The interview had major "Do you not have phones?" energy

That's the vibe I got too, OP.

They brushed off or ignored item rarity affecting orbs, XP loss, 1 portal per map, and how it takes a ridiculous number of splinters/rituals/expeditions to access those pinnacle encounters.

Also, Jonathan was clueless as to why divines were being used to trade. He should know its because they drop the least. It shows he doesn't even understand how the economy works.

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whowe1#7244 wrote:

That's the vibe I got too, OP.

They brushed off or ignored item rarity affecting orbs, XP loss, 1 portal per map, and how it takes a ridiculous number of splinters/rituals/expeditions to access those pinnacle encounters.

Also, Jonathan was clueless as to why divines were being used to trade. He should know its because they drop the least. It shows he doesn't even understand how the economy works.

They addressed all of that. Rewatch the interview.

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Kodavor#1200 wrote:

They addressed all of that. Rewatch the interview.

Did you see them go silent when darth mentions melee and the tree with their defenses? the interview was abysmal and shows a lack of willing to budge because "it's how it's always been."

they had no clue about rarity and then dismissed ghazzy.

Darth asks about clarification on tiers because Jonathan said "t1" but meant the opposite. and was frustrated at his own rigidness

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toxiitea#5772 wrote:

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Kodavor#1200 wrote:

They addressed all of that. Rewatch the interview.

Did you see them go silent when darth mentions melee and the tree with their defenses? the interview was abysmal and shows a lack of willing to budge because "it's how it's always been."

they had no clue about rarity and then dismissed ghazzy.

Darth asks about clarification on tiers because Jonathan said "t1" but meant the opposite.

Rewatch the interview without BIAS! Make a log for yourself of what was asked and was it registered and received and addressed in ANY manner if that helps.

All of it was addressed.

My 10kh in PoE1 might have helped me a bit in understanding of what was said. So i might have a little extra clarity than a newer player.

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Kodavor#1200 wrote:

My 10kh in PoE1 might have helped me

no one gives a hoot about your illustrious 10k hours mate.

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Fae_Lyth#6750 wrote:

I don't think we watched the same interview.

Some people have very strong negativity bias and can even hear what they want to hear, instead of hearing what was said. Usually manifests as bad faith interpretations, intentionally misunderstanding or reading things into what was said. Also sometimes someone just doesn't have the industry or real world experience to be understanding.

Dev's working at a 150+ employee company can not possibly be omniscient gods nor are they always the person who makes decisions about an aspect of the game they are talking about GGG has 3 to 4 other lead designers.

Even in the interview Mark deferred to Johnathan sometimes and also vice versa on several occasions. This should be evidence that making a game isn't simple and no one can know 100% (if negativity bias hadn't firmly planted a narrative you prefer instead).

This is what a real workplace looks like in the real world.

Its not reasonable to expect the things you seem to expect. The most accomplished POE players regularly have to look things up or ask their chat to confirm things. Literally even Ben has done this countless times as I listen to his stream since early days. I've got 20k hours in POE1 and forget things and have to re-look them up all the time.

BTW I am highly critical of GGG and have several worries for POE2 myself, but that doesn't keep me from being intellectually honest and recognizing nuance and the clear passion and fucks that GGG gives, even if and when they as humans inevitably make mistakes or *gasp* do things I would prefer they do differently.

Currently I'm really worried that they forked POE2 and made an amazing combat system only to not have the balls to nerf the endgame into some semblance of that engaging combat, and we all just kinda wasted our time (people who want engaging combat and not a space ship shooter)

The actually scary reveal was that the Dev (not Jonathon):


A) Plays smurf classes - the comments about getting to T15 in under 20 maps (or whatever it was - it was significantly less that you'd need to fill even 1/3rd of the Atlas) means Ranger / Sorc smurf player. So: melee, you're really out of luck.

B) Said Dev doesn't understand (or professes to not understand) overflow coding issues that lead to 20,000,000 DPS from blowing up minions while being an Archmage. Directly stated he didn't know why it was happening.



