Shiverwarp

Lioneye's Watch (Chris Wilson) September 18th Transcription

Sep 19th, 2016
6,595
0
Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
text 104.29 KB | None | 0 0
  1. ProjectPT: So we had, uh, 15 minutes before we started, is there anything non-PoE you want to rant about there Chris?
  2.  
  3. Chris Wilson: Uhm, that's a good question...
  4.  
  5. ProjectPT: (laughs) While we just fill some dead air.
  6.  
  7. LiftingNerdBro: Have you gone to bed, or did you just wake up?
  8.  
  9. Chris Wilson: I woke up at 5:40 in the morning, so it was a couple hours early for me, but otherwise fine.
  10.  
  11. LiftingNerdBro: Is it possible for someone like you Chris, to have like, a normal sleep schedule?
  12.  
  13. Chris Wilson: Normally yes, around releases... No.
  14.  
  15. LiftingNerdBro: (laughs) I can imagine
  16.  
  17. Chris Wilson: It starts to get later and later. The reason is, when someone needs to be the person setting off builds and making sure that they complete. You know, the upload to the servers and stuff, I'd rather not inflict that on one of the staff, you know they kind of try to live 9 to 5, kind of jobs, as much as possible. I don't want to say to them you know, hey, can you stick around until 4 AM and watch a progress bar? So instead it's me!
  18.  
  19. LiftingNerdBro: The worst thing is repairing a broken sleep schedule, though.
  20.  
  21. Chris Wilson: Yeah... it's worse because the crunch doesn't end, that's really when the second type of crunch starts. Like the first one is the silent urgency of "We're not going to be finished in time, we have to go fast so we have something for the players." And then the 'loud' urgency is "Things are broken! Why aren't you fixing them?"
  22.  
  23. LiftingNerdBro: I haven't seen anything like that!
  24.  
  25. Chris Wilson: Well this time we had some server memory issues, at the first couple of hours that were very stressful. It took us a couple of hours to get a fix, a temporary fix in, and then several days of re-writing stuff to get it fully solved.
  26.  
  27. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah, I can imagine.
  28.  
  29. ProjectPT: That was some grievances that happened there.
  30.  
  31. HegemonyTV: Do you some sort of pullout couch at the office, where you can just lay and sleep, maybe put a sign on you "Don't bother me unless the servers are dying"? (laughs)
  32.  
  33. Chris Wilson: I have a regular couch, in my office, so I just sleep on that. And people do bother me. Or they come and stand in my office and talk to each other, even though I'm lying there sleeping.
  34.  
  35. (laughter)
  36.  
  37. Chris Wilson: Yeah, 'tis a bit strange.
  38.  
  39. HegemonyTV: "I don't know if this is worth waking up Chris... Do you think this is worth waking him up?"
  40.  
  41. Chris Wilson: "Why does that guy have a sleeping bag?"
  42.  
  43. (laughter)
  44.  
  45. LiftingNerdBro: Let's see here, the way we're going to do it here, uh, Chris, is like, in 5 minutes, we're just going to put on some intro music, you and I, or all of us, we can just all go over that in the meanwhile. And around, in 13 minutes, we'll just start the podcast.
  46.  
  47. ProjectPT: If you have things you need to do right now, feel free to run around. We don't need you for 12 minutes.
  48.  
  49. Chris Wilson: I should be fine. So in the intro music is on, and we're talking, is that something people can hear?
  50.  
  51. ProjectPT: Yeah, yeah. No making fun of specific people you hate.
  52.  
  53. Chris Wilson: Right.
  54.  
  55. LiftingNerdBro: We ARE live now, just... just to...
  56.  
  57. Chris Wilson: Okay cool.
  58.  
  59. LiftingNerdBro: Probably should have said that when I called you up...
  60.  
  61. (laughter)
  62.  
  63. ProjectPT: We could have found out if Chris was a RACIST!
  64.  
  65. Chris Wilson: I'll be careful what I say.
  66.  
  67. ProjectPT: That actually, like, unrelated... How much does it suck, like having to be in a PR position, where everything you say is completely taken in literal context? You know if some people might have said mean things, about...
  68.  
  69. Chris Wilson: The worst thing about it, is that, even if you're careful, and say the correct things, they still get quoted, out of context, in a different context. Like for example - I was thinking about this, this morning, when the Atlas launch happened, other than the memory issue, things went pretty well! We said look, we had a great launch guys! Thanks very much for your support, and all that stuff. And so people started quoting "Most successful launch ever!" Which was something we said about a launch that we previously described as our most successful ever - because it WAS... And so, then people are saying "I don't see how they can describe this as their most successful launch ever when there's this problem." Okay yeah but we DIDN'T... So there's this case when... in that case, is just something being quoted, which IS technically a quote, but from a different period of time.
  70.  
  71. LiftingNerdBro: I know Eminem made a song about people misunderstanding. I would like to hear you do the same... I would like to hear a Chris rap.
  72.  
  73. Chris Wilson: I'm really bad at rapping.
  74.  
  75. LiftingNerdBro: I'm sure you can pull it off. But yeah, I guess that's what we should expect in the next patch.
  76.  
  77. ProjectPT: Patch 2.5 - Path of Exile: Rapping edition
  78.  
  79. Chris Wilson: The performing trick I do on camera is reading Chinese stuff, for um, for various regions we do that speak Chinese, like Taiwan, and mainland China. The publishers over there absolutely love getting me to read messages for their communities-
  80.  
  81. (laughter)
  82.  
  83. Chris Wilson: Because, as my pronunciation gets better, it sounds a little more believable over time.
  84.  
  85. HegemonyTV: Oh nice, nice. So with the whole voice acting over there, is it the same? In the Chinese form? Like for all the characters? You know like, do they have their own set of voice actors? And are you still Chrilson over there?
  86.  
  87. Chris Wilson: I have no idea who plays Chrilson. Yeah there is a Chinese voice acted version. I don't think necessarily that the Chinese players... Maybe they have heard the voice acting. I'm not sure. But it has, a lot of it has been recorded. We actually have a full Russian dub as well, that Garena was using, on the Russian servers, and as soon as we have the tech to support two voice acting versions, in our main GGG one, we'll make the Russian one available for the players who would prefer to hear that. And we uh, updated it with all the Atlas stuff recently, so we have Shaper and Zana dialogue and so on in Russian that no ones heard yet, until we can get it into the game.
  88.  
  89. LiftingNerdBro: Are you in the office right now?
  90.  
  91. Chris Wilson: Yup, I'm at the office. I was going to do this from home, but then I realized I had left my good microphone at the office. And I didn't want to subject the community to the microphone that Kripparian described as "Get off my stream".
  92.  
  93. (laughter)
  94.  
  95. LiftingNerdBro: I think I actually saw that! (laughing) Microphones are important.
  96.  
  97. Chris Wilson: Well the problem with using a Macbook's internal microphone is, it's just next to whatever kind of loud fan is just sitting on the CPU, and of course that doesn't help.
  98.  
  99. ProjectPT: What do you mean? Genius design! Always put the audio tools right behind the speaker.
  100.  
  101. HegemonyTV: Speaking of which...
  102.  
  103. LiftingNerdBro: I think yours is fine this time, Hege. I don't hear any... auto adjusting at least. But the last time we did the podcast, we had a fatal driver crash in the middle of it. We had to restart the entire computer. Sound disappeared. We're really hoping that's not going to happen this time. But uh, guys in chat, if it happens, we'll be right back! But we're hoping not.
  104.  
  105. Chris Wilson: What's the URL for the stream so I can tweet it out at the right time?
  106.  
  107. LiftingNerdBro: It is twitch.tv/liftingnerdbro
  108.  
  109. ProjectPT: You know you could put it in the Skype conversation
  110.  
  111. Chris Wilson: Cool I've got it.
  112.  
  113. LiftingNerdBro: Uhhh I'm scared to type stuff
  114.  
  115. ProjectPT: Oh right, I get it.
  116.  
  117. LiftingNerdBro: I'll just ruin the overlay. Uhh.. oh! I'll just put on the intro music here. And then we will, we'll just all go over this, I'm not sure if you guys can hear it.
  118.  
  119. ProjectPT: Well I muted wrong, I have to deal with like, audio overlap, and that would make me want to kill myself. Just a little bit.
  120.  
  121. LiftingNerdBro: Takes a very special skill to uh, separate.
  122.  
  123. ProjectPT: (laughs) Gets annoying. Well we failed about talking about Non-PoE related stuff before so... Let's try that again!
  124.  
  125. LiftingNerdBro: I don't know how to!
  126.  
  127. ProjectPT: (chuckles)
  128.  
  129. Chris Wilson: Yeah I mean, what else do we do? In my case it's just PoE. Not sure about you guys
  130.  
  131. LiftingNerdBro: I was actually wondering, Chris, with you, like, almost 24 hours of day, even when you sleep I'm sure, is Path of Exile. What do you do to take a break every now and then? Like, how do you de-stress?
  132.  
  133. Chris Wilson: I've been enjoying playing Magic the Gathering. That's cool, we play it at the office, and do drafts. I spend a bunch of time just sorting out my collection and just... you know, putting cards in sleeves, and sleeves in folders, and... you know, updating spreadsheets and that kind of stuff. Pretty geeky but, that's one of my hobbies, otherwise I try to make time to hang out with my wife, you know watch some TV and do stuff around the house. I got a pressure washer, and did some water blasting last weekend, around the house. Like externally!
  134.  
  135. LiftingNerdBro: (laughs)
  136.  
  137. Chris Wilson: And that was remarkably time consuming, therapeutic, and made me sore. Which is kind of... bad.
  138.  
  139. ProjectPT: Do you have a uh, office cube format?
  140.  
  141. Chris Wilson: We... don't have an office cube for magic, no. But we've been drafting the new Conspiracy set, recently, which has been a lot of fun. Which is designed for drafting. And it's good for inducting new people into the game.
  142.  
  143. ProjectPT: Mmhmm.
  144.  
  145. LiftingNerdBro: What have you been up to PT?
  146.  
  147. ProjectPT: Uhh.. busy. Busy working on youtube and all that fun stuff.
  148.  
  149. LiftingNerdBro: The rips are pretty good.
  150.  
  151. ProjectPT: So far people have been enjoying it. Everyone likes to watch other people fail! Turns out that's a common internet thing.
  152.  
  153. LiftingNerdBro: Yes... that's always gonna win.
  154.  
  155. HegemonyTV: So out of your staff, who would you, how would you rank, uh, the Magic The Gathering players?
  156.  
  157. Chris Wilson: We have some pretty good ones. There's this trophy in Auckland, well, in New Zealand, which is given out to the person who wins the annual Vintage tournament every year. Vintage is the format where you can play with all the old cards. And so our artist team are competing very hard to get on the trophy as much as possible. So we had 2007, and 2008, that was me and Eric winning, and then there was a big gap of no GGG people winning, but Gary, one of our customer support staff one it, this year, Hrishi, one of our designers, coming in second. So we have the trophy back now, and that's good!
  158.  
  159. (laughter)
  160.  
  161. LiftingNerdBro: Good for morale.
  162.  
  163. HegemonyTV: There's some company pride. Yeah.
  164.  
  165. Chris Wilson: Exactly. The rest of the competitors don't really understand that they're all the GGG people are trying to beat.
  166.  
  167. ProjectPT: Have you done any modern formats? Or did you never really get into that when they...
  168.  
