Chris addressing Reddit, elaborating on manifesto.

"

Tanakeah wrote:

I read over what Chris said in that thread twice and while I am glad that he is coming out and saying something, what he said, and more importantly what he DIDN'T say has raised more than a few concerns in my book. I rarely say much on the forums, but after reading this and looking at the balance manifesto and decisions that were made...this is all being handled in a rather poor fashion on GGG's part.

I shouldn't have to preface this, but I will anyway and mention that everything that I say is from my perspective and I speak ONLY for myself and no one else. If others want to chime in, then they are welcome to do so, as they've been doing thusfar in this thread. To keep the post from getting too large, I've used spoiler tags for individual portions of what Chris said and left my responses without spoilers.

Spoiler

1. There has been speculation that I have personally been driving the balance changes to match my original vision for Path of Exile. There is a little truth to this, in that I want to restore areas of the game that were important but have been eroded, but almost every area of specific balance work is the product of a large team of designers working together for a long time to come up with solutions to problems we want to address.

We care more about making a good game than we do about vanity metrics like player concurrency records. I suspect this is because we're gamers first and businesspeople second. The direction Path of Exile was going in over the last year was breaking player records but wasn't really leaving us happy with our own game.

After seeing GGG sell out to Tencent, after seeing the sheer amount of MTX that gets created on a consistent basis, and after seeing the direction of the execution of this balance manifesto and patch notes...I do not for one second believe what Chris says here. In a F2P game where your primary income is MTX, stash tabs, and other things sold in the cash shop, metrics are HUGE and make a big difference and again, I don't believe that they care more about making a good game over those metrics. Metrics come first in this case, and gameplay is second.

Now, that doesn't mean that I don't think that GGG doesn't care about the game and that they don't want to improve it. They do, but it's not above metrics and money at this point. Before they were bought out by Tencent, I would believe what Chris says, but after that...nope.

Spoiler

2. For more than a year we've been accumulating changes that we were worried about releasing because they would affect the way people currently play Path of Exile. We understand that our game is an escape for some players and if that is potentially disrupted, it could be very upsetting for them. We have great appreciation for the fact that Path of Exile has become part of your lives. When someone comes into my office with a prospective nerf, more than half the time I suggest we don't do it because it would hurt a build without a sufficiently good reason. We try to be very cautious and to care about your experience with Path of Exile.

Unfortunately, we've been hitting a breaking point with power creep recently and really need to address it. Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in. It honestly feels to us that this is in part because we've moved further away from our own vision over time.

I commend GGG for making the hard decision to nerf player power, and I DO agree that it has gotten out of control and has been an ever-growing problem and needs to be reined in. However, the EXECUTION in which this is being done is not only far too heavy-handed, it's far too ONE-SIDED. Power creep is NOT just relegated to players, but also on the side of monsters as well, and just like balancing an equation, what you do to one side you NEED to do to the other side for things to remain balanced. When I looked at the balance manifesto and the patch notes, the only thing I could think of was, "Wow...GGG is so laser-focused on making sure that players feel like they're getting ****ed over in every possible way and they're using a bazooka to take out an ant's nest in the front yard instead of a boiling pot of water."

This is the problem, IMHO...player perception, and once again GGG has failed spectacularly on the execution and pissed people off. I'll address this in more detail a bit further down, but suffice to say...good idea and I am for nerfing of player power, but the way this is being done is not good at all. Also, Chris mentioned players being unhappy because GGG has moved away from their vision overtime...that is true to a certain degree, but not in the way that Chris thinks and again I'll go into more detail in how I believe he/GGG misses the target here.

Spoiler

3. I was interviewed by Jason at VentureBeat and we chatted about the Ultimatum league. The take-away line that is quoted from this interview is that I felt that Ultimatum had bad retention because it was too rewarding, and people are quick to point out that this was not the problem with Ultimatum.

I agree.

The quote from the interview is as follows:

"Retention during the league was poor. I would say it was in the bottom 40% of leagues, a bit below average. And this is partly because for the league, both its combat was a bit spammy and its item rewards were a bit spammy," said Wilson. "These are two things we hadn’t determined during playtesting that became apparent over the course of the league. And so the fact that it was quite heavy with its reward systems meant that players played it for less time than they normally would, and this was quite useful to learn from." [...] "So overall player numbers dipped a little more than they would have done by the third month, which is disappointing, but it’s a consequence of the way that Ultimatum was designed."

