GGG Please consider changing the League Rollout to this.

TLDR at bottom

Once upon a time we had races and in these races you could earn points for the MTX store but apparently this was not A: profitable and B: pulling in enough players, This makes me sad as not everyone can enjoy some shinies despite their countless hours/days/months/years devoted to your game..

Presently the leagues are tested as far as i know by a select group of people including some streamers before release for a short time and while im sure they catch quite a lot of bugs we still have a great deal remaining every league that has been rolled out lately.

In addition the rate at which these leagues are rolled out has a variety of effects both on your development team and the user-base, For your devs they could probably use a little more time working on some of these features and the users both experienced and new would heavily benefit from a more stable release by having a longer testing phase..

I propose you extend your release schedule AFTER the main group of testers are done with it by 1-2+ weeks wherein you create a public test league where users from all across wraeclast can enter and help seek out bugs in the game prior to full release, this league would be voided to stop any potentially broken or unfinished items from being brought into circulation among your core leagues.

In addition you should bring back the Shop Rewards that were previously given out during race seasons and potentially some alternate art items, Users could be presented with a system similar to the challenges we chase after each league but would be tailored towards finding bugs and would likely be updated daily with tasks such as doing x amount of maps or delves a day, using skills with various support gems while doing this as well as running through the storyline multiple times and especially interacting with your league mechanic as much as is possible.

The alternate art items could be given to those whom actually report the most bugs, these reports would need to be both unreported and contain enough detail to allow the development team to target and eliminate the bugs.

The potential benefits here from what i see are:

More polished releases hopefully increasing player retention through the whole league and in general more time for the developers to add in features that may have otherwise never made it into a release not limited to league mechanics but other QOL updates and more.

A heavily increased interest in your MTX Store as the amount of points most people would be able to obtain would not be enough to buy nice items but would still get people who would otherwise never even open the shop to browse it looking for something to spend their points on.

Good/Productive Testers could be found through this system and brought into the fold of your earlier testing phase to further streamline the process before the main chunk of the content becomes available for the public testing phase.

In general this would be seen as you listening to countless threads that have been asking you to slow down and polish content as well as release more interesting and engaging league mechanics.. as well adding the ability to earn some points would be a very big deal to a lot of people who are playing this game not only those who cannot afford to spend in your shop but even myself and others that do and will continue to do so could earn some simple things such as skin transfers and other useful things that they would happily grind away to earn while also helping you polish the release.

Thanks for your time.

P.S. i ate your yogurt you can stop blaming (insert name)


TLDR:
Delay official league launch by 1-4 weeks
Use this time to open a voided public beta test
Reward people who work hard with Points
recruit the best testers for pre beta testing in the future
profit?

It's impossible for them to delay an official league launch date, because we are the QA team ("main group of testers"). Well-written post though.

We will always be, no matter what.

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girng wrote:

It's impossible for them to delay an official league launch date, because we are the QA team ("main group of testers"). Well-written post though.

We will always be, no matter what.

True but with this system the official launch date would still exist but it would just be 1-?? weeks longer between leagues than usual.

In addition it would also create a little more interest in the core leagues which due to the scheduling now have become at best for many a test room for upcoming league builds.

the "1-?" part is important because what does an open test period help if there is no time allocated for fixing the reported bugs? We now see that it took roughly 3 weeks to fix most of Blight.

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UlfgardLeo wrote:

the "1-?" part is important because what does an open test period help if there is no time allocated for fixing the reported bugs? We now see that it took roughly 3 weeks to fix most of Blight.

that is a fair point and part of why the testing phase is in part an idea on how to recruit good testers to use before this period where they might find the biggest bugs and the dev team due to the beta-test period would have time to implement fixes and then hopefully only minor bugs are left for the majority of the testers which one would hope the devs could iron out quickly before release.

I think 2 week testing phase would be good and personally i wouldn't mind an entire month myself but i think any longer than 2 might have a detrimental effect on a lot of league-only players.

