Chris Wilson's 2019 gdc presentation - merge if already posted.

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Arrowneous wrote:

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This all looks to me like GGG is coding PoE for the game junkies of the world. Racing is most important, role playing and strategy are out. Just keep the new leagues coming every 13 weeks, I need my next gaming fix. The hunt for tier 1 gear or crafting top gear is only a means to an end, racing to 100 is all that counts. Then the W.H.O. is right and gaming is an addiction. GGG is coding PoE to tap into the millions of addicts and take their money. All non-addict players lose as a result of this. Very sad to see GGG go this way but because they are now TencentGGG it isn't a surprise.

This is something what I do not understand. They exist on the market for more than 6 years already and this is not strange for them, that after 6 years they should offer polished product already, accessible for many players.
There is a visible error in the market expectations understanding: PoE is a game more and more designed for players like streamers or other no-lifers, which perfectly know the game mechanics, love to play it fast and can play many hours daily. That will surely make happy those clients but... majority of potential players cannot spend tens of hours to learn complicated mechanics to achieve at least basic level of satisfaction and cannot spent entire days to play and farm. They usually also are not very skilled so they die often and their progress is slow (especially in the late game).
I do not know the exact ratio between Steam players and direct client players, but I would assume that there is roughly 50% (you can estimate this comparing Steam charts with ChW numbers). This game has currently 20-40 (peak) thousand active users on Steam, so will have 40-80 thousand in total. Is it good achievement to have that small market coverage? There is also some kind of manipulation in those ChW charts - Delve in fact did not have massive peak... but there were almost 40 thousands (just on steam) people playing this league when it was ending (this level was not achieved any one time before and after). Betrayal achieved around 10000 players in third month of existence. This can also explain that unusual peak in the begin of Betrayal - people were satisfied with Delve that much, that they expected at least similar level of satisfaction with the following league. The following one, Synthesis did not have that much players on the start as Betrayal, what means that not only there not came so many new players, but they have lost some of old ones. I will not be surprised if the next league would start with players number below 100 thousand (on Steam charts).
I have noticed also the other very bad thing - in general you can see that it does mean nothing if the game is capable to keep players interested or not - only thing that matters is to have a high number of players starting a new league and spending money on supporters packs. Then, they can be ignored. This approach has direct impact on the game playability and the general quality. This is also a reason why the market coverage is so small.

I just rewatched the presentation and I feel there are a few things that merit discussion.

1. The game must have trade because items only have value if they can be traded.

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If you find an item and you are the only person that can ever consume that, it's not really something you've achieved, you can actually feel like, feel good about having it, it doesn't have any weight to it

I appreciate the trade players will probably agree with this but from the perspective of someone that plays solely SSF, it's complete gibberish. If I find an item with good stats, it's a great feeling. Even if I can't use the item on the build I'm currently playing, it will go in the stash and be used in some future build. Suggesting an item is worthless unless it can be traded is bizarre to me.

2. Chris says having sequential items is bad because once the best items are found there's nowhere for the player to go, therefore, having completely random mods is the better option. He then goes on to say that the best items from 2013 still haven't been found in reasonable numbers.

I personally see this as a lack of imagination. Having sequential items or set items alongside the current RNG wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Moreover, having the ability to mod those items would give the items longevity.

As an aside, I find it funny that Chris espouses the virtues of total RNG for items and yet one look at poe.ninja, halfway through a league, shows that for a given class with a set skill, the items used, the skill tree and the ascendancies in play are virtually identical.

3. Chris says, end game content is only accessed by 10% of players and the development of that content takes approximately 20% development effort. Moreover, it's primarily produced for an exclusive club. Apparently, there's strong overlap between streamers and top 10% and those who are not in this group can just watch streamers and wish.

I'm not sure what I feel about this. Conflicted is probably the best I can comer up with.

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MFairfax wrote:

Chris Wilson comforts himself with his graphs.

Meanwhile this game is no longer fun. Just look at today's forum postings. Everyone is having problems with everything.

Syndicate still freezes and kills characters.
Drops are still excrement.
Lag plagues the system and kicks off players.

I could go on and on. Why am I still here complaining? Because I bought a brand new computer just to play this game. It blazes every application I set it to except POE.

The gods are cruel.

That's modern gaming though.

Look at any forum for any game no matter how popular and you will exactly the same threads.

It's why they are mostly ignored by the developing company.

Watched the whole thing, thanks for posting this.

My main take-away from the end of it is that the main league content is aimed at the top 1% exclusively, which matches my experience with leagues getting burned out before being able to complete the advertised new stuff.

That puts me squarely in the audience that's supposed to watch streamers do the high end stuff (T1 crafts in this league) and foolishly hope that i could do the same.

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So that's pretty much killed any motivation i have to play this league or any future ones, since i know its just a pattern that will repeat. All the headline content is really only there for the streamers as advertising material for their audience. I've fallen for that dangling carrot one too many times.

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Kellog wrote:

I appreciate the trade players will probably agree with this but from the perspective of someone that plays solely SSF, it's complete gibberish. If I find an item with good stats, it's a great feeling. Even if I can't use the item on the build I'm currently playing, it will go in the stash and be used in some future build. Suggesting an item is worthless unless it can be traded is bizarre to me.

Therefore, it's important to have trade, so ALL people feel value from finding such items. At least as longs as GGG will keep the same tables in all leagues.

From a Standard League point of view, I share your thoughts here. I played Standard for several years, before moving over to league. And I must say, that my way of thinking when it came to item value, shifted pretty quickly, as I will never be one of those players making more than two builds/characters each league. In Standard, I hoarded a lot of items, and kept them safe for future builds. In leagues? Not so much.

I remember one of the GGG staff, can't remember who, but I think it was Qarl, talked about the different types of players PoE has. He ended the sentence with "...And some players only play standard, year in and year out", while letting out a little laugh, as he clearly couldn't understand such a alien phenomenon. GGG do not understand Standard players. They never have, and never will - and show that fact very often.

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Phrazz wrote:

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GGG do not understand Standard players. They never have, and never will - and show that fact very often.

But now, they have a new bright idea. The special idea. They realised that Standard League players can be milked. Let them pay for a quarterly subscription disguised as premium map stash tab. :)

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Mark___75 wrote:

But now, they have a new bright idea. The special idea. They realised that Standard League players can be milked. Let them pay for a quarterly subscription disguised as premium map stash tab. :)

You'll have a sad, sad life, if you are to interpret all shortcomings and mistakes by others as a vendetta ;)

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Phrazz wrote:

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Mark___75 wrote:

But now, they have a new bright idea. The special idea. They realised that Standard League players can be milked. Let them pay for a quarterly subscription disguised as premium map stash tab. :)

You'll have a sad, sad life, if you are to interpret all shortcomings and mistakes by others as a vendetta ;)

This is not a mistake - those tabs have folders structure and even pull-down menu, where you can select the proper map edition - so they could be easily fixed. If that was mistake, GGG could fix that 4 months ago, when they shuffled the Atlas and lots of people started to report this problem.

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Mark___75 wrote:

GGG could fix that 4 months ago

Ok.

See the problem is GGG doesn't care if they release bad content, because they're so confident that players will come back even if this league is a bust. They know players will come back on the next one.