  169. Chris Wilson: We haven't avoided. Unfortunately a lot of our staff play Vintage and Old-school. And by a lot I mean, it's popular, but not more like 5 people. And uhm... most people enjoy drafting or playing casually. And we have an up swelling of people just learning the game.
  170.  
  171. ProjectPT: Yeah.
  172.  
  173. Chris Wilson: Some of our newer staff are new people playing. So there's a lot of casual decks being thrown around.
  174.  
  175. ProjectPT: Timmys! Gotta have your Timmys.
  176.  
  177. LiftingNerdBro: When you guys play Magic The Gathering, like, real life format, do you also enjoy the online game? Or the game for PC?
  178.  
  179. Chris Wilson: The online one with all the digital cards?
  180.  
  181. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah
  182.  
  183. Chris Wilson: Ummm... I haven't enjoyed that one. But I'm sure I will at some stage in the future when I get into it.
  184.  
  185. LiftingNerdBro: Okay. I just heard a lot of people feel like the authentic experience is much more prevalent when you're sitting with the cards, but... I guess...
  186.  
  187. Chris Wilson: There's some subtlety to it that makes it harder for me to get into the online one, like for example it's a great place to find people to play vintage with, but then the good cards they printed recently aren't available on the online version until say November, so there's this gap of a few months where you can't play strictly "correct" Magic The Gathering, if you see what I mean?
  188.  
  189. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah okay.
  190.  
  191. Chris Wilson: So that particular border case for me... it's not really particularly useful. But a lot of people enjoy it from what I hear.
  192.  
  193. LiftingNerdBro: Okay. So I guess the real question is, when do you start developing Path of Exile, and start to play Hearthstone?
  194.  
  195. (laughter)
  196.  
  197. Chris Wilson: Some of our staff to play Hearthstone. It's kind of a popular game at lunch time and such. I haven't tried it myself yet. I kind of feel, with my addictive personality, I'd get sucked right into that, so...
  198.  
  199. LiftingNerdBro: I know that feeling.
  200.  
  201. Chris Wilson: At the time that everyone started playing Hearthstone I made a determined effort to spend that time learning Chinese. And so they were playing on their Hearthstone app, and I had my Chinese app. I'm still doing mine and many of them have moved on from theirs.
  202.  
  203. ProjectPT: How dare you be productive! What is this? (laughs) How many languages do you speak then? Or is that just...
  204.  
  205. Chris Wilson: Just English, properly. I know a little bit of Chinese, from a couple years study and, I did Latin in school, but that's just enough to read some mottos[?] and stuff like that. Four years of that.
  206.  
  207. LiftingNerdBro: You use that when you need to sound smart, right?
  208.  
  209. Chris Wilson: Right. But once you're in your thirties, it kind of, is gone, right?
  210.  
  211. (laughter)
  212.  
  213. LiftingNerdBro: I have like two more years to use it then.
  214.  
  215. Chris Wilson: Nice.
  216.  
  217. ProjectPT: Should probably start in a minute.
  218.  
  219. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah. Three minutes I think.
  220.  
  221. Chris Wilson: I have a tweet ready to send out. I may as well send it out now, give people a couple of minutes to get here, if they don't already know about it.
  222.  
  223. LiftingNerdBro: I posted it on uh, reddit as well.
  224.  
  225. Chris Wilson: Great. Now we need a global message in game. Like one of those orange ones?
  226.  
  227. LiftingNerdBro: Oh yeah. That'd be perfect.
  228.  
  229. Chris Wilson: Okay. Go easy on me!
  230.  
  231. ProjectPT: Uhh... well, you've got two people that are nice, and you have one asshole, so we'll see how this works out.
  232.  
  233. LiftingNerdBro: The assholes is obviously Hege.
  234.  
  235. (laughter)
  236.  
  237. ProjectPT: That's why he can't have a cam. Because he's just flipping everybody off, every second.
  238.  
  239. LiftingNerdBro: Just his face triggers people.
  240.  
  241. HegemonyTV: So I have a question, how often are you just trolling, er, lingering around Global chat? How much of Global chat do you read?
  242.  
  243. Chris Wilson: I enjoy the fact that... I was playing quite a lot of PoE over the last few weeks, and I just sit in Global chat silently until someone says something completely stupid, and then I reply with like - "Hi." or something. So I was seeing quite a lot of...
  244.  
  245. LiftingNerdBro: God.
  246.  
  247. Chris Wilson: I wasn't making an effort to talk an awful lot in Global chat every time I was there. It's usually Hardcore 1.
  248.  
  249. LiftingNerdBro: Oh it's gotta be so tempting to abuse that system.
  250.  
  251. HegemonyTV: Yeah do you have any employee policy? Don't talk in your orange text!
  252.  
  253. Chris Wilson: We do. We have to be very careful what we say. And so I'm kind of, not meant to... Well I guess I can make the rules there, but I've told myself I'm not meant to have completely inane conversations in Global. It should be on-topic.
  254.  
  255. LiftingNerdBro: You're the boss.
  256.  
  257. HegemonyTV: You can automatically assume if it's orange and global, it's going on reddit.
  258.  
  259. (laughter)
  260.  
  261. Chris Wilson: Well there are some things that didn't. I talked about some pretty interesting stuff in global recently that didn't make it to reddit. Which is surprising.
  262.  
  263. LiftingNerdBro: Guys I'm going to slowly transition over to the podcast now, you guys are going to be on in just a bit here.
  264.  
  265. ProjectPT: Alright.
  266.  
  267. LiftingNerdBro: And PT if you could just raise yourself slightly.
  268.  
  269. ProjectPT: Do what myself?
  270.  
  271. LiftingNerdBro: Raise your chair a bit.
  272.  
  273. ProjectPT: Oh right.
  274.  
  275. LiftingNerdBro: What's up guys! Welcome back to the Lioneye's Watch podcast with me I have my two coo-ho... co-hosts Hege and-
  276.  
  277. HegemonyTV: Cool hosts. We're cool hosts.
  278.  
  279. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah you're pretty cool.
  280.  
  281. LiftingNerdBro: And as a special thing tonight we have Chris Wilson. Also known as Chris "This Is A Buff" Wilson. He is gracing us with his presence. The lead developer from Grinding Gear Games, and he's here for a talk about anything Atlas. And anything Essence league. Thank you for joining us tonight Chris, how are you doing?
  282.  
  283. Chris Wilson: You're welcome it's great to be here, it's pretty early in the morning in New Zealand but glad to be on the podcast.
  284.  
  285. LiftingNerdBro: Very early. That's dedication. I don't know when I've been up that early last, but uh, thank you for doing it.
  286.  
  287. HegemonyTV: Release!
  288.  
  289. LiftingNerdBro: Hege, PT, how are you guys doing?
  290.  
  291. HegemonyTV: I'm doing great.
  292.  
  293. ProjectPT: I am doing... pretty well. It's been a long day so... (exhales) can't complain. Can't complain.
  294.  
  295. HegemonyTV: Looking forward to what Chris has to say.
  296.  
  297. LiftingNerdBro: We're just going to jump right into it guys. We have an hour tonight with Chris. Typically we do this podcast for a little more than an hour and a half, but we're just going to restrain, or restrict ourselves to the hour tonight so, we'll get into it. Chris, what was the inspiration for Atlas? Like the very start of it's design? You want to talk about that for a bit?
  298.  
  299. Chris Wilson: So whenever we plan an expansion we have a look at what type of player we want to service because there are... You can say an expansion is completely for new players, you can say an expansion is for existing players that does nothing for new players, or ones for returning players potentially that tempt people into playing Path of Exile again if they tried it in the past. And so, we figured it was time to give some love to the existing community that has been supportive for so long. People that are in maps, and while they enjoy the new acts and stuff that we bring out, they wanted a chance to the actually end game that they've been grinding for a number of years now. Because we realize that after we introduced maps back in 2013, we haven't really changed maps very much. Aside from, you know, introducing a couple of new ones over time. And so it was time to actually get out some polish and rejuvenate that system a little bit. Especially because maps are kind of the back bone of what's keeping people playing Path of Exile long term.
  300.  
  301. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhm, there's definitely some longevity in that. So the way you got to this conclusion, did you have some numbers showing that there was a drop-off around that time? Or what was the "hard" thing that made you decide to focus on end game?
  302.  
  303. Chris Wilson: So maps have the best retention of content in Path of Exile. Once a player gets to maps, they're pretty safe. If we've got someone playing maps we're pretty confident that we've got that user. Having said that, over time people will still drop off. So we actually, from a business case it makes a lot of sense to occasionally polishing that area and making sure it's as tight as we can. And I have some good retention figures so far from Atlas that show that the rate of drop-offs in maps is less than half of what it was previously. So, this is a major thing. Which means that the retention curve for the expansion is very likely to be a different shape then normal. Which will be really cool. So we did have some... we had numeric reason to do Atlas, but it was also because it was an expansion that people thought was very cool.
  304. It was very different than previous ones we've done. You know, we've tried hard to make sure each expansion feels different from the last. For example: Sacrifice of the Vaal introduced Vaal side areas and Vaal skill gems, and all the Atziri content. And that was kind of a nod to high-level players, saying you know, we've released Path of Exile, and other than maps, there isn't a ton for you to do at the end-game, so have some Atziri stuff to do. And then in Forsaken Masters we added almost nothing to the end-game, because we wanted to augment the main body of the game with missions and so on, to keep the areas more alive and varied as you go through.
  305.  
  306. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm
  307.  
  308. Chris Wilson: And of course there was The Awakening where we dropped Act 4, and the Jewel system, and so on. And that's important because the actual playthrough length of Path of Exile felt relatively constrained, with three acts. Uhm, before it repeats in Cruel and Merciless, which of course is a big topic for discussion. Uhm, it wasn't quite long enough for an actual single player playthrough. And we felt like the short length prior to the game repeating, dropped a fair number of players who played through for a single player experience, and didn't have enough time to get addicted to it before it repeated itself. And so Act 4 was instrumental there. And then, of course, there was Ascendancy, which added a completely new type of content for us. The Labyrinth is unlike anything in similar Action RPGs, or even in Path of Exile so far. And so finally, The Atlas is an end-game system which hopefully feels different than a new act, and feels different from the labyrinth, and feels different from the Masters system. And so we're trying hard with each expansion to do some pretty crazy stuff.
  309.  
  310. LiftingNerdBro: So with the development time that has gone into making a lot of end-game content, are you afraid that... might alienate those new players to the game, that might have needed some development for that part of the game?
  311.  
  312. Chris Wilson: Well the nice thing about a new player is that they don't know what we've spent time on, they take the game at face value. And so as long as the core game is getting better for a new player, then the experience isn't worse than it was before. What I mean is, we could ignore the core game for new players, and a year later, it's still a similar experience regardless of whether you played it at point A or point B.
  313. Having said that, we were worried with this expansion, that with so much effort going into maps, that meant that for a new / returning player, who has played a little with their friends, that the game feels a bit too samey. Uhm, so, we made sure that the Essence League was very in-their-face, in terms of something that they can see and experience in most areas as they play through a normal playthrough. And that meant that the game did feel different at face value. We kind of let the Essence League carry quite a lot of the, uh, regular player experience in this particular expansion. It is something to be aware of. Of course, the next big expansion does have a ton of new stuff for new players.
  314.  
  315. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah and I mean, there's only so much to do. Or so much that can be done at the same time, so...
  316.  
