GGG, Please stop misallocating your resources. Prioritize the game-breaking problems.

I kinda suspect that GGG have bitten off more than they can chew. This game is far more complex than D2 or D3, yet the team is far smaller than the team that made D3 (and probably D2 but I'm not 100% sure of that).

Having said that, you can't just assign people to tasks wildly outside their competency and expect anything good to result. An artist is going to be as much help working on network code as a plumber (and potentially vice-versa).


I'll preface the following with the acknowledgement that I'm talking out of my arse on this:

I wouldn't have expected a hardcore (or as I prefer "hardcore") player base to fit well with a revenue stream based largely on cosmetic micro-transactions. I would expect that a hardcore player base would be less inclined to spend money on cosmetic stuff than a more casual player base. However the entire idea of purchasing cosmetic frills in a video game is quite alien to me so I acknowledge that I could be wrong on this.

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jiussa wrote:

Having said that, you can't just assign people to tasks wildly outside their competency and expect anything good to result. An artist is going to be as much help working on network code as a plumber (and potentially vice-versa).

With the netcode, sure u got a point there, but an artist can still design new less particle intense effects for things like Poison Arrow and other effects that atm bring the engine to it's knees (until the core problem of the engine handling particles so badly is fixed).

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Darkrox01 wrote:

Yeah ur right. But the performance is also a reason for me playing default (playing hardcore was nearly the only fun i had in D3). The fps spike that hits me as soon as Piety spawns adds, or when 5+ Void Bearers or those Roll over Monsters appear is even more annoying since it happens far more often then i get desynced.
I wanna die because of my own faults in hardcore and not because the game freezes.

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Darkrox01 wrote:

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jiussa wrote:

Having said that, you can't just assign people to tasks wildly outside their competency and expect anything good to result. An artist is going to be as much help working on network code as a plumber (and potentially vice-versa).

With the netcode, sure u got a point there, but an artist can still design new less particle intense effects for things like Poison Arrow and other effects that atm bring the engine to it's knees (until the core problem of the engine handling particles so badly is fixed).

Darkrox, you are a breath of fresh air in this thread. A glimmer of objective and rational awareness.

As far as your response to Jiussa's comment -- you hit the nail on the head. Artists can be ensuring optimized textures/graphics. Office managers/coordinators can be actively searching for additional expertise. Upper management can be looking at funding options for top tier talent.

GGG made ~$2.3million in crowdsource funds in closed beta. I think it might be a safe assumption that they have doubled that number on the low end (~2 million registered users @ a 30% adoption rate x $10 average buy-in = $6million seems reasonable).

The cost of people is the majority of their overhead. Servers and bandwidth are cheap.

If they do not have the experienced coders to ratify their netcode, buy one. Buy two. Ensure your game's core infrastructure is as concrete as it can possibly be. I realize that I am romancing the notion and that it is a complicated and tedious endeavor (I've been coding in C since I was 11) -- but it's complexity does not outweigh its importance. It is paramount that the problems are solved, or the game will fail.

Gamers do not play unstable online-only games. Certainly not for long.

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jiussa wrote:

I wouldn't have expected a hardcore (or as I prefer "hardcore") player base to fit well with a revenue stream based largely on cosmetic micro-transactions. I would expect that a hardcore player base would be less inclined to spend money on cosmetic stuff than a more casual player base. However the entire idea of purchasing cosmetic frills in a video game is quite alien to me so I acknowledge that I could be wrong on this.

I believe myself to fit into your initial perception. I don't ever buy aesthetic additions in any game that I play. I don't care about Pets, I don't care about glowy graphics, I don't care about Pay-For mounts. I've never, ever bought any of them, ever. And I've played a lot of games.

However, I did find myself very eager to help support this game in any way that I could. Luckily (And smartly) they offer Stash upgrades for their micro-transactions. I gladly threw them $70-80 and purchased a few of those. Now with the left over coins I couldn't spend, I decided to take advantage of some of their daily sales for aesthetics I don't even think I've used yet.

So while I happen to fall into the camp of never, ever caring about the more irrelevant and aesthetic additions -- I do ensure I give support where support is due.

edit: Ah, read everything now, my comment is redundant :)

Nice points made, waiting for GGG to do their part now...

Still hate to see that people keep on pushing "your connection is bad" arguments or "your country is bad hence your connection is bad". If we don't lag in other games even at 100+ms, why would we rubberband and desynch here @ 50ms ping?

Anyway PoE won't go anywhere all that fast. Guess we have to be patient, but as someone mentioned - it is a bit hard when you like something. To just patiently watch it slowly decline.

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Darkrox01 wrote:

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jiussa wrote:

Having said that, you can't just assign people to tasks wildly outside their competency and expect anything good to result. An artist is going to be as much help working on network code as a plumber (and potentially vice-versa).

With the netcode, sure u got a point there, but an artist can still design new less particle intense effects for things like Poison Arrow and other effects that atm bring the engine to it's knees (until the core problem of the engine handling particles so badly is fixed).

Good point, and they have adjusted some of the effects in the game for this reason. However, it is a tricky thing to do, you don't want the game to look like crap - or else you'll have players complaining all over the place about how the effects are boring or cheap looking - the ideal solution, obviously, would be to implement some overall graphic quality changes that the player can adjust (low/medium/high).

