Current State of PoE - Summary

----- Whining and bitching -----------------------------------------

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Dynuel wrote:

Happy players don't complain, they are busy enjoying this great game (and I believe that the majority of players are very happy players), it is the sour and tired players that come to the forums and reddit to complain.

This! Happy players play the game and don't spend their time on the forum (unless they're at work... :D)


----- Improvements ------------------------------------------

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This is very hard to address, one of good ideas I heard is introducing the bottom cap on mod tiers, for instance very high item-level items cannot have the lowest tiers of mods, improving the chance of getting better items overall

+1

Quality of Life Improvements

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players are fine with heavy nerfs if they are really needed, but they need:
- More feedback from GGG, the actuall reasoning that stands behind certain changes and nerfs

I think that would solve many problems. As we saw with the excellent bug reports that players really appreciate feedback. Nerfs are necessary in some instances, but please GGG give us some feedback!

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- Build of the Week - as much time it requires, I believe this is hands down one of the best marketing tools and gives HUGE inspiration to payers and improves the replayability and retention of players

Agreed! I really miss the build of the week. If it's too much work for GGG why not make a monthly competition (and pick 4 winners) where people submit videos that they made themselves explaining their build...

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- Development manifesto and updates

Would love to see that one updated regularly :)

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- Votebox

Good idea, but I think we already know where that would be heading... ^^



----- Quality of Life Improvements -----------------------------

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- I understand the trading system redesign and making trade pannel intergalactic is a major job.

I think (and hope) they're on it...

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- We need an option to disable the 'Frient has come online / offline' notifications,

Oh yes please!

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We need to have one name attached to one person, this is the only way for players to recognise eachother and know who they are,

Yeah, I started using qwertz_... in front of all my characters now. But displaying the account name as well would make life a lot easier :D

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---- We do lose messages when in the loading screen, which causes chaos, miscommunication and often frustration.

Very annoying!

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- Formatting of the chat is confusing, when you talk to a few people at the same time it is really easy to get lost, the incoming and outgoing messages need to be made more distinguishable, I suggest making the arrow <- for the incoming messages bold, just more noticible, as we don't need to pay much attention to the messages we sent out ourselves.

Hopefully that'll get fixed with the new trading system (which is hopefully coming soon)...

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- Show basic str/dex/int without bonuses from gear in character panel

Would like that!

Something else I'd like to see is a redesign of the forum software!
- PM notification ingame
- notification on the forum if someone quoted you or replied to a thread in which you wrote as well (and the option to unsubscribe from threads)

Desynce is an issue that needs addressed before anything else. After that the crafting/trading systems including better chat features.

GGG just keeps spending there money on more content for these broken systems...Why donate when they are not going to fix the game?

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tractusUO wrote:

Desynce is an issue that needs addressed before anything else. After that the crafting/trading systems including better chat features.

GGG just keeps spending there money on more content for these broken systems...Why donate when they are not going to fix the game?

Different development team ;) And nobody wants GGG to sack most of their team...

I've read most of it, but you're already wrong in the very beginning.

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Happy players don't complain, they are busy enjoying this great game (and I believe that the majority of players are very happy players), it is the sour and tired players that come to the forums and reddit to complain.

I don't post. I don't care to. The majority of players aren't happy. The majority just don't care enough to even post about the problems they experience because the majority know that the problems that really matter will never change.

Desync is easily the biggest flaw in the game. It has little to no benefits. It was supposed to stop cheating, which still happens. It was supposed to stop RMT, which still happens. Nearly all high level players of Invasion use RMT and also use cheats. Even popular streamers. It's an absolute joke.

Is this a problem? Yes it is. Will it be changed? No. It never will be fixed. Am I okay with that? For the most part no. I now play PoE for about an hour before finding a stopping place or being frustrated enough with the lag and desync to take a break. I find it strange that desync has gotten worse some how. It is rare to ever get 50 ping in a solo instance any more. I would love to play the game more, but it's hard to play with the desync and server issues.

