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

General
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Yes, it is.

The difference is that the release trailers, campfire talks and the likes are all direct PR. ‘Here, let us show what we did’ and from there people get excited. Albeit the campfire talks are… yeah… not good. Major amounts of fluff for basically presenting patch notes. That’s annoying at best.

I don’t think LE will manage to do it in the same way though given that people aren’t outright looking forward to the game updating after 1.0 was enjoyable (since it’s the first experience for most) and then nobody heard anything substantial since then, with 1.1 catering solely to top-tier end game players while offering a ‘set and forget’ mechanic (Nemesis) as a mini-bonus interaction wise. And the event was… some liked it, but it was basically nothing new either, just some stronger random mobs which demolished you and caused more issues then good for many builds.

So it’ll be more leaning towards content creators looking into it and then reeling in people not with the regurgitating of the patch-notes and trailers but rather by showcasing the gameplay and saying 'it’s good.
I imagine that the release spike will be surprisingly low actually while retention will be comparatively surprisingly high as people come in more staggered then usually seen in this genre.

Depends heavily. We’re likely to se 0.2 of PoE 2 in March, relative to the league they present it might not be long enough after the start of the PoE 2 league… or rather could also be leaning into the exhaustion of PoE 1 league followed by the PoE 2 league where many streamers go into variety streaming rather then picking up LE again for a substantial time. The market of ARPGs is getting fairly satiated with PoE 1, 2, Torchlight, D4 and LE together. Torchlight is a afterthought because of their monetization methods, D4 is simply a mess… but we got 2 other substantial games of the genre still.

Yes, and never before has Mike overhyped things, said things which haven’t been done or made mistakes :stuck_out_tongue: I’ll trust it when it’s there and functioning well. Burning with fervor for what one created is a very important part… but it also tends to blind you at the same time to issues.

But I definitely hope - and actually expect - substantial changes.

Bestiary without nets is great!
And Blight without guaranteed crashes is also enjoyable!

But at release-state they were a mess. Much like Harvest mechanically was at the start, or why ever they didn’t remove that annoying limit of memory pieces for Synthesis (which was a fantastic mechanic by itself) or… so many others. Some decisions of GGG are generally baffling, like removing gameplay mechanics when the crafting aspects are lackluster… or removing crafting bits when the gameplay mechanics are a mess for something (Betrayal).

Which, to be fair… shouldn’t be incomplete after a ‘release’ anymore. But here we are :stuck_out_tongue:

Yeah, absolutely with you there for the quality of feedback, or the toxicity.

But that doesn’t excuse the devs from communicating. They don’t need to communicate with those specific people, but taking the information in (some had bits of the true reasonings behind a mass of anger, which is extremely valuable nonetheless) and answering to more civilized topics regularly is a basically mandatory aspect of engagement.

And even more important is to actually summmarize those things over time in some visible form. Some devs literally give out their lists of development points freely to showcase how far along things have gotten, or what’s handled in the last while. It’s a form of visibility that showcases ‘this week those 4 parts were changed in some way’ and giving hence a feedback of what exactly is worked on… and hence as a customer making a informed decision if the course is on par.

It’s rather that the current iterration of the new Atlas in PoE 2 is… cumbersome.
Besides technical issues like broken connections, disconnected areas and even failing to load when scrolling there’s also mechanical shortcomings which make it tedious.
While the towers are a great idea generally the setup is similar to what was already a mistake in PoE 1. The elder/shaper ping-pong was not enjoyed by the majority of people, neither was the setup for conquerors when it came out. That has all been simplified since it was simple ‘tedium’.
The same is going on currently with having to basically move between all towers in the area before actually running enjoyable maps… which are often still disconnected by maps that haven’t gotten any league mechanics put on them despite using all available methods, making it a ‘empty’ map.

Such stuff needs to be solved still in some way, it’s a downside as switching between maps with a hefty danger, much loot and risk as well as sudden snoozefestivals in-between is not a good state.

Oh, you don’t need to, but it’s usually not as fun to make complex mathematical equations on paper instead of using a program doing it for you to quick-check :stuck_out_tongue: It should be in-game as a mechanic rather then a third-party tool though.

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Once again cementing Nintendo as one of the biggest anti-consumer company that somehow still has more community support than EA.

