What Happened with Purposeful Harbinger

stop being a presence on reddit it's getting ridiculous.

As someone who farmed for the first 2 weeks on my flicker character building a monster who could full clear everything and then liquidating that character merely HOURS before the announcement of this I am destroyed. All that wasted currency I can never get back now just wasted because of a communication error? This is ridiculous. Planned on doing 40/40 this league for the first time and it's just not gonna happen now cause of this ruining of my personal economy.

While it suck's that a nerf came midway through league, the community shouldn't be so shocked given the nature of the build. That's part of the fun with the game, the PoE community essentially helps to shape the game, playing broken OP builds for (mostly an entire) league until the broken part receives constraint.

GGG, don't be so hard on yourselves!!! The PoE community can be harsh and overly critical. If I was playing a game and found a hack for unlimited ammo, I would have to assume that the exploit would be fixed. In fact, if that example company didn't fix that issue I would loose faith in their QA and ongoing support.

Love you guys, stay healthy!

Did you really just fkn blame Coronavirus? I was mildly irritated before, but now your credibility has become a joke.

April Fools' Day

This is why u need to test your game,
don't let the player be the tester and the QA every league
rip my 100ex

Let me iterate by saying that I understand both sides of the argument, but nerfing the mechanics around purposeful harbinger mid league is a horrible call. Is it a busted mechanic, yes it is without a doubt beyond busted. But the problem lies in the fact that despite the questioning from the community, you still said that it would not be nerfed in this league.

I have been playing this game for 7 years now, easily thousands of hours if not much more. When you have played as long as I have and I know there are others in this camp, little matters. You have crushed all the content many times over. The ONE thing that keeps you going is chasing that new high, becoming as busted as possible, tanking everything, while leaving absolute carnage in your wake. You live for it and plan around it. You are so committed to it that you don’t mind spending an additional couple hundred of hours at minimum, the GRIND.

For you to give us the green light to chase this new high “purposeful harbinger” and then change your mind mid league, it is very disappointing. It is very disappointing because you gave us GGG’s word and because it invalidates all the time and investment spent on “purposeful harbinger” mechanics this league. To invest all that time into it and then find out “Eh we changed our minds” really sucks.

Some of you might make the argument it was too busted. But does it really matter? It would have only been for one league. And on top of that most of the fan base per league falls off halfway to ⅔ way through the league. So what harm would there have been in just letting people enjoy it? In terms of community and economic balance, there won't be as much of a community in a couple weeks.

Some of you argue that at least GGG is better than most companies. It is because they are better that they must be held to a higher standard. When playing games from other companies you can expect to get screwed. If you keep playing them it's your fault for sticking around. That is not the case with GGG. GGG is a superior company, so their word should mean more. You should feel hurt when something like this happens. Reliability and innovation is what separates them from the rest. THIS should not happen.

This all would not be so bad if something was done to compensate for the changes OR if you told us that the mechanics were taking a physical toll on the servers. BEX I still love POE. I hope you understand my points. I still intend on playing POE 2. But as far as this league and possibly the next are concerned, I am done. I am only writing something this long because I am very passionate about POE.

Old players could remember that stuff with Temporal Chains + Curse Effect + Atziri's Axe = Permafreezed mobs
Was fixed day after Ghudda showcasing it.
And you should know - comments from people after this showcase was like: What have you done, duude you just broke my OP build by posting it!!!111, or: "Ty" for killing fun, you ****!
People just never changes...
They starting abuse things without any doubts, hiding these abuses, and even blame people who are really have some, even litte amount of honor and dignity...
You... yes you... little abuser, you just dont deserve that apologiez from GGG.
Think first, before you do something... that's good skill and usefull habit.
Also, you play games by your decision, no one push you to do so and spend your time. If you think you just spends your time for nothing and that's GGG fault - think again please, use your brain as it intended - for thinking and realize... how things works in this world. Main answer - you made decision, take some responsibility for your actions. You decide to test this broken build? Just dont say you did it ocasionally, without realizing that's is completely works not as intended. Like really... everbody knows... So stop complaining, and in future - make right decisions or take responsibility. That's it, simple as that.