  317. HegemonyTV: Yeah I feel like you guys hit the mark. You guys were very generous with the frequency at which you experience Essences. A lot more than my expectation. So definitely something there for them. But, a question I had was: What comes first? Does the lore determine the style of new content? Or does new content determine the style of lore? Like, when you guys were thinking of ascendancy classes, did ascendancy classes come first, and then you guys concocted a way to get the ascendancy powers through the lab? How does that fit within the overall design process?
  318.  
  319. Chris Wilson: So sometimes we find good designs that we really like, and then we have to come up with uhh, a story to populate them. An example was Talisman. We knew we wanted to do haunted amulets, that had sort of a One-Ring type feel to them, so we came up with a Talisman lore to explain that. Whereas, in the case of the December Challenge League, we have some really cool Lore, and we want to come up with a game mechanic that fits it. And the one we've chosen we think does a really good job of being a fun way of fitting that. So it can go in either direction, and it really depends on whether the lore is stronger or the design is stronger. Which one wins out and has the other crafted to fit it.
  320. In the case of Ascendancy we actually had the ascendancy class idea and the Labyrinth as two separate systems. We had in the back of our mind we wanted to do a Labyrinth, and we also had Ascendancy classes that almost made it into The Awakening as a much more toned-down, simple version, you know, one skill each or something. So we decided to drop that from The Awakening because it wasn't a good enough system. Like it needed work, it needed to be fully fleshed out, like we eventually did. And so, that happened to perfectly fit with the concept of doing a labyrinth in order to earn your ascendancy.
  321.  
  322. LiftingNerdBro: Yup, so I guess just things coincide and eventually they make a whole. Like, for how long have you guys known that you wanted The Shaper character in the game, for instance.
  323.  
  324. Chris Wilson: The Shaper character, we came up with after we designed the Atlas. We knew we needed a story, we just had to find a good way of fitting it in. As you can see with the fact that we gave Zana a lot more voice acting, and eventually even had to replace her voice actor because the old one wasn't available, there's a small amount of retconning going on. "Actually this is the story of maps, you just didn't know it all along!"
  325.  
  326. (laughter)
  327.  
  328. ProjectPT: I noticed that one.
  329.  
  330. Chris Wilson: Fair enough.
  331.  
  332. ProjectPT: I did have one other question, related to that, which of the expansions was the most lore driven, and then which one was the most content driven? Just for, example.
  333.  
  334. Chris Wilson: This is a good question. So, it's difficult to disassociate the two. For example, Forsaken Masters, while it was a design thing where we wanted to have these cool masters, and we wanted to have all the missions and the crafting. We knew exactly how we wanted that to work from a design point of view, it feels like the lore was there the entire time, because it just came up in the first conversation- "Well these are other exiles that have grown to mastery of different things, and they're there for you to befriend and work with." So the lore was there from day one, but I still feel that was a design driven expansion.
  335. And likewise Sacrifice of the Vaal was very much an "Okay we need an expansion after release, what's an evocative bad-guy that we can use?" And in that case we definitely said "Vaal civilization, we're going to go with Queen Atziri, we're not sure what form that actually takes, is she an end-game character or what?" And so Sacrifice of the Vaal was an extremely lore driven expansion where we molded the content to fit it, and in many cases I feel like it was one of our weaker expansions. I don't think that's necessarily for this reason, it may have just been the way it came out. You know Vaal skillgems didn't really quite hit where we wanted to. Sure they found niche uses later but it's not quite the system we had in mind.
  336.  
  337. ProjectPT: Are you saying that you didn't plan on everybody using Vaal Haste?
  338.  
  339. Chris Wilson: Nice. Well it's cool that there are a few that are very popular, but by-and-large a lot of Vaal skills are ignored. Like Vaal Glacial Hammer is one of the coolest things in the game! It traps you in a little arena with the monster you're trying to kill! Like it puts a circle of ice around the two of you to fight it out. But no one sees this... The six percent wasn't enough.
  340.  
  341. (laughter)
  342.  
  343. ProjectPT: So when you have a section of skills then, for example the Vaal skills, where there are certain Vaal skills that are popular, they are used almost universally, and there's... Vaal Arc. Uhm, what's then the design decision? Is this, you know, wait until we can figure out an expansion content where we can make it relevant? Do you want to push the design sooner? Where does this go in the pecking order of design?
  344.  
  345. Chris Wilson: So do you mean in regard to trying to fix the situation of some skills being more useful then others?
  346.  
  347. ProjectPT: Yeah, so, exactly, because the issue with Vaal skills, has been an issue for, atleast what you're pointing out has been the case since... Vaal.
  348.  
  349. Chris Wilson: Well there are two things to say here, the first one is that it's not necessarily a problem if more people choose one thing than another. Trying to balance and make everything equal has the problem that you're making the vast majority, who want to use the best thing, unhappy by reducing it, while also kind of increasing the... the bad things in vain. So, I don't believe that every skill in the game necessarily needs to be good. It's okay for there to be some bad choices, because there's a master behaviour to evaluate the skill to say "You know what, this is garbage, I don't want to use it." and to feel good about not using that skill.
  350. If we tried... in the past we have tried to buff under-performing things, and we get a situation where... Like with whirling blades for example, this is a great example. Whirling blades was bad because of desync. It got you killed. But we looked at it numerically and no one was using this great movement skill. We KNEW whirling blades should be where it's at. It's amazing. So we buffed it, and buffed it, and buffed it, and just kept going, and no one used it. Then we fixed desync. Which was the buff it needed, and now everyone is using whirling blades. And we're stuck in a position where all those buffs were unnecessary, we just needed to have the right one. But right now we can't exactly lobotomize Whirling blades without getting an uproar from the community, so we have to- That goes on the list of difficult things to sort out in the future.
  351.  
  352. Chris Wilson: The second point about Vaal skills, is the team have their, like whenever there's a system that's not good, they put together their plan for how they want to fix it. And there's a plan for making Vaal skills awesome, there's tons of new ones planned, all that kind of jazz, it just needs approval. It needs us to say "This is going in an expansion." But it's more likely that, "Let's overhaul melee targeting." is going in an expansion before the Vaal skills one, merely because it probably impacts half the player base. And so we have to pick our battles, where if we try to have our next expansion include ten of these hypothetical systems, we'll do them all poorly. We want to make sure it has three of them, really well.
  353.  
  354. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm. And I guess with the game such as Path of Exile, where you want to take a skill, and you want to try to make it as powerful as possible. Making something as powerful as possible means that it has to separate itself from other skills, and if you try to normalize the game you're pretty much taking away some of the identity of those skills as well.
  355.  
  356. Chris Wilson: Right. And I think it's totally fine for there to be, like, a number of good choices. Obviously it's bad if there's just one good choice, or two good choices. But I like the idea of there being 10 or 15 builds that people will argue between and no one can make the right decision, as opposed to there being a hundred builds, where no one is having any fun with any of them.
  357.  
  358. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm, that's definitely the gameplay I prefer as well. Normalization in games, unless it's like super competitive, PVP... Typically takes away some of the identity for me.
  359.  
  360. ProjectPT: Do you still find that that argument can hold when you have a skill like, let's go to Glacial Hammer, because it's fun to make fun of Glacial Hammer, you buffed it, and Ice Crash. The utilization of Glacial Hammer is that it has the when mobs have less health, frozen, cull. But the state of the game, most mobs will die in... very few amount of hits, except for bosses. But, Glacial Hammer's ability doesn't work on bosses. So... you kind of has a skill that is an inferior version of another skill, and it has no specific design.
  361.  
  362. Chris Wilson: It's one of those things where, this is an evolved system. We made Glacial Hammer, it had it's place, then we added Ice Crash, people enjoyed it. We have to be careful here where, like, so... what I'm trying to say is, we can go through all the skills in the game, and relatively quickly work out what we want to do to fix them, right? So there's improvements to Glacial Hammer that will fix the skill, the problem is that, if we try to commit to doing all that stuff simultaneously, it's going to take a number of expansions to put it in. Or we're going to do a poor job with all those skills. Or have an expansion which is entirely an attempt to reinvigorate old skills, which may not be what the game needs necessarily. So, leaving Glacial Hammer how it is, is a somewhat intentional thing, that if we can't do a job well yet, we're just going to wait, and then fix it when we know we can do it properly in the future. So, we want to make sure with melee, for example, we get melee targeting sorted out, we want to make sure that there's consistent behaviour with a lot of skills, and that it's actually really fun to use each of the melee skills in isolation. Then the second problem we have to solve is the fact that Path of Exile's monster density in higher difficulties, stemming back to a decision I made a long time ago, that higher difficulties should have more monsters than lower ones, uhm, this high monster density thing means that single target skills are inherently bad. Right? Like... you going to dual strike every monster on the map? It's not going to happen so there has to be-
  363.  
  364. (laughter)
  365.  
  366. Chris Wilson: There has to be melee splash or something. And the problem is if melee splash is mandatory, then why not just make it part of melee maybe? I mean, this is talking off the cuff here, I don't know if we're doing that.
  367.  
  368. (laughter)
  369.  
  370. Chris Wilson: The point is that, there needs to be a general system overhaul to do with monster density as well. Now I don't want to reduce monster density, it's fun when there's tons of monsters to kill. But, there needs to be a LOT of work done on melee in general before we take a step back and say "Is Glacial Hammer still bad?" Oh maybe it is, then we fix that. So, that's one of those instances where we're holding off on very complicated skill re-works, until we have a system re-work in place first.
  371.  
  372. LiftingNerdBro: Do you guys ever consider just completely trashing a skill and building it up from the ground, making it something completely different?
  373.  
  374. Chris Wilson: There are a few skills, the problem is that the players, there are niche builds that use them. Like we experimentally discussed re-doing Elemental Hit, phasing it out, having a better version. And the few players using Elemental Hit for some niche reason said "No, please! I enjoy this! I come home from work to play Elemental Hit! Don't! Don't screw around with my skill!"
  375.  
  376. ProjectPT: You screwed around with Shock Nova and I was upset with that one. (laughs)
  377.  
  378. Chris Wilson: Exactly! So that was a skill. We look at the stats for Shock Nova and we say "Ah, no one's using that!" But when we change it, to theoretically make it better, someone is upset that we changed the niche behaviour they were relying on.
  379.  
  380. ProjectPT: True, but you do know with all decisions someone's going to get thrown under the bus, and that's unavoidable. You have to choose the demographic that gets sent under the buss.
  381.  
  382. Chris Wilson: Well the skill situation in Path of Exile is interesting because we've added skills for so many years. There's skills right from the beginning, where Split Arrow only started looking good recently, you know, it had like four or five years of looking, like a plain multishot attack.
  383.  
  384. ProjectPT: You did buff it quite a bit that one patch though.
  385.  
  386. Chris Wilson: Well I mean, it's popular. We have a lot of different types of skills. And if we took a step back and said "You know what, let's take all the skills away from the game, ruin everyone's characters all at once, and put them all back at the right levels, with the right ratios, of you know, like making sure this one is more powerful than that one and so on, it could be a better game" The problem is that's guaranteed to break every single build. I reckon we would lose 30% of our players, rather than gain a percentage in that expansion. So we have to be careful, it might be better for the game, but it's not something we can easily do.
  387.  
  388. HegemonyTV: Right. I mean.. it seems, it actually seems very very tricky because you guys like the cyclical thing where you guys promote other skills, and that more or less either means you gotta re-do it, or buff it in such a way that it motivates players to try it, and then at the same time you try to bring that stuff that was strong from the previous league, and try to bring it down without trying to break the function of the skill. But then that kinda screams, you know, are you creating a power creep in such a way that, you know, over time, people are just getting stronger, and stronger tools. The tools are becoming better and the game is becoming easier. Is that...?
