Level 100 Ultimatum Reflection - League Launch, New Mechanics, Exploit Ban

A Level 100’s Thoughts on Ultimatum

Introduction

This league I played with my brother and we rushed for level 100 pretty quickly, reaching it around noon on Wednesday (Pacific time). It was a roller coast of joy and struggle, accomplishment and frustration, success and failure. And I wanted to share my thoughts on the whole experience before I forget them. I hope this can serve as an insight into the psychological journey of rushing level 100 as a relatively amateur player, and also provide interesting discussion of this league’s mechanics, strategies, and overall design for those interested.

Day One: Friday

Unfortunately, we have to start by talking about the launch. I wish I could delete it from my memory, and if GGG had reset the league on Saturday I just might have been willing to try to pretend I could do that, but the truth is this: The launch was an absolute disgrace. I gave up my entire Friday for the Ultimatum launch, and got less than 4 hours of gameplay out of it (I kept a timer next to me, pausing it whenever I was disconnected or in queue). After last league’s abysmal queue failure at launch and subsequent apology and promise it won’t happen again, an exact repeat of this, except one in which the problem lasted all day instead of an hour, is nothing short of completely unacceptable. There are a lot of cool PoE microtransactions that I think are very well-designed and I have been interested in purchasing for a while, but Ultimatum launch was the point at which I decided I will never give GGG a single penny for PoE again. Regardless, frustrated at my lack of progress on day one, I went to sleep around midnight hoping for as much rest as possible in preparation for day two. Secretly I was also hoping for a complete league reset overnight, but I knew it wouldn’t happen, [Removed by Support]

Day Two: Saturday

I woke up fresh to smoothly running servers, and to my character in Ultimatum still (disappointingly) existing. So I did my third lab, which I had wasted the last half hour of the previous day trying to do, and started mapping. Well, I should say, re-started mapping, as my map pool had been completely reset to tier 1 after the repeated server crashes of the previous night. From here, feeling fresh and mapping on functioning servers, things actually started going quite smoothly and enjoyably for me.

The new league mechanic was really cool. I guessed they took the inspiration from Ritual league, pulling out the good parts and reworking the bad ones, to make quite a fun new Ultimatum encounter system. The decision to take rewards versus risk them all for the next tier was a legitimately interesting decision as leaguestart characters. I liked that there were some interesting rewards like quality/leveled gems and jewels that come with implicits, making these items much more accessible in a self-found/leaguestart scenario. The main weird thing for me was how few arena modifiers there were. We ended up basically just playing Ruin/Miasma/Cold for almost all our encounters. Also the icons had obvious errors in them, like the third tier of slowing ground using one of the ruin icons. This didn’t really outwardly bother me, but it did plant the seed in my mind of “Do they actually put honest effort into testing their game before releasing it to millions of players, or are they just using us as their free alpha testers while charging twenty bucks to apply a trivial hue-transform to in-game graphics?” Anyway, it was only the seed of such a thought, as I said, and we carried on happily filling out our atlas and pushing up to tier 16 maps.

Around the time of reaching T15/T16 maps, we got our first Trialmaster fight. Aside from the terrifying bug that causes the game to teleport your ally to the fight but not you (until you start moving), it was exciting to suddenly be thrown into the new boss fight. However, excitement was immediately replaced by infuriation as my support got one-shot by something that we had no idea what it was, how to avoid it, or why it happened. As every boss fight since Sirus was added, GGG has given us another boss fight that is designed to be impossible to learn without dying, or perhaps a great deal of sheer dumb luck. In this one, the arena pauses and the Trialmaster teleports around, swinging his weapon at random points in the arena. After it upauses, huge slams will hit those areas, which we later deduced is probably what one-shot my brother in the first fight. However, 1) you can’t even necessarily see the Trialmaster from where you are in general (much like the bullshit of Maven’s second memory game), and 2) there’s no graphical cue to indicate the place on the ground he is attacking, how big the AoE will be, or even why this guy is swinging his weapon at midair in the first place. Like Sirus and Maven before him, the Trialmaster has embodied this “you have to die in order to learn how to defeat me” philosophy, which I really believe is downright atrocious game design for a game like Path of Exile, in which the experience and profit penalties of dying in such a fight are so steep. Now don’t get me wrong - I’m all for very hard boss fights with super high skill mechanics that players must interact with. But give us a way to learn, and design the graphics of the fight so the emphasis is on player skill, not knowledge of unclear fight mechanics.

