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

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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.

LOL you know better than that. 98 might be 62% to 100.

Read it all...I enjoyed the read OP. Not my thing, I don't even start but for a week to pass so GGG can iron out bugs not to mention I don't have to see the stupid in game notifications., but graz.

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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.

I am pretty sure this is word for word the rant I made in 820 2 days ago in std.

It was frustrating when you have Ejoris all watchstone leveled up for delirium spawns and then it got eaten and used by Zana and I couldn't remove them. I wound up just rerunning Beach maps until the sextant mods were used up and then went after Veritania. It was very frustrating to not have control as the player there. Deliirium mirror sextant mod is too rare to burn on a boss t14.
Also, you cannot even harbinger or horizon orb the boss map to bring it up to t16 which is frustrating.


I read the rest of your post and agree with most of it up until the Empyrean part. A top streamer who is tied to GGG is always going to be held to a higher standard than a normal player. Especially when they are streaming this behavior to the community.

I think GGG is doing an incredible job, but I'd like to see them take a whole league off and fix a lot of QOL issues that my guess it they haven't had time to with the constant league dev. With COVID and the constant demand of new leagues my guess is the team needs a breather.

> relatively amateur player

...that was an odd place to put in a joke like that.

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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.

I had to pull out this line from the OP. It's pure truth.

So when someone asks, "how much damage is enough damage?".

The right answer is "to kill a boss before the flasks runs out".

Because, when the flasks runs out PoE fighting experience turns instantly into stress without enjoyment whatsoever. You become a glass cannon that's just waiting to rip.


All in all, amazing feedback.

Hey support, the unredacted version is on Reddit; so, are you fucking serious with those edits?

Interesting read, definitely gratz on 100. (Did it once, betrayal op pure breachstones. 97 legit)

Really glad I decided to skip this league, I'll play standard if I get more motivated.

I'm not mad about streamers skipping queue, I respected the apology and promise not to do it again. (break that promise, they get 0 from me, btw)
They need to unfuck league launches though, I'm starting to get in the habit of not bothering day one. Also a second league in a big circle that forget some dungeons you can't reach rooms.

And consider what the hell they're doing on the nerf/buff rollercoaster. But that's my bitching.

But they are pissing people off lately, and often rightly so. Most of their profit is goodwill, and that can run out.

The bans were earned though, 1 person in group focused on stopping the timer for minutes? I've seen bans I questioned, this wasn't one.

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innervation wrote:

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

We almost made it, the first time we just needed about 10 or 20 more seconds. And remember, I had already lost my whole map pool trying to map, so there was really nothing else to do at the time.

As for the exploit ban thing, I see apparently I am in the minority here. I believe that is because I don't really know the details of the situation, but also because I am a man of principles and integrity above all else. This means I believe correct behaviour comes from first laying out one's principles and then finding out how to follow them given the deatils of a situation, not first examining the details of the situation and then crafting your principles to fit the result you would like. This is how people are blinding into immorality by complexities of life.

And my principles on this are simple. Can you define "exploit" in a way that players can categorize any action in the game with 100% certainty as being or not being an exploit? If the definition is based off some sort of thought or intention in the developers' heads, then the answer is no. And thus, when a player performs what the developers consider to be an exploit, the player should be informed this is not allowed, and only after this is punishment reasonable.

For punishment to be justified, the recipient must have been aware that what they were doing was wrong. This is a moral principle I stand by strongly, but I will admit I have a hard time describing the precise definition of "punishment" I mean here. If they had rolled back Empyrean's (and friends') accounts to before he performed the exploit, told him not to do it again, and let him continue playing, that would be reasonable. It would not be punishing him, it would be rectifying the unfortunate consequences his actions in the best way possible, allowing everyone to comfortable move forward with their lives. But because they chose to ban him when they could have instead communicated with him, they showed that their priority was to punish him over simply rectifying the situation that was ultimately generated by their own failure.

I say this as a game developer who has had players exploit my games in ridiculous ways myself! An exploit is a failure on the side of the developers to translate the game universe they hold in their mind into the code that accurately encapsulates that universe. The lack of recognition of this fact by GGG saddens me deeply.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that the ones who got banned absolutely knew that what they were doing was not ok, that it was an exploit that could harm other players (by crashing instances and thereby creating server instabilities), gave much more loot than could ever be intended, and they knew that there was a distinct possibility that GGG would react the way they did.

Please don't pretend there was some innocent "oh, we didn't know that wasn't ok" stuff going on. They knew what they were doing, what the risks and likely outcome would be, and they did it anyway after encouraging others to do so too. The ban was justified.

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CommAshen wrote:

I say this as a game developer who has had players exploit my games in ridiculous ways myself! An exploit is a failure on the side of the developers to translate the game universe they hold in their mind into the code that accurately encapsulates that universe. The lack of recognition of this fact by GGG saddens me deeply.

No, that's a horrible, tired argument.

It's not really a 'failure', exploits are bound to happen, shouldn't you know this. If you're familiar with WoW, its entire history is riddled with exploits.

When you find an exploit, whether by chance or actively looking for it, if you start abusing it and continue abusing it, then YOU ARE 100% AWARE that you're in the wrong, what you're doing wasn't intended to be that way - I'm talking about 100% OBVIOUS situations such as the Ultimatum one.
You can't just turn around and say that it's the devs' failure and you did nothing wrong, and try to absolve yourself of any responsibility. When you abuse a bug to become invulnerable and kill a boss that way, you know you're gaining unfair advantage and it's not supposed to happen. When you drop so much loot from Ultimatum that you have single digit FPS because you're abusing an exploit, and then you transfer your wealth to a different account, you obviously KNOW you're doing something wrong, and you should EXPECT consequences. They should be happy they only got a temporary ban, they got off easy. In many other games this is usually a permanent ban.

That was interesting read, thanks OP.
Can actually agree with many points.