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Maxroll will most likely be all over it again. I’m pretty sure some CCs will look into it my question is how long. If they blast through the game in 24h and the endgame changes are to little they will most likely move on fast. This is a doubble edged sword because if some people who are on the fence of playing see fast that there is to little they skip but if EHG managed to do a quality season more people might come back.

That’s most likely the most crucial thing. Heck I’m even looking forward to kill some time with D4 next week because the season theme reminds me a bit of S2. On top of it the timing is right because then I’m most likely finished with my Borderlands IP replay ^^.

Sure it wont die right away but it will fall appart even more from that day on. The best example how you end up in a pickle is Fractured. They overpromised and underperformed the whole time and made bad descissions and now there are 3 devs left clawing at the game that is as good as dead.
For my part I try to dial down my exeptions for LE drasticly so I may end up suprised at the end.

Sure it’s communicated. Chronicels of Elyria communicated they make an RTS now instead of what was promised in the kickstarter. That isn’t making things right. Yeah yeah I picked the worst example you can’t compare… I just want to make a point that communicating that stuff isn’t making it is just simply removing stuff. I still wait for the endgame options besides the monolith and running a dungeon every now and then because I’m forced to.

Yet they didn’t release a full product. If the balance in PoE 2 is equaly bad as of right now I will call them out as well as every other game. Sometimes it just looks like companys don’t even care at all for balance and hide behind shifting metas for seasons to make stuff more fun without getting a baseline first. I don’t talk about full balance that will be never achived but there are builds that are better then others by a lot and that’s a bad thing to me.

As Mike said for LE: If ppl go into the XXXX coruption ranges they messed up. My question is: “When was this not the case?”. It’s like admitting to messing up constantly. Sure I give them the benefit of a doubt that they have more pressing matters right now but they already established a “Over 1k corruption or the build is crap!” meta mentality and they most likely can’t take this away anymore without making ppl go apeshit crazy.

I let you in a bit of a secret. The world is full of deranged people who are the worst of the worst and the internet is a cesspool full of them. Every other person acts like a complete psycho on the internet. Oh you say this is no secret but a trend that kicked in when Internet was wiedely approachable to everyone? Guss noone else is suprised then.

Is this fun? No! Is this productive? No! Is this good for peoples mental health? No! Was it handled right? No! If you don’t like crazy ppl that act out get rid of them and be done with it.

One is as useless as the other because there is no reasoning mentioned here. The first thing you mentioned looks like the person isn’t even caring enough to write any meaningfull feedback and the other persons social competence isn’t that evolved. I wouldn’t mind both of them while I still think both people have the right to voice their oppinion. If I would care about everything ppl threw my way I would’ve died in elementry school.

It’s NEVER enough :slight_smile: . By testing stuff in a small scale you can’t get the big picture. I hope LE is going for open Beta branches sooner or later after CTs managed to point out the glaring issues. They need more feedback and most likely more critical feedback as well.

Aaron is exited about everything.

Why do you think this? From my knowledge back in the day when CT badges were still a thing I think that CTs, while doing an awesome thing by volunteering their time and effort, are all to positive about what EHG did while some of that was often a topic of debate. You don’t get good results out of an echochamber. Sure that’s me talking out of my ass without any proof but I think that closes the circle about feedback because it seems EHG is getting to positive feedback from somewhere ^^.

Yeah I should’ve made this clearer. I talk about the time before the launch when shit hit the fan. At release the tune changed drasticly from carebearvill to a lot of complaints about the quality of various aspects of the game. Sadly people weren’t happy before the release if you touched said topics at all.
Let’s put it this way… I find it absolutly disheartening to argue against a flok of people who don’t want to even listen to feedback that was given and give a person who gave feedback a hard time. To me that was obviously a bad thing and one cause that lead to were we are now. At least to me there was to little feedback from all spectrums from “Fuck you your game sucks!” to the obvious praises before the game launched.
Do you remember the good old “Take your time and release a finished and polished product!” chorus? That was feedback that went under the bus as it seems :smiley: . To me the “to good to be true” community back in the early days of the steam founder pack release is a part of why there are some issues right now. Sure that’s just a little part but I even grill stupid things in games I enjoyed and played for hundrets of hours if they make no sense or are stupid. That’s something that didn’t happen in the past very often.

