Please stop spreading false information.
Why is everyone jumping to conclusions? Sure I would be happy IF EHG does some kind of focus testing with specialy prepeared toons at certain stages of the game to see how things are. Am I certain EHG is doing stuff like that or gives instructions? Nah!
What are they? Cars? Dogs? They are normal players as everyone else.
We can’t tell. I was in focus test groups where nothing was demanded at all and this was the norm. I even offended devs once asking if I/we should focus test specific stuff… no wonder that game isn’t arround anymore. So my experience differs a lot from yours 
Why should he give in? He makes more money on his own. That example is rather flawed.
Again a flawed example. i would not fish for extremes or for people who make a lot of money, like neversink with donations. There are a lot of fish in the water not only the whales.
I never was under the impression someone said so all fine, just enjoying a convo about the topic here… also it might derail the convo quite a bit 
. (sorry btw ^^)
Nothing in life comes for free. Yes you actualy have to invest time and money to make the best out of it. So if you don’t have the capacity forget about it for sure. Then again don’t wonder if ppl get mad when you deliver a flawed product.
We can’t tell without trying and EHG giving feedback on the matter 
. This will most likely not happen so we only can speculate.
Now you want to tell that GGG is a small indi studio or what? GGG has enough money to do how they please.
(Yeah you better don’t) you have a funny definition of cash grab let’s see if everything els is equaly… special.
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okay nothing to see here…
How is it false? We can’t tell… maybe he is even right. I don’t think so personaly but I’m no psychic ^^. maybe all CTs are held hostage in white rooms with nothing that can distract tehm and they are whipped if they underperform and don’t find a bug every 10 minutes. Only EHG and the CTs know. Yet I never heared a CT scream for help so I guess my take on it wrong ^^.
How is it false information? I specifically said:
So this might not happen with LE. But it was the case in CTs I participated in the past. There were guidelines on things the devs wanted us to test and some even gave specific instructions on stuff to try to see if it breaks/no longer breaks the game.
They are testers. On a PTR, the majority of players just wants to have fun playing the game and they don’t care about broken stuff or feedback. On a CT, the players want to test the game.
Who’s jumping to conclusions now? It’s a free service, so his revenue most likely only comes from ad revenue due to traffic and the occasional donation. I doubt that is more than a paid job monthly.
What now… they are players all of the sudden again? As long as we don’t have insight in the CT program we still can’t tell. So to me they ask players for feedback and they play content early and that’s it. I don’t think it’s to harsh or kind of a second job or whatever. To me it’s like people play new content and at best find bugs and report them and give feedback qithout any quotas to reach or preassure applied. So players stay players first who test stuff.
I had some inside from a dude who makes modes on nexus mods who has it’s own donation link. He makes good mods with several thousand downloads over the year. he makes more money with donations then with his job and his taxes are a nightmare ^^. When I look at the PoE community that pays hundrets of dollars on cosmetics on a very regular basis I would be very suprised if Neversink isn’t making a crap ton of money. So why should he sell the golden egg laying goose for a one time buyout?
Are you trying to intentionally distort my words? I very specifically said that they aren’t “just players”. I never said they’re not players.
We do know because it’s not a novel concept.
I have played D3 beta, several WoW xpack betas, Hearthstone, even got into HotS alpha … The atmosphere on discords & forums there were completely different than the PTRs I played. And I don’t just mean people weren’t constantly being toxic dicks.
As someone who has enjoyed these closed betas as a hobby, I know how I feel about it, and the way other people acted in those CTs atleast indicates a correlation with those same feelings in those others.
Again, my personal history has shown me that CT forums have more targetted feedback, especially about options being avoided, when compared to PTR forums.
you’re welcome 
Except the Last Epoch CT has some form of an NDA involved. You can read all about it here.
That means you can’t know if a guide creator is talking based on experience or just making stuff up. So players should atleast be more suspicious about guide content.
Plus, a lot of guides are made by streamers or other content creators, and NDAs cut into their income, so very little of them would actually join CTs without compensation and at that point, you’re just part time QA and can get in trouble on the content creation side.
And no, most NDAs also include telling people you’re under NDA, so a guide creator can’t just say “fresh from CT, here is the guide for when your patch is downloaded!!”