I'm tired of hearing the 'realism isn't fun' argument being used as a blank check by people when they need a justification, for not liking an aspect of game design that is simply there to prevent stacking of a single defense mode and becoming GG in the process.

Everything is supposed to be strong against something and weak against something else.

Let's see how defense worked in Diablo 2 for instance. You could stack all the defense that you wanted from various equipments, and if you had enough of it, there was 95% chance that an enemy couldn't hit you with an attack. The same principle goes like this for attack. You could stack and synergize your equipment and skills until something would get way overpowered one form or other against many enemies in the game.

How did the designers plan for that?

For attack, we had the reflect mechanism of Iron Maiden, the corpse explosions of fire/frost enchanted enemies, the exploding bone fetishes (but they were annoying whatever be your offensive strategies), and high resistances and outright immunities to various forms of attack.
Even the vaunted Hammerdins couldn't escape from such things. Suddenly you'd be flattened by this pack of physical and magic immune wailing beasts out of nowhere. And Ancient Kaa the Soulless on Hell? depending on his mods, he could become immune to almost 3-5 modes of attack at once. Which means that unless you could break immunity, you were hosed against him.

For defense, we had spike damage. Things could just hit you hard enough that you could become paste like *that*. 95% chance to avoid attack did not equal faceroll everything. Every build had its counter in the random mob uniques/superuniques. Dual/triple enchant on an enemy was almost a death sentence unless you could kill it at range and kill it without getting hit. Melee were reduced to diving in for one hit and running away or using the mercenaries as tanks to take the fatal attack, and live to fight another day after paying the merc's healing bills.

Let's digress a bit and move to the legendary FPS series of STALKER. Despite how you were geared, if somebody brought overwhelming firepower such as a rocket launcher to bear against you, you'd be flattened in a single direct hit, and would be lucky to survive much more than a glancing blow from high explosives. But you could use skill to counter these things in their own way.

TL;DR - if you don't like how a game is designed, you can be vocal about it, but don't use the 'realism is overrated' argument. Without some realism, a lot of games can become boring very fast.

For instance just see how Puncture is designed. If you sustain a bleeding wound, you will stay alive longer if you stay still and quiet, since physiologically, the faster the heart pumps, the more blood is going to come out of your body through that wound. Though the panic reaction of increased heart rate in an adrenaline haze, due to the 'fight or flight reaction', is likely to do an equally good job anyway. Thus how it is reflected in Puncture's design. You can stay still and sustain limited damage (comparatively speaking) or try to run (whether you notice it or not) and die faster.

It all comes down in the end to a matter of taste, and nothing more. For the record, I have nothing against the game as it is in its current state, because I spend more time playing it than being vocal about concerns I do not have at present.

Thx for the nice words to all of you.

@Wittgenstein
Sure you don't want the game to look like crap, but a majority here played D2 for ages, and that looked like crap the day it was released. But smooth and fun gameplay (atleast for me) can make up a lot of that. And imo that's the direction GGG was going for in the first place, but atm they kinda lost that out of sight (so it seems to me).

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ExiledToWraeclast wrote:

For instance just see how Puncture is designed. If you sustain a bleeding wound, you will stay alive longer if you stay still and quiet, since physiologically, the faster the heart pumps, the more blood is going to come out of your body through that wound. Though the panic reaction of increased heart rate in an adrenaline haze, due to the 'fight or flight reaction', is likely to do an equally good job anyway. Thus how it is reflected in Puncture's design. You can stay still and sustain limited damage (comparatively speaking) or try to run (whether you notice it or not) and die faster.

Nah, it would be realistic if you'd have a patch to apply over the wound to stop the bleeding... and the bleeding would not stop by itself, what, is your exile some self-healing mutant? Puncture is just another lame mechanism... nothing "realistic" in it.

I stopped playing this game altogether due to the dsync problem...

I see a lot of people in this thread saying silly things like, "Learn how to avoid it and play around it." That is a totally unacceptable solution and doesn't really work anyways. Anything that charges, leaps, whirls or moves at a above average move speed will lag and dsync including you're character.

On the issue of how many people it affects;

None of us really know for sure, I doubt even GGG knows. But even if it only affects 1% of the playing population that is too much, if the problem is netcode or poorly performing server's on GGG's end. Seeing as GGG themselves have admitted there is a problem and that it is being worked on I think it is safe to say that this issue isn't isolated and can't be chalked up to a "vocal minority".

Overall since open beta was released I feel that there is far less interaction between the forum community and the development team. During the first week I suggested a weekly feedback poll be introduced...It was a great surprise when my suggestion was actually read, agreed with and put up on the site.

I don't see feedback polls anymore...Only links to the same tired Streamers endlessly grinding away at content and HC race events that, as a SC player, are about as interesting to me as watching someone else play the game I'm trying to play...

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jiussa wrote:

I kinda suspect that GGG have bitten off more than they can chew.

I reckon GGG are trying really hard to eat sensible portions of food but people want them to swallow big, fat mouthfuls of grease and shit without so much as offering cutlery.

I'm amazed GGG hasn't choked already. I'm merely a voluntary moderator and I've had my share of gag reflex moments.