Many people enjoy certain fetishes that make me almost puke. What kind of an argument do you want to make here? The atlas tree is boring and bland because it only gives some increased values. Sure it makes things more effective like every other increased value but it’s braindead and boring.

At one point in my life I calculated stuff in my head, then on paper and then I used a calculator and after that Excel kind of stuff. Should I go back to calculate stuff in my mind because using third party tools to validate my my math isn’t a good system?

PoE has an artificaly overbloated skilltree where it is easy to overlook stuff. The need for a third party software to smoothly work with an ingame system is the real bad joke.

(BTW I read the quoted part 2-3 times and I’m not sure if the first thing I wrote hit the spot or if you wanted to point out the other thing I wrote.)

Yeah sure. Still I think it’s better to fish where the fishes are instead of a puddle with only three fish in it.

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Before 1.0 1k+ wasn’t as common as it was with 1.0+. Balance became worse with launch, because they added a bunch of new stuff that was much stronger than existing ones, especially for Falconer and Warlock, which affected the whole class.

While the first one isn’t useful in itself, it can be interacted with and you can ask the person to elaborate on it.
Whereas the second one doesn’t.

PTRs aren’t that good either. D3 did that and balance was all over the place and issues still came up that needed urgent fixing within the first week.
D4 has moved to the same model recently and it also doesn’t help. Despite the PTR, sorc was so OP it had to be nerfed mid-season.
In both cases, neither their internal testers nor the open PTR caught those issues.

PoE doesn’t do PTRs and they do fine (granted, they had a bunch of very shaky league launches, but that hasn’t happened in quite a while).

So PTRs aren’t the solution people seem to think they are.

For all that Aaron loves LE and is always excited about everything, he is also honest about it and will point out the flaws in the game. It’s one of the things I like about him.
Same as me. I love LE and I’ve often said that if EHG decided to abandon the game as is right now I would still play it for a long time. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t point out to its issues.
One of those issues both me and Aaron have pointed out is that endgame isn’t too engaging currently. It’s mostly doing the same thing over and over without much control over it and without variery.

So if Aaron is testing the new stuff, he’s in a good position to know if the new content will have a big impact on this or not. Much like the other CT (I don’t remember his name) that opened a thread in the general discussion rather than the CT one was saying that he was underwhelmed by the new changes so far (this was over a month ago).

So yeah, CTs are definitely more aware of the quality of the upcoming patch than everyone else. And for all that they love LE, they’re also players and can judge on it. After all, that’s their job: test stuff and provide feedback on it. Sure, they might be biased towards LE, but pretty much any tester is.
Which is the problem with PTRs as well: no one is going to bother spending significant time in a PTR if they don’t already like the game (which is why I never bothered with D3 PTRs before).

There are nodes which make significant changes, like CI, MoM, etc. Other than that, you can say the same thing about LE’s passive tree. It’s mostly just giving increased values as well.

You can’t really do much more than having lots of nodes that just are NGU (number go up) and adding a few (generally very few) that actually add big changes. That’s because you need plenty of sources of NGU, preferably tied to your character progression, and you can’t place a bunch of “free” broken nodes willy nilly.

Yeah, that was the part I wanted to point out. There should be an in-game way to validate your options more easily.
And, to be fair, this is a criticism that also applies to LE, mostly because the tooltips are very innacurate.

That depends a lot on what you want to fish. Not every game sets out to make the most money possible. D4 tries to fish in the big pond and all it cares about is what makes the most money. They don’t care about the quality of the fish, their size, etc. LE and PoE1 are more selective in the fishes they want.
It’s a silly analogy, but the point is that both LE and PoE1 make choices to attract the players that fit the game’s identity. Whereas Blizzard just wants numbers, even if they have to lose the game’s identity in the process.

It would be a better analogy to say that LE and PoE1 are like corals that attract certain fish to it, whereas Blizzard is a fish farm that will simply process anything that comes to their net.

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Yes, exactly, because that’s the current biggest issue for LE. Longevity of content.

EHG said they’re working specifically on that, so if they pull it off all will be fine, the game itself overall is a good game after all.

If they also manage to finally get MG under control at least ‘somewhat’ (cause it’s broken entirely right now) then it should work out fine. And if CoF gets the pieces handles which are annoying or hindering smooth progression on top then the game is off to a fantastic position for the future.