  389.  
  390. Chris Wilson: I believe that is the case. And this can be solved by re-balancing right? We can do the World of Warcraft thing where we take a step back and say "Okay, these are the new monster damage and life values." and essentially just make the game numerically harder. And that's one way to balance right? To take the weak things, make them better, not nerf the good things, and then occasionally make the game harder. Which is a way of doing it, it's just a very round-about way, when the correct solution might be, to knock a few points off the top skills. But you've seen what happens on reddit when we do that. So it's ummm.
  391.  
  392. (laughter)
  393.  
  394. Chris Wilson: It may be a round-about way to do it, but it might be better for the company financially. It's tough to say.
  395.  
  396. ProjectPT: Well then going slightly tangent into what we're talking about, uhm, with new content and new content systems, where we started with the topic of Vaal skills. You've added the Sextants. Now, the Sextants were fairly promoted, at least in the promotional videos, we've seen a lot of use of them. They've been re-balanced a few times, and you did actually do the manifesto where you did kind of decide that Sextants aren't exactly where you want them to be, but you don't want them to be high quantity high use items, you want them to be more specialized, and you're excited to find them. But with that, the concern that comes between me, and uh, at least, a demographic of the community, is when we saw the initial Sextants, the drop rates, and what they did, we get confused in the Quality Assurance testing part, of new leagues. And with every league we can find an example of something that, does not make sense, and it seems nobody did anything around it. At least, actually physically playing it. What causes this to happen?
  397.  
  398. Chris Wilson: So when you're working on a project, you don't necessarily know how long it's going to take. And you have to pick a release date and lock it in for marketing reasons. And then, if the project is too much work, and they often are, because people have scope and they want to throw more stuff in and add more maps and add more bosses, you can either move the release date, which ruins the aspirations of all the players that have taken time off work, and means that you break promise as a company, and waste all your marketing budget, and all that kind of stuff. Or you can try to prioritize your efforts on the systems that you feel matter the most. And in this case resources were not properly allocated to the Sextant system. Of all the things that can be broken in the first week, that was probably the one. And this may or may not have been the right choice, I mean it disappointed some players, and it's only now that we're getting Sextant mods in that deserved to be there from the start. Let's not blame the Quality Assurance department though, their concerns were raised at the time, and, arguably, ignored in favour of us fixing other systems. You know, there are producers, like me, who have to make decisions on what we focus our resources on.
  399. So it's definitely my fault over the Quality Assurance guys who certainly had their document, documenting the problems with Sextants. In addition, there were some last minute balance changes we made to the drop rates of Sextants based on the results from Alpha. Part of this is, if Sextants are in the right place, you'll get some red circles on your map and it looks cool. If you have slightly too many, you leave a trail of red circles as you progress through the Atlas. So you get these situations where there are a hundred red circle on the Atlas, because you haven't played out all the Sextant mods completely before you moved on. And that's completely ruins how The Atlas looks, and feels, and players who encounter that disengage with the system really fast, because their Atlas is a complete mess and they ask "How do I turn off these Sextants that I don't want anymore?" We really wanted to avoid that, because if by chance, we are slightly too high, in the first week, and everyone gets an Atlas like that, they're all stuck with it, and psychologically this is a garbage system, and it's a complete mess. Whereas, if we go slightly too few, then at least it's something players can debatably say "Is this good, or bad, why is this so rare?" And we opted to go on that side and actually hit it under the mark slightly where it was quite a lot too few. And this is partly because of the way the drop system works, and there are some limitations... I mean we kind of have to hit over, or under here. And we are looking to re-work that so we can control the Sextant drop rates a lot more carefully.
  400.  
  401. ProjectPT: Well then, now that we have like, that there is the Quality Assurance, that those things are brought up, it's always very easy. But then, do you find, there can be issue with, in such a short development cycle, it's very easy to be over-ambitious with your projects, and you're always trying to do a little bit too much? And that's causing things like the Sextants to happen in the way they did.
  402.  
  403. Chris Wilson: Yes. And the things is that the cost of this ambitious development cycle is not what you guys see. Yeah, there's quality concerns on the product, of course, but the problem is that there's this elastic factor that game developers have, which is crunch time. The staff are very willing to put in very long hours, and the problem is, if the producer picks a project that is too large, then it's the staff who lose out, not so much the players. The staff will guarantee that the players get something fun to play, but they do that by working ten or fifteen hour days. And that's the thing that I want to address before the actual quality of the product. As bad as it sounds, my first responsibility is to my staff. Because if I ruin their lives, then that's the big thing. Ruining the game of course is people's entertainment, but the staff are real people as well.
  404. So, the thing that's gone on behind the scenes here is we have, in my opinion, dramatically improved the crunch situation between these last expansions, where with Ascendancy there was a lot more overtime being done than with Atlas, where people were still working hard, and doing long hours and everything, but it's nowhere near as bad. I see that as a major success. And it is a subtle thing, where when we're trying to do scope improvement, where we try to make sure expansions are correctly scoped out for the amount of time, that the primary motive that I have is making sure that we don't work the staff to death in the process. So I think we've had a lot of success with that. I mean yeah, Atlas was still a little bit large for three months, and it's effected some areas of it, but by-and-large, I think we've mostly achieved the goals of making sure the staff enjoyed the process, as well as delivering something that was really close to, uhm, everything that was shown in the marketing materials.
  405.  
  406. ProjectPT: So then which one would have been the worst on the staff, in your opinion?
  407.  
  408. Chris Wilson: Mmmm... That's a good question, Ascendancy was pretty rough. Like, you know we were almost going to release Ascendancy three months earlier. And by that I mean, when we specced it out, we specced it out as a three month expansion for release alongside Talisman. And so it was very clear after we had booked our press tour, that while we have a Labyrinth we can play through, that this is not going to be a fun experience until we spend another three months just making the Labyrinth more fun, and adding more variety, and redoing the ascendancy classes that were terrible, and so on, and so forth. It... We had to sit down and make a hard decision, future of the company here, "Are we releasing in December, or are we releasing three months later in March?" And we figured "You know, the community will understand just getting Talisman. We can say we're doing a Large-Small release cycle" and that decision there of going Large-Small, we didn't over-commit to doing a big expansion every three months. And that was very useful, because right now, with the December release, that's just, uh, a regular challenge league by itself and some other fixes. That is certainly going to be a lot of work, but it's not the same level of commitment of trying to pull another Atlas out in three months. Now, meanwhile we're working on a big release for next year of course, which the guys have been doing for quite a while in the background, because it involves some new tilesets.
  409.  
  410. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhm. Nice. So guys, let's talk a bit more about the new Essence league specifically. Hege you want to start this off?
  411.  
  412. HegemonyTV: Uhhm, you can go ahead first.
  413.  
  414. LiftingNerdBro: So I'm just, we're seeing now, with the new essences, Chris, how do you feel that, with the implementation of the new essences, that you can now craft rare items a little more reliably, how do you feel that puts rare items, up against unique items? Are we seeing like a comeback you know, for rare items? What are the intentions behind the essences here, compared to uniques?
  415.  
  416. Chris Wilson: So there are two things that we're trying to achieve with the essence crafting. The first one being that there are some top-end rare items that are used more than the Best-In-Slot Uniques that people were previously using. You know, the dream that instead of using some unique, somebody is going to find a really cool essence mod, and get lucky with crafting it, and have a rare that competes with it. And the second goal is during leveling, there are far more remedial processes that players can do where if you've got low resistances, or low life, or something like that, is you can waste a few essences to solve that problem. Now, for the second case here, we've undoubtedly succeeded, right? People are using a lot of essences as they're leveling, the ratio of rare items that people have equipped is extremely high, they're dropping out of magic items much earlier, there's far less attrition of players as they play through the game, peoples resistances are better, all that kind of stuff, right? That's basically what you get when you give people free rares. And that's working well, to accelerate the process of people playing their subsequent characters. You know if you die in hardcore, but you have a stash full of essences, like I currently do, then that makes your next character a bunch faster to play through. For the first question of "What's happening in the end-game?", we are seeing some good essence crafting occurring. But it's probably too early in the league to judge whether or not this has actually had an impact on the rate that people are actually using uniques. I mean, certainly many of the top builds want a lot of strong uniques and we don't yet have the data of whether there are more rares in those slots that specifically have essence mods.
  417.  
  418. LiftingNerdBro: So which of the essences so far have you seen being the most popular ones?
  419.  
  420. Chris Wilson: There was this boots essence... uhh... You know, the ZiggyD boots one?
  421.  
  422. (laughter)
  423.  
  424. HegemonyTV: Oh god, the burning ground?
  425.  
  426. LiftingNerdBro: That should have been left as it was. I loved that!
  427.  
  428. (laughter)
  429.  
  430. Chris Wilson: I don't have any strong data on which essences are most popular, we're planning on generating that kind of stuff this week, but I do know that the greed essence on hardcore, which gives flat life on armour pieces is extremely popular. Both anecdotally and based on what data I have seen.
  431.  
  432. LiftingNerdBro: I feel the Essence of Woe, seems to be very very popular as well, with the CI being very meta right now. And of course, energy shield being crafted, umm, but that's just anecdotal of course. Umm, you haven't, you don't have the statistics so I don't suppose you know which ones are NOT very popular, either?
  433.  
  434. Chris Wilson: I'm not sure yet, but I can imagine that ones like the minion ones, uhm, only used by minion characters, or maybe only some of those minion characters, so, there are ones that are specifically niche. But that's why there are 25 different types of essences, there's something for everyone. I mean, during the development I was pushing for it to be more like six to eight types of essences, but the team managed 25, and I think it is a stronger system, because it... certainly gives a lot of variety and doesn't create the feeling that "I have to be maxing out all six of these." now 25 is too many to max out so you have to pick your battles there.
  435.  
  436. LiftingNerdBro: So when will you typically balance these essences, when you have some statistics, are you going to wait until after the league or can we like expect them during the league?
  437.  
  438. Chris Wilson: That's a good question. The tricky thing about balancing them is that it kind of creates legacy items within a league, and we prefer to do that within, between leagues, especially if we're reusing the system mechanic again in the future. At the moment we don't have any particularly strong balance concerns about the essence numbers, I think they were generally in the right ball park. I mean yes, some will be used less than others, but totally intentional, right? And maybe some due to certain buffs, but I don't think that's an emergency situation we need to increase yet. And if we do increase something numerically during the league it creates the- it trains the players not to use something because they feel it's weak, there's a chance that we'll buff it, and therefore if we don't buff it, they're upset and waiting, and "I can't play until you buff this thing! Come on guys, you like to buff things that are bad!"
  439.  
  440. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah, yup
  441.  
  442. HegemonyTV: So with the Essence League, do you guys worry that with the leveling experience that you've had, essentially picking up a lot of customizable alchs and stuff, that people get accustomed to this leveling experience and this leveling power, that you can get from these essences, and then that in the next league, you don't have this power, or you don't have this tool, or resource, and you feel way worse? Are you guys worried about that experience?
  443.  
  444. Chris Wilson: Do you feel this occurred with Perandus, and its aftermath?
  445.  
  446. HegemonyTV: Oh, well... I still feel like the Essence League was my easiest leveling experience. Perandus was definitely easy, you got a lot of great uniques for very very cheap, but... I dunno, from my experience Essence has been by far the easiest. Because I've been walking around with all rares. Anytime I needed resists, you know, I could cap it, but with Perandus league I still had to make an effort of picking up coins and exchanging them for leveling tools, and I wouldn't be getting guaranteed the leveling tool that I need. I found the essences to be a bit more useful for customizations and filling out the holes in your gear without even having to trade. Which is great! You know, most people will take menial amounts of currency and trade them for holes in their gear so they can iron out their character and have a great leveling experience. Which I think the Essence League did, but I do worry about the next league, you know. People have these tools, and now all of a sudden, the game has changed again.
