[Megathread] Path of Exile

[bloodwulf]

I enjoyed Heist up to the point where I failed to 6-link a chest within 2500 fusings. the ammount of currency I threw on those fuses, I could have bought a already 6-linked +1 spectre chest with waaaaay better stats then the one I have, and a +1 minion and spell gem wand. F

Now I just can't be bothered to play it.

You could of autolinked it with the craft at 1500 i think.

[Enjeh]

You could of autolinked it with the craft at 1500 i think.

Yeah but I used the fuses I got as I played, so I never actually had more then 100 on me, unless I sold stuff for fuses.

I knew that my luck would run out eventually, the last 7-8 6-link's that I've made have been around 200-900 fuses. luckiest being 200 for a Belly, then 3 hours later 10 fuses on a Oro's. lol

[bloodwulf]

Yeah but I used the fuses I got as I played, so I never actually had more then 100 on me, unless I sold stuff for fuses.

I knew that my luck would run out eventually, the last 7-8 6-link's that I've made have been around 200-900 fuses. luckiest being 200 for a Belly, then 3 hours later 10 fuses on a Oro's. lol

RNG sucks sometimes. I kinda wish there was a deep pity timer, that say if you hit X amount of fuses (say 1700) it increases the chance. But Chris is incredibly vocal against pity timers. This league i have gotten a ton of 6 links and actually did not have to manually link anything on my own, as i got the cards for the item level 100 resist str armor and was able to craft from that. I ironically had a 6 link replica oro's drop on my last grand heist i ran, but that is basically only worth a divine. I really hoped the Replicas would open some new builds/playstyles but aside from a rare handful, they really are just 1-2c vendor trash.

- - - Updated - - -

From Path of Exile's release in 2013 until late 2015, we struggled to grow the community and were getting worried as the game's popularity started to slowly decline. We tried releases of many different sizes and cadences, before eventually settling into a 13-week cycle with the launch of Talisman in December 2015. Since then, we have developed 19 leagues with this cadence and had a lot of success with it. Path of Exile grew exponentially and allowed us to put even more content into each expansion to meet the expectations of our growing community. I even presented a GDC Talk on this process, which was very well-received within the gamedev industry. I still receive mail every week from developers at other studios who feel that the talk was of great value for their teams. Things were going well and we thought we knew exactly what we were doing.

Then 2020 hit and exposed just how vulnerable our development process was to unexpected events. To some extent, we were lucky that a black swan event (such as a key team member leaving) hadn't caused similar disruption to our schedule before this. We want to preface this by saying that the government-mandated lockdowns were not the root cause of the issues, but they had a significant impact and added to an already high-pressure situation. Due to the way we've been developing expansions, we had almost no wiggle room to manage the additional overheads of lockdown. Even under normal circumstances, some expansions were coming in quite close to the wire. There is a reasonable chance that we may experience another lockdown, or some other unforeseen event that adds extra pressure and we need to create a development plan that has enough breathing room to allow that to happen. After two lockdowns, we delayed Heist's release by a week and it was still not enough to mitigate the combination of constrained resources and ambitious development scope, as Heist was by far the highest-content league in PoE's history. (Adding to this pressure, our country's borders are closed which means our international hiring is frozen for the foreseeable future).

Which leads to the next issue - regardless of how difficult pandemic pressures make development, it's genuinely hard to scope out how long a Path of Exile expansion will take to develop. Some systems that appear easy to create end up taking several iterations to get right. Conversely, some things that felt like they'd be really hard just come together quickly and work the first time. Usually these over- and under-estimates average out during the development of an expansion, but sometimes you get ones that are developed a lot faster (Legion) or slower (Delve) than usual. If you categorise Path of Exile releases into the "good" and "bad" ones, you see a clear pattern of times when development took less (or more) time than expected. This shows that correct scoping and risk mitigation is critical to ensuring a good Path of Exile launch.

