Developer Questions and Answers

A few questions:

1. Any thought for third-party addons (think WoW) for 4.0.0, especially for those that may improve/augment the UI?

2. Any thought for removing the XP penalty, or decreasing it's severity?

3. Similar to #2, are you making any efforts to improve the quality-of-life for the "middle class" or even "upper middle class" in PoE? The top 20-35% of players, as opposed to the oft-cited top 0.1% of players?

Is it possible to get South African servers.

There is quite a bunch of us that love the game but playing on 200ms ping on EU servers are dismal.

Chris Wilson has said in a thread that GGG might look into it and have some good news for us South Africans (soon).

The most recent leagues have had systems where progression is tied to your character (Incursion, Delve, Betrayal and I can't speak for synthesis). Is this the trend going into the future? Is this a decision based on player retention numbers? Why are we not seeing leagues were we can sell "keys" or "stones" that give access to boss fights anymore?

On these recent systems, you can't buy your way into a cool boss fight. You have to actually grind that specific content to access what you want. I think this is detrimental to the game because if you happen to like more than one of these systems it feels awful to give up progress in one to progress in another.

If this is a decision based on player retention then I get it. Psychologically, maybe players like to feel they are progressing towards something. But honestly, the game already holds my attention for a full month when I am interested in a league and I don't feel like you should be pushing for any more than that (This is something that Chris even talked in the GDC, on the topic of "player quitting knowing when to come back/quitting before burning out").

Hello everyone!
Q: many consider PoE to be the best arpg on the market rightnow, i feel the same though the animations and the smoothness of the combat feel very clunky and sometimes even unpolished. 90% of the skills will lock you in place, this doesn't feel good. this is why Winter Orb is this popular right now! is there any chance that this "issue" is gonna be addressed?

Best regards Zappy

Do you have any plans on addressing master content issues regarding their accessibility? By that I specifically mean some way of deterministic control in players hand that would allow to increase occurrence of prefered contentet by simply increasing % chance, disabling unwanted content or different form of control that is not focused on generating tradeable resources.

I understand you can't keep overpowerfull league mechanism once merged into core. but it's way too much nerfed. in synthesis I didn't run one syndicate safehouse yet!
Globally, why don't you increase a little change to encounter master in maps ?

If you want to know what I don't like in PoE, it's not difficulty of the game, but how long you must grind to face (endgame) bosses, elder, shaper... and red map sustain.

And just as reminder, don't forget map tab issues, you promise to fix.
Thanks.

Is something going to be done with difficulty spikes? A powerful boss empowered by map mods gives a good thrill, but it requires a sufficiently high chance of character death. However, that means losing 10% of experience to next level, which can mean a dozen maps or even dozens of maps for characters on higher levels, so there's very strong motivation to minimise this probability. This causes players to build their characters to be resilient enough, which turns the rest of the map into mindless mowing of helpless monsters or to wait until level up so that the experience loss wouldn't matter. An idea how it might be doable is to make normal monsters stronger and allow the player to choose to lose access to the instance instead of losing experience.

First of all thanks for giving us this opportunity!

Will POE become a Epic Launcher Exclusive!?

Could collaboration MTX become a thing? For example if you own Portal/Portal 2 in your linked steam account you get a Portals in the design of Portal?

Cheers.

Do you have plans to give players some agency in what league mechanics they want to play more? I love Betrayal, some love Delve, and I worry adding more leagues to core will make these less accessible.

Custom user-generated maps - WHEN?!!