Bex: Rare monsters in past league content is something we'll review for 3.19.

GGG are just doing what GGG do.

This change is great, this change is great, ok, it might not be that great, we'll review it, ok we were wrong.

How many times have we been here?

3.19 forecast: Tiny's trial needs more QoL. /s

Maintenance mode time. Everybody has shifted to working on PoE 2 for the next 2.5 months.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

What's there to discuss? She's a Community Manager, or something close enough to that. That right there is exactly what a Community Manager should say when the shit hits the fan gently and there's no clear agreement between what their higher ups are doing and what players are saying.

I imagine there's almost an inviolable internal rule that GGG don't change leagues dramatically after a few balance patches. It does set a bad precedent from their perspective, and if we know anything about strongarm philosophy, it's that you don't want to appear weak or vulnerable. They probably don't want to get back to those scary days of looking like players might know their own game better than they do. I mean, they'll probably admit it as sound bite fodder, but that last non-apology from Chris? Maybe he should let the CM handle the C from now on, because oh boy was that whole 'we thought it was fine but it turns out 'normal players' couldn't handle it' the silent part awfully out loud.

Although I tend to agree with their persistent obstinance on admitting the community might be right, I also think it is potentially a good policy -- at least most of the time.

This community has a pretty bad habit of overreacting to any change that makes the game harder, even though the game is a ton easier in many measurable ways. One notable exception to that statement would be end game; end game has definitely gotten harder for the normal player. I bring this up because if you signal that you are willing to change course at the whim of the community, you'll lose control of your game quickly since the community knows they just need to throw a big tantrum any time they disagree with anything. To be quite honest, the community already does that. GGG just doesn't give in to it.

The downside to that policy is that sometimes the community is right. We're solidly in a boy who cried wolf situation. When we cry about everything different, we lose credibility when we need it most.

Archnemesis was notably harder. Several orders of magnitude harder. It made a lot of game mechanics hard to impossible for anyone playing a normal build/skill. I still can't finish blight encounters consistently, even after the changes. I'm considering just blocking it because it's a huge act of frustration and wasted time to watch blue sponges run at the pump.

An attempt to make the game harder in some sense is not necessarily a bad thing. The game has very few things where you actually need to think and react. AN didn't change that though. It just made the things you can't react to and see now more deadly. That just contributes frustration and makes people build higher DPS builds to avoid as much interaction as possible. In effect, it took one of the core issues of the game from my perspective and made it worse.

My main point here is that the community may have a point on this particular issue, but we've cried wolf on everything that was slightly different or a shift from easy mode. GGG might be obstinate, and perhaps would have this policy no matter what, but we've lost all credibility.

Disclaimer: This doesn't apply to everyone obviously, but it doesn't matter. The worst of the community will dictate the terms on this particular issue.

They are already at the point where more than half the players have moved on from the league, continuing to update and fix this issue isn't going to pull them back in. A 3.19 announcement in the future mentioning heavy changes to the AN system will create more hype and is more likely to get people back during the most important time of every league, the launch week. This is the nature of their business model.

"

DeeUU8938 wrote:

GGG are just doing what GGG do.

This change is great, this change is great, ok, it might not be that great, we'll review it, ok we were wrong.

How many times have we been here?

More than enough to see they at least changing stuff faster that normally and they are less stubborn about things.
It took years for them to remove reflect aura, but they kept reflect mod on rare. It took another years for them to remove it as well. Same thing with all the shit that people complained about since day 1 of introduction.

What if they're trying the WoW thing with a classic and retail version.

In the form of PoE classic which they make very tough, and PoE2 with lots of QoL.

"

SoulMule wrote:

What if they're trying the WoW thing with a classic and retail version.

In the form of PoE classic which they make very tough, and PoE2 with lots of QoL.

You are delusional..

They are not trying anything, they tested AN in AN league, saw they are fine ( cuz people were picking the right fight for the build) and planned all along a major overhaul of the core game..

They didn't tested properly , they threw things there and they broke everything...

Now that they have a hemorrhage they are patching it down with Band-Aids to live until next league were they might do another major overhaul to fix AN mods and screw something else.