That was the actually shocking bit.

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Kodavor#1200 wrote:

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whowe1#7244 wrote:

That's the vibe I got too, OP.

They brushed off or ignored item rarity affecting orbs, XP loss, 1 portal per map, and how it takes a ridiculous number of splinters/rituals/expeditions to access those pinnacle encounters.

Also, Jonathan was clueless as to why divines were being used to trade. He should know its because they drop the least. It shows he doesn't even understand how the economy works.

They addressed all of that. Rewatch the interview.

I did. They didn't address any of those issues in a satisfactory way.

They were seemingly oblivious to the fact that rarity affected the number of rare orb drops and once it was brought up to them they kind of scratched their heads. They suggested a divine orb sink in terms by adding more uniques to reroll, but that won't work because when you slam a chaos orb on an item it divines it first... so no one is wasting divines on that. They are simply too rare, especially if you don't stack rarity, which is something that not all classes can do easily... which means in addition to being underpowered some classes also don't find any loot. Its baffling that they would keep rarity in the game as is.

The justification for the xp penalty made no sense. Jonathan said the thinking behind it is that if you are dying all the time its keeping you "where you are supposed to be" in terms of difficulty... but the game doesn't work like that. The difficulty curve, to the extent that one exists, is actually very linear and levels off quickly (and I would argue too soon). The most common deaths are one shots and more often than not if something can 1 shot you on tier 15 it can also 1 shot you on a lower difficulty as well.. so it has nothing to do with punching above your weight. The real issue, is that once you reach the mid to late 90s a single death can erase 10+ maps worth of XP. This isn't "dying all the time" or "punching above your weight" its bad balance and not respecting people's time. Also, it incentivizes people to never do challenging content. Mark seemed to think all of the penalties stacked up were a bit too harsh but didn't really have a solution. The solution is to either get rid of the penalty or have maps go higher than tier 18 (to like tier 25 or something), that way you can still earn a decent amount of XP from a map at level 90+ such that single death doesn't wipe out a ton of maps worth of progress.

The one portal thing in regular maps they basically didn't give a clear answer for.

They didn't touch on pinnacle encounters being too difficult to access at all except for Arbiter. They said they have to do more to get people into endgame, but what does that mean, exactly?

Oh, and I didn't mention it before, but the comment they made when asked about boots is ridiculous. How can they be ok with 99% of boots dropping being automatic trash? Jonathan doesn't think its a problem and Mark "thinks its good". It's "good" that the loot is all trash?

Can't say I agree with the OP, overall. When they didn't know, they said as much and that they would investigate. That's exactly what they should do when they do don't know.

They did make a few missteps, sure. Like bleeding triggering even with shields is obviously something that would utterly destroy Chaos Innoculation unless CI is paired with MoM. So I rather doubt that it is actually meant to do that.

Beyond that, about the worst I can say is that they didn't consider the impact of rarity on currency essentially amounting to more (because 1 chance orb instead of a chance shard is 9 more shards), but the interviewers seemed to wake them up to that. And they are a bit out of touch as the state of mace. Yeah, it can be played, sure, but that doesn't change that it feels bad to do so. And beyond that, they're still sticking to their ascendancy points plan, which is something they'll obviously need a lot more negative feedback on, until hopefully they wise up and change it.

Also, their idea that we can't sustain because we're not ready for the content is silly. The problem isn't really the difficulty, and really, one of the problems I have is that the content is so far below me. The sustain issue has more to do with level 1 waystones dropping on a level 8 map. If a level 8 waystone didn't drop anything lower than a level 7, I'd be doing fine.

Overall, I think they did pretty well.

That said, I do question some of their design decisions. Like putting in the most non-functional versions of PoE1 mechanics so they can hopefully come up with a better solution to fix it than what they did in PoE1 ;)

I agree was not a good look for sure.
The worst was the assendency is just so bad and most important not fun.