How We're Developing Our Next Expansion Differently
Why don't you start using in-game polls to reach out to all players, not just reddit as you apparently ignore your official website.
You could actually then find out what your player base wants, instead of telling us what we want...Chris.
I'd like to see a poll asking us how we feel about each league thats in core, going right the way back, listing them all. I.e harbinger, remove, keep as is, or update. Breach, remove, keep as is, or update, and so on.
There is so much content in the game, I'd be happy for you to do a really simple league, I.e. a legion type league, and instead dedicate much of your development that league to fixing the core game issues.
I'd also like you to run a poll on revamping the trading system. Chris's arrogance on this matter is deeply frustrating, telling us that we need to feel we earn our items. The current trading system just annoys most people. Its full of price fixers tying to take advantage of newer players, scammers doing the same, you often have to spam 20 people to get a response, and of course the annoyance of being messaged, leaving your map, delve, etc, and the person doesn't join your party. Just have a simple buy it now function, that fixes all of the above tedium, and stops the stupid market manipulation we saw yesterday, with exalts and even mirrors being worth less than chaos. If people try to price fix with a buy it now feature, they lose their item for next to nothing. I think people need to stop calling it an auction house, which brings up bad memories of D3. A buy it now listing type, has no issues if implemented properly.
We really need a league thats linked to maps and maybe delve, that doesn't vomit out ridiculous amounts of currency. I miss being excited by an exalted drop.
I'd also like the amount of gear that drops to decrease by about 95%, but increase in quality significantly. We so rarely find an item on the ground thats an upgrade on our current gear, other than during levelling. The fact we even need a loot filter shows a failing, we didn't have filters in diablo. When being on a juiced map in a party, the amount of trash is truly mind boggling, you cant see anything, and the performance of the game even drops there is so much garbage.
And finally, party play, please make it viable for people that enjoy it. Other games offer increased xp for the greater challenge. Or drops could be more fairly shared, it sucks running in a group when the only 2 decent drops fall to the same player. It is a tough one, how to improve party play, but outside of Niko rotas, xp parties, and Empyrean, it doesn't really happen.
Last edited by IcedInferno007#3962 on Oct 21, 2020, 2:29:12 AM
Boo, Cutting content just because reddit is a bunch of whiny butts, I do not like this new direction and will be holding back purchasing the new supporter packs with the new expansion to see just how much content has gotten cut.
The way you guys have been developing since Talisman has provided a plethora of content and has seen the game boom in popularity, this is because it works! Just because some people can't handle a bug or two doesn't mean you should cut everything in half and call it quits.
I recon this will be an expansion with the lowest revenue gained for Grinding Gear Games in a very long time.
[Removed by Support]
Major client stability and critical gameplay issues are more than "a bug or two"; and player retention, not complaints from "a bunch of whiny butts", is the major factor of consideration here for the developers.
Sure, you might lack the intellectual capacity and sufficient perception to even tell when the game is bugged in a way regularly that prevents the player from progressing, but that doesn't mean the rest of us is the same.
[Removed by Support] too much bugs affects everyone. outcome mostly is player rage quits and never be back. espesialy new player.
fk archnemesis.
Last edited by Kane_GGG#0000 on Oct 21, 2020, 2:30:54 AM
Our goal is that 3.13 takes 50% of the overall development hours of Heist (which means going from a situation with overtime to a situation with testing time)
sorry to sound like the old guy i am,
from a 100 % development time to a 50 development 50 QA sounds great and all, buuut .
i would suggest to reduce those both to 1/3 and make the last 3rd rec-time ?
serious-time : you are humans and not machines .
when working under pressure of body and mind with not enought sleep or rec-time, shite happens more frequent
( as seen with the current expansion )
i really doubt, that any of your long-year players and long-time supporters .
care for a next bigger better yadayada .
small solid expansions that work are way more welcome .
i personal enjoyed Harvest the most - a little sidegame of Harvest Moon to relax, an endgameboss that didn't 1-shot or of-screen-degen a lvl 95+ for once, the nice and reliable crafting system + a nice coloursceme in neon-blue, + a naughty representative in Oshabi (talking about the lifeforce cum and her garden all the time...tisk tisk (jk))
Atlas of Worlds was a big one as well and much improved the mapsystem;
same with Conquerors of the Atlas so i'm as well eager to see what you come up with, but again, take your time GGG.
I'd like to see a poll asking us how we feel about each league thats in core, going right the way back, listing them all. I.e harbinger, remove, keep as is, or update. Breach, remove, keep as is, or update, and so on.
There is so much content in the game, I'd be happy for you to do a really simple league, I.e. a legion type league, and instead dedicate much of your development that league to fixing the core game issues.
This is what I would love to see above all else. If you are really worried about player retention and getting new players to the game then for the love of all things gaming go back over all the stuff that is currently in the game and tidy it up.
From Path of Exile's release in 2013 until late 2015, we struggled to grow the community and were getting worried as the game's popularity started to slowly decline. We tried releases of many different sizes and cadences, before eventually settling into a 13-week cycle with the launch of Talisman in December 2015. Since then, we have developed 19 leagues with this cadence and had a lot of success with it. Path of Exile grew exponentially and allowed us to put even more content into each expansion to meet the expectations of our growing community. I even presented a GDC Talk on this process, which was very well-received within the gamedev industry. I still receive mail every week from developers at other studios who feel that the talk was of great value for their teams. Things were going well and we thought we knew exactly what we were doing.
