EHG Activity

Feedback and Suggestions
21

I don’t care about the bickering / trolling above and just want to share my experience :

For me, it feels weird to see more EHG activity on Discord (and a bit on reddit) than on their official forum. Discord is a 3rd-party tool with very limited archiving of informations and not as accessible as* a forum with automaticaly created/linked accounts.

The forum has the tools to makes debate (exchanging ideas and understanding other people stances) much easier. And yet, when players want informations or confirmations from devs, it’s often radio-silence until someone dig a quote from discord, reddit or Mike’s stream.

It’s just weird that their Official Forums are not the principal place to get informations and have proper (or any) discussions with devs. Or even just understand their vision, their process, which suggestion resonnate with them, what is absolutely out-of-question, etc.

I think a simple “Oh, that’s a good idea. It’s noted” or a “We keep an eye on discussion.” or a “Heck no. There will be no further comments from us.” would go a long distance.

I know that EHG is not a small indie company anymore and can’t act like one. But isn’t there a middle ground between “a bunch of nerds doing a project for aRPG fans” casually talking with players here on this forum and a corporation that will issue official CEO-approved response only when there is uproar ? (Edit : Sorry, that was unfair. I was talking specifically about forums usage and not communication at large; community posts and Mike’s streams are very appreciated.)

AND I wish that the forum was a better source of informations in general. For example, at each version launched (0.9, 1.0, 1.1…), if you want to know which skills and which nodes are bugged, everywhere else is a better place to get infos. Streamers chats for rumors (often confirmed by streamer testing), Discord for one-sentence confirmations by devs (‘yeah, this node has 0 effect atm’), Reddit for a chaotic and incomplete list, etc. The “known bugs” topic on this forum is often not up to date and only focusing on the most important and obvious ones. That becomes frustrating to play with a skill only to learn in places like this or this a week later that X node is simply doing nothing.

Anyway, that’s not a big deal. I’m just confused by seeing that well-designed platform being ignored by their makers, to the profit of third-party tool that doesn’t offer as much (except the convenience of a chatroom).

-* : Am I using the expression correctly ? ‘Not as ____ as’ ? I googled it but it still sounds weird and not right. Like, ‘not as bad as’… is there one superfluous ‘as’ ? Am I tripping?

6 Likes
22

Well put over all, but you did use this phrase correctly. There’s two “as”

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23

Yes, it was correct like Scipo said. The reason why it’s correct is that each “as” is “pointing” to a different thing. I’m not sure how to explain this properly in grammatical terms. But you’re saying “as bad” to point out what the comparison is about and “as X” to point out what the comparison is to.
Basically the double “as” in “Y is/isn’t as <C> as X” automatically infers a comparison between Y and X in regards to C.

As for the rest of the post, I have to agree. The forums were much better when EHG was more active in it. I remember when I first started playing and I had some questions about the game direction and Mike answered me. A lot of those answers were simple "No"s or similar, but I did feel heard and it’s a large part of why I frequent these forums so much (besides also loving the game).

I know they still follow the forums and pay attention to it, but the lack of interaction here in this past year is a bit disappointing.

3 Likes
24

Well, their discord is also “Official”, so it should be pretty much on the same level as the Official forum.

I agree the forum is infinitely better for discussions though. I know discord is trying to mimic some simple forum structure, but honestly it doesn’t look great. Discord is for chat and voice, and it’s best if it stayed that way.

Limited how? There isn’t an export button in the server settings sure, but you can still export the contents of the whole discord server and store it using your preferred archival method :slight_smile:

I’ve always wondered why they don’t have a public bug tracker.
Either you make one public and everyone can filter it on their own, or you make an automated list exported from a private bug tracker. Setup difficulty depends on their chosen bug tracking solution.

25

I’m so frustrated with long timers. I’ve been here, on and off for a bit. So what?

So you/we had a conversation about a topic 5, 3, 2, 1 years ago. So what? Times change, paradigms shift, other games try something new and it sticks, life moves on.

Please, for the love of god, we don’t have to start every conversation with a reminder of how long you’ve been here, and what an awesome conversation we had back in the day.

