The biggest issue brought up by Chris during Baeclast

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Elua wrote:

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.

As Draegnarrr pointed out, this would be a bad solution for them financially. By day 30 of a league roughly half the players have left the game. By day 60 it's about 80%. I expect that GGG actually makes most of their revenue within about a 2 week window of a league launch.

I totally agree with you about the bloat though. The game really needs a personal trainer and to get in shape again :) I think the problem GGG have faced till now is that they tend to introduce game mechanics that are tied to a league and these would require additional work to separate out.

Thinks like veiled crafting options, anoint oils, beast crafts and so on. It's not insurmountable though as they've shown they can make it work during infinite Delve.

What they could do though is slim the game down, rework some of those mechanism to fit into the core game and then alternate a new league with perhaps a mix of old leagues. So Dec and May the launch big new game mechanics, and in Mar and Aug they give us a 'best of' with perhaps a new twist. I'd happily tackle a more balanced game with zones that contained three random bosses let loose from their usual arenas, kind of like Invasion for example.

And here I thought the biggest issue was that the team was unhappy with a lot of changes in 3.15 and are thinking of reverting them.

We're reaching levels of half-assery never thought of before.

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FrodoFraggins wrote:

What's TFT?

Scum

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FrodoFraggins wrote:

What's TFT?

The Forbidden Trove. This is single handedly the reason why Chris Wilson thinks Harvest league gave "easy" items. Anybody that used TFT to trade seeds and crafts was able to bypass the majority of the work needed to craft.

If they had made seeds untradeable, I genuinely believe Harvest would have stuck around without being mangled into what it is now.

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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.

Yes that is a huge internal issue that needs to be resolved. It's also a result of trying to pump out content every 3 months with no buffer. If they were done with 3.16 when they released 3.15, they could work on 3.17. But the logistics of that is really not realistic.

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This may be something that our response as a community helps GGG think about. We just basically started the hype cycle for 3.16

If you need to start a hype circle for the new league before even a month of this one has passed, I feel they know this was a colossal failure. Not exactly instilling faith they are gonna do better.

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Adrenicrome wrote:

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FrodoFraggins wrote:

What's TFT?

The Forbidden Trove. This is single handedly the reason why Chris Wilson thinks Harvest league gave "easy" items. Anybody that used TFT to trade seeds and crafts was able to bypass the majority of the work needed to craft.

If they had made seeds untradeable, I genuinely believe Harvest would have stuck around without being mangled into what it is now.

Seed trading was not the issue ever, it was solely craft trading. Even during harvest league buying full plots of ridiculously expensive speed/t4 seeds you only got 1/2 good crafts per several map harvest, whereas with trading the crafts themselves a nolife trader/crafter playing discord can obtain 10-20 crafts an hour and finish items within a day, provided they had the capital to back up those crafts. Even just making harvest crafted items untradeable for 1-2 hours after each craft would solve 90% of GGG's issues with harvest power, without taking away from their vision of tradeable items/seeds/crafts.

Sending out the flask changes without testing it absolutely boggles my mind.

GGG's reliance on secrecy for testing has been a huge problem pretty much since the end of Closed Beta.

It didn't exactly foster a healthy, collaborative alpha environment either. Not saying we were at odds with each other or the Devs but when you are deathly afraid of leaks of every single update, you're probably not going to give your volunteer testers much to work with in comparison to what you plan to release. Especially when your volunteer testers also have to care about the game enough to be very good at testing it. Communication is not a high priority when you are borderline paranoid.

I doubt it's breaching NDA to say that this model doesn't work.

But suspense is a big part of GGG's marketing of upcoming material. And that is really where they've fallen behind. You can see attempts at catching up in the history of more measured teasers but for the most part they cling to this.

And it's silly because players will have deciphered and parsed all the surprises within hours of a three month long league.

The lack of a public test server and an over reliance on oooh surprises has done this game significant damage over the years...but whenever they try a pts (see 3.0 beta) it's shambolic because the players never learned how to give useful feedback at a testing level. GGG never fostered that relationship and kept alpha a massive fucking mystery. Again, this is due to a lack of intrinsic PTS.

So your alpha, your only pre release player testing, is this pocket dimension in which trust is an issue so you don't make it a comprehensive testing ground, and live is overflowing with players who would make excellent testers but can't be trusted to keep secrets.

End result: live becomes your PTS.

Shenanigans ensue.

I was in software testing in the 90s, it is a shame that they cannot get a proper testing environment going.
As to leaks, I don't know how they would deal with that short of changing out the entire testing team.

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DoubleU wrote:

I was in software testing in the 90s, it is a shame that they cannot get a proper testing environment going.
As to leaks, I don't know how they would deal with that short of changing out the entire testing team.

Then thats what they have to do, they need to vet an entire new team, members of that team need to not have a vested interest in any form of market/trade or be known acquaintance's of previous testers. Ideally they would be casual players that if they do play only strictly play the leagues and have a verified history of gameplay they can vet to weed out any potential leakers.

Not only has the leaking and manipulation of the games economy from apha testers been going on for almost as long as i can remember but its been going on so long and is so prevalent now that i find it hard to believe that they worry more about the health of the game than they do finding every little change and feeding the info so they can exploit it on the live realms.

I said in another thread that im sure there is honest testers but they have to get taken out as collateral damage and it sucks, but the old team HAS to go.