GGG's Lead Developer addresses the PoE community about the latest league.

"

innervation wrote:

To get to Charan's post, I think it's fair to say that GGG may no longer have a healthy relationship with Reddit. I think they are posting there less, and will continue to post less for reasons that should be clear if you took the time to read my short novel. The state of the subreddit is quite hostile at this point, in some ways justified, others not. Adding evidence to my prediction is that Bex said on twitter they may not do spoilers for the December league. I imagine they're tired of the community holding them to 100% delivery of stuff that's still in alpha testing (again you can quibble about who's fault this is, GGG for the 13 month cycle and needing to hype players to return, or the playerbase for being drooling idiots).

And I don't know to what extent their Reddit game is honed anymore. Maybe disengaging from vitriol is evidence in and of itself that their game is as sharp as ever.

The reddit got so toxic that the mods had to crackdown on the vitriol. Think about that. And now you see passive-aggressive posts there echoing the Bex scenario I talked about earlier where the Reddit community is the real victim, the subreddit has never been toxic, and the real toxicity is how greedy GGG constantly slaps the playerbase in the face.

Fair enough. I only ever really skim it, so I cede to your superior knowledge on the matter! :)

I am not all that surprised when you lay it out, however: NZ's Covid approach has been rather absolute compared to a lot of other countries, Bex went away (how dare she!), etc etc. These things add up. Were I to truly want to be in the know I could be, without too much effort, but I've not so much burned that bridge as simply crossed it and moved on. I assume it's still there, but I won't check. It serves a function I no longer need or want.

I also agree that the reddit game is much more than knowing what to say, it's knowing when to say it and what not to say. I'm genuinely sad that the fickle hivemind turned on Bex, she's done so much hard work for that community, but I won't pretend we haven't done the same here. I was a CM for a game in development once. I lasted like two months. Had some interesting experiences (arranging a virtual interview with a now fairly famous game/anime composer was great), but for me it was far too much of a glance behind the curtain. You are essentially spanning two very incompatible worldviews, almost like translating from the cold, hard numbers of business and production to the fluffy uptalk of passion and we'll-get-right-on-that. Fuck that noise.

So there is some reparation required. Hm. Well, as Schagsbird said, these are grim times. Afloat is almost the best you can hope for when so many are just flat-out sinking. I don't think we ever expected that of TencentGGG, but I think you'd have to be a fool to expect the usual level of quality from *any* service right now. There are, of course, limits and standards:

https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/travel-stories/virgin-australia-business-class-passenger-slams-2minute-noodle-lunch/news-story/c0bc2323b7d00e24ad5ce5472df9d674

When you pay $2500 for a domestic flight and this is what you get fed, you've probably some right to complain! :)

But that's just a fun digression. Point being, plenty of companies are taking all sorts of creative and certainly desperate measures to stay out of the drink. I am not saying that's a perfect, bottom-line excuse, only something to very much keep in mind. I DO think PoE's quality was sliding well before 2020, and I DO think TencentGGG considered that an acceptable factor. This isn't sudden. But 2020 certainly exacerbated it. Which, to me, is the real point: when GGG made that deal with Tencent, whatever the conditions, it wasn't taking what 2020 would bring into account. How could it? But that does tell us that it was probably a 'best case scenario' decision. 'As long as things stay the way they are, we will be fine' -- not exactly the most reassuring of sentiments...and yet a perfectly understandable choice when you consider what GGG got out of the deal: the security of being buoyed by a truly international behemoth; all of its private investments paid off and paid out in ways most investors dream about; and, most importantly, sanctioned penetration of the Chinese domestic market, which is sort of like the end of the rainbow for foreign game developers and publishers.

Anyway, thanks for the detailed analysis and breakdown. I'll refrain from commenting on TencentGGG's reddit game from now on.

Nice post Innervation. I never go to Reddit so I've missed the fun. 13 week cycles are bitch, but that is what GGG wants top do. Oh well. I tend to think angry mobs mostly get things wrong. Unbridled passion has a place but its not on a gaming forum or Reddit. this league is OK and better than Harvest.

As a follow up and in retrospect I could be wrong on whether or not Reddit is 'turning' against GGG. It's hard to tell with all the complicating factors. I don't read every post and every response. I don't know what gets downvoted to the bottom of a thread. I don't see 99.9% of the posts removed by mods. I'm not there all season long - usually just for spoiler season but I've been bored lately. I also wasn't on the PoE subreddit before idk...Legion league maybe?

