I can’t believe 14 unremarkable, cosmetic items in an mtx shop is causing such a fuss.
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Right. And there’s timing to it. Three time’s a pattern.
Yeah, I’m well aware of that & he never clarified whether that was employees or included contractors (but given the jump from the previous figure they’ve given I’d put my bet on it including contractors) & if it was employees on payroll then is that headcount or fte 'cause there’s a big difference between someone working 1 day a week and 5.
If they do have 80+ full time employees, why did 0.9 take so long to put out? Why aren’t they churning out ~2/3 of the stuff GGG are putting out (ignoring any subjective views on quality)?
Yup, that’s a very pertinent point.
It’s not about seasons as such, it’s about how much they should be able to put out in a given time period. If they were 2/3 the size of GGG a reasonable expectation, after everyone got up to speed, would be for them to put out ~2/3 the amount of stuff as GGG. Which is most definitely not the case at the moment & likely for many reasons, fte being the easiest one to reach for.
I’d go with Claire’s point above, an increased team size has a much higher burn rate & that’d worry me as an accountant.
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That’s a fair point for sure.
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I was referring to the fuss, but I don’t disagree.
I have absolutely no issues with arguing and civil discussions, and to be honest the people here are for the most part doing just that.
The thing about sharing an opinion is that you are allowed to, and the other folks around you are allowed to do that as well and think differently. It’s just how basic conversations work.
However, I tend to be mostly objective stating facts, ignoring my own preferences, because they will mostly likely not line up with the developer’s ideas and ideals. The post is mostly criticism about what is happening currently with the game.
All that summed up, here is something personal.
The developers need to think about a cycle that only focuses on fixing every existing problem/bug/glitch in the game. That includes those that got introduced with the multiplayer release, not only Single player.
After that cycle and 1.0, I guarantee the reviews/attention/fan base, will be different. However until that point, there wont be much changing with the course the game has taken.
Because as far as I know EHG all work remotely and we all know everyone who works from home does no work, or at least only 65-70% of what they would do actually in an office, plus as far as I know they sit in discord most of the time giving out information to randoms instead of pure 8 hours of non stop coding 5 days a week. I just recently had to go back to work after 1 year at home, my apparent productivity was similar but I also napped on the floor on my home office for up to an hour at times and I wasnt doing that shit at work. I wouldnt be surprised if they are all playing D4
GGG work in an office and im pretty sure Wilson makes them work hard
I am deeply worried about 1.0 , it looks like that their vision of a “feature complete” or acceptable game has shifted a lot over the years.
I know that story may not be a focus for many arpg players , but having it come out without the fights against Fire Rayeh , The Emperor and Orobyss is a huge loss in terms of full and satisfying story/campaign.
Also we have the iceberg of the three missing masteries consisting of at least 15 new skills coming out all at once, add to that old skills that need a proper tree or total rework plus base classes with missing skills and we reach a total of around 20 skills released at once.
Can you imagine the amount of bugs/chaos ?
Not to mention character sheet not showing individual skills behavior and ailment application , the implementation of the trade system and monolith hypothetic randomization.
It is a lot , something that I and I think many others would have preferred to see flow gradually after 0.85 .
Correct, for the most part. There will be new bugs and chaos considering the End Game is still not finished, characters are not finished, trade system also and don’t forget the addition of things in the shop. This will tank the performance and/or the satisfaction of playing. It is exactly what happened in March. And the hype the game got for a month.
-“People, Hey there we give you new burgers with great flavor!” - 40000 people decided to try.
Results. By May most realized the new burgers aren’t so great and they miss the old burgers. - 35000 left. Currently 1200 in peak hours.
This way you can draw conclusions if Multiplayer was a success, don’t think so. It like that new hot dog stand you wanna try cause you’re tired from this current one, but you will eventually return cause the old/your favorite is better.
Retaining audience is hard when you hype around unfinished work.
Those are the reasons people got bored. MTX is just the peak of it, the way the farming works as of now, its equal to Diablo 3 rifts. Which is absolute boredom. If people believe the RPG community doesn’t see and feel this, you probably haven’t been around for long. (addressing the generic fans and supporters of the game)
When you think about a game and how it unfolds, you have to be objective and realistic. Positive is good, but realism hits hard if you fly high, exactly what happened after March.
Just because you are a lazy #### #### does not mean that everone else is (for the record, so am I). Some people do prefer working from home & can get more work done. Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if they got their 8 hours of work done over a longer amount of time due to the flexibility of wfh.
The assumption that everybody does less work at home is very old-fashioned/dated & treats people like they’re children rather than adults.
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I think people are also confusing the MP release with the fact that in addition to going online with multiplayer capabilities, it also merged two separate development branches of the game into one… The original beta SP only release and the internal alpha MP release.
These code bases were very different and maintained separately with bugs in the one having already been corrected but not in the other and improvements in one not being applied vice versa. From my experience with this kind of thing, it would have been a monumental task by any measure and should be obvious why EHG had no updates for a year and why a lot of things still slipped through the cracks and why new content was not as abundant as some would have hoped when considering the timeframes.
