Just 2 people have worked on balance so far... 5 in the future...?

Mark: "Historically we've had quite a limited number of people actually doing balance. Um it's quite hard. It's actually one of the the harder things to to have a good feel for. And if you put the wrong person in that position, who knows where you'll end up. So it's really important um to make sure that obviously these people understand the philosophies and trained well and you know you're being cautious with it. But yeah, we've got I got three new people with that. So much larger team in the future. So, I'm hoping we can tackle a lot more and we're not just going to be up to like what, one or two of us. I mean, historically, it's been pretty much me and Andrew and that's it."

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyyKfOqzGbs

I don't think a lot of people have paid enough attention to what Mark has said here in the ZiggyD interview he and Jonathan gave before launching The Last of the Druids update.

A game as complex as Path of Exile having just two people working on balance sounds absolutely insane to me... and it comes to no surprise as to why everything is so out of whack. And with these 3 new people they're training.. that would make it 5 people working on balance which still sounds incredibly insufficient to me. Does it sound sufficient to you?

Now I'm no developer but I reckon for a game as complex as this you'd need at least a team of 10-20 or so dedicated people to balance... perhaps some devs in the community can tell us what they think this game requires in terms of manpower for balance purposes.


"And if you put the wrong person in that position, who knows where you'll end up" - I'm not entirely sure how the current state of affairs is not falling under the "who knows where you'll end up" category in your minds.... and this is somehow a justification for not hiring and training more people for it... even though you acknowledge it is hard?? Do you not trust your own hiring/training process.. or do you believe that everyone is dumb as rocks and only you can do it? What's the deal here?

I'd argue your balancing decisions are rather lackluster and you could certainly use new blood to challenge your process anyway. Heck, I'm not even sure if at least Mark and Andrew are even dedicated to balancing..


Imo this should be a top priority.... that's why we keep seeing mistakes being repeated over and over again (even from PoE1) and imbalance persisting since launch as if not that much changed.

You can disagree with me, but results speak for themselves.

That would explain their absolute undying hatred toward fire magic, if it's literally just the personal whims and opinions of LITERALLY TWO GUYS. Maybe one of them had a traumatic experience with fire or something.

REVERT INCINERATE YOU COWARDS

So in that interview they haven't fully integrated the 3 new people yet?

Near that part of the interview, I think they say that the three people they brought on all ladder in HCSSF. Which is a good thing imo.

I think it's hard to do, and made harder when large segments of skills aren't in the game yet. And classes like Oracle and the new Pathfinder are ambitious and hard to predict. But from an SSF perspective, balance feels pretty good right now. The temple helped me, but there are lots of drops the temple doesn't help with, so the league mechanic didn't take over my game time. Skillwise, I'm decently strong without being OP.

I realize trade is a complaint factory. Hard for me to understand what's true. I see people saying the league is dead, and others saying the economy is fine.

"

Drayvn#7423 wrote:

So in that interview they haven't fully integrated the 3 new people yet?

Based on their own words, no. And based on their same words... that's how PoE1 has always operated.."historically".. which explains a lot.

"

DistributedAutomaton#5739 wrote:

Near that part of the interview, I think they say that the three people they brought on all ladder in HCSSF. Which is a good thing imo.

I think it's hard to do, and made harder when large segments of skills aren't in the game yet. And classes like Oracle and the new Pathfinder are ambitious and hard to predict. But from an SSF perspective, balance feels pretty good right now. The temple helped me, but there are lots of drops the temple doesn't help with, so the league mechanic didn't take over my game time. Skillwise, I'm decently strong without being OP.

I realize trade is a complaint factory. Hard for me to understand what's true. I see people saying the league is dead, and others saying the economy is fine.

I think bringing top players in for balancing isn't at all that great of an idea for several reasons, if that is true. Just because one is good or knows a lot about the game doesn't mean they have the skills for properly balancing or assesing those balance issues. They'd be great as testers Perhaps or QA but would definitely lack complementary skills for balancing.
Another issue with that is that they will have a narrow vision since they are in that top 1%, and as such risk to optimize for those top players. And honestly I could go on ...