To put my thoughts into a considered, written reply (rather than an off-the-cuff answer to an unexpected question in an interview primarily about Expedition): There were two big problems with the Ultimatum league from my point of view:

The encounters themselves didn't have great combat. They achieved challenge by just spamming a whole lot of rare monsters at you and it was hard to follow what was going on.
While the core Ultimatum double-or-nothing item reward system was decent, the absolutely massive spam of items that occurred after these encounters was unnecessary and only contributes to the problems that Path of Exile has with items currently.

I absolutely agree that the first of these points (spammy encounters), alongside other meta issues (stale metagame, etc.) contributed far more to poor retention than the heavy rewards did. The rewards issue is more of a long-term problem and I should not have implied that it was related to the immediate performance of the league.

It's almost like every time something about rewards and the like comes along, GGG/Chris is so close to getting it, but then like a true marksman they keep missing the target over and over again. From what I read and saw about Ultimatum the three biggest complaints were:

1. Boring and repetitive combat, which you addressed.

2. Rewards that were 'spammy', but here is where you spectacularly miss the point and target. It wasn't that the Ultimatum was 'too rewarding', it was that the QUANTITY was too much, and the QUALITY of the 'rewards' were garbage. You did get one thing right...there was a massive spam of items...items that felt unrewarding for the time and effort put into the league mechanics. Time and time again GGG seems to be blind to this and they cannot get the risk/reward right and when people consistently get nothing but garbage drops from interacting with the league, they quit. Why should they continue to play a league that doesn't reward them with nothing but junk? Simple...they don't.

3. You put a very interesting idea with the Trialmaster into the league and made him a very fun character, but AGAIN, you failed by making him so obscenely rare and so dependent on RNG that it turned people off. This is a consistent problem that you/GGG have and it gives off the perception that you're so obsessed with RNG as a solution to everything. And in a game with so much of it already, it grates on people. You seem to have a huge problem with the notion of letting people work towards something in a deterministic way because of not only your perceived obsession with RNG, but because it's your fallback to balance...and it has become tiressome. Ultimatum was just another example of this and your consistent method of gating league mechanics first and foremost behind RNG and not letting people experience them in a more consistent way...and that is due to another core game issue, but I'll stop here.

Spoiler

The balance changes we're making to Path of Exile in 3.15 are not the type of drastic changes that I was referring to in that clip from 2019. The changes they made to that Marvel Heroes game were ten times as impactful as what we are doing here. We are not fundamentally changing how Path of Exile is played to anywhere near such to a significant degree. We are not looking at one-minute map runs and saying that they should now take ten minutes. Yes, the balance changes do have an impact on the design of many builds, but those builds will still be capable and appropriately powerful afterwards. I know the changes are daunting to look at before you're able to experience them in game, but there are so many more opportunities for viable builds now, and we're expecting it to be a lot more engaging to play.

By the way, I stand by exactly what I said in that 2019 interview. We often discuss making larger changes to the game and we cite the points mentioned in that clip as the reason to be careful, to not change too much at once, and to seek community feedback on the changes. We have been carefully following your feedback and will continue to do so once you've had a chance to play and let us know how it has affected your builds in practise.

This absolutely made me do a double-take and I had to read this several times to make sure I wasn't missing something. Now, I will admit this might be a subjective matter of perspective, but let me make sure I am understanding this correctly, Chris. What you are saying, is that the changes you are making as a whole to player power...in your eyes...ARE NOT THE TYPE OF LARGE CHANGES THAT YOU REFER TO? So, for those unaware...and I will probably miss things, but overall, you are claiming that these changes:

1. Nerfing flasks in multiple ways.
2. Nerfing core player defenses like Evasion and Armour.
3. Increasing mana costs of skills by a fair mount.
4. Nerfing cooldowns on defensive gems and movement gems.
5. Nerfing damage and utility gems across the board for the most part.
6. Nerfing elemental/curse immunities and ways to get them.
7. Anything else I missed.

