Developer Questions and Answers

1. Difficulty levels -- its a weird dynamic for me where at a point when build diversity is so good and I want to try so many different things, its become too boring and almost discouraging to level each new build to maps because its just the same content over and over. Whats the plan for getting rid of one or two difficulties? How has the introduction of the labs changed that plan?

2. Drops -- On one hand having lots of stuff is good, but on the other having too much stuff dilutes the pool so much that it makes getting what you want seem more difficult. With more and more uniques and div cards and items being added there comes a point when its too much. At what point do you remove some uniques or skills from the drop tables? Are we nearing that point?

3. General balance -- With all the talk about making it harder to get to 100, at what point are you going to draw a line where you don't hurt 99% of the player pool just to stop the other 1% from doing something?

Any chance to get an "Endless Ledge" as an endgame alternative in the future ?

Since none of my questions from the previous developer Q&A was answered, I'd like to ask them (with a few changes) again.

Offline trading
Do you plan to implement offline/asynchronous trading anytime in the future or is it a resolute no? It would really help if we didn't have to wait for people to be online or have time to trade with us.

Steam loader
Some games on Steam handle the updates via their own loader. PoE uses Steam to deliver patches, which means copying the almost 7.5GB 9GB file to another place on the disk even for a small patch, which takes quite some time. This made many people who could play PoE over Steam go over to the standalone loader.
If they used the Steam loader, all of their friends on Steam would know they're playing PoE, which would give the game more visibility. Also the game would rise in Steam stats, which again, would give the game more visibility.
Do you have any numbers you can share about how many people use standalone vs Steam and how much bandwidth is saved by using Steam for patches?
Also in the update notes for version 2.2.1 on March 10 you've acknowledged this problem. Is there any progress? Splitting the huge file could help in some cases

ShaderCache
There are currently more than 20.000 files in my ShaderCache folder. Could you please elaborate on what these files are for? Does the game ever read from them on other gaming sessions, or are they just for the current session?
If they're indeed needed for another session, wouldn't it be better if they were all in one file, that could be easily defragmented? Because currently they're all over the disk and reading several small files from all around the HDD means a big performance drop.

Hello,

First of all do you plan to add a new chapter soon (this year) ? And my second question is directly related to, do you plan on levelling a character through 2 levels of difficulties, instead of 3 today ? I have to admit, that it would be a little more smooth to access to the nice end-game fun farming.

Thank you very much in advance for this thread.
Kind regards,

Cold pizza or hot pizza?

1: When will there be a working in-game trade system?

Trade chat is a joke, it is not working, you are not even trying to block the spam?

3 party programs and sits have nothing to do with GGG, we should not need to leave the game to trade,GGG should give us a option to trade!
Honestly, 3 party programs and sits, should be blocked, it creats so much unballance in the wealth of the game.

This game is so much item independent, but we cant trade ???

We have been waiting several years, WTF???




2: Track Guild stash!
Make a log like wow where you can se who takes out what!
Every guild have the problem that there is 1 ninja that steals everything in GS and we have no way to find out who and kick him, only option is to lock down the GS 100%

3: Guild stash takeout options
make some options to limit how lower ranked ppl can take items out of guild stash.
could be limmited to item level per day!
so 3 skill gems 20 level each = 60
or one item at item level 55
thats your qouta for the day

Gm can se if one keeps taking out he limit every day = trying to empty teh stash and take action!

I think this will reduce ninjaing from guilds and make it easyer to be officer and not having to move low lvl shit to FFA taps every 5 min cuz the GS have to be 100% locked

Is there any intention of improving the way item filters work? Mainly, making them work like existing styling codes like CSS for example. With this I mean, making selectors in the item filter additive instead of 'replacive' like it is now.

Example:
In CSS, I could tell all magic item to be red, all rare item to be green and all chromatic items to have a blue border. Then if a non chromatic magic item dropped, it would be red, and if a chromatic magic item dropped it would be red with a blue border.

In the PoE item filter, doing the same, if a non chromatic magic item dropped, it would be red, but if a chromatic magic item dropped it would be the default magic item color with a blue border. Because every selector in PoE first resets everything back to default, before applying it's style. (So, ignoring the red color I've set for all magic items somewhere else)

This would improve life significantly for people who want a lot of exceptions in their item filter. I know item filters are probably not the priority, but it doesn't seem like something that would be difficult to do, and on top of that, seems the most logical way for this to work.

I always have the same question at these Q&A type of posts: any ideas yet on spectre summoning QoL? Is it even intended to eventually implement Spectre QoL or are the annoyances surrounding it actually ment as balance (which would be dubious imo)?

Whats the average coffee consumption like at your office?
Compare that to your hot development-phases, please.

I've been playing an MMO where all of the developers were required to play at least 1 hour of the game daily in order to make sure, the game is enjoyable even for the dev team. Do you have a similiar "rule" or do you expect the dev team to play the game from time to time as well? And I mean play on the actuall public servers on personal accounts, not the in-house build with cheats.