[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

RE:Client/server Action Synchronisation
I have a better understanding of the problems associated with dsync now after reading this. I also have absolutely no idea or feedback on which method would be best to solve this problem.

All I can say is, from a player's viewpoint, the most frustrating things about dsync are;

1.) Dying to monsters that are not near you or even on your screen.

2.) Being unable to avoid damage that you can clearly see and have moved out of the way of.

3.) Taking spiked amounts of damage. (As if you were standing still)

4.) Some specific skills seem more prone to "massive dsync" that others.

It always felt as if GGG were trying to have skills in this game that were beyond the engine's ability to sync correctly. In addition it seems as if the difficulty of the game itself was based around a more stable server environment. For some people it may be more stable, but for me and many others it isn't. I'm not terribly encouraged by this part of the manifesto but the dialogue with the community is a good sign...

RE:Parties, Maps, Item Quantities and Loot Allocation

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Solo players are already at a big advantage from an item drop point of view (they get more items per player and have no loot tension), so small increases to the party rewards are not deemed to be unfair.

Don't agree with this at all. When I play solo I don't notice "a big advantage" in loot at all. In addition it takes me longer to clear areas by myself than it does in a party, I don't get the advantages of party aura's, extra party DPS, split mob aggro etc etc etc.

Upping mob HP and not mob dps isn't going to do much either. A big part of why party play is so easy is it's almost impossible to die unless you lose you're character's position on the screen because of all the fireworks going on or lag etc...

In regards to the loot options, the long timer one should be a long time if you are dead set against full on instanced loot, 60 sec+.

RE:Ranged vs Melee Disparity

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Rather than nerfing powerful ranged builds to reduce the disparity, we will make sure that melee builds can be built to be powerful enough to compete. It will be very interesting looking at the data we're gathering about the impact of Multistrike and Melee Splash.

I agree with this philosophy.

Melee characters just have to stack so much life to even have a chance to survive that it doesn't leave room for much else. Armor, while somewhat 'realistic' in it's approach to damage mitigation isn't very useful from a play-ability standpoint.

Other games have approached with in a variety of ways. D2 had 'Crushing Blow' which was pretty well mandatory for serious melee builds along with as much IAS as you could get. While this was pretty fun to use for a while it really wasn't very good for build diversity or gear diversity.

D3 has several 'limited invincibility' type abilities and some big self-heal on-hit type skills (revenge). This skills are fun but they really are kind of mandatory...And that gets boring after a while.

I think that much of the problems with melee can be solved by adding some more defensive skills that work primarily for melee characters. Skills that give great rewards for taking and dealing melee damage. Skills that can help you mitigate some of the innate problems with melee (dsync + being surrounded always).

The addition of melee specific critical effects is also a change I really like. I posted about this awhile back and people seemed to like the idea as well.

RE:Competitive Play - Races/PvP

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"Season Three and Four are where we'll start experimenting with completely different ways that league events can run (i.e. starting at different parts of the game or with major functional changes to the way the game is played). The plans are very exciting!"

Someone had a great idea in one of the feedback threads of having a mode where 3-4 people or so are struggling in a non-town camp of sorts against waves of increasingly difficult monsters. You have to gear and level all in between breaths as the hordes keep coming. Sounded like something you would see in a RTS game but sounded like it would be cool.

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RaGoNXIII wrote:

Was nice to read! I really appreciate how the develop team communicates with the community.

But I'm still waiting the manifestos that explain RNG changes, so crafting becomes really craft and less casino game, changes on loot since, as someone said before, its horrible playing solo (not as manifesto say) to make this game more rewarding instead of making us hit walls continually because we can't find gear upgrades even farming hours, and not even any good currency to waste it on "crafting", your purpose is to give us a fun game, and the balance from fun and frustrating is wrong on this game.

We feel scammed when using alchemy or chaos orbs instead of trading them, so its easy to see that something is broken. Make them drop much more, the market will adjust himself, if you remove the gold from game mechanics, don't replace it with currency... The first purpose is to use orbs on our items and gems, not stashing them to see how "rich" we are. With decent drop (and I would say like x3 on all orbs from alch), gambling shouldnt be a problem anymore, and we will fell that we progress by ourselves making our own items.

I think this is as important as melee and path of life nodes fixes. The game should feel rewarding for the time we invest on it, not punishing continuously until the player leave the game (see D3).

there's something called balance mate, just image about MP10 of diablo3 to access it ppl need full high-end gear up. But a lv.77 map can be done with a simple party. This game being rewarding enough i think. Raise up the drop rate of curencies just make the price of curencis drop down, nothing more. You can see how far the price of orb drop down since the beta? a mirror was around 10ex now it 40ex. Not many people doing crafting they just save up their orb for bussines... you know.

Amazing! I am very glad to see the manifesto back in place, as I believe it was, and will continue to be, a very important venue to promote transparency in design intentions and provide a framework around which feedback can be made. Something I think we really could have used these last two months but unfortunately did not have. But we do now, so cheers! :D

Besides the number of hot topic issues the manifesto addresses, there's one thread I'd really like to see made. General Design Motivation or some such. Contained within would be a generalized explanation of what motivates your design decisions, and the directions you would like to apply these things in the future. Sort of like a manifesto overview that provides perspective. Everybody in CB knew who you were, why Path of Exile was you, and agree or disagree, we really freakin respected that! It'd be nice to reintroduce that level of intimacy with the OB community. It's something I think has been sorely missed, and is probably the most important reason to bring back the manifesto.

Cheers!
-Pants

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ospirit wrote:

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RaGoNXIII wrote:

Was nice to read! I really appreciate how the develop team communicates with the community.