I get that you feel like a lot of these conversations are old, here’s a thought, if you don’t have anything new to say, and you don’t think anything new is actually being said, just don’t engage. One of two things happen; someone comes up with a new idea that inspires EHG and they make it better, or the topic dies from disinterest.

26

I’m sorry, I’ve read your post four times and I’m still confused. I’m not trying to be a dick or anything, I just genuinely want to know what you’re trying to say. I scanned the thread and the only time we talked about how long something has been around was the request for Mastery Respec being a 5+ year old request (basically as long as the games been around people have been asking for Mastery Respec) and that was only brought up to point out that in all this time, even as recently as December 2024, the answer has always been “no, it’s not part of our design philosophy” and judging from Mike’s response on it even he was blindsided by the change saying “it was a recent decision” and “I saw the trailer for the first time when it went live.”

27

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Like Scipo, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about but that seems heartfelt!

Who are you talking to and are the long timers in the room with us right now ?

28

Yeah, I’ve been harping on this very issue for a very long time now. It’s apparently not something that the devs are concerned about and just want us to use other sites than their official forum, and I for one have no desire to sit on Discord, Reddit, or any other site when I have their “official” forum that should be serving that very purpose.

If there is a bug, it should be in the bug section so we can see it without having to drum up an account on multiple other sites or spend time watching or chatting with someone about the game just to find out about them. All of this should be here on the official forum.

If EHG had a PA section that would be the perfect job for them to do.

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29

You’re not a dick. I appreciate you being gentle with your “wtf?” :slightly_smiling_face:

In this thread, it was that specific comment that triggered my (apparently incoherent) post, but it’s been a compilation of dozens of threads over the last six month.

ARPGs have changed a lot in the last year, and I think they are going to continue to change. EHG has been one of the bigger, if not the biggest, catalysts of those changes.

It seems to me, especially recently, that EHG is trying to look at their game with new eyes. I’m excited by that. And especially because of that, I don’t think we need to include a history lesson every time an old topic comes up. I don’t think we can point to what EHG has said in the past as if it were canon.

Probably what is additionally driving this is me looking at the PoE forums. I just don’t want LE forums to end up the same way. That place is a cesspool. The blizzard forums are just dumb, no is looking to actually have a conversation. But PoE is virulently toxic.

30

I definitely did. Gave me a chuckle.

Hey, look at that, someone else did too! :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe we need to laugh louder? Very commandingly urgently and severely so? :stuck_out_tongue:

No, absolutely not.

If you want to compare your own personally created social environment versus the usage of a third-party app which allows those spaces then obviously the first and foremost used one should be the Forum/Website.

Discord can have links to the respective bits, and should have them even but not be the sole area to get it. Generally any info about known bugs, special interactions that needed to be clarified, reveals and so on should all be first and foremost on the official site before anywhere else.

Meaning if a bug is found and noted then the ‘known bugs/issues’ should be updated at the latest 5 minutes later here. Better even… it should be done whenever one is found, and optimally with a new Thread per month where each change gets noted down when edited. This is one of the highest amounts of visible progress a developer can show towards the community. It causes perception to go from ‘I don’t know what they’re even working on’ to ‘Damn those are some mighty fine devs, they do their work and there’s always something going on!’.

Access to everyone.

Every single customer has access to the website. Not every customer might have access to Discord. For whatever reason. ToS of Discord broken as the prime one, privacy issues for a second one, lack of security features a third, support issues which can’t be solved by EHG but need to be hence by Discord being fourth… many more following beyond.

They should’ve one, and I also mentioned that it’s an important aspect to provide as much information as possible to the customers, even in small scale, and archived so it can be dug up easily to provide incentive to join a well managed product.

The last time I started to talk about that topic even remotely I remember getting quite a bit of flak for even daring to mention that the communication is not top-notch… but here we are I guess :stuck_out_tongue:

I could say I’m not a ‘told you so’ person… but that would be a lie :stuck_out_tongue:

Actually the opposite. Especially because of that we should go into the history lesson. Not for the stance of EHG alone on the topic though… but in regards to the whole sector of H&S games over time.

