Grinding Gear Games Staff Overview

quality assurance team is comprised of 14 people, many of whom have been playing Path of Exile since Closed Beta in 2011



so these 14 people who are the ones we are to blame for our poorly tested servers guess none of them tested bow builds for this patch since we can knock bosses into walls and make them unkillable 1000 hours btw

"

LokiGoC wrote:

This if anything just makes me more disappointed, knowing how many staff you don't have working on issues like lag to AUS players, and also makes me wonder why my support emails over two weeks ago have been seemingly dropped when the issue wasn't resolved and I simply never heard anything back.

For two weeks since Delve dropped I have been having the worst lag, I've posted multiple forum posts about it, had a correspondence with support started and abandoned and now I'm wondering what you are actually going to do about my issue when you are posting "about us" segments instead of dealing with real issues for players playing your game.

Honestly if I don't get any help from support soon I'm going to ask for a full refund of my support and abandon your game/company as you have done to me. I've given all the details on it 3 times over and provided more than enough material to aid with solving the issue and as of yet there has been nothing done, no requests for further information or emails returned telling me that there is an issue or that it can or cannot be fixed, absolutely nothing and I have given all I can.

Your customer service/support needs to step up it's game for how many people need it, I see so many people calling out for help on the forums and 99% goes unheard or un-helped except by other players only and then people like me actually email support and then have their emails forgotten about and no resolution or help. What else am I meant to do when I've followed the proper channels and it has got me no-where? The proper channel has literally failed me and after that, all I'm left with is a game I can't play for the insane lag spikes that make this game worse than original Diablo 2 battle.net back 10 or more years ago?

What good is my support if I'm not supported in kind?

This might sound weird but have you tried a vpn? I used to have problems with GW2 and subbed to a "gaming vpn" which actually worked great but cost money. Then I made an AWS VPN instance so I could turn it on only when I need it which was cheaper. Never tried but you can also try a free VPN like windscribe.

I wish you all the best future , the best prophecy ;)

more than 5 people i think (bad at maths)

thanks Tencent

"

TauOrigin wrote:

"

solidghost wrote:

Hi is Chris Wilson in the accounting team?

This is a myth, it does not exist!

chris is master fisherman on reddit ;-)

thanks for the overview, also wondering how such a small customer support team can manage the pretty large userbase and daily complaints. and that brian is missing, who's leading the art team now?

I'm so happy with the GGG fairy tale of a bunch of guys actually making their dream game, becoming an actual (ex-)independent company and growing slowly and controlled instead of the usual growth spurt, one hit wonder, sellout story.

As much as I don't like to see the QA hate train, if there are 14 people there is either something wrong with the methods, or for example they only use dev tools to test specific things instead of doing normal gameplay testing, or stuff had been found but there was no time before launch to implement or fix more stuff. The latter case would make some GGG posts a bit strange where they seemed to be caught off guard by issues.
Does GGG regularly invite random gamers/people to do blind testing of their game? Working on the technical insides of a game for so long can make you blind to some pretty glaring issues for the general populace. And just watching new streamers/youtubers isn't totally representative since they often feign/exaggerate emotions and a lack of understanding to engage their viewers.

This might not be the place but I'd be all for a 4 month league turnover instead of 3 months. Maybe run events for the last one or two months if you are worried about people not coming back after a too long break. But with how complex every league (or rather mini expansion) now has become, you could do with some more polishing. That might also give you more time to work on more things on the random To-Do list and improving the base game faster. Personally, 3 months is too short for me to get "done" with a league anyway.
Incursion seemed to be "just right" in terms of polishing at release but it was a nicely contained experience with not that many variables/game design impacts. But with anything bigger, like Delve, 3 months (I know it was probably in the works for a lot longer) didn't seem enough and the usual "we'll fix it during the first two weeks" isn't working too well with how fast many gamers now devour PoE content and creates a lot of bad first impressions and a more negative forum/reddit athmosphere.

"

LokiGoC wrote:

This if anything just makes me more disappointed, knowing how many staff you don't have working on issues like lag to AUS players, and also makes me wonder why my support emails over two weeks ago have been seemingly dropped when the issue wasn't resolved and I simply never heard anything back.

For two weeks since Delve dropped I have been having the worst lag, I've posted multiple forum posts about it, had a correspondence with support started and abandoned and now I'm wondering what you are actually going to do about my issue when you are posting "about us" segments instead of dealing with real issues for players playing your game.

Honestly if I don't get any help from support soon I'm going to ask for a full refund of my support and abandon your game/company as you have done to me. I've given all the details on it 3 times over and provided more than enough material to aid with solving the issue and as of yet there has been nothing done, no requests for further information or emails returned telling me that there is an issue or that it can or cannot be fixed, absolutely nothing and I have given all I can.

Your customer service/support needs to step up it's game for how many people need it, I see so many people calling out for help on the forums and 99% goes unheard or un-helped except by other players only and then people like me actually email support and then have their emails forgotten about and no resolution or help. What else am I meant to do when I've followed the proper channels and it has got me no-where? The proper channel has literally failed me and after that, all I'm left with is a game I can't play for the insane lag spikes that make this game worse than original Diablo 2 battle.net back 10 or more years ago?

What good is my support if I'm not supported in kind?

I need to rectify a great mistake I made, apparently they had got back to my support email and I somehow marked it read without reading it at all or consciously marking it read either... my sincerest apologies, I am the one who has not replied. I am a buffoon lol.

However the lag still remains so I hope that can be fixed and I ran into a pretty huge bug in Delve which I have subsequently emailed support about so hope that can be fixed, but agree with most people that you should have people properly testing this content before it's released. Considering these mini-expansions are basically a new game inside a game you should probably go so far as to have people actually "beta test" them. There's a whole part of my Delve map that I can't access now due to a very obvious bug and that seems large enough that it would have been caught by basic game-play testing, even in house.

Otherwise though, I thoroughly enjoy the game and the only thing I would ask is that maybe you make it so that there's more than a few meta builds that can make it to end game? I honestly love some of the skills and love some of the possible playstyles that you can achieve in this game but most of them can't even reach later tiers of maps. Or at least the ones I enjoy playing. Like some builds are super fun but just not strong enough. A friend I play this with and I have never even managed to kill Atziri on builds we enjoy playing.

I get it that I can just suck it up and play a meta build, farm stuff up then try to make the fun builds work but it feels boring to play something a hundred other players have done before and requires stupid expensive items. Also to feel pidgeon-holed into certain items kinda sucks too. What if I want to play a build of all unique items? They fall off later in the game compared to the perfect rares unless they are completely integral to your build. But this is just me, I like uniques, the look, the idea, the "special-ness" to them over just a rare. Just wish they held up at the far end-game, some of them that don't currently at least.

On another note though, please give us more spell block! I'm stretching it and still only managing about 30% all buffs/pots up (Not playing Gladiator, Inquisitor Tempest Shield). That's using Rainbowstride, max spell block Rumi's Concoction, two reckless defence jewels and almost every spell block passive in the tree, I'm heading for Deflection now which will give me another 6% but it pales in comparison to my max/over cap attack block. It's not even half, but before with the conversion I could have got it up to 100% conversion (without being Gladiator, Rainbowstride was 25%, two Reckless defence were 20% each, Stone of Lazhwar was 50%) so that it was the same as my attack block. Is this intentional? Hope this can be changed because I like this playstyle a lot but it seems to get the appropriate spell block I need to be a Gladiator :/