API tools faq
paste
ChiefOluk

Baeclast Episode #37 ft. Chris Wilson Transcript

ChiefOluk
Mar 3rd, 2019
1,646
0
Never
Add comment
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
text 148.44 KB | None | 0 0
raw download clone embed print report
  1. Baeclast Episode #37 ft. Chris Wilson & Synthesis 3.6 Spoilers
  2. Recorded roughly 11 PM EST March 1st, 2019
  3.  
  4. transcript by u/chiefoluk
  5.  
  6. Timestamps are based on this video:
  7. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/389033652
  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnwyTEJ6FKE
  9. ___
  10. Reddit:
  11. (Official post for Twitch Stream) Baeclast with Chris Wilson regarding Synthesis is live now!
  12. https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/awf505/baeclast_with_chris_wilson_regarding_synthesis_is/
  13.  
  14. (Official post for YouTube upload) Baeclast Episode #37 ft. Chris Wilson & Synthesis 3.6 Spoilers
  15. https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/awhdj4/baeclast_episode_37_ft_chris_wilson_synthesis_36/
  16.  
  17. (Popular discussion thread) Chris Wilson Baeclast Summary by u/dahun:
  18. https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/awg3bm/chris_wilson_baeclast_summary/
  19. ___
  20. Hosts:
  21. TarkeCat
  22. Octavian
  23. RaizQT
  24. nugiyen
  25. ___
  26. Special Guest:
  27. Chris Wilson
  28. ___
  29. Editor's notes:
  30. It's not a "verbatim" transcript. I cut out filler words, etc.
  31. The internet connection cut out sometimes. Lost words are indicated by three hyphens ---
  32. ___
  33. Silly quotes:
  34. blue wall of death
  35. it deletes your character
  36. the community notices some nuts
  37. the development cycle is a lot slower than the complaint cycle
  38. A very long time ago, Path of Exile had what was called the Maelstrom of Chaos.
  39. You shut down Mors pretty hard
  40. The idea is not dead, it's just sleeping
  41. thinkingface.emoji
  42. you're not a true melee player unless you're basic attacking
  43. if you see a suspicious patch for no reason, it's just that, it's not droprates
  44. I play a lot of Solo Self Found
  45. ___
  46. Drinking game ("roughly ten" drinks for each category, Please Drink Responsibly. Sponsored by Dr. Pepper.):
  47. Every reference to twitch chat
  48. Everyone laughs
  49. RaizQT says "Nice"
  50. TarkeCat says "On that note,"
  51. TarkeCat says "I"m just curious,"
  52. TarkeCat says "One thing," "One more thing," "One other thing,"
  53. Nugiyen tries to ask a question and then doesn't actually ask a question.
  54. Octavian is a baller
  55. Chris says "and" five times and still hasn't ended the sentence.
  56. Chris says "Awesome"
  57. Chris says "and so on and so on"
  58. ___
  59.  
  60. 0-00-00 : (Baeclast.logo)
  61.  
  62. 0-00-07 TarkeCat: Hey guys, TarkeCat here, and today we are joined by Chris Wilson for a very special Baeclast. We'll be covering everything 3.6. Thank you Chris very much for coming on.
  63.  
  64. 0-00-19 Chris Wilson: Thank you for having me
  65.  
  66. 0-00-20 TarkeCat: Other than having a slightly scotched stream, we're doing very well. Also, before we get into it, I'd like to say that this is the two year anniversary of Baeclast, so Bex very kindly gave us thirty loot boxes to give away. Some will be during the stream, some later be later on YouTube. What was everyone's first reaction to the league? So Chris isn't on the spot right away. Raiz, what did you think about Synthesis off the bat?
  67.  
  68. 0-00-45 RaizQT: A lot of blue. I very much liked the aesthetic, and I've been looking forward to a league such as this for the longest time. The actual gameplay looks interesting too. It's not just about the blue! Especially the crafting methods. That's probably the thing I'm looking forward to the most. Crafting has been really lately fun in PoE.
  69.  
  70. 0-01-08 TarkeCat: It was probably the crafting as well for me. Chris, has there been a solid push ---
  71.  
  72. 0-01-18 Chris Wilson: Oh no. (all laugh)
  73.  
  74. 0-01-40 Octavian: This is why we had such a scotched start to Baeclast. The internet has been cutting out. I don't know where he was going with that question. I'm going to guess that he was going to ask: Chris, has there been a push towards improving crafting methods and giving players more tools recently?
  75.  
  76. 0-01-55 Chris Wilson: We try very hard with each expansion to add new crafting stuff. This can be fossils like in Delve or potentially new corruption outcomes in Incursion. With Synthesis we wanted it to become a first class citizen, where we were designing the areas of Synthesis alongside crafting options. We really liked the idea of fiddling around with implicits in a way we hadn't done before. This is the design space that players can influence implicits a lot more than before, that we're wanting to explore here. It's quite scary to be honest.
  77.  
  78. 0-02-05 Octavian: I can imagine. Some of them seem incredibly powerful from what we've seen
  79.  
  80. 0-02-10 Chris Wilson: I should stress that the incredibly powerful ones are the rarest ones. We're showing off the interesting ones, but they're not dropping like candy.
  81.  
  82. 0-02-18 Octavian: I thought that might be the case. It's a nice reassurance to hear that directly. Nugi? Since Tarke's cutting in and out, we didn't finish; what are you hyped for for the next league?
  83.  
  84. 0-02-35 Nugiyen: I'm hyped for collecting all the puzzle pieces, putting them together, and running them. I think that looks really cool. The actual Synthesis zones themselves, and seeing how that goes. I'm really looking forward to seeing how we interact with that system, how it differs from Incursion and Delve, since it does seem like a mix between the two. I always love whenever they do anything to skills, so all the caster reworks are really exciting and unique.
  85.  
  86. 0-03-12 Octavian: For me that's probably what I'm most excited about, actually. The complete pass over spells, and in particular I really want to play Divine Ire. It looks really cool. I don't know if it's going to be super strong, obviously we don't have numbers, but it looks really fun. I don't care even if it's mid-tier or something. I'm going to play the heck out of it.
  87.  
  88. 0-03-35 Nugiyen: A little fantasy.
  89.  
  90. 0-03-36 RaizQT: Tarke, tell us what you're excited for.
  91.  
  92. 0-03-38 TarkeCat: Very quickly, I think I'm most excited for the spell reworks, and the new focus the dot aura especially, since I'm a big fan of dot builds. Chris, if you had to give us the Synthesis sales pitch, and how it differs from previous leagues, how would you do it?
  93.  
  94. 0-03-55 Chris Wilson: It definitely differs from previously leagues in the way it plays. The general experience you get here is that playing through the game is a little like Incursion, you find these subareas that you play. They're very bite-sized content, you finish them quite quickly. It's not easy necessarily to complete all of them. The difficulty of those areas is proportional to how many connections that piece has. So, the three and four connection ones are quite challenging to do, but those pieces are more versatile.
  95. 0-04-19 Chris Wilson: Anyway, as you're playing through the campaign and maps, you get your bite-sized Synthesis content, and it's up to you, like with Delve, how often you engage with the full memory map stuff. Whether you piece the pieces together one at a time and do shorter runs, or whether you try to make some epic chain of them to go for something further away. We've been having a lot of fun this weekend balancing the rate that reward memories spawn relative to the nexus, how far away they are and what kind of stuff is on them, and getting that to feel really good. I expect that we're going to see some interesting strategy between making short paths to get the easy ones and much longer paths to go for the hard ones. It's worth noting that, this is relatively new information, but the way we've changed how global mods work means that it really encourages you to build quite complicated structures because now when you get a global mod, it affects everything that's connected in one block; it basically propagates outwards and puts that mod on all of those maps. So, the more global mods you can tag, which are now on the reward memories, giving you a cumulative set of global mods that affect all of the connected things. You definitely get rewarded very heavily for going all in and building some incredible structures.
  96.  
  97. 0-05-24 Octavian: That leads to a question we have later down the doc, but it seems relevant now. Is there going to be a limited inventory space for the number of puzzle pieces we can collect?
  98.  
  99. 0-05-37 Chris Wilson: Yes. Currently you can hold ten. We're still fiddling with that number, but we like ten. It lets you play quite a lot of areas without having to necessarily spend them all, and it gives you more versatility for when you do. Of course, it's very tempting to plug them in one at a time when there's good rewards nearby.
  100.  
  101. 0-05-56 Octavian: OK.
  102.  
  103. 0-05-57 TarkeCat: Say you were leveling a new character and you picked up ten low level puzzle pieces, would you have to run those before you can pick up higher level ones?
  104.  
  105. 0-06-07 Chris Wilson: The memory map is a per character thing not per league. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, because it can be, and I say this because it's not like Delve, it's not a thousand deep thing that you need to keep your progress of. It's a thing that cycles where you deplete the reward memories, then you go for a new one. It can be, within half a day of gameplay, you basically wipe out the current state, so if you make a new character, you're not missing a lot. You're tagging a few rewards you needed on the last one but also because of the way that the area levels work, we can completely avoid the problem where you have the super high level board that you can't play on with a low level character by just having a different slate each. It's quite intentional that it's per character. I don't think that there are any drawbacks in this case.
  106.  
  107. 0-06-48 RaizQT: That totally makes sense. Chat is already screaming, "More than ten!" Chat, you don't even know how it works, come on!
  108.  
  109. 0-06-54 Chris Wilson: We considered that, per character or per league, thing very carefully, after getting it wrong with Delve. We're conscious of the fact that it's a lot of work to rework if we get it wrong, so we think about it very carefully before we commit now.
  110.  
  111. 0-07-05 Nugiyen: Let's say you want to construct like the perfect little Synthesis, can you just use a few of them, and just keep storing them until you have the perfect ten?
  112.  
  113. 0-07-19 Chris Wilson: You can if you want to. There's no harm in just wasting the ones that you don't want in the wrong direction and playing those while you're setting up the perfect ones for the run, because they only deplete at the point where you enter the areas. That's when the counters tick down. It's entirely possible to leave them on the map to some extent. I believe the current limit is the number of pieces that can be placed simultaneously is twenty five, but that's one of the things we're tweaking this week as we actually get to sink a lot of play hours.
  114.  
  115. 0-07-26 Octavian: Since your maximum inventory space is ten, but you said the maximum placed limit is twenty five, does that mean you can place them, not run them, collect more, and continue to place them?
  116.  
  117. 0-07-58 Chris Wilson: I'll be specific about how this works. Once one is placed, it will sit there happily forever with a number of charges on it, and they deplete at the point that you enter the area and click on the interactable object that creates basically this force field that drops. In case you entered the area by accident and don't want to deplete it, the force field thing lets you choose whether you're actually opening it up to complete the encounter.
  118. 0-08-19 Chris Wilson: There's a planning mode. The planning mode is a lot like what you guys have been asking for for the passive tree, which lets you anywhere place the pieces as a ghost version so you can plan out where your connectivity is. If the pieces planned, then when you get to the appropriate bridge, it will automatically lock that piece in and extend the bridge straight away. So, you put the plan in, and as you play, the plan will just get locked in piece by piece. That's not technically removing it from your inventory. You still have to enter the areas at least once to lock it in. Most of the pieces that you play have three to five charges, so you don't have to worry too much about running out of charges, because the reward places you're trying to get to only have one charge. You do get a bit of lee-way failing areas and such.
  119.  
  120. 0-08-57 Octavian: It's the charge system that allows for more placed pieces than inventory space.
  121.  
  122. 0-09-02 Chris Wilson: Certainly. You can plan your pieces, which hasn't them removed from your inventory, and then you can go and run these. Each time you enter one it will lock it in place. That takes them away from the inventory and onto the board, and they have a number of charges that can be used. You can accumulate more pieces, and in doing so you could have twenty five down all at once, assuming that's the number we keep. It could be higher, it could be a little lower, depending on how it plays.
  123.  
  124. 0-09-24 Octavian: Yeah, specifics are probably going to be in flux. It sounds really cool! That allows you to make absolutely massive chains.
  125.  
  126. 0-09-32 Chris Wilson: Yeah, and the massive chains accumulate these crazy stacking global mods, and they really do synergize well together. One thing we were working out today in design is the concept... Fractured items drop from what we're calling synthesized monsters, those are the monsters with the special blur effects on them. Lots of the global mods also increase drops of synthesized monsters by quite a lot, and increase the number of synthesized monsters. You can kind of double dip on this, where you're getting both more reward monsters dropping more items, and they drop better, so it's an n-squared thing with the global mods. If you build a big chain of twenty areas, tack two global mods in there, then you get quite a lot of bonuses from those areas.
  127.  
  128. 0-10-13 TarkeCat: I'm guessing it's safe to say we'll get like one of these fragments per zone you run?
  129.  
  130. 0-10-18 Chris Wilson: That's correct. For each zone you play through in the main game and through the maps, you'll get a fragment if you successfully banish a stabilizer. I should note it's actually quite hard to do the four connection ones. They're worth working for. They're not mandatory. If you fail, you'll have less versatility with the pieces you're placing, but if you can get a four-connection, it lets you branch out and make cool T-junctions and stuff later, so you can have a big connected mass, and then a reward spawns nearby and you just branch out from one of the spare connections to tag that.
  131.  
  132. 0-11-02 RaizQT: I'm just trying to clarify on the chain mods. They're not really global mods, then? They're chain mods.
  133.  
  134. 0-11-11 Chris Wilson: Originally, we described them as global mods, and the reason for that was because we were experimenting with a model where they do affect everything. The problem is, in order for them to be really powerful and impactful, we don't want the player to have too many, and they were kind of being granted by everything. Design iteration is as it is, we eventually came around to this version here, which is a lot more active. The player has to go specifically activate them as a reward outcome. This makes it a lot more interactable, and makes them quite impactful, it lets us make them very punchy and interact in a chain. We like it a lot more. So, we're dropping the terminology "global mod" and I don't know what we're calling it now, but it's got a cool effect on it at least.
  135.  
  136. 0-11-48 RaizQT: Okay.
  137.  
  138. 0-11-50 TarkeCat: Just out of interest, as a developer and as a player, what things are you most excited for in this new league?
  139.  
  140. 0-11-56 Chris Wilson: From a development point of view, I love the fact that we're getting to do cool stuff with implicit mods, and I really enjoyed interacting with fractured items, because surprisingly it feels really good to get something when you're leveling through the game with damage or attack speed locked in and you can use a just few alts to get a really good leveling item. It saves dozens and dozens of rerolls. That's a surprisingly nice thing.
  141. 0-12-20 Chris Wilson: From a player, I think the Synthesis areas themselves have a lot of tension going on with the decay that follows. We've gone through so many iterations of the blue wall of death that comes behind you to push you through the area, and there's so much tension between fighting the monsters, because you want to get fractured items from them. Only monsters in these decaying areas can drop fractured items, so you're having to compete to get as many monsters killed as you can, while making it to the stability point without getting hit by the decay. It's very tense.
  142.  
  143. 0-12-50 TarkeCat: What actually happens when you get hit by the wall?
  144.  
  145. 0-12-53 Chris Wilson: There's this huge debate going on internally. We have many developers feeling that it should be incredibly lethal. We have many developers feeling that it should just kick you out. We're working on a compromise. We don't want people losing hardcore characters. We understand that sometimes you take the wrong turn and the wall gets you, but on the other hand, it is possible to stay ahead of it. I believe that we have it dealing damage, but we also have it teleporting you out after a certain distance, once it's thick enough.
  146.  
  147. 0-14-18 Nugiyen: What? Okay.
  148.  
  149. 0-13-20 Octavian: Sort of like Incursion, but it damages you before kicking you out.
  150.  
  151. 0-13-28 Chris Wilson: It certainly damages you to stand in there, but it's not meant to be able to kill you, just discourages you from taking monster damage. Now, we're iterating on this heavily. I suspect it's not going to be the instant death wall that chat is spamming (all laugh), but we do want there to be consequences for the decay catching you.
  152.  
  153. 0-13-44 Octavian: He said you'd be forgotten though! Literal instant death. Go the Oba's Cursed Trove route. (Chris Wilson: "Deletes your character.") (laughs) It doesn't send you to standard, it deletes your character.