You are claiming that a multi-pronged nerf to pretty much anything related to player offense and defense, and doing this all at once...IS NOT THE TYPE OF LARGE CHANGE YOU REFER TO? ...I honestly cannot believe you think this is true and to me it sounds like you're talking out of both sides of your mouth and expecting me (again, speaking only for myself here) to believe you. ...GET OUTTA HERE! You do ask for players to keep an open mind and to test out the changes and assure us that things will be ok? ...Not sorry here, I am not buying that for one second.

You are changing so many things on the player side at one time, and WORSE, you are pretty much NOT changing almost anything on the monster side of things. Because let me remind you and everyone else of one thing about power creep in this game...it's NOT one-sided. Monster power has gone up over the years just as much as player power and it's a huge problem and this is what I meant about balancing an equation and having to keep in mind that what you do to one side, you do to the other or else things go awry. Well Chris, you're doing a very poor job of trying to keep that balance here, and have basically thrown it out the window.

Now, to be fair, I DO UNDERSTAND where you're coming from and again, I AGREE that player power needs to be nerfed. The festering boil of power creep has infested this game so deeply that it will take a while to bring it under control, but the execution of this method is not good. IMHO, you are stripping players of a bit too much all at once and not doing anything else to compensate for that. I do hope that I am wrong here...I really do...but I have a bad feeling that as players take up the game on Friday and take a few weeks to figure things out that...well...the outcome isn't looking hopeful.


Now, with all that said, here are some more of my personal thoughts and will try and keep them succinct, but will likely fail. Also, fair warning...THIS WILL BE RANTY! So, let's go:

Spoiler

This explanation reeks of damage control and trying to assure people that everything is fine, which is all well and good. These changes are needed, as I have stated, and I completely get that they were going to happen at some point. However, this is far too much and too one-sided and this is really, really bad optics for Chris and GGG. Plus, there are far more foundational issues that have been going on for years and years and years and a lot of them are due to outdated, way of the dodo thinking and, ironically, game vision. GGG seems to be obsessed with making this game an absolute chore and a hell for players to do nothing but grind, grind, grind, and it really seems they want to make sure that is drilled into the heads of their playerbase. Other issues that should have been addressed this time around and not just focusing on nerfing the heck out of everything on the player end:

1. Game Bloat and System Bloat -> My goodness, there are so many past league mechanics that GGG wants to keep in the game that it's become a convoluted MESS! And because there are so many, that all gets lumped into balancing and it makes doing such things an equal mess that I am sure the devs are finding to be a huge headache, maybe even more than the players. Things are so intertwined and so complex that they're not fun, not easy to understand, and honestly, IMHO, half of these league mechanics could be permanently axed from the game, and most people would likely not care, and actually would be happy to play the game instead of burying their noses in guides and Wikis and everything else.

2. Atlas Bloat -> Holy sweet mother of mercy...where do I start with this convoluted POS that is meant to be the 'endgame' of Path of Exile? It's not merely enough to work your way to high tier maps. No, now you need to:

- Farm stupid amounts of fragments for Shaper, Elder, etc, etc.
- Farm for Maven.
- Farm Sirus and his 'minions' for the Watchstones.
- THEN FARM MORE VARIANT TYPES OF WATCHSTONES!
- AND THEN FARM FOR ATLAS PASSIVES!

I could go on for a few more, but holy frikkin' heck...when does it END? What is this obsession with NOT letting people reach a level of satisfaction and get something comfortably setup, and then heaven forbid you want to do the League stuff. Because then you gotta do it all over again! For me personally...no...once is enough on Standard, and this is absolutely STUPID. Overly excessive bloat and grind that wastes time, and not in a good way.

3. Chase Rewards and Items in General -> It seems more and more GGG (especially now in this nerf phase) is ripping out chase uniques and other items all for the sake of nerfing players. Ironically, this has been happening before this, but now it's made even more prominent and it's just ridiculous. GIVE PEOPLE REASONS TO CHASE AFTER FUN AND REWARDING ITEMS and stop taking them away and nerfing them. If you're so worried about them being too powerful, how about instead you look DEEPER into your base systems of damage/defense and other things, which are an absolute ****ing MESS and the actual ROOT of your problems?!

