Baeclast Podcast with Chris Wilson

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ArtNoir wrote:

1. no
2. no
3. no

you will not be missed bye

I'm sure you'll be having a great time when you and 8 other people are the only ones left playing and the next ARPG has taken up the mantle of fun.

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defektiv wrote:

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ArtNoir wrote:

1. no
2. no
3. no

you will not be missed bye

I'm sure you'll be having a great time when you and 8 other people are the only ones left playing and the next ARPG has taken up the mantle of fun.

A lot of doomsayers said things about WoW and what is left of that now is the "WoW killer" meme going on when any MMORPG is announced. WoW, despite of all it's obvious flaws, is still alive and well.

And honestly I can't think of a better company than GGG (talking long-term game-design companies now) in terms of making the game fun and reacting to player feedback. They might screw up here and there, the timing is quite unfortunate right now tbh with diablo 2 ressurected on the horizon, but I don't think any ARPG will take PoE playerbase away. There are quite a few ARPGs out there, but none can take PoE's mantle unless the team screws up MAJORLY, which I don't think they will unless Bobby Kotick overthrows Tencent and somehow manages to fire the whole development team.

So where is the summary of the podcast that you guys said was going to be available on monday?

As someone with an accounting degree, I laughed at the part about GGG's financial state. For several reasons, but I want to make it clear that I'm not laughing out of mockery, but out of appreciation.

Chris was definitely reading from a script or prepared information/notes. He didn't sound like he had a deep understanding, instead it sounded like he had a discussion with the accounting team regarding what lay people would misunderstand. This is completely understandable, as I doubt he has an accounting degree and this is why he hires and pays accountants.

Dividends by definition are profits paid out to shareholders when the company makes more money than it can spend. That isn't to say all dividends are a sign of excessive income, there are cases where companies will take out loans to pay dividends as a way to appease shareholders or to prevent panic. People get used to getting paid a certain amount, much like how Chris mentioned that players are trained to expect mechanics like harvest to be permanent when added to the core game and then outrage follows when they basically take it away. I imagine Tencent might make a phone call or shoot an email if they saw dividends get cut drastically or weren't distributed for 2021.

Calling New Zealand dollars "worthless crappy moon money dollars" is silly and humorous but I feel it overshadows the impact of currency exchange rates on finances. The bigger the ratio difference, the larger the impact can be. For PoE players, consider pricing fluctuations that happen based on the chaos value of exalts. Cheap items will always be a few chaos, that doesn't adjust upward. Items people want exalts for end up being worth 5x more chaos when the ratio jumps from 1:20 to 1:100. The ratio of USD to NZ is nowhere near that extreme but the concept is the same, prices aren't adjusted to match exchange rates.

A big revenue number isn't important at all. It's relatively easy to inflate or overstate revenues. There should be some emphasis on ratios and cash flow. For the poe players, think about elemental penetration or elemental resistances in general. When you have 75% elemental resistances, +1% max resistance isn't 1% less damage taken, it's 4%. This is because the ratio of that 1% out of the remaining 25% taken is 4%. The same can be seen with elemental penetration being way more effective against enemies with high resistance. It's not as important what the flat number is but how it interacts with other numbers. Cash flow is a harder concept to explain in poe terms and I can't think of a good comparison at the moment.

Chris mentions IFRS standards and that it requires capitalization of R&D, in this case the money they've spent on PoE2. Since the comparison to USD was made earlier, I'm going to make the assumption that a large number of players are from the US (I don't actually know if citizens of other nations think about finances in USD, I would assume they think of things in their native currency). The issue I have here is he doesn't seem to realize that IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) does not apply to the United States of America. We have our own special blend of US GAAP (United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) which specifically states that Research and Development costs cannot be capitalized and instead must be expensed under the idea that there is no way to reasonably estimate future returns. The whole idea of income spreading and expense spreading that he mentioned is based on the matching principle in accounting where revenues are supposed to be matched in the time frame as expenses and vice versa.