Speaking of unclear fight mechanics, we got a Maven’s Writ around this time and decided to run the Maven (it was probably sometime in day three, but I don’t remember exactly). We had done it a couple times last league, so I knew how the memory game works, but had forgotten most of the rest of it. The “Do you honestly test your game?” thought once again came to mind as I was reminded how awful the two-player memory game is. It’s so unclear what’s going on even when you know what’s going on, I can’t imagine it was ever tested with a larger party - they would have realized immediately that it’s completely unplayable.

Day Three: Sunday

We were ready to start our T16 farming strategy. We had reviewed the new updated atlas passive tree and decided our first plan would be to try Breach farming in Lex Proxima. With all the breach passives, scarabs and map device crafts, plus the fact that Blessings can now upgrade breachstones, we figured this may be a great way to farm some currency and/or Chayula breachstones while also getting pretty good experience. We had really been struggling to build a T16 map pool, so we made sure to abuse two player Zana missions as well as map vendoring as much as possible to build our Atlas bonus. We pretty quickly reached 136 and then started testing our Breach farming strategy. The most open T16 map in Lex Proxima is The Park, so this was our target map for farming. Since we were also struggling to find a lot of T16 maps, we bought the cheap +1 Level Watchstones (Terror and Stalwart Defendors) and rolled Prime Sextants onto all our maps. Of course, we also used Breach Scarabs (rusted) and crafted breach, adding Zana missions whenever we could to help map sustain.

First we tested the experience in Breaches, and sadly it wasn’t great. However, it wasn’t awful either, and we were willing to stick with it if it would be profitable. But a problem quickly arose, my brother kept crashing in the middle of these Breaches. He had never crashed before (and he never crashed after either), even in other breaches. Clearly something about the Atlas passives in this region was causing him to crash. The second problem was that after running through the small handful of Park maps I had stockpiled, we were completely out of T16s despite rolling a Zana sextant (and every map being T18 with a bunch of juiced breaches). The frustration was starting to build up at this point, we had been mapping for hours in T14-T16s, farmed a way larger Atlas bonus than I ever have in the past, even started using sextants and scarabs, and still couldn’t even play T16 maps because they just wouldn’t drop. I must be having the worst RNG in the world, I told myself. So I broke down, and for the first time ever, bought a handful of T16 maps a couple days into a league. With 8-10 Park maps ready to go, we continued our farming as before. My brother crashed every one or two maps consistently, and by the end we had found a total of 1-2 T16 maps (with an atlas bonus over 140 now). Out of Zana missions, out of T16 maps, we decided to abandon Lex Proxima. Something was majorly broken here and the game was just not playable like this.

So next we moved to Harbingers in Valdo’s Rest. This was something that I thought must be nerfed into the ground after last league. In fact, I was sure it was going to be nerfed week one last league, it was so ridiculously OP I could see no other explanation than it was a bug or accident. But apparently GGG loves the blue space boys, because not only was it not nerfed last league, but the Harbingers this league are incredibly good as well. Honestly doesn’t even matter if you don’t do anything with your other three pairs of points, just using the first two in Harbinger Reinforcements is better than any other region for leaguestart experience farming. The boss Harbingers give fantastic experience, a consistent stream of Exalted Shards (and other currency shards), and you can craft Harbingers on the map device for very cheap. Oh and by the way, the absolute instant we moved to Valdo’s Rest, all our map sustain issues immediately vanished. The first map dropped two T16s and many T15-s as well. We stopped doing Zana missions completely (unless she had a Shaper Guardian or map we needed completion) and from that point on we found way more T16s than we ever needed, all the way to level 100. I’m certain something was seriously wrong with Lex Proxima and/or The Park. We farmed for hours and hours in Lex Proxima at 130+ atlas bonus, just losing every T16 map we put in, occasionally finding a T16 map from a T15 boss, and continuing the cycle. Then the instant we left, we had a massive surplus of T16 maps forever. This surpasses statistical anomaly (I say this as someone who has thrown thousands of fusings at a 48 quality armor to no avail, frustrated but completely accepting that there is nothing wrong mathematically with this outcome).

