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

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dustin1819#4812 wrote:

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.

The game is open to the public. That's all that matters.

Once you open your game to the public, it's fair game for any backlash or praise that comes from the changes that happen. That's just how gaming is now that beta is a PR term.

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Echothesis#7320 wrote:

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.

I'm curious what game. I helped develop The Dark for Diablo 1, Gemstone and a few other last 90's projects. I got back into it after 20 years by creating a class-less system for Divinity OS2 with a 400MB mod I solo'd. It was quite the catch up experience.

I had plans for BG3 but lets just say for a year Larian was not on good terms with their mod developers. I still want to get a team together and make a proper ARPG but it's such a sour genre. Both developers and players have forgotten there's an RPG in ARPG.

Turn based games have never gone away and are making huge waves now while ARPGs flounder. It's not a coincidence and sad when ARPGs came from CRPGs. In my experience player feedback is something you either instantly dismiss because you know better or think about for a bit and decide if it holds any merit. Reports on bugs and especially crashes get address quickly as possible.

Players aren't always wrong but you also need to have a target audience or no one is going to be happy. A Class-less system is actually what first drew me to PoE but seems it wasn't meant to last. Most fun I had after 2018 or so was just making hipster stuff that destroys.

Mark being in charge of balance is probably why rarity still affects currency after over a year of the community complaining loudly about it and also probably why rarity bots and group play raining currency is still a thing.

Perhaps they don't want to distribute their earning on more people? I started to get the feeling of greedy people handling this game.

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Xzorn#7046 wrote:

I'm curious what game. I helped develop The Dark for Diablo 1, Gemstone and a few other last 90's projects. I got back into it after 20 years by creating a class-less system for Divinity OS2 with a 400MB mod I solo'd. It was quite the catch up experience.

I had plans for BG3 but lets just say for a year Larian was not on good terms with their mod developers. I still want to get a team together and make a proper ARPG but it's such a sour genre. Both developers and players have forgotten there's an RPG in ARPG.

Turn based games have never gone away and are making huge waves now while ARPGs flounder. It's not a coincidence and sad when ARPGs came from CRPGs. In my experience player feedback is something you either instantly dismiss because you know better or think about for a bit and decide if it holds any merit. Reports on bugs and especially crashes get address quickly as possible.

Players aren't always wrong but you also need to have a target audience or no one is going to be happy. A Class-less system is actually what first drew me to PoE but seems it wasn't meant to last. Most fun I had after 2018 or so was just making hipster stuff that destroys.

If we are talking mods, I've also worked on private servers for both D3 and D4 (combat system design too, we had to write whole server from scratch and reverse some hilarious shit blizz runs under the hood lol). Now both projects closed due to lack of workforce but they were online for about 9 years (D3) and 2 years (D4).

About target audience, this is why GGG does nothing about glaring holes in their game for so many years. Because their target audience is exactly same people who had just abused the hell out of temple, and same who tell others (in this very thread) to suck it up because "you won't ever have top items anyway, why does it matter how much they cost?"

I think this is mistake, well of snobby nolifers is going to run dry eventually, and then GGG finds out they had lost trust of normal players completely. Exp penalty alone will make sure of it.

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SaKRaaN#0012 wrote:

Perhaps they don't want to distribute their earning on more people? I started to get the feeling of greedy people handling this game.

What gave it away? The fact they live in NZ and they want 80 US dollars for some armor sets?

And yeah I'm convinced they laid people off thinking they were only going to be working on PoE2.

Now they can't sell as many cosmetics, because they barely have enough manpower/artists to create new content outside of what is strictly needed for each new league.

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Echothesis#7320 wrote:

"

Xzorn#7046 wrote:

I think this is mistake, well of snobby nolifers is going to run dry eventually, and then GGG finds out they had lost trust of normal players completely. Exp penalty alone will make sure of it.

I have never read a more true statement on this forum. I am normal player-own business, two daughters. I could be wrong, but that's already happening. This game is starting to feel more and more like work. So it's slowly time to look for something else.

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IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

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.

You quoted the wrong part of the interview.
They got 2 people working on balancing who are allowed to make decisions w/o supervision.
That doesnt mean the team is limited to 2 people.

All this means is that they have to lead devs in that department and an unknown number of people who´s work needs to be reviewed.

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Orbaal#0435 wrote:

"

IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

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.

You quoted the wrong part of the interview.
They got 2 people working on balancing who are allowed to make decisions w/o supervision.
That doesnt mean the team is limited to 2 people.

All this means is that they have to lead devs in that department and an unknown number of people who´s work needs to be reviewed.

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. You can outsource local bugfixing to a junior and then quickly look over their code, but balance rework is a complex process with its own testing line. De-facto it usually means balance decisions are still made by above-mentioned 2 lead people who then order the rest of the team to implement those decisions (without getting any smart ideas).

Otherwise they would've wasted extra time rolling back "bad" parts and stitching "good" parts together, producing new bugs in the process.

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Echothesis#7320 wrote:

"

Orbaal#0435 wrote:

"

IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

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.

You quoted the wrong part of the interview.
They got 2 people working on balancing who are allowed to make decisions w/o supervision.
That doesnt mean the team is limited to 2 people.

All this means is that they have to lead devs in that department and an unknown number of people who´s work needs to be reviewed.

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. You can outsource local bugfixing to a junior and then quickly look over their code, but balance rework is a complex process with its own testing line. De-facto it usually means balance decisions are still made by above-mentioned 2 lead people who then order the rest of the team to implement those decisions (without getting any smart ideas).

Otherwise they would've wasted extra time rolling back "bad" parts and stitching "good" parts together, producing new bugs in the process.

Gamedesigners dont code.
That might be true for extremely small projects but not on a professional level.

Gamedesigners come up with concepts and then translate those concepts into formulas which real coders then implement. Afterwards its all about spreadsheets and getting the numbers right.

There is no coding involved at any stage - unless using excel-formulas counts as coding these days.

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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.

the league is an epic failure.