Microtransactions during a paid EA

https://www.pathofexile.com/shop/category/po-e2-mystery-boxes

Is not a good look, especially when the game in on fire right now. Why are you fishing for more money? You literally sold at least a million EA accesses.

Its pretty yikes to me to see the lootbox announced in an EA everyone paid to get into while the game is in a horrendous state. It's not a good sign of where GGG's priorities are at.

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RedaOu#0533 wrote:

Is not a good look...Its pretty yikes...It's not a good sign

I might entertain this needless hand-wringing if there were even the smallest indication that they were neglecting the product, but you can just click over to the patch forum to see that they are working their asses off.

Putting a hold on MTX isn't going to magically accelerate fixes for crashes or performance issues or address balance and design issues if those are your concern; the resources allocated to these tasks are unrelated. And what do you expect them to do with the people whose job it is to create MTX while they wait through this indefinite moratorium for approval to return to work? If your answer is reassign them to other tasks congrats now you have distracted the teams and leaders involved in addressing the issues with the patch because they have to spend time finding work for these borrowed resources and incorporating them into existing work pipelines, etc.

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Kerchunk#7797 wrote:

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RedaOu#0533 wrote:

Is not a good look...Its pretty yikes...It's not a good sign

I might entertain this needless hand-wringing if there were even the smallest indication that they were neglecting the product, but you can just click over to the patch forum to see that they are working their asses off.

Putting a hold on MTX isn't going to magically accelerate fixes for crashes or performance issues or address balance and design issues if those are your concern; the resources allocated to these tasks are unrelated. And what do you expect them to do with the people whose job it is to create MTX while they wait through this indefinite moratorium for approval to return to work? If your answer is reassign them to other tasks congrats now you have distracted the teams and leaders involved in addressing the issues with the patch because they have to spend time finding work for these borrowed resources and incorporating them into existing work pipelines, etc.

I think what you're missing is that the workflows for creating MTX are not particularly unique or specialised. MTX takes generic modelling, VFX and coding work. That work can absolutely be focused elsewhere, like on the massive amount of work that will be required to create all the content for the new acts. Saying "well the MTX team is assigned to MTX so..." is not only extremely presumptive about GGG's internal structure, but also just ignorant of how games get developed.

But yes there is still the issue of trying to milk the playerbase while the game is literally burning down. Even if it were true that the people working on MTX could do literally nothing else, there would still be the issue of how the devs treat and respect the playerbase and their time and money.

It's not about whether effort could be applied elsewhere. It's whether you approach a beggar and hold out your hand to them for a tip.

Anyway at the very least they could absolutely put the "MTX team" on the PoE1 -> PoE2 conversion which GGG have just said is a huge task and vital for WASD in PoE1.

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RedaOu#0533 wrote:

MTX takes generic modelling, VFX and coding work.

Okay, that's not a workflow. Those are just skills. I'm talking about how the work gets done within a studio. Resources are organized into teams, teams have leads and those leads have to manage that team to plan work in advance and assign tasks to individuals; each team will have their own cadence for defining and organizing that work, communicating with each other and across teams on their daily progress and status, and carefully managing delivery, feedback, and approval cycles, so they deliver assets in alignment with planned release cycles.

You can't just reach in and pluck someone from one group and toss them into another. These are real living messy human beings not interchangeable parts in a machine. There's overhead in stopping prior work, there's overhead in finding new work for them to do, there's overhead in transitioning that new work from whoever it was assigned to previously, and there's overhead in the personalities and politics of it all.

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But yes there is still the issue of trying to milk the playerbase

All right just give me a break if you can find one. Nobody is being "milked" in this scenario. MTX are and always have been 100% completely voluntary. If people want to milk themselves that's their prerogative and just about less than none of your business.

All of this is moot anyway because I assure you Tencent isn't just going to sit back and let GGG shut down a major revenue stream indefinitely 'cause "it's not a good look."

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Kerchunk#7797 wrote:

You can't just reach in and pluck someone from one group and toss them into another. These are real living messy human beings not interchangeable parts in a machine. There's overhead in stopping prior work, there's overhead in finding new work for them to do, there's overhead in transitioning that new work from whoever it was assigned to previously, and there's overhead in the personalities and politics of it all.

First of all, nothing I've said requires any groups or team to be broken up, you're just adding that to make it sound worse. Secondly, you absolutely can reassign groups to other work on the fly.

I have both been in teams that were reassigned on the fly and I have instructed teams in organisations I've been involved in to apply themselves to different work. This is actually quite a normal of having a job and working in a large organisation.

Nah posting MTX is fine. If people want to buy it, they can. It's not mandatory and doesn't affect the game in any way..

They're addressing concerns and putting out fires as fast as they can. Have a little faith.

Ok I am going to play devils advocate on this one…..
The OP opening post was unclear, but his second post explains his issue and makes it clear.
IF I’ve understood correctly he is saying the GFX team have spent time (man hours) making mystery box content which could have been used to either :-
a) finish acts 4-6 GFX;
b) finish the GFX work to allow the import (into PoE2) of MTX players have already paid for in PoE1.

IF that is the OPs point then I kind of agree. Sure it’s a double edged sword, in that GGG needs revenue to pay the workers and at the same time keep their promises (to import all compatible MTX into PoE2).
Which they should do is arguable either way tbh.

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Timbo Zero#8289 wrote:

GGG needs revenue to pay the workers and at the same time keep their promises (to import all compatible MTX into PoE2).

If this EA was purely F2P I would understand it more, since financial pressures might outweigh the "bad PR" of MTX in EA + opportunity cost of other work they could be doing.

But they just made at least like 30m USD revenue off the EA access sale, which is probably more than they've made from any league over many years past. Their timeline was 6months to a year but even if it takes a two years, 30m over 2 years is more than they've ever made in that amount of time in PoE1 league MTX, and certainly more than enough to fund their entire team for that period of time until a full 1.0 release.

This makes the "bad PR" worse because it looks far more like greed instead of legitimate financial pressures.

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RedaOu#0533 wrote:

https://www.pathofexile.com/shop/category/po-e2-mystery-boxes

Is not a good look, especially when the game in on fire right now. Why are you fishing for more money? You literally sold at least a million EA accesses.

Its pretty yikes to me to see the lootbox announced in an EA everyone paid to get into while the game is in a horrendous state. It's not a good sign of where GGG's priorities are at.

OK, fair, and I know lootboxes has a terrible name in gaming generally, but

It's just not here

It's always like this with GGG, that's their whole business model and player community are fine with it, over a decade, it might surprised a lot of people the whole gaming industry going free to play + live-service + seasons + cosmetics and such, started right here with POE, and lootboxes is one of them it's a norm, how it became cancer especially with Ubisoft products I don't know, but it's just different to POE community.

I'm not saying greed is good, even if it is OK still people allowed different opinions, but you might want to take consider that this is now a Tencent game, if you have a chinese friend go ask him and he will tell you Tencent loves money loves, so it's not gonna change, might prepare yourself a little.

Games free, p2w doesn't exist.
I couldn't care less if they add cosmetics