Sometime this weekend we crafted a reduced reservation amulet for my brother, and as usual, slapped Fertile Catalysts onto it for the extra 1% RMR. Except they didn’t work. I searched the patch notes for “fertile” to see if they had said something about it there - nope. My brother checked the bug reports forum and it was already submitted. Except GGG had also replied, saying it was not a bug. Fertile catalysts only affect life and mana modifiers, and reservation is not a life or mana modifier because in the future there might be other things that you can reserve. Okay, fine. But still, what the hell GGG? Look, I have no problem with the change: an RMR catalyst is really strong and if you want to remove it, that may even be good for the game. I’m not even bothered that we wasted an exalt throwing catalysts on an item they have zero effect on. What infuriates me is the lack of communication followed by condescending pedantry, like we should have known by reading between the lines and predicting their own game design decisions. There was no apology, of course. There not even so much as a recognition that the patch notes may have been unclear on this subject. It was just “This is not a bug. You are wrong. Bye.”

Day Four: Monday

We had a strategy and we were ready to roll. Let the grinding begin! Buying scarabs more than one or two at a time was very tough sometimes, but we put up with it because those Harbingers were sooo juicy. We farmed and farmed, killed Sirus and he dropped nothing but his hat (as had all our previous Sirus kills), but we were back to farming Harbingers. We checked experience gain in Ultimatums and noticed that Stone Circles had been stealth nerfed to give essentially zero experience. Thanks for the clarity of communication and respect for your players GGG. Whatever, we’ll skip all Stone Circle encounters. Back to farming. Now that we had a farming strategy our goal was clear: get level 98 before we sleep.

I remember I died once, probably because I did something stupid (I don’t remember exactly what now). I resolved that it was okay, I learned my lesson, and I will never die from 98 to 100. We kept farming and by the end of the day, we both made it to level 98. Time for a good sleep because tomorrow there will be no sleep. We had a mission already: get 100 before we sleep again.

Day Five: TueWednesday

I woke up pretty late, after noon, which was good news. It means I got enough sleep and was ready for the grind ahead. We started rolling. The farming was smooth and consistent, though not super fast. No beyond really does make the journey from 98-99 a long one. But on the bright side, with no beyond we weren’t lagging constantly and were able to stay alive as long as we played well (even in T19 Misinformation + Terror + Stalward Defendors maps).

Around 50% experience, we got a Trialmaster fight. I was a little scared but played carefully and managed to kill him smoothly. Except, a second later I noticed I was taking serious health damage. I dodged and flame dashed hoping to avoid the damage, but it was still coming. I didn’t care about my rewards anymore, I just exited (via /exit macro). The game froze for a second, then I logged out. But not before the death screen flashed for a few milliseconds. Infuriated at the unfairness of dying long after the fight was over, infuriated at the unfairness of exiting with plenty of health left and still dying, sad that I had failed my personal objective of not dying from 98 to 100, I took a couple deep breaths and logged back in. I went down the portal, attacked the single monster that was standing there, and... I died again…

Now the anger at the unfairness of my first death came back, then the anger at myself for dying the second time (I could have dodged, or maybe forgot a flask), then the anger at the game because if I hadn’t had such an unfair first death, the second death would never have happened. The cycle was going around and around in my mind. But I had to get it out. I tried to forget about my own experience progress. I switched my focus to getting my brother to level 99. When he reached level 99, I would know I would have already reached level 99 also if it weren’t for those deaths. Thinking this way wouldn’t change the reality of the situation, but it would make the journey more bearable for me.

When you can’t change reality, change the way you think about reality. (But don’t delude yourself. That’s different.)

