Developer Questions and Answers

I can't think of anything I personally want to ask because I've got all that I ever wanted (character effects. Yay!)

Maybe I'll just see if anything interesting comes along this time.

PS: maybe ask when is mjolnir going to get a real buff. My div card is the ultimate joke.

What are some key features you look for in an artist's portfolio? Whether it be VFX, character, environment or other artists. Is specialization better than broad knowledge? Or, I would guess, is it best to have both?

As the prophecy of 10 acts is being fulfilled, what is GGG's next goal?

Are there any completely undiscovered/unknown recipes or vendor secrets? What about vendor recipes that only a select few have ever used and are not public knowledge?

Most of my questions will be about general game balance and design of PoE.

1. What are your thoughts on the progression of PoE metagame? I as looking at the old BotW videos, and it's really obvious how significantly everything has changed since 2012–2013. In those days, you were the odd one if your build managed to clear at movement speed. Nowadays, if it doesn't, it's considered a failed build, or a goofy/"hipster" one at best. This has several general implications that I would like to elaborate upon.

Firstly, damage scaling has gone completely out of control—it's relatively easy to get into six-digit effective DPS with little more than self-found gear and passive tree/skill mechanics if you know them well enough. If one has budget to spare, seven-digit DPS isn't a surprising number anymore among the experienced players. As a result, endgame enemy HP has also been boosted repeatedly to the point where only those builds can take them on. This needs a serious universal tone-down in my opinion, how about yours?

Secondly, the classic multiplayer ARPG triad of damage dealer / support / tank has degraded completely over time. Nowadays you almost always build for damage and earn tankiness via instant leech (or similar mechanics) and killing enemies before they have a chance to actually deal damage. Supports are very rare and mainly serve to increase the clear speed further. This leads to very one-sided decisions from both sides: players tend to facetank dangers and either outleech the damage or die/log out, and the dev team just tunes the numbers higher up in attempts to compensate for this behavior (always unsuccessfully, if I may add). As a result, the coolest mechanical fights in the game are now mainly accessible by builds that shit on those mechanics to begin with. Wouldn't it be much better if the biggest fights actually required skill from all players/characters/builds instead of only those with poor or defense-oriented gear? I mean, it's pretty obvious how the current state of events would work well to make the game more boring in general, when you have an wide spectrum of choices that all converge to one and the same way of dealing with every problem.

I would love to hear an elaborate answer to these concerns. Has the design/balance team foreseen this development? What direction do they want to take the game in with 3.0?

2. What are the general thought and research processes behind introducing new skills or power-oriented uniques? Are you doing the math and testing in-house, outsource it to the alpha team (if there even is one by now), or just go with what seems appropriate at the time?

I'm asking because I've lost count of times when an obviously superior item or skill would be introduced that would overshadow most others of its class in both general experience and raw numbers, only to get nerfed repeatedly—often together with the general mechanics it was used as the vessel for. It appears as one of the two possible things: either it's being done deliberately to attract bored/jaded players with shiny new things and then repeat the cycle, or the balance team doesn't really do their math. The latter seems to be the case in at least some instances when a skill or item is so immediately ridiculous it receives its first nerf mid-league.

3. PoE's business model is remarkable. Is it by now the largest free-to-play game with purely ethical microtransactions? If not, what are its main competitors and how is it holding up? Are you receiving financial advice on how to develop the business model further? Does that development reflect heavily on the game design decisions (e. g. what content to make, performance/balance/etc. issues priority, and so on)?

4. The Legacy league is a clever and more easily sustainable rework of the 1 to 4 (IIRC) week long Flashback events of the past. Considering the role of those events as the season filler inbetween expansions, would this league also be a recurring thing once every 3-4 seasons or so?

5. What are the dev team's own biggest gripes with the game? Something they would like to change or get rid of, something they find annoying or boring?

6. Did you note any significant trends in how the player behavior changed over the years? If so, what are they?

7. Can we expect UI quality-of-life improvements? Even relatively small and obvious changes take months and years to appear. There are still no convenient character and friend list sorting, moving tabs around is a pain, I can't see who is in my ignore list (or remove particular people/see what I ignored them for), and so on, and so forth. I realize some of these require design considerations, but come on. Surely a fancy new act 2 chicken physics can share some of its budget allocation with more tangible improvements.

8. Even though the dev team constantly implements performance improvements and is proud of it, I feel like the game's performance is actually becoming worse year after year on the same hardware configuration. Maybe it has to do with the general increase in enemy and effect density, but I can't even open a Breach or party up without it becoming a slideshow very quickly (sometimes actually slowing down the instance itself, as reflected by server-side lag). And I'm playing on HC—these sudden performance drops are deadly! I keep seeing this concern echoed by the owners of high-end graphics cards as well, so it's definitely not the case of me having a potato PC. What are the plans in this regard?

9. Are any of the dev team shmup players? Starting with Rampage I've begun noticing design motifs mimicking common shmup tropes (it became quite obvious when it turned out one of Shaper's attacks was actually called "bullet hell" internally).

Thanks for your time.

This is directly violating one of the rules; specifically the one about avoiding asking questions that have been asked, however, this topic is extremely vital (as I know you already know and understand)
--
Chris, keep the PR stuff to a minimum please, the vague, non-descriptive explanations are overdone and at this point incredibly irritating.

What are the tentative solutions to the abysmal trade system in this game?
Can we expect a new trade system implemented along side the 3.0 expansion?

Hello GGG !

Im very exited for the release of the 6 new chapters, and also pumped for the xbox release.

So my first question (im running the game via steam) will i be able to log on to my account if i decide to get the game on xbox ?

And this one have been bumming me out for a while, i keep getting logged off, Is there anything i can do to help prevent this ?

Kind regards

Since April 1st is coming up soon, what is the best prank someone has pulled in your offices?

Ahoy, GGG. A pair of random questions:

1) Will the Coves or the Blackwood be making a return in Act 6/7? Seems to me like the logical place to reintroduce one or both of them and add a couple more optional areas/quests for relatively minimal effort.

2) Will we be able to go back down through the other half of the Prison and onto the Ledge in Act 6? I realize most of the Submerged Passage is, well, submerged again, but the Ledge could still be reachable from the other direction. (Again, a perfectly logical place for another side quest if you're so inclined.)

How come you decided to make xbox port? How long did you thought about it before deciding you'll do it?
What is your experience so far with it, any specific problems? (or would you like to save anectodes like that for post xbox release)
And are there any plans (or at least wishes) to make playstation port one day?