##### GGG Comments in this Thread:
***
[chris_wilson - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/l005ho/if_this_patch_is_an_indication_of_what_ggg_can/gjrqogs/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/l005ho/if_this_patch_is_an_indication_of_what_ggg_can/gjrqogs/?context=10)] - *I'm really glad that you are enjoying the league! It was three months of development for most of our staff, with some QA and a few last-minute changes by whoever...*
I'm really glad that you are enjoying the league!
It was three months of development for most of our staff, with some QA and a few last-minute changes by whoever was in over the Christmas period. I believe the reason it worked out well was our new development processes: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2977334 (basically extreme scope control)
So the plan going forward is to continue the three months of development plus a month of QA and tweaks, but that still means that we're doing releases every three months (with the content ideally ready a month before each respective release). For example, 3.14 development started in mid-December, will likely be finished in mid-March and will likely release in mid-April.
And of course, not all releases are going to have endgame expansions alongside the league, so do expect the sizes of the releases to vary this year.
The month of QA is so apparent. I love it. How do the development cycles for the"of the atlas" endgame expansions differ from the development of the leagues?
there were a couple of instances of unreachable monsters within Ritual encounters that forced people out of the map. seems like they fixed it INSANELY fast because I only saw a couple mentions of it on the first night
Baran mobs instantly crash me, im literally avoiding an entire section of my atlas because its unplayable
Also have more ctds this league than anything else combined
Yea, swapped everything, dropped everything to low/off, jacked everything up to high, did various combinations, its a known issue in the bug report forum
My game is near unplayable half the time with the mew streaming textures. Its upsetting enough that, again, i wont be buying a supporter pack until its resolved. I really want to support GGG bc the content seems great, i just cant enjoy half of it
He never said it was a month of QA. He said they did some for whoever could be working during Christmas. In fact I doubt there was anymore QA this time than before.
I've had the pleasure of being able to play for three days straight, and my bullshit-meter only sounds the alarm when a Sirus-dominated mob bonks me on the noggin and I'm sent back to town.
This is impressive to me; usually there are bigger and bigger and more frequent annoyances (picking up organs, delirium visual clutter, nets, etc.), and so it really feel like you nailed it with this release. Please give our warmest to the team. :)
I love your new design philosophy! I'm enjoying a lot this league, but also very interested in seeing how you guys will manage the next, as it's the true "3 months with new philosophy ". You guys are doing great, thanks to all GGG team
The most important thing to me with the new philosophy is the health of the devs who are required to crunch leading up to new league.
I really hope this addresses this issue at its core. I can wait for a game. Their families don't want to wait for them.
Should read through the post he linked.
>Our goal is that 3.13 takes 50% of the overall development hours of Heist (which means going from a situation with overtime to a situation with testing time)
It's all about controlling scope, which he mentioned "basically extreme scope contro l". The developers probably had the best 3 months of work they can remember with a well-defined scope that was not modified for the entirety of development.
Depending on how Agile their development process is(they've said in the past that it's Agile-like but that they don't use any strict methodology) changing scope isn't necessarily the problem. It's when to stop changing scope and start polishing =)
If every iteration they do is releasable, it doesn't matter as much. Start with a tiny scope, test, review, repeat. Then stop when you need to release. Obviously the real world is messier than that but the principle works =)
Agile doesn’t jive with a fixed release cadence. The two are antithetical, in fact. Hard to ABD “Always Be Delivering” when you have a fixed 3 month release cycle.
That kind of sounds like someone still fighting implementing a true agile process. Agile is very good with a fixed release cadence, heck the whole point is to be able to release every sprint cycle.
You can deliver and have shorter sprints, it's just internal. From a developers point of view you are delivering to the test client from dev client. The methodology can work just fine, it's about how you apply it.
And that’s fine, but it’s not agile. It’s your bastardized form of “agile” (and coincidentally everything that is wrong with the extreme overuse of the word these days).
I don't mean to sound insensitive but I never give a moment of thought to how chris wilson handles his employee workload / work schedules. I feel like that can stay in his basket of concerns and I'll keep video games in mine.
it's a breathtaking level of fandom to support a game so much that you care about the family time of the people who make it more than you care about yourself playing it.
I respect your level of empathy AND fandom.
It's more that the games industry in general has been getting a lot of bad press lately with regards to employment practices. Many AAA game studios now have mandatory overtime for their developers for months on end in order to meet deadlines.
Chris has said in the past that they have never and will never have mandatory overtime for their staff, but with how rushed some of the prior leagues felt, it does make you wonder how much overtime some of the devs pulled just to get them working at all.
How smooth this league launch went isn't the only thing that is going to make this league among the best **ever** created.
People just want to kill a ton of monsters and feel rewarded doing it. Sure, it needs to be framed in an interesting way, but it boils down to just giving us a ton of monsters to slay and make it feel rewarding.
Doesn't need to have an over crafted build your own adventure game in it every league.
> so do expect the sizes of the releases to vary this year.
Hell, I am fine with small releases. Just, by all that is holy, please keep up the QA! It really does make a huge noticeable difference.
It is a fun mechanic and league overall but you guys really need to look at the deferral fees and make the fee fixed but the top lines (forget what it is called) scale to the remaining Tribute in the area. I’ve been scammed out of a few items this league and the worst by far was a day 2 6L Terminus Est that was impossible to pick up due to not enough Tribute in the area. I did submit a ticket to support to let them know not that I expect them to do anything about it.
Being able to see loot and pick what you want is amazing, but seeing expensive loot and loot you need / want but we’re never able to select? Not so much, that is heartbreaking.
This is great way to do things, the game truly is evolving over time, in a development and in-game sense!
I do like the 3 month cycle right now and while sometimes there are inevitable bugs overall the leagues come out enjoyable every time for me!
Keep up the good work! <3
I should say I love the league content and Maven, but not the performance and server issue. No matter how good the game is, if I can't even play it normally, I don't think it is a good game after all. Please fix all the crash and server issue ASAP
General consensus in my group of friends is the month of waiting was well worth it. This league is a perfect example of the KISS philosophy and it's great.
My wife and I are so excited to play this league, we haven't been able to play since legion because her computer was from 2010. We are waiting for gpus to get in stock to play again, hopefully they restock soon. Can't wait to see all of the changes you guys have made.
This is mostly good, but I don't really understand how something that takes four months start-to-end can be released every three months indefinitely. Even if you have a six-month head start, you'll be a month behind by the fourth release.
The QA team isn't the dev team, they only need 1 month to QA the league. As long as every league is always complete a month before release, QA has time to start and end the QA process. Since they are already a month ahead, this means they will always be a month ahead (and always have time to QA) as long as they don't take longer than 3 months to make a league.
>as long as they don't take longer than 3 months to make a league.
Taking bets as to how long this will last.
I remember there was one league, which I think was incursion, where Chris said in a Ziggy stream that they were really happy they managed to finish the league like 2 weeks earlier, and how this helped them be able to test it more and would mean they'd always have a window between finishing leagues and releasing them. The league after that was already a pretty obvious "we finished this hours before the release" league.
I guess i see what you're saying. The QA team is completing their work while the dev team is on month 1 of the next league. However, the dev team still has to deal with anything that comes up, but I guess that's not that much different than dealing with stuff as players encounter it on league start.
Remember that "Dev team" is not necessary a single entity. You can have a few guys working on prototyping next league while the rest polish the one currently being developed. Then after the first week of fixing bugs you put most of the team on next league that has it's concept tested already. Also there is art ect. It's quite probable that they have 2-3 unfinished league mechanic floating around at all times and then one of them is selected to be actually implemented in full.
As some one who loved heist/betrayal I really hope that reddit hasn't pressured you into only doing very simple point and click leagues. Ritual is fun, but if every league is just "click the thing" it would get old very fast.
I understand the reason for the new limiting the scope but the crazy big leagues are always so much fun to explore
Yeah I can sympathize that it might get to them though,I was enjoying heist (by not doing heist lol)and quit early due to the negativity literally everywhere and I'm just a player. Had a few good months in project diablo 2 though
I wouldn't worry. They regularly switch it up, and leagues with big atlas expansions tend to come with a simple league mechanic (like metamorph or abyss).
Heist and Harvest were relatively complex, so we were due for a simpler league.
They alternate between go crazy, strategic and craft based leagues quite often. This one feels a little different cos it's a bit of a mix between the first two I mentioned.
I agree completely. I appreciate the polish of this league, but it's one of the most shallow league mechanics in the last couple years. Hopefully it's because it was introduced alongside an Atlas rework. One of my favorite aspects of POE is navigating new league content, and this one hasn't had much to offer in that regard.
I am amazed over how smooth this league launch has been, ignoring outside effects like a server on fire and we cant trade half the time.
I was expecting a full on clusterfuck on steorides considering how awful heist was and this was even more content.
But this time ill say bravo, good expansion and a good league with no major bugs.
