[Tencent drama] Now's a good time to talk about how Xbox did in fact affect PoE's balance
" That's it. Some design decisions that would be viable on PC are permanently off the table because they wouldn't work on Xbox. That's my point. The Xbox deal has permanently restricted the game's design space. And it stands to reason from there that GGG will further exclude designs that they know Tencent wouldn't let fly. Instead, they will design around what Tencent accepts, so that they can minimize the number of special cases they need to handle. Sure, GGG could just make a totally different version of PoE for the Chinese realm, just as they could have done for Xbox. But they didn't. Instead, they made major changes to the PC version so that it will also fit on Xbox. Which is totally prudent business practice, I'm not blaming them for it. As I said in the OP, I'm not saying that these things will ruin PoE. But to expect no gameplay-level changes from a deal like this is, at best, unrealistic. Last edited by suszterpatt#5078 on May 29, 2018, 1:07:04 PM
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" That's precisely how I feel. I enjoyed supporting GGG in the beginning because I felt like I was supporting a startup I could really stand behind. That feeling has been waning over the years and now it's gone completely. They definitely don't need my money any more and I don't need any more MTX's. Unfortunately though, POE is still the funnest game in this category for me so I'll keep playing. Indirectly supporting them I suppose but they won't get any more money from me. And when the inevitable happens and GGG completes their sell out I just hope a new player has emerged in the genre that can fill the void, like POE satisfied my Diablo II cravings in the beginning. I'll just be keeping my eye out for the next POE. POE Serenity Prayer: GGG, grant me the serenity to accept the RNG I cannot change,
the courage to challenge any unbalanced content, and the wisdom to avoid the forums. Mad: "Oh, it's simple and if you insist... I just think you're a dick. That's all." QFT: 4TRY4C&4NO |
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" Nice theory, but GGG always said that this was a server-side issue. the server computes hits, xbox only renders graphic. Here a few things: 1. the change of AoE was justified because it was one of the few attributes that scaled super-linearly. That means it was one of the few mechanics without diminishing returns and instead each % additional AoE was more effective than the previous one. 2. There are tight real-time requirements. if computing a single action of the players takes too long, this will make the game perform badly as we have the network-roundtrip time + the time the server needs to compute the outcome. Therefore single actions like a large AoE take longer to compute on a pack of mobs and might therefore produce noticable lag. 3. From 2. also follows that GGG wants to reduce the number of actions per player per second. This is cost-reduction as server time is money. |
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" Some of the computation happens serverside, sure. But the client still has to spawn visual effects, trigger audio, update the UI, and generally maintain a model of the world. We've all seen people crash their clients with excessive MTX spam even on very powerful PCs. The client can only handle so much, and the Xbox can handle very little indeed. And curiously, the servers being overloaded somehow didn't prevent GGG from creating that environment in the first place. You'd think that if they cared so deeply about server performance, they would have curbed that kind of stuff a lot sooner, possibly before even it was released. But the CoC meta went on for quite some time, and it was only when they started porting to Xbone that it suddenly had the crap optimized out of it. Last edited by suszterpatt#5078 on May 29, 2018, 3:59:29 PM
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you want to know what really effects balance?
alcohol I dont see any any key!
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" Well,you are clearly expert on this matter. Last edited by Midoriisonehotlittlegirl#1669 on May 29, 2018, 5:08:04 PM
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