"

Nubatron wrote:

My main point here is that the community may have a point on this particular issue, but we've cried wolf on everything that was slightly different or a shift from easy mode. GGG might be obstinate, and perhaps would have this policy no matter what, but we've lost all credibility.

Disclaimer: This doesn't apply to everyone obviously, but it doesn't matter. The worst of the community will dictate the terms on this particular issue.

You know I generally ignore this stuff -- league to league, roughly the same thing happens. I'm pretty philosophical about it, the way a deep-seated public servant might be about otherwise dramatic changes in regime. Same shit, different dictator, if you will. AN has been a huge blip that not even I could ignore, so I don't really know that much about the wolf-crying or the credibility of the community. I mean, you know how I feel about the community overall based on the last thing I *really* got up in arms about, right? I don't think there's any credibility to lose, because that's not really the community's role. Their role is to hold the credibility of GGG to account, and they fail to. Repeatedly. Hence that quote about 'normal players' being so inadequate compared to GGG's internal expectations not being the shock it should have been.

No, when I talk about this obstinacy as you put it, I'm looking MUCH further back, years and years. After all, that's the stuff I know because that's back when I was much more involved and concerned about the micro -- as were GGG, coincidentally enough. I hate to trot it out again, but for me their turning point was summoning snapshotting. To briefly recap: a league had dropped, players were enjoying it well enough, but there was a sort of exploit wherein you could equip very strong summoning gear, raise your army, and then switch that gear out for other stuff. Okay, I just quickly googled: this was mid 2015. Anyway, it was grossly overpowered AND boring and GGG nixed it fairly deep into that league. There was also aura snapshotting and whatnot, but as I recall it, summoning snapshotting was the moment they realised they had to control the meta, not simply throw all the lego pieces on the ground and let clever players put together builds that obliterated their content and essentially broke the game.

I'm sure this wasn't the only factor but if we assume something like this happened, then it explains at least in part what I saw not long after that: they fixed Arc (man testing that in alpha was a blast) and told the community they'd fixed it well before its triumphant ascension to meta. And I'm not saying they announced it once and moved on. It was heralded as the incoming skill to play, because at the time it was easily one of the most underused and yet desired. Chain lightning is just fucking cool, right?

Anyway, that all went according to keikaku. Arc's new potency was not THE meta but it was pretty much (somewhat appropriately) the path of least resistance as far as effective builds go.

And GGG saw how easy it was to prevent another 'snapshotting' incident: just tell players what to play. Hype up incoming new skills; announce the update of old ones. It happened not just with Arc but also traps, and then mines. For a while there, they treated each league as a chance to lay a road for players to follow. Again: not the most powerful choice (those would always be discovered by someone else) but the most obvious.

How does this relate to obstinacy? Simple: GGG had learned they didn't really need to listen to feedback because they'd found their formula. Now player dissent from league to league was a feature, not a bug. The increasing chasm between developers and players didn't really matter because the developers no longer felt beholden to the players as far as balance was concerned. After all, they provided fairly clear instructions before each league if you wanted to enjoy it. If you wanted to go beyond that or against it, well, that's on you. Good luck buddy, eager to hear your experience, hope it impresses lots of players and gets them to like/subscribe/support.

And honestly that's how it's remained, with one slight exception: they've eased off on the aggressive pre-league skill/item pushing because big streamers are doing that part for them. I figure this ties into the ever-increasingly alarming intimacy between developers and their most valuable streamers. Even as far back as Kripp in 2012/13, streamers have served as a sort of beacon for GGG, a lighthouse guiding them to the relatively safe waters of popular opinion. It's just smart for developers to recognise this and take advantage of it. BUT with GGG and PoE that's changed because streamers are no longer bright representations of the community at large -- they're more like floodlights 'controlled' by GGG showing the community where to go.