  154.  
  155. 0-13-56 Chris Wilson: Exactly. You have no account left. All your supporter packs are gone. \s
  156.  
  157. 0-14-00 Nugiyen: Have you, as a hardcore player, balanced the time it takes to take you out with the logout timer?
  158.  
  159. 0-14-10 Chris Wilson: I'm thankfully not personally working on balancing that. It's an unenviable task, but the team are doing a good job setting that up. When we say "kicks you out", we mean it sends you back to the last stability point. It doesn't just dump you on the main menu.
  160.  
  161. 0-14-24 Octavian: I was imagining "kicks you out" like incursion does, where it sends you back to the map or something.
  162. 0-14-31 Octavian: Speaking of Incursion, I think it's a useful comparison point. I'm curious as to how the memory fragments and the events that spawn in maps compare in terms of necessary clearspeed to Incursion. We've had some power creep since that league, but if you could draw a comparison?
  163.  
  164. 0-14-57 Chris Wilson: I suspect that the versions that I've played are not final enough to be able to tell you exactly how it's going to feel compared to released Incursion because right now it's changing three or four times a day including on the weekend. It's designed so that a given player who's far less skilled than most people watching this podcast are still able to collect the pieces with two connections on them. They're not particularly hard. When you get three or four, you have to cover a lot more ground in a roughly similar amount of time before the decay gets you, and so those ones, which really give you a lot of versatility on the memory map, those are the ones that start to require some either clearspeed or just getting past the monsters speed. But then you have a tradeoff, since the more monsters you kill, the more fractured items you're going to find. You do need to find quite a lot of those, because it takes three of the same class of item to synthesize, and you're going to want to synthesize a lot of stuff, and so on and so on.
  165.  
  166. 0-15-43 RaizQT: Is the mentality like Delve when it comes to the really long pieces? If you've got a ten piece chain, is it actually supposed to kill you, or is it supposed to be somewhat manageable for the average player?
  167.  
  168. 0-15-53 Chris Wilson: When you're playing a ten piece chain, there are two things in play. The first one is that it's long, which means that you have to have a bunch of time available to play through it. These things are forty percent of the size of a map or something, so ten pieces means roughly four maps for duration. There's that. In addition there's potential global mods that you've put on there. It's the global mods that certainly rewarding, and I don't think currently they do make it substantially harder. I'll have to check. I'm pretty sure the global mods are just beneficial at this stage. They vary a bit. But the important thing to note is that you are trying to chain this toward some reward island/memory that's sitting off in the distance. In order to do this, most of the pieces you place have a number of charges that's greater than one, so if you fail or horribly botch it up, you can come back and there's just lower fragment counts available. You'll probably find that you've worked on the structure for a number of iterations, that some of the counts are hitting zero and vanishing before others. You have to do repairs if you get a few failures in there, or if you get unlucky with the number of charges, then you have to repair it by putting pieces in, or the functional equivalent.
  169.  
  170. 0-16-57 RaizQT: Damn. That's pretty cool. I like that a lot.
  171.  
  172. 0-17-02 TarkeCat: In the Ziggy reveal video, it seemed like a lot of puzzle grid system was inspired by a board game. Can you give a little more detail on that?
  173.  
  174. 0-17-10 Okay, so the board game inspiration story. A lot of people have asked me. When we do our design stuff, we have various different design toys available that are handy, like paper and pencil and whiteboards, and sometimes board game pieces. We were having this design discussion and Jonathan's house, over a barbecue one day near Christmas, and he happened to have a copy of the board game Carcassonne, which was an awesome board game about a French city. This involves pieces that can connect together. Basically, they have connection points on them. While we have connection and square pieces go next to each other, that's about as similar as it gets to Carcassonne. We used the pieces to prototype it. Basically, we broke out that board game, sorted all the bits out, and took the pieces that were the right shapes for us to do Synthesis prototyping. That's the connection there. They have to connect together, so it's like Carcassonne, but like five percent comparison.
  175.  
  176. 0-17-59 RaizQT: Was this the most recent Christmas or the previous one?
  177.  
  178. 0-18-05 Chris Wilson: The most recent one. We haven't even started thinking about what the next expansion is. (RaizQT: Wow, okay.) These things are done in thirteen weeks. (RaizQT: Damn, that's crazy.)
  179.  
  180. 0-18-19 TarkeCat: That stuff is a lot faster than I thought it was. Both this league and the last league had a very narrative heavy focus. Is that something you're looking to continue with going forward?
  181.  
  182. 0-18-24 Chris Wilson: We like it. There are a couple of reasons why we like doing the narrative stuff. First thing is that the community loves it. We get so much good feedback about the story stuff, so that's awesome. It's like free awesomeness for you. It's not free, it's very expensive, but it's free from a production point of view. We get good writers, we put them on it, they write awesome stuff, and it doesn't distract the designers. If everything goes well, it doesn't have the n-squared complexity when everything has to work well together. For example, the visual effects of this decay effect, all those mechanics, that's an n-squared thing. It makes it so much harder to make the league, because you have to work alongside visual effects guys, and the people doing the decay mechanics. It's much harder to finesse it to be perfect. But a good story, that just happens because the writers are awesome. It's really nice to be able to just trust that they'll be able to come up with something amazing, and then the league has voice-acted characters and cool stuff to find out about the history, and it furthers the plot of the game. Yeah, I really like that.
  183.  
  184. 0-19-20 TarkeCat: Just on that note again: How did you feel about the successful end of the Betrayal? It seemed like a lot of people were really into the whole Syndicate board, but felt the narrative dropped stuff at the end.
  185.  
  186. 0-19-33 Chris Wilson: It's difficult in these leagues to actually have a final point where the story ends without having a looping aspect to it. It worked well in Incursion because you have the repetitive cyclic nature of it. You have a different story each time. With Betrayal you do get to see an arc of going through and defeating the mastermind, then the league necessitates that you have to be able to go through that multiple times. I don't know of how we could have done that better, but we are trying to make sure that there's a compelling arc in the league content.
  187.  
  188. 0-20-04 Nugiyen: One thing that strikes me though, is that you have a game that does have an endpoint at times, and that still works. People still replay the game. They make new characters. I'm just wondering why that doesn't hold in a league mechanic.
  189.  
  190. 0-20-25 Chris Wilson: We may be able to have a thing like, you finish the story of the league and then you get to play through it again. It's just with something like Betrayal, we know in advance you're going to be playing quite a lot of iterations. It's definitely designed to be there. You do your syndicate, then you do it again better, now that you know which rewards you have. The first time you get Tiny's Trial or whatever, and you decide you want to see it again, you're certainly going to structure it in favor of getting that second time. The same thing is true here. If finishing a reward memory was the end of the league, you'd certainly be seeing that quite a lot of times. We do have stuff that you can get to in Cavas's memories that are more final than others. There are some pretty interesting stuff that happens there that story driven people will like, including some cool boss fights. I suspect that they'll be quite pleased with that.
  191.  
  192. 0-21-06 RaizQT: It's not as complicated with this league, right? You can just put a big "forget about it LOL" screen after you've done something, and then you do it again because you've forgot about it.
  193.  
  194. 0-21-15 Octavian: It's similar to the advantage that Incursion had, where you could literally time travel back to before anything happened.
  195.  
  196. 0-21-21 Chris Wilson: I like the idea of repeatable leagues. I personally believe there's a good scope for simple leagues as well. We've been doing some very conceptually complicated leagues over the last few years, and I'm trying very hard to make sure they're easy to explain to people, while still making sure we have deep mechanics available. For example, I love the fact that most of you guys here latch onto the fact that there's cool crafting stuff, because that's very hard for a new player to understand. We have to say story stuff for the new players, look at these Synthesis mechanics, it's fun to play, and then hope that the community notices some nuts crafting stuff going on in the background, because if we put that as the forefront of our marketing material, it just turns people off.
  197.  
  198. 0-22-02 RaizQT: Has there been any clarification on how Blessed Orbs work with all of this stuff, when it comes to the implicits?
  199.  
  200. 0-22-08 Chris Wilson: We try very hard to make sure the Path of Exile mechanics do work together, so yes I believe they will reroll those implicits, and let you change the values on them.
  201.  
  202. 0-22-17 RaizQT: Oh, nice.
  203.  
  204. 0-22-18 Nugiyen: One thing on the mechanics of the Synthesis, how do you determine the actual level of the zone?
  205.  
  206. 0-22-25 Chris Wilson: When you're playing the game, and let's say you're in a level forty area, and you get a fragment, it's going to be a level forty fragment that's placed down. This means that when you're playing the game, they'll lag slightly behind you, but they're harder than normal, so it works out relatively well. In maps, things flatten off quite a lot. You get the level of the map you're playing. This means if you want high level rewards and good uniques and so on, it's probably better to chain higher level areas together.
  207.  
  208. 0-22-52 Nugiyen: It's not like you'll have a plus six or whatever it was from Incursion to your zone that you would run? Like, you could run seventy maps and one eighty three and you would end up with a complete eighty three zone. You would have to run multiple high level maps to keep it?
  209.  
  210. 0-23-17 Chris Wilson: It's our goal that people are playing the hardest map content they can in order to get the best rewards from the league. This was evidenced strongly with Delve, when there was all that drama about the fact that wanted you to be playing super high level maps to get the best sulphite gains, and we were punitive toward players that dropped down a few map levels. Having said that, this stuff is what we do in the last week of the league development, is actually give it a chance to fully playtest and consider all the abuse cases. I suspect that the exact finessing of these level numbers is going to change tons from today before release. They may even change afterwards. We want you to play higher maps.
  211.  
  212. 0-23-52 Octavian: The itemlevel of the floating reward islands, that is determined by the content that you're running. How is that generated?
  213.  
  214. 0-24-03 Chris Wilson: The exact level generated for the rewards themselves... I'll have to check that. I haven't seen how that's generated.
  215.  
  216. 0-24-14 Octavian: I didn't mean to ambush you with that.
  217.  
  218. 0-24-16 Chris Wilson: No, it's okay. I should know, but that will be tomorrow.
  219.  
  220. 0-24-22 RaizQT: Another podcast tomorrow, then. (all laugh)
  221.  
  222. 0-24-27 Chris Wilson: "Balance Sunday."
  223.  
  224. 0-24-29 RaizQT: Is that a thing?
  225.  
  226. 0-24-31 Chris Wilson: It is, close to release.
  227.  
  228. 0-24-34 RaizQT: I can imagine it being an actual thing.
  229.  
  230. 0-24-39 TarkeCat: Since you said you're focusing a lot more on these complex leagues, but you still want to have the simple ones, is it intentional that Abyss was the last non-player agency league, and every league since has been very choice focused for the player?
  231.  
  232. 0-24-54 Chris Wilson: Well, I think the leagues after that point have been tier three leagues, as it were. Talisman was the first generation two league, and Bestiary was the first generation three. I like generation three leagues. They take a lot of development effort. I just hope we can present them in as simple as possible way so that they resonate with the players. I worried Synthesis was too complicated. I was very worried about the community reactions. I love the league and know it's good. I was concerned that people might say, "wow, this is so complicated. I can't deal with it." Thankfully, people have been very understanding and they're willing to explore, which is totally awesome.
  233.  
  234. 0-25-28 Octavian: I think actually the mechanic has a really intuitive base to it. There are a lot of specific questions that we've been digging into here, "how is itemlevel determined", "what happens with global mods", and all that. But as for how it actually works, it's quite literally putting puzzle pieces together. That's intuitive, that's understandable. When we were putting together the doc for this episode, it was a little tough to come up with some overarching questions about the league, because it looked pretty intuitive and understandable.
  235.  
  236. 0-26-00 Chris Wilson: I have a question for you. There are four ways that we disseminate information on announcement day. Number one is the trailer. Number two is the developer commentary thing that's after the trailer which goes into a bit more detail. Number three is the announcement page, which has those sections and a few words. And number four is Ziggy's video. How do you rate these? Where do you get your information about the league? Are there any of those you completely ignored? What's working here? Do we need to do the developer commentary, is it critical? What's happening.
  237.  
  238. 0-26-27 RaizQT: You need to do that.
  239.  
  240. 0-26-28 Octavian: We're super nerds. That might be a question that, if chat were a little easier to parse, would be better capable of answering, because we have all poured over every detail of everything you guys have said. (Chris Wilson: I mean Ziggy.) Yeah, probably. Ziggy's video has the most reach to an audience that isn't as in-depth as us.
  241.  
  242. 0-26-52 Nugiyen: Ziggy is the most explanatory of the whole concept.
  243.  
  244. 0-26-57 Chris Wilson: Well, we try to give him the right information there. We've been involving Ziggy in the press tour, so he sees what the other external journalists see, and gets time to look at our actual complicated notes about how it works, and gets video in advance, and makes sure he is explaining it clearly, and he has opportunities to fact check with us and put together a video. We don't have to approve his video, he can put what he wants in there, but he seems to do a good job of teaching people how the league works.
  245.  
  246. 0-27-21 Nugiyen: On a personal note, the nostalgia of hearing you narrate the league is something I enjoy every league.
  247.  
  248. 0-27-32 Chris Wilson: You think I should add a "This is Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games" at the start? We cut that for time.
  249.  
  250. 0-27-36 Octavian: Nooo!
  251.  
  252. 0-27-37 Nugiyen: Yeah, but, why not?
  253.  
  254. 0-27-39 Chris Wilson: I'm happy to narrate it. I still love making sure that this stuff happens. While most of my day is spent yelling at people to get stuff done faster, I do make sure I'm fully involved in the league design stuff.
  255.  
  256. 0-27-52 TarkeCat: On that note, it does seem that ninety percent of the information does come from the official page and then the Ziggy video. A lot of the articles just feel like the same thing written six different ways, which is already better explained in the other things. I'm curious how well you think the articles work from your point of view.
  257.  
  258. 0-28-17 Chris Wilson: The articles are useful for our community for validation that the game exists outside of their bubble, if you see what I mean. The primary purpose involving the journalists is that they have an audience there of people who see Path of Exile stuff occasionally and may be interested in trying it out. It's just about more exposure. It's a relatively low effort thing to do those press tours. We don't travel to the states to do it anymore. When I go on the press tour, it means hiding in my office for a week and a half, and doing Skype calls all day, and talking to thirty or so journalists. That's very important because this is done before we've prepared the marketing page, before we've talked to Ziggy, and it really helps me get a good way of explaining the league. The first few journalist explanations are confused and terrible, and then I know what I'm doing to explain it and can put it together really clearly for the developer commentary thing for the trailer, so that you guys get a good explanation of how the league works.
  259.  
  260. 0-29-07 RaizQT: It's like a class full of people is there something where you announce a very in-depth mechanic and nobody gets it? It's something that you have to translate through Ziggy's video or something.
  261.  
  262. 0-29-19 Chris Wilson: It's always a one on one thing with the journalists. I call them and I specifically explain stuff, and we tailor; like I say to them "how much Path of Exile have you played?" and there is some journalists that have played through to maps, killed Shaper and everything and that's great, because for them, I can use normal PoE terminology. For others, I have to explain the benefits of an action RPG, why you have random levels, what an implicit mod is. I really want the journalists to understand the full Synthesis item stuff, so I made diagrams showing the history of implicit mods in Path of Exile, how Vaal corruption works, all the different options available, what makes a ruby ring different than a gold ring (all laugh), and got them to understand it. They wrote it up, and it's exciting!
  263.  
  264. 0-30-00 RaizQT: I can just imagine the guy who doesn't play the game at all and you're trying to explain all this stuff and his brain just exploding.
  265.  
  266. 0-30-07 Chris Wilson: I love the fact that journalists who haven't played the game are interested in playing the game. This is wasn't possible a few years ago to get journalists particularly interested, and now they'll hope in the Skype call and hear all about it. That's really cool.
  267.  
  268. 0-30-20 TarkeCat: On the note with some of the heaviest stuff with Synthesis, what's the philosophy on dropped items and all these special league crafted items, because it seems very favored in one way of recent history.
  269.  
  270. 0-30-33 Chris Wilson: Can you clarify the question there? What's the relationship between the?
