Developer Questions and Answers

What is the plan to fix every league's major bug / basic mechanic issues before released and rather released to public for playtesting?

Betrayal and Synthesis league really shows the lack of manpower in the development when it comes to playtesting. The 10k hour of playtesting that GGG claimed that had been executed had unfortunate become a meme at this point.

Betrayal spawn location, betrayal's transportation bug issues, synthesis's portals issues and much more.

Will Bex ever gonna be introduced as one of the Masters?

Will you consider revamping league systems to not have real "resource caps"? For example, players aren't compelled to run a Breachstone as soon as they gather 100 of the same Splinter. However, this isn't the case with many of the league mechanics; players are "forced" to run the Memory Nexus once they have 10 banked memories, do Delve once they're near or at the Sulphite cap, run the Temple once they've completed 11 Incursions, go into a Safehouse the moment its intelligence caps out, etc.

It doesn't feel good to constantly feel compelled to engage with X/Y/Z system instead of the desired one. I can't count how many 4 hour play sessions I wanted to spend doing something such as mapping, but wound up spending at most half of that time actually mapping due to several resources capping back to back.

Was the prospect of trying out an auction house of some sort for a temporary league ever floated around? If so can you tell us more? A limited league seems like the perfect time to either try it out or, worst case, show us why you were right all along...

I would be interested to see how it changes the game, and honestly think it could push it into best ever territory, implemented correctly.

Does anyone else feel that people playing AH more than the game actually grows not from having an AH or players being bad, but actually from the game item acquisition balance being wrong? Remember a pobular league, Delve, even if you implemented a pretty shady tactics back there? You've made crafting accessible not only to ultra-rich elite few, but to everyone -- and people became interested in the game much more, since they could affect their own progression without trading! Now, Delve is gutted pretty badly, although not completely, and the new idea of having exquisite-rare drops that can be molded into OP items or "saving crafting costs" is clearly not working. Don't you see you're going the wrong way from an actually good path you accidentally (and clearly unintentionally) stepped on?

What is the team's approach to creating Boss encounters in the leagues?

Currently we have boss encounters for the leagues that are generated by RNG (Unlike Breach and Harbinger) and that seems to take into account the question [Accessibility x Reward].

But what we see today is that some boss has low accessibility and low reward. We have been told that if these bosses were more accessible the rewards would be lower, in the current scenario were not we to have high rewards at the cost of accessibility?

hi

are you considering making the investigation from betrayal, alva's temple and sulphite account shared?
It feels to me that with so many mechanics if you are usted to play lots of characters in the league this would be a great improvement

maybe the nexus also if it goes core

also why did you make the final nexus encounter so hard to spawn?

The volume of invisible item drops --

I remember the discussion that came up with Jonathan and Chris on recent podcasts where they addressed the quantity, and quality of item drops; percentage of items that are immediately filtered out.

I recall that the sentiment was that it is a difficult thing to change about the game (animate weapon and so on..) -- my initial reaction was that I certainly agree that there is an issue, but it still seemed a few leagues away.

Then Betrayal went core, and I played Synthesis. And we're full blown into this issue. It's the product of the game becoming bigger and faster, and that's great. But the percentage of items that drop and are never shown to the character seems unacceptable. Also, design-wise its a problem to add league items to the mix, like we saw in Synthesis. I don't know what the average player filters out, but I don't pick up any rare items bigger than 1x1, unless it's shaper/elder/fractured/veiled, they don't even show up.

There have been changes to movement skills, item quantity bonuses, and movement speed outliers which sort of tightened up the range of this problem and marginally slowed the game down. It'll take something a lot bigger to combat this though, like rebuilding item affix modifiers, while preserving crafting power and/or a global reduction to the quantity of items that drop and a global boost to item rarity. Other things like a pass over of unique item drop rates (likely more rare) and unique item power, as well as any 'loot explosion' technical problems also get bundled into this conversation, it's not just rare items.

What sort of ideas does the team have to bring some excitement back to finding gear?

What are your thoughts on the state of multiplayer in the game? Are you happy with the general gameplay and trading player interactions experienced by players (I might scope this to refer to players like myself. Not quite the top players with organized parties but also not quite the casual player).

Why does the latency graph on F1 spike/correlate to loss in fps?
I don't understand how your connection to the poe servers/gateways is in any way affected/afflicted by gpu rendering.

Are there any plans to add more useful (real-time) details to your character sheet? Making changes to a build on the fly almost always ends up being a "test it in PoB first" thing because the tooltips & char sheet info is widely unreliable & inaccurate; even pob doesn't handle some things well. This further relates to spending less time in the game itself (disjointed) and more in 3rd party tools/websites to make it an enjoyable experience. This then results in me feeling like I play PoB as the main game, and reenacting it in PoE is just going through the motions like a monkey.