Given their position currently I would actually recommend it to them as well. Yes… giving early access to content is generall not good. Yes, it’s not done because it’s unfair for competitions. Yes for many other reasons.

But their primary worry currently should be on providing a top-tier quality product without all the issues 1.0 and 1.1 had, or at least significantly less (it’s a unicorn to believe all will be solved, but the right direction needs to be unmistakably clear)

:rofl:

I wouldn’t say it’s overbloated, it’s actually a fairly nice system.
It’s just missing relevant in-game support to make decision-making easier and reliable. Because yeah… having to use another programm to get stuff handled is not nice.

Same as in-game price-checking should be a thing, in-game trading environment and so on and so forth. Nobody likes to interrupt their game-flow for auxiliary stuff, hence the more support to handle it directly is there the better.

Not as common, true… but common nonetheless.

Not the fault of the testers. They mentioned all those imbalances and issues… Blizzard just didn’t give a piece of crap about fixing stuff :stuck_out_tongue:

It took them 6 years to not screw up the regular stuff and get into a place where the majority of issues weren’t massive anymore… and even now they repeat some of the same major mistakes like ‘let people store 4 quad tabs of itemized league mechanic stuff’ or ‘have people do some bothersome click-festival to tinker around before stuff happens’ ongoing.

Things only get as good as you make em, those things are generally known design-wise but simply ignored over and over.

PTRs are a solution as long as the company also does a good job at taking in the respective feedback… which nigh no company does well because it’s a really hard skill to discern and get through until it’s actually properly handled as would be expected in the end. Stuff gets lost in translation internally already and time constraints or missing organization does another bit on top.

Yeah, albeit they don’t take a fishing rod for it but decided to hold a cup into the water hoping fishes will swim into it. Sure, at times one does… but a more effective method in the heavily populated fish-pond would nonetheless do better.

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Based on past experiences, there is usually enough of negative comments in closed testing feedback channels as well. More comments are generally positive, obviously, but they aren’t exclusively that and the negative ones are rarely just “this is bad, make it better, you losers!” type of responses.

As for PTRs:
The problem with volunteer testers is getting them invested enough to provide useful feedback. For example:

One of my old gripes is that Attunement is the only stat without a defensive layer baked in. This makes stuff like an Attunement-heavy Shaman build very squishy without investing more into defensive talents vs a Strength build (free %armor) for example. Plus it makes harder to build class design around an already-present mechanic.

Now, you could have 10 CT players try Shaman and maybe one of them finds this correlation and posts it. That post is gonna be read. Or you could have 1000 PTR players of which 800 will create “Shamans suck, they keep dying” posts, 50 people who think they know why, but expect someone else to write a post they’ll just upvote … and that same player who’s post got drowned out by the ineffective feedback.

It’s especially hard when you’re talking game development, because part of the goal is subjective things like ‘fun’. But I’ld rather they have 10 players giving good feedback than 1000 ones who will just generate statistical data on the outcome of their talent/gear choices, but not the decision making process.

Plus, if you look at WoW/Diablo PTRs, a majority of players treat it like free early access and will follow guides to play even on PTR. At best they provide large scale data, not accurate feedback. They’re good for stress-testing servers (like EHG did pre-release) but they aren’t as useful for design testing.

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Yes, and the LE forum is not sizeable enough to not allow a single person to at least read the initial post + provide a short summary of potential issues seen at the end of the day. And that was even the case in 1.0.

And if someone does that for a few weeks with an open mind + knowledge about the game personally then the issues should crystallize out anyway, as well as which ones are perceived as the biggest issues and which ones are simply talked about a lot but would mess with the enjoyment of another large portion. We can and could see the difference in topics regularly.

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That statement was made after the release so I was aiming for said time period. Sorry if this wasn’t obvious and I forget to mention this.

Yeah sure but to what degree was Blizz accountable for that? I think people who care about LE to check out the game before launch would help. Sure the whole “new” stuff would be spoilered and whatnot but I think thousands of ppl testing is better then hundrets of people testing.

Huh? PTR testers said that the Sorc is completely busted and everyone should play Sorc… so to what extend was this again a fault by Blizz? The issue was cought and a ton of ppl played the class after a lot of guides were there instantly when the season started.

For Blizzard as it seems yes.