  447.  
  448. LiftingNerdBro: This also comes... the question here is, "Was the essence system originally designed to remain in the game after this league ends?" Or is this not something you can answer yet, Chris?
  449.  
  450. Chris Wilson: So we try to keep the decisions on that stuff 'till later. The team haven't even discussed whether Essence is staying. Right, I have no idea. Honestly, I'd like it to, but at the same time, it is a relatively intrusive thing to find these groups of frozen monsters every now and then, so we'd have to find a way of balancing it. And systems like Talisman for example you can't tone down without changing the ratios. So with Essence, we'd have to probably do a similar thing.
  451. With regard to the question of the leveling power assist, we like to do experiments. We like to see: "Does the game perform better? Do more people enjoy getting to maps? Do more people play second characters?" with a different set of rules. And we feel that that experiment is worth the potential damage of training something, training players that something is going to be a certain case. Like with Darkshrine for example, we probably dropped a lot of high quality gems on the community. Maybe that has some effect on the standard economy [I believe he is referring to the "regular" economy, not specifically the Standard league here] but it's something we got a lot of data from. We understand what it's like if, for an entire month, there's something which feels exploitative. How long do people do this for? Do they stay up for 16 hours and do it?
  452.  
  453. LiftingNerdBro: (stifles laughter)
  454.  
  455. Chris Wilson: You know, how does it... like, there's a lot of questions there that we-
  456.  
  457. LiftingNerdBro: They probably do.
  458.  
  459. Chris Wilson: Yeah they liked that one. With essences though, if it makes the game better then we can achieve it in another way. For example, the right answer here might be: another rare crafting method built into the game, maybe: cheaper master crafting, maybe: more rares, maybe: alchs are ten times more common. Who knows. There are options there if we like the system. Or maybe we have a way of just rolling essences in as they are.
  460.  
  461. ProjectPT: Well related to that, there was the nice phrase: "Make Rares Great Again", and the essence power allows you the very controlled single modification which drastically increases the odds of something which is usable for you. Often I've seen builds utilizing a lot of the essence material, or people crafting for the essence material are just using stronger rares to accompany uniques, rather than replace them. There are some of the corrupted mods which are quite interesting, and I think we'll have to wait until later in the league if anyone can actually craft things. However, there just seems to be a lack of "These are just powerful alchs" and you're still using kinda similar ratios between your rares and your uniques. And that, uniques still have this- they're so far beyond what rares can ever achieve, in so many builds. I'm not seeing the Skyforth rare, or the Abyssus rare, or any of these things.
  462.  
  463. Chris Wilson: Yup. And this may be the case. We're going to have to see how it plays out. There's a lot of crafting time left in the league and... (exhales) people will find better ways of getting tier 7 essences for crafting. Like right now we're not seeing the behaviour that we have predicted. Because we simulate out the stuff as much as possible. And there are efficient ways of crafting up a bunch of tier 7 essences, that the players haven't quite hit. Like we, when doing our modelling, have worked it out to like a tier 7 essence per, I think I worked it out to around two hours of game-time. So currently, if I'm wrong, people may be getting them that quickly, but, we believe that in the future there will be a lot more crafting with mods that do actually exceed existing ones. If you can make a really good life armour that has more life than you can get on a rare, that might start to compete with things like Belly, or whatever else the character is using.
  464.  
  465. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm. Do you guys, do you still go by the philosophy that you want rare items to have like that, the really good, well rolled rare items, do you still want them to be typically better than uniques. Or are you kinda happy that uniques have a, like a best in slot type of, uhm, approach?
  466.  
  467. Chris Wilson: I would prefer the rare items to be better, but the uniques provide-
  468.  
  469. LiftingNerdBro: Okay.
  470.  
  471. Chris Wilson: -Interesting things. Like every unique is used not because of raw numerical supremacy- well some may be, but generally because it does something to make your build interesting. And I prefer people to be using rares, because rolling rares is a more addictive system. Using rares is a more "true" Action RPG thing. But using a unique that provides an interesting thing that makes your build different, that you can understand and plan around is also a good experience for the player.
  472.  
  473. HegemonyTV: It's the synergy.
  474.  
  475. LiftingNerdBro: I also think that uniques actually feel more... rewarding to use sometimes. They feel more rewarding to obtain as well. At least, that's the impression I get when I talk to my guys in the chat and all that stuff. People get excited about the uniques. But of course it shouldn't make it so the rares become useless, but I'm not even that much against the idea of the uniques being competitive, in that regard, but yup.
  476.  
  477. ProjectPT: I was going to ask something related, then. If you feel that you do want the rares to be kind of more substantial because it's a bit of a truer ARPG experience, and you know that a lot of uniques are used because of just, surprise, their unique properties, there's been a little bit of an addition on only the high end, and I specifically- the Fear Essence, to allow, uhm, some extra mods crafted through essences, and none the less, on most pieces, whenever you're crafting either phys weapons, elemental weapons, if you're using armour pieces or energy shield, the process of prefix and suffix you need, is pretty much standard once you know it. Why isn't then, more done related to making rares just have more interesting properties that uniques don't necessarily have, and can come up more uncommon- like you added the flat chaos roll, which is an uncommon mod that appears at, I believe, iLevel 83, instead of just-
  478.  
  479. Chris Wilson: So, we do like the idea of adding more to the rare pool, but we also want to make sure that the mods on rares fit the criteria of being mods on rares. And that can be ones that uniques don't have that we can put there, but they're very unlikely to be particularly build defining ones. So, we're kind of trying to experiment with stuff. The fear essence is a good example. What is it like if rare items can get these relatively esoteric unique-item-like properties on them? Um, how understandable is it for players? How does it effect the search-ability of them on poe.trade? You know, how does it, cause, uhm, how does it cause the identity of rares to change? And so Essence is one of those steps, to experiment with that. We have to release four challenge leagues a year, so we'll have a lot of opportunity to experiment with different itemization methods.
  480.  
  481. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm. Ziggy I think mentioned the last time he was on this podcast, that you were experimenting with the idea of having like, a specific unique that, would be "Best In Slot", I don't like that word but, for each specific ascendancy. So like, we have the Brass Dome for the Juggernaut for instance. Is this something you guys are working on right now?
  482.  
  483. Chris Wilson: I believe that there are many of these prototyped up, but that we aren't accelerating the release of them.
  484.  
  485. LiftingNerdBro: Okay
  486.  
  487. Chris Wilson: This is partly because we, we're experimenting with what type of uniques are correct to put in the game. And it may be, that while these are very cool for those classes, that more "Best In Slot" stuff is not great. So there's a lot of review process. I mean, there's so much split decisions and opinions that go on with uniques on the team. I personally do not like high-level weapon uniques. I feel that every time we release a weapon above about level 60, that it invalidates rare crafting on that particular type, so that means-
  488.  
  489. ProjectPT: Hege!
  490.  
  491. HegemonyTV: Oh no! Not my staff!
  492.  
  493. (laughter)
  494.  
  495. HegemonyTV: Chris doesn't like my staff!
  496.  
  497. Chris Wilson: The existence of each item like that hurts the entire crafting process of weapons. Like, are people really making rare bows these days? I mean, it's less common than it was before. Having said that, a lot of players love these powerful unique items. And a lot of supporters wanted to design them, and in the end we decided, yeah, let's make them. You know, ignore Chris' like, you know, philosophical complaints in the background there, the right thing to do is to make them because they're powerful and fun, and people will enjoy using them. It will make supporters happy, it makes, you know, having chased stuff to find especially iconic weapons is an important part of the game. And so they're in. But, we have a lot of different opinions. And there are split opinions about the ascendancy uniques as well.
  498.  
  499. ProjectPT: So... Skyfor- Er, sorry, Starforge... is uhh, how did that end up happening? Or do you not want to comment on that sword? (laughs)
  500.  
  501. Chris Wilson: So, The Shaper is the top content in the game, and he needs some good items, and that's pretty much as far as I've heard. In fact, honestly, I have not read the stats of the sword. Right, since the release I haven't had time to sit down and read what it does. And this is because, there are teams of people that I fully trust to work on that stuff.
  502.  
  503. ProjectPT: Fair enough.
  504.  
  505. LiftingNerdBro: With the difficulty of The Shaper, he better drop some fucking good items. I have died too many times in there to not get a good item!
  506.  
  507. ProjectPT: Well, you don't do balance, so we try to avoid those types of questions.
  508.  
  509. Chris Wilson: Imagine what would happen if we released this, and so it all builds up towards The Shaper, and if you can kill these four sub-bosses, and get the thing, and then you know, have The Shaper instance work correctly for you, and you get to The Shaper, and you fight him! And then all the uniques available are garbage. People would have no motivation to even play The Atlas. Right? So there has to be something punchy there. It's much better to come out on the high side than it is to come out on the low side, and just deal with the power-creep.
  510.  
  511. ProjectPT: In a similar fashion though, just in talks of general balance, not this specific one, you created things like Atziri's flask, and then The Shaper flask, which, uh, has a more generic use. The point of a loot table is to allow you to have more loot options, and having a more expansive loot table then allows you to create things that are more specific to builds and archetypes, rather than having to put in something so generically powerful, so that so many people can use it, and not find it disappointing. And this comes down to like, Vaal Haste. Vaal Haste is... within the Vaal skills, so that everyone can play a Vaal skill, you have something like Vaal Haste, and it seems that that was what was done with The Shaper drops, rather than making specifically interesting powerful uniques, you just went, broad generic damage stats. Now you haven't looked at it, so we're trying not to use the specific examples, but more the difference between specialized uniques, and using the... having a loot table, cause you have a loot table because there's multiple drops, rather than... just power for the sake of power.
  512.  
  513. Chris Wilson: Right. Well, it's an ongoing process within our company of improving uniques we release and, unfortunately, it's not quite as simple. Even if we put rules down, we still have, you know, a hundred or so custom uniques for supporters that are in various stages of, you know, them having suggested ideas, as well as being half-finished with making it. And so, we can't really change the rules, because we both have existing uniques in the game that exist, and ones that we're in the process of making that we can't really change it around too much on those supporters. As well as different designers here, who honestly want the ability to flex their creative muscles. So Path of Exile will probably have good uniques, bad uniques, and a wide variety of different design motivations behind them in the future, and we'll just have to... kind of, have them co-exist as part of the meta-game. Thankfully they're items, which not everyone can just pick on a tree, so there's a scarcity issue, and we can, if needed, balance around scarcity. Or in the past, we've experimented with Challenge Leagues that don't have uniques present. Like in the very first Challenge League you couldn't find Kaom's Heart. That was an experiment of what would happen if Kaom's didn't exist, because it was dominating the life meta-game at the time. And so, we may return to that in the future, now that we have a lot of uniques, and going, "You know what, here's the set that don't exist in this league go make decisions[not sure difficult to hear, as LiftingNerdBro starts speaking] with your builds"
  514.  
  515. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah that would be... pretty cool. I've been thinking about that a few times as well. I really like that. It would, you know, mix up the meta of course. But I'm kinda curious, as well, Chris, I read, in the uh, development manifesto. I think it was Carl, who wrote this here? That Atlas has been a huge success so far in terms of the map progression. Is this something you could talk about? How do you guys see it as being successful?