But I'm still waiting the manifestos that explain RNG changes, so crafting becomes really craft and less casino game, changes on loot since, as someone said before, its horrible playing solo (not as manifesto say) to make this game more rewarding instead of making us hit walls continually because we can't find gear upgrades even farming hours, and not even any good currency to waste it on "crafting", your purpose is to give us a fun game, and the balance from fun and frustrating is wrong on this game.

We feel scammed when using alchemy or chaos orbs instead of trading them, so its easy to see that something is broken. Make them drop much more, the market will adjust himself, if you remove the gold from game mechanics, don't replace it with currency... The first purpose is to use orbs on our items and gems, not stashing them to see how "rich" we are. With decent drop (and I would say like x3 on all orbs from alch), gambling shouldnt be a problem anymore, and we will fell that we progress by ourselves making our own items.

I think this is as important as melee and path of life nodes fixes. The game should feel rewarding for the time we invest on it, not punishing continuously until the player leave the game (see D3).

there's something called balance mate, just image about MP10 of diablo3 to access it ppl need full high-end gear up. But a lv.77 map can be done with a simple party. This game being rewarding enough i think. Raise up the drop rate of curencies just make the price of curencis drop down, nothing more. You can see how far the price of orb drop down since the beta? a mirror was around 10ex now it 40ex. Not many people doing crafting they just save up their orb for bussines... you know.

In my opinion, you are thinking it wrong. Orbs should be used for crafting. If you want to adjust your market, then play with gold. If you remove the gold and merge both mechanics, you have to balance both. Currently, "crafting" isn't an option since you will waste it most of the times. If you make all cost the double of chaos or triple exalts (inflaction), but they drop often, your economy will survive, and the people like me that only want to play the game and forget about economy simulators (we have much better games for this) will be able to progress using all resources that we have.

Maybe you're lucky enough, maybe you play a build that allow u go with full iiq, but for me (and much other people, you and GGG can see it on this forum) this game is totally under rewarding. There is one interesting post here about how this game is becoming more and more diablo 3.

Having 10 rich people with 1000 poor ones won't result in anything good.

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RaGoNXIII wrote:

In my opinion, you are thinking it wrong. Orbs should be used for crafting. If you want to adjust your market, then play with gold. If you remove the gold and merge both mechanics, you have to balance both. Currently, "crafting" isn't an option since you will waste it most of the times. If you make all cost the double of chaos or triple exalts (inflaction), but they drop often, your economy will survive, and the people like me that only want to play the game and forget about economy simulators (we have much better games for this) will be able to progress using all resources that we have.

Maybe you're lucky enough, maybe you play a build that allow u go with full iiq, but for me (and much other people, you and GGG can see it on this forum) this game is totally under rewarding. There is one interesting post here about how this game is becoming more and more diablo 3.

Having 10 rich people with 1000 poor ones won't result in anything good.

im not rich, im gearing up with a full tank set, im not saving orb for market either, im crafter, spent like 35ex+ a bunch of chaos and ton of fusing (just fail when tried 1200+ fusing to 6L my current chest) and im not running any lotto like another ppl trying to 6L their gear. My current orb being only 3gcp, 2chaos, and around 100 fusing nothing more. And i just said ppl usually save their orb instead of crafting... but still feel the game so good and so much reward. You guys just requesting a easy game with easy finish point to reach. And what will ppl do when they reach their point? They will feel bored when undeathable, one hit kill'em all... etc... they still quit soon.

I have a rather nice mod that would benefit everyone when it comes to maps in particular,
who here likes running through a whole map after missing a turn and wondering if there are any monsters?

to make maps less running and more action i suggest a moster counter much like in the Fetid pool except start at a higher number (10-20) so that one can judge exactly if they feel its worth it to kill the last few monsters.
I would like to hear feed back on this too, to see if it is a good idea. thanks for listening, the game is past my expectations in many areas so far!

I love this game so much even in its current state. I worry that the developers, while being artistic/nostalgically genius in their execution thus far, will spread the game too thin with all these different ideas for modes/ item tension preferences and so on. You can't divide the community up so much like this. Simply put:

The people who play Path of Exile now are playing Path of Exile because they like the game the way it is now. We all make and have choices. Please Remember This. If people dont want item tension then they are realistically probably playing Diablo or Torchlight at the moment.

Please dont.

I love you.

Thanks you.

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Chris wrote:

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FireSkull wrote:

Will one of the new topics in Development Manifesto contain info about cutthroat league?
(Btw the 7 new Cutthroat races are something I think people are very happy for. GJ. Very happy to see some focus on this.)

And +1 Wittgenstein. Nice forum.

I expect that based on the feedback of the set of cut-throat events we're running in a few days, we will probably discuss our long term plans for the league in the manifesto. There are some other more urgent topics I'd like to write about first. Enjoy the leagues!

I missed out on past oppurtunities, but I am looking forward to trying out cut throat in the races.

A couple suggestions that might add to the thrill of cut throat:

1) when you select amongst possible instances, you can't see who or how many players are in an instance -except those you are partied with.

2) players joining an instance do not always start at the same point, but randomly appear in the zone. This would put those already in an instance at just as much risk as those joining it. You wouldn't know if or how many players had joined your intance or might be quietly waiting at the edge of the screen to rush in and attack a battle weakened party.

Simple fix, Keystone: Reduces damage taken by a % based on how close you are to the attacker.

There ya go GGG, now you can figure out the amounts and % base, and numbers. I just gave you a great keystone idea for melee.

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Neode995 wrote:

Simple fix, Keystone: Reduces damage taken by a % based on how close you are to the attacker.

There ya go GGG, now you can figure out the amounts and % base, and numbers. I just gave you a great keystone idea for melee.

How about reading the manifestos before posting?