People beat this dead horse since a month into monolith release yeah.

I pick other sources over Aaron. While he’s a nice dude and makes entertaining stuff I would not watch it when it comes to blasting and effective gameplay. Other peoples are a tad bit ahead of him and delve into the endgame rather fast because they love endgame stuff. If said endgame fanatics say “meh!” I don’t care what he says about it. I don’t want to belittle Aaron but to me often looks like to much of a fan to take the feedback seriously. Like I never care what people say about a game when it is sponsored by the publisher or devs. When I watched how ppl suffered through Corepunk without any idea what to do while trying to stay positive about the game while the already had those dead eyes and looked like they wanted to smash things… “What an awesome game!”… nah ^^. Maybe I get this wrong and it’s a me issue but I enjoy watching other streamers for this ^^.

Well first of all I think it’s not a job. A job normaly involves payment. I don’t think every CT is loving LE then again I could rate the word “love” much differently then you so I can’t tell. I don’t know if I would agree to the biased tester part. Sure they most likely don’t hate the game but if you look at it with the mindset that you want to improve things you should not involve feelings or bias and stay professional.

What I do for a long time.

Yeah well that’s another topic that people had over and over again and EHG isn’t moving a bit and give us numbers that seem pretty made up while ppl want accurate damage numbers.

If someone who runs a buissnes tells me he’s not wanting to make the most money possible I would never touch their products. If they say “We cater to a small friction of people world wide who pay 200€ for a can of awesome dog food!” so be it. I don’t own a dog (sadly) and if I had one I would never touch that product.

I would never invest in a buisness that only covers a small part of the whole market and isnt oriented to make the most money possible. Sure this is all said keeping in mind to deliver a quality product without going all over the place to try to please everyone.

Just remember old Blizz that scrapped whole games because they were not to Blizz standards back in the day. Now they want to print money and they do a rather good job while they lose all goodwill of their customers sooner then later. Heck even EA is still arround and they are ultra greedy.

That analogy would be okay if watching nice fishes is what you want. I just want some meat to enjoy and LE just looks like salad some times.

I’m just a bit sad that a promising game like LE isn’t making it for whatever reason. By making it I mean a commercial success in the long run.

Even PoE2 is overbloated and the design is all over the place. Sure the skillmap is divided in sections so you know where the nodes are that depend mostly on strength and what you get of it and the overlapping zones besides it. Still it’s full of shapes you need to follow that are unpleasent to watch for me as a design. You could most likely get the same effect out of the tree if you remove most buffer nodes and put in higher numbers while having a more streamlinded visual without repeating taking the same filler nodes just to reach a nice node. That’s overbloated and unnesessary in my book.

If you had someone who says “You suck!” in a testing team it’sa you problem. Sure the feedback is there but what EHG is making out of it would be intresting. Is negative feedback even heared? Are they acting because of the feednack? Are CT’s simply the next instance of QA to find bugs? We will never no fully and that’s a good thing mostly but it will leave us in the dark forever.

CT’s are all volunteers… noone ever have seen this as a problem ^^.

Yeah that’s another topic that was mentioned every now and again.

At least you know there is a glaring issue when 80% of your tester get so angry to write this down. A dev can always take the extra minute to ask for clearification and I guess they do if there is a problem that is popping up for most testers.

Statistics, as much as I hate that crap, are crucial in a game where numbers = strength. If developers watch for certain statistics they might find out that there are certain interactions that help one build to be thousands of corruption ahead of other builds.

And said majority will not leave feedback. In an PTR environment you (hopefully) have a lot of data collection running in the backround so you can see if something is ending up in to high or to low numbers and take a look into it. Even if a mojority of players just plays on a PTR thats hundrets of thousands more numbers you can crossreference.
Then there are people who give feedback. Depending on what inforamtions you gather, where you gather them and from whom you can clearly see if devs have common sense or if the leave glaring issues in their game.

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Understandable since they’re a company asking for testers and then ignoring them perfectly.
No surprise that testing is no solution for them in that case.
You don’t only need testers but also implementers :stuck_out_tongue: Kinda doesn’t resolve itself magically.

Depends, you could also go for a stable income by guaranteeing to be the supplier for something niche which only you do. Which kinda is the gaming industry in a nutshell. No need to make ‘all the money’, you just make ‘a good chunk of money’ but reliably after finding your spot. And that’s fine as long as you ensure to keep your spot.