  516.  
  517. Chris Wilson: So, in the past, the map system was very much a, "Hey you finished the game, so here's some maps, basically put them in the machine, get some random ones out, and no one's keeping track of what you've done." The maps in your stash are your progress, but if they're gone, it's like you never played any of them, because your progress is gone. There's nothing permanent. You get this feeling of, well, it's basically a slot machine. Like it really is, a slot machine.
  518.  
  519. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah.
  520.  
  521. Chris Wilson: You know, you put the tokens in, and you get some different tokens out. (chuckles) And by its very nature it has to be a little bit lossy, but then people can roll the stuff, and invest currency from elsewhere, and so on, and so on. So there was no tracking of that. So we've added a player rewards program on top of that. Essentially, you know, the casino rewards thing. Where, you get the ability to track how much of this you've done, and have various different completion objectives, and it's working like it does in real life! People like ticking stuff of. And in this case thankfully we're not, you know, eating someones savings, we're providing entertainment because they get to have fun fighting through the maps.But, uhm, It's having the desired effect where people will play through from map to map, tick the progress off, they'll gradually have the ability to uhm, shape maps, to upgrade them, they find interesting stuff, we're seeing so much more engagement with high-end maps that isn't coming through just the fact that maps are easier to get now. It's also the fact that people actually have a motivating factor. Previously you kind of dabbled in the first few tiers of maps and then said "Well that's my character over." But now people push a lot further into the center where previously they weren't doing before.
  522.  
  523. LiftingNerdBro: It definitely feels much more rewarding. And that's coming from someone who's played this game so much. And I was kind of, you know, starting to get a little burned out on the end game progression. But just, even though it's still maps, and you do the same thing as you did before, the progression just makes it feel so much more rewarding, and so much more interesting to progress in. And that's of course, that's also something to do with the new tilesets, making it have this "fresh" experience. Erm, how did you guys come up with the idea that it was tilesets, necessarily? Was that simply just to give people a new feeling? A new "freshness" to the game? Or...?
  524.  
  525. Chris Wilson: In The Ascendancy... sorry, in The Awakening expansion we introduced a couple of new tilesets like The Channel one, that were based on existing art that we already had. You know, you do the trick, if you take the aqueducts and saying "It's daytime! Look!" and then it feels different. And that's what all of the new stuff in Atlas is! Everything, is a colour shifted, or environment shifted, or careful combination of existing stuff. I mean, sure, Ramparts, for example, does have the cool trick of you going up the top, but that's using tech we already had. Because our entire tileset creation budget right now is focused on another expansion. We had to do all of The Atlas stuff with only marginal changes. Now in some cases they required some time, like, people may not appreciate the amount of work that went into the, umm, the... What's it called? Uhm, the Arachnid Tomb I think?
  526.  
  527. ProjectPT: That's my favourite map!
  528.  
  529. Chris Wilson: The spider one. So there's spiderwebs everywhere, and that's cool. Like, we like the Arachnid Tomb, that's going to get used again somewhere you know. A lot of effort went into that. And so, basically here, we knew that people reacted so positively to The Awakening's new tilesets despite not really being new tilesets. They're colour shifts and so on. It's just a breath of fresh air for the players. It's the option of playing through something in a new way. And content re-use has to be king in Path of Exile. We started out with a tiny team, and the only reason we were able to make an Action RPG, was based on the fact that Action RPG's allow massive content re-use. You know, random levels, random monsters, and so on. You know, every monster in the game is used as a map boss somewhere, and in various different forms. And... the same thing is true for every art asset. You know we add a new to the game, it's going to be used in maps, it's going to be used as a Vaal side area, you get the idea. And so, it's basically playing on that. There's a reason we added a lot more tilesets to The Atlas system.
  530.  
  531. HegemonyTV: So on that note, with the new tilesets, you guys re-visited a lot of old bosses, or you know, shifted the bosses around and gave them new abilities. Uh, we've noticed, actually new mechanics, where if you curse the Crypt boss, you take like, a devastating projectile to the face, and then you have, you know, the Goatman, which does a deadly Leapslam, and you have to get out of the way, and you have that grace period. You guys are playing with different mechanics and, uh, we talked to Ziggy and he said that there are plans for more adjustments? Is that something that we can look for in this expansion? Or is it just going to come over time with the release of you know, future leagues and expansions?
  532.  
  533. Chris Wilson: I would expect to see adjustments like that coming out in future releases, uhm, it's, there's overhead to putting stuff in patches. And our goal, like, in the past we released weekly or bi-weekly, or every three weeks, updates involving new skills and so on. Because the game was seriously lacking a lot of content. But right now, doing that kind of release schedule, and you know, we're still doing several patches a week for minor things, but doing the kind of release schedule where we aggressively introduce map bosses, right now has so much overhead associated it runs more risk of slowing things down, or breaking stuff, and it doesn't get a proper QA cycle, and so on. So, we'd rather put it in the next expansion after plenty of time for it to sit on our testing server, and get played over time, before it's actually released.
  534.  
  535. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm.
  536.  
  537. HegemonyTV: Yeah, for me, for somebody who has been playing for so long, it's very refreshing to not know what's going to be at the end of this map. And being very familiar with the layouts it's just... All-in-all it's just great stuff for a player like me.
  538.  
  539. Chris Wilson: The guys put a ton of effort into the map bosses there. It was like 80 percent of the design effort from the team went into uhm, starting the map bosses, and I remember vividly, the meeting we had at the beginning of Atlas, where we said, "Let's do all these new maps! You know, we're gonna do thirty maps, we're going to do this system here." And, everyone said, "Thirty new maps? That's a lot of new bosses." and someone else said, "Yeah, and the existing bosses are crap, we're going to re-do half of those..."
  540.  
  541. ProjectPT: (laughs)
  542.  
  543. Chris Wilson: So most of the scoping for Atlas was boss creation. You know, the map guys can make the tilesets. That's no problem. They've got that down to an art, they're really good. But making bosses... is a constant challenge to come up with new, interesting mechanics, so the guys did a really good job of getting a ton of them in there in time.
  544.  
  545. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm.
  546.  
  547. ProjectPT: So going then to The Atlas creation, focus on end-game, one of the statements was, you know, changing everything you would know about end-game. And no one can argue that there has been a lot of work done with bosses. There's been some fantastic designs, there's been some great mechanics that have been added in, too. And it's nice that it's not that "Hey, it's that mob with an autoattack! ...Cool." So at the same time, we still have the same map rolling system, we still have, a very similar, just in style of how we clear, how we... the progression is gated through a secondary mechanic of the atlas, but it's still you know, run a map, make sure it has packsize, drop a map, run the map, make sure it has packsize... Did you guys... Why didn't you guys consider taking a look at the map modifications and, does more need to happen with the construct that is maps, that you have?
  548.  
  549. Chris Wilson: More probably does need to happen. We were very careful to not change too much at once, because, when designing a system like Atlas, there are two ways it can go. It can be good, or it can be bad. If it's good, that's great, we've ticked off another expansion, people are happy, retention improves. That's actually what happened. So that's good. If it's bad, everyone says, "Okay, well that was garbage, I hated this. I'm not going to play anymore." and then, overnight, we've killed the game.
  550. Like... literally! This could be THE most dangerous expansion if it turned out to be a terrible system that people weren't enjoying. And we're sitting there saying, "Do we even want to release this?" right, like, maybe we just keep the old game, it's alright, we're making money, we're getting paid, it's working well, you know, the company is growing at a reasonable rate and everything's fine. Why rock the boat? Why release the system? But in the end, we liked it enough, that we were confident doing so because we weren't changing the fundamentals of maps. If you close your eyes and pretend the Atlas isn't there, then yes there are a couple of small differences to how it makes your progress slightly different, but at the end of the day you're still doing a map, getting some more maps, playing those, and climbing the tiers. Except it's controlled by a diagram that you can't see. So we wanted it so that if someone hates the Atlas itself, they can still continue to play the game a lot like it was before. Now that we know it's successful, it may be that we can change the core mechanics of how maps drop, potentially, in the future.
  551.  
  552. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm.
  553.  
  554. ProjectPT: Has there been something then that you, designed part of it, or you just got to the concept, that you were just, "This is too big of a risk. We kinda want to try it but... we can't risk the player base with that decision."?
  555.  
  556. Chris Wilson: Yeah... (sighs) there were some interesting ones. We're actually taking... uhh, we're doing another big risk for an expansion next year, I think you guys will know when you see it. And uhm, should be interesting.
  557.  
  558. HegemonyTV: You use your own company as like a giant focus group, right?
  559.  
  560. Chris Wilson: Yeah there's a lot of Path of Exile players here. It's very easy... so like, I pitched at a meeting, to the company, last week, what we're doing for some of the content next year, and the people were psyched! Like as far as a pep-talk goes, just going, "Okay this is the content we're making." That worked incredibly well. Like, way more so than The Atlas system or The Labyrinth. You know, people said, "Oh cool, we'll make that, that's good." But for this one here... it just really excited people, my wife who does our accounting came to me and said, "I'm so excited about that stuff!" and I'm thinking, "Okay you don't... you've never played Path of Exile before,you know, how did this excite you?" So there's some cool things going on.
  561.  
  562. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah. Nice. We'll look forward to that.
  563.  
  564. HegemonyTV: So... I just wanted to bring up one of the community concerns, with the age old "Life vs. CI" It seems to be a very popular hot topic. I'm sure you're aware that The Shaper has been killed in such a way that, you know, CI characters can utilize different tools, such as like, Vaal Discipline, and you know, just crazy amounts of damage, to cheese one of the hardest bosses in the game. How do you guys feel about this ongoing war, Life versus CI. We've heard Path of Exile, "Path of CI", you know, "Path of Melee", "Path of Block", you know, it kind of goes in it's cycle.
  565.  
  566. LiftingNerdBro: It's always black and white.
  567.  
  568. HegemonyTV: Yeah, I would like to hear, you know, your comments on that.
  569.  
  570. Chris Wilson: It's good for there to be debate about which one is better, especially as it changes from one to another over time. We feel it's very healthy for the game to change its identity like this. And you know, "Path of Life Nodes" wasn't that many years ago. We'll probably make a mistake to accidentally "Path of Life Node" it back up again. We have literally discussed restoring Kaom's Heart to it's old stats, the last month.
  571.  
  572. HegemonyTV: Ohhhh, snap.
  573.  
  574. LiftingNerdBro: Oh shit.
  575.  
  576. HegemonyTV: You heard it first.
  577.  
  578. (laughter)
  579.  
  580. Chris Wilson: There are things in progress that may...
  581.  
  582. ProjectPT: Everybody's selling their legacy Kaom's.
  583.  
  584. Chris Wilson: Oh dear. So, the point is though, there's even debate among the team about this "Life vs. CI" thing, so, I went to the guys and said, "Look I'm going on this podcast, and one of the topics they're going to definitely talk about is Life versus CI, with regard to The Shaper stuff, what's going on, so guys, what's going on? What can you tell me?" and, I wasn't expecting an argument about which was better, if you see what I mean. But it happened, there were people saying, "Actually, they're wrong. There's a ton of good life-stuff going on now, they're just misinformed" And so, regardless of whether those particular people are right, maybe the community wisdom is right-er, there's still a lot of debate, and a lot of reason to potentially roll life characters. Having said that, it's certainly clear that CI is popular at the moment, and the community likes flavour-of-the-month a lot. Once something is deemed to be "correct" they're going to play it, it's powerful, and that will cause people to then complain that it's too powerful. Typically-
  585.  