Another important topic to discuss is that of Feature Creep. This is when the featureset of a piece of software gradually increases over time as developers think of more cool stuff to add, eventually causing production problems. This is a somewhat common problem in software development (for example, there's a boss in Diablo II called Creeping Feature as a nod to this, over 20 years ago). While Feature Creep sounds like a terrible thing, it can often be great for making a game feel special. A lot of the stuff that makes Path of Exile special was added because a developer thought of something cool and worked hard to squeeze it in a specific release. While Feature Creep can wreak havoc on a schedule (and hence the overall quality of an expansion at launch), it's also important to make sure that developers have a way to still add those special touches that make the game feel like it has endless stuff to discover. We feel that this is best done in the planning phase rather than late in development when such changes can affect the quality of release.

Late in Heist's development cycle, we had a serious internal discussion about how we could restructure our development process so that subsequent expansions are less risky. This discussion resulted in an experiment that we decided to carry out for the next three month cycle.

We have defined a very specific scope for December's 3.13 expansion. It contains everything that a large Path of Exile expansion needs, but no more. I am personally handling the production of this expansion to make sure that no work creeps in that isn't in the planned scope. The schedule that we will hopefully achieve with this approach will likely have everything quite playable and ready for gameplay iteration before our marketing deadline, and in a very stable and polished state by the time it is released.

The positive consequences of this experiment are clear: if it succeeds, we'll be able to deliver 3.13 on-time, with a strong stable launch, plenty of gameplay iteration and solid testing of features. If this experiment works as we expect it to, we'll be able to continue using it for future expansions which will allow us to continue with our 13-week expansion cycle, which we strongly feel is best for the continued growth and long-term health of Path of Exile in the period before Path of Exile 2 is released.

This experiment comes with some side effects, however. You'll definitely notice that the patch notes are much, much shorter than they usually are. That's because we're focusing on getting the most important changes done, and doing them well. I'm aiming for us to try to fit the patch notes on just a few pages, if we can manage it. This does mean that we have had to be careful to pick our battles though - the balance changes we are doing have been carefully chosen to have the largest impact and fix real problems. It's also likely that we'll front-load the announcement to have more of the expansion's contents revealed at once, reducing the number of small teasers we post in the weeks following announcement.

Our goal is that 3.13 takes 50% of the overall development hours of Heist (which means going from a situation with overtime to a situation with testing time), and yet feels like a large December expansion. If you're interested, it's an Atlas expansion (like War or Conquerors) with an in-area combat league and a few other bits and pieces. We'll also be announcing it in a slightly different way than we usually do. Stay tuned!
Posted by Chris

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2977334

Shorter Patch notes means some flavor/optional stuff is going to be cut.
Focus on narrow development of the expansion content is good.
Taking 50% of the development time of Heist is ambitious.
An Atlas Expansion with in area combat is great.

The big takeaway for me is, the stipulation that to keep the 13 week cycle they have to succeed here. That means they are considering changing it, which shows the willingness to put everything on the line to make better content.

[Edge-]

As they've repeatedly said, "actions speak louder than words".

I'll wait to see how they deliver on this, and I don't know why this wasn't their approach from the start given that they're also working on POE 2. Heist seemed like it was designed with the notion that the whole studio would be working on it, not part of it while the rest are on the expansion.

[bloodwulf]

As they've repeatedly said, "actions speak louder than words".

I'll wait to see how they deliver on this, and I don't know why this wasn't their approach from the start given that they're also working on POE 2. Heist seemed like it was designed with the notion that the whole studio would be working on it, not part of it while the rest are on the expansion.

Agreed entirely. Considering we have had a lot of leagues in recent years such Bestiary/Synth/Harvest/Heist that have had bad retention and/or bad launches, they obviously needed to reevaluate their cycles. GGG is always acting "surprisepikachu.jpg" every time their crunch cycles lead to 2-3 weeks of broken or buggy content. Then they are supposedly dedicating a large amount of manpower to POE2, yet also wanting to release incredibly ambitious in scope seasons every 13 weeks. Something has got to change, and hopefully this means a smaller more focused season.

[Fencers]

I always admired GGG's candor but in this case, I think it was somewhat forced by the unevenness of the last few leagues.