And then we have this other related issue where GGG now see streamers as their community (see official 'community reactions' posts; no, mate, they're just streamers doing their job hyping shit up for a buck). I don't think that it's as simple as I've illustrated it but I DO think if you unpick seemingly casual hints as that, you can see why GGG thought AN was internally fine and why Chris felt the need to put 'normal players' in inverted commas when describing that X factor they couldn't quite predict. People like to say that GGG are now balancing for the 1% or for the streamers or whatnot. That statement by Chris confirms this but I dislike both terms. 1% implies wealth which is why some people bitch that GGG are balancing for the whales (and I can't even begin to tell you how wrong THAT is), and 'streamers' is to me too generic a term. Anyone can stream, same way anyone can be a blogger or an influencer or whatever. What 'streamer' as a term fails to clarify is the *level of influence*.

So I choose to look at it slightly differently. GGG aren't balancing their game for the 1% or the streamers; they're balancing their game for the performers. For the contestants, if you will. Path of Exile is a show a lot of people watch, and it's got to be challenging for those relatively few individuals everyone else (tongue very much in cheek there) is watching. This is, to me, the gruesome terminus of PoE's long-running love affair with Twitch and GGG's all-too-happy greasing of the gears with streamers who showed clear influence and an ability to bring in supporters. So to me, ignoring Path of Exile as a 'game', what we have is a fairly simple and very recognisable business model: reality tv. Shit, I can even make a haiku about it:

GGG: produce
biggest streamers are the stars
Exiles? audience.


When you look at it that way, it makes complete sense that AN was 'internally fine' and that 'normal players' were the X factor from GGG's perspective. The priority, I think, is not in delivering a PoE that the 'normal players' can enjoy but in ensuring that the contestants are not bored and thus not boring to watch. I mean, if you're already off that train as I am they're always boring to watch, but I've never been a huge reality TV viewer anyway (Forged in Fire is about it, because, fuck, swords are also fucking cool). The whole time, GGG were thinking not about 'normal players' but about their stars.

It's all so horrifically counterintuitive though. Why would you alienate the majority of your playerbase to cater to the minority? Surely all those normal players are going to just stop supporting even if your elite (not elitists -- big difference) are 'okay' with the state of the game. Well, maybe. But clearly the metrics and data show otherwise, else they would never have made such a terrible misstep as AN, which again in the context of PoE-as-TVShow, is completely understandable a mistake. They didn't overestimate 'normal players'; they forget that their big stars have their limits too. Like everyone else, I was monitoring the steamcharts and did NOT see a dramatic drop in players, at least nothing that would cause GGG to panic. After all, it's not the dips they care about but the spikes. They don't really care about retention beyond the long game: who they retain for next league. Why? Because the sub model for this TV show isn't weekly or even monthly. It's pretty much a case of pay up front -- you can bet the bulk of their packs are sold in that hype period before a league drops. After that, who really cares what the audience does?

I strongly doubt they'd have changed a thing about AN had the outcry of difficulty been limited to the audience, to 'normal players'. Because, as you said, 'normal players' cry wolf and if a star can handle this content, you too can -- they're just players like you and me after all! Git gud, bro. But if the stars are also struggling as we saw with AN, well shit, GGGang, I think we might have overcooked this one a tad. Not a good look when your pros agree with the plebs.

But even those 'fixes' have been pretty conservative. Instead, and this brings us back to Bex's statement (which I've not bothered to source, so I'm taking OP's word for it), they're just going to be more careful next time. And by that I don't read 'we're going to be more mindful of normal players'; I see that more as 'fuck, we got caught tuning the game for our stars and clearly we overestimated them too'.

I hate that I can see it this way but it's hard not to when you connect certain dots. I've never seen a developer so precious about so obvious a small circle of well-known streamers. I've never seen a developer with either the audacity or ignorance to consider said circle 'the community'. And, until a few weeks ago, I'd never seen a developer refer to its supporters and players as 'normal' in inverted commas.

But from that perspective, 'credibility' isn't even a factor. An audience doesn't need credibility. It just needs to exist and pay to watch the show. Or, as with PoE, pay, maybe watch, but certainly play along at home.

Okay I've wiped myself out with this one. I'm probably not finished, but then again, will I ever be?

Harvest, blight, deli and Expedition are really fucked up with these AN mods.