I'm not sure how long the closed testing phase is but consider if they had 2 weeks of public and then 1 final week of preparation where the beta is closed down and servers are prepped for full release it would be much smoother sailing than we have now i would hope.

In the end the amount of time GGG would be willing to dedicate to this is a difficult decision to make in some ways the rapid release schedule of leagues keeps a lot of players around and at the same time also tends to wear down others, I'm a standard player at heart because i like to take my time but the allure of making huge profits in leagues keeps me playing them.

Additionally i think this testing phase would help prepare those who are racers to acclimate and widen the base of people who compete at that level to be #1

I was participating in the 3.0 closed beta.
Had to pay for access like everyone else, but thats a another story altogether.

Player/tester had access to a separate forum to report stuff or make suggestions and it was just like here. No dev ever answered.
I guess they read it, they moderated it for sure, but noone knew if anything of the reported stuff was ever read by someone else than the moderators.

That didnt sit well with me and personally I wouldnt do it again.

I wasnt the only one disliking how that beta was handled and to noones surprise the tester started to fight each other over various suggestions for various reasons.
So it all ended in constant fighting, just like here, until the product was shipped and the main issues were unchanged, untouched.


Honestly that was a horrible experience and I wouldnt recommend doing it again.
Some said it was a cheap moneygrab, might as well been time constraints. Who knows.

Now with that in mind and as someone working in the in the gaming industry as producer, I often times thought about the production cycle and how to improve it. As a matter of fact: I cant see how it could be improved given the extremely short cycle. Going through pages of feedback and just discussing it takes a lot of time and thats exactly what GGG doesnt have. Time.

When GGG announced they were hiring tons of people to get the console version done, I was hoping that at the end of that process things would change. It didnt. Now I know or guess rather those guys were most likely working on the 4.0 engine.
But that´ll be finished at some point too.

So Im still hoping at some point a lot of manpower becomes available, simply because the engine is done and what else would they do? Next gen console version? Sure why not, but again: At some point they should be done with it.

And Im still hopeful that the above mentioned manpower could be used to create 2 dedicated league dev teams with a production cycle of 6 month each, alternating the league releases, so the 3 month cycle would remain intact.
Obviously this would double the production costs per league, if both teams had the same size as the current team has.

This could be scaled down to a degree, so that both teams can get 4-6 months worth of work done. Basically just enough time to get stuff polished - cant tell if that takes 1 or 2 or 3 months extra.


Question then is: Would they make more money with more polished leagues to justify the increased costs?
Thats not a given, keep that in mind. But I sure do hope so and would be more than happy to fork over some more money for a better product.


Cheers

What is rly killing PoE now is pure greed. 3 month cycle is juts not enough to achieve good product, but GGG don't care. They only want fast money, sell more packs in shorter period of time. This is stupid, greedy and short time strategy.

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Elua wrote:

What is rly killing PoE now is pure greed. 3 month cycle is juts not enough to achieve good product, but GGG don't care. They only want fast money, sell more packs in shorter period of time. This is stupid, greedy and short time strategy.

how dare you saying such thiing about MUH poe! those $20 circles and masks are totally worth it d0d!

and having a select few as testers while paying them and still releasing the content is the way to go! let the rest of the pleberbase deal with the bugs..

with that said it's been suggested too many times 4 months should be their "cycle" but they got used to use normal players to alpha/beta testing their content every league..

question is: how long until people get sick of being a alpha/beta tester for free for a billion dollar company?

What we need is professional test team that test new content but also work with community.

Streamers are not representative group of average "endgame" player.
I can imagine many situations when what is awful for a player can be positive for a streamer.

So why we need professional test team that works with community?
Because trashy content like Sirus fight can also be considered well made depended what goal GGG was trying to achieve.

For community Sirus is: trash boss fight you can fail because of stupid chaos storms.
Meanwhile current testers "said" it's fine because the only information the've
got was: "fight should be hard and unforgiving".

Testing is important but what is even more important is who is testing.

I have some testing education and professional experience, also ISTQB FL certificate.
But I think I will be not test PoE for in-game rewards, this need to be pay in real money if I want participate seriously.