The biggest issue brought up by Chris during Baeclast

What they should do is to add stuff into every league contonously, like a new boss pops up in a certain map every week in a league or some shit, with new uniques(or old uniques that only can drop from this boss this week) etc.
Then after a week it aint there no more and some other shit gets a week etc, doesnt have to be major things, just something.

Not a flashback league where i have to level up a new toon.

We need new stuff that keeps us going during the league.

The old bosses gets old very fast when you have done them a bunch of leagues before, and even more so when they barely drop anything of value.

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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.

Easier solution. Stop being vulnerable to leaks by changing your hype model. Surely by now people aren't playing this game because they're on tenterhooks at the suspense of incoming changes.

Other games with just as much at stake balance wise manage it just fine.

This is just another way in which the indie GGG and indie PoE grew way too fast and didn't have a chance to evolve naturally from one model to the next.

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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.

Take into consideration , the money generated in a six month league , compared with 2 x leagues of 3 months each.

Yea I'm really not clear on why secret alpha testing exists. Is it that much of a hassle to have people whose job it is to test things whose other duties are divorced from implementing or coming up with the things they're testing so they're less biased? On the other side of the coin is it that big of a hit to just have a more open testing environment?

I feel like just moving harder either way is significantly better here. Seemingly every league needing immediate drastic changes to something is not a good look, especially when they said they were focusing the scope of leagues better to have less untested things.

Don't ask me. All I did was try to catch typos and smoothen the early game experience. I do know there were (are?) alpha testers who never played the live version of the game. On one hand that's ridiculous right? How can you test for the final product if you never use that product?

On the other hand it makes perfect sense if you want your alpha level of testing to be utterly separate from the live. QA testers very often don't play the games they test: they're just given a certain build and told to do a number of things to see if those things break that build. What will one day be a game is at that stage just a disassembled product being tested in parts.

But when some of your QA are also users of the product you'd better believe it can be really frustrating testing an incomplete build in a vacuum with no real knowledge of what is going on. But hey, early access to something secret is never not going to have its allure. And some vague belief that you are helping feels good too.

Still it's a weird model. To this day people cannot be blamed for thinking that Poe alpha was a pre beta stage rather than an ongoing step in the process. Again, I think its because virtually no one else does it this way. Anything involving players testing is public. As it should be. You can ask someone to keep a secret but you can only fire them for breaking that trust if you're also paying them. Without that leverage leaks are inevitable.

I think the solution can be Alpha and Beta phases of testing.

Alpha phase, is guys that test throughout the development. Testing each system as it gets completed. These guys are under contract with heavy weight on the penalties if such contract is breached or information leaked.

Beta phase, a more open phase 2 days before launch. This to identify events or exploits that require Chris to hit that red button on that mechanic. Major bugs that people from current Beta testers exploit and abuse in the first week of the game.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Easier solution. Stop being vulnerable to leaks by changing your hype model. Surely by now people aren't playing this game because they're on tenterhooks at the suspense of incoming changes.

I don't think you've thought about this properly, that model is their primary sales driver its got hype, fomo and regular anticipation rolled into one.

They could switch model but that seems like an enormous change, one I would not welcome as a complete parasite living off real supporters (thankyou guys), and anything they changed it too is likely to get its own degree of backlash. They could release things in a more staggered form for better testing like I think you are indicating but staggered release = less fomo, less fomo less sales :p

Pretty much any online game is vulnerable to leaks I think the sad truth is Chris will have to accept that legal enforced NDAs are actually the only way if you want to have third party testers behave themselves and the truth is even then there is likely to be some that won't.

They aren't really the size of the SE FF14 team who do all their testing internally to prevent just that kind of thing AFAIK.

It is a classic this is why we can't have nice things scenario where the one bad apple consistently defines the rules for the good ones, such is life!

You're right. I haven't. Not my job to. I think broadly I'm not wrong, other than perhaps the glib "simpler solution" bit. Come on...you know I know nothing is simple about PoE. There is no real solution. It's just like Joshua found out in Wargames. The only way to win is not to play. Whatever "the game" might mean. Although I think Joshua, being the supercomputer version of a child, missed one crucial fact: one party does lose if no one plays -- the arms dealers.

Back to D2R. Now there is a game that has nice things I can have.

PS re xiv: I'm new to it for the most part but I already enjoy the memes about it being made by a small indie company called Square Enix. Some of the design shortcomings...my god.