Heck, I bet a lot of the top players are opposed to nerfs and would rather buff everything into oblivion if given the chance.. which is a terrible approach to balancing.

Tbf the more I look into GGG as an employer and a game studio, the more perplexed I get.

They employ 200 people.

But balance has been done by 2 people..

Jonathan apparently coded whole Temple mechanic mainly by himself..

What's the issue in getting the other people involved? To me, I get a bit alarmed at how it sounds like the studio is operating. Like.. Are employees actually being actively involved and coached? Are they being trusted as professionals in their field?

And yeah, I am not very convinced that bringing players in is necessarily any better than bringing basically any game design professional in. Players suffer from the same amount of biases as everyone else and most players are not very good at looking at the whole wider picture and mostly focus on specific slice of the game that they happen to enjoy the most.

If they mean 2 people on PoE2 that makes perfect sense to me. The game's not even finished yet. Any time spent on balance is essentially gonna be undone anytime they make a big sweeping change like, idk, a new class with a wide array of new abilities anyone can use. Once all the classes are out and they figure out how they want endgame builds to scale I would expect a lot more people focused on balance.

If they mean 2 people on PoE1, yeah that's a pretty huge issue I think that I hope they fix by the time PoE2 hits that stage.

That does seem insanely low. Isn't this something you can crowdsource with select members of the community? Heck, you can literally build an AI system to intelligently try the viable permutations of skills, items, etc. Granted this example is a more limited problem set, but over a decade ago people wrote an AI system to look for niche build orders and better timings for Starcraft 2.

Regardless, this is probably part of the reason why this is a one-shot game. Either you make citadel and above bosses so insanely powerful that they just one shot everyone, or they're too weak to actually kill players.

Case in point, I just got 100-0'd by a moderate T15 Doryani in citadel despite 4500 total health (NOT counting energy shield) with full resists, 24k armor vs normal hits, 48k armor vs critical hits, and 86% of armor counts towards elemental damage.

Not to mention there's so much screen puke that you can't see what's happening, but that's another story.

This game isn't fun when you make it so absurd. This build probably has at least 300d into it, which isn't a lot this league, but honestly it can't get much more optimized than it is. What's the solution? Energy Shield and give up on bossing when you're playing armor?

Having 2 people working on balance isn't even the funny part of that statement.

What's funny is those two people are likely not the ones coding new skills or mechanics.

This insures nothing is released in a balanced state. When you're both Quality Control and Coder for a game you have a tremendous amount of potential to not only stop garbage from going live, but fix it quickly when it does. These balance guys are probably just paid testers.

It's become quite clear that GGG is not using any type of standardized formula for creating skills and added mechanic designs fall very short of consideration with other existing mechanics.

It doesn't take dedicated people to balance a game. It takes devs who understand their game.
It also takes a leader who helps each group properly communicate.

"

IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

I think bringing top players in for balancing isn't at all that great of an idea for several reasons, if that is true. Just because one is good or knows a lot about the game doesn't mean they have the skills for properly balancing or assesing those balance issues. They'd be great as testers Perhaps or QA but would definitely lack complementary skills for balancing.
Another issue with that is that they will have a narrow vision since they are in that top 1%, and as such risk to optimize for those top players. And honestly I could go on ...

Heck, I bet a lot of the top players are opposed to nerfs and would rather buff everything into oblivion if given the chance.. which is a terrible approach to balancing.

I was a developer of diablo style arpg once. Coded whole combat system server-side, and interacted with our small tester team a lot.

Trust me, you do NOT want balance advice from active players of your game, much less elite players or trader players if your game has trade. If they retire from grind and spend time looking at your game design docs as a whole, maybe. Otherwise their definition of "better" is influenced by their favorite parts of the game.

By extension one could say my prolonged criticism of GGG balance on this forum is biased as well, but I've long stopped to be a really active player by poe standards:) Its mostly "try new patch" - "see same old crap" - "reach lvl 90+ once" - "quit".

Its funny how elitist players here try to downplay criticism of poe with the "I play so much more than you and have so many more millions of dps" argument.