Developer Q&A - Part I

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As a player who wants to delve and only Delve, is there any way to reduce the reliance on mapping to access Delve content?

The honest answer here is that we believe that game systems like Delve will become boring if you have unlimited access to them, and so it's important to limit their access by requiring regular Path of Exile play between sessions of special content.

The other factor that is Delve-specific is that rewards from Delve are strong, so it'd be an economic problem if people had more access.

Having said that, Scarabs and other game mechanics can help you trade for more Delve time.

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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.

Ok so here's the thing both of the answers are fine alone, and together they are total incompatible nonsense. If you think it's important for trading to be an awful experience that's fine, and if you think it's important for content to be trade it's fine. You cannot have both, it's insane. What these two statements together read is

"If you want to play your favorite part of the game more, you need to play the part of the game that we made intentionally awful and miserable more."

Tradeable content cannot be a solution to giving players choice when you intentional make trading bad. If you want to keep trading bad you have to make obtaining content without trading easier not harder. If you want to make trading awful that's fine, but then you have to treat it like it's an awful part of the game.

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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.

Any plan on doing a "Breach 2.0", "Beyond 2.0" type of league where you just add more things to the past community favorite league mechanics? or would this be bad for marketting?

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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.

Thanks for bringing on these together! This was a really fascinating and exciting read!

I really like the answers given to a lot of these questions.



Here's to hoping the bring back old style races like descent, endless ledge. With alt art prizes for reaching certain goals.... Not this 3 week flashback that favors people who don't work for living...

Big F about no trade changes.

Smaller F about crafting recipe changes. I already hated the unveiling system in Betrayal, but having to do it again in Synthesis, and at much slower rate on top of that was a huge turn-off for me (amongst many other things).

And the looting aspect of the game is already a complete disaster & travesty at this point, along with the slot machine rng crafting making gearing (especially a new character going through acts) an utterly dull, boring & uninteresting aspect of the game.... which is a shame, since that is usually one of the fun parts of ARPG games.


Finally: nothing about any UI updates or changes :/
The game's ui (especially the combat stats) is already awful and extremely outdated, but it sounds like nothing is ever going to happen to improve there.

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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.

Kinda feels like the core issue being raised was ignored on this one. Chris pretty much addressed clear speed as an overarching game problem, and that faster clearing to rewards accelerates progress..... when the question seemed more focused on how a clear speed build is neccisary to meaningfully interact with mechanics like Incursion and Memory Decay.

It felt like Chris was answering the Clear speed question he wanted to address rather then the one that was actually posed. But I do feel it's a big issue. I've made a few builds this league that I quickly found just could not reliably get through memories fast enough to feel 'viable'. It wasn't about the speed of character progress, but about the ability to engage with the league mechanic, which is very much a seperate issue.

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DinoUY wrote:

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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.

Hi Bex,

Question: Is there any chance we get an audit log or action log to know what is hitting you, for how much, and in case you die, what did kill you?

Thanks!

i would LOVE to see this feature added to the game. maybe even a replay of the last 10 seconds before you died! that'd would be SO good to have.

+1

So nothing is going to change. Good to know. Fuck trade amirite? Player's interactions amirite? How about that players retention?

Hardcore game my ass. This game is already easy enough and fucking trivial with all these powercreeps and speed meta builds.

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We generally try to create content that doesn't require insane clear-speed.

Excuse me, isn't that a plain bullshit?

Essence - "good luck killing that double regen triple essences crab"
Breach - DPS, AoE, stun and chill immunity check (literally the first league that forced me to play a very specific build instead of the one I planned initially)
Abyss - "you don't have enough dps -> go play standard"
Bestiary - "kill things instantly or die to oneshot"
Incursion - "you are unable to play this league if your build isn't in this list: … "
Delve - "our game has no naturally scalable defence, so you must abuse that one broken mechanics or you must oneshot everything before it kills you"
Betrayal - "look, why don't you play offscreen 2M dps build yet?"