Why I think the game fell off so hard and why its disappointing

[Airowird]

@Macknum

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 .

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)

@Macknum

Again the above… On many different tests I participated I read “Stupid mechanic!” as feedback and some people wrote a whole Bible.

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.

@Macknum

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 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.

@Macknum

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 ^^.

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.

[Macknum]

@DJSamhein

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.

Yeah but if it isn’t hard GGG should get their asses up and do it because I personaly like Dev driven stuff over 3rd party tools.
To me the whole thing sounded like they wanted to buy Neversink out but this is most likely a misunderstanding on the topic from my part. If they offered him a job to do what he does anyway he would be kind of stupid not to take it because a lot of people would most likely take GGGs approach over Neversinks approach. That highly depends on the contract terms though I can’t tell.

@Airowird

You say “just remove the P”, well … that’s what CT already is.

Yeah at the end it’s a closed beta test but semantics aside I talk about scale. More isn’t always better yeah sure but in getting numbers and datapoints more is very intresting ^^. I know some people who think they run some some tests or throw in bots to compensate for numbers and at the end of they day they learned nothing but “Looks like it’s smooth!” and all of the sudden they end up in a real scenario where that unavoidable guy in the back say “Yeah smooth as sandpaper!”,

But to not derail this topic even more we can simply agree to disagree while I don’t deny your point at all. A small dedicated team can do a lot but since I can’t tell what is what I simply say “The more the better.”.

@Airowird

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 realy reeeeaaaaly hope the devs have a flagging system from “Completely useless ignore!” to “Very insightfull and awesome!”. If not they should implement it fast ^^.

@Airowird

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.

But I know where to go and whom to ask to get guides that bring me from 0 to hero even before the game/season already launched. The intentionaly thing is from my side just to point out that most guide creators don’t throw arround bad stuff but make edjucated gusses at worst.

@Airowird

What data are collecting that you can’t get from the server directly?

Don’t ask me I only suffered from “Backround data collection systems are on!” and lost a lot of performence. A company I tested a game for had a backround check programm at work that kept track of FPS hickups. Sadly the whole thing that ran in the backround was a FPS killer by it’s own.

[DJSamhein]

@Macknum

Yeah but if it isn’t hard GGG should get their asses up and do it because I personaly like Dev driven stuff over 3rd party tools.

As I mentioned, the site itself isn’t important. It’s just a vehicle. What requires the most effort is the constant maintenance of the filter presets. Adding new stuff, evaluating what’s important or not, adding tiers, currency, etc.
If Neversink stops updating the filter presets every league it will be a big hit on PoE. That is what they wanted to hire Neversink for. To make sure that he wouldn’t just stop doing it.

@Macknum

If they offered him a job to do what he does anyway he would be kind of stupid not to take it because a lot of people would most likely take GGGs approach over Neversinks approach.

It would depend on a lot of things, really. The time he invests in it and would have to invest in the future, what job(s) he currently has that would possibly be affected by it, what the actual profit is from what he currently does, etc.
Even the simple fact that currently he’s doing it for love of the game in his spare time and if he feels like it he can stop doing it at any time. Or if he doesn’t feel like it, or has some real life situation that prevents it, he can simply update the filter a week later and it’s not a problem. Whereas having a contract would force him to keep it indefinitely.

[Macknum]

@DJSamhein

If Neversink stops updating the filter presets every league it will be a big hit on PoE. That is what they wanted to hire Neversink for. To make sure that he wouldn’t just stop doing it.

If Neversink stops it he is hopefully smart enough to sell it so someone else fills in. If all of the sudden neversink disappears and there is a void someone else will fill it or GGG is finaly forced to do something.

[DJSamhein]

@Macknum

If Neversink stops it he is hopefully smart enough to sell it so someone else fills in.

You seem to miss the point. There is nothing to sell to someone else. Neversink is so important to PoE because he puts in the effort every single league to update his presets. To add new currency, new uniques, to analyze the market and figure out what items are valuable or not.
This isn’t something you can sell. It’s his personal effort.

@Macknum

If all of the sudden neversink disappears and there is a void someone else will fill it or GGG is finaly forced to do something.

Yes. But whether or not they can do it and still maintain the same quality is a different thing. Neversink has a decade of experience by now. He can update his filter in a fast way that corresponds to the league necessities.
A new person doing that (either for love of the game or because GGG hired them for that) would have a steep learning curve. There would be several leagues with a subpar filter because of that. And playing PoE with a bad filter feels horrible.

