Why did everyone hate Synthesis?

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Exile009 wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Nobody wants any league to fail.

And yet the rest of your response is attacking a bunch of leagues. So you wanted them to succeed, so long as they were something other than what they were? So leagues called Blight, Synthesis, Bestiary, etc., but actually designed to mimic Legion or Breach? Yeah, I can really tell your concern for the leagues from that. Have you also ever told a girl you loved her for a personality that doesn't match hers at all? If so, how'd it go?

Also, someone seems upset. Thought so. It was obvious you don't like this perspective, as it represents a direct counter to your own ideas on how the game should be. But hey, in the other thread you were looking forward to the D2 remaster, and D4. But I'm not. So maybe we can both be satisfied. Your choice. ;)

Dont confuse a curse word, or disagreement, with being upset. Truthfully idc what you do, or think, enough to impact my mood. (I suspect you operate similarly)

But for the sake of discussion, I merely stated those leagues "failed" due to the inherent mechanic they came with. Players dont know about league mechanics, or have say in them, in advance. If we did, and I did when Blight was announced, we could have indicated that tower defense is a poor choice given how PoE plays.

Problem is we are given leagues, and have to respond accordingly. Again, if GGG told us in advance, or gave us development choices (which realistically would have to be 6+ months beforehand), maybe that would be different.

I would hope they take notice of what leagues perform, and which dont, and balance that with development ideas and strategy. I'm suspicious about that, but have nothing tangible to back it up, other than the less than stellar statistical performances. That being said, I know everything wont work, and some leagues will be better than others, but I at least expect them to learn.

Edit: a basic TL:DR is GGG cant say "we leaned alot from Synthesis and Legion, here is Blight", because it makes little sense.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Edit: a basic TL:DR is GGG cant say "we leaned alot from Synthesis and Legion, here is Blight", because it makes little sense.

It's possible to learn without doing a volte face. In fact, that's generally what we encourage when it comes to learning - we even have a word for it, iterating. You're not meant to learn from putting your hand in the fire to put it in ice instead. Or from living in a totalitarian dictatorship that complete anarchy is the answer. They still seem to want to experiment, and so they do. But they do iterate. They only said they've learned, not whether that lesson comprised a complete change in league philosophy or just a change in the design of some things that makes them more enjoyable.

For an example, I'm fairly confident their openness with the results of anointing in Blight (releasing the full list of recipes ahead of the league, marking the recipe for each passive notable on the in-game tree, showing the anointment result before the anointment is crafted, etc.) is a direct result of their observations of how people responded to the obscurity that was the hallmark of the Synthesizer and/or Timeless Jewels.

Details matter, and much of what we pick up over our lives both personally and in product design is all about getting those details right(er). That is still learning.

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Exile009 wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Edit: a basic TL:DR is GGG cant say "we leaned alot from Synthesis and Legion, here is Blight", because it makes little sense.

It's possible to learn without doing a volte face. In fact, that's generally what we encourage when it comes to learning - we even have a word for it, iterating. You're not meant to learn from putting your hand in the fire to put it in ice instead. Or from living in a totalitarian dictatorship that complete anarchy is the answer. They still seem to want to experiment, and so they do. But they do iterate. They only said they've learned, not whether that lesson comprised a complete change in league philosophy or just a change in the design of some things that makes them more enjoyable.

For an example, I'm fairly confident their openness with the results of anointing in Blight (releasing the full list of recipes ahead of the league, marking the recipe for each passive notable on the in-game tree, showing the anointment result before the anointment is crafted, etc.) is a direct result of their observations of how people responded to the obscurity that was the hallmark of the Synthesizer and/or Timeless Jewels.

Details matter, and much of what we pick up over our lives both personally and in product design is all about getting those details right(er). That is still learning.

Yet the performance issues, crashes, bugs (duplicates with oils absurdly bad), and mechanic interaction seems to show they are learning very slowly.

Perhaps the issue is the rapid development cycle. I cant say for sure, but maybe Blight was already in development to the point that lessons learned from previous leagues couldnt be implemented fully?

I mean how can you implement Blight, and Minion changes, then tell us that enemies surving longer (due to the mechanic) cause calculation and performance issues? It seems crazy that no one brought that up, or it appeared in QA in even the most simple examples? Really? I'm to believe that?

Henry Ford, inventor of the automobile, was known as saying "If I'd asked the people what they wanted, they would've told me 'a faster horse'." Nobody wanted a car until Henry Ford made one, and even then it was a rocky road. Look where the cars are at now.

Nobody knew they wanted MOBAs until some yayhoos modded Defense of the Ancients up. Now we can't get away from the bloody things.

Nobody knew we wanted mass online brawlers until PUBG/Fortnite came out and the world exploded.