The first Bex post I spoilered here had 0 points at the time of my posting, the second was +500 or something. One need not look too far to find people with a kind word to say about Bex.

And who knows, perhaps next league GGG pump out something that is significantly less buggy and has a mechanic more uniformly praised than the last two fairly divisive leagues. If that happens maybe things look a lot sunnier both here and in Redditlandia.

But I can compare things to Harvest. Reddit was a shitshow on Harvest release until all the die-hard haters quit the league. Then things turned pretty damn positive as those who remained loved what was left. That is a cycle that makes sense to me. Bugs get catalogued, tensions are high. Not every league will suit everyone, and the haters will make noise on their way out leaving only the happy remainder.

Well...we're still waiting for a vocal 'happy remainder' to manifest during Heist league and take over the front page of Reddit. That I can tell you.

"

But I can compare things to Harvest. Reddit was a shitshow on Harvest release until all the die-hard haters quit the league. Then things turned pretty damn positive as those who remained loved what was left.

If that is true then that is a difference between here and Reddit, it seemed like a good half of the people commenting about Harvest on this forum had no challenges and there was far more hate overall during the entire 3 month league cycle.

Also, I feel bad for GGG. Chris himself said in a video somewhere that the team was far more passionate about working on Heist and they had to begrudgingly work on Harvest, but Harvest ended up being the one that has a cult following due to how game changing it actually was. I just don't see Heist which lives and dies by just being a reward dispenser having the same appeal. Still, I will be sad if yet ANOTHER pseudo-mapping league mechanic gets removed from the core game and we have to wait another good 2 years before GGG becomes brave enough to attempt one again. I kind of want Heist to succeed to an extent so that GGG will try to do something conceptually better than it.

At this point it might be fruitful to look at the past leagues and note which were crowd-pleasers and which were more ambitious, thematically-rich experiments.

I think you might see a pattern.

Heist, insofar as it competes for limited league playtime against atlas completion, misses the mark for a lot of players. Harvest was also in this category of taking chunks of time away from mapping, although better integrated into actual maps.

Perhaps it's time for ambitious side activities and story arcs like Heist to grant xp and a road to 100 comparable, or even favourable, to mapping. If the goal is to test and sample all the league content, perhaps that league content should provide many of the same benefits as conventional atlas completion.

There will still be people *coughBooRuskycough* who go off and do what they always do every league, be it deepdelving or "Oops, all Syndicate!" or simulacrum rotas, and these are more or less seamlessly integrated into mapping. (Less, in the case of delving you're really only bothering with the atlas as a source of yellowcake)

As such, at least during league, Heist should be self-sustaining and capable of providing players with everything they could get out of choosing mapping instead (which GGG should hope they don't do). And not only at the highest levels of heists/blueprints, but at every step. (Remember when GGG said league-specific content would, and should, be its own best resource? How we were supposed to get loads more breach splinters from actual breaches than from say, legion eggs or temple rooms or deli orbs. That.)

what they need to do with the sub reddit is stamp on them, they cede too much of the idea of control with frankly dumb statements like we won't nerf things mid league. And I say the idea because they don't actually have any lol.

All that does is create a fulcrum for morons to attempt to use against them when they actually need to change something, why would you offer that it isn't even true they would change shit mid league if they really felt the need to anyway.

Its just a poor choice of what to say and what do they gain by it? They appease the 3 players who play extreme power builds, reach content very quickly yet are incapable of making rational decisions about whether an interaction is broken or not (except they know, they just pretend they don't).

That is the internet equivalent of handing an open trap to somebody you know has a habit of trapping you, why bother.

Simultaneously while reddit is absolutely awash with morons frothing at the mouth there are legitimate complaints that GGG need to address themselves because if nothing else it hurts their bottom line. They just need to do so without behaving like its a response to some tantrum thrown over there, stick to the rational posts with rational answers and ignore all the rest.

Asking for a statement about this league is dumb for example, doesn't actually deserve a response I can write their answer already.