That is why GGG wanted to hire Neversink and make sure this would never happen.

Personally, I also think that not creating your own internal alternatives to Neversink’s filter or PoB is a recipe for potential disaster. But it’s worked well for GGG so far, so there’s not much we can say about it.
After all, you have games like Skyrim which should have been mostly dead by now that are still vibrant based solely on the community continuing to churn out mds for it. So the power of a community to keep a game alive is no small thing.

[phandaal85]

@TrundleGod

But in last epoch, there is no competition anymore, or no reason to compete. Because the dev’s took the boring approach of prioritizing nerfing top builds, (which only results in less build diversity overall) instead when the approach should have been heavily focused on all the underpowered and underplayed abilities and talent trees, which would result in many new builds popping up that people want to play. That never happened, some skills that were garbage remained garbage for years during the early access until past release.

Personally, this is what disappointed me. It made sense that outlier builds would get nerfed. Problem is, this is all that happened. Playing Falconer, I did not want infinite dive bombs or ballistae exploding the entire screen at once. I did want abilities like Puncture or Acid Flask to be more interesting to press on their own sometimes, or maybe see lesser-used combos like Net-heavy builds get some love.

When patches came and went and the main things that happened were nerfs, and the prevailing attitude at EHG seemed to be more about bringing our builds down the level that they wanted us to play, I dipped. Said then, and I will say it again - I do not care what EHG wants. I care what I want. This is a selfish viewpoint, of course, but selfishly it is my time and money.

In the end though, this game gave me over 200 hours of fun, so it was not a waste by any stretch. Just not going to spend more time with it until it is clear that they are achieving diversity by increasing fun rather than by decreasing advantages.

[Airowird]

Well, if we’re both talking about the amount of testers, then yeah, more is better … as long as they keep taking the effort to write those bible posts

[DJSamhein]

@phandaal85

When patches came and went and the main things that happened were nerfs

I don’t know where you get this, though. First, there were plenty of buffs that allowed many builds to suddenly become viable, Shield Bash being only one of them. Secondly, even with the nerfs, the top builds are still overperforming.

[AkumaNoTsubasa]

@TrundleGod

the dev’s taking the boring approach of constantly nerfing the competitive builds in the endgame

This is the problem of almsot all ARPGs. At the moment ARPGs are all (I don’t know any very recent one that does it differently, please let me know if you know one!) on the trip of “Every build may be at MAXIMUM that much fun that you barely do content.” (slightly exaggerated)
It’s not about giving players power and fun anymore. A player just having fun is bad for the developers. Sure, a build that is immortal and oneshots even the biggest pinnacle bosses is too much, we can surely agree on that, but a few fixes to the build just doesn’t hyper-overperforms anymore is all that’s needed. Instead of hypernerfing the only builds that are being played: BUFF the builds that are not being played.
But “Buffing” is dead in this business. Yes, powercreep CAN be bad but truely only in a persistent environment. When you have Leagues/Seasons/Cycles you have a fresh start every now and then, you can adjust numbers at these points for all sides (player and enemy) to reduce the powercreep from both sides while giving players still the advantage of being able to play all builds and not just a handful of builds that managed to fall through the Nerf-Armada.
In games with leaderboards and/or an economy you will ALWAYS see players only play the top meta builds, why? Because everything else is worthless. Why should a player chose the build that needs 15 minutes for a single map when they can use a different skill and do the same thing in 2 minutes?
Sure some single players will chose the slower build for multiple reasons but the masses? No. If you can’t compete with the super fast meta builds you can not amass the currency needed to buy upgrades for your builds. You will stay behind on the leaderboards. You won’t be able to farm the most rare gear because you in the time you maybe see one bad version of it drop once, the meta-build players have seen 30 of the item.

Developers really should start getting back on track to what these games made big and it’s definitely NOT builds that are weak and useless.

[kozlow]

A few days ago I watched a video called “8000 Corruption Orobyss VS Falconer Last Epoch”.

The power increase is not bad as the drop is as bad as in corruption 500 LOL.
I know, the chances increase, etc., but in the video the guy had 1 LP with bad rolls and another without LP.

So let people have fun with all the builds.