  271.  
  272. 0-30-38 TarkeCat: Where does GGG view the value of a dropped item versus a crafted item?
  273.  
  274. 0-30-45 Chris Wilson: Right, I see. This is actually one of the reasons why you can't chance synthesized base types to get synthesized versions of those specific uniques. Because we want to make sure that dropped items can still be the best uniques in the game. Which is going to be a super unpopular opinion, because everyone wants crazy synthesized uniques, but there will be room for that in future expansions. This is about rares and rare crafting, and we value the regular crafting process and this is making some really good base types. I agree that when you're looking for the best rare in the game, it's probably not one you'll pick up off the ground, but it probably wasn't already. It was already in a situation where crafting made the best rares in the game more easily. Having said that, it's still worth picking up rares, and we do want future expansions to continue to make that valuable, it's just that the pendulum has swung slightly towards crafting to make rares in this particular expansion.
  275.  
  276. 0-31-34 Octavian: So there's a hope to implement some means by which dropped rares might be a more legitimate source of powerful items?
  277.  
  278. 0-31-49 Chris Wilson: For sure. One of the things I dislike about current Path of Exile is that there are so many rares on the ground, or so many everything on the ground, and you have to wade through it, and you're getting so much good stuff from trade that there's no way that you'll ever pick up a rare that's going to be better than what you get from trade. I would very much like it if things were significantly harder to find. I think that would take it back to a much better experience for players, but it's not the kind of thing that we can easily change. We don't have an intention of changing this particularly quickly. Forwards in the horizon, we'll have a few changes in there, we're eking towards various other expansions, but we can't rip the band-aid off and go, "oh by the way we cut drop rates by seventy percent. Have fun with that!" It's going to feel like a totally different game. Currently people play leagues and they get a lot of enjoyment out of them, and people stick around for whatever they want to out of the three months, but a lot of players are only playing for a few weeks out of those three months. I would love it if there were just months and months of progress to go in each league, but that comes down to the item game. Trade makes it fast. Crafting makes it fast. They're both really fun, I don't want to reduce either, I still want to make sure that that has more legs to it.
  279.  
  280. 0-32-57 RaizQT: Was the dropped items mentality something you guys have had for a long time, or maybe this was a conclusion after Delve, having seen pretty much nothing ever dropping good, but everybody just using fossils to craft all the best items?
  281.  
  282. 0-33-13 Chris Wilson: Part of this is that we want to keep the game interesting by putting new itemization mechanics in there, which often means new crafting methods. We do want to keep pushing the boundaries for this. There is an inevitable slight creep that occurs over time, and which we have to correct for it correctly.
  283.  
  284. 0-33-30 RaizQT: Okay.
  285.  
  286. 0-33-33 Nugiyen: In terms of items, creating their power: Every time you introduce a new implicit, a new crafting option, you also increase the power even for the earliest stage of the game. I'm kind of wondering when you're saying you want players to have more of a progression. It feels to me like every time you're increasing the power, even from an early stage, everything progresses off a lot faster.
  287.  
  288. 0-34-04 Chris Wilson: All of these power increases in these expansions are relatively subtle for the average player. For example, these crazy implicits you're capable of getting. That requires A, figuring out how to get those implicits, this isn't obvious; B, getting the fractured items of the right type and the right levels and all the various bits and pieces you have to work out in order to be able to roll that implicit; and then getting the good implicit; Blessed Orbing it until it's high; on the right base type, which is tricky; and then crafting it using all the regular stuff. Turning a white item into a rare is a bit of a process. So, the power creep of those implicits isn't meaning that the average dude that's playing through the game is ten percent more efficient. Consider the double corruption outcomes in Incursion, they weren't just handed out for free, you had to know exactly what you were doing, take a big risk on a unique or valuable rare. We try where possible to make sure the item power creep is theoretical power creep. It certainly affects the best items in the game, for sure, a lot of good players have been able to get a lot of good items from it, but we're trying hard to not go "It's a new expansion, it's twenty five percent more damage for everyone!"
  289.  
  290. 0-35-06 Octavian: So, the goal is to push the top end without too heavily the bottom or the middle end of it, so that people have more room to keep playing but aren't going to burn out more quickly by more rapidly progressing through content.
  291.  
  292. 0-35-23 Chris Wilson: More options available for having aspirational items in the endgame. We want it so that there are lots of cool possibilities that you can try out, and you'll make some more stuff in each league. Then in the next league we'll make stuff that's awesome in a different direction, and in Standard you can combine all of these together and make some broken stuff.
  293.  
  294. 0-35-39 Octavian: Is there content planned for Synthesis, or down the road, that's going to challenge that top end? Currently it's super deep Delve, and compared to super deep Delve the rest of the game is made of tissue paper.
  295.  
  296. 0-36-00 Chris Wilson: This is a concern we are careful to regress it. We have to be careful. Delve took a lot of work to get that incredibly deep content there. There's hard stuff in Synthesis; we tried to push the boundaries, but most of the thing that's pushing the incredible endgame challenge is future expansions we have planned that are quite meaningful. 4.0.0 is a great opportunity for use to take a step back and look at the overall challenge of Path of Exile and make relatively large tweaks to that, and we have at least one expansion between now and then that's also going to push some boundaries.
  297.  
  298. 0-36-28 Octavian: Mmmm. Well, that is very good to hear.
  299.  
  300. 0-36-30 TarkeCat: Would the very high difficulty of for example of Syndicate encounters be an inkling of where you'd like the game to be more towards? With the high difficulty, is that more the direction where you want PoE to go into?
  301.  
  302. 0-36-52 Chris Wilson: I don't know if we would say that. The Syndicate encounters certainly have some numerical difficulties in places, but I think the perceived difficulty is the amount of effects happening at the same time. I'm not sure that the direction that the design team wants is difficulty through spam. I think that was more consequence of how those fights ended up.
  303.  
  304. 0-37-19 TarkeCat: You put your hand up, Nugi, it looked like you were going to...
  305.  
  306. 0-37-21 Nugiyen: No, that was for chat, just to calm everyone down, it's okay. (All laugh) I was turning you up, Tarke, people were complaining you were a little bit low. I just put you up to max.
  307.  
  308. 0-37-35 TarkeCat: Before we move off of Synthesis, do you guys have any more questions about it?
  309.  
  310. 0-37-41 Octavian: That about covers my curiosity for the moment.
  311.  
  312. 0-37-45 TarkeCat: A big one that I got spammed constantly for for weeks: The community has heard that you're hoping to address melee in 3.7. Does 3.6 patch notes have any cursory changes to melee to hold people over until then?
  313.  
  314. 0-38-02 Chris Wilson: Honestly, I have not even looked if the 3.6 patch notes include melee changes. I have the document. I can find out by reading quickly, but I haven't looked yet. I suspect it's entirely possible that the guys have made some small changes to it. If they want to, they're welcome to it. We haven't said, "Don't change melee." It's just we've said, "In 3.7.0, make all the melee changes the community wants," and they've said "yes, sir," and it's going to be awesome. I don't know what's in each, I should have checked, but I kind of like not being able to answer that, to be honest.
  315. 0-39-14 Chris Wilson: There was a thing last year where the community said you should change ascendancy classes and redo them and we said "great, we'll do this. How long is it going to take? Four months. Okay." So we scheduled this for whatever, I think it was 3.3 or 3.2, the Bestiary one I think, so we got to work on that. Then we announced our next expansion, and of course the ascendancy changes aren't in there, and the community freaked out, and we're like, "but we are doing it, it's in the next one!" So we make the promise. Along comes small changes we made to nerfing stat sticks and so on, in Betrayal, and the community said, "oy, you have to fix all of hand casting, there's so much spellcasting stuff that's wrong." We looked at the feedback and said, "you're completely right, this is terrible, we have to fix all the spellcasting stuff." So we got to work, and we've been working on it, and then half way through the league, the community started going berserk, "look at this! There are problems with melee!" And we're looking at this going, "We can just tell that when we announce the spellcasting changes they're going to have forgotten they asked for this, and instead it's going to be 'we've been asking for melee for months, where is that?'" So we decided, do we change tack halfway through, throw away half the spellcasting stuff and just do quick knee jerk reaction fixes to the berserker? No, of course we wouldn't. We doubled down on making the spellcasting stuff thorough, and doing a good job of it, and left most of the melee stuff to 3.7. But this means we're working on melee for 3.7, so don't expect any more, please.
  316.  
  317. 0-39-48 Octavian: What I've been saying to my chat whenever this comes up is that the development cycle is a lot slower than the complaint cycle. You guys are always going to be working a step behind what people are having problems with. People will be playing on live, and they'll be having problems that are very obvious to them at the moment, but that's the sort of thing that needs time to fix, and then that time happens, it gets fixed, and you have to work on the next thing that they're complaining about.
  318.  
  319. 0-40-26 Chris Wilson: Yes, that's correct. The team do have a lot of balance stuff --- change, and there's a lot of stuff we try and then we back out of. There have been weird changes at the balance, where we looked at it and said, "everyone is just going to be angry and there's no upside," and then we reverted it and you guys didn't hear a thing about it.
  320.  
  321. 0-40-27 Octavian: Do you have any examples? That sounds very interesting.
  322.  
  323. 0-40-34 Chris Wilson: I'm not going to give any examples. There have been some weird experimental changes. I love the fact that there have been weird experimental changes, it's just if it's bad, we'll get rid of it. There's a story that I repeat so often that people are angry, about how Marvel Heroes one day decided that the incredible clearspeed meta that they had needed to end, so they put cooldowns on all the attack spells, and now that's not a game anymore. We're not going to repeat that mistake. As much as we want to fix certain things, we can't just turn something off. The game won't exist after that. We have to be very careful to work correctly in the right direction and make changes the community is going to understand and agree with and signal them correctly. There's things we've done in the past like Cast on Crit changes where it blindsided the community and they reacted very strongly to that, and we don't want that to happen again. We want it to be a dialogue where you guys know what's coming, and you agree with the manifestos we post, and everyone agrees the game is going in the right direction. That's the goal of these changes.
  324.  
  325. 0-41-28 TarkeCat: The manifestos have been getting a lot better. Please keep doing them. It makes the context of these changes so much better for the community.
  326.  
  327. 0-41-42 Nugiyen: (In the past, every patch had small changes for nearly all skills, so it affected everyone. Why did you stop that to favor fewer, larger changes, like the upcoming melee rework?)
  328.  
  329. 0-42-43 Chris Wilson: Part of it is that we had done all of the smaller changes that we were able to make in the past. I made glacial hammer deal six percent more damage, and I'm mocked to this day about that, but that was deemed to be the small change that was necessary for that particular skill. We have a list of all the skills left in the game, and what we want to change, and in each case it's like, "redo the skill to work like X". Basically we've hit the limit where in order to actually fix it, we have to go and redo the skill. That's why we started doing skill reworks. The skill reworks were great, but they only focused on a few things, so we've taken a step back. We're doing spellcasting as one holistic thing that changes, and we'll do the same with various melee things. I'd love the team to get more time to tweak other stuff as well, like merely saying "traps might be weak, let's make them awesome," that might not be the case, but, the concept that a small tweak that opens up tons of builds would be amazing in each patch, but the team is limited. As the game gets more complicated, it requires so much more testing for this stuff. It interacts so differently with all the different uniques and other skills in the game, a lot of changes get made, and then we realize it's scary and terrible and we have to turn them off.
  330.  
  331. 0-43-49 TarkeCat: With the last few leagues, how you've had these mini focuses, like you've focused on reworked traps, or reworked selfcast, we're also seeing now this holy and chaos thing, is that just an extension of that? By setting these themes, you can more easily focus on one thing to develop at a time.
  332.  
  333. 0-44-05 Chris Wilson: The holy and chaos thing are the two archetypes we're doing here, and the thing about archetypes is that they are kind of builds that we're recommending to players if they're looking for something relatively good that's straightforward and has a sign pointing at it. The intention is, the average Path of Exile returning player would come back to the game and go, "I know I like Path of Exile, I know I want to play this content, but man, looking up all these build guides, and figuring out what the best build is..." I hear feedback like, they find a build that sounds awesome, and then they work out it's not a league starter build and you need eighteen exalts of gear to play it, and that sucks. It's quite hard. The concept of that "archetype", we just started a few leagues ago advertising it as heavily I guess, is that these are things that we say to new players, "this is a complete and capable build that uses new content and is enjoyable, and we've vouched for it." It might not be the best build in the game, but it's fun and you can have a shot, and it's on theme with the recent changes, and it uses new skills. For example, the Chinese realm has completely embraced this archetypes concept, and they put a ton of marketing in their copy; I don't know what they've put on their site at the moment, but in the past you go there and it literally shows three cool pieces of art for the archetypes, and "these are the three character types that you get to play in this expansion" because they wanted to bring in a lot of new users and market it off those things. Now we haven't done the marketing in the same way to our community, we just say, "these are some new skills, work it out"; but the archetypes are certainly there to give an idea for a new build to returning players.
  334.  
  335. 0-45-29 Octavian: Something to latch onto because it can be difficult getting into the game to have that sort of thing. Very often the advice I give to a newer player who shows up is to ignore class selection as your character and instead look up a skill and look at videos and figure out which skill looks fun and choose your class as a result of that. The game can be difficult to approach if you're not doing third party stuff, because you don't play "marauder" in path of Exile, you play "Juggernaut Molten Strike". Giving players an archetype to play, something that they can click on and say "this is my character", that does make a lot of sense to pull in people from outside the game.
  336.  
  337. 0-46-14 Chris Wilson: Certainly. In this case, play any holy spell, throw them on your character and you'll kill some monsters. --- Better with chaos stuff combining the old chaos stuff. They're things that we're vouching as strong.
  338.  
  339. 0-46-30 Octavian: The one concern that I would see expressed about this direction is that some of the skills that are designed for these archetypes would maybe not be as competitive necessarily for real min-maxing in the endgame if they're more simplistic skills and if they don't have as much in the way of potential scaling.
  340.  
  341. 0-46-46 Chris Wilson: The good news is that the designers who work out the skills are often different people than the those who pick what archetypes are being promoted. I wouldn't worry too much about that. The big skills guys care so much about the skills being good beginning of the game. It's all they talk about, they spend so much time on this. I think it'll be okay. Honestly, Soulrend is a great example. It's a super simple chaos skill compared to a lot of them, but it's very viable in endgame from what we can see from our QA testing. This is the kind of comment that comes back to bite me in two weeks' time where people say, "Tell me about that, Chris." But so far, it's looking good.
  342.  
  343. 0-47-19 RaizQT: That's the thing. What do you tell the average player who just gets into it? In other games, it's very simple. "Hey, I've got this friend who wants to play the game, and he likes a warrior." But in Path of Exile you can't really just go, "ah, yeah, just play a warrior, or a mage." There's not really anything like that. What would you like to see in terms of skills that players new to the game select? Or is it just, let them do whatever and that's the enjoyment?
  344.  
  345. 0-47-53 Chris Wilson: Path of Exile is kind of about forging your own identity. As long as there aren't trap skills, I mean trap skills in that they're bad to pick, "noob traps" as opposed to traps and mines... As long as there aren't noob trap skills, which was the case with a lot of spells before, I'm okay with them picking whatever. I'm not expecting people to get to Shaper on their first character. If they are angry with the game because they can't do everything on their first character, then they're not going to have the long term stamina to play Path of Exile over a number of leagues. I like people exploring, and I advise people rather than "play this build it's good" I advise people "play whatever you feel like for as long as you feel like and then when you realize you're ready for it start looking at build guides and you'll at least be able to read them by that point."
  346.  
  347. 48-35 TarkeCat: What spells are you personally most excited for from a player point of view?
  348.  
  349. 48-42 Chris Wilson: I am excited by the fact that there's no guide online that's going to tell me that blah blah blah is the right choice and if I don't use it then I'm wrong. It means I can load the game client, see what spell attracts me that day and hopefully have a good time with it. That's the joy of having had such an extensive rework to it, is that it's going to be a while before players work out... Obviously there will be some "best skills" in this, but hopefully they'll be less far ahead but it's all mixed up, and that time of uncertainty is going to see prosperity in the build community.
