How We're Developing Our Next Expansion Differently

differently?

the same people?
the same deadline?
the same scope?


what is different?

lots of words. distinct lack of 'we are sorry, we have messed up', promises ive read before. i guess it is all 'actions speak louder and talk is cheap' kind of thing.


and please, people outside might believe that 'lockdown excuse' but as a seasoned vet in SW dev industry i know that if a team 'worked' before lockdown it works after it. in many cases even better than before (less office distractions)


oh.. and for once stop pretending this giant fiasco is new. it started YEARS ago, each league is a dud on release, each takes 2-3 weeks to 'work', each one got a major 'make it functional' patch ~3 weeks in. people got simply fed up with that because bugs you guys let in are so trivial to spot you can no longer be excused


and person who 'okayed' 900 new gems (that noone asked for) and 100 new uniques (that noone asked for).. maybe do a Root Cause Analysis on that. because Heist did not need this content bloat (95% of these bring nothing to the game). 1000 entities, designed with auto-fill in spreadsheet and tested by noone. at the cost of 3 major skill reworks/premieres being non-functional on release.

maybe do a manifesto on that

I hope, the Heis shit goes not core

Im glad that your team is opening up to the community with your future plans.

On that note, an experiment that involves:
1) no added bloat
2) testing the product
3) stable release
4) communication with community

That's not an experiment, that's how a software product release is supposed to be.

"

sidtherat wrote:

differently?

the same people?
the same deadline?
the same scope?


what is different?

lots of words. distinct lack of 'we are sorry, we have messed up', promises ive read before. i guess it is all 'actions speak louder and talk is cheap' kind of thing.


and please, people outside might believe that 'lockdown excuse' but as a seasoned vet in SW dev industry i know that if a team 'worked' before lockdown it works after it. in many cases even better than before (less office distractions)


oh.. and for once stop pretending this giant fiasco is new. it started YEARS ago, each league is a dud on release, each takes 2-3 weeks to 'work', each one got a major 'make it functional' patch ~3 weeks in. people got simply fed up with that because bugs you guys let in are so trivial to spot you can no longer be excused


and person who 'okayed' 900 new gems (that noone asked for) and 100 new uniques (that noone asked for).. maybe do a Root Cause Analysis on that. because Heist did not need this content bloat (95% of these bring nothing to the game). 1000 entities, designed with auto-fill in spreadsheet and tested by noone. at the cost of 3 major skill reworks/premieres being non-functional on release.

maybe do a manifesto on that

I do agree on this. I am getting more fed up each league since i see a pattern being in place that keeps repeatingover and over again.

I am not sure i will be getting through this much more ..

If its just 1/2 as laggy as Heist, its an enormous win!

Thank you Chris and the team for all your effort over the past few years. Cannot wait to see what this Atlas Expansion brings in 3.13. Hopefully the new development scope will allow the team to release more stable expansions into the future? The less bugs and crashes the better! All the best GGG.

ATLAS expansion!!! yay!!! cant wait!!

I am glad that you are taking a serious look at your development cycle. It has needed some tuning for several leagues.

I would also like you to stop making core changes to long standing skills that totally overhaul their use. The changes you made to curses totally bricked every character I had left on standard.

It is far from a good feeling to have characters thrown to the trashbin after working to get them right for 100+hours. Having single target curses is fine, and would be a welcome addition, but not totally changing their uses that have stood for years.

As an example, I had a level 95 Gladiator with 75+% chance to block attacks and spells. He used Cyclone with the bleed keystone to get 8 stacks quickly. With 2 curses cast when damage taken for 1) Warlord's Mark to get some form of consistent life steal, and 2) Vulnerability for more physical damage.

With your changes to Warlord's Mark, it took away all lifesteal. There is no good node within at least 5 skillpoints to replace this. That is an unacceptable change. It is way too expensive to justify. There are no good lifesteal nodes on any path to block anything.

Having to have a shield with a %life return on block would be the only other option...Ya give me 1000chaos and 100 exalts to make one as good as I had on then. Pigeon-holing like this is not a good thing at all.

You may argue that having max block at life return is too much...so much for playing defensively then. I sacked a lot of damage to make this work. Playing this after your changes utterly changed the feel of the character. The only way to succeed with it would be to make it a zoomzoom build, which I purposefully did not do.

This is probably enough to get my point across, so I won't go deeper into how it changed, into other (non)viable options left, or to discuss how you broke other very nonmeta builds (like a Bow wielding Guardian who used Barrage to get curse on hit or others).

Just please stop doing this kinda of thing that utterly transforms a skill's functionality.

"

Innomen wrote:

"personally" he says.
So he's just been spending his tencent dividends and only just now decided to get back in the whole doing work thing. /smh

We are not in the know on the agreement between Tencent and Chris as a result of the sale. It's most likely part of the agreement for him not to do any work; requiring him to be less involved in development/management with just continued involvement around PR. You can tell that he remains the face of the company but in his interviews he really hasn't a clue on this and that when a new league is announced. He gets the cliff notes but when he is asked for details on features he has to ask so and so off-camera.

Why do you think he is in much better shape? Less stress, more time to work out, less junk food, etc. He deserved it and I have tremendous respect for what he's accomplished but in case people still think that Chris is the one steering the ship there, I don't think he has since the acquisition.

Now what this post is saying is that he is going to take on a project management roll for the next league and perhaps that league only which is also not unheard of (and probably get bonus pay for doing so), but it does not imply that he's suddenly about to start doing work because he was slacking or irresponsible over the last 2 years. Wiki GGG and look at that ownership breakdown. 86% Tencent lol. Chris is technically not responsible for anything really.

amazing! THX GGG