Developer Q&A - Part II

"

As a note about your reason for not supporting linux, it not having a singificant enough playerbase.

I'd like to mention that a lot of people would be willing to main a linux system if more games were supported on it. I play on a Linux system right now (Manjaro), but many times I just dual boot in windows for nothing more than a handful of games, and POE is one of those simply because of as of my latest distro swap, I just don't want to be bothered jumping through all the hoops.

Steam's Hardware / Software Survey has Linux users at < 1% (0.81%).

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined

I ran FreeBSD / RedHat back in the day, but let's not kid ourselves - game support is the least of Linux's adoption issues.

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InsiderTradingX wrote:

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vio wrote:

yep, that would be the result. sulphite sources likely get optimised for people having one character farming it and another character using it.
if you don't have 2 chars you're fucked.

players that argued for sharing sulphite across accounts run several chars per league and profit from it.

I disagree. Those of us delving deep (1000 and lower) in Synthesis league just run 6-12 rotas a day and I can see no benefit for changing char just for farming sulphite. For example, on a triple rota, in which we will each get 50-54k, it is not uncommon for 1-2 of us to be capped before we conclude. So we just keep the party, and some of us burn 10k or so of sulphite, and then we come back to compete the rota. To change chars without just be an unnecessary inconvenience.

yes, maybe i've been wrong about this. thanks.

ooof so many answers

Path of Exile with Vulkan ?!?! THE HYPE IS REAL!

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Chris wrote:

Can you please make Betrayal per-league rather per-character?
Can you please make Sulphite per-league rather than per-character?

Yes, but not right now...

Man, that would be freaking awesome. I'm unsure why it was introduced at a Character Level when added to core. It de-incentivizes playing the game more. You'd think that a company like Grinding Gear Games would be interested in doing everything they can to make sure that people play.

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Chris wrote:

Master content such as Incursion and Betrayal can be distracting and disrupts the flow of just grinding maps. Do you have any plans to change this?

Yes, sort of.... maybe...

At least from my perspective, I don't have a problem with the fact that you should run that content to aid in your map pool.

The problem is, You gutted map drop rates, to force people to run the new "core" and league content, but the drop rates are not holding up to what they were previously.

It would have been nice if the running the "Not Map" content at a casual pace, kept your map pool where it was previous to the addition, and the more that you actually pushed to run that content, the more that it helped to make your map pool better.

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Chris wrote:

Players feel that map sustainability is tied up with Betrayal and other master content, making it non optional. What is your stance on this?

Yes, we have a plan, but hold tight...

I can honestly say that I have NEVER received a single map drop from Betrayal content. I didn't play Betrayal League. I've only completed 2 Safehouses. But, from the Masters, the 2 safehouses, and the labs, have NOT yielded better results on maps.

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Chris wrote:

Have you guys considered allowing us to trade maps of a tier for any other map of that same tier for a small cost at an NPC?


Here, have that orb as a thing permanently.

That works, as long as the orb doesn't end up being Annulment, or old school eternal in rarity.

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Chris wrote:

You indicated that knowing a monster could drop something that improves your character could be a good motivator for playing one more level. It feels like item drops don't compare anymore and the focus is on crafting systems with most rares being used for the Chaos Orb recipe. Do you think changing item drops could improve the trading environment?

Yeah, we see that this sucks.

You know what would make this easier? Better trading. Easier trading. You can leave the drops as terrible as they are, and just give better trading. Easier ways to actually get items that are good.

Or, Get rid of some of the absolute garbage rolls that items can get. Not a complete and utter gutting, but people have stopped ID-ing items, because the chance that it's going to ID, and be worth more than the fraction of an orb that it is unid' for use in the recipe is just so minute that it doesn't even matter.

At some point, It's just not worth the time. Any more, in maps, I barely pickup items. I keep stash tabs of each slot unid'd, and when I complete a collection of enough Ammy's to trade them off for recipes, I do it en masse, and don't even bother with ID-ing things, unless it's a base that I care about for one of the chars that I play.

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Chris wrote:

Would you consider creating a SSF version where you can't migrate back to the trade league but would have increased drop rates?

No.

Because a version of the game that can't be moved to base game, that people can progress and have fun, and give the option of appealing to a more casual player base is a bad thing?

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Chris wrote:

Why can't we hide fractured items on our item filters?

Because while we don't want to give you information about why they are important, we want you to know that they are important.

If you are going to insist that we have to see "new" items, how about you put a little more info in the game regarding why they are important, and how to use them. Synthesis took the purposeful obfuscation that GGG trades in as "difficulty" and ramped that up on the new crafting system.

I stopped caring, because I'm tired of having to open minimum 5 tabs to play content.

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Chris wrote:

Now that your console player base is bigger, do you have any plans to make the official website more mobile-friendly?

You should REALLY think about doing that, or just pay a dev team to build a mobile app. It's 2019. Not having a mobile friendly website, "because it's hard, and a slow process" is no longer acceptable excuse.

