The largest problem facing current PoE is the 3 month cycle and lack of testing

And when I say testing I mean everything that goes into launching a product at a company - from the 21+ strong QA team GGG allegedly have to the 'runway' of time for devs to get the testing feedback and adjust, to the dev team itself responsible for shifting gears - that's all part of 'testing'. And so when I say something 'wasn't tested' I'm not in a position to say which part of this process carries the blame. It's probably the case that everyone who works at GGG is quite competent, but they don't have time to do their jobs given the 3 month timeline.

I've played every league on launch day (if GGG's servers allowed it) and I rate Lake of Kalandra as the 3rd worst ever behind Bestiary and Ascendancy. There is no excuse for a modern league to be making it into a bottom 3 list - the team is too talented and GGG have learned too much over the years, but here we are.

It's the Economy, stupid

The Exalted/Divine change was not thought out well enough, Divine supply/demand side economics were adjusted too aggressively and needlessly simultaneously, and, as will become a theme in this post, was not tested. Equally concerning - it also wasn't announced, but Chris has already mea culpa'd that - no need to prattle on there.

This lack of testing resulted in GGG jerking the droprates around multiple times in the first week of the league. We're buffing Harvest, we're buffing white mobs, we're reducing quant, we're adding rarity, on and on and on. This greatly diminishes my league start enjoyment. I like following along with 'spoiler season' and developing a plan, both a build and a farming strat. It's always been 'adapt or die' around here, but I'd like to adapt to one set of changes per 3 months, not per 3 hours.

One of the things I liked about the exalt based economy was the emergent ability to slowly progress towards a full exalt in steps. Players made exalt div cards, GGG began rewarding stacked decks and exalt shards...the net result was a consistency of progress wherein, even when you didn't get a jackpot drop during a play session, you probably moved towards completing a full exalt. We don't have anything of the sort for Divine Orbs and it feels bad. It feels double plus bad when they take divine drops away from regular mobs and tuck them in the loot goblin pouch of the god-molested 4 prop rares that you can only find in high red maps. Very very bad indeed.

On top of all this there was some kind of hack going on letting unscrupulous players find these jackpot mobs within seconds. No one in any genre of game wants to play side by side with cheaters. I know it's a never ending fight, but it looks like the bad guys won early in this league. Crazy thing is Chris said they were aware of this possibility and took steps to prevent it - which again suggests to me a problem that could have been solved with more testing time.

Lake League

Concept is great, it's fun to ponder where to put tiles, fun to construct the path, fun to use the 3 bonus shaping instruments. The player agency involved truly makes the player feel smart for building a clever layout. Then said player gets to distance 12 in their layout, opens the chest, and gets nothing - because the league rewards weren't tested - the player doesn't feel so smart then.

I saved up 46/50 tablets to run post-buff, because it was obvious very early they would be buffed. I ran them yesterday and was still quite underwhelmed. I had a tablet (or multiple) at almost every area level from 68-83. Rewards didn't start to get decent until T8, 9, 10 map equivalent. The rewards are out of balance with the difficulty and time it takes. I remember being first in line to say they overbuffed Synthesis...I remember getting a full breachstone as a reward and thinking the 'reward creep' of our leagues was insane. I'm glad it's reigned in - but in the current Atlas Passive Skill Tree iteration of PoE, I have to compare what's coming out of Lake chests to the rest of the game, and it was pretty pathetic on launch.

This should have been an easy catch - its a simple league. Not a ton of lore or npcs or voice lines. Nothing like Heist introducing 800 skill gems and 200 uniques or whatever. How did a league this 'simple' not get nailed in all aspects? Where is the imagination and creativity? This league should have so many fun little details and quirks, but for some reason, the same team that gave us recombinators and 40c-reward-per-use Sentinels now give us this?

Shrine effects in the Lake should be permanent. Mirrored jewelry props both positive and negative should be doubled in Lake zones. Breach should count how many mobs + rares you kill and spawn an ever growing single grasping hand chest in the middle that can drop Breach Scarabs, splinters, maybe even a small chance at a full grasping mail at higher tiers. Strongboxes, instead of being 'rewarded' with 5 armorers/regular/blacksmith boxes with the classic 1-6 properties could combine into 2 giga strongboxes with 6-15 mods. The possibilities were endless. The Lake is a self contained area, why not have some fun with it?

Speaking of questions, why is the Lake so much harder than the core game? It's a challenge league, I get it. It's a new, more difficult challenge (with new and more powerful rewards!! ahem). Chris put it in his philosophy post about leagues being 2x more difficult...that's like 8 tiers of map more difficult. I don't think that's a reasonable balance. And tablets weight their iLvl UP not DOWN, so if you want to make a lake you can run you have to spam maps that are too easy for you just to not get butchered starting at distance 7+. Making this harder is that if you stop to do just one map for 'progression' at, say, T13...the WHOLE tablet you're working on becomes T13. This was very frustrating. If content is going to stay 2x as hard you should let us run 10 T14 maps, then 1 T1 or T5 to bring the content down, not force it up.

More questions: what's with the Lake tileset? It's like it was designed to punish short range movement skills like frostblink and dash, and designed to slow down melee characters while things like Tornado Shot and Eye of Winter mines get to spam safely from a distance. My cyclone and frostblink are constantly catching on terrain, or going on c/d without moving me because of weird terrain gen.