  350.  
  351. 49-07 RaizQT: Nice. You're traditionally a melee player, right? Yourself.
  352.  
  353. 49-12 Chris Wilson: Traditionally online, yeah. But I try to see a variety of characters in our internal test builds.
  354.  
  355. 49-17 RaizQT: Of course.
  356.  
  357. 49-20 TarkeCat: On the note of shifting metas, you've spoken before on Baeclast about how you're not super happy with the state of movement, and we've seen small gradual changes going forth. How close is the current state of movement skills to that ideal vision?
  358.  
  359. 49-40 Chris Wilson: I don't think there are big changes to movement in the near future that I'm aware of. No one's surfaced that as a thing I'm aware of at least. Designers may have ideas they haven't fully run past us, so there may be changes coming but I'm not aware of anything planned to wreck movement. Personally, I was happy with our previous philosophy that movement skills are meant to be situationally useful. Lightning Warp, for example, moving you at the speed that you run at was a completely intentional thing so people don't just spam teleport across the map like they did in D2. As far as we're concerned, we would avoid having that in the game. Since then, players have been smart and they worked out that if you take Lightning Warp and Less Duration and various other things, you can actually use it as a travel skill. And some other skills have been improved over time to match that. You see people Leap Slamming across the map. I don't think it's in a problem situation at the moment. I don't think we're getting to the point where movement skills are dominating and wrecking the game like has happened in a few other games, but we're keeping an eye on it.
  360.  
  361. 50-38 RaizQT: Probably the opposite to be honest. Movement skills seemed really dominant in the past, and you did a really good job of scaling them down by scaling everything up. It's in a pretty decent spot I think.
  362.  
  363. 50-48 Chris Wilson: I'm glad you feel that way. That's really good news.
  364.  
  365. 50-50 Nugiyen: Do you have any plans on the horizon of new movement skills?
  366.  
  367. 50-57 Chris Wilson: There are always new skills coming out. It's hard to know what's on the horizon in terms of new skills, because the team works on so many different prototypes. Right now, there's crazy skills being experimented on. Half of them will never make it through prototyping. It's impossible to know what's going to be real and what's a failed experiment. There's new movement skills in the pipeline, I don't know when we'll see them. Might be a league, might be a year.
  368.  
  369. 51-23 TarkeCat: Okay. You've kind of already answered it, but with movement we had this slow gradual change, small changes over the last few patches. When do you think slow gradual changes are warranted over complete reworks?
  370.  
  371. 51-37 Chris Wilson: It depends on the confidence of the complete rework's going to be better. For handcasting, we're not expecting players are going to grumble that they're favorite skill has been slightly nerfed because they don't think there are particularly large nerfs going on there. I guess it's because they haven't seen the balance manifesto yet, which is a positive one I should mention, everythings getting buffed, it's awesome. But we want to make sure with large revamps that the game is in a much better state, and it's indisputable, and even if someone is getting nerfed they'll understand why that's the case; whereas gradual stuff we're being very careful. There are things where we want to turn them down to a certain level we'll do it over a few patches because it's still going to be strong all the way down.
  372.  
  373. 52-15 RaizQT: Real quick Chris, which animal are you on the google doc?
  374.  
  375. 52-20 Chris Wilson: That's a good question. (all laughs)
  376.  
  377. 52-24 RaizQT: You're not the kangaroo, right? (Octavian: The pressing questions of our time!) I saw the kangaroo and was like, that would be really messed up.
  378.  
  379. 52-30 Chris Wilson: I think I am the kangaroo. But I don't want to be.
  380.  
  381. 52-35 RaizQT: Is that, like, personally offensive?
  382.  
  383. 52-37 Chris Wilson: There are no kangaroos in this country!
  384.  
  385. 52-40 RaizQT: That's the point!
  386.  
  387. 52-41 Chris Wilson: It was comically brought up as the reason it's offensive.
  388.  
  389. 52-45 RaizQT: Damn! Got it.
  390.  
  391. 52-48 TarkeCat: Thank you for that beautiful insight, Raiz. Before we move into more general Path of Exile questions, is there anything on the terms of balance or animals that you guys want to talk about?
  392.  
  393. 52-58 Nugiyen: I have a question. On the whole theme thing, and the archetypes, how do you feel that PoE has moved to creating certain packages rather than what the game started out being: you have a skill, and then you create something around it. The GMP Fork Fireball. The whole create your own skill. It seems to me that your design philosophy has gone into creating packages for people that are easy to digest.
  394.  
  395. 53-36 Chris Wilson: Well, there's a couple of things here. The first one is the game already has --- there's hundreds of these gems all over the place. They're still all there and hopefully good. The other thing is it's like when you're buying Legos, you buy it in sets that make specific thing, rather than just buying random pieces. Obviously you use your Lego pieces to make all sorts of cool models of your own design, but they often come in existing sets. This is partly from a marketing point of view. If we can package something nicely, it's adding the same content to the game, so the game is improved just as much, and more marketing helps the game spread, and we have to put effort into that. There's a constant attention attrition going on in games these days. You have to be interesting, you have to have good marketing, otherwise the game will gradually become less popular. We've been doing a good job over the past few years, and part of that is content has been packaged up more appropriately for new users. And PoE is gradually becoming more mainstream as more people are better able to help their friends. This is good for everyone. It means the game makes more money. We see the size of the leagues we're releasing every thirteen weeks. That's possible because the game's become slightly more mainstream. My main role is to making sure it doesn't become too mainstream to the point where it loses its identity. I'll make sure, that I'll promise you guys, that it will retain it's hardcore-ness.
  396.  
  397. 54-46 Octavian: You draw them in with the archetypes, saying "You can play this holy mage", and then you ambush them with the million support gems.
  398.  
  399. 54-54 Chris Wilson: Exactly.
  400.  
  401. 54-557 Nugiyen: I do think though that PoE has gone in a direction where crafting and a lot of other systems have gone a lot more complex. I do think it's perfectly alright to have skills with not the most amount of complexity.
  402.  
  403. 55-17 Chris Wilson: I understand. Well, the crafting is entirely optional. You can load Path of Exile up and get all the way to maps without doing any significant crafting, and that's enough that we own the person's soul, and then they can read the wiki.
  404.  
  405. 55-30 RaizQT: (laughs) That's a good point to move on.
  406.  
  407. 55-38 TarkeCat: Going into more general PoE stuff, I'm just curious; looking back and reflecting on Betrayal, since it had such a mixed community reaction, how do you feel about it?
  408.  
  409. 55-48 Chris Wilson: I didn't see the mixed reaction. Maybe I was reading Reddit on the wrong days, but I thought people really liked it, to be honest.
  410.  
  411. 55-55 Octavian: The league seemed to be well received, but I don't know how much of that was bundled with the master changes and the general overhaul to the base of the game. Because a lot of the complaints that I was seeing were mostly directed at the Syndicate itself, rather than any of the other changes, outside of how Alva operates, but that's a very specific thing.
  412.  
  413. 56-19 Chris Wilson: I understand that the encounters were rippy and there were various concerns with various bits and pieces. I don't think any more than we normally had in a league. We have problems with our releases sometimes, and we try to fix them over time, and some leagues are more complicated or have issues, and we try to polish those up before we put them in the core game, but, we certainly read the feedback. I think you'll find that Synthesis is let's just say good in different ways and bad in different ways than previous leagues have been.
  414.  
  415. 56-52 RaizQT: (laughs)
  416.  
  417. 56-54 Nugiyen: Raiz, you don't seem too confident on that one.
  418.  
  419. 56-55 Octavian: I saw Raiz holding something in there.
  420.  
  421. 56-58 RaizQT: There's a lot of negative feedback on the difficulty of Syndicate, but you guys seem to have toned that down. I think the biggest complaint was the randomness of damage. It did feel like overall in Path of Exile you have certain breakpoints that you get to in terms of difficulty, but with the Syndicate, there were just so many things to keep track of, that the difficulty seemed just a lot more random. Your ranks you have to keep track of, then the different enemy spawns, on top of items that could really change up an encounter and add map mods on top of that, I think a lot of people felt it was just a little bit too much.
  422.  
  423. 57-38 Chris Wilson: Yeah, I understand. The team have seen that feedback. You'll probably find that those same problems depend on the version, and they have done a relatively deep pass over some of the Betrayal stuff before it's making it into the core game. You'll see in the patch notes there are changes to the stuff especially now that you get multiple Betrayal encounters in one area, that's required quite a lot of from the ground up implementation of parts of the league. Hopefully behind the scenes, some subtle things. They've done balance passes over bits and pieces and adjusted rewards. I think there was a manifesto about this.
  424.  
  425. 58-16 Octavian: It's a little hard to judge, too, because a lot of the most intense community feedback was right at the start, when people were very unfamiliar with the mechanic, and when the mechanic was at its rippiest, because we saw adjustments to visuals, adjustments to numbers, adjustments to fortifications in particular. So, it's hard to tell how much of the league mechanic becoming more palatable was because of players playing it longer and actually learning what the enemies do, and how much was a result of the changes.
  426.  
  427. 58-43 Chris Wilson: Certainly. It wouldn't be the first Path of Exile league to be super rippy at the beginning. If you remember Invasion, we certainly had some relatively large outcry. I prefer to err on the side of rippiness. I think the worst thing we could do is to release an unchallenging league that we have to make harder halfway through, because that will just make everyone angry. I think it's better to produce harder content; I prefer not to be too hard, but this is a hardcore game. I'm sure a lot of the community would rather have it slightly rippy than too easy.
  428.  
  429. 59-14 Octavian: Yeah. Still, one of my biggest disappointments with Delve and the changes to Delve early on, is the fact that the EMP monsters went from actually terrifying nightmares, to things that I don't even care about or notice anymore.
  430.  
  431. 59-29 Chris Wilson: It is entirely possible for us to over react to something like that.
  432.  
  433. 59-33 Nugiyen: What I'm hearing you say is that this is not the last time we're seeing a difficulty spike of Betrayal and Invasion in PoE?
  434.  
  435. 59-44 Chris Wilson: I think that we'll try to get it right, and it does... What's up with chat spamming question marks when we talk?
  436.  
  437. 59-51 TarkeCat: They just do that. (All laugh)
  438.  
  439. 1-00-00 Chris Wilson: We'll try to get the balance right, but we'll try to be slightly on the difficult side.
  440.  
  441. 1-00-07 Nugiyen: I can respect that.
  442.  
  443. 1-00-10 TarkeCat: One thing. You mentioned that some interviews in 4.0.0, you want to retire some of the past leagues never have more than ten in the game at once. How much of that is inspired by rotations in Magic: the Gathering?
  444.  
  445. 1-00-22 Chris Wilson: I love getting inspired by Magic: the Gathering, and I would love to tell you it was, but it was actually more a matter of complexity. For example, I'm not saying tormented spirits are going away; they're staying, there's no problem with tormented spirits, but that's exactly the kind of thing one day we could decide to retire if the content gets old and it's not doing a lot for players. When vacuum farming turned down to the point where it's not happening much, and the random rare they guarantee being dropped being worthless, it's the kind of thing we could just say, "hey, no more tormented spirits." We are keeping them at the moment for various reasons, we like them. But we do think the additional mechanics introduced relatively rapidly throughout the storyline does have a negative effect on newer players. To some extent, maybe maps can be too busy. I wouldn't have said that two years ago, but there's certainly a lot of stuff going on at the moment.
  446.  
  447. 1-01-13 RaizQT: So, exiles kind of feel like that at this point to many people. In the early game they are challenging and rewarding, but in the end game it's kind of...
  448.  
  449. 1-01-20 Octavian: But exiles show off all the pet MTXs so well.
  450.  
  451. 1-01-27 Chris Wilson: That Flameblast exile, by the way, in hardcore, that guy is bad news. That makes the game exciting for you.
  452.  
  453. 1-01-31 RaizQT: Nice.
  454.  
  455. 1-01-34 TarkeCat: When it comes to retiring old mechanics, when you're designing your new leagues, are you designing them in a way that they could be replaceable, or are you purely thinking about things from years ago?
  456.  
  457. 1-01-50 Chris Wilson: We don't really have anything in particular in mind that would --- try to keep the game just to emphasize the fact that there's no guarantee that leagues are going to stay around in the game. We think that's important that that's signaled well in advance. Like, the idea that one day Incursion might just be turned off because we feel like it is an important thing to prepare people for, that way there's less backlash when it happens. The new leagues are entirely possible to turn them off; they're entirely self contained. If there's no sulphite and no Delve entrance, then there' no more Delve. That's just a thing. Obviously, you'd lose all the fun bits. As it gets integrated into the master system, you certainly lose important things we'd have to put elsewhere, so it's unlikely those master-related leagues are going anywhere any time soon. One day, Path of Exile has been released in some form for six years now, with leagues, and there will be at least another six, right? So, there will be quite a lot of leagues we'll have to make decisions about in the future.
  458.  
  459. 1-02-41 Octavian: Speaking of older league mechanics, what... I forgot the question halfway through (all laugh), because your topic became interesting, and I focused on that rather than the question I had. I'm going to pass it off to one of the others.
  460.  
  461. 01-03-00 TarkeCat: Okay, so one thing then. You said you're not necessarily designing things to go core in the game, but is it fair to say that most leagues these days seem to be assumed to be rolled in, because the last league that didn't get rolled in was something like Talisman.
  462.  
  463. 01-03-18 Chris Wilson: So, that's a good question. When we designed the 2018 leagues the four of them, they were explicitly designed with the plan of replacing the Forsaken Masters. We sat down in December of the year beforehand, when we were trying to figure out what Bestiary would be, and we said when are we replacing the Forsaken Masters and how does this happen. I could talk about this for an hour if needed, there's a lot of cool stuff there, but it essentially came down to, we're going to have a set of compelling character based leagues, and then we're going to swap them with the Forsaken Masters in this one big surprise thing when all the Forsaken Masters have mysteriously been corrupted blah blah blah. We worked out plan. So, those were all intended to go into the core game. Now, the nice thing about intending is that we could potentially change it. There was a mixed reaction to Bestiary. That caused us to think about the plan, huh, do we really want Bestiary in the core game? Well, we can worry about that later." Later on we fixed it. No one's complained about it since, so that went well. I don't know whether Synthesis is going core. We haven't even had a single discussion. Not once has any staff asked anyone that I'm aware of, "is Synthesis going core?" We're going to see if people like it. Obviously they'll like it because it's awesome. We'll see if it has longterm legs in the game. It probably does, because it's got the whole, like in Delve, super endgame stuff going on, and having more parallel endgames is good, but we haven't had that discussion yet. If it comes down to it, we might say, "no, not core", and have it available as a thing in the future. Or maybe we'll say, "sure, it's harmless to have in there alongside all this other stuff." We'll see based on reaction and how it feels after a few months of playing it.
  464.  
  465. 01-04-45 Octavian:. We're still on the topic of leagues. I have recalled my question, so chat can stop spamming question marks at me, which I'm sure they're doing. I haven't even looked, but I'm sure they are. Has your philosophy changed over the last two years about league specific items from specific leagues. There once was a time when they were much harder to obtain, which is sort of indicated by the rarity of Time Lost Relic, it's a set of ten cards and they drop incredibly uncommonly, but now there's Delve that spits them out, there's Incursion that spits them out, there's Syndicate the "drop a unique item" does. Are they just meant to be much more common and you just want to give players more options to build around?
  466.  
  467. 01-05-28 Chris Wilson: This is one of the cases of reward creep. Where it has the subtle effect causing that problem, and I feel in my heart I would rather that they were rare to get, just like I would love it if the rare items you find on the ground are so special and meaningful that they are frequently an upgrade for your character and so on and so on. There's philosophical ideals here that we aren't one hundred percent meeting. It's tricky because giving out those items is special, right? But like anything, people can become inoculated towards them. The more we give them out, the less valuable they are, and so we have to be careful with how much we do that. In some cases, we've taken stuff specifically toned it back to give it some breathing room so that it can be meaningful again later. An example is why we don't have the reliquary keys in every single league. They'd be completely worn out if we did.