Evaluating the MP release needs to take this into consideration.
Do I think the MP release was a success?
From the purpose of merging the code, 100%. Thats a crazy amount of work to have done.
From someone who doesnt play MP and struggles to play online due to physical location & associated ping/lag - I’d say the MP release could have been FAR FAR worse.
Did I want more? Sure. Did I expect more? Nope.
All things considered, I’d say EHG did a pretty good job.
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In general I agree with this if Multiplayer didn’t have tons of rubberbanding, constantly skills glitching out and slow loading of each and every zone.
Yes, I’m talking about multiplayer with people, not just online. It’s a very different experience.
And it’s shameful to even say this, but I have the worst ping from all of my friends. Which is constantly 35-40ms. All of them have 20-30ms.
At this point I think this topic makes it pretty clear they have so much work, and no it’s not about connection. It’s about a busted multiplayer release which was hyped by streamers for the wrong reasons. Getting a very lucky timing aka. PoE season was burned off already.
And yes, its normal for most of us to play other games that are better. Most of us don’t like to pay to be used as beta testers. Yes, we saw the game it’s far from finished, good. Expectations from here are lowered a ton until its actually out in an acceptable state.
Because whats the point of having trading or multiplayer when the results are so poor after so much time in early access.
It is very appropriate to quote the famous meme of blizzard soon, as this is what people should look forward too. I’d say a year at least to make this thing stable including any new content that gets added and fixed for a few months after.
But apart from that yes. When someone buys a product that says “early/experimental use” its by his own will, and no, nobody uses those for more than few times. In life and online people don’t like to be beta-testers, unless its their job.
PS. Because of situations like these I kinda miss the physical releases of old. Yes there were bugs present, you didn’t know what you were buying, but you knew there isn’t any better. And you knew you are playing the best there is. Now there are many examples of failures, success stories and ways to go about a game/art/product. It’s just shameful to even explain these things in 2023.
Massive failure overall.
It took almost an year to deliver a gameplay experience with huge instability and connectivity issues. Compare state of MP client to the offline experience we had before. It still has many problems that are being constantly addressed and 1.0 launch is getting delayed even further.
It had to happen, but the execution wasn’t pretty. I’m not laying any blame and hopefully things will get better with time. But the game was built with single player focus in mind and it shows. The multitude of problems of going online are just the cherry on top.
There obvious and big problems with the net code still. The area loading time is a huge tell.
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This is not true. Since the kickstarter they have said they wanted to make a mp game. Did they start by building a sp game and then transition it into mp? Kinda. They had 2 clients with 2 builds of the game that they merged into 1.
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Having the intent to make a MP game and designing systems that work for MP are two different concepts.
Almost nothing in the game is built to support MP. Echoes don’t progress for both parties. Classes have no synergies. Boss farming basically requires to people to play in parallel to build stability. Story progress syncing basically requires both players to be together ALL the time. I can go a long time like this - but basically what the team is now trying to do is make a single player game work in multiplayer.
If you consider that the game is still alive, people are playing and the dev team is getting paid and you can actually join games with other people then yeah that is a success. But MP injected a bunch of problems that were not there in the first place and set development back by nearly an year. And many of these problems are still pending.
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I can’t be certain if you’re joking here, or about to break your back from bending over backwards trying to justify laziness as an excuse for the game not progressing at a better rate, and/or being in a more stable state than it has been since MP release.
In either case, isn’t comparing employee numbers, at this stage between EHG and GGG a little dishonest? How large was GGG’s staff when POE was roughly 6 months from v1.0 release? Yeah, they’ve grown quite a bit in the 6 or 7 years since, but their player base is also quite a bit larger, not to mention the content available in the game itself. I don’t recall GGG having more than a handful of employees when they came out of beta…
Trade came out with the MP patch? I seem to remember the factions being delayed. Or, maybe I just didn’t pay attention, because having to pick a faction to trade is the dumbest idea I have ever heard of in an ARPG. And ladders? What-da-akshual-fawk does that have to do with the price of tea in China (not to mention not being in his list). “Hey, the game was buggy and I kept getting disconnected, but the ladders are awesome. I can measure my epeen with other neckbeard, basement dwellers while I sit in the login queues!”
Dont worry, the ladders were buggy as well.
All my friends who I wanted to play MP with are gone after the first play session to play other hack and slash games because they disliked LE MP. So for me it’s kind of a disaster because I like to play in teams 
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In theoery it was a good thing to revamp the game so MP works without issues (some time in the future ) becasue at launch there is only one chance to make a good impression. If everything is fine in the early game people can’t refund the game anymore when they find out Monolith is endgame 
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Just out of interest here, did they have any opinion on the solo play portion of LE? I.e. did they see hope at least? Or did they just go “Nah, LE is crap” and move on?
I was wondering that because I usually only play SP (pseudo-offline) and the experience is leaps and bounds better than online & MP imho so it would be unfortunate that opinions on LE are solely based on the state of the MP.
The game is better than its MP experience right now.