Stop using RNG as a balancing factor, STOP relying on balancing around rarity and let people have some more deterministic ways to get things beyond just Div. Cards and the like. Stop being so frightened of letting people actually get good loot because you're so terrified that they'll stop playing your game because 'they get things too quickly'. And speaking of loot...how about you STOP with dropping so much absolute TRASH ON THE GROUND TO WHERE LOOT FILTERS ARE PRACTICALLY MANDATORY just to rid screen clutter?

Also, for items that do drop, how about you actually once again quit with excessive RNG and tighten up some roll ranges for items? Why should an ilvl 86 item have the possibility of rolling the absolute bottom of the barrel mod ranges? That makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER! If you're in an area where ilvl 86 loot is dropping, then you have no damn reason to see those mods and they are absolutely not going to be worth anything. Believe it or not, GGG, you CAN tighten those stat rolls more, and you CAN still weight them to whatever you want, and at least then when players roll/craft gear, they'll get something useful.

People might actually WANT to pick up more loot, and know that when loot DOES drop, it will have a better chance of being decent. It just boggles my mind that after all of these years you're still so obsessed with RNG all over the place and quite frankly it's hurting the item hunt. Again, if you're so worried about player power in that regard...I say again...look at your core mechanics and foundational level thinking and realize that's where your true issues lie. Perhaps it's time you bit the bullet and started putting some hard limiters in the game instead of it being 'The Wild West' for items...little more structure, little more control, and you can rein in player power without having to use the nuclear options.

4. Fix your cracked and failing foundation -> I've said this multiple times, but your foundation was so poorly thought out, and all you've been doing over the years is trying to fix the visible structural flaws. Some examples as I have said before are player defenses...for the most part, the base defenses SUCK, and now you're making them worse. Armor scaling is a joke and doesn't do what it should...this is one of the only games where I have seen armor not able to do its job for what it is made for, and that's mitigating physical damage. At this point, WARFRAME does this far better than you have, and that's really sad, even more so because that game has rampant power creep in it, and yet it somehow manages to get that right to a better degree than you. And trust me, I know this is not a perfect comparison by any means, but holy smokes...

And now Evasion is getting smacked down...and you wonder WHY your playerbase as a whole is stacking all kinds of defenses and using all kinds of crazy means to stay alive. Because at heart THE BASE DEFENSES IN YOUR GAME ARE FLAWED AND BROKEN and yet you can't seem to acknowledge or want to fix those, but oh you are soooooooooo eager to want to kick players to the ground. ...Priorities indeed...

Trading has gotten slightly better over the years, but it's still a ****ing mess and once again, your obsession with wanting to make it hard so that players purposefully have a challenging time of interacting with one another and all in the name of the game's 'precious economy' and dodo ways of thinking. ...Did I mention that I was going to rant here?


I could go on and on, but I'll stop here as I am sure this is reaching nonconstructive territory, so I'll end it with this. In summary, I believe that player nerfs were absolutely needed, and I don't disagree with you there, Chris. However, what I believe you have done VERY WRONG, is that you have NOT targeted these nerfs in the best way. You are so focused and (again) obsessed with pulling back player power because you're not happy with it, and that's fine. BUT, this nerfing cycle/patch could have been MUCH BETTER had you done some also much-needed nerfs/improvements on the MONSTER AND GAME SIDE that the players fight against.

NOTHING has been done to mitigate out of control monster damage, outrageous multiplicative scaling on their end, bad design for some encounters, the above mentioned game and Atlas bloat, and the seemingly unwillingness to even acknowledge or consider potential QOL things. And I'm not talking about item vacuuming or the like. But yes...had you done some more on that end, had you given the players more of what is sorely needed on the player side in this patch, people would be more willing to look at these nerfs in an understanding light.

And what's worse...I fear with how slow you and your company are to make changes like this...it's going to be a long time before that needed balancing on the monster/game side comes in, and by then, there might be more damage done than you have estimated. I genuinely hope it doesn't come to that, but at this point...who knows...this could very well spell some dark times for this game, and I do hope the damage this will do is not irreversible...