Because sometimes you simply can’t reliably branch out without hurting the already established product by doing so.

In PoE 2 I have to agree with that, the design is more enjoyable to look at… but worse to navigate in. Simple shapes would’ve been better.

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Aka making the most money possible at that given time. Premium car manufactorers cater to a niche market as well. They still want you to pay a ton of money if you bring your premium car in to repar a switch or a nob in your car while you can get the same piece they bill you hundrets of dollars for in a quad pack for 4,99. Every buisness wants to make money… heck even 1 dollar shops make money. it’s not only seelling a 10 dollar cost to produce items for thousands of dollars because people are stupid it’s about income to keep up with changes and to pay the bills.

Buuuuuuut simple shapes would’ve made it simpler and that’s something PoE want’s to avoid like the plague so they overbloat in every possible way ^^.

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I don’t understand your reasoning behind this. Every company in the world aims for a subset of the consumer base. You have companies like Zara that cater to a lower income base and ones like Armani that cater to a high income base. Both want to make the most money they can but they target vastly different people.
Likewise, Apple clearly targets very different consumers than Android does. Windows/Linux, Fiat/Rolls Royce, the list goes on.

In terms of gaming, this translates into companies making games entirely focused on the profit they may bring (for example, the absolute flood of mobile games with microtransactions for quick easy money) vs companies that make games based on their quality (Larian, EHG, GGG, Crate, etc).
This does not mean that Larian doesn’t want to make the most money possible with BG3, or that EHG doesn’t want to make the most money possible with LE. It just means that they don’t want to sacrifice their game identity in the name of profit.

Basically, every game out there could make generic changes to their games to generate more revenue than they currently do, but they would do so at the cost of the game identity and making their product one more of the generic “insert game here”.

Again, this isn’t mutually exclusive. FromSoftware only covers a small part of the ARPG playerbase and they want to make the most money possible. However, they won’t sacrifice their vision and make their games an easy zoom-zoomy triggerfest.
PoE/LE only cover a small part of the diablo-like playerbase (the part that likes to grind). D4 only covers a portion of the diablo-like playerbase as well (the opposite one: casuals that want fast gratification and little grind).

I can’t really think of a single company selling a product that is targetted at every single person.

The biggest problem with PTRs is that casual won’t play them. Or just play them for a very short time. CTs and PTRs both share the same issue: only players with a very high skill/knowledge of the game participate in it. The only difference between a CT and a PTR is scale.
It’s only when the game is out and you see the overall picture of your whole playerbase that you get an actual real picture of what is going on. And you’ll never have it with a PTR because only a small portion of the playerbase engages in it.

Not to mention that most of the problems arise when the jungroans of the playerbase get their hands on it and start breaking it. I don’t know if jungroan is part of GGG’s CT, but there are always more out there that aren’t. They’re the ones that think so far outside the box that they break the box.

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It is overbloated and there are things which could be simplified without sacrificing almost any complexity, but overbloated skill tree is a thing of PoE, without this it will not look like PoE. Jonathan discussed it in the interview in terms of marketing, and I agree with him that it was smart marketing decision to keep it.

They simplified a lot of other things, like flasks, skill gem slots, gem colors.

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While this is true it isn’t the whole story. All of said companys made compromises that changed changed the original plan. Even games like BG3 that I like very much was there and done that. Still I belive they surely want to make as much money aspossible because with money you can keep the company running. Sure if you want to build a hill to on then… die… I guess.

Nestle most likely :D. Just to make my thought process a bit more clear. It’s good to have aa vision for a game and a set goal you want to acomplish. If the vision or the goal is simply bad or worse then what other companys offer and they want to sell it like a passion project, pointing out Fractured here again, they do things wrong.

Yes. That’s where you look at the data and keep in mind that you look at the data from very skilled individuals that in no way shape or form are average Joes. You keep this in mind and still have data to work with. Sooooo?