  468.  
  469. 01-06-15 Octavian: You'd say we've reached a point that is too heavy on league specifics, that you'd be interested in toning that back, or is that just a personal opinion?
  470.  
  471. 01-06-22 Chris Wilson: I'd personally find stuff that's too heavy way before reaction is done against it. I am way on the hardcore side of opinions about Path of Exile and I purposefully let the team make decisions. Team members who play more than I do. That's the thing right, I don't play enough Path of Exile to wake up one day and go, "monsters are going to do four times more damage. We're playing hard mode now guys." Instead, I let the team members who farm Uber Elder, who have multiple level 100 characters per league, they can make these calls because they honestly know better than I do. One day, maybe I'll make a director's cut version of the game that's got some insanity going on, where it's hard to even get to maps, and ten percent of chat will like that, but in the meantime I'll let more qualified people make decisions about the game that they know better than I do. I am able to help with league design and make sure they're going in the right direction philosophically, but specifics about droprates and what items are available and that kind of stuff, I really have good experts on the team that handle that.
  472.  
  473. 1-07-20 Nugiyen: With you having a goal in the future of removing some leagues, have you considered the implementation going from league to league? Right now, we have a ten percent; every time we get into a new league, you take ten percent of the old one and add it to it, which has been going on for quite a while. Have you ever considered, with maybe less clutter, having more of the same experience that you could then seek out rather than you just get ten percent of it in a map?
  474.  
  475. 1-08-01 Chris Wilson: I see what you're saying. You have the league in the game, you can play it, but you have to basically choose to. This is a Zana mod kind of thing. We can do that. We can slap Talisman on a Zana mod, you can get yourself some Talismans if you want to. Maybe that's a good home for Synthesis, if we don't want to have memory fragments in every area. I suspect we'll have more of that in the future. But for the time being, we are quite happy with Path of Exile being busy. A lot of the designers like the fact that there's surprising amount of stuff to do that combines in interesting ways in the maps you play. It feels like Standard thing hasn't been a complaint for a few months now that Betrayal's been out, and that's been good.
  476.  
  477. 1-08-39 Octavian: Standard doesn't feel like Standard anymore.
  478.  
  479. 1-08-42 Chris Wilson: Good, good, good. That was our number one concern. When Diablo III was on the horizon back in 2012 or so, we looked at the stuff they had going on in Act 1, and they had these random events and stuff. It was more toward the beginning of the game than toward the end, and we had nothing like that in Path of Exile. This worried us, because our world didn't feel as alive in terms of random things you can encounter. That's one of the reasons why the leagues try to jam stuff into every area, because over time we would just accumulate this living world of cool things happening all over the place. I feel we have achieved that to an even larger degree so that other RPGs will struggle to compete with Path of Exile's content. All these other action RPGs are going to be a four act experience with something like difficulty settings or adventure modes I'm guessing, they're not going to have ten acts and eighteen leagues worth of content in there. This is something we're trying to capitalize on as much as we can before there becomes an actual market issue.
  480.  
  481. 1-09-36 TarkeCat: Basically the World of Warcraft effect, where every new MMO couldn't compete with the ten years of development completely dominating the space because of it.
  482.  
  483. 1-09-46 Chris Wilson: That's the plan! I mean, it's great to have a lot of content in the game. As long as it has value, we love that Path of Exile has lots of things to do. Keep people focused on playing different types of things. People play the trading game. People play the racing game. People play the guild game. People make unique item collections and try to get all the ones of various types. There are all these things they can do and if grinding Synthesis or grinding Delve is exciting to them as an alternate endgame, that's even better to have that experience available.
  484.  
  485. 1-10-13 TarkeCat: You briefly touched on Delve earlier, I'm just curious if Delve's had many issues with limiting future design space by how all-encompassing it is.
  486.  
  487. 1-10-28 Chris Wilson: I didn't see any significant issues with it. My main core problem with Delve, to keep it rewarding, we have to do various things to limit the access to it, and that always upsets the community, because due to the rewardiness, they want unlimited access, right? Our recent change where there's essentially eighty percent more sulphite because you find three nodes in each area is basically a capitulation to "fine, have all the Delve you want", is kind of the philosophy of, "let's just see what it's like then if you have a bunch of Delving." I don't know, I don't necessarily fully agree with that, but I'll support it when the team brought it up as a solution to people being angry about sulphite. We reserve our right to change it in the future, but we're about to enter a metagame with some significant rewards coming from Delve content compared to before.
  488.  
  489. 1-11-11 TarkeCat: I think it's more to do with the fact that, it's not that people want to Delve because Delve is super rewarding, I think it's just that people enjoy actual Delve gameplay. If you could make it more accessible but nerf the rewards, then most people would be happy.
  490.  
  491. 1-11-25 Chris Wilson: Well, we'll certainly consider that, but we like ---
  492.  
  493. 1-11-30 (all: You're cutting out)
  494.  
  495. 1-11-42 Chris Wilson: I was saying, we do like the fact that Delve is very rewarding, so we don't want to neuter it completely and say you can Delve all you want. Hopefully we'll find a middle ground. Jonathan would be very pleased that you enjoyed the design of Delve. He was very instrumental in that particular league, and would be very glad that people are enjoying for fun-ness's sake, not just for the rewards.
  496.  
  497. 1-12-03 Nugiyen: As an endgame player of Delve, one thing that I've always had a bit of an issue with, is the availability of it. I'm in a minority here, but I do not find myself enjoying it too much because there is a lack of availability, and if you want to push your character, which I thought was part of the design of Delve, it is very time consuming to even get there to the point where you can challenge yourself.
  498.  
  499. 1-12-36 Chris Wilson: Due to the fact that it's difficult find enough sulphite to push hard?
  500.  
  501. Nugiyen: Yes. You're never really limited by character strength, it's more amount sulphite gains. There comes a point where you do get enough and it is difficulty, but it's very time consuming. If you just want to sit down one day, you always have to go through these motions to even get the ball rolling, to go and challenge your character.
  502.  
  503. 1-13-08 Chris Wilson: I'm going to tell you a story. A very long time ago, Path of Exile had what was called the Maelstrom of Chaos. This was the precursor to maps. The way it worked was, we'd have various attempts at what the final difficulty of Path of Exile was. Our first plan was "hey guys, we'll have a fourth difficulty level, and that difficulty level will be incredibly hard, but also very constant, so you can play anywhere in the game you want. It doesn't matter if you like grinding The Ledge, or Western Forest, or The Prison, you can play anywhere. Like adventure mode or something. And get good experience."
  504. 1-13-36 Chris Wilson: So we did that and people played just The Ledge for obvious reasons. So we said "fine, we're going to make it so it's tapered upwards," so that people play the harder areas; that wasn't working either. So we said, "okay, because of the fact that there is lack of tileset diversity, which causes people to get burnt out, we're going to make these twenty random areas, like maps basically, but they weren't items, called the Maelstrom of Chaos, but when you finished like Act 2 was the highest act in the legitimate playthrough, once you finished Act 2 difficulty four, you get to unlock a waypoint to the Maelstrom of Chaos, and there are twenty consecutive areas that get harder and they got very hard, that are higher and higher rewards. Like having twenty tiers of maps. Twenty chunks of Delve depth. You could basically run through to the point you wanted to play in and play at that difficulty." We thought this was great because you wanted to skip ahead to higher content you could do so, but there was some clear signaling you shouldn't.
  505. 1-14-25 Chris Wilson: So the top streamers got to the highest Maelstrom of Chaos areas and had difficulty with it because it was hard, but that was exciting, it was good for the stream. And our stats showed that the average players were pushing past all the monsters that they could be challenged by, getting to that hardest area where the best stuff dropped, and then dying and hating it and it was terrible. Retention was going down, people were quitting left right and center. It was bad. People felt "I can see a streamer be good at this game, and I know I'm good at this game," though they weren't, and expected to play at the highest content.
  506. 1-14-58 Chris Wilson: So we had a big discussion, I vividly remember to this day, because it's probably the thing that made Path of Exile good, was the map system. That involved us saying, "What if there was a cost to open these Maelstrom areas that escalated?" So we said, "Okay, what if entering the first area cost one alch, and entering the second cost two, and then four, and it gets higher," where if you want to go and waste like thirty GCPs worth of wealth getting into the highest Maelstrom area only to fail, you'll quickly learn that's not the right thing, and the wealth you're getting from the items drop let you pay for access to the area.
  507. 1-15-28 Chris Wilson: So we experimented and eventually we decided this was just chewing through all the currency, and maybe we could do a cool thing with item mods. We had this plan where you sacrifice a rare item and it reads the mods off the item and they dictate what mods the monsters get, and all this stuff that you could do, like in darkshrine, a little bit like Synthesis synthesization. We experimented with this and eventually decided that the best thing to do was to make them actual dedicated map items, that way the mods could say what they did in the area and we could have a really punitive pyramid where the hardest maps were really hard to get. You have to get a bunch of lower level ones, and it was unlikely to get the higher level ones. If you remember the map drop odds for the initial map system, it was really hard to stay in anything.
  508. 1-16-05 Chris Wilson: So we dropped the map system in, and all the entitlement issues went away immediately. Because it took so much effort to get the higher maps, people played the right maps, and everyone had fun, and this is the reason why Delve was so punitive with sulphite costs. It's just this leftover thing where we firmly believe that if you accidentally let people get into content that's too difficult, it's way worse for the game. There's my long rant about that.
  509.  
  510. 1-16-25 Octavian: One of the main differences I would point out between the mapping system and the Delve system is that for the Delve system your fuel is homogeneous. Everyone's using sulphite, and the people really deep and the people really early are using that sulphite way more efficiently than anyone else, so they're able to have the purchasing power to buy the gilded sulphite scarabs to keep pushing, and it punishes anyone trying to delve at a middling depth, like just starting itemlevel 83. Whereas you don't have that problem with maps because that guy running a Phoenix doesn't care about a City Square map, so a City Square map can be worth an alch. But if everyone is competing for the same resource, then that makes it so that resource is priced based on the people who can pay the most.
  511.  
  512. 1-17-17 Chris Wilson: You're one hundred percent correct. I really appreciate your explanation. That is correct and it's something we'll have to work on with Delve. I hope that the sulphite changes we made counteract the --- to the point where more people have fun, but since it's a core part of the game, we'll have to keep iterating on this league by league, so, expect more changes in the future. In the meantime, please let us know your feedback after you've had a chance to play the 3.6.0 version.
  513.  
  514. 1-17-41 RaizQT: Just to clarify for chat, GCP used to be the main currency in the game. Four GCP were an exalted orb.
  515.  
  516. 1-17-52 TarkeCat: One thing, you spoke about it a little bit before about how your intention is for players to run the highest levels of content ideally. We've seen a lot of low level play with the last few leagues, Delve especially, we've talked about that. How do you feel about the current risk/reward structure of Path of Exile, where some of the low level content is just as, or at least incredibly, rewarding?
  517.  
  518. 1-18-17 Chris Wilson: It's not great, and we want to fix it by having people running harder content if they feel they can. What we feel is very important that you want to take extra challenges, take extra risks, it makes the game more fun. Basically higher heartrate equals more fun. We're ignoring the heart attack risk here. (all laughs) We do want more adrenaline in the gameplay. I would love to gradually improve that over time. The thing is, we have literally four million numbers in our data that we can change and it's hard to know exactly what ones will achieve the right result. We're working towards it but we have to take it step by step and see how people feel about it each thirteen weeks.
  519.  
  520. 1-18-45 Octavian: This leads into a little short question that maybe I should've saved for the Q&A but it seems relevant here. Are there going to be puzzle piece rewards, global mods so to speak, that are gated by itemlevel, to encourage players to run higher level content?
  521.  
  522. 1-19-03 Chris Wilson: For sure. The bosses are map only; the top boss is certainly higher level than the bottom maps. You certainly have to be up there in the tiers before you can even get the best uniques from it. Note that we totally get the feedback about RNG gating bosses and we're not looking at doing anything particularly crazy here. It's more a matter of playing high level content and being good at the game than getting incredibly lucky to see this content. But this may mean these bosses, the ones that are relatively common don't drop a unique every time. Ten percent or twenty five percent chance of them dropping a unique because of the fact you get to face them relatively often.
  523.  
  524. 1-19-40 Octavian: That is far preferable in my opinion, because it means you get to play the content without inhibiting the value of those unique drops. That is great! I want more people to be killing Shaper, but I still want Shaper drops to be valuable. If you need to rework the unique droprate for that, that's fine.
  525.  
  526. 1-19-57 Chris Wilson: The reason why we end up with these bosses that feel RNG gated is because; the way the process works is, we make our league, realize we can add some stuff that's pretty rare, and rare is cool because then people see it on stream occasionally and it's aspirational, I love the idea of the game having random stuff that's a one in a million chance of occurring, that you just randomly find a mirror, that kind of stuff. So everything's good. That content by itself is harmless to exist. Obviously it's rewarding. And then we say, "oh no, we need to keep pushing harder challenges" because we frequently receive feedback that people want harder challenges. And so we think, "we'll just throw these very rare things on the challenges." Thats the mistake, I feel, is accidentally succumbing to making it now a mandatory thing, when if it was incredibly rare and rewarding and not something players feel they have to do to get 40/40, so I suspect its presence on the challenges is what was causing the RNG gating concern, moreso than the actual cumulative RNG that we've used in the past.
  527.  
  528. 1-20-50 TarkeCat: On the note of determining power level based on rarity, how do you feel about the fact that we've seen a lot of very powerful uniques recently instead of seeing nerfs, you've just made them exceptionally rare. Where do you draw the line between should we nerf this item or just make it much rarer?
  529.  
  530. 1-21-08 Chris Wilson: That's a good question. Part of it comes down to what ---
  531. 1-21-27 Chris Wilson: This comes down to whether that unique item is important for people to have access to. There are items in the game like Shav's in the past for example where it's very important for certain builds, and if we made it punitively rare all it's doing is requiring people to grind more before going and playing that build. For some things, like for certain crazy ones, it's okay to require a bunch of grinding for multiple players, but we have to basically decide what is the time gate that has to go into being able to play this build, whether or not they're looking for that unique or looking for something to trade for it. To answer chat, no, I'm using my laptop. But I was intending to use a phone before. The phone failed hard.
  532.  
  533. 1-21-58 RaizQT: (laughs) I got Jebaited chat.
  534.  
  535. 1-22-13 TarkeCat: On that note, when you're designing uniques, we've seen a few almost set items through like aspects, and a few of the new uniques that we've seen in the new league, they directly affect one skill in particular. How do you design a build-enabling item without it feeling like a mandatory item?
  536.  
  537. 1-22-32 Chris Wilson: That's a really good question. We've experimented with soft item sets, because it's very interesting to have synergies, but we're consciously aware of the fact that if they start to feel mandatory, you have a character decked out in uniques, and that would be game killing. It has to be you have to want to find and craft rare items, because that makes your character different than other people, and it makes it harder to directly compare characters, and all that good stuff that's possibly too subtle. In terms of build defining stuff, I like the idea that a build can be achieved in multiple ways, and players have to weigh up the various options. You'll probably be seeing more of that over time. We discussed this, maybe you can don maybe eight hundred fifty uniques, the concept that maybe having a baby Shav's in the past where that particular problem a player's trying to solve can be done with another item that has obvious drawbacks, and the wealthy option is to go for the Shav's. This type of thing is completely acceptable to us; have inferior build-enabling items which are just the one you use until you can afford the better one.
  538.  
  539. 1-23-29 Octavian: I think a large part of what helps avoid that in Path of Exile in particular is the absolutely massive plethora of crafting options that are included over the last few leagues. Shaper and Elder bases, combined with fossils, and now with the new implicits we're getting with Synthesis. Can those occur on Shaper and Elder bases?
  540.  
  541. 1-23-51 Chris Wilson: I haven't asked. I don't see why not, but let me check that with the team. I feel like this is one of those things where the answer is either "obviously yes" or "obviously no" depending on the person. (all laugh)
  542.  