I just don’t agree with buggy mechanics.

And you touched on the point that I’ve been warning about since early on: allowing a few builds to be “ultra meta”, instead of making them all reasonably good, means ruining the experience with the market.

[Kulze]

@Llama8

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.

Umh… I think you misunderstand the task of a game tester a bit. Of QA in general…

They’re not there to ‘represent’ any one. They’re there to find broken crap first and foremost. The things which would cause issues. Hence vast balance outliers, mechanics crashing the game, glitches, bugs… that sort of thing.

If you want a wide net of balance passes you take in community feedback and statistics, because no matter how much you throw ‘average joes’ in there it won’t work, for that you’ll need a substantial amount of players.
Also given that the genre is heavy on knowledge base… by the time those people could give you viable detailed feedback they’re… well… not average joes anymore unless they got to left hands, because they know enough to be upper-tier players already.

I know I like to call myself ‘mediocre’ in playing ARPGs usually… but I know also damn well that I’m likely somewhere around the top 5% when it comes to the level I’m actually playing. Which doesn’t mean much since hence there’s thousands above me which are actually visible to the community and are the actual ‘top-tier’… the so called ‘0,1%’ in PoE’s circles for example.

One way or another, I could give decent-ish feedback in testing environments, but not a great job… people like Jungroan though are the core audience you wanna get for any test. Fewest amount needed… biggest amount of broken things found.

TLDR: It makes zero sense to bring in your middling player into testing environments because the ‘middling player’ won’t find broken stuff and has not enough knowledge to give educated detailed returns to you.

@Macknum

What? This was reworked rather recently O.o.

Act 2 was - partially - visually upgraded, but the overall design of the Act wasn’t changed. It needs a sweeping pass like Act 1 basically.

@Macknum

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.

Is it? Why? I never understood why the zone repop is actually an issue.
All the options as to where it would cause issues are something I would say are viable reasons why it happens.

If you die in a campaign… you defintiely should need to re-do the area you’ve tried to finish. See it as a ‘level’ to beat. If you die in the middle of a level in a shooter you also generally don’t respawn at this exact position (classical shooter-level layout, not massive designs nowadays), you instead start over. Yeah, time to get a bit better!
If you portal out and in again you’re not running backwards in a zone anyway, so enemies behind you shouldn’t matter.
And if you die in a Monolith it shouldn’t be finished, hence re-doing it.

I don’t know why that’s brought up even, I literally don’t understand where people see the issue with it. It’s the ‘time investment’ aspect again… ‘It doesn’t respect my time’… no, it does. It just doesn’t make stuff worthless to achieve because there’s literally nothing at stake even as small as re-doing content for failing.

@Macknum

Yeah but if it isn’t hard GGG should get their asses up and do it because I personaly like Dev driven stuff over 3rd party tools.

Yep, but Neversink has no constraints for doing his website compared to GGG. He’s a third party after all. His layout can be mediocre, his design choices ‘off’ from the style. When GGG does it then it’s a different expectation. It needs to have the UI styles according to the game, fit in, have no issues for usage, be easy to use and not overcomplicated and so on and so forth.
It’s a fairly hefty investment actually.

Hence why they try to avoid that for as long as possible. You can be sure when Neversink stops that either GGG hires someone to pick up the slack or… they substantially hurt for it.

[Llama8]

@Kulze

I think you misunderstand the task of a game tester a bit. Of QA in general…

Not really, I’ve done the former several times, have had discussions with EHG about how they see/use the CT specifically. QA is a somewhat different beast to CT, they have scripts & look i to specific issues to reproduce them to get the necessary info for the coders to devise & implement a fix as well as testing the stuff the rest of the team has done to try & find stuff that doesn’t work as intended (just like this is not intended to be an exhaustive list).

@Kulze

They’re not there to ‘represent’ any one.

CT are, it’s not a zero sum game, they’re “representing” the various different facets of the communuty in terms of giving feedback as well as finding stuff that’s broken. CTs aren’t just unpaid QA, at least not in EHG’s eyes. I’m not speaking for other companies who may well have that view.

@Kulze

If you want a wide net of balance passes you take in community feedback and statistics, because no matter how much you throw ‘average joes’ in there it won’t work, for that you’ll need a substantial amount of players.

Yes & no. For EHG, the CTs are expected to give more detailed & useful/actionable feedback, mot just “bruh, da shiet suckzorz! Git gud devs!!!11”.