The examples I mentioned I was either not under NDA, or the NDA expired once I got a public forum badge that the game dev used to basically tell everyone I was in the beta anyway.
A lot of players treat PTRs as early access. So if you just slap your data collection on the live servers, you generate the same data live as PTR, without burning out casual players before the actual release.
Then I don’t read your posts, because I’m not here for you to shout at and take it. Discussions go both ways. Be an adult and either participate fully or don’t reply at all.
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OK I’m going to voice my opinion here. I have over 1k hours into the game almost all of it before official release. Just logged in yesterday to play for a bit, I think they made a serious mistake in maintaining that whole void area as the first one you run for any length of time. It is extremely dark and unattractive. Not a good way to win over new players.
Just got through it this morning and got to the final boss at about level 26 or so. I lost to the boss and it respawned me a mile away with ofc no map done and full of mobs all over again. Then I remember every time you leave an area and go back into it, it all has to be cleared again. I promptly quit the game and sorry I won’t be back. This game disrespects my time even more than the newly released POE2.
Good Luck 11th hour I think you’re a great group of devs but this game is not rewarding enough for the time you want us to put it. The combat is not in any way fun enough to merit killing the same mobs again and again and frankly the unity engine is just plain ugly imho.
Ah yes, clown’s back! Ensuring everyone knows right away what that person is! Good job!
Has it? Interesting to know that a game with too little content is balanced for Streamers and Youtubers?
I guess in that case PoE is really bad for content creators.
April to be exact, which is spring, not even late spring… just spring.
Unlikely given that we’re already seeing the major notes in the roadmap, which would be surprisingly hard to bring to such a low level.
If it’s enough anyway though we’ll see… and if the quality upholds on top unlike in 1.0.
Ah yes, the winning strategy which brought the majority of other games trying to do the same into the red. The classic winning strategy, clearly uncovered by you! Such a genius! 
I guess it’s clear why no replies are read, can’t take it to get this mass of wasted writing space dismantled before someone can even finish a single sneeze.
Depends? We don’t know the revenue he gets versus the effort it takes to do that stuff.
Secondly, it’s a more stable position compared to being a freelancer basically. So it’s unclear.
No, jungroan is a prime example of a fantastic tester. He goes out of his way to specifically find things which are utterly and entirely broken.
This is a top-tier tester, you want the extremes specifically for such types of jobs. Not some random joe off the streets.
You give them a whole 10 minutes? 5 is enough! 
It’s fairly aged in terms of design, but it does a fantastic job in immersing us into the story.
After all out protagonist is brought from a vibrant world into this disaster of a decaying thing leftover. That’s a good presentation, can’t complain there. It’s supposed to look drab in comparison to anything else in the game.
Wait… PoE 2 does… disrespect your time?
They got fantastic systems in place so it doesn’t happen at all! It’s counter to that, item drop balancing needs to be worked on a bit more though.
As for LE… how so? Persistent instances cost massive amounts of resources server-side. Also if you’re at the final boss (of Act 2?) then you respawn basically a few feet away from the boss arena, it’s one of the smallest map areas in the game.
I think he means because all mobs respawn on death, which make areas like the Dreadnought quite miserable at times.
I actually had a “fun” moment where I died to the boss, then got attacked because some mobs spawned near the checkpoint.
Yeah, I know that’s what likely is meant, it just makes very little sense.
After all it’s a classic ‘Checkpoint system’ to ensure a player has the ability and power level to pass segments, otherwise having to re-do them. It’s a fairly normal thing.
They didn’t do it in PoE 1 and hence you get situations like people throwing themselves against Kitava, ‘dieing through’ the boss with 20… 30… 40 deaths, wittling her simply down by making a pile of corpses out of yourself.
Exciting gameplay, right? Guaranteed wins!
I would say solving the initial downsides of their systems rather shows some proper thinking. And Last Epoch also has at least some sort of weight behind your actions. Either your build and skills are up to par or you gotta re-do stuff… how it should be!
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Why is it so hard for people to maintain intellectual honesty and focus on the central theme of the original post, instead of completely distorting it?
Let’s get back to the topic: EHG could have focused on improving the builds and having 10x the diversity of options.
For those of you who are talking about poe, d3/d4, GD, revenue, dead game vs. live game, etc., have you ever tried to create your own build or create an off-meta build and not been frustrated?