Covid
Ambitious league in both scope and resources
Have to make Christmas release and already delayed 1 week
Very sorry we'll do better (but probably not because its the price for 3 month releases)

Done

"

VolcanoElixir wrote:

Also, I feel bad for GGG. Chris himself said in a video somewhere that the team was far more passionate about working on Heist and they had to begrudgingly work on Harvest, but Harvest ended up being the one that has a cult following due to how game changing it actually was. I just don't see Heist which lives and dies by just being a reward dispenser having the same appeal. Still, I will be sad if yet ANOTHER pseudo-mapping league mechanic gets removed from the core game and we have to wait another good 2 years before GGG becomes brave enough to attempt one again. I kind of want Heist to succeed to an extent so that GGG will try to do something conceptually better than it.

I can easily understand that the development process of Heist created a larger, internal spark. The character designs, voice acting, 'thematics', character interactions and all of the minor story arcs are all interesting - for players and developers that care for stuff like that.

Sadly (or "naturally"?), a lot of players, especially players within this genre, do not care about that stuff. So when we remove the characters, character interactions, the stories, the new progression system that became more or less useless when the community 'demanded' the alert system to be redesigned, what is actually left in heist - between all the bugs? Short 'maps', more micro management and more pauses between action; all of them 'triggers' of frustration for many players.

I still like Heist for what it is, because I value the whole game, and not just the grind, the speed and the market. I want more reasons/chances to interact with the game, not less. So I enjoyed Harvest and I enjoy Heist. Now, I'm probably a soon-to-be-extinct breed, especially in the Hack'n Slash sub-genre, and I'm close to accepting that.

Anyhow, I have this rule I live by. While feedback and critique are important in many aspects of life, cruelty is not. Cruelty is as useful as an asshole on your elbow. And if people can't critique something, or give feedback on something without being directly or indirectly cruel, the biggest problem will always be them; not what/who they are criticising (unless what/who they are criticising is cruel too). And you can say what you want about GGG and their products, quality and traits, but 'cruelty' is not one of them.

I dont like this argument but i need to say it - im playing poe since beta. I can say that im getting older with it :).

Truth be told, its not the same game which was launched by few dudes with great ideas. From growing, somewhat big and now world wide recognized company i d expect better QC/QA and most importantly few steps plan concerning their own product. To me its hardly possible and i don't believe that ggg hired some dimwits who cannot even predict what kind of outcome some obvious decisions may have (example: smuggler cache rarity and markers quantity). Whats wrong then?
Its not that game is getting worse and worse, i know many d argue about that, but our (mine too) expectations are just great and increase over time. Why anybody should be surprised that players rage so much? Whining will always happen im whining a lot too, but nothing is going to change the fact that players have more and more doubts about their beloved game (me too) and have very valid reasons to do so. Currently if nothing good happens - if next league or two wont be stable, first arpg which is going to be decent will make poe deserted.

Lastly, why customer should ever give a shit about poor quality of the product in a way of pure compassion? To most of people (i guess) its fairly simple, if product wont meet your expectations you ll do what - pat producer on head and say im sorry that i whine or throw it in the face wanting yr money back? Think about it :).

BR
KingGreg

My anonymous opinion:

Everyone loves, both developers and players, loot 'splosions and crafting leagues. Any League that has connstant loot 'splosions or a crafting league will be popular no matter how buggy it is to start with.

Any league that is not a loot 'splosion and doesn't have crafting advantages will not be popular.

And... most, if not all, leagues have some kind of loot 'splosion or crafting opportunities. It's the ones that have the most of both that are the most loved. If one has significant amounts of one or the other (or both) the next League will "suck" if it falls short of either by comparison.


The developers have structured their development cycle and development allocation (teams) in such a way, with four "content added" Leagues a year, that there is very little opportunity for anything BUT negative feedback.

By the time a League is bug-hunted and polished, it's either a week or two until the next League or already halfway through the next League and the dev teams are once again faced with another round of hate mail. Eventually, they're going to see little possibility of positive feedback throughout their entire life-cycle working at GGG as a content developer simply because of the dev cycle and the natural debugging, optimization, and play-balancing GGG has to do for weeks for every single League.


PS: I also have no idea at all if there is any sort of engaging "story" behind any particular League. I guess the last one I paid attention to was... uh... none? That has an effect on traditional "ARPG" fans by limiting opportunities for engagement. Some interesting "story focused" League content with a few innovative mechanics might be refreshing... with loot 'splosions and crafting!