Desync is not that big of a deal for standard league players, but it destroys the HC population. Most of my invasion guild no longer plays invasion. Not because of the invaders. But because of how much desync influences these encounters with invaders to the point that in nearly every zone of cruel/merc it's either skip half the instance or alt f4 so you don't die from desync burst.

Another thing in your post is that you mention the player population. It's kind of laughable to believe that a significant number of people changed from steam to standalone, but if that's what you want to believe then sure. The reality is that less and less people play this game every day for whatever reason you want. You can bring up whatever statistics you want, but when I look for a public party in any act in HC, there's an incredibly small amount, usually grinding docks or fellshrine. At end game I thought it would be different, but my friends shows me the public parties for A3M and it's either docks, trading, and a few mappers, 20 public parties max at prime time. That's not a lot of players. This is very different from Nemesis. There were far more parties for progression and end game.

Understand that ARPGs aren't for everyone. The appeal beyond the normal loot grind for a lot of people is the challenge of HC. However, thanks to desync, many people are immediately turned off by the fact that in order to play HC they are forced to alt f4. Isn't that ludicrous? Let that sink in. Imagine telling someone in order to play a game successfully that they have to log out or force quit. So why is this such a problem now in comparison to Nemesis? Invasion, being a true challenge, causes way more chances for players to log out, not because they can't rise to the challenge of Invasion, but because why risk it on desync? Why bother trying to kill any of the invaders when their is always a freak risk of having to alt f4 hindering progression even more. The funny thing is that people will try to rationalize it saying that the invaders are just too hard, when the reality is that the servers are so flaky it's nearly impossible efficiently kill them with skill when your gear is on par with their difficulty.

For the rest of your post:
I don't care about the difficulty of the league. I enjoy it. I don't care about the nerfs or the buffs because there is fun in the dynamic meta, not matter how crazy it is. Who cares if my armor is suddenly a small % difference. "OH NO MY ARMOR IS NOW 10,000 and not 10,200" OH NOOOOOO. I'd rather have drastic changes than changes that do nothing.

The quality of life features will get there. A lot of players want an auction house, but I don't. I want more of an in game proper listing feature. Instead of bidding and buy outs, you contact the user with an offer, but you are still able to see what the user is selling via his listings. But trading isn't that big of a deal, it's incredibly easy to farm in this game for everything except the most exotic of builds.


tl;dr the majority of players don't post because they know the massive problem of desync will never be fixed. Many players have stopped playing or have drastically reduced their playtime. A declining population in Invasion shows that. Nerfs/Buffs matter very little to the majority. Quality of life features will happen eventually, just like guild support happened.

I agree they need to add reasoning behind changes, at least when it it is something major changing the playstyle of an entire build.

If people complain about the change, and no word from GGG about it, they won't stop. Simply ignoring the players does not work. More threads will pop up, and more players will complain.

It is really frustrating to not know what is happening and why it is happening. I am quitting for this reason alone.

I have tried to figure out if smoke mine was removed to replace a different way of controlling minions, but no official word about it makes it hard for me to decide if I should invest in a respec or not. (say what you want, summoner is not viable in any competitive form without the skill)

If they could just take the time to respond. It would be one less thing to think about, and I could reroll again.

The lack of response from GGG makes many feel they don't care. In return players stop caring, and make "whine" threads as many like to call it. They wouldn't be whine threads if GGG responded for once.

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Dynuel wrote:

----- Lack of reasoning from GGG ---------------------------------

Also I find the biggest problem are not the nerfs or changes, but the lack of feedback / reasoning from GGG standing behind the changes.

For instance, if you say that something was heavily nerfed (without any reasoning), the overall perception of the community will be VERY NEGATIVE (especially from the vocal whiners/trolls), however if you nerf something and give sensible reasoning, no-one will say a word. Compare these two:

"Evangelists were nerfed and smoke mine no longer works for summoners"

Yes, this is a major communication gap that GGG should take to heart.