  586. LiftingNerdBro: It's just one of those things that happens, when there is a meta, and there is some popular people playing some builds, and then all of a sudden, you start to see the same thing, and it gets blown completely out of proportion. I completely disagree that life is bad, or that CI is the best-
  587.  
  588. ProjectPT: The thing is I want to call bullshit on all of this.
  589.  
  590. (laughter)
  591.  
  592. ProjectPT: And here's the reason, you have one-shot mechanics. And if you can over-health those one-shot mechanics, the difference between taking, for example, Uber Atziri's lightning hits, and not being able to take the lightning hit, is the ability to just stack damage and face-tank the fight. Or the ability that any fuck up is death. Now, when you talk about The Shaper encounter, yes a life-based build has killed it, with a support in hardcore, and life-based can do it. But, any situation where you can out-health a one-shot, cough cough, volatiles, in high tier maps, your energy shield is going to give you so much more room for mistakes. And that's where the problem comes in.
  593.  
  594. HegemonyTV: I personally feel that the problem comes with, you know, strong tools like Vaal Discipline, being able to chain them, use them for sketchy situations. Just sustaining an insane amount of pool, while you have life-based builds which have Vaal Immortal Call, which is... I guess can be considered life-based? Because it's on the left side with the endurance charges? It has the endurance charge synergy, but that has been left in the dust for so long. But yeah, the tools like Vaal Discipline, it brings so much safety, and I just wonder, as a designer, I'm guessing it's Rory that designed the shaper fight, when he watches somebody face-tank all the mechanics... you know, is he dying a little inside? Is he like, "Aw, my masterpiece, somebody has found a way to cheese it."
  595.  
  596. Chris Wilson: Well, let's just say the person who primarily designed The Shaper fight was the person who was most strongly arguing that life is actually probably more viable at the moment. So, uhh, that was very interesting.
  597.  
  598. HegemonyTV: Oh.
  599.  
  600. LiftingNerdBro: But I mean... Sorry go ahead.
  601.  
  602. Chris Wilson: There was another point with the "Life vs. CI" thing, that we can see statistically people are doing, is that typically, starting out in a league, people don't have the good items needed to sustain CI characters, you know they don't have the Shavs or whatever... or, the high, you know, CI, good res, and so...
  603.  
  604. ProjectPT: Low-life, before, catch the error. Low-life is Shavs, CI is just, High Regalias.
  605.  
  606. Chris Wilson: Yup. Sorry. You're right. Shows that I have not played a CI character before on the live realm. So. Statistically though, in terms of people stacking life, which is something we can track, we see that life is predominant early in leagues, and later in the leagues there's a big shift toward CI as people have really ramped up their wealth in the game, and they want to try those kinds of builds. In this league here, it was a much quicker ramping up. People generally played more life for their early characters, but the transition to CI was much faster. You know, essences, knowing that the build from last league was probably untouched from the crazy balance nerfs that we did all over the place.
  607.  
  608. LiftingNerdBro: Mmhmm. I just feel like if you look at the ladder it's not like it's only CI characters that's up there.
  609.  
  610. ProjectPT: Well I think that in general, that the community does... and I apologize, because I'm trying to speak for the community, there isn't an issue in philosophy I don't think with anyone, of having maybe CI having an advantage, or having life an advantage. But there are abusable ways to get CI life pools above well over 15 thousand without legacy gear, especially if you're going to consider parties. And then life-based builds struggle and sacrifice everything to get like 8k. And you're like, "Yay! I can still get one-shot by everything threatening... whereas CI builds can just walk through it. Fantastic. "
  611.  
  612. LiftingNerdBro: I mean, maybe your build's just bad PT. (laughs)
  613.  
  614. Chris Wilson: I'm sure every member of the balance team will listen to this part of the broadcast, and they are working on, at least plans, for what they want to change in the future. Now there's a lot of other environmental stuff, like for example, when we were introducing ascendancies, they solved a lot of issues that we had, but we couldn't talk to the community about, "Hey guys! We're doing this thing called Ascendancy Classes, we'll tell you more about it later, but it solves various balance things we've been working on!" So there are reasons why certain changes are slow. Uhm, you know because of future systems. Having said that, this is a difficult question to solve. Sorry my voice is giving out.
  615.  
  616. ProjectPT: And you don't do the balance, so you did have to liaison us information, and it's not fair to really, push you on that one. And that's fine, but it's still a huge concern.
  617.  
  618. Chris Wilson: I'm sure they're aware of it.
  619.  
  620. LiftingNerdBro: I feel that, Chris, with your voice dying, and we are nearing the end here, I feel like we should... I wanna ask you guys if there's something near the end here, that you want to talk about, Chris, Hege, or PT, because then, we don't want to take more of your time of course.
  621.  
  622. ProjectPT: Okay you go first Hege, you say something, then I'll say something.
  623.  
  624. LiftingNerdBro: Remember, we don't have much time, Chris needs to go within too long.
  625.  
  626. Chris Wilson: I can stay a little bit longer, if there's still questions you want to ask.
  627.  
  628. ProjectPT: Okay we will abuse, we will milk any time you give us. We won't lie, any time you're willing, we'll take.
  629.  
  630. Chris Wilson: Let's keep going for a little bit.
  631.  
  632. HegemonyTV: You guys announced, you know, pretty awesome news, that you guys are evolving your code into better platforms like DX11, and then, later on down the road, DX12? You know with performance improvements, are you guys going to re-visit some old mechanics that were taken out because of performance issues? You've had like particle density, mob density, fracture, those things were pretty cool and interesting, but you guys removed them for good reason. People weren't getting a very positive experience, but as your engine becomes better, are you going to be pushing harder for, you know, exciting things? And will that be an avenue for possibly restoring some of the CoC power, maybe reducing its millisecond delay, to like 300 instead of the old 100, you know, instead of 500 that it is now?
  633.  
  634. Chris Wilson: So I just want to go on record to say that, while we are working on a DirectX 11 version, we currently don't have any plans to support DirectX 12, so the community shouldn't have an expedition... it's... it's slower unless you put a million dollars of work in, is the short version there. But umm, it's 'cause it's more powerful if you've got a team of 30 guys working on it. Which we don't. Okay so, to answer your actual question here, in general, yes. If we can get the game to perform at a level where the players are happy, then we'll definitely increase the fidelity of how fast we're doing various things, or how good the particles are, and that kind of stuff. We have a way to go before enough people are happy with performance on all of their characters.
  635. So the other thing to note is that a few of the issues here, like the Cast on Crit time, do conflate server and client performance together, while it has a client performance effect, our servers are also getting destroyed by the builds that people are playing. Like, the number of people we can fit on a server has decreased by like, 60% in the last couple of years, based on the fact that people are doing builds that just hit so many monsters so many times, and do so much stuff. Like, it's fascinating really how much more it's costing us per player, compared to before. Without the actual technology changing. We've only been improving it. But the amount of more complicated things happening in the game, and you know, combined with the slightly increased monster density over time, as more people are playing in maps, it does have the side effect of causing server load. Now we can solve this by throwing money at it, it's all completely paralyzable, if previously we could fit say 1,000 people on a server and now we can fit 500, which are round number, not accurate, but if we want to do this we just have to buy twice as many servers. And people don't interfere with each other on the server, you know, it's not causing lag spikes or anything, but it does require us to pay twice as much money to the server host per month.
  636. Now, we can afford to, you know, the game is going well financially, so that's not a problem, and we're happy to trade people's supporter packs for server time, it's what they're for. But, if we can find a way of solving the server load issue, which is through some very subtle balance changes occasionally, and you know, improved technology, then it will make the company a lot more able to add content with that money, instead of just using it to buy CPU time.
  637.  
  638. ProjectPT: Well one of the things that you even mentioned before though, was that high density packs were causing issues in other forms, you know, drop rates or whatever. So this seems to be another argument towards, though you have wanted the idea of the further you get the higher the mob density, and people want to kill things, wouldn't a smaller mob density solve this problem as well as many other balance problems you are running into?
  639.  
  640. Chris Wilson: It certainly would! But that's a very dangerous change to make. Let's say we explain to the community members that are paying attention and we say, "Look, we've reduced mob density because it makes single-target less viable, it makes the game very spammy performance wise, I mean, more mobs is more hit effects, more particle effects being played and that kind of stuff, and it also causes a server performance problem. So we've reduced it. And now we're saving money which we can use on content. The game performs better, and balance is a lot better." Some people would say, "Great that sounds like a good thing!", and other players would say, "Weird, the game's really empty now, I don't understand what's going on. I'm just not interested." And I suspect that's like 80% of players or something unfortunately. And none of them are listening to the podcast because there's two tiers of players. There are people who just play to have fun, they don't engage with what we say, and that's great, and then there's the people that are actually active community members. We love you all, you're all listening to the podcast. We like the fact that you pay attention and everything.
  641.  
  642. ProjectPT: But your opinions are dumb!
  643.  
  644. Chris Wilson: Your opinions all good
  645.  
  646. HegemonyTV: With the talk of like netcode and the server stuff, like when I had the pleasure of making my Unique, I was told that we could try to experiment with some experimental effects like knockback distance, but I was told that the programmers relayed that it wasn't going to feel good with desync. Now that you guys have lockstep, like, what do you guys consider the standard to be when you're designing a mechanic, like what do you determine is fair?
  647.  
  648. Chris Wilson: Well we have to be careful here, because 15% of players are still playing on predictive mode. And while it's a better predictive mode than it was in the past.
  649.  
  650. HegemonyTV: I'm sorry did you say 15 or 50?
  651.  
  652. Chris Wilson: One-Five. So, 85 are on lockstep. I actually tried, my hardcore character that I played this league was on predictive mode, by accident, now this wasn't what killed me, that was... being dumb, but I was playing on predictive mode up until level 60 without noticing, and that's how close predictive mode is now, which is really good. I couldn't tell it wasn't lockstep, in fact it felt better than lockstep because there wasn't the 50 millisecond delay on my actions. So, we have improved it a lot, but we have to bear in mind that something that causes desync like potentially certain uses of knockback could be a bad experience for people playing on predictive mode. Especially because those predictive mode users are generally those with high latency. It auto selects lockstep if you have low latency. So high latency combined with desync prone things produces a bad experience, and having 15% of players be upset with the experience would be bad. So, we're still careful, while desync is mostly fixed, we can't design things in that would work badly with it.
  653.  
  654. ProjectPT: One of the things that we didn't really have as much time to talk about was some of the newer players experience. You touched on a bit how, since The Atlas was focused on end-game, the essences would help touch on the new game experience. One of the things related to what we were discussing right before the podcast, Magic The Gathering, a huge thing, and anyone who is streaming always gets this question, the difference between "increased" and "more". Magic The Gathering uses a keyword system, and your game very much does use a keyword system, where you have a phrase that means a very specific thing outside of it's literal English definition. Why don't you have these fonts bolded, because if someone sees a bolded or highlight colour, it indicates that it is a different mechanic, and that there is something very specific to the phrasing, and instead you just have everybody assuming increase and more is the same thing, for, fairly, you know, insubstantial reasons.
  655.  
  656. Chris Wilson: We have a system prototyped up in the office where, if you press Alt on an item, currently it shows the item level, and the intention with the new system is that it explains any mechanics on the item that are "weird", and this is aimed at stuff like Consecrated Ground, for example, where you have to google it to see what it means. And we haven't currently applied it to "more" vs. "increased" because it effects a lot of items, but we could do if needed.
