Why did everyone hate Synthesis?

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Arrowneous wrote:

The heart of all GGG's failed leagues (from a majority of players perspective) is always:

1. Failed QoP. Synthesis killed frame rates (so what else is new).
2. Betrayal was now in the core and Syndicate ambush (pop up portal)
    just froze PoE client and next screen was "you are dead". That's total shit.
    I have an SSD and the Betrayal ambush was screen freezing me to death too.
3. Too complicated coupled with the same old way too many bugs. Took GGG most of
    the league to smooth out and even then it was still laggy memory runs.
4. Synthesizer required too many items to be saved to then throw into it coupled
    with the normal low rng factor for anything good so tons of work for few rewards.

You forgot what talisman, synth and bestiary had in common. t13 gated content.

It appears that the people have spoken, and they love to spam white maps ad nauseam.

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purely_sinful wrote:

Serious question. I’m not here to debate but rather to understand why it was so despised. I’ve seen it repeatedly referred to as the worst league there ever was.

Synthesis was developed during holiday season.
So less employees were available.

Synthesis was a very ambitious concept and would have been hard to implement properly even with a full team around.

The Synthesis Prototype for these reasons was finished later than usual, so QA had less time to find & report issues as well as the programmers had way less time to fix said bugs. And ofc they had less iteration cycles to find the sweetspot balancing wise.

GGG didnt extend the previous league nor host a 1-2 month fun league to delay Synthesis and then release a properly tested league.

GGG has proven time and time again, that they are trying to squeeze in more content into new leagues than they can handle - which is unrelated to Synthesis and happens on a very regular basis.


Combine of all the above and you have a recipe for disaster.
Btw: All of these factors also apply to Bestiary league, which is also widely unpopular as a result.

Both leagues, Synthesis and Bestiary, suffered from a very rough start, it took GGG both times weeks to fix fundamental bugs and they never had time to fix the less severe issues.
Both leagues then had to be pulled from the game. Bestiary made a comeback like half a year later - so could Synthesis btw at some point in time.

Anyways: By the time GGG had fixed the most severe issues (something like 6-8 weeks into the league) many many players had already stopped playing those leagues - which is the saddest part imho.


This vicious cycle might repeat itself over and over again, until GGG stops trying to squeeze in as much as they possibly can.
Basically values quality over quantity.
Until this day comes, expect more leagues like Bestiary or Synthesis every now and then.



Cheers

First, full admission: I didn't play Synthesis. Like, at all. I saw the league announcement, saw the writing on the wall, and I was pretty burnt on Path in general at the time so I skipped Synthesis. In retrospect, glad I did.

Second: I love Blight. I'm very much enjoying the league, and Blighted maps are one of the best implementations of league-specific endgame I've seen so far. Anybody can find and try to run a Blighted map, and depending on which tier you get it decides your challenge level. It's a splendid change of pace from "Collect ten billion splinters to gain access to a fixed-difficulty one-time-use Endgame Thingus that has a super awesome chase drop you will NEVER see because it's almost impossible to get to in the first place and only one in a hundred of them drops the chase thing anyways."

Blighted maps are a five-minute adrenaline rush followed by Christmas. I treasure each and every one I get, it's been heartbreaking the two times I flubbed one, and I've got a smile on my face for the rest of the night every time I bag one because even if it doesn't drop a Super Cool Chase Item, it was simply fun watching a million Blight pods spit stuff out at me, much of which was usable or mildly profitable. This is how league endgame should work. Fuck the Breach model. Which leads me to...:

Third: I hated Legion. I almost wish I'd decided to play Synthesis instead of Legion, because Legion was a giant waste of about six weeks of my life. I played it to about eight challenges and realized that not only was I never going to see the "Domain of Endless Conflict", but the actual legion encounters themselves were simultaneously boring and frustrating. About the only thing going for them was a swank soundtrack, and this was despite me playing a Lightning Trap Saboteur that was supposedly purpose built to mollycobble Legion encounters. Put that character away and never looked back.

People like to sing the praises of Breach, say it was Za Besto League in PoE History, but honestly? Blight's been more fun for me. Synthesis took the brainy approach they introduced in Betrayal too far - much as I enjoy some thinking and strategy in my Path, Synthesis was proof that the overall playerbase hates their brains and doesn't want to use them. Blight is proof that people have shoddy connections and computers. And Legion was proof that the damned Breach mechanics are as played out as they're going to get.

My sincere hope is that Blighted maps remain, even if we don't get access to oils anymore (despite oils and annointments making for a super interesting addendum to item crafting and gearing that's actually accessible to the majority of the players, unlike LITERALLY EVERY OTHER CRAFTING LEAGUE IN HISTORY), and that Grinding Gear learns from Blight. This type of endgame is absolutely the way, going forward. League'd versions of existing maps needs to be a thing more often, and if I never see another "Splinter of You'll-Never-See-This-Place-You-May-As-Well-Sell-Me" again I'll be perfectly happy forever.