"

Bex_GGG wrote:

We are so sorry for people's loss of time, currency and faith.

To be honest, this would be one of the times where, for some of us with a keener eye, it actually generates more faith.

From my observation, it's not really a flaw if GGG wavers from what they said. What can be an issue is being utterly inflexible in the face of new evidence.

"

Bex_GGG wrote:

This won't happen again.

Personally, I'd caution against a promise that you can't really be certain you will always be able to keep.

To be honest, this should've brought up the discussion of whether you should even continue such a promise, or recognize that, in light of this sort of circumstance, perhaps a new paradigm is in order going forward.

"

Bex_GGG wrote:

Since the announcement, we have had many discussions about what went wrong for us internally and how we can do better going forward.

Hopefully this was more than just a superficial discussion. There's a lot of things at work here, and even from the outside, I know there's three critical questions that absolutely need to be addressed if the company is to have any realistic hope of improving upon the situation that led to this:

• Does the company need to substantially change the way they handle game testing? Currently, it's pretty well-circulated that testing (both for balance and bugs) in Path of Exile is incredibly reliant upon software: software performs consistency checks to see if a patch will break anything, and balance is primarily handled through complicated formulae. The former already has a flaw in that it's not so great at figuring out a balanced spot for entirely new elements, as this proved.
  
  Given how huge the balance changes have been after every league, (and even when they manage to miss a lot of glaring things, requiring repeat nerfs to the same element two or more leagues in a row) it's pretty solid evidence that most of the game's true feedback on any prospective balance act only comes well after it goes live... Which can result in situations like this.
  
  While the answer to the big question here is all but certain a "yes," and this means that a lot more "human testing" would be required, the exact way to acquire this could be up in the air. GGG has two strong resources on hand: a very strong income stream with very low maintenance overhead, and an almost rabid fanbase.
  
  The former could be tapped into to either pay for professional testing (either hiring dozens of dedicated full-time testers, or outsourcing to another company) while the latter could be tapped into to operate a "Beta server" very much like what was done for 2.0.0 (in 2015) and 3.0.0, (in 2017) but just repeated for every single major patch.
  
  Each has its pros and cons: the former would be pretty expensive, but give GGG incredible control over the what happens and what gets revealed. The latter would offer tremendously more hours of eyeball exposure, and would likely pay for itself. (due to it adding value to supporter packs)
  
  
• Is "no mid-league balance changes" even sustainable? I've already touched upon how large the balance swings are with each major league. Complaints from players on that alone have gotten pretty severe: a lot of players talk about their dislike of expecting any good build they get to be nerfed into uselessness once the league ends.
  
  It's resulted in a very chaotic meta, with tectonic-level shifts nearly every single league, and rarely any "safe" builds anymore. Many players have outright accused GGG of even ceasing to care much about meta balance, instead just intentionally making one type of build wildly overpowered one league, before intentionally forcing a meta shift to something entirely different the next league. (e.g, the shift from Winter Orb in Synthesis, to Cyclone in Legion, to summoners in Blight was pretty staggering; giving us some of the worst build diversity ever)
  
  This makes it an open question whether having a new league, with exactly one balance act, every 91 days is a good idea. There's a lot of alternatives.
  
  Perhaps one solid "compromise" with the extant "no in-league balance changes!" would be to instead add 2 mid-season balance passes: one about 28 days in, and the second 57 days in. (the last around the time when GGG used to start a 30-day race in older leagues) This way, players can act confident knowing that they won't see a nerf for the first four weeks.
  
  As we've seen before, PLENTY of players can assemble and finish a complete build in just a couple of weeks, so it offers plenty of time to make something and get good use out of it. Secondly, with three times the balance passes, this means any nerfs would likely be SMALLER, since there'd be no concern of it being "too weak," since GGG could simply make a second pass later in the league. This would sort of take a page from competitive games like League of Legends: they perform balance passes every two weeks, in the middle of PvP seasons, but do freeze them once it reaches the end, so that the final tournaments are made with the exact same balance status.
  