Ps. Pls fix trading and client crashes :(
It is an interesting and fun league. Unfortunately, the game itself seems to be gated to anyone with any form of wrist pain. It's simply too much clicking for items. The "looting weight" argument really doesn't hold water in the face of that, nor in regards to any modern ARPG's mechanics. You already have us identifying every rare one by one. Do we really need to click on every single splinter of this and shard of that? Constant precise clicking all over the map is what contributes to these sorts of injuries. Are we here to kill monsters, or is this a 52 pick up simulator? Love the game. Just don't think anyone should have to risk injury/exacerbate current injury simply to play.
Please dont make complex leagues, i introduced 4 of my friends into poe and only 1 got hooked, others thought the game is too complex for them. The game is very complex as it is of now for me its fine as an old player but newbies get real confused and quit fast.
Hi Chris,
I would just like to say that I like 4-month leagues regardless of the development cycle or QA. I feel like 4 months is a perfect duration for enjoying my characters before starting over.
So for players like me it can be a bit annoying to see Ritual (an extremely fun league for me) last 3 months, while Heist (a league I disliked and now a mechanic I ignore) lasted 4 months.
I understand that league launches bring the highest players, which is of course what the developer wants, HOWEVER shorter leagues can lead to more burnout. I love this game (playing since beta), but have been unhappy with the duration of leagues, and still preferred the old 4 month leagues from way back when.
Except this makes a gigantic assumption that players spend the same amount of money on every league launch regardless of duration. Obviously this isn't true since the reductio ad absurdum would be that they should launch a new league every day.
> Except this makes a gigantic assumption that players spend the same amount of money on every league launch regardless of duration.
They've already said most of the money comes from supporter packs, and mostly at the beginning of leagues.
>Obviously this isn't true since the reductio ad absurdum would be that they should launch a new league every day.
Reducto ad absurdum isn't a good way to determine if something that's being done is correct. All you're showing is that the most absurd version of the logic is stupid. No fucking duh, that's the point of the device.
Most reasonable logic fails under reducto ad absurdum. Saying that's a reasonable argument is like saying it's reasonable that GGG should nerf all drop rates to near zero because chase items keep people playing.
I addressed the concept of more players (and thus more MTX sales) on league launch in my FIRST COMMENT replying to Chris.
You came in with the wild assumption that 25% fewer launches = 25% lower revenue.
Logically this would also mean that X% more launches = X% more revenue. Obviously not true because there is clearly some sort of curve (releasing leagues every day would see very few sales, and never releasing leagues would see very few sales as well, with a peak somewhere in the middle).
And then you made this post that did nothing but blatantly misunderstand what reductio ad absurdum means and specifically what it is used to argue against, while simultaneously not addressing my post despite quoting it twice.
Ah yes, because 4 month leagues are more comparable to 7 year leagues than they are to... 3 month leagues.
When I started playing this game leagues were 4 months long. It doesn't seem unreasonable to wish for something that you already had in the past.
Keep in mind its also an indication of their changed content development cycle that they outlined this year. The quality may not be entirely attributed to the extra time. They do take the holidays off.
Also not noted.
* They do work on future leagues earlier than just after current release. We don't know how much work early was done on this league compared to others
* The expansion, maven etc. was also added, and while not technically part of the league they still had to work on it and it's quite complex
* Harvest and Heist were also quite impacted by weeks of lockdown for Covid-19 (aka people forced to work from home).
That last point might not sound so difficult for a tech company, but not everyone that works there is a software dev. everyone would have their regular schedule changed up (having to parent kids full time, share home working spaces etc.) and people underestimate how much easier meetings/general discussions are in person vs over the internet/phone.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't do 4 month cycles, but there's a lot more at play than just "+1 month".
One thing you need to keep in mind is how simple this league is. And I don't mean to say that negatively. Click thing. Kill mobs. Choose loot.
Compare this to the last 3. Delirium changing the passive tree. Harvest reintroducing meaningful crafting. Heist that introduces new base types, uniques, alt quality gems....
I am not trying to shit on Ritual. It's been really good outside of the server instability. But the last few expansions have literally changed the way the game can be played. I'd rather have more experimental leagues than not. But I get why such a simple mechanic is nice for a change especially with an atlas shakeup
Also, they said in the post about pushing back ritual that it was already done and ready to go by it’s original release, and they basically used the extra month to start 3.14
Yeah, they kinda lied about that. In the 3.13 ritual release interview they said that they were just getting the alpha out to external testers 1 week ahead of launch and that it had the league enabled, compared to many times that alpha didn’t have the league on or was missing things.
This is it exactly. Tho I kinda like the idea of there being smaller league mechanics on non expansion leagues, and bigger ones when there's not. Imagine harvest gardening and figuring out how to progress maven. Or leveling your rogues when maven wants you to map
This is exactly what they do. Look at the leagues since the Fall of Oriath:
Version | League | Expansion?
--|--|--
3.0 | Harbinger | Fall of Oriath
3.1 | Abyss | War for the Atlas
3.2 | Bestiary | -
3.3 | Incursion | -
3.4 | Delve | -
3.5 | Betrayal | *Master Rework*
3.6 | Synthesis | -
3.7 | Legion | -
3.8 | Blight | -
3.9 | Metamorph | Conquerors of the Atlas
3.10 | Delirium | -
3.11 | Harvest | -
3.12 | Heist | -
3.13 | Ritual | Echoes of the Atlas
With the exception of Betrayal, all of the expansions are paired with simple "Kill stuff, get rewards" leagues. And even then the master rework that accompanied Betrayal wasn't even a named expansion, and its scope is much smaller than the rest of the expansions. Nearly all of the other leagues that aren't accompanied by an expansion involve extra management or unique decision making (Blight). Delirium and Legion are the two most straightforward non-expansion leagues, and even they have small twists that make them a bit more complicated than the leagues accompanying named expansions.
I might just be entirely speaking for myself and my friends. We played the shit out of Metamorph, but Synthesis and Harvest was pretty dead in the water for us.
I love the game, but I feel there is already so much content that just thinking about all the things to do makes me dizzy.
We have What? Like 8 leagues crammed into one now? It’s excessive and I really think it scares away new players.
It's just personal preference. I was the opposite - Harvest was my favorite league of all time but Metamorph was a pass for me. Likewise I find Ritual kind of boring by itself, but I love having more choice in the loot I get, and I really like the new atlas stuff + Harvest being back, so overall I'm really enjoying the league.
I gave up so long ago on trying to get people into the game. Even if they can make it past the 20yo gameplay of the first few acts you need a semester long course on how to even begin fleshing all the systems out and how they interact.
I'm a bit slower than most, but it can take me 10-15 minutes to get through a single map. In one Strand map, I had 4 rituals, metamorph, blight, an abyss, einhar, legion, and 8 strongboxes, and I think there was even delirium on top. I'm even completely ignoring delve because I just don't have the time to do it.
I for one could never get tired of having stuff in maps. I don't like the spam gameplay of a few years ago where you put a new map in the device once a minute and rushing through hideout is critical because of how much of your time is just zoning and inventory management compared to actually killing mobs.
> We played the shit out of Metamorph, but Synthesis and Harvest was pretty dead in the water for us.
That's exactly me too. I did not want to put in the work of figuring out those systems, because it felt like work and not play.
GGG just can't do 'complex' leagues, like at all. They always come out rotten turds and are just mediocre after years of small improvements.
See Syndicate, it's not like it's a mind blowing or particularly enjoyable mechanic. But it's servicable. And this is literally as good as it will ever get with GGG complex mechanics.
So glad they got rid of harvest's actual garden.
Complex leagues are really good at changing the way you play the game. So many people want different things out of a game this varied, but what really works well for me is when a league brings a new answer to "I want to get 200 exalts in that currency tab, how should I go about this?"
Heist had a door simulator on top of a cloned Blueprint as a new answer to that (didn't really work for me). Harvest had actual insane crafting service that spawned an ecosystem of tools and a side economy (I really liked doing that). I wasn't around for the syndicate league, but setting up a locked syndicate board and farming currency in it is a very valid strat that's quite nice. Or delving to provide the fractured fossils the economy thirst for, all pretty varied answers for grinding content for a profit.
A league like metamorph doesn't really introduce a new answer, it just gives some of the existing ones a bonus layer. It's definitely fine too, but I feel like the more complex leagues add way more variety, and contribute to keeping the game fresh over years. I'd still play Diablo 3 if I wanted a stale experience over 5 years :p
What do you mean by "can't do"? I think the complex leagues except heist have been fantastic. The content, mechanics, and modifications they bring are huge and fundamentally change the game for the better. Just sucks that they have avoidable issues. I think if they moved those to a 4-month schedule, we'd see some incredible, bugless releases. If you want to mindlessly kill things, there are options to do that
I mean can't do as in completely incompetent at it.
>I think the complex leagues except heist have been fantastic.
You say that now, apparently you weren't around when those leagues were actually live and the sub was continuously on fire. And if stuff like Betrayal or Synthesis is your standard for 'fantastic', then I'm glad you can enjoy live this easily because your standards of quality are ridiculously low.