Nobody knew we wanted an ARPG until, twenty-odd years ago, Blizzard made a game and said "HEY! Y'all like this? We do!"

If Grinding Gear is never permitted to try anything other than "what makes it great", Darth - if they're never allowed to try new things or experiment with the genre - all we'll ever get is a faster horse. Of course players want "more ARPG"; they have no idea what the next Super Cool Thing they'll like even better is. We would never have gotten Delve if Grinding Gear had listened to people cawing about wanting "a great ARPG and not this other shit".

I would rather Grinding Gear keep doing Bestiary or Synthesis than do another Legion. Doing more ambitious leagues that don't quite work, a'la Blight or Betrayal, or even doing ambitious leagues that don't work at all, a'la Synthesis or Bestiary, is going to do better long term than just shitting out another barely-reskinned Breach league every three months until the heat death of the universe. That way lies stagnation, decay, and eventual death.

They need to figure out the New Hotness, and Chris Wilson knows it. It's why they've been working on, and hyping, 4.0 for the last year and a half. People may not like the growing pains, but we have a better game now due to rocky leagues in the past. if people want aboard this whole live-service gaming train, here's one of the prices we all pay.

I remember the decay mechanic being very poorly implemented and unfixed for a long time too. It could start pretty much anywhere, and you or the rewards platform could be decayed away in about two seconds!

This shit is messed up, I hate this forum. You spend like 10 minutes writing something and it's gone in the blink of an eye.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Yet the performance issues, crashes, bugs (duplicates with oils absurdly bad), and mechanic interaction seems to show they are learning very slowly.

Perhaps the issue is the rapid development cycle. I cant say for sure, but maybe Blight was already in development to the point that lessons learned from previous leagues couldnt be implemented fully?

I mean how can you implement Blight, and Minion changes, then tell us that enemies surving longer (due to the mechanic) cause calculation and performance issues? It seems crazy that no one brought that up, or it appeared in QA in even the most simple examples? Really? I'm to believe that?

When it comes to things like performance, crashes and bugs, I tend to default to a fairly simple explanation - new ones keep popping up (cue the old engineers' rhyme about always having more bugs to fix after every patch) and/or they're just not easy or simple to fix, and they still have a product to deliver. Pretty much every patch the game gets contains bugfixes (and ostensibly performance improvements too), for both new and old issues. But when you've got something as unwieldy as PoE, it seems it's just really hard for them to get on top of things. But they've got content to deliver, and holding it off until everything is squeaky clean is just impractical. Not to mention at least some of the issues only seem to crop up when released into the much larger diversity of computing systems used by PoE's playerbase. Anyway, even simpler leagues like Legion launched full of problems so I'm not sure what the solution to that is, only that whatever it is is likely not as easy or quick as people seem to imagine (else it likely would already have been done).

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purely_sinful wrote:

Why did everyone hate Synthesis?

Synthesis had design issues, multiplied by technical issues, multiplied by powercreep, multiplied by poor balance, multiplied by dependency on trading - which resulted in unseen before level of frustration among players.

League itself wasn't bad, but rather half-made - 3 more month of developing before release could make it best league ever. Too bad it was wasted.

And i don't think it was worst league - players just have short memory.

Synthesis was badly designed the most apparent being the way you acquired, stored, and consumed the fragmented memories -- it made creating the pathways a large inconvenience in addition to disposing of useless fragments was rather tedious. The memory system really needed a revamp.

Adding to that the timed event of acquiring the fragments from maps generally only favored ranged clear speed builds, and in particular teleportation skills had a huge advantage which narrowed down the effective play styles. Of course it didn't help that for half the league the decay mechanic was bugged, meaning decays could occur with the pylons you needed to reach and at 3-4 pylons this made it impossible as a result.

Further to this if you actually faced the bosses... They obscenely over tuned, while the rewards they offered were generally not that worthwhile. The bosses were largely RNG with what sort of mods you'd get, if you got increased AOE and boss life and critical chance multiplier along with high damage mods or minus resistance chances are you won't be killing em off. Lots of effort and luck for so little reward, the bosses were just there for the seasonal challenges.

Finally, there was just the emphasis on crafting, which made the rewards more narrow in scope to the playerbase -- not everyone is a crafter after all.

That said, they honestly could've done with a lot of improvements if they took idea from delve in so much that there should have been ways to increase your memory fragment stock and slow down decays come to mind. If there were upgrade mechanics I think it would've been a lot better, as it creates a good sense of progression through the content and making it less RNG.

Outside of the synthesizer and weird decay rng.. synthesis was one of my favorites. I felt really rewarded for putting a path together with amplifiers and the reward nodes actually felt rewarding. And I didn't need a super fast build to do it.

With a few tweaks, synthesis could be one of better leagues but like most of the content in this game, it will never gets the time it needs. Maybe 4.0 will see big changes to league content, would be nice.