Since I was young, I’ve always felt that it’s the third quarter of any race that’s the hardest, not the final one. When the finish is in sight, you will never give up. But when it’s still far enough away that you don’t feel it, you could just give up. I pushed on, and with 12 hours straight of farming that day, we both were finally level 99. It was time to make a decision about how to spend our currency. We were hoping to buy a Headhunter, but it would leave us completely broke, in fact we probably wouldnt even be able to afford it until 20 or 30% experience in. Or we could save some currency for Pure Chayulas to boost our 99-100 journey. We opted for the latter, planning to map as long as we could and then mix in Pure Chayulas when our willpower started to drain and our brains started to melt. Of course, we could have just bought our way straight to level 100 off Pure Chayulas from here, but we didn’t do this because it doesn’t quite feel like we earned the 100 if we do that. However, some Pure Chayula’s would be necessary if we wanted to retain any hopes of reaching 100 before we slept.

This whole day is a foggy blur in my mind now. Well, when I say “day,” I mean roughly 1pm on Tuesday to around noon on Wednesday. I had to put myself in this continued state of constant focus and attention for what ended up being roughly 22 hours straight. This is something I had never done before, not quite like this anyway. The chronology of events is quite muddled and distorted in my mind now. I do remember that mat some point my brother’s friend joined us for a few hours of mapping, went to sleep for 8 hours, came back to map with us some more, then went to get lunch, and came back to map with us again. Trudging through the weary stress of hours upon hours of mapping, it was comically relaxing watching this guy in the low-mid level 90s charging headlong into T19 Harbinger bosses with 4k life, Vaal Cycloning on Miasma with -60 chaos resist, and full on face “tanking” mega Metamorphs with complete reckless abandon, dying and dying again with not a care in the world, all the while leveling up at light speed compared to our own progress. It kept me laughing and kept my energy up, which was definitely helpful to keep me going through this eternal grind.

In the early hours of the morning, the tiredness started to hit me really hard. My brother’s friend had gone to lunch and it was just the two of us. Most of the time I felt like I couldn’t even control my mouse anymore, and looking at the screen made me lightheaded. Just putting a map in the map device seemed like a monumental challenge at times, and half the time I tried to loot something my mouse was several inches away from what I was trying to pick up. Every moment started to become a struggle.

But there’s this thing about me, which Penn of Penn and Teller also noted about himself roughly as follows: When something is easy, I’m probably not going to be motivated to do it. But if something is hard, like a serious crazy challenge, then it becomes easy.

So I kept going. I focused only on the current moment, only on doing whatever I needed to do right now. Right now I need to get 4 maps from my run tab. Right now I need to read the minimap and call out the optimal exploration path. Right now I need to not die to Sirus’s rain of stars. Keep talking enough to stay awake, but not too much to distract us so we could die. And so we carried on, mapping straight to 50% experience, which I think I reached somewhere around 8 or 9am. At this point my focus and mind were really in shambles. Every set of maps now for the past 12 or 24 maps I had been telling myself, just this map set and then we break and do Chayulas. But then the set finished and I told myself, okay just one more. And one more. But that can only go on for so long. So we joined a Pure Chayula rotation. The variety helped a lot, and after that I was feeling good to go back into mapping. We continued interleaving mapping and Chayula rotations, spending a handful of exalts but still managing to save the majority of our wealth. Around noon on Wednesday, we hit level 100. Having played almost 24 hours straight (a full 24 hours for my brother), it felt awesome to finally reach our goal. There were times when I felt like I couldn’t even put the map in the map device or pick up the chaos orb on the ground, when my hand wasn’t working, my brain was delirious, and my eyes just hurt being open, but we had both pushed through all these challenges, tackling each moment as it came, and finally, we had succeeded!

Reflection

So how did I feel about the league overall? Well there was the launch, which of course can be described in no other way than a complete unacceptable failure.

Then there are the reworked atlas passive trees, which seem pretty lame. Some are incredibly strong, like Harbingers which only costs two notables for Harbinger bosses that give amazing experience and valuable currency shard drops, while others are super weak and can’t even be used reliable. Passives that minorly buff beyond when we have no guarantee beyond on our maps? Passives that buff the delirium mirror but give only +10% chance to find a mirror? Compare that to Breaches giving more loot, Breaches giving more experience, players having access to Breach scarabs, and Breach crafting on the map device. Even if in the endgame economy these were to be balanced theoretically, it should go without saying that one of these is much better game design than the other: actually being able to reliably interact with the mechanic you’ve invested your passives into is the far more enjoyable option for the player.