  543. 1-24-05 Octavian: The point I was driving at is all of those crafting options allow you to build items that are going to be very often more powerful than a unique in that slot. It wards off the problem you're talking about earlier about having a character decked out in all uniques and having that be boring.
  544.  
  545. 1-24-21 Chris Wilson: That's awesome.
  546.  
  547. 1-24-22 TarkeCat: On the note of that, quickly, I assumed that the whole point of synthesized items is that they couldn't be Shaper or Elder and they would compete with one another. I thought, "Do you want the good unique route, or do you want the good Shaped route or the good Elder route, or do you want the good Synthesized route?" I thought that was cool, if that is how it works, then you have more very powerful items competing with one another.
  548.  
  549. 1-24-43 Chris Wilson: I'll need to talk to the team. But discussing where these come from. The base type is chosen based on one of the base types you put in as a fractured item. It can't just go and select something else in the game. Can you get fractured Shaper and Elder items? Well, where can you get Shaper and Elder items? You get them from maps. These are not maps, these are synthesized areas that are decaying that drop fractured items. So, my layman's analysis that any community member can do suggests they're not possible. Having said that, I really should ask some people who know the answer to this.
  550.  
  551. 1-25-14 Nugiyen: I'm pretty sure Mark said it's not possible. Or maybe that was clarifying about chancing items.
  552.  
  553. 1-25-20 Octavian: Despite being very similar to Incursions and how they spawn, that means the memory fragments in maps aren't so similar in that they inherit the mods from that map. Are they considered to be a part of the map that they spawn in, so if you're running a map with minus max, the event you find is also going to have minus max?
  554.  
  555. 1-25-40 Chris Wilson: I'll check into this to make sure. That's bringing up some bad consequences of the Shaper and Elder bases being synthesized and all, and I agree this is worth checking, but I'll make sure this time. What will happen is, I'll pull the team into my office, they say, "Yes, Chris, we dealt with this last week, we forgot to tell you. There was no problem here." And then I made a big deal of nothing.
  556.  
  557. 1-26-03 TarkeCat: One thing, and this is a funzo question, I asked the same thing to Jonathan, If you could change one thing in PoE, ignoring dev costs, ignoring money, what is that one thing for you?
  558.  
  559. 1-26-16 Chris Wilson: You mean ignoring community feedback, right? (TarkeCat: Ignoring everything!) (Octavian: Just snap your fingers, it happens. No consequences.) I can change one thing in Path of Exile ignoring dev costs and money if I want to, that's no problem. It really is a matter of what the community think of stuff. I don't know... You've heard my opinions about stuff. I love the game's hardcore aspects, but I don't think that necessarily belongs in the core game. That's why I pushed for private leagues and more awesome things that make private leagues hard. That private league mod that says you can't find rare and magic items, you have to craft them, everything drops white or unique, that was a Chris special. (Octavian: That was a good one.) That was me saying, "Add this one, trust me, it'll be fun." We've got a durability like system in the works, kind of, it's hopefully coming for private leagues, I'm super excited for that. This is stuff that ninety nine percent of players are never going to bother to play with, and it even costs money to turn on these mods on the private leagues. They're probably not even going to bother because of that. But it makes me excited to have the harder options available in Path of Exile, people who really want a challenge. There are a lot of people who want a harder game here.
  560.  
  561. 1-27-20 Nugiyen: Do you have a plan for how many mods you want to introduce to the whole private league?
  562.  
  563. 1-27-30 Not per se. I would like to have as many as possible. It's just that, development time. This thirteen week schedule we're on is pretty crazy. It's very hard to make the time to do things that are ancillary. We have this custom race system that's like private leagues, where people have ad hoc races they want to start... all this cool stuff we're planning to do, and it's just hard to find the time to get it done, because we have to deliver these four releases per year, we have to make sure 4.0.0 is in a good state to show at ExileCon. There's been no questions about ExileCon yet. We can talk about that. (All laugh) Anyway, there's a lot of stuff to do.
  564.  
  565. 1-28-07 TarkeCat: Okay, so Chris, Now, Bex hinted that you're flying us all out for a live Baeclast, correct?
  566.  
  567. 1-28-17 Chris Wilson: We will be looking at potentially getting some streamers and journalists out to the convention at our expense. This is tricky because there is going to be some line we draw somewhere and some people are going to be upset because they think they're important enough to come and for some reason they're not invited. I apologize in advance if you're left off the list.
  568.  
  569. 1-28-34 Octavian: Yeah, that's not an enviable list to draw up.
  570.  
  571. 1-28-37 Chris Wilson: I'm not going to draft it myself. I'm going to make Bex, so she's going to have final calls. I'm clearing my conscience here, and Bex will do a great job. I'm sorry for whoever is left off this list.
  572.  
  573. 1-28-48 RaizQT: You should be sorry for Bex after this comment. Oof!
  574.  
  575. 1-28-52 TarkeCat: She's actually going to cancel Chris's ticket to give it to someone.
  576.  
  577. 1-28-55 Chris Wilson: Yes, exactly. I'm going to pay for that comment, I'm sure. But in all seriousness, we'll pick whoever we can, and there's various factors in play. There are streamers and so on like Mathil and Ziggy who are in Australia who are ten times cheaper to get them out than it is to get someone from Europe, and we don't know how much budget is available yet, it depends on how ticket sales go and so on. We'll certainly be trying to get a lot of coverage in person. That's one of the draws for having ExileCon is so the fans not only get to meet the developers, they get a chance to see some of their favorite streamers and so on from across the room.
  578.  
  579. 1-29-31 Octavian: On the topic of ExileCon, aside from information about 4.0.0, what else should people be excited for going into ExileCon?
  580.  
  581. 1-29-41 Chris Wilson: We don't only have information on 4.0.0, we have information for 3.9.0 ---
  582. 1-29-58 Chris Wilson: 3.9 is the December expansion for this year. It's no where near as large as 4.0.0, it's more like Betrayal or something. We know a lot more about the kinds of things we want to do with that than we know about 3.7.0 or 3.8.0. We're going to announce 3.9.0, we're going to announce 4.0.0, let you have a chance to play both of these, and also there's going to be like ten talks from developers. There's tons of cool stuff we'll be able to do. We have some neat surprises lined up. We'll be putting a page up either this week or next, where you can buy tickets. We'll have the date and the location, all the things you need to book things, so it should be fine. We've also got some VIP auctions for exclusive dinners with developers and that kind of stuff. I think Jonathan's personally cooking food for some people.
  583.  
  584. 1-30-40 (Nugiyen: Whoa!) (Octavian: That's wonderful.) (RaizQT: What!? Nice.) (TarkeCat: Just to confirm, chat, Jonathan time is best time. That's pretty impressive.)
  585.  
  586. 1-30-45 Chris Wilson: Jonathan's very good at cooking, by the way. I'm not kidding here. This is something he cares deeply about being good at.
  587.  
  588. 1-30-51 Nugiyen: I have heard that food is a hot topic at Grinding Gear Games.
  589.  
  590. 1-30-58 Chris Wilson: When it's barbecue, For sure.
  591.  
  592. 1-31-04 TarkeCat: Since you can't say exactly when you're selling the tickets, do you have any rough price points in mind?
  593.  
  594. 1-31-12 Chris Wilson: I don't think it's harmful for me to talk about the roughish price points but, they're not cheap, right? We only have a limited number, we have a lot of expenses to cover, and so it is a premium thing. If you don't have spare money, you probably can't go to ExileCon. It's going to cost thousands of dollars of flights to get out here, hundreds of dollars of hotels, downtown Auckland is a metropolitan city, it's not incredibly cheap. We've got deals with hotels, but compared to the thousands and thousands of dollars it costs, and the fact you're going to want to see New Zealand and drive around and go to the Lord of the Rings filming locations and go to the Weta Workshop tour and check out Hobbiton, and all that kind of stuff that's expensive. The actual tickets might be two hundred US dollars each, are actually quite cheap in comparison, but we do need to price them high because we're already making like a half million dollar loss on the event even if we sell all the tickets. We do need to recoup some costs so we can pay for it.
  595.  
  596. 1-32-02 RaizQT: For getting into the details, do you have any expected amount of people? How many people are you expecting.
  597.  
  598. 1-32-11 Chris Wilson: The details I don't want to talk about are things like the exact date. I know what the dates are, it's in mid-November, but the reason I don't want to give the dates here is because people start booking flights, and then they miss out on a VIP dinner they didn't realize was on a certain day or something, so I'm happy to talk about broadly what's at ExileCon, because if you go to the pathofexile.com/exilecon page we threw up months ago, it's got a list of "we want to do roughly this stuff." I'm happy to talk details. It's just that the actual page with tickets for sale and the exact details are coming out in a few days and please wait until you see that before you actually try to book plane tickets. Anyway, I've completely forgotten what your question was, can you please repeat it?
  599.  
  600. 1-32-46 RaizQT: How many people are you preparing for?
  601.  
  602. 1-32-48 Chris Wilson: We're expecting about fifteen hundred people. We have a good venue, theatre capacity, so we can have an announcement keynote that shows you some cool stuff, for approximately fifteen hundred people. We might be able to squeeze some more in. Bear in mind, we are bringing some media and journalists. We're bringing all of our developers, they may get a ticket for their partner each, and so we think we're putting up about one thousand regular tickets up for sale initially, and roughly one hundred and fifty VIP ones for sale, at first. The VIP ones are just a lot more expensive and you get priority in a few things, but also you get to do dinner with the developers and so on.
  603.  
  604. 1-33-24 RaizQT: I think you guys are underselling yourself.
  605.  
  606. 1-33-28 Nugiyen: Yeah, one thousand five hundred seems very low.
  607.  
  608. 1-33-34 Chris Wilson: You have to come out to New Zealand! These are people who are willing to waste thousands of dollars going to the airline, and that money is not going to Path of Exile if they spend thousands of dollars on plane tickets.
  609.  
  610. (All: Don't you have New Zealand fans to fill the venue?)
  611.  
  612. 1-33-48 Chris Wilson: Then maybe we do fill the venue! And then it's first come first serve in that case. Bex and I have been talking about strategy for putting the tickets on sale. We do think we need to give the community a heads up, "at this time, they will go on sale." That way there can be a bit of... I don't think they're going to sell out. It's an expensive event to go to. People in chat are asking about virtual tickets. Here's our plan: You can watch all the streaming stuff for free, you don't need to pay. If you just want to see the announcement, you can watch it on Twitch. We're not going to charge you for that, we're not planning to sell virtual tickets. You basically get the experience of seeing the announcements for free. Note that we're not planning on streaming absolutely everything that happens at the event. There is a degree of having to go there to see some of the cool stuff, but realistically the important part is seeing 4.0.0, you can just watch from home with no problems.
  613.  
  614. 1-34-36 RaizQT: Don't worry chat, we'll stream it.
  615.  
  616. 1-34-39 Chris Wilson: We're doing all this for people to see it, right? This is a big marketing event for these expansions. The intention is to have as many people watch it as possible. And I'm pretty sure Blizzcon did stream for free the main announcement, it was just the other content they charged for.
  617.  
  618. 1-34-51 Octavian: You don't want to hide away the, what did you say, half a million expenditure, and not allow people to see what's going on and be part of the spectacle.
  619.  
  620. 1-35-02 Chris Wilson: I love fan meetups. Getting twenty people together in a bar and let's just talk about how the development works. I try to be candid here, but there's seven thousand people watching and hundreds of thousands more later on YouTube, so I have to be a bit careful, but when there's some beer involved and no cameras, you get to talk about a lot more stuff. That's why ExileCon is going to be awesome, because there's going to be a ton of developers who aren't PR trained and they'll say all kinds of stuff they're not meant to about future expansions. It's a gold mine for information! It's going to be so much fun to hang out with the community for the weekend.
  621.  
  622. 1-35-32 RaizQT: You guys are really underselling yourself. One thousand five hundred, Chris, I promise you.
  623.  
  624. 1-35-38 TarkeCat: I think it's going to sell out a lot faster than you think it will.
  625.  
  626. 1-35-40 RaizQT: It's going to sell out in two hours.
  627.  
  628. 1-35-43 Nugiyen: Two? Fifteen minutes.
  629.  
  630. 1-35-47 TarkeCat: That's one thing that I probably asked, this is a very selfish thing to ask, for the streamers who can't be flown out, because, fair enough, will there be any system where they can at least get dibs on a ticket?
  631.  
  632. 1-36-05 Chris Wilson: I think so. You have to bear in mind that, like, there will be some guy who's got twenty viewers stream and is trying very hard, amazing guy and makes great content, and he is a streamer, and he's doing everything right, but he hasn't reached your level of success yet, and he may ask, "May I please have my free streamer ticket, I've been working very hard at this," and we have to draw a line somewhere. So, I'm pretty sure there will be the people who get flown out, the people who get just the hotels, the people who get just a ticket, the people who get a polite apology.
  633.  
  634. 1-36-36 TarkeCat: One other thing, on the terms of the opening announcement being streamable, just to clarify because different companies have different rules, are you going to be okay with the streamers who can't make it streaming your ceremony and then doing live commentary?
  635.  
  636. 1-36-51 Chris Wilson: As in, they're restreaming our stream? I'm pretty sure it's fine. It's more publicity, right?
  637.  
  638. 1-36-58 TarkeCat: Because there are quite a few companies who actually will shut that down ASAP so it's actually really good to know that in advance.
  639.  
  640. 1-37-05 Chris Wilson: I don't think we're particularly known for shutting stuff down. Have we ever shut something down?
  641.  
  642. 1-37-14 RaizQT: You shut down Mors pretty hard with those balance changes. (All laugh)
  643.  
  644. 1-37-24 TarkeCat: We had a couple of loose gaming industry questions, but, chat, and also anyone here, is there anything more about ExileCon you want to ask before we move on. Otherwise it will literally be thirty minutes of me begging for a ticket.
  645.  
  646. (All: Yeah...)
  647.  
  648. 1-37-41 RaizQT: I think we're good. Unless you have something, Chris, that you want to mention that we're absolutely forgetting. We've never been to an event like this one.
  649.  
  650. 1-37-55 Chris Wilson: I would encourage anyone to plan ahead a trip around New Zealand. There's so much cool stuff to see. Don't treat it as flying to Auckland. Do the convention. People are saying "merch". We are getting merch made. Not tons, it's expensive and hard, but we have some cool stuff. There'll be a merch shop. It should be fun.
  651.  
  652. 1-38-16 TarkeCat: One thing that I know people care a lot about, do you think there will be any exclusive MTX for ExileCon people?
  653.  
  654. 1-38-24 Chris Wilson: I believe we will probably give an exclusive single MTX to the attendees so that they can --- fact --- This isn't a big deal. Our goal isn't to drown them in free swag to the point where everyone's jealous, it's more a matter of, "you got a thing". I don't know what the thing is yet. And I'm careful not to speculate.
  655.  
  656. 1-38-41 TarkeCat: If there's only something like one thousand five hundred special ExileCon kiwis, I'm telling you those are going to sell for millions on eBay, and that's how you'll get all your costs back. One hundred percent.
  657.  
  658. 1-38-52 Chris Wilson: We weren't planning to sell them on eBay ourselves, but the intention was that...
  659.  
  660. 1-38-57 TarkeCat: Cut out the middle man, Chris! It's fine.
  661.  
  662. 1-39-00 Chris Wilson: The way it works with signing up for ExileCon tickets is you do it on your Path of Exile account, like, you log in to the site, and you buy the ticket, and therefore the microtransactions can go directly on your account, rather than having to give you a code that goes onto eBay. Sorry.
  663.  
  664. 1-39-13 TarkeCat: That's good. I prefer that system where it's going straight to an account, because then you don't have all this scumminess of people stealing codes. I think that's a good way of doing that.
  665.  
  666. 1-39-21 Chris Wilson: Also, we're probably not going to sell kiwis again, because there are a lot of very very rightly entitled people who spent a lot of money early on saying "please don't do kiwis" and I think they're in the right there.
  667.  
  668. (All: No kiwis.)
  669.  
  670. 1-39-35 RaizQT: ... and no Razer Footprints please.
  671.  
  672. 1-39-38 Chris Wilson: Chat's suggesting a different bird.
  673.  
