Developer Questions and Answers

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Why do you release new patches with no testing at all? We would all love to beta test stuff and we were all very bored 2 months into the last league. As a community we could have beta tested syndicate and fixed many of the problems. Why don't you use your willing community to help improve your game?

"Why do you release new patches with no testing at all? We would all love to beta test stuff and we were all very bored 2 months into the last league. As a community we could have beta tested syndicate and fixed many of the problems. Why don't you use your willing community to help improve your game?"

What are you talking about...? The literally spend so much time beta testing with the temp leagues they implement that Standard Plaayers don't get to see any new content for 5-6 months until they decide what is fine to put from the temp leagues into standard. They beta test a shit ton, just whether you are aware of it or not.

Do you have plans for making unique challenge totem ?
Because with each league reward totem is always same and the motivation to do 40 challenges is lower and lower. Maybe create unique totem that match league theme ?

question 1:
Have you talked about the changes to lab encahnts?

An idea about it:
A good way to go about it without changing how to obtain them , but just how you use them would be creating 3 vessels, helmet vessel, boot vessel and glove vessel and allow people to use their end of the lab enchant on the vessel and than being to apply such enchant on any other item allowing people to buy the enchant they need from other people.

question 2:
Have you ever considered using the synthesis feature on bosses? Making drops drop normally trough the map , but once you kill the boss all the loot that is in the map gets sucked to the void and then erupts as loot from the boss.
This would make no difference in regual gameplay(other than maybe on choosing a map to run) and would make the boss feel so much better without actually increasing his drop rates.

question 3:
whats the average gameplay of a senior development per league? And if they actually play, how many times do they interact with trading

question 4:
Why are we still getting forced caps and force mechanics into char specific? Why can't we have shared sulphite across league and have "no sulphite cap"(by this i mean the 999,999 value normaly used as max)

question 5:
Why havent party bonus been changed since the start when the game has totally shifted from its original design and being in party no longer makes the content harder, because of aura bots and curse bots?

As a bit of background: I played every league last year for several hours, and Betrayal the most for 2-3h daily every day. Despite that, I never dropped a single T14 map, or faced a single Bestiary boss (still haven't seen one ever), nor reached deep enough in Delve to see any bosses or cool content from it due to low Niko encounters/sulphite gained. Basically, I devoted myself HARD for one league because I wanted to finally see the Shaper, the Elder, the Pale Council, Atziri, and Delve/Bestiary bosses. I only managed to see the council and Atziri.

With that said, here's my question:

Do you design and balance the game around only the most devoted players? Do you take into consideration more casual players who'd like to beat Zana's quest or experience league end content on their own terms? What about players who can't commit dozens of hours a week but don't want to play standard? What about SSF players?

Or, to word it as a single question: Do you have any plans to make the game more accessible to casual/SSF players, or are you too worried about the 1% running out of things to do too early in the league?

(To clarify, this isn't about what the first Q&A question answers, it's not about complexity or difficulty or accessbility for new players, but rather about the game being less frustrating and more enjoyable without devoting your life to it).

EDIT: as an addendum commentary on "let us know which leagues you like and don't", I think all leagues have some value. Standard should probably have all of them at all times, but seasonal leagues should handle it like Zana mods: each league has the devs choose ~10 from the total pool (that you guys think will work in an interesting way with the new league presented). This could let certain leagues get the spotlight and create interesting economies and metas. For players that don't want to see something gone, they will always be in standard, but for players that only play seasonal leagues, it could make some leagues fresh again when they reappear after ~6 months. Same way everyone is excited whenever Cadiro is back in rotation, some of the more tired leagues could become exciting again if they are gone for a couple rotations, and it would also let you spotlight some older ones again, like Harbingers.

You've said that easier trade reduces number of times players upgrade their gear. My experience is that trading is the only time I upgrade my gear after level 30 or so, no matter how long I put off trading. How often do you expect players to upgrade their gear without trading?

Instead of changing the way all trading works (with a market), what about just changing it for maps? Or adding all maps to Zana like GGG did with gems?

I progressed more on the atlas this league than I ever did in other leagues, but it was at the expense of many many hours of trading my currency for maps. I have no interest in doing this again to progress through the atlas.

Spectre's haven't gotten any love in recent leagues. Not sure if this is intended or just a side effect of the way you wanted mobs to act, but nobodies leaving bodies to copy... We haven't gotten a new cool mob to play with since Incursion league.

So, could y'all either let us desecrate normal mobs (Whether or not they leave a body) or give us another way to spectre mobs?

Chris - do you and the team play the league after launch? Or are you mostly busy with the upcoming developments?

Have you actually used trade in a league? Or do you mainly use console commands to spawn needed items?

Even if you don't want to add an AH - are there any changes to trade coming to PC? For example allow trading while in a map/lab by giving a trade pop-up and automating trade in that way - making it possible for people with less time than streamers and developers to engage in trade?

So not a fully automated AH, but automated so that the 'goods' part is automated (no way to cheat - no reason for a Scam message on poe.trade anymore), but still requiring an active confirmation from the seller.