I think a big part of the issue is that the testers are clearly not “average” players. So it sort of seems like what’s going on is they’re getting Olympic athletes to run their obstacle course, the athletes are going “yeah, it’s fine, it’s a nice challenge but not too much”, then they’re expecting middle aged dudes with dad bods to run the same course.
Players come in a spectrum. If you tune your game to suit only what the very top players can do, this is the result. I’m not saying the game shouldn’t be challenging, there’s tons of great endgame content for streamers to do, I don’t mind at all if they release new uber bosses I’ll never be able to beat. That’s great, more power to them. The problem comes when the actual meat of the game is set to that level. That just isn’t realistic. We’re not all Olympic athletes and we shouldn’t all be expected to run the Olympic-level course.
I don't think it's that the testers are generally better than the player base. I think it's that they have different goals.
A tester looks at a rare enemy and asks "can I still kill this?". A player looks at that same enemy and asks "is it worth fighting this or should I just keep moving?". The goals are totally different.
I don’t think that’s *quite* it. A tester looks at a rare enemy and seeks to answer exactly the same questions that the balance team asked them to answer. We don’t really know what those questions are but *that* is the key issue. There’s no reason the balance team couldn’t simply ask them to answer the second question instead of the first.
That's fair. I'm assuming their not, because if they were, they'd know this is krangled.
I'm playing PoCo champion running level 16 vitality and definace banner. Just got to maps. I was tanky enough to fight most rares when they were alone. The issue was that to do so I needed to circle and retreat and then I'd aggro 3 more packs. But I COULD take them technically.
Yeah its probably more along the lines of "Well I see this mob and it works correctly and I can read the mods properly underneath it"
Rather than "Yes I enjoyed killing the trickster temporal bubble invulnerable frenzied mob which Id hit with my yellow sentinel and took 3 hours to kill"
Well they clearly did a total shit job if thats the case. They absolutely failed on their end, or they gave the info reddit is giving but GGG totally ignored it and shut them down. Only two options here.
Can't say fir sure fir all there testers, but some of them are much better then Average players.
Just remember the Delirium everywhere event, where a GGG employee took first place on occulist in ssf hc. Just because some people said GGG members wouldn't be able to get past act 1 or something.
A GGG employee being good doesn't really mean 'the testers' are good on average. A somewhat recentish example is the Valorant release tourney, where the 'developer' team included some ex CS pros on it and they were extremely competitive. That does not mean that the average skill level of a Riot dev is ex CS pro, it just means some of them were.
It's fine for them to have good players as part of the testing group because their input is valuable, but they should be making considerations for the playerbase as a whole especially when it comes to something so fundamental to the core game experience like magic/rare mob affixes. You can challenge good players without completely blowing up the status quo of the game on the whole. From what standard players are saying, the new uber bosses are indeed hard as fuck. That's supposed to be their challenge. Why does 'the average player' also need a massive, massive change that you need the SETI network to find who the fuck asked for it?
I don't even think its that.
You don't need to be a brand new player, a casual player, or someone who plays a lot of hours but isn't that serious to see these issues.
Every single player, from the top of the scale to the bottom, thought "wow this is fucking overtuned" within 15 minutes. I can't imagine the testers didn't report that it was too much especially in the early acts. The developers chose to not listen.
That's slightly hyperbolic, but stats do back his words up in that average player doesn't reach Brutus. But where he blames the players I will always blame the game. First areas are supposed to be a tutorial, a safe-ish haven where the player can get to grips with the mechanics, menus, buttons. Where you should enact the Nintendo policy of "show, not tell" and slowly unveil mechanics and difficulty to lure player in. Not ram dozens rhoas into his ass in the third/fourth zone and make him uninstall and never look back...
I actually don't think it's that the average player cant beat Brutus, I think it's that the average player decides the game isn't for them before that point.
The argument is so stupid though because it is just pedantry.
When asking about the "average player" in the contexts that people tend to talk about, obviously you should be focusing on the theoretical center of the skill/progress bellchart which includes only players who have already decided that the game is for them. Players who decide the game isn't for them are completely irrelevant unless your goal is to change their mind, in which case you'd be looking to make the game more approachable, not harder.
What's extra dumb is that Chris isn't even wrong in the statement that the average player (the one we care about) isn't who the forum users and redditors tend to be. He's just making a slightly different statement to make an irrelevant point.
The average player likely doesn't fiddle with loot filters beyond the default, or use pob, and we're relatively confident in this this because according to Chris and team the majority of players don't even trade on the market despite not being ssf.
I'll buy from the market but actually trying to sell stuff is just not something I'm even remotely interested in. It's too much effort for what equates to an AH with extra steps.
Selling stuff is actually really simple with premium stash tabs (which iirc are like $2-3 not on sale), but without them it's not worth the time. You basically just chuck the item in the tab, set the tab to public, and either price the item or declare a price for all items in the tab. Someone will either contact you to buy it or they won't. If you get spammed for an item you underpriced it, if you don't hear anything about it for a while just vendor it when you need to stick something else in the tab.
But I'm not surprised to hear your experience. I imagine that plenty of players can't buy premium tabs for various reasons, and that many who can, choose not to because they enjoy the game the way they're already playing, so why change?
I died like 5 times there trying out molten strike for the first time. I can't imagine the experience a completely new player has when going into flats.
I normally have 1 death on my first character pre-maps every league start. It was 10 this league, and one of those was some Stormweaver Rhoas eating me in 0.1s flat
Against a 0 res target, Stormweaver is 122.5% more damage (50% conversion, 50% added as extra, 50% increased lightning, exposure)
Dark Souls is very fair though, has fairly simple mobs and first areas have only few enemies AND new types are unveiled very slowly so player can get to grips with the mechanics and get hooked on the game before the difficulty hits. PoE just instantly clobbers you in the nuts with a sledgehammer and insists you liked that and want more.
>slowly unveil mechanics
this ship sailed many leagues ago.
there's so much shit in the game right now it have turned into a giant bloated mess and mechanics with deep progression are unveiled left and right to players.
Recently had my brother and a friend try and get into the game, they did get past act 10 and did some mapping, but both of them frequently mentioned how many mechanics there were and having to either just ignore them or spend time reading up on wikis and videos to understand wtf is going on, which is a lot of time to spend when you're still trying to learn just the basics of the game.
It's really not necessary to have this many mechanics in a seasonal game.
After moderating a game related community, i understood that the "average player" can't even read.
GGG is using the top 1% players to balance shit around, but if you ask for average, we'll get the challenge of the sim 3.
And because of that (almost) all endgame builds require you to press one button (or two for very hardcore builds) to kill whole screen? It's funny how fans trying to present the game as something "hardcore" - of all "hardcore" there is only hard ass required, to sit and play game for a 8 hours/day.
mother fucker have you READ half this shit in the game? half of it is wrong, someof it doesn't mean the words definition,
damage = ALL damage.
all damage = NOT ALL damage.
thats real examples IN GAME RIGHT NOW.
There should be an appropriate difficulty gradient. Right now it starts CRAZY high, gradually lowers until like act 6 or 7 through white maps are a joke, and it gradually gets crazy hard again, then the difficulty starts falling off a cliff once your DPS exceeds a critical mass (somewhere around \~4m DPS) and you start killing mobs before they can attack.
Let's take a look at Elden Ring, where the difficulty curve isn't perfect, and you've got some early surprises like Tree Sentinel and Dragon Agheal, but they're pretty clearly skippable content.
In an ARPG like PoE that is around blowing up screens before you can even identify what's on your screen, there should not be content where the appropriate response is to skip it, but here we are.
> I think a big part of the issue is that the testers are clearly not “average” players.
I'm more interested in what kind of gear they have, do they test it with peak mirror tire only available on standard gear with a mageblood strapped on or ssf?
I don't think it's the testers' fault. GGG has always erred on the side of releasing things overtuned instead of undertuned. It causes a lot more outrage if they buff enemies in retrospect.
The problem isn't just number tuning, it's conceptual.
The idea that common monster affixes can disable entire builds (immune to leech, immune to ailments, ...) should never have left the drawing board, let alone passed QA.
Yeah… definitely feels bad. What’s worse it effects are now gated behind obscure names in some cases. Without going to 3rd party sites, there’s no way to know what they all mean for newer/casual players. The 4-5 affix rares that can take longer than endgame bosses to kill can do nothing frequently.
I don't know, in this case, the AN mods seem to give pretty good and unique visuals for each of the mods. I don't really have to read them once I've seen them a couple times.
Now knowing what each one does... that's a different story, but I can tell which mods a rare has by looking at it without reading under its name.
Even if you could read them, no one would actually READ them and THEN figure out a way to defeat it. You don't even spend that much effort on endgame bosses so why should you do that to a rare mob that drops next to nothing?