Then it’s to late if not everything works as it should. Look at Blizz who had to do a lot of stuff while the season is running that should’ve been done beforehand. Balance changes, bugfixes and whatnot during a season, not to speak of nerfs because then ppl will be craycray, are things that could be handled earlier when the game was tested properly. To properly test a game you need all the influx of testers that you can and if it is only for data. Sure I could be wrong and everything is sunshine and happyness and the next season will be awesome without any bugs and a good balance where no build is able to go over 999 corruption but I highly doubt it ^^.

is it just me or did this happen less back i nthe day when gametester was a payed job and there were enough arround to test games? Sure there were always problems and stuff to fix but not in the magnitude we have today.

For marketing sure, then again if you look at it for what it is it’s a reason why a lot of people stay away from the game. Not because it’s hard or ugly or EA but just because the first look at the skilltree is a “Nah I’m done!” moment for most players I know who never touched PoE. So sure keep it for marketing only this will make the game… better? I guess not.

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EHG listens to feedback, that’s why the Merchants Guild exists, because people complained about the lack of trading option.

As for CT vs QA: I think you need both. QA knows how the things work internally and will often try to filter out edge cases and unusual input in a system based on expectations. CTs go in relatively blind, they have little to no notion of what decisions were made to end up with a skill implementation, they start testing based on the end result, not the attempted goal.

As for PTR statistics: Yet again, this only works for data you chose in advance to log. Yes, if they rework Sentinel and 97% of new characters suddenly have Vengeance in their build, it’s probably a good idea to go look into that more. But that data isn’t going to tell you why people chose it. Not everything people do in games is purely numbers. It doesn’t even tell them how much they’ld need to buff Rive to be competitive, because nobody is using it to collect data.

Plus, there is always the bystander effect. The more people are on a PTR, the less inclined they are to actively give feedback, especially in an open beta. Because a part of those people will think “well, someone with more time will write up a post I can upvote, not gonna bother”. It’s what I did in WoW and stopped playing PTRs. Not to mention the amount of people I met that just used a Wowhead guide anyway, so they literally provided no feedback on talent choices, they just ‘upvoted’ their favourite guide source.

Both CT & PTR have their pros & cons. For example; in WoW, PTR data leaks are basically expected. In LE, most leaks happen during Mike’s stream. :crazy_face:
Seriously though, it’s a quality vs quantity argument, and unlike D4, a Last Epoch PTR isn’t going to hit quantity levels to the point you can rely on Law of Large Numbers. So it’s better (in my opinion) to aim for a qualitative testing environment instead.

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Trading was in the concept since forever and also mentioned on kickstarter and before they simply said: “No trading!” what led to the discussion. They stepped back from a feature and got a backlash for it. I don’t say they promised it and their promise was set in stone but it was mentioned forever.

Yes.

There isn’t even a need to look why people use it. They have all the admin rights they need, could clone a save file or 100 and look into it. Without collecting data things look different though.

Yes but still there is data as mentioned many times. Sure if the dev of whatever game isn’t intrested in collecting data this is an issue.

Now you only need to explain to me what quality testing is. 50+ payed high skilled game testers or the CT branch or both or 2 people who look into QA from time to time if their work allowes them to? With large numbers you have a higher chance to get better feedback at least statisticly.

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This happens to every single game, even outside of the genre, though. Is every single company in the world incompetent, or is it simply that these things are hard to accomplish?
Every single league in PoE you have a lot of patches in the first week fixing bugs, crashes, balance issues and even the occasional nerf to whatever jungroan is doing.
And this happens to other seasonal games as well, even shooters like Destiny 2.

Because the single golden rule is: “If it’s possible for a player to break the game, some player will break the game”. And since there are way too many combinations to test them all, you just catch the most common ones. But you can never catch all the things that 200k players will be doing unless you have 200k players testing it. Which… is just playing the game.

You can increase your testing team to be able to catch more problems, but that just reduces them. It will never get rid of them all.

Big companies still have paid testers. Smaller companies try to cut on costs with community testing. But even back then there were always broken things aplenty. It’s just that now you have:
1- More complexity. PoE, LE, GD, etc are all much more complex mechanically than D1 or D2 was. They allow for a lot more different combinations of interactions.
2- More exposure. Back in D1-D2 days you had limited ways of finding out the broken stuff. Some forums or sites like gamefaqs and little else. And most players didn’t know where to look for stuff (or even bothered).

After all, you only have to look at cases like VMT:Bloodlines to see that even back in the day there were plenty of broken games. Community patches to fix games weren’t even a rare thing.