Are you happy and satisfied with the variety of builds we currently have in Last Epoch?
The topics is why it fell off so hard and is disappointing, that’s the thread title, which includes a large variety of things.
First and foremost: Lack of end-game. Simple as that. We got a single core-audience viable end-game mechanic and 2 bothersome side mechanics that are either extremely simplistic (Arena) or simply not fleshed out properly (Dungeons).
That’s the first and foremost reason, everything else following afterwards. The second you mentioned with:
Variety? Yes.
Viability and power level of them? No
You can make a lot, a large portion just feels fairly bad.
Much like end-game getting the classes into a properly working order without being utterly all over the place is also important.
If we go into the third reason it’s likely the pacing of the game, hence difficulty in campaign versus monoliths, overall power scaling… that stuff.
As someone who has tried making their own build in early, poe, D3, D4 (but not the jungle book xpac) and Grim Dawn …
I would rank build diversity for self-made builds as LE > GD > D4 / PoE > D3
I’ld even throw WH40k - Inquisitor around GD, as long as we’re talking the quality of options vs the raw amount. (e.g. It only has 3 schools of damage)
I once had a list of like 50+ builds that I had either played or had a planner for built around something. Did they all succeed hitting 300-600 corruption etc? Some did fall off earlier or no longer exist due to a revamp, (RIP Squirrel Spriggan BM) but I’ld say more than 3 out of 4 managed to hit at least 300 corruption and the ones that didn’t were usually a self-imposed restriction. (e.g. building around Void Cleave → Abyssal Echoes → Erasing Strike combo all at once, forced myself to use a specific set,…)
The builds that failed regardless were usually still able to hit 150-ish corruption, but lacked the scaling. So pre-Aberroth, that build could still do everything around. To me, that’s a build that needs more support, but didn’t completely fail like e.g. not having a set for it in D3.
I will say that the problem is more clear now that there is more power creep, so you see which builds are capping at 1000 corruption vs 300. And it’s definitely something they’re gonna have to work on for both current balance and whatever new things are coming in the future. But they are working on it at least. Sentinel has some few issues, like Time Rot not being a viable build due to its stack cap, Paladin lacking its 5th skill, … But it’s in the pipeline for 1.2, so we’ll have to see how it improves then.
That is generally the difference between a Closed Test & a PTR.
You need both. Games shouldn’t be balanced solely around the high end players unless that’s your target market.
Jungroan has nothing to do with being a high-end player. Sure, he is one but that’s not the point here.
That dude is actively seeking out ways to break the game through the implemented mechanics and managing to do that in a consistent manner… while being at the top-tier still. He finds builds nobody else does… as the first person, from hundreds of thousands of players. And when GGG handles one build he uses… he just finds another nobody else has yet found.
He’s a gold-mine of testing their systems, the one guy which repeatedly, regularly and nearly without fail doesn’t crash instances… he crashes instance servers.
You know the channel ‘Let’s Game it Out’? That guy there is a former QA tester, and one of the top-tier ones too. And Jungroan is on the same level in finding stuff, he’s a prime example of one of the best people a company can have in QA.
I actually didn’t know that channel, but I do know the Spiffing Brit one, which is similar. He doesn’t break the game in the same way, but rather uses the game mechanics to “cheat”. Fun bloke, too.
Yeah, but my point was that you don’t just need high end players (or people who can find stuff or whatever you want to call it), at the rist of repeating myself, because games shouldn’t be balanced solely around the high end players unless that’s your target market you need the input from “average players” as well.
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At one point you call them testers first and formost and then again as players. That’s a bit confusing because even if players test something they are firt and foremost players to me. Some who does a paid job as a tester is a tester to me because it the profession of a person and what she is doing. A player who tests stuff is a player. You just switch arround terms caling players players at one time and then testers and so on so forth. That back and forth just confusing .
The remove P and get a bigger TR if this is your concern. I don’t know if there is an influx of CTs or not because if they constantly invite players in right now everyone should be a CT ^^.
I had all kinds of alpha and beta testing and came across all kinds of people so my experince is: “Just another day on the internet”.
Again the above… On many different tests I participated I read “Stupid mechanic!” as feedback and some people wrote a whole Bible.
Why should they? If a CC intentionaly makes bad guides people don’t watch the stuff anymore. I know knowone doing this intentionally. If there is someone who took an old build and added in the changes and claims this should be the new shit it’s a different story and you take it with a grain of salt.
I don’t know if EHG deleted the old posts when CTs were a topic and had batches and were a topic ^^. I hope they did because if not you can find a ton of CTs that way.
Yeah but most backround data collection systems drain performence so live players would most likely be mad losing 10-30 fps and some latency to do something that could’ve been done on a PTR ^^.
Sure it’s unclear but if random Bob get’s a lot of money for a “meh…” game I take a guess and say Neversink gets a lot of money ^^. Still no proof here so either side can be right. On the other hand it depends on the position. Giving his tech to EHG for a one time paycheck will most likely be a bad thing depending on the ammount offered.
To me he is aprime example of an entertaining CC because he breakes stuff for fun and to get payment out of it. He recently had a talk with this other PoE2 CC I can’t remembet… something with a dionsaur iirc ^^… and told some stuff about what he is doing. His approach is perfect because he trys out everything but I don’t know if he keeps it up as a regular job and that he found a place where he want to be. Most payed testers I know are more knowlegeable in coding and stuff as well to understand the how and why on top of testing.
It depends on the game and the spectrum you want to cater to. If you want the biggest playerbase possible you aim for the average Joe. If you want to have PoE+ you only pick up experts that blast 24/7 who call other games “to easy”.
What? This was reworked rather recently O.o.
Loosing XP at a certain level in PoE2 is far more time consuming then anything in other Hack and Slash games for sure. Then again rerunning LE and the stupid zone repop the devs want to get rid of since forever is just a “Feels bad man…” moment. If one encounters these again and again for whatever reason one can be very frustrated. To me this is very understanding.
Okay I don’t want to sound like an ass here and stick to the example given. If you die in LE at lvl 26 vs the first boss for god knows what reason you’ll never suffer from the xp loss in PoE2 because you won’t reach high enough levels there anyway. So this might be the reasoning here to a certain extent… don’t know.
Yes and Yes and will do in the future.
I’ll never be satisfied and always one more but I’m rather pleased with the variety in LE compared to D4.
The issue was not “giving his tech”. His site is (somewhat easily) duplicated. What they wanted to hire him for is the continued maintenance of the filter. Which is what Neversink does every single new league.
If Neversink stops doing that, you suddenly get a void because you stop having a valid filter to use. Especially because Neversink does a lot of work on it, not only adding all the new stuff in the league to it but also making judgements on the valuable stuff (usually updating it frequently in early league days).
That is what GGG wanted to hire him for, not his site. As we’ve seen with poe.trade, replicating the site itself isn’t too hard.
I think there is a difference in what their goal is. A player logs in the game to experience the implemented mechanics. A tester logs in to improve those mechanics.
You say “just remove the P”, well … that’s what CT already is. Just also with an NDA. But even so, the mentality of someone saying “hey, I’m willing to make your game better so I (and others) will enjoy it more later on” is different than someone logging into the test realm as “I’m here to play an Early Access version which might have some FPS loss or unstable servers, but as long as I’m having fun now, I don’t care.” The current CT/NDA format probably filters out a lot of the second category, so the limited resources of a CT-server support team can be utilized more efficiently. And that’s what it comes down to: using their limited resources as efficiently as possible. Larger companies like ActiBlizz or GGG simply have a far lower threshold for efficiency, so they might be able to do CT, PTR & EA all at once.
As for how many people are needed to optimize CT value for LE … I don’t have numbers on that, but I assume it’s something EHG looks at on a monthly basis. (Or at least they should)
The argument here is that turning CT into PTR only gets you more of the first thing, which can drown out the latter, as you only have X people reading the forums within the company.
I never said intentionally making bad guides. But you don’t know on patch day if a guide is purely slapped together based on nodes, or if it’s tried & tested. Regardless, guide creators might not be a good argument to bring into this, let’s stick to people neither creating guides, nor the ones that are gonna google one on patch day anyway.
What data are collecting that you can’t get from the server directly?
You could collect offline data, but as it’s open to exploits/cheats, it’s not reliable data anyways.