  657. And so this is something we're playing with. We have a China launch in the near future, and we've added this system because there are a lot of new players there, and the game is very overwhelming to be dumped in with all of this content at once. And so, we wanted to try it out on that audience and see whether they like the Alt-text explaining mechanics. I mean it could be used, the mechanic can easily be enabled on our realm in Two-Five-O for example, and that could help in this situation, if a player knows to press Alt. Now we could of course have a tutorial where we teach the player to press Alt, you know, on basic items.
  658.  
  659. ProjectPT: I vote plus one on the tutorial.
  660.  
  661. LiftingNerdBro: I think that sounds like a really good idea. Like, I get a lot of comments on the very basic guides I do on youtube, that, these have been, they have definitely made a difference in how much people have enjoyed and would continue to play the game, right? I have one question here, at the end Grinding Gear Games, you guys have expanded on the Action RPG genre since the launch, you have the different skillgem system, you have the mapping system, and in 2.2 you also introduced the Labyrinth. I'm curious, with the pioneers, if we should put it like that, what kind of design spectrums do you have envisioned for the future of Path of Exile, like what else can the Action RPG genre, and GGG, do to evolve the genre?
  662.  
  663. Chris Wilson: There's a thing we're doing next year, that we think is kind of new, like when we've described this to a couple of people they've said, "No other game would try to do that", and I'm keeping this incredibly vague, like I can't say anything else, because that's for a later announcement. But it is pretty wacky, and I think it will help solve a problem, in Action RPGs that our game has, that other games have not solved well. And an example here, and it's not at all related to flasks, but an example, 100% not an itemization flask thing.
  664.  
  665. LiftingNerdBro: Okay. (laughs)
  666.  
  667. Chris Wilson: I don't mean that as a wink. It actually isn't related to flasks.
  668.  
  669. ProjectPT: So it is related to flasks?
  670.  
  671. (laughing)
  672.  
  673. HegemonyTV: We got it. Read you loud and clear.
  674.  
  675. LiftingNerdBro: Confirmed.
  676.  
  677. Chris Wilson: Confirmed, yeah. Now when we don't release any changes to flasks people are going to be "I'm pretty sure you promised that..."
  678.  
  679. ProjectPT: We're just going to use your quotations and apply it to everything. Like all these changes apply.
  680.  
  681. Chris Wilson: Okay so, example, Diablo 1 and 2, and Titan Quest, and various other games had potions that you drink. You get a lot of them. You got to town, like in Titan Quest you buy like a stack of 80, and in Diablo 1 and 2, you fill up your inventory and belt full of potions. You go out in the world, and whenever you're taking damage, if you need life you're just pushing the potion key. And so, the next generation of Action RPGs had to solve this, because no one liked that. We said, "Well, we don't have gold so, you're not buying potions, let's go with this flask system that refills on kill.", and Diablo 3 added the red orbs on the ground, that you get during combat, which is like getting life on kill, but done in a slightly more indirect way. And so, we prefer the way that we did it, because we like our game, and we feel this is the case of different companies solving the same problem in different ways. And this system that we're looking into in the future is another way of solving an existing problem in a different way than other people have.
  682.  
  683. LiftingNerdBro: Okay, well, interesting, I guess we'll just have to look forward to that.
  684.  
  685. ProjectPT: Was there anything that you wanted to kind of share indirectly that we aren't having to ask a question, or indicate, or something you want to chat about while you have a bit more time?
  686.  
  687. Chris Wilson: Umm, I think we've mostly communicated everything that we wanted to communicate recently. I mean it's tougher after the release of an expansion because the only things to talk about are either what we're doing immediately to fix problems in the expansion, which we've tried to put in the manifesto post as soon as it's decided on, even if it's a week or two before it's coming out, or things that are coming out in the future, that we can't talk about. And I wish we could, but the marketing schedule just means that we have to be very careful to- A) Only talk about things we know are actually going in. Otherwise you get those problems where developers over-promise stuff for years and years and then none of it's in the released game. And B) Journalists want to hear something that is exclusive to them so they can announce it to the community and people read their articles, and enjoy going through their content. And that works well for us because we get to, you know, have their readers hear about our game, and so on. So we have to, uhm, keep a lot of cards close to our chest until it's time to announce it.
  688.  
  689. HegemonyTV: I have one last question, if you guys don't mind. You guys are planning to release two skill mid-league, we don't know when, but if that is a success, as far as player retention, is that something that you guys will continue to do going forward?
  690.  
  691. Chris Wilson: Sure. We used to release skills during the leagues, like mentioned earlier, and those patches had minor drops associated with retention. I think it's because it was making it confusing, and we pushed them pretty hard, and it just probably wasn't the right time for it then. We'll release these because we're keen to get them out. You know, we were hoping to get them in Two-Four-O, if things go badly with finishing them off, maybe they slip to Two-Five-O, I can't promise it's in Two-Four-O, but our current goal is to release them, uhm, in the near future. Essentially the story behind those skills is that there were two channeling skills that we were working on, and we weren't particularly happy with the final state of either of them. Right, they were good, they're fine, but we want them to be better than that. We feel they can be better with a bit more work, and whenever we mentioned channeling people said, "You better have a laser skill! Channeling are always lasers!"
  692.  
  693. (laughter)
  694.  
  695. ProjectPT: Well clearly.
  696.  
  697. Chris Wilson: And we're thinking, "Crap. We don't have a laser skill, that's a problem." so...
  698.  
  699. ProjectPT: How did you not have a laser skill!?
  700.  
  701. (laughter)
  702.  
  703. Chris Wilson: Well there was a prototype but it wasn't anywhere near finished, so the third skill probably might be a laser skill. And we may have added that one in order to not get the outburst of "What? What do you mean there are channeling skills that aren't lasers?" So that's something we'll be talking about more in the news. I don't even know what form the laser skill is taking.
  704.  
  705. HegemonyTV: I'm pretty sure we're going to be come The Shaper. That big plasma beam.
  706.  
  707. LiftingNerdBro: Archon.
  708.  
  709. HegemonyTV: Archon yeah.
  710.  
  711. ProjectPT: I'm pretty sure you're already screwed saying you weren't planning the laser.
  712.  
  713. (laughter)
  714.  
  715. LiftingNerdBro: There's no winning here.
  716.  
  717. Chris Wilson: The guys had already prototyped up a laser skill it's just... okay so the tricky thing with lasers is the following: imagine that you're taking your laser and you're sweeping it across the play-field.
  718.  
  719. ProjectPT: Like piety.
  720.  
  721. Chris Wilson: You quite rapidly sweep from point A to point B, let's say you know, 100 degrees apart, and, this is occurring over say, 5 or 6 server frames, which are 30 milliseconds each, 'cause you swung quite rapidly. If you go from one side of the monster, to the other side of a monster, you expect to have hit that monster, as you swung through it, cause you moved your mouse in an arc. But on the server, it did some damage on one side, not to the monster, then on the other side, and not to the monster, and didn't hit it. So you have a whole pile of hard math. And this gets bad, and people start to cry, and, they're working it out.
  722. It's not a problem. I mean we've had to do this for the piety beam situation, also in the game, so you can't, you know, dodge between it. But this is the reason why laser skills are harder than they sound. And the reason why the prototype didn't get passed a prototype initially, cause we saw it was fun, but it's a lot of work to make it actually releasable. Anyway, I can't promise anything in particular with the skills, there's discussion of one of the three stopping being a channeling skill and being a regular skill. I'm not quite sure how it's going to end up. But the point is, three skills currently in development, when they're ready, we'll release them. It's unlikely to be in the next week, and there's a chance they may get moved to Two-Five-O, if we feel it's for the best.
  723.  
  724. ProjectPT: So then, what TV Show accompanied your hardcore experience?
  725.  
  726. (laughter)
  727.  
  728. Chris Wilson: Unfortunately, I was paying a lot of attention during that. Which made it all the more embarrassing to die. (exhales)
  729.  
  730. (laughter)
  731.  
  732. LiftingNerdBro: You knew it was going to happen, Chris.
  733.  
  734. HegemonyTV: It's okay, we're talking about Piety's laser beam, that killed me the other day.
  735.  
  736. Chris Wilson: My death was bad. So I made it through Merciless with very little lightning resist. The entire time thinking, "I'm completely screwed, what am I doing? Why do I have so many Topaz flasks?" You know, "This is bad." So, I'm actively trying to upgrade my lightning resists. But I've got one of those annoying situations with the itemization where I can't quite swap it around to get that lightning resist without burning all of my essences, and I kind of feel I can make it through, and just luckily find a good rare. It's a problem. It's all capped, apart from lightning. And it's been okay. I've made it through Act 3, and it's time to fight Piety. And I think to myself, "Okay, what does she do in terms of lightning? Let's have a think about this. Well I know she's got a fire form, and I know she's got a cold form. I specifically remember as adding those. There was a lot of design discussion, there was cool concept art, I remember the marketing. Does she have any lightning attacks? Well the other form of Piety uses Ball Lightning. Does this one use Ball Lightning? I can't remember her using Ball Lightning. I just fought her twice in the previous difficulties. You know, she uses Lightning Warp, maybe that's her lightning attack! Okay, let's give this a go!" Died in one second.
  737.  
  738. (collective exhale)
  739.  
  740. Chris Wilson: Lightning storm.
  741.  
  742. ProjectPT: Well done.
  743.  
  744. LiftingNerdBro: I died to Piety not too long ago either, but the embarrassing thing is it wasn't Merciless.
  745.  
  746. ProjectPT: At least you didn't die to Hillock.
  747.  
  748. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah that's true. I guess that trumps all. Alright Chris, we don't want to take more of your time. Thank you very much for joining us tonight, it's been very interesting, and very enlightening, we really do appreciate that.
  749.  
  750. Chris Wilson: You're welcome guys! I had a great time. Thanks for the good questions.
  751.  
  752. LiftingNerdBro: And uhh... so
  753.  
  754. HegemonyTV: Thank you for the thorough answers!
  755.  
  756. LiftingNerdBro: Yeah.
  757.  
  758. Chris Wilson: You're welcome.
  759.  
  760. LiftingNerdBro: So for you new viewers out there who could be interested in Path of Exile, it is a free to play game that you can download on pathofexile.com, or by finding it on Steam. Is there anything else they should know here, Chris?
  761.  
  762. Chris Wilson: Try it out.
  763.  
  764. LiftingNerdBro: Try it out. There you go. Also if you didn't catch tonight's show live guys, you can watch the VOD on Hegemony's Youtube, and we do this podcast every Sunday live on this channel, and if you want to catch the next one, make sure to give this channel a follow, and we will then see you guys again next Sunday. Take care.
  765.  
  766. ProjectPT: Ciao.
  767.  
  768. HegemonyTV: See you later.
  769.  
  770. LiftingNerdBro: Uhh PT I'll host you.
  771.  
  772. ProjectPT: 'Kay, my streams up. Not gonna unhost you.
  773.  
  774. LiftingNerdBro: Alright, we're still streaming by the way, just a sec.
  775.  
  776. ProjectPT: Which means I probably need to fuck off. Uhh, thank you very much for your time Chris.
  777.  
  778. Chris Wilson: You're welcome, thanks guys, I'll see you more later on.
  779.  
  780. HegemonyTV: Have a good one, thanks again.
  781.  
  782. Chris Wilson: Take care, bye.
  783.  
  784. [Thank you to TheRealZipZip for correcting me about Hrishi's name, I had it transcribed as Riche]
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment