State of Exile Episode 5: Meeta Chris Wilson!

S: What do the devourers look like underground?

C: It was originally called the 'root spider', it was the 2nd monster designed after the blood monkey, but none of the concept art ever done shows this. Erik designed it and no one has dared ask him, and some of the stuff he's designed is pretty freaky so we're all scared to ask.

S: Are there possibly plans to increase the number of challenges in 4-month leagues over 8, and award different rewards at certain thresholds such as 3 or 6 challenges done, instead of it being all-or-nothing?

C: That sounds very cool. It's a higher budget version of what we're doing now but I definitely see it increasing desire to go after challenges. Not very many people pursue the challenges, this would definitely make an option for the less hardcore players who don't go after all 8 challenges. I'll bring this up with the team, since we are currently working on the next 4-month leagues and the challenges are up in the air as of now.

S: How do you feel about muleing in races?

C: It's intended and allowed. If players want to do that, and waste the time associated with doing so, they can. However, if a particular skill is outclassing all the others and is being muled all the time, that's something to be looked at. We've also considered races where the stash is disabled but we're testing it out still.

S: Some race seasons have very appealing items while others do not. Are the value of races based on how many expected players there are, or how do you figure out the rewards for seasons?

C: We try to vary the power between each season because we have the issue of power creep if each season has more and more powerful uniques. We do try to vary power and looks. This last season we have some very good looking alternate-art items at low thresholds and we feel that this is a good alternative to powerful items, and we will likely mix and match looks and power for future seasons.

S: What kind of information has GGG gathered from the recent cut-throat races?

C: I wasn't in the meeting regarding the cut-throat data, but from what I've heard, they've made a lot of tweaks based on that data. We've also considered adding area limits to temporary cut-throat races, such as a 24-hour cut-throat race with cruel and merciless difficulty disabled, to prevent players from dissapearing into the higher difficuties while most are at the lower ones. There's that along with other experiments we'd like to try when we get the development time for it.

S: Are there any plans to take Path of Exile into e-sports, either with PvP or racing?

C: We're very careful with the word 'e-sport', since an e-sport should be extremely fun regardless of how much it is repeated, and we don't feel races and pvp are quite up to the standard we want them to be at in that regard before we'd start advertising them in the realm of e-sports. There are a lot of players who play only for very specific parts of the game. Some enjoy PvP, some enjoy racing, some just want to play for the story and only come back after each major patch. It's very hard to know where our developmental efforts are best spent, and while we try to make sure each area of the game is tended to, it can easily feel like a certain part of the game is being neglected. Currently a lot of our development effort is going towards the 1.2 mini-expansion and Act 4. If we wanted PoE to become an e-sport in the near future we would have to divert development from these aspects into PvP and racing.

S: Are there plans to market Path of Exile in other countries?

C: Yes, there will likely be announcements this year about us bringing Path of Exile to non-english speaking countries, and one I'm particularly excited for is South America. There's a lot going on, we want to get servers in these countries and language availabilities so people in these countries can play path of exile without being hindered by latency or language barriers.

S: How does GGG intend to make the next league not feel like a direct nerf to droprates, since strongboxes will not be appearing as often?

C: We've talked about this a lot, and one thing to note is that strongboxes will be a base part of the game in all leagues from here on out, even though there'll be slightly fewer of them. This will especially apply to map boxes, since it's currently too easy to get high level maps with strongboxes. In the upcoming 4-month leagues, there will be new mechanics which at least affect the ability to kill monsters, if not the ability to find items.

S: Are there any future plans regarding blood magic? It feels underpowered, especially with the importance of auras currently.

C: I haven't heard of anything being discussed but I'm also not in most of the keystone discussion meetings anymore. I'll bring this up with Qarl and Rory. I'm taking notes during this podcast to bring back to the office to discuss.

S: When will the community get a practice mode for Descent and Descent:Champions?

C: When we designed Path of Exile, we designed it to be replayable, and it took 7 years. Descent:Champions took like two weeks, and it's partly because it wasn't designed with replayability in mind. We're relying on the race running infrequently to keep the smoke and mirrors up because if it could be run whenever a player wanted it would be extremely easy for both the game mode to become boring and for people to work out perfect ways to race through it. However, there are still discussions of the next race season having Descent:Champions races more often.

S: What do you think about items like The Taming being taken out of new leagues?