Then there is Ultimatum and its new league mechanics. At first it may seem a little lazy - a simple rework of Rituals with a more captivating reward system - but the fundamental idea is very good and enjoyable to play. Simple ideas can be good, and often small changes to mediocre ideas can turn them into great ideas. Disappointingly, being good in theory is about where the goodness of Ultimatum mechanics end. The obvious lack of genuine thought or legitimate testing that went into the actual implementation is impossible to ignore:

• Ultimatums, like Rituals, are circles with monsters spawning inside them. And as was already learned from Rituals (though should have been obvious even in theory), if you randomly place a circle on a map, there will exist disconnected areas of that circle that the players cannot travel between (while being confined to that circle). The fact that this renders some Ultimatums completely unplayable and worthless maykes me wonder how much serious thought and genuine testing they put into the implementation. The fact that this is the same exact problem as last league just baffles me. And the fact that they still haven’t fixed it (as of me reaching level 100) makes me think they don’t really care.
• Minor but very obvious UI errors like the wrong icon for Hindering Ground III in the area options, which also weren’t fixed, once again make me think they don’t care about quality and attention to detail in the game.
• Stone circle missions give no experience. A couple days in, survival missions were stealth nerfed to give almost no experience as well (at least some waves, or in some scenarios). A lot of the arena mechanics were regularly being stealth patched in ways that demonstrated 1) the game designers have a terrible grasp of how their own game even works, and 2) they don’t care about communication to the players or integrity of the game.
• Some arena mechanics are completely unplayable. For example, increasing damage taken up to 50% for just a single modifier is just ridiculous, and single flask is downright stupid. Path of Exile is a game designed around the fact that your character can only function properly with your flasks active, and you will die without them. Flasks are an essential gear component, restricting a player to one flask is like saying your helmet/armour/rings/etc are disabled. Playing a build that functions without 4 flasks doesn’t make the game more interesting or the player any more skilled, in fact it does the opposite, dumbing the game down. Not to mention it would be stupid because it would gimp your character for the other 99% of your gameplay.
• The UI for entering the Trialmaster fight is absolutely god awful. There should be clear indication that you are agreeing to fight the Trialmaster, not some tiny text that you have been trained through hundreds of repetitive dialogs to ignore long ago.
• The new conqueror citadel system can’t have been legitimately tested at all, because it makes zero sense at all. The citadels now use your watchstone and sextant charges when you open them, but they block you from pulling out the watchstones to prevent wasting these charges. What’s more, if you notice after you enter your map that the next will be a citadel and try to pull a watchstone out, it will block the watchstones as soon as you pull one out. Now this might not be a terrible problem if the citadel maps were the same maps as the ones you were normally running, but in my entire journey to 100, playing purely in T18+ maps, my conquer citadels were all T14 except three. This means my unique watchstone charges were regularly getting stolen by gargabe T14 maps, and I couldn’t stop this unless I checked my atlas before entering each map and pulled the stones out ahead of time. Except, woops, even this doesn’t work when your double conqueror progression procs on the second to last map. My point is, if anyone legitimately tested this even once (by legitimately I mean not in some sandbox environment where they get infinite exp and all items they want, where nothing is at stake and the testers have no experience with real Path of Exile), they would immediately realize it’s a problem.
• Undocumented changes, such as the Fertile Catalyst no longer affecting RMR. It’s fine to nerf things, in fact that’s necessary for a healthy game, but demonstrate respect for the players by telling the players when you make these changes so they don’t waste their time and resources, rather than treating them like idiots when they report your undocumented change as as bug.
• And finally, I was once again reacquainted with a whole slew of longstanding PoE bugs, bugs that I’m sure have been reported hundreds of times because I encounter them every time I play the game, but once again, it seems they just don’t care.

Conclusion

I realize now that I sat down to write this reflection with the intention of sharing my journey to 100, vent some frustration at the league start, but mainly to share thoughts, strategies, and my own experiences with the new league mechanics. However, in the course of straightfoward honest reflection, it morphed into something completely different. The reason we awll love gaming so much is that it allows us to enter a separate universe with clear-cut rules, away from the bullshitw of real life: a universe that tests our cunning, problem-solving, creativity, and skill, to see who can raise themselves up to the challenges the universe provides. But when we caen’t trust and respect the builders of this universe, when they constantly deceive and disrespect us, when they don’t even respect the universe they built themselves but only care about the cash it creates… When all this happens, immersing oneself in the raw challenge of the game becomes impossible to do.