Sure, but other things were in the concept as well and they said they wouldn’t do it and the community didn’t do the same. So trading is a separate case because the community demanded it and they complied. Whereas the other dropped stuff is forever dropped.

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They didn’t simply say “no trading!”
They said they couldn’t fulfill this part of their kickstarter with the Bazaar they had in mind: “it will never overshadow the rewards of engaging with the world yourself”
In their original intent, there wasn’t a trade vs SSF faction to pick at all.

But the value that feedback has per person is going to be lower. A 100,000 player PTR does not have 100x the threads & posts than a 1,000 player PTR. With large numbers you have a higher chance to lose valuable design feedback, because players feel less obligated to go in depth with their feedback. That’s called social loafing

Sidenote: I don’t know if this was your intent, but cutting up quotes like that makes it look as if you are trying to make it seem like I agree to needing both CT & PTR.

But for that second part: Cloning my character doesn’t allow you to follow my thought process. My first level 100 character ever was an Upheaval (human form) Druid. And it was like my 15th character I made. You could clone it all you want, that doesn’t tell you why I picked Druid and then not use shapeshifts. It was a cold build that also ran Entangling Roots, if you want to give it a shot. I’ve said it before in a WASD threat: I don’t play casters as much because it aggravates my shoulder injury faster than melee.

None of that type of info is going to be found in background data collection or cloning.

If you only need a large amount of simple data, PTRs are great. If you need each individual data point to add significantly more to the feedback, CT may be the better choice.

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You didn’t understand what I mean. Marketing is not just what you put in ad, it’s where game sits in the mind of people among its competitors. PoE traditionally associated with bloated skill tree which may be scary at the first look, this is how people saw this for the decade and after changing it, people wouldn’t feel (not at the same degree) that it is the game they heard about for the decade or played it for the decade. It’s like removing Diablo character from the Diablo series — might be better for diversity of stories, but come on, it’s not Diablo without Diablo. And it’s not PoE without famous bloated skill tree.

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Trade was planned from really really early on. It was always in their roadmap internally. That’s why they made the shards drop itemized instead of going directly to the forge. Now the itemized shards are a - bad - remnant of that dropped idea to allow trading them, much like keys are in the same boat.

It was not the whining of people but rather always a plan to have people somehow have the ability to play solo without community interaction in a reasonable competitive way compared to those trading. Which led to the current iterration of the factions.

EHG simply dropped the ball in trading, and hard as well. The core idea is a fantastic one though.

It already gives you a starting spot to look into the ‘why’ though, which is more then before.
And if 1000 people play it then 2-3 commonly will write about the reasonings in some way or another, which gives the second piece of the puzzle.

It has undenied upsides, saying that testing environments with a general population is not working is a senseless notion from the get-go. They work, you have options as a developer to derive meaningful and substantial data from it and it creates a stable environment.
Abstaining from it is usually done of those inherent upsides would also come with severe respective downsides, like letting people play a cycle mechanic early on, hence reducing retention rate at release, which is the case in fast-paced cyclic content like ARPGs commonly go with.

Occssionally.
Jungroan.

Those terms don’t go well together, it’s like GGG has it out specifically for him :rofl: That guy is a fantastic build creator and great at breaking the game. Kudos to him.

They did for a while.
Before the backstepped and invented the split faction system.
I specifically bought into the game in a time where it was great to play already and promised to get Multiplayer with seasonal content as well as a trading environment. I would’ve been fairly pissed if they actually didn’t go through with the trading, actively speaking against anyone buying the game rather then bringing a few people in.
And I’m sure a decent chunk of other people were also in that boat.

Doesn’t matter, in testing quantity is superior to quality as it handles more edge cases. That’s always been the case. Hence why you go with a substantial amount of testers to find as many bugs as possible and some distinct QA testers to try and break stuff in a more targeted way to have the qualitative aspects of testing covered to boot.

You can’t avoid either in the long run.

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Yes, but their initial plan was the Bazaar, not the MG. The MG is a significant step up from an RNG car boot sale.

You’re assuming that. Would you also say that currency dropping itemised in PoE was because they’d always planned the currency AH that they delivered in 3.25? :roll_eyes:

No, they didn’t say “no trading”, they just said that they’d heard the feedback on the Bazaar & were scrapping that implementation of trade & going back to the drawing board. There’s a difference.