Regarding Devs not releasing Patch notes yet

General
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I’m glad they are doing some of these amazing looking updates, and I really appreciate that. The visual updates look amazing. I was worried the visuals would be like Grim Dawn (great game but a little too slow and visuals lacking). So that is great!

However, at my core I am a gamer, and it seems more than a bit odd the only update on patchnotes I’ve gotten was from random streamers on youtube. And I don’t want to watch them.

It also gives a huge advantage to streamers and youtubers in contact with LE devs, since they will know which builds are going to be extremely powerful, and then they can use those builds in multiplayer to get ahead faster and also get more followers.

Imagine if you were heading onto a field with other people to play a sport or game, and multiple players already knew the rules and had strategies developed before the Ref (devs) has even told you the rules. That’s not only weird, it’s just unfair (smaller issue).

It just seems a bit odd to not have a direct page of patchnotes or even HINTS one week away from a major patch. I’d give them the benefit of the doubt here, but even the skeleton Developer team with Diablo 3 releases patch note previews weeks before. They change them by updating with red text. And despite D3’s flaws, you can almost always count on knowing the main mechanic changes in advance.

With that said, I love a lot of the stuff the devs are doing. If they choose to release the patchnotes on the day of release, consider it a flat out error in judgment. There seems to be a couple updates today consecutively, hopefully I see a full list of patch notes. Even a week in advance is not even close to enough. And let’s be completely honest, despite how great the game is, patches and patch notes have been done in an unsatisfactory way.

It’s not just abut the patchnotes or it being unfair streamers/youtubers get a major advantage here. It’s about the respect of communication between Devs and people who care about the game. And this isn’t a debate, communication is key. I sincerely hope this is not the way they plan to release seasons or leagues, where the Streamers get the massive advantage of preparing months in advance, while regular people with lives get 7 days or less.

Again, maybe there is some very well thought out reason to not display the patch notes. But this has not been communicated. If I could simply read a message, even if it was something stupid that didn’t make sense, at least we’d feel the respect of communication.

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Streamers have patch notes? Since when?
They are probably going by what was available in the multiplayer week and the demo.

If EHG had patch notes ready, I’m sure they’d share them.

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Get ahead in what? There’s literally nothing competitive in this game.

I cannot fathom how this has any effect on anyone.

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They know that because they play the game more. They don’t get patch notes earlier (though some are also CTs so do have prior knowledge of the patch).

They’ve not finalised the patch so no patch notes. Plus doing the patch notes isn’t instantaneous.

You think EHG are being disrespectful in their levels of communication? Ok…

They won’t, since the seasons won’t be ready “months in advance”.

Yeah, they’re not done yet.

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Hello! I’d like confirm that the reason patch notes haven’t been posted is that we’re still working on them. We plan to post them before the 9th.

We decided not to release patch notes alongside the recent Multiplayer tests for a few reasons:

  • Focus our efforts on getting the game itself ready for the events
  • Avoid confusion if something in the patch notes changed again before the official 0.9 release.

Many of our social posts are previews of the content coming in 0.9, though they’re in more of a Showcase format than patch notes.

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Yeah this game is dodgy with CTs, I would say its a discord thing. Discord causes massive problems in games and devs shouldnt mingle in there with other players. Seems like a huge conflict of interest

Example: certain users here ‘know’ for a fact the more +corruption a Shade gives and also its increased rarity increases Omnis drop rate but the same user ‘doesnt know’ the minimum requirement for it to show up but at the same no developer has posted those words on this forum so they must of gotten it exclusively from Discord

Also another thing this site gets info last. The information Hierarchy for this game is Devs > CTs > Discord > reddit/last epoch > official page

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Exactly. And although the game isn’t released officially yet, they have sold 500,000 copies. That’s a $15,000,000 supported game. I fail to see how they don’t have one person on staff who can copy a few pages of patch notes onto a forum post, put in bold text “THESE PATCHNOTES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE”, and then update them closer to release.

