The biggest issue brought up by Chris during Baeclast

He stated something along the lines of the tester leaks mean that they need to keep the alpha testing period shorter before release.

Assuming the client was feature complete and ready for testing earlier than it was delivered to alpha testers, then they are shooting themselves in the foot.

Combine this with their strict need to release every 13 weeks regardless of it's state and you get Expedition. His only solution seems to be to 'limit the scope of development each league' rather than 'test robustly even if there are leaks and announce a release date when it's ready'.

Their goto solution simply doesn't work. Maybe it's time to have more robust testing and have faith that a good, well-tested league will outweigh the cost of details being released sooner (and the meta being mined).

This may be something that our response as a community helps GGG think about. We just basically started the hype cycle for 3.16 today with all the info dropped. While we don't know the league mechanic, we do know a ton of info that would normally go into a dev manifesto.

If the community responds in a way that is received well by GGG, AND they interpret it in 3.16 as being correlated in some way to players knowing much further ahead what to expect, there may be some internal changes related to your suggestions.

It's a ton of ifs and buts along with several potential problems along the way including the misinterpretation of player response to 3.16.

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FrodoFraggins wrote:

He stated something along the lines of the tester leaks mean that they need to keep the alpha testing period shorter before release.

There was a certain person who runs TFT who knew about the legacy flasks mths in advance and were buying up legacy taste of hates and other flasks all during ultimatum. They need to purge the alpha testers list entirely.

I got pms for perfect legacy flasks all last league that have been listed for years with no interest...I have some screenshots of a trade and conversation i did with one of them, i took them because i knew something was up... Surprise..



there is a discord screenshot of a conversation about that trade i was having 12 days ago. obviously cant post the screenshots of the actual guy.. witch hunt etc..

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stormyknight wrote:

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FrodoFraggins wrote:

He stated something along the lines of the tester leaks mean that they need to keep the alpha testing period shorter before release.

There was certain people on TFT who knew about the legacy flasks mths in advance and were buying up legacy taste of hates and other flasks all during ultimatum. They need to purge the alpha testers list entirely.

I got pms for perfect legacy flasks all last league that have been listed for years with no interest...I have some screenshots of a trade and conversation i did with one of them, i took them because i knew something was up... Surprise..

What's TFT?

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FrodoFraggins wrote:

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stormyknight wrote:

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FrodoFraggins wrote:

He stated something along the lines of the tester leaks mean that they need to keep the alpha testing period shorter before release.

There was certain people on TFT who knew about the legacy flasks mths in advance and were buying up legacy taste of hates and other flasks all during ultimatum. They need to purge the alpha testers list entirely.

I got pms for perfect legacy flasks all last league that have been listed for years with no interest...I have some screenshots of a trade and conversation i did with one of them, i took them because i knew something was up... Surprise..

What's TFT?

The forbidden trove. Discord.

Personally , the biggest red flag for me was the fact they have difficulty communicating between teams, to the point that it effects what is released into the game.

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Xtorma wrote:

Personally , the biggest red flag for me was the fact they have difficulty communicating between teams, to the point that it effects what is released into the game.

Because half the alpha testers are only interested in feeding their cliques info about whats going to be changed and how they can exploit it, im sure there is some people interested in the health of the game but this stuff has been going on for years and is brought up every now and then.

I'm half and half here, the alpha leaks is a big problem and I can totally buy Chris shovelling shit on them.

However the flipside is some of the mistakes that GGG release would be obvious in the most basic of tests, Skill gems in particular are a bugbear of mine - an experienced player with access to premades could test every new active skill in less than a day.

Not in a way that suggests they are perfect far from it, but you could ensure they weren't broken very quickly and yet broken things still make it in.

I really hope they improve this aspect because I can't see it as anything other than mismanagement or a prioritization problem, it shouldn't require heaven and earth to fix just a little more communication I suspect.

Leagues should last 6 months, not 3. PoE is so much bloated by content and we need almost 1 month to just start realty playing game after all chores unlock systems. 6 month cycle will be much healthy for game and will fit current state better.

6 month leagues would practically halve their income, I completely agree with you from a player or a quality perspective but from a business I completely disagree :p

IMO the thing that sets PoE above most other GaaS is the content rate its the biggest reason for their success... they just have to do a better job.