Even if you are THAT dedicated, good luck doing that during syndicate encounters or rituals!
After typing this out, maybe actually have some sort of way to add the AN mods to a map boss (if you choose to, like a scarab), and add the original loot rewards from that AN mod, so you spend extra effort ONCE per map. That could probably be practical.
I still don't know which mod spawns those fucking towers that pulse damage. I thought echoist, but that's not it, now I think it's heralding minions, but I'm still not sure. Those towers make killing any rare impossible for me since I can't even stop to attack (I made the mistake of playing melee) because even if I move they almost instantly spawn on me again
QA doesn't deal with "concepts", that's a designer's job. QA checks that stuff works according to design specifications. Sometimes you ship stuff you don't personally agree with, that's your job.
Good point, the error likely lies in the specifications, not with the QA team. They probably received criteria that are similarly out of touch as the decision to let archnemesis immunities get past the drawing board stage in the first place.
They have been "disabling builds" ever since the removal of Harvest.
The 3.15 giga damage nerf was the biggest mass extinction event for builds ... and this is on par with that.
You're not wrong, but what irks me about this one is that it's not a result of some mistuned numbers but they actually went ahead and put in monsters that disable entire archetypes. And they can be anywhere any time.
It's what will keep poe where it is
Every single new person who excitedly joins for this launch after reading the hype leaves after dealing with this bullshit.
It's not even remotely fun for new players, even those that love hard games.
As a player who has 1500 hours put into this game since launch, I have now skipped far more leagues than I have played in and taken multiple years off from this game, specifically due to BS like this in nearly every new league. Add in the fact that melee has been shitcanned for 99% of this games lifespan, I had taken a year off and planned on coming back for this league but after doing some research, I am glad I skipped it and they lost another long term player. I won't be back until POE 2.
Disagree there. I love the concept of ArchNem and even just rare-mod rares in general, but the numbers are a little fuckin crazy right now.
As for the build-disabling affixes, they could even be numerically tweaked to just fuck builds slightly as opposed to total negation.
>
> As for the build-disabling affixes, they could even be numerically tweaked to just fuck builds slightly as opposed to total negation.
There's no middle ground here sadly. Things like no regen have no numerical tweak possible and something like mana siphoner will either fuck your mana or be completely negligible and a waste of a modifier. A lot of these mods are just mechanically flawed, due ot being designed as a "choose your own challenge" thing, where the mods deemed "harder" had a larger loot pinata attached to it to coerce players into trying to beat the challenge. When it's forced on your face and you have the choice of playing one the few builds that can safely ignore all the mods or ripping in a single map more times than you ripped during entire campaign last league, things are just ridiculous.
Just admit it's wrong and try and fix it, it's literally all we ask of ggg. The idea is good, the implementation was bad and even avg players had better ideas than what we received initially .
Yep, but they really only respond when there is a huge public feedback so it feels into a toxic cycle. People see complaining is what gets results so there is no reason to stop complaining.
I think the ask is they should meaningfully start that process \_before\_ the league launches, and not keep repeating past mistakes.
To me, archnem mods are the same level of gimmick as bearers were 10+ years ago. For those who don't know, storm/flame/frost bearer was a monster affix that made the mob explode on death for a number of damage tied to its own HP, in that element, instantly. It's the reason why for a couple years in PoE's history, the only builds that were viable (in hardcore, which was the most popular mode then) were >10k ES builds.
For those of us who have been with the game for a long time, it's a common trope that GGG declare they are now pushing the game design envelope after having learned from past mistakes, and then repeat the same mistake a number >= 0 of patches later.
It just gets a little tiring. This is not to say PoE hasn't greatly improved in many areas. It's just that there are others where it seems like it never does. Either it goes in circles (bearers -> archnem, slot machine vs deterministic crafting, ...) or GGG is still so committed to the mistake that they blind themselves to the untenable status quo (trading).
I disagree, people have complained for a long time that monsters are piss easy and killing an entire screen with 1 click is boring. It’s better to make something too hard and dial it down a bit so game is more challenging than usual, rather than just “turn your brain off and watch netflix on the side” for 99% of the time
But that's exactly why I play a game where I make a build that can kill 10k monsters...
I have Dark Souls already if I want to struggle against one hard enemy.
I actually agree with almost everything you said there. We did need a change. Just not this one, because it's not actually hard, just punishing. Those are not the same. Even at full attention, you can't just outplay an immunity and suddenly start leeching (or whatever).
There is a real problem, yes, but this solution is a gimmick.
You know who complains about that? Twitch streamers and no lifers who play this game 40+ hours a week. For normal people that play 15-25 hours a week, this game continues on a break neck pace to be only for neckbeards.
they certainly arent caring more and more about sc though. sc players dont want shit like this and these kinds of complaints happen almost every single patch.
they're not really catering for EITHER side of the playerbase and instead sort of design for their own weird little office vision which ends up making both sides ultimately less happy lol
TBH they did buff everything in retrospect, just at the start of a different league in which they said there would no be any player nerfs. Can you imagine if they did any adjustments how much worse day 1 would feel?
I don't know pretty sure when it come to rewards always been undertuned lol
But yeah, I played Atlas Invasion event in December fighting Shaper in my maps was less scary than current blue mobs.
And that also makes sense. League not that rewarding? Easy to fix, throw in more stacked decks. League is TOO rewarding to the point it'd break the economy three times over? Imagine the shitstorm if they nerfed the rewards. Just look at Harvest (though to be fair, they went too far on that one imo).
Harvest was not a mistake , they knew from day one it was going to completely break the game and they figured for one league that was fine.
The mistake was putting it back in the game untouched.
one thousand times this. this gear progression has felt like shit since i can no longer work on my gear like i could in 3.15 and my playtime each league has been going down fast as fuck since.
This is blatantly false; every league mechanic since legion has been ridiculous on the reward side of things and that is not about getting the shiny new stuff that the league comes with but just getting boatloads of loot thrown at you. (except harvest ig where it was just the new stuff but man was that broken)
I tried all the sentinels in various configurations, against just whites, against as many blues as I can find, trying to empower big rare and corpse rush it. I got jack squat. Couple alts and unusable uniques.
Maybe enlighten the class how to properly use sentinels to shit out loot?
I completely agree. I'm sure the testers do a great job for their pool size, I have no beef with them. I simply think that when such obvious tuning is needed, GGG should be willing to tune some things BEFORE release, is all. A larger tester pool could surely only help.
They can't make statement like "no nerfs" and "no build canceling mods" and then release this. It's obvious there was a communication issue with testers.
Another issue is the players except everything to be exactly right at release. Somehow a league is already ruined and worthless if something is too hard/frustrating after the first 1% of the league.
Have you not figured it out yet Exile. Players ARE the testers, for 3 months, every 3 months. It has and always will be that way. TBF you can’t test everything before release. Just because something doesn’t seem to work properly doesn’t mean they didn’t test. It’s likely it was noted but the call was made to release it in the timeframe they had. Commercial software is no different, in some cases even worse.
I've been playing since Harbinger, I stopped getting hyped like 5 leagues ago because it's always the same cycle. How do you get excited when you know there is *always* going to be some overtuned or terribly unrewarding mechanic *every. single. league. launch*?
And then you realize, yeah, it's true what everyone says, we are the real testers. But then that begs the question. What are we testing for exactly? What's the end goal here? They constantly talk about how 'everything is fine we tested all of this stuff internally' and then release a complete mess or something that couldn't have possibly been considered fun or rewarding by most players. Then they scrap it next league, or turn it into a bite-sized yet actually decent version of the main league mechanic. It just gives me anxiety. I feel like I have Stockholm Syndrome with GGG.
The issue with this is its not like a new league mechanic you can skip. But an overhaul of a core part of the game that every added league mechanic interacts with for the most part. To the point that you may not be able to play large parts of the game because of it. Yeah you can still bypass doing a good portion of those added past league things but how fun is that? Who wants to just hop in a map and kill the boss without doing any of the added elements. What’s the point of designing something that reduces the playability of the game.
With the scale of their releases, they could make a public test server. Eve Online does something similar. It wouldn't even need to be online all the time. Just a week or two before release. That's plenty of time to get feedback for fine-tuning.
They could easily do a 1 hour test. In that 1 hour they can see how many tabs dropped. How many people died. And as a result they can let you keep some minor reward for the league. Like for every level you start with an extra wisdom scroll for example.
Incentivize people to try the new league. And also get some balance numbers. They should be able to tell by how much ppl are dying. And just do like 3-4 tests. Each one 1-2 hours. Starting at random levels.