C: While we do turn off these uniques, we haven't said they will never return, and they could potentially return as both race rewards or as items that temporarily drop in all leagues. It's sort of like MTG where they rotate things in and out. We think the idea of items that become available for awhile and then become unavailable for a long time while existing copies remain in the economy is interesting. It's likely that future 4-month leagues will contain popular uniques from past 4-month leagues but I can't confirm anything with that yet. It's also a good way to encourage players to try the 4-month leagues. We're trying hard to stay away from cheap tricks like increased experience during weekends or things like that. We try very hard to do what we'd enjoy as players, and hope that the playerbase likes it. There's a lot of things we could do to just double our playerbase but such things aren't healthy for the game long-term.

S: Are there any things like guild achievements, challenges, or PvP coming in the future?

C: When we were preparing the game for release, we intended for there to be guild challenges, similar to the 4-month challenges already in-game, but we weren't able to complete them in time and they haven't been worked on with as much effort since then. It is still planned though and the difficulty of such challenges would likely outweigh even the challenges that currently exist in our 4-month leagues, since a whole group of people would need to work together on them. We even have some thoughts for challenges such as guild capture-the-flag, which would incentivite parts of the game that aren't seeing much use right now. We're interested in this but the amount of development we put towards it really depends on the community. If the community says "that's cool, not a huge deal", we'll work on it slowly over time, but if it seems to be a big thing that a ton of players really want, we can focus on it and have it out much sooner than we would otherwise.

S: Are you happy about the amount of players that killed or fought Atziri?

C: Access to Atziri is bottlenecked on both fragments and player skill/item. At the beginning of the 4-month leagues there were very few people capable of facing atziri so in turn we had the fragments spawn at a very low rate. With each major patch we've increased the drop rate of these fragments, both to simulate the spread of atziri's corruption and because more and more players became capable of providing a challenge for atziri. This is an experiment, people wanted things like, to use a D2 term, organ farming, there's been a lot of feedback about how we implemented it and we've learned a lot from it for next time.

S: Are there any plans for other endgame bosses like Atziri that are separate from the story?

C: We'll definitely have more bosses like atziri in the future. Unique maps are an ideal place for this. However, we've purposely designed the next mini-expansion to not center around a particular villian that needs to be defeated, both because it would be more of the same which isn't necessarily good and to avoid the same problem discussed with race rewards previously; we don't want each mini-expansion to bring out a new boss that has to be harder and harder than the last. We've designed something completely different for the next mini-expansion, it's crazy and no one will be expecting it. It's NOT farming fragments to fight a new atziri-style monster, but we hope players will enjoy it still.

S: How does GGG decide what skill will be next to be implemented?

C: We've improved this a lot in the past year. We used to be like "let's think of cool skills and make them", whereas now we're like "what does the game need? let's make a skill to fill that hole". We haven't announced our next skill but there's a specific build which we feel needs more tools at its disposal and the next skill will be centered around this. We try to make the skills cool too, of course, and we think we've been successful here, especially compared to some old skills; we try to sweep things like elemental hit under the rug nowadays.

S: Are there plans to improve alpha testing in order to better balance content before its implementation?

C: Alpha is a bit of a touchy subject. We've had good feedback from alpha members, but if we keep the group small, we just get far better testing from our paid QA team. If we keep the group large, we then have issues with content leaks, and it's hard to always figure out who is leaking content. Additionally we don't want to give alpha players cheats which can make testing of certain content extremely difficult for them. We do have plans for a larger scale test of future content with player volunteers, and we'll try to do it in a way where their testing is useful while leaks are also controllable.

S: How do you feel about leech after the nerf, particularly mana leech?

C: I'm inclined to agree that the leech changes were focused on life leech and that we could look especially at mana leech. The reason for the nerf was that leech was absolutely broken and made some players effectively immortal. In retrospect the nerf may have been slightly too heavy, or there may have been a better way to approach it. We're discussing it a lot and we do have to do a lot of testing before changing it again, but we feel that the changes to leech were very important and we don't regret doing them.

S: What do you think about the constant changes to the skill trees? It can be frustrating to return to an old character and find they've been nerfed into the ground.

C: We change the skill tree to try and make it better, and in general this means buffing. A lot of people have been talking about improving the witch area, and this tends to mean filling the area with really good notables, giving you a spike in power as you rise up in levels prior to you leaving your class's starting area on the tree. We've done this with other classes recently and feel that it worked out well. We rarely nerf things on the tree and when we do it's because we feel it's very overpowered. For example, area of effect, buff duration, and buff effect nodes went overlooked for so long by the playerbase and were never really used, but then when those nodes became popular and were combined with particular uniques it was shown to be overpowered and adjustments had to be made. While we have to do this for balance I understand it can be frustrating to have those balance changes affect your build, and this is partly why between 4-month leagues we tend to allow character skill resets. Every 4 months we'll generally give everyone the button that says they can reset their skills once, regardless of skill tree changes. This helps preserve the permanence of spending skill points in the 4-month leagues while still allowing players in standard and hardcore to wait for a skill reset if they've made a terrible mistake with their character.