@Kulze

TLDR: It makes zero sense to bring in your middling player into testing environments because the ‘middling player’ won’t find broken stuff and has not enough knowledge to give educated detailed returns to you.

Well then i guess that’s just another thing for you to slate EHG for as “clearly” they’re doing this wrong, along with everything else. You may wish to brush up on how EHG uses the CT rather than just making assumptions based on other companies.

[Macknum]

@DJSamhein

This isn’t something you can sell. It’s his personal effort.

Domain, the code and whatnot. All of this can be sold. I don’t know if there are some leagal implications if you copy&paste a website or the code used to deliver a service but to me all of this has a worth that can be sold.

Sure updating the page is important but not rocketscience so anyone who is willing to do can immerse themselfs to do so.

@DJSamhein

Yes. But whether or not they can do it and still maintain the same quality is a different thing.

Sure it could be far better… duh?

@Airowird

Well, if we’re both talking about the amount of testers, then yeah, more is better … as long as they keep taking the effort to write those bible posts

Those people are everywhere. At the end of the day it’s the devs job to go through all the feedback and take from it what they want or need ^^.

@Kulze

Is it? Why? I never understood why the zone repop is actually an issue.

Because you have to redo what you already did. That’s mostly a non issue but while you talk about obvious psychologial impacts a lot you schould know how people are impacted if they suffered a defeat and then have to do the same stuff again to get back where they have been.

@Kulze

Yep, but Neversink has no constraints for doing his website compared to GGG. He’s a third party after all. His layout can be mediocre, his design choices ‘off’ from the style. When GGG does it then it’s a different expectation. It needs to have the UI styles according to the game, fit in, have no issues for usage, be easy to use and not overcomplicated and so on and so forth.
It’s a fairly hefty investment actually.

Why? Their trade page looks ass as well.

[Kulze]

@Macknum

Domain, the code and whatnot. All of this can be sold.

Deprecated after 3 months, the work-load needed to sustain the code beyond that timeframe is massive.

That’s what DJ is talking about. You can’t sell future workload and make it happen without actually putting effort into it when the time comes. Kinda hard to do

@Macknum

Because you have to redo what you already did.

Yeah? Did you ‘beat’ the zone? So why should it not be re-done when failing?
And yeah, the quality of checkpoints of any kind is important (LE needs a bit of work on that still) but re-doing content itself existing as a baseline is not a choice… it’s a necessity.

If you fail a dungeon in games… you generally got to do them from scratch.
If you fail levels, checkpoint of from scratch.
Game overs to re-do stuff.

By the notion you’re giving forward it sounds as if reaching 0 Health should basically only mean your character is falling to the ground before standing up without any downsides at full life again, endlessly, without repercussions.
You need downsides to failure. The question is just the magnitude. And LE’s downsides are fairly mild.

@Macknum

Why? Their trade page looks ass as well.

Does it?
It uses the PoE font style, it has the same dropdown layout as the in-game settings UI, it follow the color-scheme of the game, provides all models properly displayed, a overview of all mods (the dropdown lists there need work definitely though), a display of tiers for each mod and more options then any sane person would ever need for.

Optimizations would be to only allow input fields relevant for the specific item category being searched for, but in terms of functionality (which is higher then design measures) it outpaces LE’s MG system by magnitudes already… and doesn’t take too much of a hit in terms of design despite of that.
It does take a hit… but not a major one. LE’s Bazaar doesn’t look much better, but it’s vastly more clunky and non-functional.

[DJSamhein]

@Macknum

Domain, the code and whatnot. All of this can be sold.

The domain can be changed. That’s not an issue. Sure, the code for the site itself isn’t really simple, but it’s not that complicated. GGG could replicate that in less than a month with just a few devs.

@Macknum

Sure updating the page is important but not rocketscience

The problem isn’t updating the page. It’s updating the filter presets. It’s knowing where to add the new stuff, but more importantly, how important the new stuff really is.
GGG adds a new unique. Should it go on the tier 4 uniques list and thus hidden from the more restrict filters? Is it a new Mageblood and thus we should make it huge with a beacon and a special sound?

Sure, someone else can try to do that. But currently, no one can do it as fast as Neversink. He has a new filter preset for the league ready almost immediately and he doesn’t have to keep updating it all the time to adjust item’s relative importance.