As an accounting nerd and experienced PoE player, I hope that I was able to shine a bit more light on these concepts, but I fully understand that most people don't care. The reason I feel that Chris doesn't fully understand these concepts is because he doesn't make any poe comparisons; which also suggests to me that the accounting team doesn't really understand poe mechanics or they would have given him comparisons. Neither of these are a concern though, since they each do their own separate job and they don't impact each other.

As for the state of PoE and build diversity, I'm not concerned with nerfs. That to me is a good sign that the developers care about balance and don't want to just inflate things into unreasonable values. The main concern to me is that nerfs make me more hesitant to try builds that got nerfed. It just feels bad. I loved cyclone when it was first revamped, and it was understandably nerfed, but now I refuse to play another cyclone based build because it'll always feel worse than it did before. In this case it was the AoE nerfs that got to me. While my friends assure me that it's still pretty good with some investment, I don't want to invest into and be constantly reminded that it used to be better with no investment.

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willianvon wrote:

So where is the summary of the podcast that you guys said was going to be available on monday?

good question

I love the direction that the team wants to take.

If you make any major changes, a minority will invariably voice their grievances louder than those who appreciate those changes. You will naturally upset some with change, as you are altering something which has an established player base, but you will not hear as much from the new players who come for the (better imo) changes, or from the players who are active on PoE like myself, but have been wanting change for quite some time.

I would love to see more depth in combat, and more practical use for diversity in skills, which can be achieved by (among other things) lowering the "more multiplier". Essentially nerfing the players, and closing the gap between having a diverse skill set and a specialized "clear the screen in a second, with a singular specialized win skill" (the current meta)

So lower player damage relative to monster life, and lower monster damage relative to player life. Remove or severely nerf the "more multiplier", and use attack/cast speed as the effective more modifier, with a natural cap of consuming more mana. Have in general, fewer monsters, which are harder, but with more rewards/xp; as opposed to a new mob every 15 feet on the map, which is extinguished instantly.

This would go a long way to making PoE a richer experience in the actual combat, in addition to the already rich character building.

Thank you for reading <3

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Aias_o_Telamonios wrote:

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Incarcerated wrote:

Both of you are part of the problem. You assume what he says without knowing it. Bravo.
He addressed this in the podcast. There are no more nerfs coming. Some buffs.

As for Tencent taking power from Chris? I don't think you realise what you're asking for there matey. You think it's bad now? Let's hope we never get to see how badly thought out this statement of yours is.

Actually the problem is self righteous people like you who think they know better than everyone else. Well guess what you don't. Half the player base has quit. What does that tell you?

And as for tencent removing Chris.... you do realize that GGG has other people too right? ... right?

I simply pointed out what he said and that you either missed it or didn't listen to the podcast. I'm not claiming to be better than you.

Maybe my point wasn't well made.
Chris is attempting to communicate with the community and has put himself forward as the punching bag for what GGG is doing as a company. His vision of the game isn't as important as his methodical nature and understanding of player behaviour. He is absolutely the man you want in charge.
I'm not saying you're wrong in that there are others that will be able to do the job. It's that you would most likely regret losing the foundation that holds up the company and therefore the game.

So instead of antagonising and blaming, perhaps you could help by sharing your thoughts and leave honest feedback so that they can understand your point of view. And maybe you could also consider seeing things from their perspective even if it is simply to understand how they came to believe in what they are doing.

I want path of exile 2 to be as slow as path of exile closed beta, open beta and v1. The more the time pass the more it become an asian game. Just look the mobs animations, they feel so much unnatural... That's something they have better in Grim Dawn. Their game is slower, the gameplay harder and it's not boring just because it's "slow". I just watched that poe 2 gameplay (it came out 4 months ago, I missed this news ?). It look great but I know when Chris do a video, it's never what it truely look like when we play.

About the flasks I don't find them big as a nerf. Maybe I was newbie not using them enough I don't know... A couple uniques has been nerfed maybe too much but in general I didn't saw a big difference and I don't even use these new orbs making them automatic (I have read they are planning something with the bench so I'm waiting). Maybe they could do something like that : if you use them as automatic, you lose 50% of its value (100 mana regen would be 50 only) and then buff them all a little. At the end it would give more freedom for the flasks you want to manually use and all of them will be nerfed compared to before expedition.