  674. 1-39-42 RaizQT: That's not a bad idea.
  675.  
  676. 1-39-49 TarkeCat: The spicy question that I wasn't sure you were going to approve, you said you weren't sure what you were going to say to, what are your thoughts on the recent mass layoffs in the industry specifically in areas of community management or growth, as someone at the head of studio?
  677.  
  678. 1-40-02 Chris Wilson: I don't think GGG will ever get into a position where these layoffs that are really --- mass layoffs as opposed to just, if they don't like working with someone, they gradually phase them out or whatever people do in companies. I don't know, we don't really lose staff. I'm not sure how that works. I have seen that other companies have laid off half their staff, and I imagine if they --- they gain --- like, Path of Exile's doing well, right? This year, especially, we saw massive increases of player numbers and the future's looking really good. But this is really up to the community, right? Keep recommending the game to your friends, keep playing it. It's okay to not necessarily play for the entire duration of the league, just come back every single league. We're releasing cool stuff. If we ever release a league you don't like, just come back for the next one. I mean, you're all here after you didn't like Bestiary, right? So, that's a good sign! I don't see where Path of Exile is going in a year and our future --- (Nugiyen: I loved it!) (TarkeCat: For the record, we liked it.) I liked it as well. I think there was just a bit of, internet likes to hate stuff, plus the nets were a bit clumsy when you nuke the whole screen at once.
  679. 1-41-10 Chris Wilson: With regards to mass layoffs, I don't know. GGG is not exactly waiting to announce its own set of things like that, so no particular problem. I am disappointed that some of my favorite developers have had to shed quite a lot of their staff. That sucks, especially for those people. If they would like jobs, they should email us?
  680.  
  681. 1-41-35 RaizQT: Is that a necessity, to be in New Zealand, or do you have people outside also?
  682.  
  683. 1-41-42 Chris Wilson: You have to work at our office. I think the only people who don't work at our office are some local translators. The developers do have to work in the office. We can get people work visas from other countries if they're good, but the requirement is, to get a work visa for New Zealand, we have to demonstrate that we couldn't find a New Zealander who was equivalent. If you're some hotshot graphics programmer and we need you for our optimization, we look in New Zealand, not find anyone, and get the work visa. But if it's something like customer support, realistically we can find New Zealanders who can do customer support pretty easily, so no work visas there.
  684.  
  685. 1-42-23 TarkeCat: We had a few questions put to the side for Q&A, so if you havn't got an answer for it, just say yes or no. (Chris Wilson: Sure.) Have there been any thoughts or discussions about the update on larger action bars?
  686.  
  687. 1-42-38 Chris Wilson: You mean the number of skills? (RaizQT: Yes) (Octavian: Holding alt or shift to switch to a second bar.) We had a plan of using Ctrl or something like that to do that. It never got off the ground. It's just one of those things that we'd like to do, we just need to find a programmer who's not making the league to do it. The idea is not dead, it's just sleeping.
  688.  
  689. 1-43-03 RaizQT: You're doing a really fantastic job of introducing new abilities and Vaal skills, and all this sort of stuff. It's really working out, especially the combo. For the first time ever, I feel you can actually combine abilities and it feels good. Unfortunately, frequently, a lot of players run into the summoner problem of the past, which is, "I would love to use this skill, and vary up my gameplay, but we just don't have enough skill bar." It's becoming pretty pressing at this point.
  690.  
  691. 1-43-31 Chris Wilson: I'll give you a reason why this isn't done. We actually store the binding of what key you have something bound to, in the item itself, is if you take that gem off and you put it in your stash or something, and then you put it back on later, it remembers where it was in terms of binding. This is lost on trade. This stuff means that when we add additional bars, for extra slot space basically, we have to put a bunch of effort into making sure that that's handled in terms of the item's being able to store that. There's this subtlety like that. When you're dealing with I don't know like five or ten billion items in the database, you need to be pretty careful that you don't make it slow, for example. So there's quite a bit of annoyance to get this feature to work, but it would be really good.
  692.  
  693. 1-44-16 RaizQT: Really good.
  694.  
  695. 1-44-17 TarkeCat: That seems like something that someone thought was a great idea six years ago and is now a slightly big problem.
  696.  
  697. 1-44-26 Chris Wilson: We're happy with the decision, we think it was the right one, it's just that it has consequences. We like making things fast, by that I mean we make things that are designed for performance, and then they are hard to maintain later.
  698.  
  699. 1-44-45 Nugiyen: Have you considered with the mines, you have Detonate Mines, because it's an integral thing to use when you use a mine, so it doesn't take a keybind, you just get one for free. Have you considered that for summoners, and for other archetypes?
  700.  
  701. 1-45-06 RaizQT: Or focus.
  702.  
  703. 1-45-08 Chris Wilson: It's possible. This discussion will prompt some discussion, I can guarantee --- going to be watching this and they're going to talk to me about it ---
  704.  
  705. 1-45-20 TarkeCat: I also had a lot of requests for colorblind mode. I know you have said before in another podcast that you told me about it, but has there been anything on that?
  706.  
  707. 1-45-30 Chris Wilson: There's no new news on that. One of the things we discovered with color blindness especially with Australia, to some extent just changing the intensity of the reds and greens we use can help them be distinguishable, and so we have some color blind staff members who helped us with Betrayal to make sure the red and green and yellow lines between the different syndicate members were distinguishable due to the intensity of the hues, but they still used bad colors as it were. There's stuff we're learning about this all the time, but no significant news.
  708.  
  709. 1-46-05 TarkeCat: On that note of things being asked a lot about, has there been any update on fossil stacking?
  710.  
  711. 1-46-12 Chris Wilson: This is a fun one. A lot of people want a fossil stash tab, and it would be great to sell them that, but I feel that the need of it goes away once we add stacking. So, our plan is, we add stacking, and then we see if they still want to pay for a fossil stash tab, and in that case we can probably make one. It's pretty easy to make stash tabs. The fossil stacking is still in our list of things we want to do, it just isn't done yet. It'd be a pain to do, and it takes, again, someone who's not working on the league. We have to commit to making it a 3.7.0 feature, which we haven't committed to because we don't quite know the scope of 3.7.0.
  712.  
  713. 1-46-45 TarkeCat: There definitely won't be anything in place for the patch coming up, then?
  714.  
  715. 1-46-49 Chris Wilson: Nothing in 3.6.0 for that one, no.
  716.  
  717. 1-46-55 Octavian: Have the hiring restrictions that you talked about earlier, about having to prove that there isn't someone up to the task in New Zealand before being able to look outside, made it difficult to approach some of these needs that aren't league specific, and so need a developer that isn't devoted to the league content to fix?
  718.  
  719. 1-47-12 Chris Wilson: Not really. We can still hire developers, it's just that Path of Exile is very complicated, and while we try very hard to find Path of Exile players to be developers, like chat is mentioning OpenARL is a great example --- approaches us with one thousand hours in PoE and is a developer, it's very important to throw them on making content as quickly as possible. We constantly need more content developers. We're not going to be able to finish 4.0.0 at the same time as our other four expansions this year, unless we can get more hands on it actually making game content. That's why these superfluous features like fossil stacking are easy to say, "oh it doesn't really matter, let's do it later." Even though I understand every time you open your stash, you are wanting that to have been done.
  720.  
  721. (All: Hmm. thinkingface.emoji)
  722.  
  723. 1-48-07 TarkeCat: One other thing, and this is a very very very important question, why does cyclone AoE keep getting nerfed?
  724.  
  725. 1-48-18 Chris Wilson: I have to ask someone about that. I am a cyclone player. I'm not happy about that either. But they have good reasons. They care about AoE. There's a balance manifesto for Tuesday New Zealand time that I approved yesterday; it talks about AoE quite a bit. They care. Cyclone AoE, that's melee and we don't do that. (All laugh) "Why is melee so shit" asks chat. It's not, actually!
  726.  
  727. 1-48-52 TarkeCat: You see, the thing is, Chris, if you ignore all the skills which are good, and then you ignore all the skills that aren't "true melee", then you're left with the skills that people don't like.
  728.  
  729. 1-49-04 Chris Wilson: Look, it needs attention. A lot of Path of Exile needs attention over time. And it will get attention.
  730.  
  731. 1-49-11 RaizQT: Is there something you distinguish between melee splash melee, and melee like sunder, tectonic slam, or is it all the same to you guys?
  732.  
  733. 1-49-20 Chris Wilson: At the end of the day, there's a lot of different melees. Sunder, is that really melee? It involves a weapon, and that's about where that one ends. When the guys are doing their melee pass, they'll pick non-spells pretty much, as far as I can tell. We'll see! I'll get more information. Now that we've said this is a thing we're wanting to do, I would like to be more vocal about the manifestos and so on throughout their process. Give you guys more of a heads up as we go. There's no need for it to be a secret, 3.7.0 announcement day "we're doing melee!" You know it all in advance.
  734.  
  735. 1-49-56 RaizQT: You're one of those, Chris. You're not real melee, huh?
  736.  
  737. 1-50-03 Octavian: It's the "no true scotsman" argument. We can keep going down this rabbit hole until, "you're not a true melee player unless you're basic attacking." Come on. You have effectiveness of added damage and you think you're a real melee player? Come on.
  738.  
  739. 1-50-18 TarkeCat: The other most spammed things, has there been any thought to lab enchants? What happens when labyrinth itself eventually sees changes?
  740.  
  741. 1-50-29 Chris Wilson: Lab enchants are a big discussion internally and there are several reasons. First one is the topic you want to hear about, and that topic is, it's really hard to find the right lab enchant. There are hundreds and hundreds of different enchants possible, and it's a lot of runs. And currently people will set themselves up to be lab enchant runners, where they'll run the labyrinth repeatedly and try to get these and sell them for exalts. We make them easier so you can get the one you want, this is entirely optional extra power for your character. If you get the one you want, then that completely undermines this play style, where some of the most effective league starts that we've seen came from people farming the lab as a solo activity, and just spam running that and getting enchants to sell for four exalts each and so on. So, we're very worried taht if we make it easier, basically if we take the challenge away, that just lobotomizes this thing where these people are having a lot of fun causing that to occur in the community. We understand that the problem is getting worse, but we don't want to change it so "ah, here's all your free enchants, you're done now", which is what some people are asking for.
  742. 1-51-35 Chris Wilson: I think the second thing; enchants are changing a lot. Now they're separate from implicits; Enchants mean something completely different in 3.6.0. What does a ring enchant mean? Nothing right now, but it might be in the future expansion. Where's that coming from?
  743.  
  744. 1-51-51 RaizQT: What? Spoilers!
  745.  
  746. 1-51-51 Octavian: That is really interesting. And I would love to dig more into that, but I think the twofold problem that people have there though is, one, that you mentioned that it's entirely optional extra power, and for some skills it doesn't feel that way, if you're talking about storm call or tornado shot, those are skills that way way worse without their relevant helmet enchant. Also, it's very difficult to get the correct enchant you need on a weird off meta base, so it makes a lot of people feel like they can't really play with this strange alternative helmet, so they are forced into just using Devoto's or just using Elder Royal Burgonet or whatever.
  747.  
  748. 1-52-30 TarkeCat: Or not even playing the skill at all.
  749.  
  750. 1-52-34 Chris Wilson: These are valid concerns. I think the team a lot more --- just that they don't want to trivialize it by accident. And that sometimes happens with overreactions. We've overreacted in the past with stuff. I would rather see small gradual changes to make it easier than... Potentially, this is me talking without having checked, maybe even the ability to move enchants between items, somehow, so that you can buy a random unique with it, and then move it onto the weird off meta item you're looking for. Something like that. Those things could potentially be additional ways to look at it without changing the number and nature of the enchant.
  751.  
  752. 1-53-13 Octavian: It'd be interesting to have, maybe an option where you have more control over the enchant that you're getting but the enchant you get is the merciless enchant instead of the uber, so you can still get a moderately powerful version of the enchant that you want much more easily for running uber lab.
  753.  
  754. 1-53-30 That's a possiblity. It's only a matter of time for each --- --- revamp, and I'm not saying there's a labyrinth revamp coming soon, it's held up remarkably well, but one day it'll be old, and one day we'll put a coat of paint on that, and --- changing the system at that point when we're forced to, or potentially earlier. I know people want something in the next patch or two to address this issue because it's quite a hot topic one. The designers are definitely aware of it.
  755.  
  756. 1-53-57 TarkeCat: I've just got one more or two more, so if you guys want to throw anything into the mix, or get something from the chat, feel free to go for it. Should we expect any more widespread unique rebalancing in this patch coming up?
  757.  
  758. 1-54-09 Chris Wilson: There are some small unique balance changes. Actually, I took them out of the manifesto --- on Wednesday and I wanted to more clearly signal the fact that if people are going to go gamble on buying them all from poe.trade or whatever then they should do that based on the patch notes rather than the manifesto. I think that the changes in this expansion, because of the sheer number of buffs to everything, we just made a few power adjustments downwards for a few key uniques, like three of them maybe, so it's not a big deal. We have not included a full unique rebalance in this expansion. Partly because the designers have been very busy doing ---. Certainly in the future we'd like to. It's so much easier to change the power level of a unique than it is to have them make a new one, and Path of Exile is very very full of uniques at the moment, there's like eight hundred and fifty of them. We'll continue to make uniques that do interesting stuff, but we don't need to spam filler ones, so we need to take old ones and make them more powerful.
  759.  
  760. 1-55-05 Octavian: On that note then, you're saying that the spell reworks are so significant that they're edging out time for a unique rework. You mentioned earlier that you're excited that it's going to shake up the meta. Does that mean this overarching spell rework is going to be very significant across the board?
  761.  
  762. 1-55-23 Chris Wilson: I think it will be. It's going to mean there are so many more viable things for people to play. The goal here was that everything is rebalanced around various damage and shaped characteristics. And so on. All the tiny stuff. It's going to at least give a large period of confusion where they don't know what their skill is, and I think that's really good for experimentation. People will find a lot of interesting builds. In addition, it'll just mean there will be a lot more viable things. And all of the bad player experiences where you still have a character picked the wrong spell entirely through no fault of your own, and then the game is bad, because you have the wrong spell; that kind of stuff will be a lot less of a problem.
  763.  
  764. 1-55-58 Nugiyen: On bad player experiences, trading maps for a lot of people is something they really hate. Have you ever considered giving players options to combineds maps? Let's say you find a bunch of red maps, instead of having to go and trade for the ones you want, maybe you just combine the ones you have into one specific one? So you consume all the maps you have. Let's say you have Dig on your Atlas, this is tier fourteen, and you want to go to Sunken Temple. Instead of going upwards three to one, you can go sideways.
  765.  
  766. 1-56-43 Chris Wilson: I'll bring it up with the team. I understand that you're carefully not suggesting an auction house here, in a diplomatic --- --- more solutions to the map problem. It's appreciated. I'll talk to the team about it.
  767.  
  768. 1-57-03 RaizQT: Just one more question about ExileCon. Will it be possible for people who are there... With Twitchcon, they ran into a big issue where they did a huge announcement for something that everybody should have been streaming, but everybody was at the convention. All the journalists and streamers were all there, and it wasn't possible for them to stream. Will it be possible for us to broadcast the live event?
  769.  
  770. 1-57-29 Chris Wilson: My understanding is that we're trying to get it so that the streamers we are flying out have a place on their stream so that they can cover stuff. An example is that the official coverage we are doing involves, it's called The Announcement. We do our one hour ceremony where we talk about all our stuff we want to talk about, and then the same stream cuts into various community members who are there or online talking about their opinions about stuff and so on. We are trying to provide an official venue for them to do that, but of course we want to support people's streams on their own channels so that their own audiences what they think of stuff. I don't know enough about streaming, I've never streamed myself, I have a very tangential relationship to this, so we are trying hard so that we do cater to this correctly. I've been working closely with Ziggy and with Bex trying to make sure that I understand it correctly when setting it up. A lot of learning, some good experience from the streamers.
  771.  
  772. 1-58-23 TarkeCat: One other thing, this is very specific. Are you planning to have any host for your live stream, or is it literally going to be a random camera in the back just straight playing?