Then 2020 hit and exposed just how vulnerable our development process was to unexpected events. To some extent, we were lucky that a black swan event (such as a key team member leaving) hadn't caused similar disruption to our schedule before this. We want to preface this by saying that the government-mandated lockdowns were not the root cause of the issues, but they had a significant impact and added to an already high-pressure situation. Due to the way we've been developing expansions, we had almost no wiggle room to manage the additional overheads of lockdown. Even under normal circumstances, some expansions were coming in quite close to the wire. There is a reasonable chance that we may experience another lockdown, or some other unforeseen event that adds extra pressure and we need to create a development plan that has enough breathing room to allow that to happen. After two lockdowns, we delayed Heist's release by a week and it was still not enough to mitigate the combination of constrained resources and ambitious development scope, as Heist was by far the highest-content league in PoE's history. (Adding to this pressure, our country's borders are closed which means our international hiring is frozen for the foreseeable future).
Which leads to the next issue - regardless of how difficult pandemic pressures make development, it's genuinely hard to scope out how long a Path of Exile expansion will take to develop. Some systems that appear easy to create end up taking several iterations to get right. Conversely, some things that felt like they'd be really hard just come together quickly and work the first time. Usually these over- and under-estimates average out during the development of an expansion, but sometimes you get ones that are developed a lot faster (Legion) or slower (Delve) than usual. If you categorise Path of Exile releases into the "good" and "bad" ones, you see a clear pattern of times when development took less (or more) time than expected. This shows that correct scoping and risk mitigation is critical to ensuring a good Path of Exile launch.
Another important topic to discuss is that of Feature Creep. This is when the featureset of a piece of software gradually increases over time as developers think of more cool stuff to add, eventually causing production problems. This is a somewhat common problem in software development (for example, there's a boss in Diablo II called Creeping Feature as a nod to this, over 20 years ago). While Feature Creep sounds like a terrible thing, it can often be great for making a game feel special. A lot of the stuff that makes Path of Exile special was added because a developer thought of something cool and worked hard to squeeze it in a specific release. While Feature Creep can wreak havoc on a schedule (and hence the overall quality of an expansion at launch), it's also important to make sure that developers have a way to still add those special touches that make the game feel like it has endless stuff to discover. We feel that this is best done in the planning phase rather than late in development when such changes can affect the quality of release.
Late in Heist's development cycle, we had a serious internal discussion about how we could restructure our development process so that subsequent expansions are less risky. This discussion resulted in an experiment that we decided to carry out for the next three month cycle.
We have defined a very specific scope for December's 3.13 expansion. It contains everything that a large Path of Exile expansion needs, but no more. I am personally handling the production of this expansion to make sure that no work creeps in that isn't in the planned scope. The schedule that we will hopefully achieve with this approach will likely have everything quite playable and ready for gameplay iteration before our marketing deadline, and in a very stable and polished state by the time it is released.
The positive consequences of this experiment are clear: if it succeeds, we'll be able to deliver 3.13 on-time, with a strong stable launch, plenty of gameplay iteration and solid testing of features. If this experiment works as we expect it to, we'll be able to continue using it for future expansions which will allow us to continue with our 13-week expansion cycle, which we strongly feel is best for the continued growth and long-term health of Path of Exile in the period before Path of Exile 2 is released.
This experiment comes with some side effects, however. You'll definitely notice that the patch notes are much, much shorter than they usually are. That's because we're focusing on getting the most important changes done, and doing them well. I'm aiming for us to try to fit the patch notes on just a few pages, if we can manage it. This does mean that we have had to be careful to pick our battles though - the balance changes we are doing have been carefully chosen to have the largest impact and fix real problems. It's also likely that we'll front-load the announcement to have more of the expansion's contents revealed at once, reducing the number of small teasers we post in the weeks following announcement.
Our goal is that 3.13 takes 50% of the overall development hours of Heist (which means going from a situation with overtime to a situation with testing time), and yet feels like a large December expansion. If you're interested, it's an Atlas expansion (like War or Conquerors) with an in-area combat league and a few other bits and pieces. We'll also be announcing it in a slightly different way than we usually do. Stay tuned!
Good to hear something from you and acknowledging that the current way the current 13 weeks cadence is executed is not optimal.
Majority from criticisms what i read here on the forums seem to assume that 13 weeks is not enough to bring out a big scope league like Heist in that short time in a playable/smooth state.
If you can prove the contrary with that new "experiment" that is going on for the next 3 leagues it would allow you to stick to the old cadence.
But i strongly assume you will have some problems kickstarting this new process, as it was never done before and you still need time to-think new interesting ways as league mechanics.
What would you consider a success? If all 3 leagues in a row a delivered on-time (in a playable state) or the last one, or even one?
If it by some means, dont works out like you expected you can maybe still stick with the 13 weeks cadence as a base but maybe extend the time by one month for bigger leagues/expansions.
Lastly i like the slight teaser you made for the next december league.
While not saying what the actual content or mechanics are, there needs to be more "in-area" league mechanics like Abyss ,Harbinger, Breach as this is the most non-distruptive play style a lot of players like.
Good luck with your new approach.
"
DixuMixu wrote:
damage control by the man himself!
"
Atlas expansion
and that's what everyone wants to hear! league mechanics that are not tied to the core gameplay of poe, which is mapping, are awful as history has shown
Yes. We have enough side areas by now (maybe till POE 4.0).
Bring back the leagues where you have not to change multiple zones or wait to get the arpg feel.
Masterpiece of 3.16 lore
"A mysterious figure appears out of nowhere, trying to escape from something you can't see. She hands you a rusty-looking device called the Blood Crucible and urges you to implant it into your body."
Only usable with Ethanol Flasks
Last edited by gandhar0#5532 on Oct 21, 2020, 3:25:22 AM