S: Are there plans to implement a high-damage primarily chaos skill?

C: I have no idea, I'd have to ask Qarl.

S: What's going to happen with invasion bosses?

C: I put this in the development manifesto silently recently. There are some areas in the game that currently have no boss that appears in them, and we can take certain invasion bosses and use them as permanent bosses in these areas. However, the concept of bosses randomly invading areas they aren't supposed to be in will not be coming to the other leagues, as this role is already filled by rogue exiles. We don't need 2 layers of randomly spawning bosses in the base game.

S: What do you think about evasion builds, should they be buffed?

C: Evasion implicitly has the problem that it's binary; you'll either take full damage or none. In the past we've done some things to improve evasion, such as entropy instead of RNG and the acrobatics keystone. When evasion concerns are brought up to the balance team, they are of the opinion that it's actually quite powerful. Our most recent build of the week is even about a hardcore evasion build. I don't think evasion is currently underpowered, but players need to keep in mind that they have to survive the few big hits they will take.

S: Why was dodge capped at 75% in the last patch?

C: It's best to get nerfs in before they actually affect anyone's build. Just because you can't reach 75% dodge now doesn't mean you can't later.

S: Will there be an official level 28 pvp bracket for tournaments?

C: I'd be surprised if there wasn't, but it could change. If it does, there'll be a good reason for it.

S: With strongboxes becoming a part of the game, will chests and barrels become less so?

C: We're looking at this. In our original idea for ambush, strongboxes didn't exist and you could apply currency to any container. With the prominence of jars and such lying around everywhere it became obvious we had to limit this, which is how strongboxes originated.

S: Can you elaborate how 6-linking will be changed soon, as you alluded to on reddit?

C: I was careful with my phrasing there, and I can't answer this question because it concerns content with the upcoming mini-expansion, but one thing the mini-expansion will address is other ways to influence the crafting of items. We don't want to just increase the chance to 6-link an item but we want to increase availability of sockets and linked sockets. We're still working on these systems but crafting improvements are a core part of the mini-expansion, but it'll be at least 5 weeks until you hear anything.

S: Will signature races always be fixed seed?

C: No, we don't want to just repeat the same thing every time, but I am not sure if the next season's signature race will be fixed or not. Probably not.

S: Can we have corrupted zones in maps?

C: The point was that there would be three endgame options competing with each other that players could decide between. You could farm bosses such as piety, you could do maps, or you could farm corrupted zones. We didn't want to allow players to do two of these at the same time. Some players prefer to stick to maps while someone who is good at killing atziri can stick to corrupted zones, and if someone wants a change of pace they can switch to another of these activities. This may or may not have worked, depending on your opinion, and we're experimenting with other ways to tie endgame together in the future.

S: This is mainly in response to the seraph wings. Is there a defined line where you decide if a microtransaction is appropriate for Path of Exile?

C: Erik lays out our art direction and he's been here since day 1. He's been very consistent this whole time, and items such have wings have been in the plan from the start; players just haven't seen Erik's notes and concept art. Wings are incredibly difficult to create, which is why these took so long, and we also want to sort of stagger our release of things that are different from each other. While these wings may seem out of place to some of our players, we're very used to them by now in the context of Path of Exile's art. I trust Erik's decisions, and we have plenty of grimy and gritty things planned for the future. Additionally, the seraph wings are intended to be worn with the entire seraph set, where they don't look as out of place. However, for our youtube video preview, the wings had to be equipped by themselves on a level 1 character, and this is where they do indeed start to look out of place and the negative feedback we got on this video was somewhat understandable. We feel that the wings are meant to be worn in the context of the seraph set, where they do not look out of place.

S: Are there plans to implement more high level maps?

C: I'd like to. Part of the reason that maps form a pyramid in terms of level is that players aren't supposed to be running the high level ones as often as they currently do. We certainly will add more over time to increase variety. Having said that, despite the top players farming the top maps, the majority of maps run by players are low level. We heard some people on the forums insist recently that no one would run a 66 map, but we can see who's running what maps, and at least a quarter of all maps run are 66 maps. Our budget on tilesets and new maps skews towards which ones are being run the most, and that is currently low level maps.