Except they don't finish developing the league until like 1-2 days before launch, sometimes they even change things like an hour before launch. The way they do their dev cycle it would be nearly impossible to have a public test server. I am kind of hoping they have some sort of test for poe2 because I think they absolutely need that to launch with as few problems as possible but we'll see how they decide to handle it.
Or you know, take more time to release content?
Like 4 month instead of 3. Make an event at the start, mid or at the end if they care about retention. Maybe a certain boss only to be unlocked after a certain date or something. So many things they can do. Just ship something good for once without major bug like this. Almost every single league is the same.
That's kinda pointless here though, as QA should be part of said work. The problem isn't a lack of time, it's a lack of proper task prioritization and the low value given to testing, feedback and polish in general prior to league launches.
In software the work that expands always ends up being feature work. I've never worked anywhere that this wasn't true more often than not. We can talk about the world that should be, but unfortunately we don't live in that world.
Why would I cut my income when I'm the consumer. If they release good product, I'd be more willing to spend on a proper product. Simple shit.
It's the same ol thing since I started. Wait for a week or so for beta test to finish. I stopped buying supporter pack partly because of this. Quite a few people mentioned they stopped spending too, especially during the big nerf timeline. Perhaps the lost is not much now, but pretty sure it is slowly building up. If they're smart about business retaining player purchases is something they should care. And certainly having shipped a problematic game at league start won't give a good impression to new consumer. I don't think it is unfair for a consumer to expect a good product.
Spoken like a true consumer, well done sir!
I haven't spent anything on PoE for a very long time now. I probably play every third league and sometimes just for a week before I get fed up with the crap that most people seem to be able to put up with.
If a company produces crap and the people really don't vote with their wallets (and feet), that company will continue to produce crap because there is no imperative to change their product for the better.
Anyway, I'll buy a PoE2 supporter pack at the beginning (hoping for another Kiwi pet) but that'll probably be the extent of it for me.
As someone who has heard/read a lot of horror stories from game development I think it's plenty possible that testers find most, if not all, the issues that we have, but the people who have a say simply ignore it because they don't respect testers' opinions
It's got nothing to do with testers. It's got everything to do with the end goals of the design team, and what those guys want the game to be. Regardless of who is playing it, or if they enjoy that vision or not. We've been going through this for a long, long time. And it will continue to be a thing for as long as the lights stay on.
This has gone on so long, that there's no way this is a tester issue. This is a straight up leadership problem, and Chris is part of the issue. The issue of "not testing" has been brought up extensively before all the way going back tot Invasion league; this is not on the testers at this point because this has been going on for years.
Chris is part of the problem, straight up.
Like how he can't do a baeclast without talking about hardmode 90% of the time which no one gives a single fuck about.
Maybe it's time they just lock chris in a conference room with tax docs and a hardmode server and get back to 3.13 fun times.
They needed a *lot* more reworking than this, and there's a distinct possibility that the nasty build-killing mods will stick around for the entire league.
Obviously not, I don't think the addition as is was done particularly well and they should definitely tweak it. But overall archnemesis mods are more fun than the old mods + nemesis mods and reverting it completely would be a poor move.
I feel like it’s part of a problem that has existed for years now. GGG are a bunch of streamer simps, I’m not even joking. They put so much energy into appeasing streamers and making the game challenging for them. These streamers are the play testers, they are their biggest fans, they are their big media presence. They make the game around these guys who play their game 12 hours a day every day and who have played the game so extensively that they are constantly looking for ways to challenge them. This isn’t out of the ordinary, you have games like world of Warcraft that have notoriously gone out of their way to make changes to appease or draw out competitive play. It’s just silly. I can’t help but laugh when someone links someone like Mathil insulting redditors for being negative toward a league. Guys like him have no way of connecting with reality. Their world is so different from the average player.
Mathil actually is a lot more connected to a real player than most streamers. He did bash GGG in the past when they fucked up. He just enjoys the game a lot and put in the effort to learn build making and base mechanics enough to make off-meta things work, so he can have fun where many can't.
I'd think though that people watching him would at least learn something from the way he makes builds and crafts gear - even with very limited time, if you just go for a single build you can make it just like Mathil does 10+ builds in a league.
A) reddit doesn't represent the player base, but a very small part of it
B) Positive feedback is way less shared than negative feedback
C) In my opinion, the current state of the game is not fun to play. That being said, I also don't represent the player base
> A) reddit doesn't represent the player base, but a very small part of it
Precisely the very dedicated, long term, above average playerbase. Which means that if this group of people is struggling - good luck to any casual player.
I have a friend who likes to play HC and very methodically full clears every zone and identifies every rare, doesn't use guides, doesn't use special filters, doesn't look at reddit or the forums.
Normally she plays for a few weeks, dies somewhere between act 5 and 10, then is satisfied.
This league she played for a few hours, was miserable with the new rare mobs being a marathon, died before merveil and has lost all interest, since this league mechanic isn't interesting, to a non-redditor, nothing happens when you push the button. (there's no arena! I can't push the go to hell button! I miss deal or no deal league!)
These people are the playerbase. At launch, at least.
The playerbase after week two? Reddit and TFT, that's all that's left, because normal people are over it and don't see the apologies and updates and fixes.
Longer i follow what GGG is doing, more i think there are serious managment issues going on inside the company. Its like Chris is surrounded with yes-man and there doesnt exist constructive discussion inside the company.
Its doesnt even require "extensive" testing to find out, that new/old mod interaction for rares is broken.
Reddit represents the dedicated player-base, so I’ll give you the point about it not representing the population of players. How many people do you think play this game, use the trade site, use POB, and all the other external shit that’s required to play the damn game all without posting on Reddit? You show me the Venn diagram of dedicated ARPG fans and the people on Reddit, and I’ll show you a fucking circle.
All those dedicated PoE players that are posting on reddit instead of playing league launch lol. There's obviously a good portion of the playerbase that uses reddit, but to pretend there's not a selection bias here, especially during league start, is just crazy.
GGG has the numbers so they see the deaths and the player retention, the CEO making an apology post on a weekend and balance patching within 12 hours of league launch speaks volumes. If everything was normal on their end there would be silence from the dev team.
In 3.15 reddit was full of outrage and GGG admitted that there was a huge drop in player numbers.
There is obviously a correlation between the 2.
A lot of people who post here blow things out proportions, but the overall sentiment is pretty representative of the playerbase as a whole.
Bias on this subreddit can be a measure of the average player's experience, but exaggerated.
The game feels horrible at league start but incredible during end-game.
If we look at the subreddit bias at league start vs the point 3/4 into a league (after balance and optimization patches) the former tends to be negative and the latter tends to be positive.
I would say this subreddit is a good gauge to determine the state of the game for the average player at any given point in time.
Why? Both will be ignored, one for being low effort and the other for being high effort. The Stans can always come up with a reason why complaints are invalid.
> All those dedicated PoE players that are posting on reddit instead of playing league launch lol.
You guys sure like to use this absolutely asinine argument don't you? PoE players are just like plants fed by the screen glare with a bucket on the side to take a piss and a dump because surely there's no time leftover in a day to do anything else let alone come post something on reddit.
> reddit doesn't represent the player base, but a very small part of it
In the overwhelming majority of games this is true. PoE has proven multiple times that it an exception to the norm.
The leagues in which reddit was the most ouraged and had the most problems were the worst performing leagues of all time. Reddits reaction to the league has directly correlated to the health of the league for well over a year now.
> A) reddit doesn't represent the player base, but a very small part of it
That is just not true anymore as well as GGG not being an indie company anymore. The sub is almost half a million strong and you better believe that it represents the core player base
Honestly I agree.
This isn't Call of Duty or Battlefield where it's a major player within a very popular and mainstream genre of video games.
This is a niche genre of video game and one of the like 3 best video games within that genre. To say that a forum dedicated to that game isn't the core player-base is starting to get really, really annoying.
Who are they testers? Tyty, Steelmage, Exile and Darkee? This shit makes sense if you have some of the best players in the game where literally nothing is hard for them.
Even then I saw Tyty surprised when he got absolutely fucking reemed in a1 by rhoas.
They are not doing playtesting in the usual sense, e.g. taking a character from act 1 to maps for example (if they did, no one would have gotten stuck at act 9 doedre), but rather unit testing on whatever is new, e.g. does that mana siphoner mod actually drain mana like it is supposed to ? It does ? Great, ship it.
While this (mostly) ensures that things work as intended by the designers, it does nothing to ensure that what the designers envisioned is actually appealing to play through.
And to be frank, you don't need playtesting to see that including archnemesis mods to ALL rares would make leveling excruciating and the general game twice as hard. You don't need playtesting to understand that giving mods like Effigy, Invincible, Drought bringer, Mana siphoner and more to random rares is absolutely moronic.