[kaminaris]

This means we will be getting less content with same amount of bugs because no matter how much you test software internally you are not able to reproduce every case.

Meaning there will still be threads on reddit saying something sucks and something is broken.

This has been the case with soft development for like 30 years now and its not magically gonna change. It was also reason why agile development came to be.

The only thing that can actually break that cycle is to let people test their new leagues like 2 weeks earlier to gather issues and fix them. Kinda like WoW does with PTR.

Let me tell you this, no amount of QAs in WoW would be able to come even remotely close what what people on PTR can find.

I for once, didn't have issues with new league. Yet I don't deny they existed but why? Because of different internet connection? Different PC setup? Different programms running?
Good luck trying to reproduce endless possibilities in your QA team.

[bloodwulf]

This means we will be getting less content with same amount of bugs because no matter how much you test software internally you are not able to reproduce every case.

Meaning there will still be threads on reddit saying something sucks and something is broken.

This has been the case with soft development for like 30 years now and its not magically gonna change. It was also reason why agile development came to be.

The only thing that can actually break that cycle is to let people test their new leagues like 2 weeks earlier to gather issues and fix them. Kinda like WoW does with PTR.

Let me tell you this, no amount of QAs in WoW would be able to come even remotely close what what people on PTR can find.

I for once, didn't have issues with new league. Yet I don't deny they existed but why? Because of different internet connection? Different PC setup? Different programms running?
Good luck trying to reproduce endless possibilities in your QA team.

Problem is, GGG essentially has no QA team of any merit. They let incredibly obvious issues slip by that are caught within an hour of launch (Heist portals being lost due to Rogue's Harbor instance being full for example). They need to narrow the scope of their leagues if we expect any change. They have stretched themselves too thin with work on hugely ambitious leagues, preliminary work on the next league, and POE2. Best case for this game is if they do narrow scope launches until POE2 so they can recover manpower from that and refocus the full staff on the singular game again. Now we will still launch with bugs and issues, but typically small scope in-atlas leagues have less gamebreaking\economybreaking issues than the large ambitious leagues.

[Vynx]

Let me tell you this, no amount of QAs in WoW would be able to come even remotely close what what people on PTR can find.

I've been doing software testing for 6 years now, and I'm still amazed sometimes by the issues clients sometimes find.
The environment someone's using for a software is a huge variable.
I thing GGG doesn't want to have a PTR because it will kill somehow the hype of a new league, which in return will get less MTX and supporter packs being bought.

[Nzx]

You know it's actually fucking crazy reading threads like this and on the PoE subreddit in comparison to just playing the game without engaging with its community. I haven't had a single locked-out heist, or any crashes. The content I don't enjoy (and there's very little of it) I just don't engage with, and the only league I've ever disliked in my ~1k hours of play is Harvest, because it drove my organisational mind insane. Yeah it's all anecdotal, but every time I read people posting about this game I get the feeling that they had a single crash one time (much like all the WoW people who come here when they get declined for one +15 and say the entire game needs rebalancing) and now GGG are the enemy and they're useless at development and whatever else. There's a lot to be said about negativity breeding negativity, and this game's community is rock-solid proof of that.

[solinari6]

Is it really that hard to believe that other people have different experiences than you? When Heist came out, on PS4, it was crashing for me about twice an hour. It was CRAZY. If you read the ps4 reddit, you would see it was not a unique problem AT ALL. I came back and tried it after the latest patch, and haven't had a crash since. There was a serious problem, but it looks like it was mostly fixed. If your configuration never gave you constant crashes, consider your self lucky, instead of others whiny.

[Kelimbror]

Playing Quins Ethical Hardcore League....lost my first character already. I normally don't play hardcore game modes, but this is super pepega town and having fun.