S: Are there plans to change shield charge or add a new shield ability?

C: It'd be cool and there's at least one team member pushing for new shield skills, so you'll probably see more in the future, but we don't have any far in development currently.

S: Are there any plans for a support gem that reduces the amount of souls required for vaal gems?

C: We're still gathering data on the usage of vaal gems and we're dicussing them a lot. People aren't abusing them and a good amount of players are actively using them, so they're in a good place for us to just sit back and gather data for awhile, we don't need to rush any changes with them.

S: I like corrupted areas, will there be more low-level content in the future?

C: Part of the issue with corrupted areas is that low levels can find fragments that aren't useful to them since they won't face atziri for a very long time. We're keeping this in mind for next time and will try to have awesome content similar in scope to atziri that is more accessible, for example being available near the end of normal difficulty instead of requiring you to be a level 70 or 80 character with great skill and gear.

S: Can we have a quality of life development manifesto?

C: We have a half-finished manifesto regarding this, but there's a lot going on in the near future. A development manifesto would be good for this, since most of it is either "yes, we'll do this, but here's why it's low priority" or "this is way harder than you'd think to do". For example, a common complaint is that you don't recieve chat messages when loading areas. This is significantly harder to fix than the players think and isn't a quick fix whatsoever. The development time it would need is quite a large commitment, especially when we have other important things we're actively trying to get ready.

S: Will there be chances for player-designed uniques in the future?

C: I hope so. We temporarily cancelled this because the queue is too long. If you're really keen on designing a unique item and really patient, you can email support and ask to be put in the queue.

S: How do you feel about the balance of blood rage?

C: I haven't been involved with exact skill balance recently so I can't answer this but I'll bring this up with the team.

S: Do you have any ideas you're throwing around for the game that are inspired by magic: the gathering?

C: That's a good question. We ran an experiment back in 2011 where players would recieve a sort of booster pack before a pvp competition, an assortment of random items. While this had balance issues, it was interesting. It's surprising how many things from MTG can be applied to Path of Exile.

S: So you're saying you're going to make a boss named the Polar Kraken? I'm kidding.

C: Nice.

S: The intricacies of the current metagame keeps giving everyone I show Path of Exile the wrong idea about the game. What are your thoughts on this?

C: We don't want to remove intricate things just for the sake of dumbing things down for popularity. We need to keep things complicated while also finding ways to comfortably introduce new players to the game. Build of the Week is designed to do this and this is partly why we're trying to bring it back.

S: Will there be any more supporter packs in the near future?

C: Yes, but we're making sure not to bring them out too fast. People were asking for sacrifice of the vaal supporter packs and while our players are very generous we don't want to ask for money that often. Additionally, we don't want the time of supporter pack availability to be so short that people miss out on the exclusive content in them. The currently ones have at least several weeks remaining and I don't have a timeline to share for the next supporter packs.

S: With so many new concepts coming out so often such as rogue exiles, shrines, and strongboxes, won't there eventually be too much?

C: We're happy with the idea of phasing things out and bringing them back later. However, a lot of things we've been adding with the 4-month leagues are things we feel the game needed. In Diablo 3, while I don't like a lot about that game, I really like how they made the areas and environments very immersive and varied, with things like the randomly spawning events. That's a goal of ours with Path of Exile, and we feel that having a huge pool of randomly-spawning features and never knowing what to expect is a lot more fun than just having 2 features active at any given time.

S: Can we expect to see GGG at future conventions?

C: Maybe. Since we're a small team, it's a huge effort on our part to go overseas and get a booth and all that when we're normally at home developing the game. However, if we've overseas for other reasons such as promotion, we try to do fan meetups.

S: Has there been a discussion of guaranteed movement speed boots in a race?

C: The point of the side-quest awarding a quicksilver flask early game and the vendor recipe requiring a quicksilver flask is so that racers have to make a choice whether to skip it altogether, spend the time to kill hailrake for the flask and use it, or spend the time to kill hailrake and sacrifice the flask for move speed boots. We feel that's better than giving players free movement speed.

S: Anything you wanna say to the community, such as spoilers you have a greenlight on?

C: We have an upcoming two-week race that we're going to make an announcement on later today. There's going to be special prizes such as hardware, and we have a charity connection for it too. The next Build of the Week will also be concering a Molten Strike build that will be helpful for the two-week race.

S: Will we have longer cut-throat races soon?

C: I don't know, I have to talk to the guys at work, but I'll try to get it in soon.

<And one final question...It doesn't regard ingame content but I'll keep it podcast exclusive>