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Chris wrote:

Will you make console trading easier like it is on PC?

Sort of.

But.... like 4.0, right?

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Chris wrote:

There is internal discussion about opening up the trade API for console realms, to allow support for trade sites that find items in your premium stash tabs. Currently we haven't reached a definitive conclusion on this. One thing to note is that text chat on consoles (which isn't yet finished) is probably necessary for this system to work well.

SHouldn't chat have been a thing that was ready at launch?

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Chris wrote:

Do you plan to add extra mods for private leagues? For example, would we ever be able to pay for a private league with infinite Delve?

No. Because we are clinging to the idea that you only have fun in this game when you grind incessantly for nothing.

Yeah, I got nothing.

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Chris wrote:

I think there is a huge difficulty spike between T15-T16 Maps and Shaper Guardian bosses, to the point where I feel forced to get a character specifically designed to tackle these bosses. Do you plan on reducing the difficulty on these bosses, or maybe add an extra Map Tier to lessen the difficulty spike?

We don't agree, so no.

I... actually agree with you here.

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Chris wrote:

Favour points are difficult to get and are too focused on us getting our daily missions done. Do you plan on reducing the cost of Hideout Decorations? Maybe lower the cost as Masters level up?


We don't play the game, but we understand that a lot of people are really angry about our all new, super awesome, super fun, but apparently not for people who actually play, favour system.

You should prioritize this. God the new favour system is awful. It's not fun. it's frustrating. It's just another layer of obfuscation that didn't need to be introduced.

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Chris wrote:

How do you keep your mindset fresh when thinking about Path of Exile? I can imagine that sometimes - much like the players - you get stuck with a certain point of view about a game design issue.

We play Path of Exile, I promise!

Not seeing how that's possible, lately.

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Chris wrote:

Will there ever be a merchandise store?

Absolutely. We need to find more ways to bilk money for the game.

I hope that there are enough people that will play, and buy merch by the time it launches.

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Chris wrote:

Are there any plans to add new slots for the Harbinger currencies that are now part of the core game to the currency tab and/or rearrange it to make crafting easier on the item slot in the middle of the tab?

Look forward to being required to buy an all new, and improved currency tab!

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Chris wrote:

It seems to be a widely held desire to have a death log showing the last few damage sources prior to death. Is this something you have plans to add to the game? If so, are there any software/hardware limitations getting in the way that you could describe at a higher level?

It's hard. Other games can do it, because they aren't as complex as us. We are going to struggle, because it's hard, and servers are expensive, and we never wanted to give you that data, so we never planned for a way to deal with the fact that people may want a feature that is available in a ton of games.

This just further highlights the disconnect between GGG's desire to keep as much as possible obfuscated from the player, and how out of step that idea is with the players.

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Chris wrote:

You mentioned a while ago that Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Overload were way too powerful for an individual node. Any timeline for those changes?

Yeah. Melee is too good. We're going to use this as the next point to destroy melee. We just have to wait long enough after the "Melee Patch" that it makes sense.

They're good. But for some builds, they are (1, or the other, or both) to try and make builds work. Best Calcs put EO at the largest source of DPS for most MS builds.

That's going to be a huge kick in the pants, if skills and other passives aren't improved to help pick up the slack.

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Chris wrote:

Will you add 2-factor authentication on the website?

It's hard, and what if you lose the authenticator!? We might have to offer the same level of customer service as ActiBlizz....

I quit playing WoW at the end of Cataclysm, and let my account sit, with an authenticator on it, never bothering to mess with it. In the years after, I moved, sold things, threw things out, and my authenticator went with it.

36 hours, 3 emails from each side, and it was fixed. I then went on to play other Blizz products with the same account after.

You could, partner with existing 2 step authentication services, which are even easier to handle than proprietary.

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Chris wrote:

Why do so many items drop from the game even though we're just filtering them out?

DONT FORGET YOUR STONE HAMMERS!

You could, just rework things so that some of those vendor recipes aren't needed any longer? I mean,

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mutiv wrote:

Path of Exile with Vulkan ?!?! THE HYPE IS REAL!

Something like Linux Mint would probably work great if there was support for non Microsoft graphic libraries. That is really the only thing holding back most games from running better on linux than Windows.

This is great news !

I stopped playing PoE a few years back when I couldn't stand dual booting to Windows _just_ for this game.
(and of course, booting to Windows was always a pain since the updates where just force rebooting the pc each time, and everything seems so out of place and slow...)

I did try to play from Wine, but the desync + shader loading time made the hardcore play impossible.

I'm eager to try again as soon as the Vulkan conversion is done.
This is very good first step toward Linux :D

Thanks ;)

I don't care what Tarke says. This is good.

"

dead babies washed on up on the beach of the Twilight Strand

Had to even google that up. Another PoE trivia there :D

Amazing, like really, I'm loving your child Chris more every day. Sad that I won't have as much time as I had from now on...

Merci pour les nouvelles et longue vie à PoE depuis la France !