Because while very commendable that EHG does try to shift how they look at their game, some of those have been done with negative effects at times… and pointing that out saves both EHG and us as players a substantial amount of time and frustration.
If they try to take a new spin on things all’s fine, but then there is the dire need to be prepared to rollback and demolish it in moments before it becomes ingrained by some or confuses the long-term playerbase with what they’re even doing.

It’s important to adapt and change over time… but also important to provide a steadfast solid baseline of what you wanna achieve.

Any substantially sizeable group becomes toxic by design, with extremely few exceptions.

Because the non-toxic people stop interacting and the amount of toxicity hence increases since those are either drawn by it existing or don’t care about it.

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31

I get what you mean now. I will say that I completely agree that we shouldn’t take what was said 5 years ago as canon. However, I do think that when you’ve held the same stance for 5 years, even as recently as a couple months ago, and then you change your stance with no announcement? It’s pretty off putting. What other longheld stances will they just go back on? What if their longheld stance of being a seasonal game is changed into a TQ/GD model of progressing through a hand-crafted campaign w/ progressively harder difficulties? They’ve talked about how the game is a seasonal game since the kickstarter and then in Patch 1.3’s launch trailer there’s a 5s screen of “No More Seasons!” do we go “well, they’re looking at it with new eyes! That’s a good thing! Think of all the new players they’ll bring in that didn’t like seasonal content!” while ignoring the people who leave because they didn’t like the change?

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32

I think if they fundamentally change the game, that would be a conversation they won’t be able to avoid with their player base. But those are big changes. D2 had skill respecs only because players were playing the game in very-unfun ways. And that was most players. And it was because the player wanted to play the build, not the character.

I’m more focused on smaller player-convenience type changes, rather then core-identity typed changes. I like that the marketplace changes and I Iike devs that adapt to market place changes.

I think if EHG dev play another game, like the new thing that game did as players of arpgs, and then say, “should we do that? how would we do that?”, that is a worthwhile design exercise that hopefully bares fruit.

Example 1; WASD movement. I hated it when I tried No Rest for the Wicked, but liked it (eventually) when I tried PoE 2. It made PoE2 combat more engaging on a moment-per-moment basis. I think EHG jumping into that is smart, especially since LE bosses are already intended to have a good amount of gameplay.

Example 2; D4 started hard, got very easy, now (in response to PoE 2, I think), they are leaning back into hard. Am I liking where they are going? Honestly, probably not. I don’t want every ARPG I play to be sweaty. I like that some are considerably less sweaty and more power-fantasy. But that does seem to be where the market is going, so I can’t say I blame them.

Example 3: EHG deciding to allow mastery respecs. What I hope it means is that EHG looks at a lot of the anti-player/anti-fun/anti-convenience crap that GGG is famous for and think, “uhhh, maybe that only works for PoE. Maybe a majority of players don’t need to be punched in the junk to feel a sense of satisfaction”. After all, EHG does already have an auto-sort feature, maybe pets that pick up gold and affixes isn’t the anathema to having fun while playing an ARPG that online masochists make it out to be. I’d like to have a glowy loot lizard pet running around picking up stuff.

33

Of course, change is inevitable and there will be people who hate the change and people who love the change. For me though, there’s a line between player convenience and game identity.

Example 1: It’s inconvenient to have to click on every single affix shard or gold piece that drops. Adding in vacuums to suck them all into your inventory is a great quality of life feature that doesn’t detract from the game’s identity. It’s an dungeon crawler hack and slash, not affix shard cleanup simulator.

Example 2: EHG has had the stance that your Mastery is your class and it makes no sense to Respec your class in any RPG. It’s inconvenient for players who dislike their selected Mastery, but the same situation may happen with their base class. Should we allow players to change entire base classes (Sentinel to Rogue) because they feel bricked by their choices and don’t want to restart? If “Mastery = Class” is no longer their stance and their stance is “Mastery = Build Choice” in the same way that “Skill Specialization = Build Choice”. Then why can’t we also say “Class = Build Choice”? EHG could add in a basic sex select with a standard male and female models like Grim Dawn and then you pick your Class+Mastery in game and can just Respec them whenever you want with a gold cost. That would be less anti-fun after all. Who needs multiple characters

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34

I get why you are annoyed. It is the exact opposite of what I thought they would change first. It certainly wasn’t on my menu of things I wanted them to change. I don’t actually think I’ll ever use it. I mean, I’m rolling a mastery-X character and that will influence the name I give the character. Why would I change the mastery (unless I was a new player and picked ‘runemaster’ when I really wanted something like a ‘sorcerer’)?