  
• Is the current paradigm of "a new expansion-tier update every 91 days" even the best idea anymore? This is kind of a follow-up to the question above. It's already pretty clear that only one "over-correcting" balance patch every 91 days isn't cutting it, but it also brings examination of the release of leagues into this light as well.
  
  Virtually every long-time player here has become aware of a basic fact of life in PoE that all of GGG are aware of: the release of a new league brings a HUGE surge of new players, that then rapidly diminishes, resulting in only a fraction of the level of activity for most of the league's duration that was seen during the first couple weekends.
  
  At the same time, leagues in Path of Exile have gotten increasingly more complex and detailed; it was with Delve league that GGG decided to simply start calling each an "expansion," to reflect the sheer amount of new content each brought on board. Indeed, the average new league brings more new stuff to the table than the first expansion, "Sacrifice of the Vaal" did.
  
  When it's clear that most of a period a league is "dead," it begs a question of whether waiting on a 91-day interval for any new-planned content, as with balance, is a good idea. And for that matter, given how many issues crop up, it's questionable if this much effort on this cycle is the ideal choice, and not simply over-working the staff to yield a product worse than what they could otherwise make.
  
  This becomes relevant in light of realizing that Purposeful Harbinger was part of the new expansion's most important addition to character builds, (cluster jewels) and this constant torrent of not just new content, but new dimensional content. This is stuff that adds an entirely new dimension/direction to gameplay and character building, as cluster jewels have, and catalysts, anointments, a fifth map device slot, etc. have beforehand. Every single league now brings not just "new things to do," but has major bearing on how players play the game, and this has been the case since 3.1.0/Abyss league (and War for the Atlas) came out, and has not let up since.
  
  It's quite plausible that a better alternative might be a pacing similar to what was had in prior years for Path of Exile: after all, in spite of Legacy League offering exactly zero new "expansive"/"dimensional" content, saw a tremendous spike in player activity upon launch.
  
  This suggests that perhaps GGG might even consider transitioning away from the "3-month league" cycle entirely: the same (or better!) player attraction & retention might be acquired by having fewer "expansions" a year, and instead more frequent leagues (or races) relying more on recycled content. Not even a full-blown modernized "legacy" league; one could even just recycle a previous league's content without adding any new mechanics.
  
  The benefit of such a schedule would be threefold: first, it'd likely result in an increase in player activity, as effectively every month would be "first month hype." (It'd also put a dent in the streamer meta of "play Path for the first two weeks then switch to a more consistent game") Secondly, as most of these "leagues" would in fact have no new content, this would dramatically reduce the workload on the development team. Third, because of the lack of new content, this would ease up the issues for balancing the game. In this scenario, "no mid-league nerfs" would be preserved, since each league would last just 30 days.

"

At minimum, when we were questioned about the build's ongoing potential we should have taken a pause to reflect as a team about this, rather than giving our default response of "no mid-league nerfs".

This. This right here is the only thing you guys should have done. If you guys had come out with all of the justification in making this mid-league fix, without having previously announced it was safe, the (deserved) outrage would be far less.

You gave people the green light. Even if the build was (it was) incredibly broken, you gave people the green light. At that point, if you discover anything else wrong with it, you push the fix to the next league.

I had no intention of ever playing the build. This didn't affect my league or my investments at all. This blunder though has without a doubt reduced my willingness to continue throwing money at you guys, and I imagine a lot of other people share that feeling as well.

Not only will this reduce the amount of money that people give to your company, it most certainly will reduce the amount of time people spend theorycrafting builds and finding new and interesting ways to make items interact with systems. This will bring fewer people back for future leagues. This decision will hurt future retention and will overall harm PoE's longevity. That is a SAD thing. I'll always love you guys and your work but this is a major OOF.

tl/dr: Green light was given. Should have pushed to next league. RIP your wallets.