In this moment I am reminded of the fundamental rule of parallel computing: the more workers you have operating in parallel, the more total resources are spent coordinating the workers, and thus the less total fraction of resources are available to be spent on the task itself. Combine this with a fundamental rule of society: individual people can be good, or bad, but corporations are abstract entities that exist only to make profit. What you get is the scary thought that GGG is already beginning to tread in the footsteps of Blizzard North turned Activision Blizzard almost a decade ago. A small group of incredibly hardworking and talented individuals design a masterpiece of a game, the company grows and is eventually bought by a huge corporation. As a large corporation, it no longer cares for the integrity of the game, it no longer cares for the experience of the players, it simply milks the genius of those hardworking and talented individuals from years past with as little investment as possible, for as long as it can. And then it moves on to find the next talent it can swallow up, empty out, and turn to husk for its own profit. Because it is a corporation, and a corporation doesn’t care.

A corporation can’t care. Only people can care.

So the only question is: Is there someone who does care, someone with enough power to steer GGG away from the course history has laid before it and enough respect for the game to imbue this masterpiece with the quality and integrity it deserves, to make gamers around the world willing and proud to be a part of the experience that is Path of Exile?


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Note: Note: The following is the least important part of this whole thing, and I don't want it to detract from the above reflection, which is the real reason I wrote this. It's fine if you disagree with what I say below, especially if you have more information than I do on the topic. Primarily, I want to open up the philosophical discussion of moral right and wrong, and who carries the burden of responsibility when it comes to unintended game strategies, or exploits.

Exploit Ban

After a nice long post-100 sleep, my brother mentioned to me that Empyrean was banned. I asked why, and he explained that Empyrean was endlessly farming monsters in the Ultimatums by not completing the objectives (either not standing in the stone circles or not staying in the arena for survival, I don’t know if it was just one or both, but that doesn’t matter to me). Baffled, I thought, what on earth could be wrong with that? I mean, we had even tried that but abandoned it immediately because it didn’t give experience. Apparently, my brother said, that was an “exploit.”

Okay, let’s talk about this GGG. Through all your stealth patches, undocumented game mechanics and game changes, and general level of constant ambiguity about how the game works, through all the bugs and wacky (viz. terrible) game design decisions, you expect players to guess how exactly you as developers have intended for us to play the game, and then when we encounter something that we think you think is the “wrong” way to play, we have to not do it or else we will get banned.

How absolutely absurd is that? You guys literally write the game. You have the power to write the rules that govern the universe in which we play. If you don’t want us to do something, you can literally make us not able to do it. And if we figure out a way to play the game more efficiently than you thought of when you were writing the game, that’s called intelligence. You should be congratulating such players on their creativity and cunning, not drop kicking them into outer space.

If killing more than 30 seconds worth of monsters in a survival encounter was not something you wanted players to be allowed to do, all you had to do was code it into the game. We have no way of knowing what you want us to do and not do, [Removed by Support]. When I walk out of the arena in Ultimatums and the timer pauses, I have to assume you wanted it to pause. And when monsters keep giving loot even while the timer is paused I have to assume that’s intended also. And I have to assume [Removed by Support] realize this means one could prolong a survival encounter and keep farming monsters. This is such a basic and straightforward game mechanic, if we can’t assume the developers understand this, I literally don’t think I can assume doing anything in the game is safe from the ban hammer.

Last league when I first skilled the Diplomatic Escort notable, I thought for sure it was a mistake. There were so many Harbingers on my screen that my game froze for multiple seconds while fighting them and my experience shot up to over a billion xp/hour. Not to mention this had only cost me two pairs of atlas ascendancy points. This was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen, and I was absolutely certain it was going to be nerfed within the week (not the drops, I had no clue about the mirror shards, I just mean the monster quantity). But apparently this was totally fine and working exactly as intended! Meanwhile in Ultimatum league, slowly farming monsters that keep spawning in an arena will get you banned because [Removed by Support] that if monsters keep spawning and the timer can be paused that means players can pause the timer and keep killing monsters.

