Would you pay to have GGG focus exclusively on fixing the game issues but no new content?

"

tramshed wrote:

Perhaps GGG doesnt give a shit if you want to play POE on an ancient computer/shitty laptop. On most decent pcs it runs perfectly fine, even in groups.

I bet my PC is way better than yours. Has nothing to do with specs of the game. I have yet to play the game with at least a half second omnipresent lag.

That's beside the point anyway. If GGG actually doesn't give a crap if people with mid-range PCs can play the game then their business model is even worse than I imagined (which was pretty bad imo to begin with.) It's people like you who make excuses, and then suggest a good portion of the playerbase (and their money) just go play another game that will kill the game even faster.

You may think you're being witty, but you're just pushing more fans of the game towards the exit. You do realize if GGG stops taking in donations from people with "shitty" PCs that the game will eventually shut down, right? Is this a case of "it doesn't affect me personally, so it must not be true for a hefty portion of other players"?

"

NavarreElder wrote:

If you don't like the way GGG decides to handle their game, leave.

[Removed by Support]

"

glh5 wrote:

"

NavarreElder wrote:

If you don't like the way GGG decides to handle their game, leave.

[Removed by Support]

If you don't like him/her being alive, tough luck.

"

bluefalcon74 wrote:

"

tramshed wrote:

Perhaps GGG doesnt give a shit if you want to play POE on an ancient computer/shitty laptop. On most decent pcs it runs perfectly fine, even in groups.

I bet my PC is way better than yours. Has nothing to do with specs of the game. I have yet to play the game with at least a half second omnipresent lag.

That's beside the point anyway. If GGG actually doesn't give a crap if people with mid-range PCs can play the game then their business model is even worse than I imagined (which was pretty bad imo to begin with.) It's people like you who make excuses, and then suggest a good portion of the playerbase (and their money) just go play another game that will kill the game even faster.

You may think you're being witty, but you're just pushing more fans of the game towards the exit. You do realize if GGG stops taking in donations from people with "shitty" PCs that the game will eventually shut down, right? Is this a case of "it doesn't affect me personally, so it must not be true for a hefty portion of other players"?

While I respect your right to your opinion, I don't see where some poster's excessively negative attitude in either direction helps the game get better, or for their opinions to be heard.





"Lag" or latency is not a product or the "specs of the game" or the player's computer. Latency is the time delay between one computer and another. It is caused by:

1) heavily used routers sending signals back and forth which increases the number of "Hops". Depending on the distance and path, these can add quite a bit. Sometimes you may find that your connection bounces back and forth several times before reaching you. Going from a server in Dallas, to Houston, to Chicago, To Atlanta, To Houston, to Seattle and then to your computer in Fort Worth would be an example, with each leg of the journey taking more time.

2)Poor signal quality or packet loss. This causes one computer or the other to have to re-request the data to be sent all over again.

I doubt GGG "doesn't give a crap" about their players with lower spec computers. I do think that GGG could and should allow a lot more of the graphic options to be disabled or turned off. If I hadn't found the textures settings of 5 (almost as blocky as the original Nintendo Zelda game) I would not have been able to participate in multiplayer games.

Because I was able to use this (and the gc-2) I was able to play for over a year and finally upgrade my computer.

So - I am not disagreeing with some of the basic sentiments on graphics options.

Russell already commented on the difficulty of getting good help, so we know that GGG is trying to continue to optimize the game itself.

If you've never programmed, then you don't really know what that is about. If you've learned programming anytime in the last 20 years, you still really have no idea what that is really about.

When you see someone who takes your 5 pages of code and boils it down to three lines of code, than you have an idea what it is about.

GGG mentioned the basic game engine itself. The tool set they have to work with constrains them to a degree. Game engines aren't free, and good ones aren't cheap. You can create your own, but there will be a lot of learning and fixing along the way.

This isn't about making excuses. Anyone who has run a business knows the key part of improving things isn't in deciding what to do. That part is usually easy. The tough part is in executing your plan. There are costs involved, both in time and money. Things won't just happen because someone says "do it".

The utter vitriol I see in many posts would cause some very negative repercussions if the posters acted this way in the real world. Because people think they are anonymous, they suddenly get very brave and are willing to spit in other people's faces.

This is sad and disgusting.

There are business studies that show a small percentage of customers are not worth having. They will cost the business far more than they will ever bring in.

GGG will realize this and act on it at some point. All businesses have to at one point or another.

The only question is whether they will have to have some minor fee ($5, %10) to cull out the festering masses who are only here to complain, or can they keep the free to play model indefinitely?

I would like to see GGG be able to keep the game free.

Yes, they do need to continue to improve the game and add new content.

No, they do not need to cater to every whim.

They will have to identify their core group.


You can't please all the people all the time.

"

Russell wrote:

You cant just outsource programming like you can art. We outsource where we can. You have to have an understanding of how our engine works and all that to work with it. Also having someone work on something that can straight up break the game not in the office is incredibly dodgy. Not to mention they could potentially gap off with the code.

If recruiting a veteran gfx developer is so hard, could you hire student developers from a local college/university cheaply enough to train them up in house?

gotta open a company branch in wherever and delegate all those tasks to them

As long as GGG is not moving their office somewhere else assembling an experienced good developing team will be pretty hard. Also, as revenue falls, the probability of core issues being ever improved shrinks, and if anything the dev team will be scaled down again.

Maybe for PoE 2, if there is such thing, GGG will make some different decisions regarding how the engine is set up and works.


Not much hope left unfortunately, as income probably peaked a few months ago and will never ever rise substantially again. If they do something, it will be too little too late, as they opportunity window will have passed anyway. Such is videogames market nowadays, if you fail to act fast enough you are dead if any severe issues plague your game, it's not like it used to be when developers could just keep up with the bullshit patches over long periods of time.

"

Russell wrote:

I hear a lot of you saying "why not just hire more people to work on the graphics problems". We actually did about 4 months ago. It took us 2 and a half years to find someone then a year to get him over here to nz. Then after 3 months he left because he just wanted to work on his own engine. However in that 3 months he was here he improved the fps by around 40-50%. I dont know if anyone remembers that but yeah.. The first thing we got him on was optimising the engine.

Now the problem we face is trying to hire someone good enough again. If we could hire from over seas easy peazy we would probably have a new programmers by now. However we have the whole : You have to first look around and prove there isnt someone good enough in nz. Then you may go through the one year process of trying to hire someone from overseas. It frigin suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks . It not easy to find graphics programmers with a lot of xp lying around with no job.

Oh about the frame drops on amd cards im not sure. I have a amd and dont experience any lag myself. However a large portion of our people at work do work on nvidia I believe. Though I think youll find its the same with most company's. Amd have kind of moved over to the console market now for most of their income. I believe Jonathan tried getting in contact with them for some optimisation advice and he just got ignored.

Tell me where he lives, so I can punch him in the face.

"

knac84 wrote:

As long as GGG is not moving their office somewhere else assembling an experienced good developing team will be pretty hard. Also, as revenue falls, the probability of core issues being ever improved shrinks, and if anything the dev team will be scaled down again.

Maybe for PoE 2, if there is such thing, GGG will make some different decisions regarding how the engine is set up and works.


Not much hope left unfortunately, as income probably peaked a few months ago and will never ever rise substantially again. If they do something, it will be too little too late, as they opportunity window will have passed anyway. Such is videogames market nowadays, if you fail to act fast enough you are dead if any severe issues plague your game, it's not like it used to be when developers could just keep up with the bullshit patches over long periods of time.

As long as there is no real competition in the ARPG market, there is still chance for opportunity.