That is something that takes years of practice to be able to evaluate properly. Just looking at patch notes and knowing where things fit isn’t something that most people would be able to do.
So yes, you could get someone else to do it, but in the first few leagues the filter would take a lot longer to be available. Which would have a big impact on the game, since the first couple weeks are the most important ones for the game. After that it starts to fall off. And without a proper filter, it would fall off much faster.

@Macknum

Sure it could be far better… duh?

It could. Not likely, since no one has looked at what Neversink does, thought “I can do better than that” and did it. If it was easy, someone would have done it by now.
There’s a reason why his is the most popular by far.

[Macknum]

@Kulze

That’s what DJ is talking about. You can’t sell future workload and make it happen without actually putting effort into it when the time comes. Kinda hard to do

Okay… I know a lot of people who do hardcore tasks/hobbys/training and whatnot. Everyone of them is dwarfed by another person who does the same and is better at it. A project isn’t dieing if you find somone willing and motivated to work on it after you stoped.

@Kulze

Yeah? Did you ‘beat’ the zone? So why should it not be re-done when failing?
And yeah, the quality of checkpoints of any kind is important (LE needs a bit of work on that still) but re-doing content itself existing as a baseline is not a choice… it’s a necessity.

For me there is no problem but I understand people who are unhappy about it. If you keep in mind that EHG said they want to get rid of it but there are some tech issues it looks like it isn’t a necessity. On top of it I play H&S games to H&S stuff so to me it’s completely normal to play and slay the same stuff over and over again because repetition is the core of the game.

@Kulze

Does it?

Yeah if I compare it to the PoE 1 trade site I used it’s not breathtakingly different or outstanding or an upgrade. It does the same and looks a bit different but only so little.

@DJSamhein

The problem isn’t updating the page. It’s updating the filter presets. It’s knowing where to add the new stuff, but more importantly, how important the new stuff really is.

That’s what I ment ^^.

@DJSamhein

Sure, someone else can try to do that. But currently, no one can do it as fast as Neversink.

Why should they if he does it? As mentioned above. If there is a void it will be filled and there are even more talented people (for sure) who could do it. There is simply no need for it so why should anyone?

[DJSamhein]

@Macknum

Why should they if he does it?

If they think they can do better they would do it for one of several reasons:
-Pride/joy of doing something better.
-The possibility of making money from it by taking Neversink’s market.
-The inherent fame it would bring in that circle.

It’s no different from the mods “market”. There are games that have many many similar mods. There are currently 65k mods on Skyrim. Many of them are similar, in that they intend to augment the same thing, even the same feature. Most of the time a modder looks at the existing mods and goes “I could do better” and he does it.

[phandaal85]

@DJSamhein

@phandaal85

When patches came and went and the main things that happened were nerfs

I don’t know where you get this, though. First, there were plenty of buffs that allowed many builds to suddenly become viable, Shield Bash being only one of them. Secondly, even with the nerfs, the top builds are still overperforming.

That’s the neat thing - you don’t need to get it. Your understanding was not required for me to go do something else.

[Kulze]

@Macknum

If you keep in mind that EHG said they want to get rid of it but there are some tech issues it looks like it isn’t a necessity.

EHG wants to have persistent zones because it feels better immersion wise to have persistence existing.
This means that when you open a town portal you go into town, do your stuff… and when you come back the same situation is still where you left it off.

That has nothing to do with re-doing things or the fail-state, it’s solely about presentation and the ability to create content which allows multiple tries rather then a singular one (which currently isn’t easily possible because of the persistence issue).

The point is rather that a majority of people ask for persistence not because of the above mentioned bits… but to make the game easier. ‘Why can’t I re-try Aberroth!’, ‘When I die I have to re-run the zone!’, ‘All monsters respawn after my character went 6 feet under!’ and so on. Nobody would complain about better presentation of the system or content being balanced around several tries to get to know the boss mechanics for example. But the majority complains for baseline mechanics which aren’t avoidable without severe downsides or talking about making top-end content easier which is supposed to be darn hard for a reason.

[DJSamhein]

You’re the one who doesn’t seem to “get it”. I understood you. I’m just disagreeing with you on a demonstrably false statement.
Why are you posting on a public discussion if all you want is to shut down discourse? Are you Abomb with another account?