Developer Q&A - Part I

thanks ggg

Another day with damage control. Lots of answers with little to no real information.

Betrayal as a core mecanic + this league killed the game for me and my friends. Yes, the old masters were borind, but that system worked fine, i knew what i have to farm and how much to get my crafts. Now you have to grind and prey to the rng gods you will get what you need. You also have to do the mine, temple (more rng layers) etc. Those are things that reset with every league. Good luck finding many players that enjoy this. More and more mindless grind with each league where you can't say how far you are from what you seek/want.
Just a small exemple that made my friends stop playing this game and i will follow them i guess. Making your players grind more without any sense of progress will kill the game in the end, unless you like the new system GGG uses "gaming as a job", which will do fine in the asian market.

Ah, so sad Synthesis wont be in the core game. Would love to have it as a Master content for Zana instead of getting poorly rolled blue maps. Hopefully like with Bestiary, Synthesis will come back after the community outrage(for no good reason IMO) has quiet down a bit.

Otherwise I am very satisfied with the answers and GGG sticking to their core philosophies about the game.

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It has been 18 months since you posted the Trade Manifesto. Do you still stand by it?

This question prompted a long discussion. Many hours of senior developers talking about trade. Our conclusion was: Yes, we do stand by everything we wrote in the manifesto. We are not adding a Trade Market to the PC version of Path of Exile.

Too bad. Trading is the worst part about this game.


....


For humans.

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Do you have any plans to make sustaining maps less tied-up with past league content like Betrayal, Delve and Incursion?

We have two options. We can either make it so that you don't get maps during past league content (and buff the non-map rewards), or have some reliance on those systems for providing map drops.

Because people tend not to play content that doesn't have map drops, we picked the option where league content drops maps.

If you also could remove map drops from monsters and increase map drops from map nodes/map rooms, because right now I am feeling taken hostage by the game(you, the devs) to full clear every monster in T16 incursion temples.

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What about another Legacy League as an end-of-league event?

It's a popular request, but Legacy actually has a number of problems. For a start, it was designed around difficulty levels which were removed in 3.0.0, so work would be required to unlock leaguestones in a different way. Secondly, most of the Legacy league content has gradually made its way into the game in different forms, so would feel less exclusive. The amount of work required to fix up this league to work as an event would be significantly more than we could put in at the moment. Possible for the future though!

That would be awesome! If you decide to do this, check out my suggestion to re-implementation of leaguestones as a form of content control! (link below)

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nathlar wrote:

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GrumpyMcElbows wrote:

1. Speed meta
2. Crafting
3. Rares not worth picking up
4. Trade

These problems are all related. I really cannot emphasize this enough.

This summarizes the main problems really well.
After reading the Q&A i just got "wait until 4.0.0 , because we are doing nothing to resolve the real problems"
Lets hope there will still be a player base for that time.

>>> Economy specifically tailored to feed the top couple percent of no-lifers...

It's not a bad thing as that seems to be the whole reason why POE was made in the first place.... but it means the average player won't experience the same game and there will be nothing to keep them coming back.

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Bex_GGG wrote:

Hey everyone, we've done our best to gather all the most pressing questions into the first part of this Q&A. Let me know if there are any missing and I'll make sure we get them into part two's answers next week.

Sorry to say it, but this is more of a question & answer 50% of the time. A lot of questions are not actually answered at all or have such unspecific answers that could mean anything and have no eta, that the answers are completely meaningless. Like the question about target audience; do i understand correctly that you want to target as many people without providing specifically for any group of them? And what about rare crafts being an exclusive and sparcely available thing? They are exclusive to trading at this point; not to actually playing the game. Also not addressed at all. And i can go on but won't for both our sakes.

Moral of the story; if you do a Q&A please be so kind to actually answer the questions or not mention them at all cause this is frustrating. Also; you owe us nothing, but please stop making the game harder to run every league...

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It has been 18 months since you posted the Trade Manifesto. Do you still stand by it?This question prompted a long discussion. Many hours of senior developers talking about trade. Our conclusion was: Yes, we do stand by everything we wrote in the manifesto. We are not adding a Trade Market to the PC version of Path of Exile.

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Clear speed seems to becoming more and more of a necessity with each league mechanic you add. Are you happy with this trend and do you feel like this is affecting build diversity?

People certainly aren't playing Path of Exile at the speed that I initially imagined when we started development back in 2006, but I know that if we made a big effort to slow down top-end play, it'd probably ruin the enjoyment that many of our most-engaged users have. We have seen other games make that mistake and don't want to repeat it.

We are fully aware of clear-speed concerns when designing new league content. We generally try to create content that doesn't require insane clear-speed. Of course, it is true that the faster you can complete an area and get its rewards, the faster you will progress, so there's an implicit incentive to making good (i.e. fast) characters.

I don't buy it. Adding some crappy timer to every league so that you have to play fast character is not "content that doesn't require insane clear-speed". Get out of here!