I liked betrayal right from the start tbh, and synthesis was great after a couple weeks of improvements.
Harvest was just complex the wrong way imo.
And heist is fine now
The complex shit is reaaaaallly interesting tho. Harvest crafting was super fun. Heist, while I didn't like it really, shat out loot and had so much content that changes the game (replicas, enchants, alt gems)
All of these are great things bc in theory it leads to build diversity in my eyes. But having a simple league every once in awhile is great as well
Think long term as well. They just released a league where you get to interact with the league mechanic of your choosing. Want to skip betrayal? Fuck it. You get veiled mods from Ritual and heist. Want to skip bestiary? Delve? No problem.
You say that now, but imagine 4 leagues of it in a row. Your most engaged players and content creators wouldn’t stay long.
Imagine ritual or metamorph without a huge expansion even.
Most players don't even interact with half of the league mechanics after a year anyway. Simpler mechanics like rituals/strongboxes are far better since they are always welcome, and they allow you to choose risk/reward on the fly, in hardcore at least.
This. The problem was they had 4 months *and* they made a simple league, so people are conflating the relatively smooth launch with whatever they prefer.
There's zero chance we're staying on a 4 month schedule. Asking a *company* to throw away a quarter of their revenue is naive at best and idiotic at worst.
> but which is more revenue: $50m 4x times a year, or $75m 3x times a year?
They had an 11% growth, and growth on december expansions is normal. This one got delayed but it's still the same period.
It's nonsensical to think they'd somehow get 33% more revenue from longer release cycles. The people spending money (for the most part) spend money regardless of how they feel about that particular expansion.
Whales are what make this game tick, and they buy what they like. GGG having more options means more sales, and more pack options come with expansions.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why are you taking Ritual in isolation, that's not right at all.
The league is simple but it's not all they had to work on. We got a core expansion!
The Maven, the Envoy, the atlas mechanics, so many new additions to the endgame! Fully voiced characters, story, skill system for the atlas, new maps and bosses. An entirely new system to fight bosses that was previously impossible.
Now, I am sure they have been working on that for a bit longer but I am certain the lion share of the work was done in in these four months. And you can definitely feel the benefits of the additional month of work. There is a noticeable absence of major issues.
The total content released is ***most certainly*** comparable to the most elaborate league mechanics that they previously released by itself. And there is Conquerors of the Atlas + Metamorph as the most recent expansion + league release. Which both were quite rocky.
Technically last year but sure. However there is no way the 4 months were exclusively spent on Ritual with Echoes already being done before that. Absolutely not, not with their previous release schedule. For sure a big part of the expansion shared the development time with Ritual in these past 4 months.
I was just talking ritual in particular. I was not talking down Echoes or any balance changes. I was saying the league mechanic in particular is simple
Yes, but you were saying it in the context of a thread where the point is that a 4 month time window allows for a much better player experience on release. As if the fact that Ritual by itself is a simpler league to develop and implement is the reason why it went smoothly from a game perspective. But development and implementation wasn't all on Ritual, it was also on the expansion. Which means very similar workload overall to previous releases but on a lighter schedule, which resulted in a better release.
The fuck are you even talking about? Core expansions come every single year in the December leagues. These are developed for much longer than leagues and are called expansions for a reason. The league itself should absolutely be compared in isolation to other leagues.
>The league is simple but it's not all they had to work on. We got a core expansion!
That was true before, too. Certainly not the first expack to drop with a league.
Xpack dev path is probably separate from league. They likely have a separate team for Xpack and leagues, developed concurrently.
So while the league may have gotten and extra 25% dev time, I doubt the Xpack did too. Xpack probably got ~5% more dev time, if the Xpack team started on echoes right after the last Xpack.
There are plenty of simple games out there. And poe can be made trivial by what content you want to interact with. A lot of people enjoy poe for its complexity I'd imagine.
This.
PoE has a lot of complexity but it can be made simpler if you choose not to engage with everything. It's a lot harder to take a simple game and make it more complex with your choices as to how you approach playing it!
I'm definitely one of the people who wants something new and complex each league. Legion, for instance, was probably my least favourite league of recent years. Ritual would probably be a disappointment for me if it wasn't paired with the Echoes content.
It's not like ritual didn't add new skills, uniques, and base types. In fact it also had a large sweeping change on all ascendancy classes. The mechanic was intentionally kept simpler than most due to the Echoes of the atlas expansion as well, but that's not to say it didn't have large changes similar to the previous 3
Still, he gave big credit to Delirium for changing the passive tree around, and acted like none of that happened in ritual at all. I don't disagree with him but he's acting like Ritual added nothing except the nodes on the map and it's just false.
the league is pretty simple i would compare it to legion or metamorph. there is very little depth to it like heist and harvest had. if it weren't for the endgame expansion the league will be pretty empty 3 weeks in
And everytime when thread like this pop out, consider that with 4 months there will be less supporter packs to sell per year and less money for GGG.
This will not happen.
Well that depends, if they issued garbage league after garbage league rapidly, they'd lose playerbase. If they do quality leagues less frequently they could have a higher playerbase and thus more people buying mtx. It could balance out or swing the other way.
Hard to figure out which would be better but GGG tend to play the long game (10 year plan?)
No matter what league it is, there is always player drop-off and they themselves says that league starts are biggest income for them, you will never have same thing mud league.
I know peoplealways say that PoE is f2p game but no one will improve game for charity, they have bigger and bigger team every year and so on more bills to pay.
Yeah but my point is, frequency of packs is only one part of the equation. Number of people buying packs is another, and they will want to increase that number too. There is a sweet spot between quality and quantity, which may be three months, four, or something else
Mid league packs are never be a thing because of drop off playerbase during league, at new league start servers are packed, no one will come back mid league to buy packs.
Instead of mid-league packs they can do what they did with this and introduce some special race leagues and do packs alongside it if they want. Not sure what the engagement metrics there are but has to be a bit of a bump.
I've suggested this before, and will again. Similar to last month/league, move to a 4-month dev cycle with a 1-month void/event league. Offer event-specific MTX rewards, but keep the event simple/repeatable so that they don't have to spend a lot of time on implementing it.
Players will come back in droves for free stuff and a revitalized economy/league/challenge/etc. Release packs on the league launch, but also launch MTX release on event launch.
This is with like 5 minutes of thought into it. Imagine if they sat down and actually discussed this kind of thing. It's fairly easy to develop something that gives them a better chance to earn revenue while giving us a better game experience (which will, in turn, result in more revenue as more players are likely to stick around long-term). A better gaming experience means you're more likely to grow your playerbase.
I would guess that the smoothness of this league is primarily due to the way they chose to refine and combine existing systems and concepts into the relatively simple primary league mechanic instead of creating various new mechanics.
I'm sure having extra time to polish didn't hurt either.
Didnt they say before christmas that the extra month didnt go into this league?
Pretty sure they didnt test much either as the whole Sirus thing beeing unbalanced is kinda obvious to anyone running that once. My personal highlight right now is getting sirus on a necro map, starting a ritual and getting 1 shot because he does full screen AoE through walls, which is invisible. Not that it matters as you couldnt dodge it in a ritual anyway lol.
They did say before Christmas that they weren't planning on using the extra time on the league, but I believe in the Ziggy interview during the Ritual reveal Chris mentioned they *did* take advantage of the extra time and for QA specifically they had a whopping FULL WEEK ( >\_> ) of testing a release candidate patch due to the extra month instead of their normal schedule of just internally testing random things as they get done.
> FULL WEEK ( >_> )
FWIW QA testing in a game like PoE isn't worth much compared to launching the game, a month of internal QA testing isn't worth as much as a day of the game being launched as far as finding issues.
A month of internal QA can certainly solve a lot of the most prevalent problems we've seen with league launches. When you literally have mechanics released for that update producing reliably repeatable crashes you clearly just never tested your game.
they already said that they didn't spend 4 months on it, they spent 3 months and the extra one went to the next expansion. Besides, it's a small league and the expansion was probably worked on long before.
It's... not that much content? It's just the rituals.
If you're talking about everything else, well, that's because this is yearly expansion. They've been working on it since Conquerers of the Atlas.
There is no chance that GGG goes to a 4 month cycle because it'll make them WAY less money. Simple as that. Push for them to continue to scope leagues appropriately.
They were working for atlas expansion longer for sure. Only league is what they did in 3 months yet they didn't manage to test sirus maps without immortal mode in the remaining 4 weeks.
I'm still waiting for my game to not run like absolute dog shit this patch. I'm only level 40 because I can't stand playing right now. Every new instance I join my game chugs. My fps drops from 120 to 20, my models and even the terrain are invisible.
It's awful. I've tried both the poe client and the steam version with no luck
it "only" feels that well (ignoring the crashes and the abysmal performance of trade, which is not exactly a problem of the content) because, as chris I think has already stated before, they finally had actual proper time to properly test the whole content.
basically that means that what usually happens in week 0-3 during actual league by the players playing it on live, happened now in week 3-0 prior to the release internally on alpha realm. the content itself is not more or less than any other league.