[NoiseTank13]

You know it's actually fucking crazy reading threads like this and on the PoE subreddit in comparison to just playing the game without engaging with its community. I haven't had a single locked-out heist, or any crashes. The content I don't enjoy (and there's very little of it) I just don't engage with, and the only league I've ever disliked in my ~1k hours of play is Harvest, because it drove my organisational mind insane. Yeah it's all anecdotal, but every time I read people posting about this game I get the feeling that they had a single crash one time (much like all the WoW people who come here when they get declined for one +15 and say the entire game needs rebalancing) and now GGG are the enemy and they're useless at development and whatever else. There's a lot to be said about negativity breeding negativity, and this game's community is rock-solid proof of that.

PS4 was massively fucked over. PC had it's own share of fuckery, but PS4 was the worst.

I do get the most CTD's with no explanation in this league than any other. Anecdotal I'll grant you, but I'm not alone.

[kaminaris]

I've been doing software testing for 6 years now, and I'm still amazed sometimes by the issues clients sometimes find.
The environment someone's using for a software is a huge variable.
I thing GGG doesn't want to have a PTR because it will kill somehow the hype of a new league, which in return will get less MTX and supporter packs being bought.

And this is the only way to actually find all bugs, i know it makes less hype of the new league but its either that, or customers will drill into their heads that this things cannot be avoided.

- - - Updated - - -

You know it's actually fucking crazy reading threads like this and on the PoE subreddit in comparison to just playing the game without engaging with its community. I haven't had a single locked-out heist, or any crashes. The content I don't enjoy (and there's very little of it) I just don't engage with, and the only league I've ever disliked in my ~1k hours of play is Harvest, because it drove my organisational mind insane. Yeah it's all anecdotal, but every time I read people posting about this game I get the feeling that they had a single crash one time (much like all the WoW people who come here when they get declined for one +15 and say the entire game needs rebalancing) and now GGG are the enemy and they're useless at development and whatever else. There's a lot to be said about negativity breeding negativity, and this game's community is rock-solid proof of that.

You can tell that watching hundreds of streams, yes crashes did happen but not even remotely as close as meme-land reddit spergs paint it.

- - - Updated - - -

Is it really that hard to believe that other people have different experiences than you? When Heist came out, on PS4, it was crashing for me about twice an hour. It was CRAZY. If you read the ps4 reddit, you would see it was not a unique problem AT ALL. I came back and tried it after the latest patch, and haven't had a crash since. There was a serious problem, but it looks like it was mostly fixed. If your configuration never gave you constant crashes, consider your self lucky, instead of others whiny.

No, you need to consider yourself UNLUCKY to actually have constant issues. Streams were proof of that.

[solinari6]

No, you need to consider yourself UNLUCKY to actually have constant issues. Streams were proof of that.

Yes, I'm sure that post GGG made about how sorry they were they released the game the way it was, and how they were going to re-evaluate how they do expansions in the future to make sure that the scope doesn't get away from them ... I'm sure that was all just to placate the whiny reddit babies.

[kaminaris]

Yes, I'm sure that post GGG made about how sorry they were they released the game the way it was, and how they were going to re-evaluate how they do expansions in the future to make sure that the scope doesn't get away from them ... I'm sure that was all just to placate the whiny reddit babies.

Already explained:
You can tell that watching hundreds of streams, yes crashes did happen but not even remotely as close as meme-land reddit spergs paint it.

[solinari6]

Already explained:
You can tell that watching hundreds of streams, yes crashes did happen but not even remotely as close as meme-land reddit spergs paint it.

I disagree.

[Highmitsu]

The league itself took a while to get where it is now, that's for sure. NPCS not opening doors, getting stuck, not being responsive... that sorta stuff happened for almost everyone, I think. Biggest bug for me was not being able to fight Conquerers for 3 days which was pretty stupid, to be honest.

[unfilteredJW]

Already explained:
You can tell that watching hundreds of streams, yes crashes did happen but not even remotely as close as meme-land reddit spergs paint it.

Hundreds you say?

[Cyclone Jack]

You can tell that watching hundreds of streams, yes crashes did happen but not even remotely as close as meme-land reddit spergs paint it.

This was the least stable release for me, and I have been playing since before Act 2 was added to the game.