It’s actually funny they have had time to do these other update posts but can’t post hints at changes. Apparently the FREE multiplayer weekend demo had some of the patchnotes applied, which kinda gives you that feeling where you gave a panhandler saying they needed $35 on the way into a building, and then you catch them in the same spot on your way out rattling their cup of change at people. ‘Sorry I wasn’t cheap enough to play the free demo to see the patchnotes that I wasn’t told would be on there’.

And again, I am being blunt about this because I actually enjoy the game a lot, so I’ll be completely ignoring negative or replies attempting to contradict. When I say something, I mean it. I’ve played 250 hours so far, a lot of them on Sorcerer. Maybe they should be paying me at this point since my other 3 friends who play this game all feel the same way “where are the damn patch notes or hints”

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I actually dont think the patch notes are available to anyone currently however if there is someone who is close to the devs who wanted to know “Will xx skill be buffed” they already have the answer and other small bits of information not readily available to the player

For me personally I only care about Aura of Decay being buffed, if I hung around in Discord asking about it reguarly even just a ‘will this receive a buff?’ probably would of had an answer instead ill wait for the notes

I went onto the MP Launches to test a fresh start to mono’s and some of the changes are live there ie Bone Golem/End of Time rework. I made new characters just to quickly check skill trees

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I’m sorry to burst your bubble here but you’ve severely over estimated the extra information that the CTs get.

All the “early patch notes” comes from people taking data from the game builds that we released publically during the test events. The builds we used for the test events had a very significant amount of changes that the CTs had never seen before those events started.

Edit: I’m also shocked by the assertion that we provide too much publically available information about the game when people ask. I literally check Reddit and the forums many times a day, every day, to try and answer questions and don’t hold back because it’s not on the discord.

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Only a very few fraction of players, the community testers, have a bit more knowledge, although they also don’t know the final patch notes. From this tiny fraction, most have responsibilities and jobs and won’t play full time. Only a handful are streamers.

On top, you can go on lastepochtools and see known changes to skill trees or uniques, so you are not entirely blind here. + You will get the patch notes before release.

Any advantage, if at all, is miniscule and won’t materialize due to time constraints. Also I asked some CTs what they are going to play and most are starting with their favorite builds. None of them have some clever plan laid out to get to level 100 super fast. In fact, some won’t even play that much because they don’t wanna get burned out before the faction release.

All that said, i still don’t get why it’s so bad if somebody reaches empowered 2 days before me.

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How so?

Really? You think the amount of communication that the devs have with the community is bad and they just shouldn’t talk to us or answer questions? That seems surprisingly curmudgeonly.

Yes, the devs have said this.

This, however, is/was public knowledge on Tunk’s site. It’s also entirely possible that they’ve forgotten.

Or Tunk/Dammitt datamined it.

$17.5m at a minimum.

Because, as I said, they want to have all people working on getting the game ready.

Thank you for actually reading the “patch notes” they put out re the free mp weekend. If you had you’d understand.

Correct, they probably aren’t.

Given there was a free mp weekend, would it not have been possible for that curious player to have got in and looked through the skills for changes (compared to the build planner)? Or, heaven forbid, perhaps i heard that Dammitt had updated his site based on the free mp weekend build (since it’s publicly available).

So am I, the amount of contact you guys have with us is one of the best things and i hope that never changes.

Also, I think some people are still ever so slightly “butt hurt” (to use an Americanism) about either CTs or not being a CT. Or something. But curmudgeon is an awesome word.

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divided by the 5 years of development since Kickstarter and the number of staff working on this game… I’m already impressed they are still as passionate about delivering this game as they were 5 years ago. These folks have been working for peanuts for a really long time.

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Yeah the thing with ‘what builds are best’ is that all anyone knows is based on previous experience with the game in general, and looking at the changes from the playtest. I get the concerns, but the reality is whatever is the strongest build for 0.9 for x content, isn’t currently known. People can make close guesses, but the actual most optimal things? Nah, none of us have any idea for sure.

Even more so, theres not really been much incentive to figure that out in the past either. Theres a very high chance that we’ve all missed some stuff in 0.8.5 thats way stronger than what we think.

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No they did not, not on this FORUM, maybe on Discord. Show a developer doing a blog post of Omnis of a breakdown of how it drops including +1 corruption/rarity giving more drop chance. Which is why I wrote what I did

Its not on there, neither is it on LEtools from Dammnit but yet I had mega hints from certain forum users that they knew better though. I have played PoE since 2013 I dont know any drop rates for anything as its company secrets

Ive never applied to be a CT so if you are trying to referring to me but not outright saying it than thats funny

edit: So I went on Discord for LE for the first time ever and found this under ‘ask-the-devs’ (a channel that shouldnt exist imo due to information disparity) and we have this:

Where is this available? oh it isnt. this person asked a dev directly and received a nicely type accurate response of information which isnt available ingame or anywhere? Replace the wording from Smelters Wrath to “will aura of decay get buffed in 0.9” “No…not next patch” “ok thanks” thats insider information, also a post somewhere about new Reaper Form not making it in. I didnt know there was a new Reaper Form let alone coming in 0.9

Point is all I have to do is loiter in this chat for information I wont get anywhere else

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where are these magical patch notes I was supposed to get? (dr3adful) I have been posting stuff I know from the Crash The Server party, which was a PUBLIC event, as long as you owned the game you could have played on the servers. Also as well the Last Epoch Planner has been updated with this event’s version of the game.

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The ask-the-devs channel on our discord is one of, if not the closest thing to universally approved that we do. We have no intention of stopping it. I’m sorry you don’t like it.

Almost all the questions that get asked there can be answered by reading forum posts but most people don’t have time to go through them all so they just ask the specific question they want to know.

If you ask the same question there and here, we will answer it in equal detail. The format of a single thread that I can keep open as I work makes interacting with it significantly faster.

The ask the devs channel is not locked behind any sort of paywall or special permissions. Nobody is getting an unfair advantage by asking questions in it.

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Historically, we get patch preview a few days before which is a very large overview with some indepth detail, however in the past the pure patch notes have been dropped the day of.

In the lead up to those, the devs highlight specific things they want us to go deeper into to explain design philosophy on and how / why it was done.

They don’t owe it to us to drop them a week in advance just so you can plan or know what made the cut and what didn’t this patch. They are constantly working on the game and things do get cut last minute as they don’t want to put something that isn’t ready in.

This isn’t at a stage where bigger, more developed games are already to go with the changes they are making to a cycle.

Once they get there, that may change but one thing these devs are not short on is communication and answering questions you have if it’s an answer they can provide (as stuff may still be in the works).

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Thank you for moving the goal posts. Just because the devs haven’t done a detailed post on a specific unique in a specific location does not mean they haven’t talked about in general terms how rarity affects drops in a reasonably popular public place (ie, this forum, discord or reddit). Just because you’re pissed off about the CTs for whatever reason doesn’t mean they are the source of all the game’s/community’s ills.

You, and many others, have had an axe to grind against the CTs simce the beginning. But, if you say so, dear…

Er, on discord? Where you got it from a channel where the devs seek to elicit questions from the community so that they can answer them and help build a rapport with the community?

Fair enough, but why is that a) anybody else in the community’s problem, b) the dev’s problem? If you only want to get info from the forum, that’s entirely your choice, but you’ll be missing out.

The devs using more than one channel to interact with the community is not a bad thing, nor is it evidence of some bizarre malign conspiracy to #### you over.

Yes, that’s the entire point of that channel.

Good, 'cause it’s awesome. The only thing I’d change about it is to get some other devs more involved with it (like Stanz or Trasochi), though if they don’t have the time or don’t want to, that’s fair enough.

I’d also like to see them so stream more as well (as much as I enjoy you Mike).

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Agree, but FWIW - Stanz does not work for EHG any more :slight_smile:

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How is it a surprise to anyone that people who go looking for more info do get more info? It is the case with pretty much everything.

My only concern regarding CT was that it would consist of only certain type of players that gate–keep Discord quite a bit with their preference and shoo any opposing opinion away but the item trading discussions and the result showed to me that devs do look for more than those and consider every feedback.