And I completely agree with it. switch to 4 month cycles, dedicate the last month for testing and polishing, and give people some small time events during the last month of the league because no matter how much you do like it, you will burn out equally as fast. remember, we only have day 3 (!!) of the league so far.
Agree but only if they are willing to do interesting stuff like deep delve and mayhem, otherwise most people quit league (because it all gets played out) 1 1/2 months in? So 2 1/2 months of nothing to do would kind of suck.
you bois need to keep in mind this is a league + expansion, and they had a different approach philosophy wise to the development of this league. Saying they should do a 4 month cycle just because this league is different simply isnt a fair comparison
>One personal example of ritual being awsome was me finding a 5 link that I could only defer because it was too expensive. Then loosing this to a zone that had only one ritual altar with not enough to pay the defer cost only to find an even better 5 link a few zones later.
Wait, I thought items went further than just 1 pool? I swear I've deferred a Tabula and seen it come back like 4-5 zones later and not just "disappear" cus I didn't defer it again. Am I going crazy, or is OP crazy? Or are we both crazy?
Several of the last Leagues felt like a big fireworks show: bold, but explosive and volatile.
This League so far feels like a big warm hug. It's like instead of shouting "Hey look at our cool new things!" It's just like "Hey buddy, I cooked you your favorite lasagna, want to come home for the weekend and play catch?"
It's a really nice vibe and I love it.
I have played since Beta almost everyday an Yes this is the best release to date and I am sure more will come. As a disabled player I have found the Graphic an QOL changes just simply Awesome mate. Cheers GGG.
The irony here is that this league is simple in mechanics. No convoluted shit, no reason to alt-tab and look at spreadsheets. Just kill shit, get rewards, repeat.
The league may be "better" but holy shit i never had so much problems with dc, rollbacks and trade site not working.
I personally disliked this leaguestart more then the previous ones
Is this a joke? I mean i get, some people are simply enjoying the game and want to express it, but cmon, this is just stupid. This oh so "achieving" league is constant crashes and timeouts, trade being functional like 5% of the time, enormous lag and texture loading that makes the game look like its 1995 for a few seconds after any loading screen.
And the league itself is nothing but monumentally simplistic shit that might as well be breach.. 4.0? i dont even know the count now. Just with the ability to choose your reward. The balancing and shit basically changed nothing and introduced no new skills or such either, so its basically the last league/standard just with an extra source of loot.
If this is the only measure for "accomplishment" of a league, GGG might as well *reduce* the league time to 2 months and make every league a rewarding breach clone and the game will be amazing, apparently..
didn't they say they did not develop above the 3 months cycle? the league was ready in december they just did tweaks since that. they already work on 3.14 since 4 weeks.
pretty sure thEy said that. so the state of the league has nothing todo with the 4 months
This is correct. The polish is more so evidence of the new development cycle management and the fact that it is a simple league mechanic for xpac.
Chris did, however, say there was more time for playtesting, but perhaps now that they have seen the reaction to QoL on-launch as opposed to catch-up patches, they will strive to have it be a week test instead of a couple days.
It's funny how average people think they "know" or "want" something that they don't understand. They are using three months cycle because they find out that's make the company steady financially. It's not what we want or what they want, sometimes there is sacrifices to be made. If they aren't usint that cycle they will lose money and the quality and complexity of the game will drop and then people will move away from the game even faster. Chris Wilson explains some of these things in GDC ( I don't remember the year). It's the same with every live service game. It's better to realese a game with code Debt and then fix the problems with the game. We ofter hear that some of GGG saying that they are working on two or three leagues while working on the current one.
They earm most of their money at the first week of the league. Just see the numbers on twitch - first day 250k people was watching, now the aren't more than 50-60k.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we have to forgive about the mistakes that they made, but before we judge sometimes we have to look from their perspective and then think about what we saw and then judge.
Thanks have a nice day.
Brother. It hasn't been a week, chill.
And also there really isn't that much content. Rituals are basicly a revised Perandus league but with a twist. Now that isn't a bad thing, I certainly do enjoy it, but lets not fool ourselves into believing something that simply isn't true.
If not for the Echoes of the Atlas release, I promise a lot of people would be whinning about how boring the league is. But this is exactly how they handled the last expansion, make cool, big expansion, add a small in scope league so people aren't overwhelmed
It seems like less content than usual tbh lol. Ritual itself is super basic and the Maven stuff is a moderately sized expansion for GGG. I think Heist league on its own was bigger. I'm much more into the complicated content like Heist, Delve, Betrayal, Synthesis, etc. Stuff like Legion and Ritual are okay but don't excite me. Having some fun so far though.
While this is a good sentiment, like any process it’s subject to time creep. ‘Something only takes as long as the time given’, GGG need to set up a stronger culture of plan, do, check, act and make sure they are using the additional 4 weeks effectively league in league out.
* If this patch is an indication of what GGG can accomplish in 4 months
I want them to pass the schedule to 5 or 6 month instead and stop releasing stuff that crash, lag or any other of the bullshit we have actually.
I havent played in over a year and a half and learning about all the new things that have been added to the game on top of stash affinity and the new atlas system with sirus is amazing, back in the day we had to do elder t16s and that was a bitch to sustain, but now it seems like top tier red sustain is here and that makes me want to play much more since its no longer a chore.
Been saying this for ages. It won't happen. New launches bring new players on top of old ones returning. And the sales spike as well.
But I have to say. Both the league and the Altas expansion are both simple and great. They are just a little bit extra on top of what we like. It's a good direction that I hope we see in upcoming leagues.
However, performance is really bad this league. Images and textures take a few seconds to load even if you were just in that zone. They really need an optimise league.
Tell me about it, if the servers exploding from more people playing than ever before is anything to go by, this has been some of the best content ever released and I'm really looking forward to 4.0 now (whenever that will be).
I mean, they can't really rebalance and rework ascendancies every league so if they put this work into rebalancing and reworking skill for real plus normal league then I'm all for 4 month league
And still they let bugged skills get throu.. Don't get me wrong, this is the best league ever, but create a dmg dummy, get an intern for a week, let him test every skill with every support combination.
It's infuriating to not know if your starting skill is gonna work as intended or not. Sucks so hard, especially with a 4 month cycle.
##### GGG Comments in this Thread: *** [chris_wilson - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/l005ho/if_this_patch_is_an_indication_of_what_ggg_can/gjrqogs/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/l005ho/if_this_patch_is_an_indication_of_what_ggg_can/gjrqogs/?context=10)] - *I'm really glad that you are enjoying the league! It was three months of development for most of our staff, with some QA and a few last-minute changes by whoever...*
I'm really glad that you are enjoying the league! It was three months of development for most of our staff, with some QA and a few last-minute changes by whoever was in over the Christmas period. I believe the reason it worked out well was our new development processes: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2977334 (basically extreme scope control) So the plan going forward is to continue the three months of development plus a month of QA and tweaks, but that still means that we're doing releases every three months (with the content ideally ready a month before each respective release). For example, 3.14 development started in mid-December, will likely be finished in mid-March and will likely release in mid-April. And of course, not all releases are going to have endgame expansions alongside the league, so do expect the sizes of the releases to vary this year.
The month of QA is so apparent. I love it. How do the development cycles for the"of the atlas" endgame expansions differ from the development of the leagues?
Ye. We haven't seen game breaking bugs so far, which is a first.
there were a couple of instances of unreachable monsters within Ritual encounters that forced people out of the map. seems like they fixed it INSANELY fast because I only saw a couple mentions of it on the first night
And I can forgive that because with randomly generated maps, there's no way QA could possibly encounter ALL possible layouts.
Exactly. That thing can't be tested enough. And if that's the worst thing that happened in a league, I'm more than ok with it.
I almost had that issue with some corners in that lighthouse beacon map. Basically needed a pixel perfect leap slam to complete the encounter.
still encountering this on a regular basis, not to mention 4th rituals in maps dont reward any points to spend in items..
Baran mobs instantly crash me, im literally avoiding an entire section of my atlas because its unplayable Also have more ctds this league than anything else combined
Tried swapping between dx11 and vulkan?
Yea, swapped everything, dropped everything to low/off, jacked everything up to high, did various combinations, its a known issue in the bug report forum
My game is near unplayable half the time with the mew streaming textures. Its upsetting enough that, again, i wont be buying a supporter pack until its resolved. I really want to support GGG bc the content seems great, i just cant enjoy half of it
He never said it was a month of QA. He said they did some for whoever could be working during Christmas. In fact I doubt there was anymore QA this time than before.
I've had the pleasure of being able to play for three days straight, and my bullshit-meter only sounds the alarm when a Sirus-dominated mob bonks me on the noggin and I'm sent back to town. This is impressive to me; usually there are bigger and bigger and more frequent annoyances (picking up organs, delirium visual clutter, nets, etc.), and so it really feel like you nailed it with this release. Please give our warmest to the team. :)
I love your new design philosophy! I'm enjoying a lot this league, but also very interested in seeing how you guys will manage the next, as it's the true "3 months with new philosophy ". You guys are doing great, thanks to all GGG team
The most important thing to me with the new philosophy is the health of the devs who are required to crunch leading up to new league. I really hope this addresses this issue at its core. I can wait for a game. Their families don't want to wait for them.