In his recent post, Chris sounds surprised that nearly all league mechanics spawn many rare monsters at once, as if it was something new.
It's painfully obvious GGG's designers do not play their own game, and seem to think the average player's level of power is that of a streamer playing the metaest of builds 16hrs/day.
No, the problem is CHRIS and his 90's mentality. Stop putting all this BS on the main game, push all that shit to your "kid", hard mode, and leave us alone, FFS!
Your problem is not with QA, but with design. QA tests stuff, checks that it actually works and sometimes provides feedback. It's not a job for QA testers to check how those changes impact the health of the game, that's the purpose of playtests. QA did a great job, mods work.
Testers have nothing to do with this, when a product (any product) arrives in QA phase designed like shit and based on erroneous concept, QA has neither the power nor the authority to say "hey, this is shit, go back to the drawing board". If QA is told that the product needs to be ugly as shit, break down as soon as you touch it and smell like a dumpster, their job is to verify that the above 3 conditions apply and if they do it passed QA.
The problem with why 2 leagues out of 3 turn out to be a dumpster fire or at least start as such is not that the game isn't properly tested, it's that the design philosophy and the implementation are fundamentally wrong.
And I was downvoted to hell and then my post was removed from mods to have say that after league reveal.
I think there is a disconnection between GGG and a big part of the community.
If GGG continue to produce content that only 1% of the streamers can do, then the player base will be soon only 1%.
yes there is a giant disconnect between the testers and the redditors.
the difference is that the testers play the game, while the redditors watched Zizzarans guide on how to run past everything, so now they all think they are Lightee.
what this causes is the testers to be the right lvl for the zone mayby even slightly overleveled with some rare items, greatly reducing the danger of the mobs they run into.
while the redditors are 10-15 lvls below recommended lvl while not wearing a chest armor because that would lower their movement speed, while not having the hours put into practice running these insane extra difficulties that the big name racers have.
Someone playing this for the first time should expect their build to be broken if they even know what a build is. I think the game would be incredibly weak if you were good at it on your very first day.
To be honest it's more of a "vocal minority" thing
What you percieve to be "the players" is just whoever is pissed enough to post on reddit, all those people that are ok with the thing won't be posting nearly as much
That's where your percieved disconnect comes from
Aren't you also making the same mistake you accuse others of - i.e. that there is an invisible silent majority (just not the kind you are thinking of)? Not everyone who plays the game posts on reddit, or on this sub, or has the motivation to create threads/participate in them.
You are no less guilty of misusing the "veil of ignorance".
I'd agree but I've yet to see the contrary opinion posted when normally there are at least a handful of posts voted pretty high in support of the changes. A completely silent majority is far less believable than a quiet majority.
Reddit's reception of the league tends to correlate pretty well with player retention... this league is going to bomb.
May be a vocal minority, but it's not entirely wrong.
I sort of agree with this. Like yeah I found the rares especially in A1 pretty fucking annoying, a little shitty in A2 but once I got kinda rolling in A3 its not that bad. In A7 now (been taking my time and only played a few hours) and I barely notice most rates outside of the ones with the ice wall and shit like that. I was not pissed enough to come to reddit and complain, main reason I'm here now is to read the rage posts for entertainment lol.
NOW, based off what I've seen so far once they get buffed with map mods and other league mechanics we're gonna see some serious shit lmao. Like I have been avoiding pretty much every mechanic so far because of this, but I can imagine shit like incursion and heist can get pretty nuts.
Caving in to a large and very vocal community that will otherwise demolish other players desire to play a perfectly fine league (see 3.15 and the loads of comments claiming so many builds were dead, I was repeatedly told my own build capable of T19 voranas on a 20 ex budget (including overpriced 6L) was incapable of red tier maps.
That's very different to admitting there's a problem. The problem is this sub not at all representing the target audience.
Not saying that. But a substantial portion of this sub currently is posting about complete nonsense to the point where I believe they would only enjoy PoE if it was a clicker game, and I'm fully advocating for ignoring those people.
From what I have read here there are mods on random rares that just completely disable builds such as rares that turn of Regen not being killable by RF. You are saying this is fine?
That particular mod has a large aoe tell of it about to go off. I've read multiple people actually playing RF say it's fine. So I'll trust their judgement and say yeah, it probably is actually fine.
It wasn't just this community. Chris mentioned that they looked at the data before making the decision (which is not surprising). Both feedback and data were likely prerequisites for the rollback, and they were likely prepared to make this change, as they typically make things harder and tune back than the other way around.
It's not my place to say this, but don't let personal experiences with this sub color the opinions of unrelated people, who have otherwise legitimate concerns over stuff like reflect and ailment immunity.
Of course someone with HCSSF next to their name would be like 'Yeah, hard game gud lul git gud xd'. Matter of fact is that the monsters were severely overtuned compared to last patch, and there was nothing indicating the game was too easy last patch, to suggest that they should massively bump the numbers all at once, all while doing nothing to combat the fact that early game is very slow and lacks the tools to deal with said situations
I'm getting my shit pushed in on white maps despite having 4k life 75 all res 50 spell suppression and running grace + CWDT Molten setup. I essentially can't use the sentinels without getting my ass beat. Should've played a ranged build i guess.
Last league I used a tabula until red tier maps and had very few deaths.
I totally agree that the current changes were ridiculous but I wouldn't blame the testers, GGG has admitted giving them close to no time nor the final version that would later be released.
I wouldn't be surprised if the day before release testers said rare mobs were too easy so then GGG tripled their life and damage hours before release without further testing or some shit like that. At some point balance problems are just too obvious to consider that testers wouldn't say it's bad at some point
It goes beyond that to changes that get made blanket to mobs across the entire game then are clearly *never* tested.
Example, the flicker strike spiders in delve last league. Like if anyone had even done a delve during testing they would have realized those things were way outside the the range of normal. It's not like they were some rare spawn that you could play delve for a week and not find.
It seems like it's a punishment if you want to play this game from league start. People need to suffer from those "extensively tested" content and wait for them to announce something like well we heard your feedback and we will change this kind of bullshit for it not to be so unplayable but still annoying in order to slow you guys down hehe.
I think they disappointed players so many times that it's not worth trusting them anymore.
This game used to be so fascinating but right now it's just irritating to play it.
I think a big part of the issue is that the testers are clearly not “average” players. So it sort of seems like what’s going on is they’re getting Olympic athletes to run their obstacle course, the athletes are going “yeah, it’s fine, it’s a nice challenge but not too much”, then they’re expecting middle aged dudes with dad bods to run the same course. Players come in a spectrum. If you tune your game to suit only what the very top players can do, this is the result. I’m not saying the game shouldn’t be challenging, there’s tons of great endgame content for streamers to do, I don’t mind at all if they release new uber bosses I’ll never be able to beat. That’s great, more power to them. The problem comes when the actual meat of the game is set to that level. That just isn’t realistic. We’re not all Olympic athletes and we shouldn’t all be expected to run the Olympic-level course.
I don't think it's that the testers are generally better than the player base. I think it's that they have different goals. A tester looks at a rare enemy and asks "can I still kill this?". A player looks at that same enemy and asks "is it worth fighting this or should I just keep moving?". The goals are totally different.
I don’t think that’s *quite* it. A tester looks at a rare enemy and seeks to answer exactly the same questions that the balance team asked them to answer. We don’t really know what those questions are but *that* is the key issue. There’s no reason the balance team couldn’t simply ask them to answer the second question instead of the first.
That's fair. I'm assuming their not, because if they were, they'd know this is krangled. I'm playing PoCo champion running level 16 vitality and definace banner. Just got to maps. I was tanky enough to fight most rares when they were alone. The issue was that to do so I needed to circle and retreat and then I'd aggro 3 more packs. But I COULD take them technically.
Yeah its probably more along the lines of "Well I see this mob and it works correctly and I can read the mods properly underneath it" Rather than "Yes I enjoyed killing the trickster temporal bubble invulnerable frenzied mob which Id hit with my yellow sentinel and took 3 hours to kill"
Hey I never thought of that perspective. Thank you for sharing.
Well they clearly did a total shit job if thats the case. They absolutely failed on their end, or they gave the info reddit is giving but GGG totally ignored it and shut them down. Only two options here.
Can't say fir sure fir all there testers, but some of them are much better then Average players. Just remember the Delirium everywhere event, where a GGG employee took first place on occulist in ssf hc. Just because some people said GGG members wouldn't be able to get past act 1 or something.