  773.  
  774. 1-58-38 RaizQT: Chris is the host, right?
  775.  
  776. 1-58-40 Chris Wilson: I'll be on stage during the announcement, but we're still working out the logistics. --- we'll get someone to MC it and so on. You and I can talk offline about the specifics about how to run ExileCon. I'll happily do that, I'd love advice on it. Let's do that. I don't know if the community want to watch us hash it out, maybe they do, it's interesting.
  777.  
  778. 1-59-00 TarkeCat: In that case, guys, I'd like to end Baeclast, that was a great episode! :D :D :D
  779.  
  780. 1-59-10 RaizQT: You snailed yourself. You're going to get ten pages of why Tarke thinks he would make a perfect host for the event.
  781.  
  782. 1-59-15 Chris Wilson: I have one thing to remind people of before we end: The PlayStation 4 version will come out in March alongside Synthesis. We don't know the exact date yet. We will announce it as soon as we do know. Basically we'll probably have about two weeks of heads up, so we'll give the firm date about two weeks to go, and it's going to be a big thing, so if you have a PlayStation, you want to play, we're really looking for to it. Of course this means that future expansions will come along on that platform with all the content of PC, and so on and so on. This is a big deal, and please, if you have PlayStation friends who wouldn't play because they wouldn't play with the PC peasants and they want to play on PlayStation, make sure they check us out at launch.
  783.  
  784. 1-59-56 TarkeCat: My girlfriend's actually really annoyed that the PlayStation keeps getting delayed. She really wants to check it out.
  785.  
  786. 2-00-01 Chris Wilson: It's going to be good. The improvements that we've made have meant great things for the XBOX version and the PC version, there have been tons of performance improvements. I think we cut five seconds off the XBOX loading screens, or something recently, we're working to make the PlayStation version better, so it's all around good stuff on all the versions of Path of Exile.
  787.  
  788. 2-00-22 RaizQT: Not gonna lie, I'm considering getting a PS4 just to play the events. It is very cool that you guys are launching it at apparently two weeks after the league launch, so I think a lot of people are preparing racing ladder push on PS4.
  789.  
  790. 2-00-36 Chris Wilson: One of the things we've been working on as well is having a website for the console versions, because currently, if you're on XBOX player, you can't log in to our website and see the ladder. We're taking the Path of Exile website and making it so that the XBOX players can log in as well, and they can use the forums as their console accounts and the supporter packs they bought on the console will give them forum titles, and blah blah blah. It also means they'll be able to do things like look at ladders, which is great. But the consequence of this is, is that supporting multiple Path of Exile realms backing the website let's us also support having no Path of Exile realm backing the website. And what that means is if we shut the game down for a patch, the website will stay up (All: Yay!), and that means you can read the patch notes! It just means the things involving your characters go offline. This is a big change that's been a while in the works, but it will mean you finally have some QoL on that website.
  791.  
  792. 2-01-32 RaizQT: And this is coming sometime next league?
  793.  
  794. 2-01-36 Chris Wilson: Sometime next week hopefully. We're actually deploying ; there's a patch on Tuesday. Everyone's going to ask, why is there a patch, it does nothing. What it's doing is this kind of stuff. We've put some realm architecture improvements so that in case there were tons and tons of players on Synthesis launch, we don't have a huge queue like last time, it's doing the split realm stuff, it's all this stuff we're trying to get in before 3.6.0 because it might break stuff and we'd rather do that this week than on 3.6.0 launch. So if you see a suspicious patch for no reason, it's just that, it's not droprates, we don't even have a patch planned to change droprates.
  795.  
  796. 2-02-09 Octavian: But sometimes the patches are droprates, is what you're saying.
  797.  
  798. 2-02-14 Chris Wilson: Oh, we totally screw around with droprates all the time. The rumors are true. \s (not \s) (maybe \s)
  799.  
  800. 2-02-18 TarkeCat: One thing quickly though, since you'll have all the console and PC players using the same website, will there finally be some way for people to link their PC and XBOX accounts? For something like supporter packs. That's been the biggest thing for me, as someone who's very interested to play PoE on PlayStation, losing six years' worth of supporter packs hurts.
  801.  
  802. 2-02-44 Chris Wilson: We have to keep the supporter packs separate so that you only get the microtransactions --- --- There's rules about this, and unfortunately it means that we don't allow them to be associated that way. If you bought the pack on PC, you can only use it on PC; if you bought it on XBOX, you can only use it on XBOX. These are ongoing topics that I discuss with the platform holders, but they have legitimate reasons for having these policies. Their rules, the rule against, that all games have to follow. The best experience would be if everyone could share everything between the platforms. That's a future people are moving towards, but as it currently stands, you have to keep the purchases on the platform that they got the money for.
  803.  
  804. 2-03-20 TarkeCat: You cut out for a second but it seems like it isn't a GGG issue but more of a how Microsoft and Sony work issue, is that correct?
  805.  
  806. 2-03-28 Chris Wilson: Yeah. There's a lot of complexity to it, but basically yeah, there are rules about this. It may be that we haven't pushed hard enough, it may be that we were misunderstanding. I'll continue to push on it, but as it stands, we do not allow this type of sharing with microtransactions between platforms.
  807.  
  808. 2-03-46 TarkeCat: Honestly, that is the biggest thing for me. I had set up some plans to do some streaming from PoE on PlayStation. I'm actually getting really excited for it, but the main hindrance is the losing six years' of the MTX and the supporter packs, and going back to four stash tabs, and I can't really justify to myself, "Just buy it again!" you know?
  809.  
  810. 2-04-08 Chris Wilson: I understand what you mean. We'll continue to look into it, but I don't have --- about this stuff. It would be great for us if we get this to work, right? It's better for all the players, then it's better for everyone.
  811.  
  812. 2-04-23 Octavian: On that topic, are there plans in place to increase the number of default stash tabs, or allow for default stash currency tab, to be put in place for newer players? (RaizQT: Or a default premium tab?)
  813.  
  814. 2-04-36 Chris Wilson: Currently there are no plans for this, and we have to be very careful. I know it sounds good on paper to say --- fifth tab, there are all these fractured items you have to hold, or why not a currency tab with lower limits because it teaches people about the ---, add a premium tab so they can engage with trade without having to use the forum item posts. These are all valid arguments. But, this is our whole monetization. This is one of those things we can't go back on. If we add that tab, and then things go downhill and we need to get rid of it, that's just a bad situation to be in. We're very careful before we change this kind of core stuff, because what we know right now is that the level of purchase in Path of Exile pay the bills and everyone is happy and we keep making the game, and we're really careful before changing that kind of stuff. We're still doing mystery boxes exactly the way we did a long time ago, there's all sorts of experiments we'd love to do, but we're just really careful. Even just putting hideouts in the most recent supporter packs was a decision people have argued loudly about because it's adding additional value to those packs that we can now never easily take away without subsidizing something else, and so on.
  815.  
  816. 2-05-39 Nugiyen: Another question on tabs, for the Standard people, I've had this question a lot: map tabs. With you changing the atlas, a bit more rapidly now, and maps getting changed, rotating into new sets, every time they have to buy a new tab if I understand correctly. Is there any plan to address that issue?
  817.  
  818. 2-06-08 Chris Wilson: So a map tab is able to hold one series worth of maps at once, and I was talking to some people on Reddit about this. I've been looking into this because it's not optimal at the moment. Technically, we can take the maps out and put them somewhere else like in a quad tab, and then use the map tab for the current series, and so on and so on, but then you have the segregation of like some maps from each series, so we were thinking, our best idea so far was the concept of converting older series of maps into equivalent ones in the current series. Basically, you can take the old maps that you want to collect like a few of each for posterity reasons, and then you can convert the rest into the current series and you'd have those all converted and useable again. This type of thing we might do. It's a real pain for several reasons. There are hundreds of millions of maps in play here, and the way the map tab works is already quite complicated to store so many items in one stash tab essentially. There's a lot of complexity with changing it, and even if we do have a clear plan on how we want to do it, it then requires the large amount of Jonathan time, a large amount of other people who are making leagues' time, and the usual it's slow to get things changed in the backend of Path of Exile thing. So, I can't promise it fast, but it is a hot topic issue and we're fully aware of the feedback. I wish it were a better situation there, but we don't have a good answer for you yet.
  819.  
  820. 2-07-24 Nugiyen: On a personal note, as well, with tabs, and especially with remove-only tabs, I play a lot of Solo Self Found, and I have this strategy of, whenever something goes wrong, and I have to restart, I will migrate everything to the current league, which means I get a lot of remove-only tabs. And if I use the map tab, I end up with say eight remove-only map tabs with say one hundred maps in them, and I have to manually take all those maps out. Is there any way that you could make that transition easier to remove the map tab? Divination cards, map tab, these things to merge them?
  821.  
  822. 2-08-03 RaizQT: Click one button, fill up inventory.
  823.  
  824. 2-08-04 Chris Wilson: I see what you're saying. That's quite interesting. Yes, we probably can do that. We probably should do that. It's a matter of getting it to work. The tricky thing is, if we talk about all aspects of Path of Exile, we'll come up with fifty things like that that we should do and then we have to pick the ten that we do do in the immediate future. I'm hesitant to promise any one thing. We try to follow through on our promises.
  825.  
  826. 2-08-26 TarkeCat: I think also the biggest thing with that that a lot of people overlook is it seems quite obvious to automatically update everything, but you do have those guys especially in Standard, who the whole point of it is to collect all the old legacy things. So, you have to not only account for what's the best player solution, but what's also the best solution that that one guy who wants a map tab of just all the old maps, and then all the newer maps.
  827.  
  828. 2-08-51 Chris Wilson: I love the fact that people collect stuff, by the way. Seeing people say "look at all my old maps" --- amazing. We considered for a while putting the whole expansion numbers, like expansion symbols on the items so when you collect all the base types, a bundle of swords from each of the expansions. There's all this cool stuff. In fact, we actually have a new type of stash tab specifically for collectors, which we'll be maybe releasing in the coming weeks.
  829.  
  830. 2-09-17 Octavian: Since you like collector's stuff, I have a pitch that I've been carrying around a little while now. I've tweeted it at various people. Delve boss drops should have flavor text similar to race flavor text that says the depth it was killed at. So, you have this extra little reward for killing a depth 900 Aul. You know, the Aul's Uprising says "depth 900," and that's really cool.
  831.  
  832. 2-09-42 Chris Wilson: That is pretty awesome. You're a smart guy.
  833.  
  834. 2-09-47 Octavian: Well thank you.
  835.  
  836. 2-09-48 TarkeCat: Octavian is going to go to bed smiling. (All laugh)
  837.  
  838. 2-09-51 RaizQT: Octavian's so red. Also! When it comes to maps, could you give us a little bit of a clarification. I believe the wording was something like, the Atlas is getting shuffled up again. Is that a pretty major rework like the recent one, or is it like a couple maps getting moved around and that's it?
  839.  
  840. 2-10-07 Chris Wilson: It's a full scramble. The goal here is diversity so you can't expect the same layout, the same maps in the same places. Obviously there's restrictions where the ones with crazy bosses have to go near the end, and ones with baby bosses have to go near the start, but the intention is replayability, because things are subtly different league to league, the pathing is different and so on. This is a thing we're trying to do, we've come up with tools for it now, where we think that we'll actually extend player retention in maps by having them be different, you're not subconsciously getting bored by them. It's maybe a boring game designer thing to do in the background, but we think it's been helping so far. We'll continue to do that.
  841.  
  842. 2-10-44 Nugiyen: It is not boring, trust me.
  843.  
  844. 2-10-46 Octavian: This is, going forwards, something that's potentially just going to be regular. Every league a new shuffle? (Chris Wilson: Yes.) Okay, cool.
  845.  
  846. 2-10-57 RaizQT: I don't know if you have any information on this, but, when Incursion wasn't implemented, you guys mentioned that there you're not doing it for a reason, and that reason was it's probably going to go through some balance changes. But when Incursion got released, not a whole lot happened. Has your mentality just changed, or was there not enough time?
  847.  
  848. 2-11-19 Chris Wilson: I think it was a lack of time. Last year was rough. Last year may have looked like a well-oiled machine to you guys because everything got delivered and it wasn't too buggy, but there was some rough weeks there getting everything ready in time. As a studio lead, one of my goals is to not have rough weeks for the team. I want the ability for things to be smooth and stress free. If there are small things I could have done better, I'm willing to accept that it was my failing rather than the team's failing. I couldn't push them to be done, not with the expense, the amount of time people were spending on this stuff.
  849.  
  850. 2-11-53 RaizQT: Is there something that we can do as community members to maybe make it easier for you guys?
  851.  
  852. 2-11-58 Chris Wilson: Ah, no, well, look, at the end of the day, we've committed to a thirteen week schedule because we think it's for the best for the game, and everyone has reasonable expectations, like Synthesis is slightly smaller than Betrayal. The amount of stuff in this is less than there was in Betrayal. People have taken that totally fine. I haven't heard a single complaint so far that this is a slightly smaller league. It's certainly larger than Incursion was, and we managed to pull quite a lot out over that Christmas period, but there were going to be a few leagues this year that aren't quite so large. If we can just make sure that people's expectations are reasonable, I would rather deliver slightly smaller leagues with lots more extra stuff that people are wanting to address parts of the game taht I keep getting excuses and not having time to do, and in a really solid 4.0.0 later. As long as the community are understanding of the fact that if we repeat last year's schedule, we're not getting anything else done at the same time, then I think we'll be okay.
  853.  
  854. 2-12-47 Octavian: To be entirely honest, I fully anticipated Synthesis to be a much smaller mechanic. This seems if anything overdelivering.
  855.  
  856. 2-12-57 Chris Wilson: Thank you. We try to underpromise and overdeliver. We want to pack it full of much stuff as we can. We don't really know a lot about the rest of the leagues we're doing this year yet. We're currently in the design of the 3.7.0 one. We have an idea of what theme we want to go for, it's pretty cool. We have a lot of ideas about 3.9.0 which is the December one. We have literally nothing for 3.8.0 yet, it may not make a lot of sense, but we'll get to that in a few months.
  857.  
  858. 2-13-25 TarkeCat: Just for the sake of Chris's time, since it is getting late for him, if the three of you want to give him one last thing, or Chris wants to give anything to us, I think we should round out.
  859.  
  860. 2-13-32 RaizQT: I already gave Chris the perfect opportunity to sell out MTXs and he didn't take it. He's too nice of a guy, so I think I'm done.
  861.  
  862. 2-13-45 Octavian: We're pretty much good.
  863.  
  864. 2-13-48 Chris Wilson: Thank you so much for your time, guys. It was awesome.
  865.  
  866. 2-13-50 TarkeCat: Yep. Thank you very much for coming on. I hope we can do this again, and I apologize to the discord spam you're going to get from me in the next couple of hours.
  867.  
  868. 2-13-59 Chris Wilson: It's not a problem. I'll be asleep, so I'll see about it in the morning, on Balance Sunday as I referred to it earlier.
  869.  
  870. 2-14-04 RaizQT: I was just joking about the ten pages. Tarke never puts in that much effort into anything. Don't worry, Chris.
  871.  
  872. 2-14-11 Chris Wilson: Thank you Raiz. He was there saving the day this morning in an interview --- all the good questions, which was awesome.
  873.  
  874. 2-14-19 TarkeCat: See? I try, I try. Thank you everyone for coming out today, if you missed any of the podcast, don't worry, this will be on YouTube. Thanks again to Bex for all the loot box codes to celebrate our two year anniversary. Two years of putting up with Raiz's bullshit, and the rest of the codes I'll give out on YouTube. Nugi, if you want to hit us with the outro, then we can peace out.
  875.  
  876. 2-14-40 RaizQT: Thanks for watching guys, bye!
  877.  
  878. 2-14-45 Chris Wilson: Bye!
  879.  
  880. 2-14-46 (Baeclast.logo)
  881.  
  882. 2-14-50 (somebody yawns)
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Public Pastes
We use cookies for various purposes including analytics. By continuing to use Pastebin, you agree to our use of cookies as described in the Cookies Policy.  OK, I Understand
Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!