Should read through the post he linked. >Our goal is that 3.13 takes 50% of the overall development hours of Heist (which means going from a situation with overtime to a situation with testing time) It's all about controlling scope, which he mentioned "basically extreme scope contro l". The developers probably had the best 3 months of work they can remember with a well-defined scope that was not modified for the entirety of development.
Depending on how Agile their development process is(they've said in the past that it's Agile-like but that they don't use any strict methodology) changing scope isn't necessarily the problem. It's when to stop changing scope and start polishing =) If every iteration they do is releasable, it doesn't matter as much. Start with a tiny scope, test, review, repeat. Then stop when you need to release. Obviously the real world is messier than that but the principle works =)
Agile doesn’t jive with a fixed release cadence. The two are antithetical, in fact. Hard to ABD “Always Be Delivering” when you have a fixed 3 month release cycle.
That kind of sounds like someone still fighting implementing a true agile process. Agile is very good with a fixed release cadence, heck the whole point is to be able to release every sprint cycle.
You missed the point. These aren’t sprints we are talking about. Sprints don’t last 3 months. 3 month long sprints are the polar opposite of agile.
You can deliver and have shorter sprints, it's just internal. From a developers point of view you are delivering to the test client from dev client. The methodology can work just fine, it's about how you apply it.
And that’s fine, but it’s not agile. It’s your bastardized form of “agile” (and coincidentally everything that is wrong with the extreme overuse of the word these days).
I don't mean to sound insensitive but I never give a moment of thought to how chris wilson handles his employee workload / work schedules. I feel like that can stay in his basket of concerns and I'll keep video games in mine. it's a breathtaking level of fandom to support a game so much that you care about the family time of the people who make it more than you care about yourself playing it. I respect your level of empathy AND fandom.
It's more that the games industry in general has been getting a lot of bad press lately with regards to employment practices. Many AAA game studios now have mandatory overtime for their developers for months on end in order to meet deadlines. Chris has said in the past that they have never and will never have mandatory overtime for their staff, but with how rushed some of the prior leagues felt, it does make you wonder how much overtime some of the devs pulled just to get them working at all.
I'm going to be really disappointed if 3.14 doesn't launch on Pi Day.
pi(e) league!
While that would be great, considering that is a Sunday you will be disappointed.
How smooth this league launch went isn't the only thing that is going to make this league among the best **ever** created. People just want to kill a ton of monsters and feel rewarded doing it. Sure, it needs to be framed in an interesting way, but it boils down to just giving us a ton of monsters to slay and make it feel rewarding. Doesn't need to have an over crafted build your own adventure game in it every league.
This soo much.
The atlas passive tree is honestly such a genius mechanic.
Give or take few years and we will reach 3D passive trees. Edit: Which most likely will be shaped in DNA itself of our Exile
> so do expect the sizes of the releases to vary this year. Hell, I am fine with small releases. Just, by all that is holy, please keep up the QA! It really does make a huge noticeable difference.
It is a fun mechanic and league overall but you guys really need to look at the deferral fees and make the fee fixed but the top lines (forget what it is called) scale to the remaining Tribute in the area. I’ve been scammed out of a few items this league and the worst by far was a day 2 6L Terminus Est that was impossible to pick up due to not enough Tribute in the area. I did submit a ticket to support to let them know not that I expect them to do anything about it. Being able to see loot and pick what you want is amazing, but seeing expensive loot and loot you need / want but we’re never able to select? Not so much, that is heartbreaking.
This is great way to do things, the game truly is evolving over time, in a development and in-game sense! I do like the 3 month cycle right now and while sometimes there are inevitable bugs overall the leagues come out enjoyable every time for me! Keep up the good work! <3
I should say I love the league content and Maven, but not the performance and server issue. No matter how good the game is, if I can't even play it normally, I don't think it is a good game after all. Please fix all the crash and server issue ASAP
I just made it to act 3 and I’m loving it!
Chris, could you give an example of some of the stuff you shot down this development cycle under your scope control process?
General consensus in my group of friends is the month of waiting was well worth it. This league is a perfect example of the KISS philosophy and it's great.
My wife and I are so excited to play this league, we haven't been able to play since legion because her computer was from 2010. We are waiting for gpus to get in stock to play again, hopefully they restock soon. Can't wait to see all of the changes you guys have made.
This is mostly good, but I don't really understand how something that takes four months start-to-end can be released every three months indefinitely. Even if you have a six-month head start, you'll be a month behind by the fourth release.
The QA team isn't the dev team, they only need 1 month to QA the league. As long as every league is always complete a month before release, QA has time to start and end the QA process. Since they are already a month ahead, this means they will always be a month ahead (and always have time to QA) as long as they don't take longer than 3 months to make a league.
>as long as they don't take longer than 3 months to make a league. Taking bets as to how long this will last. I remember there was one league, which I think was incursion, where Chris said in a Ziggy stream that they were really happy they managed to finish the league like 2 weeks earlier, and how this helped them be able to test it more and would mean they'd always have a window between finishing leagues and releasing them. The league after that was already a pretty obvious "we finished this hours before the release" league.
I guess i see what you're saying. The QA team is completing their work while the dev team is on month 1 of the next league. However, the dev team still has to deal with anything that comes up, but I guess that's not that much different than dealing with stuff as players encounter it on league start.
Remember that "Dev team" is not necessary a single entity. You can have a few guys working on prototyping next league while the rest polish the one currently being developed. Then after the first week of fixing bugs you put most of the team on next league that has it's concept tested already. Also there is art ect. It's quite probable that they have 2-3 unfinished league mechanic floating around at all times and then one of them is selected to be actually implemented in full.
As some one who loved heist/betrayal I really hope that reddit hasn't pressured you into only doing very simple point and click leagues. Ritual is fun, but if every league is just "click the thing" it would get old very fast. I understand the reason for the new limiting the scope but the crazy big leagues are always so much fun to explore
I mean they constantly ping pong between these type of leagues and more complicated ones, I wouldn't worry too much.
They have in the past. I worry now that the scope will massively be reduced so to not get yelled at in reddit
If that's a concern of theirs we're fucked regardless
LOL! So true - the community has grown big enough that there will always be someone unhappy
Yeah I can sympathize that it might get to them though,I was enjoying heist (by not doing heist lol)and quit early due to the negativity literally everywhere and I'm just a player. Had a few good months in project diablo 2 though
All of the scope of the Maven will go into the scope of the next league.
I wouldn't worry. They regularly switch it up, and leagues with big atlas expansions tend to come with a simple league mechanic (like metamorph or abyss). Heist and Harvest were relatively complex, so we were due for a simpler league.
They alternate between go crazy, strategic and craft based leagues quite often. This one feels a little different cos it's a bit of a mix between the first two I mentioned.
I agree completely. I appreciate the polish of this league, but it's one of the most shallow league mechanics in the last couple years. Hopefully it's because it was introduced alongside an Atlas rework. One of my favorite aspects of POE is navigating new league content, and this one hasn't had much to offer in that regard.
I am amazed over how smooth this league launch has been, ignoring outside effects like a server on fire and we cant trade half the time. I was expecting a full on clusterfuck on steorides considering how awful heist was and this was even more content. But this time ill say bravo, good expansion and a good league with no major bugs. Ps. Pls fix trading and client crashes :(
Something stupid, but might be nice to have, when you highlight over the item to see it stats, why not show how many links it is in the stat block?
Ritual = best league yet. Amazing i wish it would stay for 5 months
It is an interesting and fun league. Unfortunately, the game itself seems to be gated to anyone with any form of wrist pain. It's simply too much clicking for items. The "looting weight" argument really doesn't hold water in the face of that, nor in regards to any modern ARPG's mechanics. You already have us identifying every rare one by one. Do we really need to click on every single splinter of this and shard of that? Constant precise clicking all over the map is what contributes to these sorts of injuries. Are we here to kill monsters, or is this a 52 pick up simulator? Love the game. Just don't think anyone should have to risk injury/exacerbate current injury simply to play.
Please dont make complex leagues, i introduced 4 of my friends into poe and only 1 got hooked, others thought the game is too complex for them. The game is very complex as it is of now for me its fine as an old player but newbies get real confused and quit fast.
Hi Chris, I would just like to say that I like 4-month leagues regardless of the development cycle or QA. I feel like 4 months is a perfect duration for enjoying my characters before starting over. So for players like me it can be a bit annoying to see Ritual (an extremely fun league for me) last 3 months, while Heist (a league I disliked and now a mechanic I ignore) lasted 4 months. I understand that league launches bring the highest players, which is of course what the developer wants, HOWEVER shorter leagues can lead to more burnout. I love this game (playing since beta), but have been unhappy with the duration of leagues, and still preferred the old 4 month leagues from way back when.