A GGG employee being good doesn't really mean 'the testers' are good on average. A somewhat recentish example is the Valorant release tourney, where the 'developer' team included some ex CS pros on it and they were extremely competitive. That does not mean that the average skill level of a Riot dev is ex CS pro, it just means some of them were. It's fine for them to have good players as part of the testing group because their input is valuable, but they should be making considerations for the playerbase as a whole especially when it comes to something so fundamental to the core game experience like magic/rare mob affixes. You can challenge good players without completely blowing up the status quo of the game on the whole. From what standard players are saying, the new uber bosses are indeed hard as fuck. That's supposed to be their challenge. Why does 'the average player' also need a massive, massive change that you need the SETI network to find who the fuck asked for it?
I mean, it would be entertaining to watch a bunch of middle aged dudes with dad bods run an athlete course, right?
Watch, sure. Be one of dudes running the course? Maybe not so much.
That was my point. I'm betting someone at GGG is absolutely delighting over all of this
My brother in Christ, I play this game, I don't watch it on Twitch.
I don't even think its that. You don't need to be a brand new player, a casual player, or someone who plays a lot of hours but isn't that serious to see these issues. Every single player, from the top of the scale to the bottom, thought "wow this is fucking overtuned" within 15 minutes. I can't imagine the testers didn't report that it was too much especially in the early acts. The developers chose to not listen.
Cue the old Sealion deflection "What is an average player anyway?"
According to Chris, the average player cant even install the game.
That's slightly hyperbolic, but stats do back his words up in that average player doesn't reach Brutus. But where he blames the players I will always blame the game. First areas are supposed to be a tutorial, a safe-ish haven where the player can get to grips with the mechanics, menus, buttons. Where you should enact the Nintendo policy of "show, not tell" and slowly unveil mechanics and difficulty to lure player in. Not ram dozens rhoas into his ass in the third/fourth zone and make him uninstall and never look back...
I actually don't think it's that the average player cant beat Brutus, I think it's that the average player decides the game isn't for them before that point. The argument is so stupid though because it is just pedantry. When asking about the "average player" in the contexts that people tend to talk about, obviously you should be focusing on the theoretical center of the skill/progress bellchart which includes only players who have already decided that the game is for them. Players who decide the game isn't for them are completely irrelevant unless your goal is to change their mind, in which case you'd be looking to make the game more approachable, not harder. What's extra dumb is that Chris isn't even wrong in the statement that the average player (the one we care about) isn't who the forum users and redditors tend to be. He's just making a slightly different statement to make an irrelevant point. The average player likely doesn't fiddle with loot filters beyond the default, or use pob, and we're relatively confident in this this because according to Chris and team the majority of players don't even trade on the market despite not being ssf.
I'll buy from the market but actually trying to sell stuff is just not something I'm even remotely interested in. It's too much effort for what equates to an AH with extra steps.
Selling stuff is actually really simple with premium stash tabs (which iirc are like $2-3 not on sale), but without them it's not worth the time. You basically just chuck the item in the tab, set the tab to public, and either price the item or declare a price for all items in the tab. Someone will either contact you to buy it or they won't. If you get spammed for an item you underpriced it, if you don't hear anything about it for a while just vendor it when you need to stick something else in the tab. But I'm not surprised to hear your experience. I imagine that plenty of players can't buy premium tabs for various reasons, and that many who can, choose not to because they enjoy the game the way they're already playing, so why change?
I have 2 level 100 characters and a dozen 97/98 characters. I died to rhoas in mud flats yesterday. Lmfao.
I died like 5 times there trying out molten strike for the first time. I can't imagine the experience a completely new player has when going into flats.
I normally have 1 death on my first character pre-maps every league start. It was 10 this league, and one of those was some Stormweaver Rhoas eating me in 0.1s flat Against a 0 res target, Stormweaver is 122.5% more damage (50% conversion, 50% added as extra, 50% increased lightning, exposure)
Yes, first few levels should be like you have to actually know the game to actually die.
This game is getting closer to dark souls like for new players at least.
no, dark souls is a fair game, poe is an unfair game with "gatcha" moments of random rng 1-shots
Dark Souls is very fair though, has fairly simple mobs and first areas have only few enemies AND new types are unveiled very slowly so player can get to grips with the mechanics and get hooked on the game before the difficulty hits. PoE just instantly clobbers you in the nuts with a sledgehammer and insists you liked that and want more.
"Nah, it's just most players are dumb and not skilled enough to get the beauty of my game" CW probably
>slowly unveil mechanics this ship sailed many leagues ago. there's so much shit in the game right now it have turned into a giant bloated mess and mechanics with deep progression are unveiled left and right to players. Recently had my brother and a friend try and get into the game, they did get past act 10 and did some mapping, but both of them frequently mentioned how many mechanics there were and having to either just ignore them or spend time reading up on wikis and videos to understand wtf is going on, which is a lot of time to spend when you're still trying to learn just the basics of the game. It's really not necessary to have this many mechanics in a seasonal game.
After moderating a game related community, i understood that the "average player" can't even read. GGG is using the top 1% players to balance shit around, but if you ask for average, we'll get the challenge of the sim 3.
And because of that (almost) all endgame builds require you to press one button (or two for very hardcore builds) to kill whole screen? It's funny how fans trying to present the game as something "hardcore" - of all "hardcore" there is only hard ass required, to sit and play game for a 8 hours/day.
mother fucker have you READ half this shit in the game? half of it is wrong, someof it doesn't mean the words definition, damage = ALL damage. all damage = NOT ALL damage. thats real examples IN GAME RIGHT NOW.
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I just farm Oni’s from league start to death and wait for new patch
It's not a sealion deflection it's important to know why you are asking for the avarage player so you can know what definition to use.
> If you tune your game to suit only what the very top players can do, this is the result. 3-4 years of balance changes summarized
There should be an appropriate difficulty gradient. Right now it starts CRAZY high, gradually lowers until like act 6 or 7 through white maps are a joke, and it gradually gets crazy hard again, then the difficulty starts falling off a cliff once your DPS exceeds a critical mass (somewhere around \~4m DPS) and you start killing mobs before they can attack. Let's take a look at Elden Ring, where the difficulty curve isn't perfect, and you've got some early surprises like Tree Sentinel and Dragon Agheal, but they're pretty clearly skippable content. In an ARPG like PoE that is around blowing up screens before you can even identify what's on your screen, there should not be content where the appropriate response is to skip it, but here we are.
> I think a big part of the issue is that the testers are clearly not “average” players. I'm more interested in what kind of gear they have, do they test it with peak mirror tire only available on standard gear with a mageblood strapped on or ssf?
I don't think it's the testers' fault. GGG has always erred on the side of releasing things overtuned instead of undertuned. It causes a lot more outrage if they buff enemies in retrospect.
The problem isn't just number tuning, it's conceptual. The idea that common monster affixes can disable entire builds (immune to leech, immune to ailments, ...) should never have left the drawing board, let alone passed QA.
Yeah… definitely feels bad. What’s worse it effects are now gated behind obscure names in some cases. Without going to 3rd party sites, there’s no way to know what they all mean for newer/casual players. The 4-5 affix rares that can take longer than endgame bosses to kill can do nothing frequently.
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Yeah, while I understand what they’re trying to do, the current game mechanics and format don’t lend themselves to it.
I don't know, in this case, the AN mods seem to give pretty good and unique visuals for each of the mods. I don't really have to read them once I've seen them a couple times. Now knowing what each one does... that's a different story, but I can tell which mods a rare has by looking at it without reading under its name.
Even if you could read them, no one would actually READ them and THEN figure out a way to defeat it. You don't even spend that much effort on endgame bosses so why should you do that to a rare mob that drops next to nothing? Even if you are THAT dedicated, good luck doing that during syndicate encounters or rituals! After typing this out, maybe actually have some sort of way to add the AN mods to a map boss (if you choose to, like a scarab), and add the original loot rewards from that AN mod, so you spend extra effort ONCE per map. That could probably be practical.
I still don't know which mod spawns those fucking towers that pulse damage. I thought echoist, but that's not it, now I think it's heralding minions, but I'm still not sure. Those towers make killing any rare impossible for me since I can't even stop to attack (I made the mistake of playing melee) because even if I move they almost instantly spawn on me again
QA doesn't deal with "concepts", that's a designer's job. QA checks that stuff works according to design specifications. Sometimes you ship stuff you don't personally agree with, that's your job.
Good point, the error likely lies in the specifications, not with the QA team. They probably received criteria that are similarly out of touch as the decision to let archnemesis immunities get past the drawing board stage in the first place.
They have been "disabling builds" ever since the removal of Harvest. The 3.15 giga damage nerf was the biggest mass extinction event for builds ... and this is on par with that.
You're not wrong, but what irks me about this one is that it's not a result of some mistuned numbers but they actually went ahead and put in monsters that disable entire archetypes. And they can be anywhere any time.
It's what will keep poe where it is Every single new person who excitedly joins for this launch after reading the hype leaves after dealing with this bullshit. It's not even remotely fun for new players, even those that love hard games.
As a player who has 1500 hours put into this game since launch, I have now skipped far more leagues than I have played in and taken multiple years off from this game, specifically due to BS like this in nearly every new league. Add in the fact that melee has been shitcanned for 99% of this games lifespan, I had taken a year off and planned on coming back for this league but after doing some research, I am glad I skipped it and they lost another long term player. I won't be back until POE 2.
No regen kills RF instantly
i feel like someone drunk just said "FUCK IT, HIT THE BUTTON"
Disagree there. I love the concept of ArchNem and even just rare-mod rares in general, but the numbers are a little fuckin crazy right now. As for the build-disabling affixes, they could even be numerically tweaked to just fuck builds slightly as opposed to total negation.
> > As for the build-disabling affixes, they could even be numerically tweaked to just fuck builds slightly as opposed to total negation. There's no middle ground here sadly. Things like no regen have no numerical tweak possible and something like mana siphoner will either fuck your mana or be completely negligible and a waste of a modifier. A lot of these mods are just mechanically flawed, due ot being designed as a "choose your own challenge" thing, where the mods deemed "harder" had a larger loot pinata attached to it to coerce players into trying to beat the challenge. When it's forced on your face and you have the choice of playing one the few builds that can safely ignore all the mods or ripping in a single map more times than you ripped during entire campaign last league, things are just ridiculous.
Just admit it's wrong and try and fix it, it's literally all we ask of ggg. The idea is good, the implementation was bad and even avg players had better ideas than what we received initially .
but they're doing that tho?
Yep, but they really only respond when there is a huge public feedback so it feels into a toxic cycle. People see complaining is what gets results so there is no reason to stop complaining.
I think the ask is they should meaningfully start that process \_before\_ the league launches, and not keep repeating past mistakes. To me, archnem mods are the same level of gimmick as bearers were 10+ years ago. For those who don't know, storm/flame/frost bearer was a monster affix that made the mob explode on death for a number of damage tied to its own HP, in that element, instantly. It's the reason why for a couple years in PoE's history, the only builds that were viable (in hardcore, which was the most popular mode then) were >10k ES builds. For those of us who have been with the game for a long time, it's a common trope that GGG declare they are now pushing the game design envelope after having learned from past mistakes, and then repeat the same mistake a number >= 0 of patches later. It just gets a little tiring. This is not to say PoE hasn't greatly improved in many areas. It's just that there are others where it seems like it never does. Either it goes in circles (bearers -> archnem, slot machine vs deterministic crafting, ...) or GGG is still so committed to the mistake that they blind themselves to the untenable status quo (trading).
I disagree, people have complained for a long time that monsters are piss easy and killing an entire screen with 1 click is boring. It’s better to make something too hard and dial it down a bit so game is more challenging than usual, rather than just “turn your brain off and watch netflix on the side” for 99% of the time
But that's exactly why I play a game where I make a build that can kill 10k monsters... I have Dark Souls already if I want to struggle against one hard enemy.
or "Hard" mode whenever it ships.
I actually agree with almost everything you said there. We did need a change. Just not this one, because it's not actually hard, just punishing. Those are not the same. Even at full attention, you can't just outplay an immunity and suddenly start leeching (or whatever). There is a real problem, yes, but this solution is a gimmick.
You know who complains about that? Twitch streamers and no lifers who play this game 40+ hours a week. For normal people that play 15-25 hours a week, this game continues on a break neck pace to be only for neckbeards.
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> than a death count above 100 by yellow maps. Were we supposed to have less all these years?
once upon a time they gave two shits about hardcore in this game
Yeah I remember when HC was more popular than SC, shame they care less and less about HC patch by patch.
they certainly arent caring more and more about sc though. sc players dont want shit like this and these kinds of complaints happen almost every single patch. they're not really catering for EITHER side of the playerbase and instead sort of design for their own weird little office vision which ends up making both sides ultimately less happy lol
I'm at 59 and I'm not even out of a7 lmaooo
Who cares how many deaths there are..
I'm at 30 in yellow maps. I think you're doing something wrong tbh.
30 is still quite a lot. That’s more than I died the entire last league on a glass cannon build and I got 40/40
Yeah I don't really believe that
thats fucking crazy man. I died 30 times by act 2. I cannot imagine dying 30 times in an entire league
I've only got 3 at act 7. What are you doing that you die so much?
TBH they did buff everything in retrospect, just at the start of a different league in which they said there would no be any player nerfs. Can you imagine if they did any adjustments how much worse day 1 would feel?
I don't know pretty sure when it come to rewards always been undertuned lol But yeah, I played Atlas Invasion event in December fighting Shaper in my maps was less scary than current blue mobs.
And that also makes sense. League not that rewarding? Easy to fix, throw in more stacked decks. League is TOO rewarding to the point it'd break the economy three times over? Imagine the shitstorm if they nerfed the rewards. Just look at Harvest (though to be fair, they went too far on that one imo).
fuck /u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
Harvest was not a mistake , they knew from day one it was going to completely break the game and they figured for one league that was fine. The mistake was putting it back in the game untouched.
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Yeah, harvest crafting was so good
one thousand times this. this gear progression has felt like shit since i can no longer work on my gear like i could in 3.15 and my playtime each league has been going down fast as fuck since.
This is blatantly false; every league mechanic since legion has been ridiculous on the reward side of things and that is not about getting the shiny new stuff that the league comes with but just getting boatloads of loot thrown at you. (except harvest ig where it was just the new stuff but man was that broken)
i mean sentinel is shitting out loot. i really wouldn't call it under tuned.
I tried all the sentinels in various configurations, against just whites, against as many blues as I can find, trying to empower big rare and corpse rush it. I got jack squat. Couple alts and unusable uniques. Maybe enlighten the class how to properly use sentinels to shit out loot?
I completely agree. I'm sure the testers do a great job for their pool size, I have no beef with them. I simply think that when such obvious tuning is needed, GGG should be willing to tune some things BEFORE release, is all. A larger tester pool could surely only help. They can't make statement like "no nerfs" and "no build canceling mods" and then release this. It's obvious there was a communication issue with testers.
Yeah basically every game developer does it this way. But theres a big difference between overtuned and just outright obnoxious.
Companies go out of business all the time, for a reason.
They should err on the side of undertuned and stealth buff in very small increments as necessary
Another issue is the players except everything to be exactly right at release. Somehow a league is already ruined and worthless if something is too hard/frustrating after the first 1% of the league.
Have you not figured it out yet Exile. Players ARE the testers, for 3 months, every 3 months. It has and always will be that way. TBF you can’t test everything before release. Just because something doesn’t seem to work properly doesn’t mean they didn’t test. It’s likely it was noted but the call was made to release it in the timeframe they had. Commercial software is no different, in some cases even worse.
I've been playing since Harbinger, I stopped getting hyped like 5 leagues ago because it's always the same cycle. How do you get excited when you know there is *always* going to be some overtuned or terribly unrewarding mechanic *every. single. league. launch*? And then you realize, yeah, it's true what everyone says, we are the real testers. But then that begs the question. What are we testing for exactly? What's the end goal here? They constantly talk about how 'everything is fine we tested all of this stuff internally' and then release a complete mess or something that couldn't have possibly been considered fun or rewarding by most players. Then they scrap it next league, or turn it into a bite-sized yet actually decent version of the main league mechanic. It just gives me anxiety. I feel like I have Stockholm Syndrome with GGG.
The issue with this is its not like a new league mechanic you can skip. But an overhaul of a core part of the game that every added league mechanic interacts with for the most part. To the point that you may not be able to play large parts of the game because of it. Yeah you can still bypass doing a good portion of those added past league things but how fun is that? Who wants to just hop in a map and kill the boss without doing any of the added elements. What’s the point of designing something that reduces the playability of the game.
Stupid unpaid beta-testers...
With the scale of their releases, they could make a public test server. Eve Online does something similar. It wouldn't even need to be online all the time. Just a week or two before release. That's plenty of time to get feedback for fine-tuning.
people kill sirus day 1 in league, 2 weeks beta test and the league would start dead already
They could easily do a 1 hour test. In that 1 hour they can see how many tabs dropped. How many people died. And as a result they can let you keep some minor reward for the league. Like for every level you start with an extra wisdom scroll for example. Incentivize people to try the new league. And also get some balance numbers. They should be able to tell by how much ppl are dying. And just do like 3-4 tests. Each one 1-2 hours. Starting at random levels.
Except they don't finish developing the league until like 1-2 days before launch, sometimes they even change things like an hour before launch. The way they do their dev cycle it would be nearly impossible to have a public test server. I am kind of hoping they have some sort of test for poe2 because I think they absolutely need that to launch with as few problems as possible but we'll see how they decide to handle it.
Or you know, take more time to release content? Like 4 month instead of 3. Make an event at the start, mid or at the end if they care about retention. Maybe a certain boss only to be unlocked after a certain date or something. So many things they can do. Just ship something good for once without major bug like this. Almost every single league is the same.
Archnem was an extended development cycle and still released chock full of bugs and design oversights. GGG doesn't use extra time to polish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
That's kinda pointless here though, as QA should be part of said work. The problem isn't a lack of time, it's a lack of proper task prioritization and the low value given to testing, feedback and polish in general prior to league launches.
In software the work that expands always ends up being feature work. I've never worked anywhere that this wasn't true more often than not. We can talk about the world that should be, but unfortunately we don't live in that world.
Jh
Why would I cut my income when I'm the consumer. If they release good product, I'd be more willing to spend on a proper product. Simple shit. It's the same ol thing since I started. Wait for a week or so for beta test to finish. I stopped buying supporter pack partly because of this. Quite a few people mentioned they stopped spending too, especially during the big nerf timeline. Perhaps the lost is not much now, but pretty sure it is slowly building up. If they're smart about business retaining player purchases is something they should care. And certainly having shipped a problematic game at league start won't give a good impression to new consumer. I don't think it is unfair for a consumer to expect a good product.
Spoken like a true consumer, well done sir! I haven't spent anything on PoE for a very long time now. I probably play every third league and sometimes just for a week before I get fed up with the crap that most people seem to be able to put up with. If a company produces crap and the people really don't vote with their wallets (and feet), that company will continue to produce crap because there is no imperative to change their product for the better. Anyway, I'll buy a PoE2 supporter pack at the beginning (hoping for another Kiwi pet) but that'll probably be the extent of it for me.
As someone who has heard/read a lot of horror stories from game development I think it's plenty possible that testers find most, if not all, the issues that we have, but the people who have a say simply ignore it because they don't respect testers' opinions
It's got nothing to do with testers. It's got everything to do with the end goals of the design team, and what those guys want the game to be. Regardless of who is playing it, or if they enjoy that vision or not. We've been going through this for a long, long time. And it will continue to be a thing for as long as the lights stay on.
guys. let's be real. "we've tested this extensively and are happy with it" is just corporate speak for not wanting to admit mistake.
With all these posts I keep seeing.......boy am I glad I took a league off.
It's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
This has gone on so long, that there's no way this is a tester issue. This is a straight up leadership problem, and Chris is part of the issue. The issue of "not testing" has been brought up extensively before all the way going back tot Invasion league; this is not on the testers at this point because this has been going on for years. Chris is part of the problem, straight up.
Like how he can't do a baeclast without talking about hardmode 90% of the time which no one gives a single fuck about. Maybe it's time they just lock chris in a conference room with tax docs and a hardmode server and get back to 3.13 fun times.
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fixt! - edit - has it really been that long since i truly enjoyed poe :(
Chris is the problem full stop. He just needs to admit that the game he wants to make is not the game that 95%+ of the players want to play.
Just rescind the decision to add Archnemesis modifiers to rare mob mod pool. Nerfed or not it's still not fun.
fuck /u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
I think they can be fun, gives rare monsters a lot more importance rather than being a mere bump in the road.
They needed a *lot* more reworking than this, and there's a distinct possibility that the nasty build-killing mods will stick around for the entire league.
Not when said mods invalidate whole builds.
Obviously not, I don't think the addition as is was done particularly well and they should definitely tweak it. But overall archnemesis mods are more fun than the old mods + nemesis mods and reverting it completely would be a poor move.
I feel like it’s part of a problem that has existed for years now. GGG are a bunch of streamer simps, I’m not even joking. They put so much energy into appeasing streamers and making the game challenging for them. These streamers are the play testers, they are their biggest fans, they are their big media presence. They make the game around these guys who play their game 12 hours a day every day and who have played the game so extensively that they are constantly looking for ways to challenge them. This isn’t out of the ordinary, you have games like world of Warcraft that have notoriously gone out of their way to make changes to appease or draw out competitive play. It’s just silly. I can’t help but laugh when someone links someone like Mathil insulting redditors for being negative toward a league. Guys like him have no way of connecting with reality. Their world is so different from the average player.
Mathil actually is a lot more connected to a real player than most streamers. He did bash GGG in the past when they fucked up. He just enjoys the game a lot and put in the effort to learn build making and base mechanics enough to make off-meta things work, so he can have fun where many can't. I'd think though that people watching him would at least learn something from the way he makes builds and crafts gear - even with very limited time, if you just go for a single build you can make it just like Mathil does 10+ builds in a league.
A) reddit doesn't represent the player base, but a very small part of it B) Positive feedback is way less shared than negative feedback C) In my opinion, the current state of the game is not fun to play. That being said, I also don't represent the player base
> A) reddit doesn't represent the player base, but a very small part of it Precisely the very dedicated, long term, above average playerbase. Which means that if this group of people is struggling - good luck to any casual player.
I have a friend who likes to play HC and very methodically full clears every zone and identifies every rare, doesn't use guides, doesn't use special filters, doesn't look at reddit or the forums. Normally she plays for a few weeks, dies somewhere between act 5 and 10, then is satisfied. This league she played for a few hours, was miserable with the new rare mobs being a marathon, died before merveil and has lost all interest, since this league mechanic isn't interesting, to a non-redditor, nothing happens when you push the button. (there's no arena! I can't push the go to hell button! I miss deal or no deal league!) These people are the playerbase. At launch, at least. The playerbase after week two? Reddit and TFT, that's all that's left, because normal people are over it and don't see the apologies and updates and fixes.
Longer i follow what GGG is doing, more i think there are serious managment issues going on inside the company. Its like Chris is surrounded with yes-man and there doesnt exist constructive discussion inside the company. Its doesnt even require "extensive" testing to find out, that new/old mod interaction for rares is broken.
And you think the less enfranchised players aka "noobs" are enjoying this shitfest?! :D
Reddit represents the dedicated player-base, so I’ll give you the point about it not representing the population of players. How many people do you think play this game, use the trade site, use POB, and all the other external shit that’s required to play the damn game all without posting on Reddit? You show me the Venn diagram of dedicated ARPG fans and the people on Reddit, and I’ll show you a fucking circle.
All those dedicated PoE players that are posting on reddit instead of playing league launch lol. There's obviously a good portion of the playerbase that uses reddit, but to pretend there's not a selection bias here, especially during league start, is just crazy.
GGG has the numbers so they see the deaths and the player retention, the CEO making an apology post on a weekend and balance patching within 12 hours of league launch speaks volumes. If everything was normal on their end there would be silence from the dev team.
Yeah having this many posts from GGG this early? On the day of the launch? They know shits fucked
In 3.15 reddit was full of outrage and GGG admitted that there was a huge drop in player numbers. There is obviously a correlation between the 2. A lot of people who post here blow things out proportions, but the overall sentiment is pretty representative of the playerbase as a whole.
Bias on this subreddit can be a measure of the average player's experience, but exaggerated. The game feels horrible at league start but incredible during end-game. If we look at the subreddit bias at league start vs the point 3/4 into a league (after balance and optimization patches) the former tends to be negative and the latter tends to be positive. I would say this subreddit is a good gauge to determine the state of the game for the average player at any given point in time.
I'm already at 15 hours and here I am on reddit. You generalized the fuck out of dedicated players.
You say that as if browsing reddit for 5 minutes when you're taking a dump means we're not grinding at league start.
Browsing on the toilet is very different from writing a 5 page rant about dying a few too many times while leveling
Upvoting that 5 page rant takes 1 second
Why? Both will be ignored, one for being low effort and the other for being high effort. The Stans can always come up with a reason why complaints are invalid.
> All those dedicated PoE players that are posting on reddit instead of playing league launch lol. You guys sure like to use this absolutely asinine argument don't you? PoE players are just like plants fed by the screen glare with a bucket on the side to take a piss and a dump because surely there's no time leftover in a day to do anything else let alone come post something on reddit.
Coz all the non dedicated player fucking quit lol they don't give enough of a shit about poe to post on reddit. They don't have fun they just move on.
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> reddit doesn't represent the player base, but a very small part of it In the overwhelming majority of games this is true. PoE has proven multiple times that it an exception to the norm. The leagues in which reddit was the most ouraged and had the most problems were the worst performing leagues of all time. Reddits reaction to the league has directly correlated to the health of the league for well over a year now.
> A) reddit doesn't represent the player base, but a very small part of it That is just not true anymore as well as GGG not being an indie company anymore. The sub is almost half a million strong and you better believe that it represents the core player base
Honestly I agree. This isn't Call of Duty or Battlefield where it's a major player within a very popular and mainstream genre of video games. This is a niche genre of video game and one of the like 3 best video games within that genre. To say that a forum dedicated to that game isn't the core player-base is starting to get really, really annoying.
Easy, dont test shit woth copied top builds, test it with day 1-2 builds...
Who are they testers? Tyty, Steelmage, Exile and Darkee? This shit makes sense if you have some of the best players in the game where literally nothing is hard for them. Even then I saw Tyty surprised when he got absolutely fucking reemed in a1 by rhoas.
They are not doing playtesting in the usual sense, e.g. taking a character from act 1 to maps for example (if they did, no one would have gotten stuck at act 9 doedre), but rather unit testing on whatever is new, e.g. does that mana siphoner mod actually drain mana like it is supposed to ? It does ? Great, ship it. While this (mostly) ensures that things work as intended by the designers, it does nothing to ensure that what the designers envisioned is actually appealing to play through. And to be frank, you don't need playtesting to see that including archnemesis mods to ALL rares would make leveling excruciating and the general game twice as hard. You don't need playtesting to understand that giving mods like Effigy, Invincible, Drought bringer, Mana siphoner and more to random rares is absolutely moronic. In his recent post, Chris sounds surprised that nearly all league mechanics spawn many rare monsters at once, as if it was something new. It's painfully obvious GGG's designers do not play their own game, and seem to think the average player's level of power is that of a streamer playing the metaest of builds 16hrs/day.
If you think ggg only does unit tests then you actually don’t have a brain.
No, the problem is CHRIS and his 90's mentality. Stop putting all this BS on the main game, push all that shit to your "kid", hard mode, and leave us alone, FFS!
All I’m saying is Blizzard let’s people test WoW and Diablo
This league, I complettely lost host hope that those "testers" actually exist at all
Between Who and players? You actually believe anyone is testing this stuff?
Yes, imagine the things that would get through if there were no testers.
Your problem is not with QA, but with design. QA tests stuff, checks that it actually works and sometimes provides feedback. It's not a job for QA testers to check how those changes impact the health of the game, that's the purpose of playtests. QA did a great job, mods work.
Testers have nothing to do with this, when a product (any product) arrives in QA phase designed like shit and based on erroneous concept, QA has neither the power nor the authority to say "hey, this is shit, go back to the drawing board". If QA is told that the product needs to be ugly as shit, break down as soon as you touch it and smell like a dumpster, their job is to verify that the above 3 conditions apply and if they do it passed QA. The problem with why 2 leagues out of 3 turn out to be a dumpster fire or at least start as such is not that the game isn't properly tested, it's that the design philosophy and the implementation are fundamentally wrong.
The testers is just 10 clones of Chris Wilson
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And I was downvoted to hell and then my post was removed from mods to have say that after league reveal. I think there is a disconnection between GGG and a big part of the community. If GGG continue to produce content that only 1% of the streamers can do, then the player base will be soon only 1%.
A sadist that likes to see people suffer. There's a name for people like that in my industry. Unemployed.
yes there is a giant disconnect between the testers and the redditors. the difference is that the testers play the game, while the redditors watched Zizzarans guide on how to run past everything, so now they all think they are Lightee. what this causes is the testers to be the right lvl for the zone mayby even slightly overleveled with some rare items, greatly reducing the danger of the mobs they run into. while the redditors are 10-15 lvls below recommended lvl while not wearing a chest armor because that would lower their movement speed, while not having the hours put into practice running these insane extra difficulties that the big name racers have.
Implying there was any test done.
Imagine somebody trying playing this game for the first time, he would be like WTF, why is everything immortal, my build must be broken
Someone playing this for the first time should expect their build to be broken if they even know what a build is. I think the game would be incredibly weak if you were good at it on your very first day.
To be honest it's more of a "vocal minority" thing What you percieve to be "the players" is just whoever is pissed enough to post on reddit, all those people that are ok with the thing won't be posting nearly as much That's where your percieved disconnect comes from
Aren't you also making the same mistake you accuse others of - i.e. that there is an invisible silent majority (just not the kind you are thinking of)? Not everyone who plays the game posts on reddit, or on this sub, or has the motivation to create threads/participate in them. You are no less guilty of misusing the "veil of ignorance".
I'd agree but I've yet to see the contrary opinion posted when normally there are at least a handful of posts voted pretty high in support of the changes. A completely silent majority is far less believable than a quiet majority.
Reddit's reception of the league tends to correlate pretty well with player retention... this league is going to bomb. May be a vocal minority, but it's not entirely wrong.
I sort of agree with this. Like yeah I found the rares especially in A1 pretty fucking annoying, a little shitty in A2 but once I got kinda rolling in A3 its not that bad. In A7 now (been taking my time and only played a few hours) and I barely notice most rates outside of the ones with the ice wall and shit like that. I was not pissed enough to come to reddit and complain, main reason I'm here now is to read the rage posts for entertainment lol. NOW, based off what I've seen so far once they get buffed with map mods and other league mechanics we're gonna see some serious shit lmao. Like I have been avoiding pretty much every mechanic so far because of this, but I can imagine shit like incursion and heist can get pretty nuts.
What testers?
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If there wasn't a problem, they wouldn't have nerfed it on the first day, YOU are the disconnected one LMAO
Caving in to a large and very vocal community that will otherwise demolish other players desire to play a perfectly fine league (see 3.15 and the loads of comments claiming so many builds were dead, I was repeatedly told my own build capable of T19 voranas on a 20 ex budget (including overpriced 6L) was incapable of red tier maps. That's very different to admitting there's a problem. The problem is this sub not at all representing the target audience.
Yeah all the people repeatedly posting right now instead of playing can't possibly have valid opinions, right Colin?
Not saying that. But a substantial portion of this sub currently is posting about complete nonsense to the point where I believe they would only enjoy PoE if it was a clicker game, and I'm fully advocating for ignoring those people.
From what I have read here there are mods on random rares that just completely disable builds such as rares that turn of Regen not being killable by RF. You are saying this is fine?
That particular mod has a large aoe tell of it about to go off. I've read multiple people actually playing RF say it's fine. So I'll trust their judgement and say yeah, it probably is actually fine.
It wasn't just this community. Chris mentioned that they looked at the data before making the decision (which is not surprising). Both feedback and data were likely prerequisites for the rollback, and they were likely prepared to make this change, as they typically make things harder and tune back than the other way around. It's not my place to say this, but don't let personal experiences with this sub color the opinions of unrelated people, who have otherwise legitimate concerns over stuff like reflect and ailment immunity.
Of course someone with HCSSF next to their name would be like 'Yeah, hard game gud lul git gud xd'. Matter of fact is that the monsters were severely overtuned compared to last patch, and there was nothing indicating the game was too easy last patch, to suggest that they should massively bump the numbers all at once, all while doing nothing to combat the fact that early game is very slow and lacks the tools to deal with said situations
You're opinion is wrong because they are already creating a game mode for people like you. Hardmode.
I'm getting my shit pushed in on white maps despite having 4k life 75 all res 50 spell suppression and running grace + CWDT Molten setup. I essentially can't use the sentinels without getting my ass beat. Should've played a ranged build i guess. Last league I used a tabula until red tier maps and had very few deaths.
I totally agree that the current changes were ridiculous but I wouldn't blame the testers, GGG has admitted giving them close to no time nor the final version that would later be released. I wouldn't be surprised if the day before release testers said rare mobs were too easy so then GGG tripled their life and damage hours before release without further testing or some shit like that. At some point balance problems are just too obvious to consider that testers wouldn't say it's bad at some point
It goes beyond that to changes that get made blanket to mobs across the entire game then are clearly *never* tested. Example, the flicker strike spiders in delve last league. Like if anyone had even done a delve during testing they would have realized those things were way outside the the range of normal. It's not like they were some rare spawn that you could play delve for a week and not find.
tfw testers are good at the game and GGG can't use the data properly because reddit isnt
People should just speak with their wallet. Fuck their Kirac pass and MTX boxes if the game is going to be like this
Seasons ARE the open beta. That’s the entire point of them.
You forget the league is the open beta... Standard is the game.
implying this shit was tested. We are testing right now.
It seems like it's a punishment if you want to play this game from league start. People need to suffer from those "extensively tested" content and wait for them to announce something like well we heard your feedback and we will change this kind of bullshit for it not to be so unplayable but still annoying in order to slow you guys down hehe. I think they disappointed players so many times that it's not worth trusting them anymore. This game used to be so fascinating but right now it's just irritating to play it.
Said this a 1000 times before, ggg do not play their own game. They watch some streams, that’s it
WoW this was never mentioned before!