General Game Balance

I've felt since the post Ritual Harvest nerfs that old league content has been pretty balanced. Some things were still better than others, but if you loved a mechanic you could spam it and not feel awful about not playing 'the mathematically correct' end game strategy. I'm not even going to talk about skills - just the stuff on the Atlas Passive tree got released so untested it's wild.

We were told to get our magic find characters ready only to have their quant stealth nerfed. Every league mechanic I planned on speccing into was stealth nerfed or bugged. I was so optimistic about the Harvest rework - as a design and concept I believe its finally in a perfect spot (even if the current cast of crafts on the bench aren't what I'd choose to keep on there). Then I didn't find one in 48 maps. Then I heard about how little essence was dropping. Then I blocked it from spawning on my maps before ever finding one. RIP.

I was also optimistic about Essences. Then we found out how it plays with Archnemisis. RIP.

I was also optimistic about Beyond. I rushed to these points on the tree. Then we found out the node to spawn it with a 10% chance was bugged (Scent of Blood). I still don't think they realize that the node that makes rare beyond demons drop a basic currency item is bugged (Fiendish Opulence). It's probably a case like the Arcanist strongbox where my rare beyond demons roll 'chromatic orb' as their basic drop, then the larger loot drop rules take over and say 'don't drop that, save it for a bigger stack', but who knows? Testers would if they had the time, probably. Also the mobs drop next to nothing (better after patch) and Tainted Currency was overnefed (allegedly getting buffed/reviewed). RIP.

Metamorph is bugged too. Multiple times this league it has ignored the organ I selected and picked a different one. I can see this because when I go to make my second metamorph, the option I chose the first time is still available to be selected and a different one is greyed out. It doesn't happen every time but it has happened more than once. RIP.

These Atlas specialty bugs and over-nerfed state of mechanics have all sapped the fun out of my league start. The economy and item drop roller coaster has my head spinning. If the Lake was fun and rewarding I'd probably cope with the first two and focus on the new fun stuff. But the new stuff is just the atlas but worse. Harder to navigate. Hard to taper to the difficulty level I'm seeking. Less rewarding than spamming T1 white maps.

I probably won't play this weekend. Might come back with fresh eyes later, might not. I'm back on the forums after a very long hiatus because in all the 'noise' this league, I think GGG needs to hear this from a player of my experience (both game and life, one of the hats I wear at my job is QA). Test your game. Test it. Whatever it takes. All these problems are minimized with testing. If you love your team, give them more time. If your team isn't getting the job done, start a Public or Private test realm. I know you want your big reveals and your secrecy and hype, but releases like this do lasting damage to your brand. It erodes trust. It mutes happiness. I can only speak for myself, but if I'm not happily playing your game, then I'm also not spending money on it.

People who know nothing about games, data, and statistics have thrown around retention charts for years. This is the twice-per-day that the stopped clock 'sky is falling' crowd has the correct time of day. This may be the first time I've ever found agreement with the reddit - now that's how you know things have gone pear shaped. Players know its been a bad league launch. GGG know its been a bad league launch. You can't manifesto and communicate your way into a better league launch in November. You can exhaustively test your way there though. Whatever it takes, please.

Having played some more this week and seeing some more GGG posts, I feel more strongly than ever about testing and the 3 month schedule. Every change they will have made by this Friday (the 14 day mark) should have been caught and made before league launch.

Kudos for doing 6 patches and 9 official posts from Chris/Bex in as many days, but has the fire drill been worth it? Further kudos to Chris for running towards the fire and not away from it...as I saw introspectively posted on Reddit today: "I wouldn't want us as clients".

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I did a few more lakes, even found a divine in one - but I didn't feel rewarded...I felt like I finally won at the slot machine. First you have to 'win' the 1-in-7 roll to get a currency chest, then you have to win a 1-in-who-knows what to 'win' a rare drop, then you have to win the coin flip to have it be a divine.

I still believe the best route towards making the Lake feel good is continue chipping away at the dick-punchingly difficult tiles like Beyond, and buff the bad chests to be less bad (gem, weapon, armour). Throw some div cards and uniques into their loot tables and rewards will feel better, more consistent (in a league where map rewards have gone off the deep end of INconsistent), and at parity with time spent in maps.

Imo, every league you guys make from here on out should be competing for a spot in people's 'top 5 best leagues' list. Lake could have been there for some people with more time in the oven to cook.

Idk if you'd be interested but i've also made some threads about changing the 3 month cycle and how testing is done to not only help GGG but involve the community more in the process.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2656909

Considering PoE2 being developed alongside the game i kind of wish they had slowed down a while ago making the release cycle longer because it does feel like they have been forced to ship some content that was not ready and i also feel in part some of those leagues were not made core because they were not given more time.

It is what it is, I'd really like to see more of their work stay in the game going forward and anything that could improve the game and give the community more faith in GGG.

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SilentSymphony wrote:

Idk if you'd be interested but i've also made some threads about changing the 3 month cycle and how testing is done to not only help GGG but involve the community more in the process.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2656909

Considering PoE2 being developed alongside the game i kind of wish they had slowed down a while ago making the release cycle longer because it does feel like they have been forced to ship some content that was not ready and i also feel in part some of those leagues were not made core because they were not given more time.

It is what it is, I'd really like to see more of their work stay in the game going forward and anything that could improve the game and give the community more faith in GGG.

People have been railing against the 3 month cycle for quite a while. I always felt able and willing to adapt to release bugs and missteps; I'm not sure if my preferences have changed or if this is GGG releasing a league farther out-of-bounds than usual.