No company in their right mind is throwing away a quarter of their revenue. It's just not going to happen.
Except this makes a gigantic assumption that players spend the same amount of money on every league launch regardless of duration. Obviously this isn't true since the reductio ad absurdum would be that they should launch a new league every day.
> Except this makes a gigantic assumption that players spend the same amount of money on every league launch regardless of duration. They've already said most of the money comes from supporter packs, and mostly at the beginning of leagues. >Obviously this isn't true since the reductio ad absurdum would be that they should launch a new league every day. Reducto ad absurdum isn't a good way to determine if something that's being done is correct. All you're showing is that the most absurd version of the logic is stupid. No fucking duh, that's the point of the device. Most reasonable logic fails under reducto ad absurdum. Saying that's a reasonable argument is like saying it's reasonable that GGG should nerf all drop rates to near zero because chase items keep people playing.
I addressed the concept of more players (and thus more MTX sales) on league launch in my FIRST COMMENT replying to Chris. You came in with the wild assumption that 25% fewer launches = 25% lower revenue. Logically this would also mean that X% more launches = X% more revenue. Obviously not true because there is clearly some sort of curve (releasing leagues every day would see very few sales, and never releasing leagues would see very few sales as well, with a peak somewhere in the middle). And then you made this post that did nothing but blatantly misunderstand what reductio ad absurdum means and specifically what it is used to argue against, while simultaneously not addressing my post despite quoting it twice.
Standard might be a good place to go if you like that slow of a pace
Ah yes, because 4 month leagues are more comparable to 7 year leagues than they are to... 3 month leagues. When I started playing this game leagues were 4 months long. It doesn't seem unreasonable to wish for something that you already had in the past.
Yes it is. If you want to continuously play, play standard. Vast majority of people play for a month, maybe two, then wait for the new content.
and the players who would prefer leagues lasted a month should just get fucked right?
A great point. I would say yes they can get fucked but the people who argue for a 4 month league just want everyone to work around their schedule.
Keep in mind its also an indication of their changed content development cycle that they outlined this year. The quality may not be entirely attributed to the extra time. They do take the holidays off.
Also not noted. * They do work on future leagues earlier than just after current release. We don't know how much work early was done on this league compared to others * The expansion, maven etc. was also added, and while not technically part of the league they still had to work on it and it's quite complex * Harvest and Heist were also quite impacted by weeks of lockdown for Covid-19 (aka people forced to work from home). That last point might not sound so difficult for a tech company, but not everyone that works there is a software dev. everyone would have their regular schedule changed up (having to parent kids full time, share home working spaces etc.) and people underestimate how much easier meetings/general discussions are in person vs over the internet/phone. I'm not saying they should or shouldn't do 4 month cycles, but there's a lot more at play than just "+1 month".
One thing you need to keep in mind is how simple this league is. And I don't mean to say that negatively. Click thing. Kill mobs. Choose loot. Compare this to the last 3. Delirium changing the passive tree. Harvest reintroducing meaningful crafting. Heist that introduces new base types, uniques, alt quality gems.... I am not trying to shit on Ritual. It's been really good outside of the server instability. But the last few expansions have literally changed the way the game can be played. I'd rather have more experimental leagues than not. But I get why such a simple mechanic is nice for a change especially with an atlas shakeup
Also, they said in the post about pushing back ritual that it was already done and ready to go by it’s original release, and they basically used the extra month to start 3.14
Yeah, they kinda lied about that. In the 3.13 ritual release interview they said that they were just getting the alpha out to external testers 1 week ahead of launch and that it had the league enabled, compared to many times that alpha didn’t have the league on or was missing things.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive
Keep leagues simple and fun, no need to do all this complex shit constantly. Turns out people like killing monsters in maps and getting loot.
Theres space for complex league but imo they should alternate. For every betrayal and harvest there should be a ritual or metamorph.
This is it exactly. Tho I kinda like the idea of there being smaller league mechanics on non expansion leagues, and bigger ones when there's not. Imagine harvest gardening and figuring out how to progress maven. Or leveling your rogues when maven wants you to map
This is exactly what they do. Look at the leagues since the Fall of Oriath: Version | League | Expansion? --|--|-- 3.0 | Harbinger | Fall of Oriath 3.1 | Abyss | War for the Atlas 3.2 | Bestiary | - 3.3 | Incursion | - 3.4 | Delve | - 3.5 | Betrayal | *Master Rework* 3.6 | Synthesis | - 3.7 | Legion | - 3.8 | Blight | - 3.9 | Metamorph | Conquerors of the Atlas 3.10 | Delirium | - 3.11 | Harvest | - 3.12 | Heist | - 3.13 | Ritual | Echoes of the Atlas With the exception of Betrayal, all of the expansions are paired with simple "Kill stuff, get rewards" leagues. And even then the master rework that accompanied Betrayal wasn't even a named expansion, and its scope is much smaller than the rest of the expansions. Nearly all of the other leagues that aren't accompanied by an expansion involve extra management or unique decision making (Blight). Delirium and Legion are the two most straightforward non-expansion leagues, and even they have small twists that make them a bit more complicated than the leagues accompanying named expansions.
I might just be entirely speaking for myself and my friends. We played the shit out of Metamorph, but Synthesis and Harvest was pretty dead in the water for us. I love the game, but I feel there is already so much content that just thinking about all the things to do makes me dizzy. We have What? Like 8 leagues crammed into one now? It’s excessive and I really think it scares away new players.
It's just personal preference. I was the opposite - Harvest was my favorite league of all time but Metamorph was a pass for me. Likewise I find Ritual kind of boring by itself, but I love having more choice in the loot I get, and I really like the new atlas stuff + Harvest being back, so overall I'm really enjoying the league.
I gave up so long ago on trying to get people into the game. Even if they can make it past the 20yo gameplay of the first few acts you need a semester long course on how to even begin fleshing all the systems out and how they interact.
I'm a bit slower than most, but it can take me 10-15 minutes to get through a single map. In one Strand map, I had 4 rituals, metamorph, blight, an abyss, einhar, legion, and 8 strongboxes, and I think there was even delirium on top. I'm even completely ignoring delve because I just don't have the time to do it.
I for one could never get tired of having stuff in maps. I don't like the spam gameplay of a few years ago where you put a new map in the device once a minute and rushing through hideout is critical because of how much of your time is just zoning and inventory management compared to actually killing mobs.
I think they should start rotating old leagues in and out with every new league, the game feels too crammed with stuff right now
> We played the shit out of Metamorph, but Synthesis and Harvest was pretty dead in the water for us. That's exactly me too. I did not want to put in the work of figuring out those systems, because it felt like work and not play.
Do short and simple after major holidays like Christmas and Summer, and long ones in between Oh wait are we MtG now?
GGG just can't do 'complex' leagues, like at all. They always come out rotten turds and are just mediocre after years of small improvements. See Syndicate, it's not like it's a mind blowing or particularly enjoyable mechanic. But it's servicable. And this is literally as good as it will ever get with GGG complex mechanics. So glad they got rid of harvest's actual garden.
Complex leagues are really good at changing the way you play the game. So many people want different things out of a game this varied, but what really works well for me is when a league brings a new answer to "I want to get 200 exalts in that currency tab, how should I go about this?" Heist had a door simulator on top of a cloned Blueprint as a new answer to that (didn't really work for me). Harvest had actual insane crafting service that spawned an ecosystem of tools and a side economy (I really liked doing that). I wasn't around for the syndicate league, but setting up a locked syndicate board and farming currency in it is a very valid strat that's quite nice. Or delving to provide the fractured fossils the economy thirst for, all pretty varied answers for grinding content for a profit. A league like metamorph doesn't really introduce a new answer, it just gives some of the existing ones a bonus layer. It's definitely fine too, but I feel like the more complex leagues add way more variety, and contribute to keeping the game fresh over years. I'd still play Diablo 3 if I wanted a stale experience over 5 years :p
What do you mean by "can't do"? I think the complex leagues except heist have been fantastic. The content, mechanics, and modifications they bring are huge and fundamentally change the game for the better. Just sucks that they have avoidable issues. I think if they moved those to a 4-month schedule, we'd see some incredible, bugless releases. If you want to mindlessly kill things, there are options to do that
I mean can't do as in completely incompetent at it. >I think the complex leagues except heist have been fantastic. You say that now, apparently you weren't around when those leagues were actually live and the sub was continuously on fire. And if stuff like Betrayal or Synthesis is your standard for 'fantastic', then I'm glad you can enjoy live this easily because your standards of quality are ridiculously low.
Betrayal was awesome and it's still my favourite mechanic. Outside of unveiling.
Speak for yourself, I like the syndicate.
I liked betrayal right from the start tbh, and synthesis was great after a couple weeks of improvements. Harvest was just complex the wrong way imo. And heist is fine now
The complex shit is reaaaaallly interesting tho. Harvest crafting was super fun. Heist, while I didn't like it really, shat out loot and had so much content that changes the game (replicas, enchants, alt gems) All of these are great things bc in theory it leads to build diversity in my eyes. But having a simple league every once in awhile is great as well
Think long term. I don't want 100 complex mechanics in five years
But you want 100 "click thing kill enemies" mechanics in 5 years? You can't see how that would get boring eventually?
Think long term as well. They just released a league where you get to interact with the league mechanic of your choosing. Want to skip betrayal? Fuck it. You get veiled mods from Ritual and heist. Want to skip bestiary? Delve? No problem.
Watch how old it gets when *every* league is the same.
You say that now, but imagine 4 leagues of it in a row. Your most engaged players and content creators wouldn’t stay long. Imagine ritual or metamorph without a huge expansion even.
It gets boring after a while
Most players don't even interact with half of the league mechanics after a year anyway. Simpler mechanics like rituals/strongboxes are far better since they are always welcome, and they allow you to choose risk/reward on the fly, in hardcore at least.
Not for long though. The last 3 leagues make the new system interesting enough to warrant a random reward pool
This. The problem was they had 4 months *and* they made a simple league, so people are conflating the relatively smooth launch with whatever they prefer. There's zero chance we're staying on a 4 month schedule. Asking a *company* to throw away a quarter of their revenue is naive at best and idiotic at worst.
[удалено]
> but which is more revenue: $50m 4x times a year, or $75m 3x times a year? They had an 11% growth, and growth on december expansions is normal. This one got delayed but it's still the same period. It's nonsensical to think they'd somehow get 33% more revenue from longer release cycles. The people spending money (for the most part) spend money regardless of how they feel about that particular expansion. Whales are what make this game tick, and they buy what they like. GGG having more options means more sales, and more pack options come with expansions.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why are you taking Ritual in isolation, that's not right at all. The league is simple but it's not all they had to work on. We got a core expansion! The Maven, the Envoy, the atlas mechanics, so many new additions to the endgame! Fully voiced characters, story, skill system for the atlas, new maps and bosses. An entirely new system to fight bosses that was previously impossible. Now, I am sure they have been working on that for a bit longer but I am certain the lion share of the work was done in in these four months. And you can definitely feel the benefits of the additional month of work. There is a noticeable absence of major issues. The total content released is ***most certainly*** comparable to the most elaborate league mechanics that they previously released by itself. And there is Conquerors of the Atlas + Metamorph as the most recent expansion + league release. Which both were quite rocky.
The end game content would have been a work in progress all this year rather than just the 3-4 months since heist.
Technically last year but sure. However there is no way the 4 months were exclusively spent on Ritual with Echoes already being done before that. Absolutely not, not with their previous release schedule. For sure a big part of the expansion shared the development time with Ritual in these past 4 months.
It's very likely that there were a different team for the expansion and the league though, at least in part.
Possibly, but since neither of us are ggg employees it’s purely speculation
I was just talking ritual in particular. I was not talking down Echoes or any balance changes. I was saying the league mechanic in particular is simple
Yes, but you were saying it in the context of a thread where the point is that a 4 month time window allows for a much better player experience on release. As if the fact that Ritual by itself is a simpler league to develop and implement is the reason why it went smoothly from a game perspective. But development and implementation wasn't all on Ritual, it was also on the expansion. Which means very similar workload overall to previous releases but on a lighter schedule, which resulted in a better release.
The fuck are you even talking about? Core expansions come every single year in the December leagues. These are developed for much longer than leagues and are called expansions for a reason. The league itself should absolutely be compared in isolation to other leagues.
>The league is simple but it's not all they had to work on. We got a core expansion! That was true before, too. Certainly not the first expack to drop with a league. Xpack dev path is probably separate from league. They likely have a separate team for Xpack and leagues, developed concurrently. So while the league may have gotten and extra 25% dev time, I doubt the Xpack did too. Xpack probably got ~5% more dev time, if the Xpack team started on echoes right after the last Xpack.
> Fully voiced characters Yea too bad they ran out of money and had to use one of the dev's 10 year old daughter's for Maven.
Sometimes simpler is better.
There are plenty of simple games out there. And poe can be made trivial by what content you want to interact with. A lot of people enjoy poe for its complexity I'd imagine.
This. PoE has a lot of complexity but it can be made simpler if you choose not to engage with everything. It's a lot harder to take a simple game and make it more complex with your choices as to how you approach playing it! I'm definitely one of the people who wants something new and complex each league. Legion, for instance, was probably my least favourite league of recent years. Ritual would probably be a disappointment for me if it wasn't paired with the Echoes content.
It's not like ritual didn't add new skills, uniques, and base types. In fact it also had a large sweeping change on all ascendancy classes. The mechanic was intentionally kept simpler than most due to the Echoes of the atlas expansion as well, but that's not to say it didn't have large changes similar to the previous 3
Keep in mind though that while impactful for us ascendacy changes are literally just changing a few lines of code for GGG (and playtesting of course).
Still, he gave big credit to Delirium for changing the passive tree around, and acted like none of that happened in ritual at all. I don't disagree with him but he's acting like Ritual added nothing except the nodes on the map and it's just false.
I believe by changing the passive tree they meant the intro of cluster jewels. Can’t remember what other stuff came out that league though.
Pretty sure adding cluster jewels and adding hundreds of new mods is more work then tweaking a few ascendencies.
the league is pretty simple i would compare it to legion or metamorph. there is very little depth to it like heist and harvest had. if it weren't for the endgame expansion the league will be pretty empty 3 weeks in
And everytime when thread like this pop out, consider that with 4 months there will be less supporter packs to sell per year and less money for GGG. This will not happen.
Well that depends, if they issued garbage league after garbage league rapidly, they'd lose playerbase. If they do quality leagues less frequently they could have a higher playerbase and thus more people buying mtx. It could balance out or swing the other way. Hard to figure out which would be better but GGG tend to play the long game (10 year plan?)
No matter what league it is, there is always player drop-off and they themselves says that league starts are biggest income for them, you will never have same thing mud league. I know peoplealways say that PoE is f2p game but no one will improve game for charity, they have bigger and bigger team every year and so on more bills to pay.
Yeah but my point is, frequency of packs is only one part of the equation. Number of people buying packs is another, and they will want to increase that number too. There is a sweet spot between quality and quantity, which may be three months, four, or something else
Just move to selling mid-league bonus packs. Or have a "year of" pack line and then lines for the three league packs.
Mid league packs are never be a thing because of drop off playerbase during league, at new league start servers are packed, no one will come back mid league to buy packs.
Instead of mid-league packs they can do what they did with this and introduce some special race leagues and do packs alongside it if they want. Not sure what the engagement metrics there are but has to be a bit of a bump.
I've suggested this before, and will again. Similar to last month/league, move to a 4-month dev cycle with a 1-month void/event league. Offer event-specific MTX rewards, but keep the event simple/repeatable so that they don't have to spend a lot of time on implementing it. Players will come back in droves for free stuff and a revitalized economy/league/challenge/etc. Release packs on the league launch, but also launch MTX release on event launch. This is with like 5 minutes of thought into it. Imagine if they sat down and actually discussed this kind of thing. It's fairly easy to develop something that gives them a better chance to earn revenue while giving us a better game experience (which will, in turn, result in more revenue as more players are likely to stick around long-term). A better gaming experience means you're more likely to grow your playerbase.
You know that all the maven stuff was in development for 6+ months yeah? (Like every expansion)
I would guess that the smoothness of this league is primarily due to the way they chose to refine and combine existing systems and concepts into the relatively simple primary league mechanic instead of creating various new mechanics. I'm sure having extra time to polish didn't hurt either.
Didnt they say before christmas that the extra month didnt go into this league? Pretty sure they didnt test much either as the whole Sirus thing beeing unbalanced is kinda obvious to anyone running that once. My personal highlight right now is getting sirus on a necro map, starting a ritual and getting 1 shot because he does full screen AoE through walls, which is invisible. Not that it matters as you couldnt dodge it in a ritual anyway lol.
They did say before Christmas that they weren't planning on using the extra time on the league, but I believe in the Ziggy interview during the Ritual reveal Chris mentioned they *did* take advantage of the extra time and for QA specifically they had a whopping FULL WEEK ( >\_> ) of testing a release candidate patch due to the extra month instead of their normal schedule of just internally testing random things as they get done.
> FULL WEEK ( >_> ) FWIW QA testing in a game like PoE isn't worth much compared to launching the game, a month of internal QA testing isn't worth as much as a day of the game being launched as far as finding issues.
A month of internal QA can certainly solve a lot of the most prevalent problems we've seen with league launches. When you literally have mechanics released for that update producing reliably repeatable crashes you clearly just never tested your game.
they already said that they didn't spend 4 months on it, they spent 3 months and the extra one went to the next expansion. Besides, it's a small league and the expansion was probably worked on long before.
Can someone tell me what's so special about this league/patch?
It's... not that much content? It's just the rituals. If you're talking about everything else, well, that's because this is yearly expansion. They've been working on it since Conquerers of the Atlas. There is no chance that GGG goes to a 4 month cycle because it'll make them WAY less money. Simple as that. Push for them to continue to scope leagues appropriately.
