negative only because people who have bad expriance come here to share it, people with positive expriance usualy dont come to forums or to costumer support, they have no bussiness here.