Responses to the 3.1.0 Patch Notes

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Darkblitz9 wrote:

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typecast wrote:

Brightbeak? Bloodseeker?

Why is Bisco's still in the game? That's an item that shouldn't have gone out in its state after the IIQ nerfs of 2013/2014.

Brightbeak? What about it?

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Darkblitz9 wrote:

Bloodseeker? Claw that only gets instant leech when you hit with the weapon itself.

Bloodseeker's the last form of instant leech that needs to be complained about and it's whole identity is the instant leech. It's fine.

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From what I overhear in the office, the new Abyss Jewels are "outrageously powerful for summoners" and can roll "so much crazy shit".

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Chris wrote:

Do you feel this approach was worse than holding back information to bolster the patch notes with crazy reveals?

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From what I overhear in the office, the new Abyss Jewels are "outrageously powerful for summoners" and can roll "so much crazy shit".

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Chris wrote:

We posted the 3.1.0 patch notes today, and wanted to quickly address some specific feedback.

There are too few buffs
This was honestly a time issue. We have buffs planned that have been pushed to later 3.1.x patches or 3.2.0 due to being incomplete as of this week. The 3.1.0 expansion was developed under an aggressive schedule, fitting what would normally take 26 weeks into 17. While we try to budget sufficient time to include everything we want to into a release, we felt that this was an acceptable compromise over not having a big December release for you to enjoy during the holidays. Buffing stuff isn't just a matter of typing a bigger number into a box, but often involves re-creating content from the ground up, like with Lightning Tendrils.

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Buffing stuff isn't just a matter of typing a bigger number into a box, but often involves re-creating content from the ground up, like with Lightning Tendrils.

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Sardekar wrote:

Thanks for addressing the salt, but you definitely did handle this in a way initially that you should have known would produce a mine's worth.

Don't hype something up only to let people down, it just makes you look worse than if you'd never bothered with the hype. Stop being so nerf-happy, this is a PVE game, not an esport, balance is pretty much irrelevant, fun however, is not. You can tell us about cool new unique interactions all you want, but taking things away that players had easy access to and replacing them with combinations of items/gems only pigeon-holes players into having to take that "one thing" to make something work. You did away with VP being needed for x amount of builds by now introducing more content that will require x item or node just to work. It's build limiting and it's boring. Allow us more flexibility in how we build, more rare-based, less uniques.

Sometimes it really does feel like you guys see players are enjoying something, they want to spend money as a result, and your reaction is "uh oh, we better nerf that!"....this makes absolutely zero sense. This is why leagues depopulate so quickly after launches. We get bored too quickly, because the mechanics of POE are quite simple, too many builds feel too similar, and 10 acts or no, we're still just repeating the same content over and over. Remove our fun and/or gimmicky stuff and what are we left with?

Performance fixes, new skills that aren't all basically the same theme all at once(all channelling one patch, all corpse related another), fixes to broken or underused content such as shitty ascendancy classes, melee skills, etc, should have been a priority over 90% of what you actually did roll out in this patch. Perhaps the new maps will add some variety and be mind-blowingly good, but they'll still get boring playing the same old skills over and over again, except now with fun new nerfs!

With the way things have been going in your nerfing pattern, it seems that if something is popular, it has to go. By that logic, I'm surprised you haven't reduced Tabula to a lower drop rate. I'm not at all suggesting you do this, it would likely kill your game, but you have to admit it fits the pattern, which should illustrate why it's a really bad metric for nerfing.

Also, one of the biggest things that pissed people off- stop listening to racers and reddit. Racers don't play the way that 99.9% of us do, and they have no idea how we play, why we play, or what we like. Balancing anything around people like Ziz is going to make for a terrible game, and that should honestly be blatantly obvious.

Thanks again for the transparency and continual communication, just please learn to better sort through your feedback and learn what to ignore and heed. Use common sense when it comes to getting people's hopes up, it shouldn't be surprising what will piss off the average player, especially not this many years in. People are now going to spend the next couple days either wondering if their builds still work, or bitching on forums about how their favorite thing was nerfed- this is bad PR and not good for POE's overall health, which none of us want to see.