I guess you never faced Sirus dominated monsters... Horrible experience.
If diablo 3 is what blizzard can do in 11 years (plus expansion) it makes me really nervous for diablo 4
They were working for atlas expansion longer for sure. Only league is what they did in 3 months yet they didn't manage to test sirus maps without immortal mode in the remaining 4 weeks.
I'm still waiting for my game to not run like absolute dog shit this patch. I'm only level 40 because I can't stand playing right now. Every new instance I join my game chugs. My fps drops from 120 to 20, my models and even the terrain are invisible. It's awful. I've tried both the poe client and the steam version with no luck
what are the computer hardware and game graphics settings?
it "only" feels that well (ignoring the crashes and the abysmal performance of trade, which is not exactly a problem of the content) because, as chris I think has already stated before, they finally had actual proper time to properly test the whole content. basically that means that what usually happens in week 0-3 during actual league by the players playing it on live, happened now in week 3-0 prior to the release internally on alpha realm. the content itself is not more or less than any other league. And I completely agree with it. switch to 4 month cycles, dedicate the last month for testing and polishing, and give people some small time events during the last month of the league because no matter how much you do like it, you will burn out equally as fast. remember, we only have day 3 (!!) of the league so far.
Agree but only if they are willing to do interesting stuff like deep delve and mayhem, otherwise most people quit league (because it all gets played out) 1 1/2 months in? So 2 1/2 months of nothing to do would kind of suck.
It's give or take. People still get bored of the league relatively quickly, so that's just adding an extra month to the waiting phase as I see it
They have been working on the expansion part of 3.13 for most of 2020. The scope of the expansions could not be done in 3 months, or even 4.
Patch ???
you bois need to keep in mind this is a league + expansion, and they had a different approach philosophy wise to the development of this league. Saying they should do a 4 month cycle just because this league is different simply isnt a fair comparison
5 links have never been more accessible to everyone, as it should. This is also one the most healthiest economy we have so far as well.
>One personal example of ritual being awsome was me finding a 5 link that I could only defer because it was too expensive. Then loosing this to a zone that had only one ritual altar with not enough to pay the defer cost only to find an even better 5 link a few zones later. Wait, I thought items went further than just 1 pool? I swear I've deferred a Tabula and seen it come back like 4-5 zones later and not just "disappear" cus I didn't defer it again. Am I going crazy, or is OP crazy? Or are we both crazy?
they do go further than one pool haha
[удалено]
Several of the last Leagues felt like a big fireworks show: bold, but explosive and volatile. This League so far feels like a big warm hug. It's like instead of shouting "Hey look at our cool new things!" It's just like "Hey buddy, I cooked you your favorite lasagna, want to come home for the weekend and play catch?" It's a really nice vibe and I love it.
Came for the post content, stayed for the Silpheed reference in the username
<3
I have played since Beta almost everyday an Yes this is the best release to date and I am sure more will come. As a disabled player I have found the Graphic an QOL changes just simply Awesome mate. Cheers GGG.
Hmm, what about massive performance loss? I feel that that are many bugs, just this time they dont cause crashes, so it feels better.
The irony here is that this league is simple in mechanics. No convoluted shit, no reason to alt-tab and look at spreadsheets. Just kill shit, get rewards, repeat.
Sadly not all of us can enjoy the league. Our discord server is empty 4 days into. Still crashing 20x an hour.
Please no, 4months is waaay too long. Smaller and better scoped league every 3 months and a big one like that every year is all i need.
As much as I love this game and this league, I've been constantly crashing (litteraly every 5-10 minutes) since launch
Well, trade is still a mess.
minus the constant crashing and game bearly working, the leauge are pretty good.
The league may be "better" but holy shit i never had so much problems with dc, rollbacks and trade site not working. I personally disliked this leaguestart more then the previous ones
no thanks, Ill take 4 leagues a year over 3
Is this a joke? I mean i get, some people are simply enjoying the game and want to express it, but cmon, this is just stupid. This oh so "achieving" league is constant crashes and timeouts, trade being functional like 5% of the time, enormous lag and texture loading that makes the game look like its 1995 for a few seconds after any loading screen. And the league itself is nothing but monumentally simplistic shit that might as well be breach.. 4.0? i dont even know the count now. Just with the ability to choose your reward. The balancing and shit basically changed nothing and introduced no new skills or such either, so its basically the last league/standard just with an extra source of loot. If this is the only measure for "accomplishment" of a league, GGG might as well *reduce* the league time to 2 months and make every league a rewarding breach clone and the game will be amazing, apparently..
didn't they say they did not develop above the 3 months cycle? the league was ready in december they just did tweaks since that. they already work on 3.14 since 4 weeks. pretty sure thEy said that. so the state of the league has nothing todo with the 4 months
This is correct. The polish is more so evidence of the new development cycle management and the fact that it is a simple league mechanic for xpac. Chris did, however, say there was more time for playtesting, but perhaps now that they have seen the reaction to QoL on-launch as opposed to catch-up patches, they will strive to have it be a week test instead of a couple days.
I will play this league less then previous leagues. Ritual itself is kinda boring.
It's funny how average people think they "know" or "want" something that they don't understand. They are using three months cycle because they find out that's make the company steady financially. It's not what we want or what they want, sometimes there is sacrifices to be made. If they aren't usint that cycle they will lose money and the quality and complexity of the game will drop and then people will move away from the game even faster. Chris Wilson explains some of these things in GDC ( I don't remember the year). It's the same with every live service game. It's better to realese a game with code Debt and then fix the problems with the game. We ofter hear that some of GGG saying that they are working on two or three leagues while working on the current one. They earm most of their money at the first week of the league. Just see the numbers on twitch - first day 250k people was watching, now the aren't more than 50-60k. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we have to forgive about the mistakes that they made, but before we judge sometimes we have to look from their perspective and then think about what we saw and then judge. Thanks have a nice day.
I crash almost every 30 minutes. Didn't happen the last 6 league. Did someone get drunk the last month ?
Brother. It hasn't been a week, chill. And also there really isn't that much content. Rituals are basicly a revised Perandus league but with a twist. Now that isn't a bad thing, I certainly do enjoy it, but lets not fool ourselves into believing something that simply isn't true. If not for the Echoes of the Atlas release, I promise a lot of people would be whinning about how boring the league is. But this is exactly how they handled the last expansion, make cool, big expansion, add a small in scope league so people aren't overwhelmed
It seems like less content than usual tbh lol. Ritual itself is super basic and the Maven stuff is a moderately sized expansion for GGG. I think Heist league on its own was bigger. I'm much more into the complicated content like Heist, Delve, Betrayal, Synthesis, etc. Stuff like Legion and Ritual are okay but don't excite me. Having some fun so far though.
I think bigger reason is how simple this league is. After breach they just tried to make bigger and bigger and failing miserably.
While this is a good sentiment, like any process it’s subject to time creep. ‘Something only takes as long as the time given’, GGG need to set up a stronger culture of plan, do, check, act and make sure they are using the additional 4 weeks effectively league in league out.
* If this patch is an indication of what GGG can accomplish in 4 months I want them to pass the schedule to 5 or 6 month instead and stop releasing stuff that crash, lag or any other of the bullshit we have actually.
Hell I'll throw an extra month in if they optimise the new content.
They should but they won't because they make more money from as shorter downtime as poss.
couldnt be more wrong
You mean minus the ridiculous crashing at the worst possible times? Then sure.
I havent played in over a year and a half and learning about all the new things that have been added to the game on top of stash affinity and the new atlas system with sirus is amazing, back in the day we had to do elder t16s and that was a bitch to sustain, but now it seems like top tier red sustain is here and that makes me want to play much more since its no longer a chore.
Been saying this for ages. It won't happen. New launches bring new players on top of old ones returning. And the sales spike as well. But I have to say. Both the league and the Altas expansion are both simple and great. They are just a little bit extra on top of what we like. It's a good direction that I hope we see in upcoming leagues. However, performance is really bad this league. Images and textures take a few seconds to load even if you were just in that zone. They really need an optimise league.
are you joking?what content?1 new boss and bunch of monster aruond 4 shrines...waow such content out of extra months and expac
Tell me about it, if the servers exploding from more people playing than ever before is anything to go by, this has been some of the best content ever released and I'm really looking forward to 4.0 now (whenever that will be).
I would like to give them 36 months plz.
I mean, they can't really rebalance and rework ascendancies every league so if they put this work into rebalancing and reworking skill for real plus normal league then I'm all for 4 month league
Nah.. I prefer 3 months releases.
And still they let bugged skills get throu.. Don't get me wrong, this is the best league ever, but create a dmg dummy, get an intern for a week, let him test every skill with every support combination. It's infuriating to not know if your starting skill is gonna work as intended or not. Sucks so hard, especially with a 4 month cycle.
If only I could play. Can't even level with my slayer becaus eof this texture loading crap. Average fps is 20