OH BOY, THE NERF HAMMER WILL COME HUGE

they want to explain changes on video... what is really hapenning: they will put tons of nerfs, but will talk round and round to make them look like buffs

like: oh we reduced the dmg on this but we increased the atk speed to compensate
(-50%dmg and +7%speed)

u guys pushign us to diablo 4/last epoch/lost ark more and more everytime...
u guys ballance arround the 1% and push down the rest without addressing the real problems, EVERY TIME

guys... not everybody is a streamer/no lifer that can play 10hours a day!
we just dont have that many hours to play the game!

can we have an enjoyable softcore? can we? let ruthless be for streamers/no lifers and let us softcore players enjoy a game where we dont have to play 10 hours a day to start having fun again

The concept doesn't even make sense regardless what they plan to do.

A "Balance Manifesto" aka explaining your changes to players is factually good for your game.
Good patch notes do both at the same time and doesn't need to be a separate thing.

What's worse is going 100% radio silent only 10 days into a league like this one.
We're talking about communication right? Every notable problem gets no response at all.

i'm expecting so many nerfs...

"

Xzorn wrote:

The concept doesn't even make sense regardless what they plan to do.

A "Balance Manifesto" aka explaining your changes to players is factually good for your game.
Good patch notes do both at the same time and doesn't need to be a separate thing.

What's worse is going 100% radio silent only 10 days into a league like this one.
We're talking about communication right? Every notable problem gets no response at all.

True enough, but I kinda get where they're coming from, the past few manifestos have been a shit slinging contest. They didn't accomplish their main goal of making players less angry about the changes you're doing in the slightest.

So, it's one of two things, either they really aren't doing much that would make players unhappy, or they are and have judged that a manifesto will do more harm than good. It's kinda like a prayer for the dead, if they were decent people they don't need one, and if they weren't then prayers won't help.

"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied"

- James Hacker

:-p

"

raics wrote:

"

Xzorn wrote:

The concept doesn't even make sense regardless what they plan to do.

A "Balance Manifesto" aka explaining your changes to players is factually good for your game.
Good patch notes do both at the same time and doesn't need to be a separate thing.

What's worse is going 100% radio silent only 10 days into a league like this one.
We're talking about communication right? Every notable problem gets no response at all.

True enough, but I kinda get where they're coming from, the past few manifestos have been a shit slinging contest. They didn't accomplish their main goal of making players less angry about the changes you're doing in the slightest.

So, it's one of two things, either they really aren't doing much that would make players unhappy, or they are and have judged that a manifesto will do more harm than good. It's kinda like a prayer for the dead, if they were decent people they don't need one, and if they weren't then prayers won't help.

While it is true that negative feedback is not always adequate and argumented and containts actual suggestions on what they should have done instead, but community reaction to manifestos is merely symptom, not a problem. Problem is how GGG handles balance, regardless of amount or quality of feedback.

For example: poison SRS did really well in this patch, enough to be considered busted OP. But something tells me that instead of surgically fixing that specific synergy, GGG is going to nuke whole poison archetype, so my elementalist poison golemancer will be put into the ground, even though it was never OP to begin with. I don't have sheer minion numbers of SRS nor their attack speed, but my investments might well be sent down the drain... again. And with no other reason than "we just want you to start from nothing again".

This has happened in the past, and this approach is bound to trigger mass negative feedback, they know it, and have no intention of changing their ways in the slightest.

"

Echothesis wrote:

While it is true that negative feedback is not always adequate and argumented and containts actual suggestions on what they should have done instead, but community reaction to manifestos is merely symptom, not a problem. Problem is how GGG handles balance, regardless of amount or quality of feedback.

... But something tells me that instead of surgically fixing that specific synergy, GGG is going to nuke whole poison archetype...

Id argue the problem is the massive gap between what players expect GGG to do and what they can do given their schedule while also generating profit.

Surgically fixing this one synergy is going to have some sort of impact on other parts of the game no matter what, which then also need to be fixed surgically and those fixes will impact something else, creating a cascading and never ending wave of issues that need to be addressed surgically.

Even IF they ever achieved "surgical" precision balancing across the board, it would only mean they cant introduce anything new anymore because it would disrupt or destroy the delicate balancing.
It would essentially render their business model unsustainable, why would they even want that to begin with?


Im not saying they cant do a better job.
But the term "surgically" is laughable given the context. Thats never going to happen and everyone expecting "surgical" solutions will always be disappointed.

Okay, let me suggest surgical solution for poison minions:

1) add cooldown to withering touch support applied by minions, e.g. if a stack of withering arrives, and its creator is minion, it can only be applied if more than 0.5 sec has passed since last application of withering from minion (any minion). If withering stack was created by player, apply normally.

If you think this is too hard to implement, it is not. Even amateur combat framework I've built for myself in another Arpg allows to do such things easily.

2) poison stack cap (or lack thereof) was always an elephant in the room. Like wither, it was (supposedly) intended for gradual application, not for reaching the DoT 35M cap in a few seconds. They could make it so each minion could apply only a limited amount of poisons to the same target, and this amount would be lower for minions that can be summoned en masse, like skeletons or SRS, and higher for spectres, golems, and maybe zombies, since they don't have busted Vaal army summon version.

For players, it can be left with same unknown huge limit as it is.

Cool.

You just buffed poison blade trap, which is already a strong contender and fixed nothing.
As usual, players will abandon whatever got nerfed too harshly in their opinion and flock to the next best thing.
Could be traps or totems or whatever else allows them to stack poison through the roof in no time.

Now what? Surgically balance all phys based trap and totem skills or just nerf poison?
What happens if you did that? Player will flock to the next best thing, whatever that might be.
And on and on it goes.


Thats is PoE in a nutshell.
Its always been like that and your solutions doesnt change that nor does it fix anything - it simply moves the goalpost and thats it.

I am aware of traps and totems, played them too. And didn't mention it here for the sake of not writing a wall of text. And as usual, people latch at the opportunity to say this devalues the whole idea, and thus there is nothing to discuss.

Posion stacking problem is a subset of general damage scaling from proxies problem. And yes, all kinds of proxies players can create need similar kind of treatment, if we choose to allow transferring any self-cast skills to them. Yes, iterating all combinations of traps it a hefty amount of work, but my point was, each and every of these cases can be solved "surgically".

If GGG has decided to create an uncontrollably wild scaling system, and then don't bother with doing precision taming of this system in favor of edits that are simpler and quicker to put together, then it is not surprising their efforts cause massive negative feedback regulary. And now they've decided to "solve" it by reducing communication even further and pretending problems do not exist.

You are right that people will always found the most optimized build in this pile, but a job of designer it to make sure that this "most optimized" was like 10% - 20% stronger than the next, not 10 times stronger at it is here now. In short, if they went and created this mess, imo it is fair to charge them with responsibility to go to any lengths necessary for the fixes, not just choose simple nuke solutions.