I do get it. It’s just that… not auto-picking up affixes is so demented and incomprehensible (to me) that I thought they were going to be another ‘vision’ developer that slowly became more and more out of touch. Now I have hope.

35

Yeah, I understand why people are excited for the change. I’m mostly expressing an extreme “what if?” that now has precedence. I’m all for quality of life changes that don’t impact the core design philosophy. Like, I’ll never understand why open world sandbox exploration games said “here, let me show you where everything is so you don’t have to explore this massive sandbox we created for you.”

Like… Let me explore and stumble across something exciting, not plan out my entire journey because the map already shows me where everything is.

3 Likes
36

I’ll very heavily speak against that.
Also the initial ask was for respec to be implemented solely to allow fixing mistakes, Blizzard went a bit ‘extra’ there without understanding even what was asked for by the community. A classic Blizzard-move.

So you dislike EHG? :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s because ‘No Rest for the Wicked’ is a top-down souls-like and not a H&S ARPG. The marketing is simply wrong.
You don’t kill hordes of enemies but instead have a slow tactical and very controlled combat style to suceed.
That’s a massive difference in playstyle and that game highlights it perfectly.

Yes, Blizzard doesn’t even have a clue what sort of playerbase they want to cater towards. The game’s a mess still. First with the barely understandable affix system they had without feedback on how much effect it ultimately has on your character (because any sort of rotation DPS measuring was simply not available). Then their awful decision of implementing items found every 50k hours in a game catering to casuals. And now making it harder overall despite their target audience definitely not being those people.

Blizzard is a shit-show for a reason.

And yes, not everyone likes sweaty games… that’s what D4 hence was supposed to provide. And entirely failed.
LE is not supposed to be as casual. It’s also not supposed to be super sweaty. It had a nice middle-ground and lost it by now. Mastery respec being a major mess plainly spoken as it showcases the lack of their own playerbase. Not the ‘new fad influx’ of players but the ones having supported the game since the darn kickstarter to currently.
A kick in the nuts from the devs simply. Not nice. Don’t kick nuts, that hurts.

First of all… GGG focuses nowadays heavily on QoL since they realized nobody liked the game because of it but despite of it. It was just that good gameplay wise anyway.
But there’s a thing which can easily lead into ‘too much QoL’. I mean… we can also create a rotation macro and then let the character move forward automatically and execute the abilities in order. Kinda takes away from the experience, right?
Mastery respec falls into that category. EHG wants to avoid things like ‘spreadsheet feeling’ and other miniscule crap nobody cares about as long as the gameplay and replay-value are huge… but this one? That’s got a massive major impact and has been ignored and overthrown.

If ‘pets that pick up gold’ come it’s not really good either. The intentional effort to pick up items is surprisingly meaningful (And I didn’t believe that either for a long time). I’ve played such a substantial amount of different games to date though, testing out even mobile games during commuting time… to have seen how specific details tend to shift the view of a product.
It’s not about masochism for that specific example. But that demands a properly controlled experience without high effort from the player. The loot filter is great, but it’s a advanced feature. A baseline loot filter which is a ‘1 click choice’ is something that the game needs simply. With that you’re right. Because it removes the negatives of the system which makes it more ‘ARPG masochistic’ without taking away the positives.

37

No. Not a top-down, isometric

Mmm right :roll_eyes: no complaints here

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38

Blizzard is the video game equivalent of Disney: “why should we care when you’re going to pay us anyway? Here, have a $100 horse skin for a game that cost $70.” (or for Disney: “Here, have a shitty live action remake of a classic that didn’t need it”)

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39

Also not isometric. Isometric solely describes a 2D environment, No Rest for the Wicked is graphically created in 3D, just displayed on 2D :stuck_out_tongue:

There’s a specific term which I got no clue how it’s called for it though.

40

Because there are now way more people on Reddit/Discord than on official forums. That’s true for every ARPG outwhere.