This is like playing against the creator of chess, and when you fork his King and Queen with your Knight, he says, no Knights are supposed to be weak! That’s an exploit! Then he flips the table and bans you from all chess tournaments. In banning Empyrean, this is the image you choose to paint for yourself GGG.

Consider your own agency in the rules of the game as its author. Consider the ridiculousness of asking us to all read your minds or be banned for doing something you don’t want. Consider the contradictory nature of Path of Exile as a game that emphasizes exploration, creative problem solving, and optimization, while simultaneously banning those who explore what you didn’t explore, solve problems in ways you couldn’t solve them, and optimize better than you could.

And at the end of the day, if a player does something you don’t like, consider the following course of action:

1) Commend the player for his creativity and intelligence, he was able to come up with a solution that even you the creator had not foreseen!

2) Acknowledge internally and publicly that you made a mistake which caused this player to do something you had not intended. Notify the entire community of this mistake and explain that while you are working on a technical fix, you need to implement a temporary meta-game rule that certain actions in the game are not allowed, which you enumerate clearly and describe the consequences for precisely.

3) Issue a warning message directly to the account of any player who has performed this now-banned strategy so you are certain they are aware of the news.

4) Fix the problem within the game itself (i.e. patch the game) so the meta-game rules are no longer required, then rescind aforementioned meta-game rules and allow players to return to normal gameplay.

I understand that game design is hard. I have designed many small games myself, and had to deal with all varieties of hackers and exploiters. So I will grant that sometimes there are technical problems that need to be temporarily remedied by telling players to not do something. And if you have told them clearly to not do something, and they continue to do it, then I accept that some form of in-game penalty may be required. But did you do this? Did you tell all the people you banned that they needed to stop what they were doing or else they would be banned? Or did they just wake up one morning to their accounts being locked with no idea what on earth is going on?

This started off as a good read and became something else (namely cringeworthy feedback on Mr Life's-Not-Fair) - much like your description of your intent of subject matter. At least that's artistic in a weird sort of unplanned way. I'm just going to go through and post some thoughts, most of them critical, but know that I did mostly enjoy reading the post even if I strongly disagree with a lot of the feedback portions.

You tried to do lab night 1 given the state of the servers? That's...optimistic. :P

Agree on Ultimatums could use more affix variety, I'm shocked at how few people mention this in their feedback, usually opting straight for difficulty/reward commentary.

I mostly disagree about maco level analysis on Trialmaster and how GGG do new fights. You're on the cutting edge of progression. GGG want to kill players. You can express your skill by learning from your first death and 'not dying to that again'. It's not so different than MMO raiding in that regard. Clearly the stuff isn't completely untelegraphed, but they seem to intentionally use same-y colors and other things to add a form of difficulty that yes, most players blanch at. C'mon tough guy, you're not the average player right? Put these fights on lock after your first death to them!

Complaining Maven isn't balanced around 2 person play? Silly. If it were there would be infinite complaining about how you 'have to' run the content with two players instead of being able to solo it. I'm assuming your second person is an aurabot. Like you are already getting your shit boosted by 700% I think you can cope with one or two downsides given the colossal benefits you get. If your brother wasn't playing a support archetype than good for you two for being non meta.

I'm very skeptical that map drops are fucked - we hear this claim literally every league like clockwork. I would bet everything I own that 2 months and 26 days from now we're hearing it again. You can add it to the 'death and taxes' list. GGG have nerfed Breach drops a million times, that's all it is. You guys invested all your shit into breach and that's a fine strategy on paper for your goals but yeah, I wouldn't be shocked at all if you got, on average, more maps from 200 harbinger mobs than you did 20,000 breach mobs.

I would like to commend you for saying Breach and Harbinger are good/valuable/viable though - Reddit shits on them endlessly and even here on the forums most people claim Harbingers are unplayably bad loot drops.

Did GGG communicate the RMR changes? I believe they did but I don't remember where. Can't you hover your amulet to see the tags? Maybe I'm not fully understanding the issue. If the catalyst says 'I buff mana tags' and the mod has a mana tag then yeah you're right. If they took the mana tag off and you didn't read the patch notes closely enough, or didn't double check your amulet first that's on you.