Having worked in commercial software development, I recognize the terse style of these status reports and understand why they're so fragmented.

Large software projects are developed and maintained by teams of managers, programmers, and testers whose primary form of organization and communication is via a networked database of bug reports. Each issue that is reported to the team is confirmed by a tester, who opens a new item in the bug database describing how to replicate the issue. The manager prioritizes each new item and assigns it to a programmer. The programmer investigates the issue, updates the codebase and/or specifications as needed, and marks the item resolved. The tester then reviews the changes and confirms the issue has been resolved. The manager then retires the item and determines whether it should be added to the suite of regression tests.

At the end of each week, programmers file status reports on their work progress. For each assigned issue, they cite its current status in a short reference to its bug database description. Resolved issues are summarized as completed tasks, such as:

"Reduced Cleave penalty from -30% to -20%."

Programmer status reports are terse summaries that lack context. Why? Because the detailed context of each issue is readily available in the bug database. Anyone interested in the full story can consult the database to determine exactly how and why the issue was resolved. No further elaboration is required.

The Patch Notes released with each patch are comprised of long lists of resolved issues culled from programmer status reports, formatted in a consistent style. The reason they seem so fragmented is because players have no access to the context provided by the bug database which these terse updates implicitly reference. These Patch Notes are fine as a concise summary of updates, but they fall short of adequately describing the whys and wherefores of a complex patch.

In my view, GGG is missing out on a valuable opportunity to communicate vital gameplay developments to the player base. Instead of relying solely on terse programmer status updates, GGG should explain the context of each Patch Note item in fleshed out reports in the Patch Notes forum. This does require additional work and research, but I believe it would pay off in dramatically increased understanding of patch changes among the most vociferous players and forum commentators.

Great post and I agree with the things you have stated. I feel that you should remove your section about Whining and Bitching. The whole section doesn't give any validation to players who respond to the game with feedback. It comes across as "If you post something you aren't happy about you're instantly a whiner". It mostly just invalidates your own post because by what you're saying you'd be a happy player and why are you posting.

One thing that I don't see addressed is how Low Life Shav/CoE builds are so much more powerful than any other build. The gap is too large between Low Life Shav and any other build a player can come up with. It's great that there is a 'Ultimate' item. However players receiving several times the power of other builds is just a bit much.

I wholeheartedly agree with closing the bottom gap on affix's. One of the reasons why this is such a good solution is because it fixes both drops AND the crafting system. This games crafting system is AMAZING up until the point you realize it feels like playing the lottery. I do not feel that it would negatively affect the end game item hunt. People hunting for 'END GAME' items want perfect items. Making top tier affix's roll less often and mid-tier/high-mid-tier roll more often helps the average player more than anything. It also opens up the option of using currency to craft an item specific to your needs rather than it always being better to go to poe.xyz and trading for one.

I don't have much to add, good write up. Only thing I can say is I hope the QoL changes are made a higher priority for GGG going forward. The new content is alright but I honestly haven't enjoyed the Act3X zones or anything from the SotV expansion. Only thing I look forward to now are things that make the game less of head ache.

And about that new trade system.... what is going on? It's been a year and a half since I started playing and people thought it was just around the corner then. I feel like they're trying to be too careful and it'll never be released. Even after all this time it will probably just be another thing that gets added to the game in an unfinished state and will take another year for it to finally to be completed.

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NanoShinonome wrote:

I've read most of it, but you're already wrong in the very beginning.

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Happy players don't complain, they are busy enjoying this great game (and I believe that the majority of players are very happy players), it is the sour and tired players that come to the forums and reddit to complain.

I don't post. I don't care to. The majority of players aren't happy. The majority just don't care enough to even post about the problems they experience because the majority know that the problems that really matter will never change.

Who's the majority you both speak of?