In short? Because, among other reasons, it was a complicated mechanic which required adequate playtesting and QA not to be a buggy clusterfuck that even pissed off fans of the concept.

Great concept. Horrible execution. Once they polish it, they can reintroduce it into the game--or could, if it weren't already tainted by prejudice.

Which raises the question: Why not release every new league 3 months later than they do? After one lackluster minimum-effort league done expressly to make this "catch up" possible, the release schedule would remain the same, with ample extra time to casually catch up with QA problems reported by the (in-house, I hope) alpha testers, in between periods of developing the next league.

Yeah, I know. That makes too much sense.

Such low hanging fruit.

1. Ambitious ideas, short and poor development cycle (GGG admitted this)

2. Severe technical and performance issues (related to above) which ranged from entire table maps from being locked out, to the league mechanics making a number of builds unplayable (cyclone, flicker, ect)

3. People's widely ranging experience with synthesis crafting, resulting in casual player not caring or understanding the Cavas crafting, to the hardcore figuring out the system and making ridiculously broken items that had zero comparisons.

4. Boring and unnecessary league specific rng.

5. Crappy mtx challenge rewards (same for league mtx)

6. What the hell is table top doing in PoE?

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1453R wrote:

blah blah blah blah stuff

ya i agree with this, other than legion. i loved legion. i thought the encounters were fast and epic.
also i was able to SSF the last month of the league and ended up with like 30 timeless conflict frag things. i think i had enough for 3x 5way runs if i wanted to do them (don't think i did)

but anyway i agree with blighted maps being some of the best league end game content introduced. WAY BETTER than collecting fragments here and there in order to get a thing in order to put multiple things together in order to do an encounter. fuuuuuck that.

you can tell that splinter crap doesn't bode well because of how it translates to the game today. in SSF (i only mention cause trade is different, you can buy the emblems/breachstones) in blight league i have just finished my very first breachstone. a xoph. other fragments for breach and legion are sitting at around 80 splinters. almost 2 months into the league.
it just takes FOREVER to get enough splinters. maybe it works fine for the league mechanic when its available every single area, but splinter collecting feels like trash any other time.

i definitely hope they keep blighted maps in the core game as rando drops - even still have oils drop from only blighted maps.
i also hope they have future league endgame content in the same manor, and less "pick up 100 of these in order to get one of those in order to save up enough of those to do the thing to have a chance at getting this drop"

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DarthSki44 wrote:

6. What the hell is table top doing in PoE?

Could be really fun, if implemented with thought and care.

Keep an open mind. High-quality implementations of radical ideas could really turn this ARPG on its head, and in very appealing ways.

It's a huge IF, yeah. And most of us know GGG is not capable of touching even the minimal standard necessary. But it's a pleasant dream for as long as you can forget that fact.

Weird ideas thrown into games as experiments are a good thing. They just need to be fully realized in order not to be trash.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

6. What the hell is table top doing in PoE?

Could be really fun, if implemented with thought and care.

Keep an open mind. High-quality implementations of radical ideas could really turn this ARPG on its head, and in very appealing ways.

It's a huge IF, yeah. And most of us know GGG is not capable of touching even the minimal standard necessary. But it's a pleasant dream for as long as you can forget that fact.

Weird ideas thrown into games as experiments are a good thing. They just need to be fully realized in order not to be trash.

I don't want to appear to be close-minded, I would just prefer they adhere to core Arpg mechanics and stick to them, then expand from there.

When they have deviated like in Sythesis, Bestiary, and Blight, it hasnt worked well. When they embrace what makes PoE great, Legion, Abyss, Delve, Breach, Harbinger, its SO MUCH better.

Do you actually have examples of when a game deviated significantly from its core audience and it worked well? I cant really think of any, but maybe there are.

There's only so many layers of RNG you can hide meaningful rewards behind, before even the Konami-grinder-set-completion clans write a season mechanic off as a trap.

Due to the way the memories worked, you were better off peddling components to major stakeholders than becoming self-sufficient memory templaters.

YOu could honestly not enjoy the league or get a feel for it in its entirety if you went SSF or had limited hours to play. That plus large items taking up paid real estate in your stash killed a lot of the excitement.

Cynics pointed out that perhaps stash tab income was down so the league focused on crafting should open some wallets. It didn't, because most players never stood a chance of getting onslaught shoes or triple ES vaal regalia.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Do you actually have examples of when a game deviated significantly from its core audience and it worked well? I cant really think of any, but maybe there are.

Good question. And yes, I'd say most successful hybrids (sometimes creating an entirely new genre in the process) fit that definition. Even the ARPG genre itself is arguably the result of such experimentation.

But again, it requires care, and attention to detail. Neither of which the GGG team has demonstrated in spades the past few years, to put it kindly. So, from a purely pragmatic point of view, it's pretty safe to say that your recommendation is far more realistic than mine.