Not sure why you tried Trialmaster again, especially after the first time. I'd put that in the 'lab running through 5 minute server d/cs on day 1' levels of optimistic.

In terms of atlas ascendancy balance I think you're better than most players in terms of being measured in feedback, but most, including you, don't seem to want to consider the whole ecosystem. Namely that if all Atlas Ascendancies are balanced (truly balanced, objectively, which is impossible) then Zana is going to throw that balance out of whack by virtue of her rotating pool. So GGG's only option would be to pre-emptively nerf any region that is going to be able to have Zana spammed on it. They could do that, but most players aren't going to 'get' what's going on and just cry about it.

At least you consider scarabs and watchstones in your evaluation.

It strikes me as strange that someone likes the game enough to do a lot of pre-league prep, play for as long as you did, be one of the first to reach 100 like you did, has so many overwhelmingly harsh criticisms.

I'm no stranger to being critical of their league-launch streamer favoritism (and friends and family discount!) but this is obviously a lot more than that. You're taking shots at the devs, the QA, the HR, the PR...pretty much everything. You called the launch unacceptable and lambasted pretty much every employee and division within the company. So my question is: how much more are you playing this league and are you playing next league?

Congrats on 100 btw.

Dying to BS at level 98+ is the worst! It'll always be breachstone runs for me. I can't handle it. Grats on reaching your goal.

Life's not fair guy was banned because he made GGG look absolutely terrible on launch day, not because the ban was deserved. They had to suspend him to save face since the community was furious (and not just pretend furious like usual.) It is what it is.

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DiabloImmoral wrote:

Life's not fair guy was banned because he made GGG look absolutely terrible on launch day, not because the ban was deserved. They had to suspend him to save face since the community was furious (and not just pretend furious like usual.) It is what it is.

Yes, my first thought when it happened. He also just straight made them look bad from a business standpoint. Not exactly the spokesman you want.

I think map drops were fucked and they've background adjusted them because the numbers were bad. Only anecdotal evidence but they are fine now i've got a nice stash but I got stuck at tier 5 for a full day.

I've not been stuck at tier 5 since like tempest league when they weren't called that. This is obviously straying into tinfoil hat territory but the truth is running corrupted 8mod T5's and not getting any map drops is as much of an outlier as getting 5 high tier reds from one red. It absolutely could happen to us as players but its unlikely.

Sadly I kinda agree with OP's gripes about the design and fixes implemented on the whole to Ultimatum, it feels like they are putting out fires without the time to properly document them but the knock on is we are playing a more beta game than ever. I've felt like doing a design post on everything wrong with Ultimatum but frankly If it isn't obvious to them by now I don't think the feedbacks really relevant lol.

A personal gripe i've got is remnant of corruption has been made like 20x rarer, they weren't that value anyway.

People have been PERMA banned for far less, also he actively circumvented the ban by dumping to a "trading" alternate account. Theyre lucky they got a 1 league ban because if you ask me it shouldve been permanent.

Interesting read.
As a fresh medschool graduate this also sounded worrying at some points though.
If you get so exhausted, sleep-deprived and already feel lightheaded while looking at your screen, having severe mouse accuracy problems - this can end "bad" tbh. (Epileptic) seizures are no joke..

I myself am also guilty of too long playtimes, lack of sleep and whatnot - but when you start getting actual neurological symptoms like lightheadedness and lack of pointing accuracy its definitely time for a break.

What build did you guys play then? As a solo player i find it hard sometimes to play a basically SSF build for early league pushing that transforms well enough into something beefy with enough damage to push for 100/T19s.
Guess its much more doable when you have a full on support character and the other one just goes for enough damage and aoe?

We're not even playing the same game. Would hate the game you're playing. The nerve that they call it Path of Exile. GGG should sue them.

I didn't read the whole thing but congrats on your lv100. I'm lv62 and I see myself 62% of the way to max level already so I might get there in due time.

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yamface wrote:

I didn't read the whole thing but congrats on your lv100. I'm lv62 and I see myself 62% of the way to max level already so I might get there in due time.

Not unless you cheese the game by using "intelligence".